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Navy and Nation

23/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Last week I attended the ‘Navy is the Nation’ conference at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth naval base. Despite being held against a backdrop of intermittent storms sweeping in from the Solent, this proved to be a very enjoyable affair, superbly organised by Simon Williams and Matt Chorley. I was one of the speakers, using my talk to try out some of the ideas that’ll be appearing in my next non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This seemed to go down very well – I always attempt to leaven my talks with plenty of humour, and I got a gratifying number of laughs. (‘Whenever I tell people I’m writing a naval history of Wales, I tend to get one of two reactions. One is “there wasn’t any”; the other is that people tell coracle jokes. Stealth coracles. Nuclear powered coracles. That sort of thing.’ There was also a good response to my suggestion that Wales provided arguably the most reviled name in British naval history – not Bligh, not John Byng, but Sub-Lieutenant Christopher Leyland, the man who gave the world that scourge of suburban gardens and source of endless arguments between neighbours, the dreaded Leylandii.)

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!

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The McEnroe Moment

09/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Every now and again, a historian comes across a snippet of information so bizarre that he or she reacts by silently quoting a certain illustrious tennis player – ‘you cannot be serious!’. (Or at least, that would be the case for historians of my generation; those born after, say, 1980, might prefer the current de rigueur exclamation of choice in tweets and text messages, ‘WTF?’) It’s often said that there’s a considerable similarity between the instincts and working methods of historians and policeman, and the discovery of such a snippet at once transforms even the most mild-mannered historian into Inspector Morse, relentlessly pursuing the solution to the mystery at the expense of all else – perhaps abandoning rather more pressing assignments in the process.

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!

Posted in Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

1665: The Second Blast

02/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

In the summer of 1665, while plague was beginning to spread in London, one of the greatest battles of the sailing era took place. The Battle of Lowestoft ‘was one of the most blue-blooded battles of the age of sail. The British fleet was commanded in person by James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, heir to the throne, and the first prince to command a fleet in battle since the days of the Plantaganets’ (as I put it in Pepys’s Navy). Prince Rupert of the Rhine commanded the White Squadron of the British fleet, while a horde of aristocrats swarmed to sea as volunteers: they included Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, the king’s favourite the Earl of Falmouth, and a number of the most famous Restoration rakes, such as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Buckhurst. Meanwhile the Dutch were hamstrung by factional jealousies between their seven provinces and five admiralties. As a result their fleet had no fewer than twenty-one flag officers, the British only nine (in the pattern established in 1653 of admirals, vice-admirals and rear-admirals of the Red, White and Blue squadrons). The bitter rivalries in the Dutch fleet ultimately caused chaos during the battle itself, contributing to one of the worst defeats of the Netherlands’ ‘golden age’.

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.

***

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.

***

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!

Posted in Naval historical fiction, Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

1665: The First Blast

26/03/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

The new Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, is set against the dramatic events of the year 1665. This is one of the few dates in British history that most schoolchildren allegedly still know, but its prominence is due principally to the dreadful outbreak of plague that swept through London that summer – and from my own teaching experience over many years, I know that few things go down as well with twelve year old pupils as grizzly descriptions of plague symptoms and the often bizarre ‘preventatives’ that were adopted at the time. The plague does provide part of the backdrop to The Blast, but the book’s main focus is the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, which was proclaimed in London on 4 March, and the main narrative runs from that time to the climactic Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, one of the great epics of the age of sail (and which I’ll describe more fully in a subsequent post).

The year 1665 began with a natural phenomenon that was taken by many at the time as a sign of great and terrible things to come. In November 1664 a comet appeared in the skies, remaining visible until March; a second comet was seen in April, although for the purposes of the novel, I’ve conflated these into one. Pepys first noted it on 15 December 1664: ‘so to the Coffee-House, where great talk of the Comett seen in several places and among our men at sea and by my Lord Sandwich, to whom I intend to write about it tonight’. Sandwich’s journal, published by the Navy Records Society in 1929, records that he had first seen the comet on the eleventh. On the seventeenth he recorded this description:

This morning about 3 o’clock I saw the Blazing Star again in the main topsail of the Argo Navis, distant from the Great Dog – 29o35′, the Scorpion’s Heart – 26o. The bodyof the star was dusky, not plain to see figures or dimensions, but seemed 4 or 5 times bigger than the Great Dog, of a more red colour than Mars. The tail of him streamed in the fashion of a birchen besom towards the Little Dog the one half of the distance between them.

Sandwich, commanding the fleet in the Channel, made regular observations of the comet throughout the winter. Pepys records frequent sightings of it and that the King and Queen sat up one night to watch it. The more credulous took it as an omen, and the first apparent proof of their dire predictions came on 7 March 1665, just three days after war had been declared, when the great ship London, a powerful Second Rate man-of-war mounting 76 guns, suddenly blew up in the Hope, a stretch of water in the Thames estuary. She was intended to be the flagship of Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red squadron, in the forthcoming naval campaign against the Dutch. Not all of her men were aboard, but a significant number of women were – wives, girlfriends and perhaps some rather less formal companions. Over three hundred were killed, although a small number survived because, miraculously, the roundhouse at the stern was untouched by the blast and remained above water.

Built at Chatham and launched in 1656, the London was an impressive ship which had served in the blockade of Dunkirk in 1658 and in the Baltic in 1659. At the Restoration, she was part of the fleet that went to Scheveningen to bring back the royