In fact, there were few, if any, grounds on which to criticise the conduct of the French squadron at Solebay. The French were the van squadron, and would therefore expect to lead the combined fleet’s line-of-battle to sea – unless they received contradictory orders from the commander-in-chief. Both British and French sources indicate that the only order of any sort which d’Estrées received was a verbal one to keep as close to the wind as he could, an order which did not imply a preference for one tack or the other. If d’Estrées followed the blue and red squadrons to the north he would almost certainly have fallen to leeward of the Dutch; similarly, the direction taken by the British fleet was born of pragmatism, rather than design, because in the flood tide between five and seven on the morning of 28 May, with the wind at east-south-east, the ships would already have had their heads to the north. Why were no clearer orders given? In the first place, the Dutch attack was an almost complete surprise, with the allies having placed too much store on intelligence reports which indicated the Dutch were in their own anchorages; consequently, many accounts of the battle indicate that all parts of the combined fleet, including the French, were in considerable confusion for some time, and many ships cut their anchor cables in their frantic endeavours to gain sea room. Crucially, the confusion seems to have been particularly great aboard the fleet flagship, the Prince, which had begun to careen at two in the morning of the twenty-eighth. When the approach of the Dutch was reported at about three, her master noted ‘[we] cleared shipp in Gods name’, but even so, the ship was only ready for action by seven, half-an-hour before she engaged and some time after she had got under sail. The ship had been heeled over for the careen and her yards had been topped. Therefore, for an indeterminate amount of time after three it is doubtful whether the flagship could have made many signals at all, and there is no evidence that James ever attempted to communicate with individual ships or squadrons; the only signal recorded in all the contemporary accounts is the general one for the fleet to weigh, namely a gun firing and the Prince’s foretopsail being let loose.

It is not even clear whether James was with the ship throughout the night, or whether he had returned hastily to her from quarters ashore; and if so, when. A Southwold restaurant still bears a plaque recording the local tradition that it was the duke’s headquarters ashore prior to the battle (as well as preserving the delicious legend that the doomed Sandwich spent his last night on earth in the building, bedding a local serving wench). Local legend also recalls a panicked recall of men from ashore and suggests that many men were drunk, having been given leave by the duke to celebrate the Whitsun holiday; even if there is only a grain of truth in these stories, the fleet’s response to de Ruyter’s attack was clearly disorganised and hastily improvised. At about six, d’Estrées sent one of his officers, Hérouard, to request specific orders, but received in reply only the verbal command to keep close to the wind. Sir Julian Corbett’s remark that ‘it apparently never entered the duke’s head to tell [the French] the rear was to lead’ makes perfect sense if it is set in the context of a flagship aboard which confusion reigned and to which the admiral might have returned only recently, without time to assess the situation fully. Moreover, James had a habit of giving peremptory and ambiguous commands, then expecting his subordinates to second-guess his meaning. It is therefore entirely possible that the Duke of York simply forgot to give, or did not properly explain, a simple but essential part of an order whose verbal nature again suggests an element of haste. Significantly, James never seems to have suggested, even in private, that the French had disobeyed his orders.

Nevertheless, perception was all, and the popular perception was undoubtedly that the French had been duplicitous. This impression was reinforced during the course of the war – by Louis XIV’s triumphalist campaign in the Netherlands and above all by the naval battle of the Texel / Kijkduin on 11 August 1673, when the French fleet again separated from the two British squadrons but this time failed to engage in a meaningful way and allegedly disobeyed a recall command, again allegedly because it was under secret orders from Louis to permit the British and the Dutch to hammer each other. The growing opposition to the war was reflected in Parliament and ultimately forced Charles II to make a unilateral peace with the Dutch early in 1674, but more importantly it can be argued (and has been, by the likes of Steve Pincus and myself) that Solebay, the Texel and the war as a whole were critical in developing a popular mindset which regarded the French, rather than the Dutch, as the natural national enemy.

De Ruyter had already made an abortive attempt to engage before the juncture of the two allied fleets, and when he learned on 27 May that the combined fleet was moored in Sole Bay to take on provisions (it had arrived there on the twenty-third), he immediately ordered his fleet to attack, taking the allies by surprise in the early hours of the twenty-eighth. At three that morning, the master of the victualling ship Friendship saw an incoming scout raise the alarm by letting her topgallant sails fly loose and firing her guns. The combined fleet was moored parallel to the shore in its squadrons and divisions: the French squadron, forming the van, was the most southerly and westerly, with Duquesne’s division the southernmost of all, while the earl of Sandwich’s blue squadron lay to the north and east of James’s red squadron. The wind was from the east-south-east, the Dutch approaching from the north-east. What happened next was to be the most controversial aspect of the battle, and the cause of both contemporary and later criticism of the conduct of the French. While both the blue and red squadrons got underway to the north on the starboard tack, thereby reversing the order of the fleet, d’Estrées got underway to the south on the port tack. The spectacle of the French fleet going in the opposite direction to its British allies was the origin of the charge that the French had deliberately deserted the rest of the combined fleet. In fact, the French put up a good fight against Adrian Banckert’s Zeeland squadron, which was detached to engage them: up to 450 French mariners were killed, among them des Rabesnières, one of the architects of the naval alliance, who was subsequently honoured with a spectacular funeral in the choir of  Rochester Cathedral. This heavily publicised and deeply symbolic act was as much a tribute to the dead officer’s Protestant faith as to his gallantry, and perhaps was also intended to reconcile those who saw it or read about it in their newsletters or Gazettes to what was already an unpopular alliance with a Catholic power.

While the French fought and died to the south, the British fleet was hotly engaged to the north. The light winds ensured that the whole scene was soon shrouded in smoke, adding to the confusion and making it difficult to identify misconduct. The flagship Prince was under sail by 5.30 (no small achievement, as she had been heeled over to careen only two hours before) and by eight was engaged with the Dutch. De Ruyter personally targeted the Prince; although she was easily identifiable to the trained eye, the huge royal standard at her main made her unmistakable. De Ruyter now delivered one of the laconic bon mots for which he was famous. Turning to his helmsman, he said ‘Mate Zeger, that’s our man’. Zeger replied ‘Sir, that’s what shall happen’. The Prince was soon under fire from seven ships and could obtain no relief from her seconds, which were becalmed. The Duke of York ignored the risks to the life of the heir to the throne, striding across the deck to encourage the men and ordering the helmsman to edge ever closer to the enemy. Several of his retinue were cut down on either side of him, but the duke bore a charmed life. The new acting captain of the Prince, John Narbrough, was impressed: ‘no prince upon the whole earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy…he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be, and most pleasant when the great shot are thundering about his ears’. By midday the Prince was effectively disabled, her main topmast shot away and her mainsail rendered useless by the fallen mast. With Dutch fireships bearing down for the kill, Narbrough ordered the ship’s boats to tow her to safety, and James shifted his flag to the St Michael; when that ship in turn became shattered, he moved to the London. Other ships were in almost as bad a state. The Resolution had seven feet of water in the hold and had to drop of the line. The Royal Katherine was taken by the Dutch, then retaken shortly afterwards when some of her gunners managed to overpower the Dutch prize crew; even so her captain Sir John Chicheley, who was also the squadron’s rear-admiral, had already been taken off and was on his way to captivity in Holland. The Red squadron fought on until about eight in the evening, when the two fleets finally parted.

The main force of the Dutch attack had been directed against the squadron nearest to them, the Blue, and especially against Sandwich’s flagship, the brand new 100-gun First Rate Royal James. The Blue had little time to organise itself into a line of battle, and the Royal James was soon isolated. Immobilised by Jan Van Brakel’s Groot Hollandia, which became entangled in her bow cables and rigging, Sandwich’s ship was subjected to a devastating bombardment by Van Ghent’s flagship Dolfijn. An order for Jordan and his division to come up to her assistance was deliberately ignored; at least, that was the interpretation placed on events by Richard Haddock, Sandwich’s flag captain, who recorded how Jordan ‘passed by us to windward very unkindly…and took no notice at all of us’. Jordan’s own account of the action effectively ignored the issue, concentrating instead on how his Sovereign and the rest of his division had fought all day (or so he claimed) against eight or nine large Dutch ships. Meanwhile Charles Wylde, captain of the Bristol in the Red squadron, had tacked at noon and fought to the south-eastward for two hours, ‘having a hot and bloody fight without any cessation, and so kept on, they having the wind to our great disadvantage’. At about two, the Bristol passed to leeward of the Royal James and saw the great ship on fire. She had been attacked by three fireships, one of which, the Vrede under Captain Jan Daniëlszoon van den Rijn, had been secured to her port quarter and successfully ignited. With many of her men already dead or wounded (including her flag captain, Haddock, who had been shot in the foot) the Royal James no longer had the resources to fight off the attack or to put out the flames. By four, when the hastily repaired Prince came up, the Royal James was burned out. The fate of Sandwich was a mystery until his bloated body, recognisable only by the Garter ribbon that he still wore, was fished out of the sea on 10 June, thirty miles from the grave of the Royal James. Wylde of the Bristol, who clearly wrote up his ship’s log contemporaneously, prayed ‘the Lord grant his Royal Highness his life and our fleet better success…God in mercy continue our general and all our courages, and hope to ring them [the Dutch] a better peal than ever they heard, this being not inferior to any [battle] before’.

Wylde was entirely justified in praying for the Duke of York’s safety, for the hammering of the flagships inevitably led to a shocking attrition rate. In addition to Sandwich, the recently knighted Sir John Cox, the Duke of York’s flag captain on the Prince, was killed by a cannonball, while Sandwich’s opposite number, Van Ghent (who was killed by canister shot that shattered his torso and left leg) became the only senior Dutch officer who fell; he is commemorated by a large memorial in the Domkerk at Utrecht. As well as Cox and the Frenchmen Les Rabesnieres and Des Ardents,  five English captains were killed, the most notable being Francis Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol and one of the chief architects of the combined fleet, and Sir Frescheville Holles, the charismatic and swashbuckling one-armed cavalier who had clashed more than once with the rather more prim Samuel Pepys. One of the lieutenants who fell was the twenty-one-year-old Winston Churchill of the Fairfax; his elder brother John, who was attending the Duke of York aboard the Prince, survived the battle, and went on to command in many more glorious and successful engagements. Charles Harbord, son of the king’s Surveyor-General, and Charles Cottrell, son of his Master of Ceremonies, perished with Sandwich on the Royal James; last Thursday I was at a superb concert in Westminster Abbey, and from my seat in the nave I could see the grand memorial erected to the memory of the two young friends by Harbord’s father. Also among the dead was Colonel Richard Nicholls, another member of the Duke of York’s retinue, who had once played a not insignificant part in rewriting world history. In 1664 Nicholls had commanded the expedition that overran the small Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of a long and densely forested island off the American coast, and renamed it New York in honour of his patron. Nicholls’ body was taken back to his home town of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and interred beneath a monument capped by the Dutch cannonball that had killed him.

On the lower deck, men perished in their hundreds. Sandwich’s lieutenant, held as a prisoner on De Zeven Provincien, was appalled by the casualties at Solebay, telling De Ruyter that more had died by the afternoon than in all four days of the great battle of 1-4 June 1666. Over a thousand British sailors were killed (and almost half as many again died in the French squadron), including perhaps half of the crew of the Royal James; a contemporary Dutch list suggests that some 528 of their sailors perished. As usual in seventeenth century warfare, the flagships bore the brunt. The losses on the Royal James were exceptional and amply demonstrated the devastating consequences of a successful fireship attack (which were mercifully rare), but the other British flagship, the Prince, had about a hundred killed and wounded; however, the French Ruby, the last ship in the rear-admiral of the Blue’s division, had only three killed and four wounded. Similarly De Ruyter’s flagship Zeven Provincien had twenty-eight killed, a figure exceeded by only one ship in the Dutch fleet. Each bare statistic conceals individual tragedies. The deaths of just four ordinary seamen on the Victory left no fewer than twenty-one children fatherless in Midland villages far from the sea. William Williamson, boatswain of the St George, died of wounds received in the battle, leaving a widow and six children at Rochester. Soldiers fell alongside mariners. Thomas King of Charlton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, died aboard the Advice, Edward Bevan of Pembridge, Herefordshire, aboard the Royal James. Inevitably, some sought to exploit the relatively generous provision of royal rewards for the families of dead and wounded men: Daniel Vincent, ordinary seaman aboard the Victory at Solebay, who claimed that he had a wife and six children, was actually an unmarried man. Even officers jumped on the bandwagon. John Tooley, lieutenant of the Third Rate Edgar (who claimed to have six children when he actually had only two), the commander of a sloop and the captain of an infantry company were all on a list of 117 names that an Admiralty clerk triumphantly titled ‘The Cheates Discovered’.

On the day after the battle, 29 May, James summoned a council of his flag officers and decided to renew the engagement. After all, the date was auspicious: it was both the birthday of his brother the king and the anniversary of the Stuart Restoration, so the imperatives to re-engage and to win were particularly strong. The ‘bloody flag’ of defiance – the red flag at the main, the signal to engage – was hoisted, accompanied by ‘three shouts for joy, to see it flying and we so near the enemy’. According to Charles Wylde of the Bristol, James intended ‘by the assistance of the Almighty to have rung them [the Dutch] such a peal and played them such a game that they might have had occasion to have remembered all the Whitsuntides hereafter’. The planned attack was thwarted by the onset of both ‘a dark and thick fog’ and a gale so strong that it was impossible to run out the lower tier of guns on the flagship; night was also drawing on, and although the Dutch fleet was only half a mile away, the pursuit was abandoned. The strange weather of the twenty-ninth was the precursor of a particularly shocking summer, even by the standards of the ‘Little Ice Age’.  By the beginning of August, one of the Scots serving in the fleet (and who thus presumably had long personal experience of dire weather) could write to his country’s Lord Admiral, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, that ‘we have had a very tedious summer of it, never fleet having endured so much foul weather’. A week later, another of the duke’s correspondents reported to him that ‘the Dutch had traffic with their confederate the Old Gentleman (= Satan) in this affair, for nothing ever came so opportunely as these late storms for them’, while a third claimed that there had not been ‘three fair days together this ten weeks’. These comments are borne out by the objective evidence of the weather entries in ships’ logs and reports from both the fleet and coastal towns, all of which tell a sorry tale of violent storms alternating with dense fogs; as John Narbrough, the duke of York’s flag captain, put it on 27 July, ‘never such weather known in these seas at this time of year before now’. The damage to the fleet was so great that it withdrew to effect repairs, first at Bridlington Bay – where it spent much of August – and then to the Buoy of the Nore, where it arrived on the twenty-third, effectively ending the year’s campaign.

(To be concluded)

***

A combined Anglo-French fleet was a key element of the secret Treaty of Dover, signed between Charles II and Louis XIV on 1 June 1670, which set out their plan for a joint attack on the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The marquis de Seignelay, son of France’s principal minister, Colbert, went to England in November 1671 to complete the detailed arrangements for its organisation . Seignelay joined with two other French negotiators, the Huguenot officer des Rabesnières-Treillebois (who would perish as rear-admiral of the French fleet at the battle of Solebay) and the French ambassador in London, Colbert de Croissy, and their discussions with Charles II’s ministry culminated in January 1672 in the so-called ‘secret treaty of Whitehall’. This was signed inter alia by the Earl of Sandwich, holder of the high honorific position of vice-admiral of England, despite his serious misgivings about the principles underpinning the war. ‘Fine tuning’ of the agreement was subsequently undertaken by Captain Francis Digby, an experienced naval officer, second son of the Earl of Bristol and one of the principal models for my fictional hero Matthew Quinton, who spent March and April 1672 in France. He met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and had several meetings with Colbert over the next few days, working alongside Charles II’s ambassador to France, ‘the almost indecently ambitious’ Ralph Montagu. Not surprisingly, the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris, he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle, having ‘the same liberty of visiting the ports and ships as was allowed to Mr de Seignelay in England’, before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry - dying in battle, like his French counterpart des Rabesnières, at Solebay on 28 May.

The terms as eventually agreed in the Seignelay and Digby missions went some way toward eliminating the most obvious potential causes of discord. After some argument between Digby and Montagu on the one hand and Colbert on the other, the British crown’s claim to the ‘salute to the flag’, which had caused so many problems in diplomatic relations with France during the 1660s, was suspended for the duration of the war; in practice, when the two fleets finally joined on 7 May 1672 some of the French ships did salute the British flagship while others did not. As the secret treaty of Dover had specified, the overall command of the combined fleet was given to James, duke of York and Albany, Lord High Admiral of England, who had commanded the British fleet at the battle of Lowestoft in 1665. In terms of both experience and social rank, the king’s brother was the obvious commander-in-chief, and his appointment avoided some rather awkward political problems – the French had expressed an unwillingness to serve under the other two likely candidates, Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Sandwich, both of whom opposed the war and one of whom (Rupert) was known to be almost virulently anti-French. Appointing James ensured that the comte d’Estrées, vice-admiral of France, could be appointed second-in-command with no loss of national prestige, especially as James was given a French as well as a British commission, but d’Estrées’ almost complete lack of seagoing experience necessitated a clumsy compromise by which Sandwich, who was to command the rear squadron, was to leapfrog to the supreme command if James was incapacitated or absent. In practice, this principle of always having a British officer in overall command applied only to the main fleet; on other occasions, even vastly more experienced British captains, like Sir Richard Haddock (bringing a squadron from Portsmouth to the fleet in May 1673), were placed under the orders of the French, and it was accepted from the beginning that if a substantial British squadron was to be sent to the Mediterranean at any point during the war, it was to be under French command.

The flag officers and captains appointed to command the combined fleet for the 1672 campaign were probably as distinguished and experienced a body of naval officers as the British and French kingdoms could muster. In the Duke of York’s own squadron, the Red, the vice-admiral’s flag was given to Sir George Ayscue, one of the few well-born officers to have held high command under the Commonwealth (he was a godson of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his knighthood had come from King Charles I). Ayscue had also commanded a Swedish fleet, and had recovered from the disgrace of being the only British admiral ever to surrender in action, a ‘distinction’ that he still holds; his flagship, the Prince, ran aground and was surrounded during the Four Days’ Battle (1666), and Ayscue was held prisoner at Louvestein Castle in the Netherlands for over a year. The rear-admiral of the Red, Sir Joseph Jordan, was a seventy year old veteran and sometime staunch parliamentarian. Sandwich was appointed Admiral of the Blue with the Irish cavalier Sir Edward Spragge as his vice-admiral and Sir John Harman, another former parliamentarian, as rear-admiral. The careful selection of this command group was undermined by the death of Ayscue on 5 April. Ten changes of ship or flag resulted: Spragge and Harman moved to the Red to serve under James, flying their flags in the London and Charles respectively. Jordan moved to the Blue as vice-admiral, taking as his flagship the huge and venerable Sovereign, and the vacancy as rear-admiral of the Blue was filled by Sir John Kempthorne, a former cavalier who had distinguished himself in a dramatic single-ship battle against a Barbary corsair squadron in 1669 and who now hoisted his flag in the ancient Second Rate St Andrew. These appointments exacerbated an already tense atmosphere in the officer corps, which was riven by factions based partly on the old political lines of ‘cavaliers and roundheads’ and partly on newer, more personal animosities. Sandwich’s return to high command alienated many: he had been disgraced following a unilateral distribution of the cargoes of lucrative prizes captured by his fleet in 1665, and he knew full well that ‘I must do I know not what, to save my reputation’, as he told his friend John Evelyn. Sir Robert Holmes, the chief naval client of Prince Rupert (who was given shore responsibilities as de facto acting Lord High Admiral), was overlooked for the vacancy caused by Ayscue’s death, and this merely fuelled his resentment against his old friend Spragge, who had moved from Rupert’s to York’s orbit and had benefited accordingly. Several of the more junior captains nursed their own grievances and ambitions for promotion. Thus the officers entrusted with the task of destroying the Dutch state were very far from being a ‘band of brothers’, even before they were joined by a new, unknown and automatically suspect set of comrades-in-arms, the French.

The command of the French squadron was held by Jean, Comte d’Estrées, son of a Marshal of France and nephew of one of King Henri IV’s legion of mistresses. Originally an army officer who had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general in the 1650s, d’Estrées transferred to the sea service in the 1668 and by 1672 was the senior French commander in the Atlantic. An arrogant and abrasive character whose relations with his subordinates were often difficult, d’Estreés hoisted his flag in the Saint Philippe, a relatively old seventy-eight gun ship. D’Estrees’ second-in-command was the sixty-two year old Abraham Duquesne, flying his flag in the new Second Rate Terrible and commanding the van division of ten ships.  A Huguenot from Rouen, Duquesne had risen to the very top of the French officer corps despite the impediments of his religion and low birth (he had begun his career in merchant ships). The two remaining French flag officers were Des Ardents, ‘un excellent et vaillant officier’, commanding the Tonnant and acting as d’Estrées’ second-in-command in his centre division of eleven ships. La Rabesnieres-Treillebois, another Huguenot and one of the architects of the naval alliance, commanded the rear division of nine ships, flying his flag in the Superbe. Six of the French captains were singled out by Seignelay as ‘les bons ouvrirs’; their number included the future admiral the comte de Tourville, then thirty years old and captain of the fifty-gun Sage. Although the commanders of the French squadron were undoubtedly as strong a group as Louis XIV could have provided, the same certainly was not true of the ships they commanded. The largest ship was the Saint Philippe, which carried fewer guns than eleven ships in the two British squadrons; none of the huge new First Rates built at Brest and Toulon in the late 1660s were allocated to d’Estrées. However, this may have been due to concerns about the sailing qualities of the new ships, a consequence of the difficulty of providing the huge crews that would be required to man them, or else simply a realistic reflection of the opposition that they were expected to face. The largest ship in the Dutch fleet employed in the summer of 1672 carried only eighty-two guns, and the smaller French ships were certainly more akin to the majority of Dutch ships than the generally overgunned and frequently sluggish British vessels, which carried their guns much lower in the hull than their lighter, faster and often more manoeuvrable French counterparts.

Attempts to achieve genuine co-operation between the British and French squadrons were made in many ways, both large and small. Tactical arrangements were clearly going to be crucial to the hoped-for success against the Dutch navy, and one obvious requirement of tactical co-operation was met from the beginning: French translations of all the relevant sailing and fighting instructions were provided to d’Estrées’ ships. In these areas, the French were clearly expected to conform to British practice, and this is most strikingly the case in the area which was probably to cause some contention between the two nations than almost any other, both during and after the war – the signalling system. The French fleet was incorporated into the system of flag signals which the British had used since at least the time of the second Anglo-Dutch war. This entailed giving each ship in a division a number between one and fourteen, although the variable size of divisions meant that not all numbers were allocated; a specific signal corresponding to each number indicated that the admiral wished to speak to that particular vessel. Therefore, Le Téméraire, the second ship in the French rear-admiral’s division in August 1672, was allocated flag number six, so that her divisional signal consisted of a white flag with a pendant flying from the foretopmast downwards on the backstays, while her individual signal flew from the foretopsail yard.

There was considerable interest and curiosity on both sides in the qualities of each other’s ships. At the first juncture of the two fleets in May 1672, British observers were particularly impressed with des Rabesnières’ ship Le Superbe, which was visited (along with several other French vessels) by both Charles II and the duke of York, and which Samuel Pepys claimed became the model for most of the new British third-rates built in the mid- and late 1670s; the French ships in general were felt to be well-designed and lacking in superfluous clutter, although there were mixed reports of their manning levels and some criticism of their guns, which were thought to be lighter than and inferior to their British equivalents.

(To be continued)

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals - but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

Friday 2 April 1982 was an ordinary working day for me. I was teaching at a comprehensive school in Newquay, Cornwall, although I’d already resigned in order to return to Oxford in the summer to begin work on my doctorate, and was living in a quite astonishingly decrepit flat known throughout Newquay as ‘the Hovel’. The first I knew of that day’s Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was when I turned on the BBC’s six o’clock news, and I can still vividly remember my reactions. Astonishment, certainly, despite all the news stories in previous weeks about escalating tension and scrap dealers on South Georgia; trepidation about the potential implications; but also I have to admit that I felt a certain excitement when I heard Margaret Thatcher’s words about a task force being made ready to sail south. I’d been a ‘warship spotter’ since childhood, but the 1960s and 1970s had seen the Royal Navy (and, apart from Northern Ireland, the armed forces as a whole) involved in very little real action. So the prospect of the ships whose careers I’d followed for so long actually preparing for even the possibility of serious combat was something I felt I had to witness at first hand. On Saturday, therefore, I drove over to Plymouth, about an hour away, and stood on the Torpoint shore watching as the LSLs – the ‘Knight’ class landing ships like Sir Galahad - being loaded. I then returned to Newquay as I was due to play in a darts tournament that night (for those who don’t know, I was once a pretty decent darts player, even reaching the dizzy heights of the Varsity match!). I vividly remember that one of the opposition players was already wearing something that he must have obtained that day from one of the many T-shirt printers in Newquay – a shirt bearing a Union Jack and the legend ‘F*** Argentina’.

During the course of the tournament I decided that I would drive to Portsmouth the next day to see what was happening there, despite the fact that it was a journey of four hours or more. Getting up at 3.30 AM, I drove along the main roads along the south coast, past Lyme Regis, Weymouth and Bournemouth, so I was probably one of relatively few witnesses to the streams of military traffic going in both directions at that hour of the day. At Portsmouth I spent most of the day on the Gosport shore watching Harriers flying onto the deck of Invincible; the carriers never usually sailed with their air wings embarked, but it was clear that the planes were being flown on to them in harbour so that the ships could sail with the Harriers arrayed on deck, an obvious show of force and a warning to the Argentinians. It was clear from what I had seen at both Plymouth and Portsmouth that the dockyard workers were making astonishing efforts to get the ships ready for sea within such an unbelievably short timescale. I contemplated staying over in Portsmouth to see the carriers sail on the Monday and phoning in ‘sick’, but conscience prevailed (something which I regretted, so when the chance came some months later to see Fearless, Intrepid and Brilliant return to Plymouth, sailing behind the latter up the Tamar in one of the harbour cruise boats as the tugs fired red, white and blue waterjets in salute, I duly manufactured a tactical ‘stomach bug’ – unprofessional, perhaps, but seeing history always beats teaching it).

The war itself was an utterly surreal time. For a long time, of course, nothing happened – the task force was sailing south, the UN and the Americans were attempting mediation efforts, and inevitably, in the classrooms and bars of Newquay punditry and rumour-mongering were rife. I followed developments avidly: all sorts of ships were being acquired (the SS Uganda, on which I had spent my first extended period at sea during a schools Mediterranean cruise in 1971, was converted into a hospital ship), old Tribal-class frigates in reserve at Chatham were recommissioned to cover the North Atlantic as the newer ships sailed south, and so forth. But matters were clearly getting more serious and closer to home. Two of the players on our darts team were air crew at RAF St Mawgan, and one week they were at the match, the next they weren’t; their Nimrod surveillance aircraft had been deployed to Ascension Island. Finally the ‘shooting war’ started with the sinkings of the General Belgrano and the Sheffield, then the landings at San Carlos and the advance overland. Even by pre-Internet 1982 standards, the information available was frustratingly sparse. I still remember the sombre tone of the Ministry of Defence spokesman Ian MacDonald presenting the terse official bulletin that recounted the loss of HMS Sheffield – the first sinking in action of a Royal Navy warship in my lifetime, and thus an event that shocked me profoundly. There was a hushed silence in the pub, and afterwards people spoke in whispers; there was talk that Margaret Thatcher would see the Queen that night for a formal declaration of war, and the ever-bullish and down to earth darts team captain advanced his own theory that Britain should simply sail a Polaris submarine up the River Plate and anchor it in full view of Buenos Aires.

Of course, there was worse to come, notably the attack on the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram at Bluff Cove on 8 June. The casualties among the Welsh Guards were terrible, but even then I realised the dreadful irony that there were probably casualties with Welsh blood and Welsh names on the other side too – the heirs of the Welsh colony in Patagonia. What I did not know, and only learned many years later when I researched my family history, was that one of those who perished on Sir Galahad was a distant cousin of mine, Guardsman Eirwyn Phillips – a cousin I had never known, and now never would.

And then, quite suddenly, it was all over. Despite the steady advance and encirclement of Port Stanley, very few seemed to have expected the surrender to come quite as quickly as it did; indeed, some of my older and more gung-ho pupils were clearly disappointed that it had ended so soon. For me, though, I suppose the end came on 17 September 1982, a couple of weeks after I’d moved to Oxford, when I took a train down to Portsmouth very early in the morning to watch Invincible and Bristol return home. I was there early enough to scramble up a drainpipe onto the roof of the Round Tower’s flanking battery, a distinctly unsafe vantage point given the lack of fencing – but many were already up there (and helped to haul me up), and many more joined us. The day was very hot and there was an intense heat haze in the Solent. Finally the huge bulk of Invincible loomed out of the mist, and as she appeared a chant went up from the crowd: ‘Easy! Easy!’. Even then, I felt uncomfortable about such rampant triumphalism; regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war, and of the rival claims to the islands, one thing the war of 1982 had certainly not been was ‘easy’.

(I’d hoped to include some of my 1982 photos with this post, but various technical problems have defeated me. With luck I’ll put them online in an additional post sometime this week.)

But of course I was in the area primarily to work. My days at Anglesey and Caernarfon record offices were very productive, particularly the former (which produced inter alia what must be the most graphic description ever written of the state of the toilets on a World War I battleship). Both proved to be very pleasant working environments, both manned by really helpful and friendly staff and with that at Caernarfon enjoying some of the best views of any repository I’ve ever worked on; the search room looks out directly onto the quayside of the old dock, now filled with yachts and with the waters of the Menai Straits beyond. ‘Fieldwork’ took me to many places with direct or indirect naval connections. By far the most poignant of the former was the huge memorial and mass grave in Holyhead cemetery to those who died aboard the submarine HMS Thetis in 1939, which failed to surface after her first trial dive; the vessel was subsequently recovered, beached in Moelfre Bay and eventually put into service as HMS Thunderbolt. Other locations which will feature in Britannia’s Dragon included the site of HMS Glendower, the wartime training base on the south coast of the Llyn Peninsula, far better known in its later incarnation as Butlin’s Pwllheli. It’s unfortunate that there’s no memorial marking its naval service, in contrast to the situation at Butlin’s Skegness which was the wartime HMS Royal Arthur; both bases were the result of deals struck between the far-sighted but somewhat unscrupulous Billy Butlin and the Admiralty. (The book will include an account of the deliciously fraught meeting in 1945 when the local MPs, including Lloyd George’s daughter Lady Megan, discovered just how comprehensively Butlin had outmanoeuvred them, driving a coach and horses through planning regulations – suspended in wartime – and creating a vast holiday camp in the midst of the heartland of the Welsh language and culture.)

A site which certainly does proclaim its naval heritage is the astonishing Parys Mountain on the north coast of Anglesey, once the largest copper mine in the world. The discovery of this huge resource in 1768 coincided providentially with the Royal Navy’s adoption of copper sheathing and with the outbreak less than a decade later of the American revolutionary war, which hugely increased the demand for that sheathing. The nearby port of Amlwch was transformed into the world’s largest copper port and the second largest town in Wales, about half the size of late C18th century New York. Parys Mountain is remarkable but somewhat unsettling, a vast scar on the landscape literally carved out of the heart of a hill – and, in the early years at least, carved out principally by manual labour and hand tools alone.

So all in all, it was a very good week which contributed a substantial amount of material to the book. Although a considerable amount of additional research still lies ahead, the writing phase starts tomorrow!

One of the key themes underpinning the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ is the hero’s complex relationship with his tangled family history, which often impinges on his progress as a ‘gentleman captain’ in the navy of King Charles II. This was one of the very first plot strands that I settled on when I started to develop the first book, Gentleman Captain, so as well as mapping out Matthew’s own character and immediate relationships, I also developed an intricate ‘back story’ which involved creating an entire Quinton dynasty dating back to the Norman Conquest and which is granted an earldom for service rendered to Henry V at Agincourt. Several aspects of this back story have already surfaced in the books – the death of Matthew’s father at the Battle of Naseby, and the impact this has on him; the importance of the role model provided by his grandfather the eighth earl, a larger-than-life swashbuckling Elizabethan seadog; and enigmatic references to court scandal involving his mother in the early years of Charles I’s reign. The new Quinton book, The Blast That Tears The Skies, develops several of these strands and adds some new ones that stretch even further back into the family’s history. Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher, suggested that it might be helpful to readers to provide a family tree, so this is duly provided at the start of the book – commencing with the fourth Earl of Ravensden, a tough old warrior who fights in Henry VIII’s wars before marrying a former nun who lives to a very great age, outliving all her sons in the process.

Of course, in creating the ‘back story’ for the Quintons I had several real aristocratic families and actual individuals in mind. An obvious ‘dynasty’ with a similarly distinguished record of service over many generations would be the various branches of the Howards; others like the Dudleys rose, flourished and fell, while some like the Churchills produced outstanding figures a few generations apart. On Anglesey I’m not far from Plas Newydd, seat of the Pagets, Marquesses of Anglesey. The first Lord Paget was a prominent statesman of the middle Tudor period; his descendant the first Marquess of Anglesey led the cavalry charge at Waterloo, losing his leg in the process (the artificial replacement is preserved at Plas Newydd). Two of his brothers and two of his sons were prominent naval officers, all of whom will feature in Britannia’s Dragon, while several others, including the current marquess, served in the army, in Parliament, and so forth. I know this is a familiar story in many respects – wander around many a stately home in Britain and you’ll see endless portraits of younger sons in army or naval uniforms. But it’s actually quite an unusual story in Wales, partly because the Welsh aristocracy was so much smaller than its counterparts in the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom and partly because their history has been much more neglected. The Scottish nobility, owning grand castles and estates larger than many an independent country while being perceived as responsible for such injustices as the Highland Clearances, has been hugely prominent in the country’s history, has been studied in depth in many books and retains considerable influence; it’s hardly surprising that the first hereditary peer to be elected to the House of Commons should sit for a seat in the far north of Scotland that his family has represented for most of the period since 1780.  The Irish aristocracy of the ‘ascendancy’ has been studied and vilified in roughly equal measure; the shells of their great houses, burned down by the IRA in 1918-22, stand throughout Ireland as testimony to their dramatic downfall.

The Welsh aristocracy has no equivalent history of power, oppression or doomed romance. Apart from the occasional rant by Lloyd George or the odd Communist, the class as a whole has been virtually ignored. But then, for long periods of Welsh history there was no aristocracy at all; for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the counties of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, two of the most prosperous in the Principality, had no noble families domiciled in them, and for most of the rest of that period there was only one in each county. There was a gentry and squirearchy, but generally they were far poorer and less influential than their English equivalents. Their houses were more modest, too – the vast exceptions like Penrhyn and Cardiff Castles were often built by outsiders or those with ‘new money’.  But the stories of Welsh aristocratic families are worth telling, and in Britannia’s Dragon I’ll be focusing both on the seamen on the lower deck and on the likes of the Pagets and Sub-Lieutenant Micky Wynn, RNVR. Who he? In 1942 Wynn commanded one of the MTBs on the St Nazaire raid, supporting HMS Campbeltown (Lt-Cdr Stephen Beattie, another Welshman, who was awarded the VC) and performing heroics before losing an eye and being captured by the Germans, eventually ending up in Colditz. Wynn later inherited his family’s title and became the seventh Baron Newborough, owner of the Rhug estate in Denbighshire. Let Wikipedia’s bare entry record the bizarre sequel:

In 1976 he was called before the magistrates for allegedly firing a 9 lb (4.1 kg) cannon ball across the Menai Strait…the shot went through the sail of a passing yacht and he was charged with causing criminal damage. Even though it was his mother-in-law’s birthday, he denied the charge, protesting that it must have been someone else. He was found guilty and fined. He died in Istanbul in 1998 and his ashes were shot out of an 18th-century cannon.

I think both Matthew Quinton and his grandfather the old Elizabethan sea-dog would have thoroughly approved of Micky Wynn, Lord Newborough!

Of the other speakers, most of the attention inevitably focused on the opening keynote address by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, particularly his throwaway line that decommissioning HMS Ark Royal and doing without aircraft carriers for a decade was ‘taking a punt’ – which, as he half-admitted, had been made to look rather silly by the events in Libya and the re-emergence of what he called ‘the obvious exception’ to the strategic assumption of being able to rely on other nations’ carriers, i.e. tension over the Falkland Islands. However, as one would expect there were also weighty contributions from some very eminent naval historians. The ever-entertaining and provocative Professor Eric Grove weighed in against the media’s lazy conflation of the terms ‘army’ and ‘armed forces’, now effectively seen as synonymous, and emphasised how the navy had a serious PR problem caused by its association with seemingly old-fashioned ways of warfare and with the controversial legacies of the British Empire, not to mention the fact that it had lacked a serious friend in Cabinet since A V Alexander in Attlee’s ministry. Eric rightly pointed out that despite their rhetoric in opposition, Conservative governments have always been far less friendly to the navy than Labour ones – contrast the large number of warship orders placed by the Wilson/Callaghan administration of 1974-9 with the Nott defence review of 1981, let alone the rather more recent precedents. (Wearing my hat as chairman of the Naval Dockyards Society, I might add that all closures of major dockyards and naval bases in the 20th century took place under Conservative governments.) Eric was in a ‘double header’ session with Professor Geoffrey Till, who made an impassioned plea for the UK to invest in its navy or sink into irrelevance; as he emphasised, the future is going to be maritime because of the shift of global power to the east (this decade will be the first time in 400 years that the Far East will spend more on naval defence than Europe). Instead, the last decades and the priorities of the present government could be summed up in Till’s brilliant phrase, ‘Engage the enemy more cheaply’.

Other talks had less immediate political relevance but were nevertheless of great interest to naval historians. It was good to see and talk to Professor John Hattendorf again, having not seen him for some twenty years or so; he delivered a fascinating survey of the complex relationship between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. There was also an interesting talk about aspects of Tudor seapower from Andrew Lambert, the Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, whose professorial lecture on the war of 1812 I’d attended a couple of days earlier, in the process getting hold of a signed copy of his new book The Challenge (a title which could refer equally to the US Navy’s challenge to the mighty British fleet in 1812 and to Andrew’s own challenge to the orthodoxy about the naval war that holds sway on the other side of the pond). Andrew also provided a nice ‘trailer’ for one of my themes in Britannia’s Dragon by focusing heavily on John Dee, the Welsh mystic who largely conceived of the concept of the ‘British empire’ in Elizabeth I’s reign; equally useful for me were James Davey‘s material on the importance of popular perceptions of the Matthews-Lestock case in 1744 (Matthews was from Llandaff) and Duncan Redford‘s analysis of geographical warship naming from the late 19th century through to the 1970s, which showed that Welsh names were surprisingly well represented, especially in comparison with Scottish ones.

So all in all, it was a very enjoyable and productive conference, one which was coloured by frequent barbs against a whole range of ‘panto villains’ ranging from our esteemed Prime Minister to President Sarkozy via Sir Winston Churchill (virulently anti-navy in later life, which I hadn’t realised) and of course the RAF. The real highlight, though, was the conference dinner in the wardroom of HMS Nelson. I’d eaten there before, some twenty years ago when serving as a Sub-Lieutenant RNR (CCF), but had forgotten quite how splendid a room it is, adorned with great murals of Trafalgar, the Glorious First of June and so forth, along with the coats-of-arms of British naval heroes from Drake to Nelson. It’s a shame the public hardly ever gets to see it; but if governments continue to cut back the navy and eventually sell the now unfeasibly large wardroom building, perhaps one day it might!

I have to confess that I’m particularly prone to this tendency. It was a ‘McEnroe moment’ that set me off on the ten year odyssey to explore the mysterious ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600, which eventually culminated in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy, in the process putting other projects on the back burner, acquiring a couple of bookcases’ worth of Scottish history, and fearlessly conducting research in archives, castles and pubs from Perth to Carmarthen via Maidstone and North Berwick to the Loire valley. (OK, perhaps the pubs weren’t strictly essential to the parameters of the project, but I always seemed to obtain some of my best insights in them.) I’ve been intrigued for a couple of years now by such oddities as why the Earl of Southesk killed the Master of Gray in the distinctly unlikely surroundings of Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1660 – the subject of a talk I give to local history societies – and whether or not Joanna Bridges, who lived at Mandinam, Carmarthenshire, in the 1640s and 1650s and married the famous Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor, was really the illegitimate daughter of King Charles I and the Duchess of Lennox. So yes, when it comes to being intrigued and distracted by a historical fact that comes from a fair way across left field, I’m your man.

On Easter Saturday, I had another McEnroe moment. We were exploring Ely Cathedral – one of my favourites – when I came across a plaque next to a floor brass. I hadn’t seen this on previous visits, so presumably it’s fairly new. The plaque proclaimed that the subject commemorated in the brass, Humphrey Tyndall, an Elizabethan Dean of Ely, had been – wait for it - heir to the throne of Bohemia. Now, the idea of a middle-ranking Anglican cleric being next in line to a central European kingdom has pleasing echoes of The Prisoner of Zenda (one of my favourite books) and of the (probably apocryphal) offer of the throne of Albania to the cricketer C B Fry, but it seemed a distinctly implausible one. For one thing, I’d taught the Thirty Years War for long enough to know that by 1619, at least, the throne of Bohemia was elective, that the King thereof was in turn one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, and that the Habsburgs, the Emperors from 1440, always ensured that they occupied the Bohemian throne themselves to ensure their next heir was elected to the imperial crown. (By coincidence, the last Habsburg heir to the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Archduke Otto, last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died only last year, becoming the last Habsburg to have a state funeral in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, followed by interment in the Capuchin Crypt, one of the spookiest places I’ve ever visited.) When I started doing serious historical research in the early 1980s, exploring a mystery one stumbled across on an Easter weekend would have had to wait until the opening of the library the following Tuesday, but nowadays, of course, I have but to emulate my lazier ex-students and make straight for Google and Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia entry on the Tyndall family states:

When King Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, she brought with her first cousin, Margaret of Treschen, daughter of Litvaticus, Duke of Tescen in modern Silesia by his wife Elizabeth, sister of Charles IV and daughter of John the Blind, King of Bohemia. This lady married Sir Roger de Felstead (or Bigod), of Felstead in Essex, a standard bearer at the coronation of Richard II and their daughter, Margaret, married Sir Thomas de Tyndall of Talsover and Deane…when the House of Luxemburg died out with the death of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1368–1437)…Sir William Tyndall became one of the heirs to the elective throne of Bohemia. John Nichols (an 18th century antiquary) relates that a delegation of Bohemian boyars were sent to England to offer him the throne but that he refused, the Habsburgs succeeding to a throne they held (with one interruption) until 1918. There was an oral tradition at the University of Cambridge that Humphrey Tyndall, brother of Sir John Tyndall of Mapplestead and uncle (or great uncle) of the eminent deist Dr Matthew Tindal, was again offered the throne by the Protestant party in Bohemia in 1620. This Humphrey was Dean of Ely and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Humphrey refused, saying that “he had rather be Queen Elizabeth’s subject than a foreign Prince”, leading to the ill-fated Frederick V, Elector Palatine (married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and ancestor of the present Queen) becoming King for a year – a development that was a principal cause of the thirty years war.

This account set various alarm bells ringing. ‘Oral tradition at the University of Cambridge’ sounded distinctly dubious – even leaving aside my Oxford bias and any bitterness about the Boat Race – while Tyndall was hardly going to turn down a throne in 1620 (actually 1619) on the grounds that he wanted to remain Queen Elizabeth’s subject when she’d been dead for seventeen years…and Tyndall himself had been dead for five. Another online source says that the offer was made in 1591, which is equally implausible as it was half way through the reign of the King-Emperor Rudolf II – and the idea of the Bohemian Protestants preferring an obscure Fenland cleric like Tyndall to a well-connected prince like Frederick V simply beggars belief. A little more Googling and Wiki-ing casts further doubt on the story. It took me a while to track down ‘Litvaticus, Duke of Teschen’, but this must be Przemyslaus I Noszak, Duke of Cieszyn, duke from 1358 to 1410. He was an important figure at the Imperial court and brokered the marriage between Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. So far so good for the Tyndall story. But the duke’s wife (sorry, I’m not typing that name again…) was not the sister of the Emperor Charles IV and daughter to John the Blind, King of Bohemia; although she was named Elizabeth, she was the daughter of  Bolesław, Duke of Koźle-Bytom. Charles did have a sister Elizabeth, but she died when only a few months old.

So it seems as though Humphrey Tyndall wasn’t descended from Bohemian royalty; but this begs the question of why so many people, perhaps including himself, believed that he was. It might have been a simple confusion of one fourteenth-century Elizabeth with another, part of a mangled family legend that had been passed down for two hundred years and then mangled again by a couple of eighteenth century antiquarians. But the much-derided antiquarians of the Georgian and Victorian ages sometimes had access to sources that are now lost, and I’ve learned many times not to dismiss their statements out of hand simply because I can’t find anything else to corroborate them. Will the story of Dean Tyndall and the throne of Bohemia be worth a more thorough investigation? Possibly; but probably not. For one thing, I don’t think I can cope with the spellings!

On paper, though, the two fleets were relatively equal. The Dutch had 107 ships, 92 of which carried thirty guns or more, and the fleet as a whole mounted 4,864 guns and was manned by 21,500 men. The British had 88 ships mounting thirty guns or more in a fleet carrying a total of about 4,800 guns and some 24,000 men. But these bare figures concealed a huge disparity in weight of shot: the British had twenty-seven ships capable of firing over 1,000 pounds of shot, the Dutch just one. (Pepys’s Navy)

What follows is a precis of my account of the battle in Pepys’s Navy:

The two fleets sighted each other on 1 June, but on that and the next day, Obdam (the general appointed to command the Dutch fleet) refused to attack, despite the apparent advantage that the easterly wind gave him…By the morning of the third, though, the wind had come round more to the south-south-west, favouring the British, and at 2 a.m. the fleets were about five miles apart. From dawn (about 4 a.m.) onwards, both sides manoeuvred to gain the weather gage, a contest that was won by Vice-Admiral Christopher Myngs, flying his flag in the Triumph, and the van division of the Red. The two fleets then passed each other on opposite tacks, too far apart to do any real damage to each other…Once the two lines had passed each other, at about 5.30, the Dutch began to tack, and York intended his fleet to tack from the rear, according to his new fighting instruction; but it took so long for his flagship to hoist the correct signal that Rupert, commanding the van or White squadron, used his initiative and tacked first. This seemingly confused Sir John Lawson, leading the van of the Red in the Royal Oak, who did not tack in his turn, thereby opening up a gap between the White, now heading north-west, and the Red, still heading south-east. To remedy the situation, Penn took the flagship Royal Charles out of the line, followed by the Earl of Sandwich’s Blue squadron. The manoeuvre was made smartly enough to prevent the Dutch breaking through the fleet as it tacked, although Sandwich almost became entangled in a mass of confused ships. The two squadrons then formed a second line to windward, the Red covering Rupert and the White while the Blue fell in behind the latter. Obdam attempted to break through to gain the weather gage at about 7.00, but was deterred by the presence of the Red, and as the two lines came abreast on opposite tacks, at about 8.00, James again ordered his fleet to tack from the rear, this time with better success. Carrying out this remarkably difficult manoeuvre while under fire was an astonishing achievement, never to be repeated in the rest of the age of sail…

At about 10 a.m., both sides began a terrific bombardment that lasted for some eight hours, and could be heard plainly in London…Lawson, leading the van again, was wounded (mortally, as it later transpired); his ship dropped out of the line, and his division fell into confusion…The centre and rear divisions of the Red remained to windward, effectively out of the action, leading the commander of the latter (Berkeley of the Swiftsure) to be publicly derided for cowardice; the commander of the former, the Duke of York, also came in for criticism after the battle, though it is possible that Sir William Penn, making the decisions on the flagship, sought to keep the Red apart as a reserve, ready to support any part of the line that required it. Sandwich’s vast but cumbersome Royal Prince and her seconds came under such heavy attack from Obdam’s 84-gun flagship Eendracht and the 76-gun East Indiaman Oranje that James and the Red finally committed to the action and sailed down to relieve them. Sandwich and Rupert both then launched their squadrons into the heart of the Dutch fleet, Sandwich noting that he hoisted ‘my blue flag on the mizzen peak, a sign for my squadron to follow me’.  York’s Royal Charles then fell in alongside the Eendracht, and the two flagships began a murderous duel. At about noon, three courtiers standing next to James on the quarterdeck were killed by one chainshot, and the heir to the throne was splattered with their brains. Obdam, too, was killed, and a little later, at about 2.30 the magazine of the Eendracht exploded, killing all but five of the 409 men on board. The blast, which was probably caused by an error in handling powder, shook houses and blew open windows in The Hague.

The destruction of the Eendracht fully exposed the weaknesses in the Dutch command structure, and the inter-provincial jealousies that blighted their fleet. Kortenaer, Obdam’s nominal deputy, was severely wounded and unable to assume command, but his flag captain kept his pendant flying. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam contingent, led by Cornelis Tromp (son of the great Maarten, killed at Scheveningen), would not accept orders from the next in seniority, Jan Evertsen, a Zeelander, so the afternoon ended in chaos, with three separate ships flying the commander-in-chief’s pendant of distinction. Many ships simply turned and fled. The Dutch were pursued relentlessly by the British squadrons, although the Red was held up for some time by the astonishing attack of the lone East Indiaman Oranje, which took on the Royal Charles herself before gradually succumbing to the steady stream of the duke’s seconds as they came up in turn. Small groups of Dutch ships were cut off and forced to surrender, or were destroyed by fireships…

In all, and including several captures of fleeing ships made on the following morning, the Dutch had lost seventeen ships. Eight had been destroyed, including the three largest, and nine captured. There were about five thousand casualties, twenty per cent of the fleet’s manpower, which included the commander-in-chief and two other flag officers killed. 2,844 prisoners of war were landed in Suffolk in the immediate aftermath of the battle. By contrast, the British had lost one ship and only some 700 men, though these included two flag officers, including Lawson (whose wound turned gangrenous), and the royal favourite Falmouth, one of the three young men scythed down alongside the Duke of York.

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However, the British failed to exploit their victory. Sail was mysteriously shortened during the night, allowing the Dutch fleet to escape; this was attributed to the actions of a courtier, Henry Brouncker, allegedly acting under orders from the Duke of York. The mystery of Brouncker’s motivation forms part of the plot of the third ‘journal of Matthew Quinton’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, and all the other key events of the battle feature in the story too.

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Finally, and changing subject entirely, today is the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the Falklands War. I originally started out as a ‘warship buff’, my primary interest being in the Royal Navy’s ships of my childhood and youth, so the war, the first time the navy of that era saw action, was something that made a huge impact on me. I also have some hopefully unique recollections of and perspectives on it that I’ll share on this site in future posts. In the meantime, a Happy Easter to all!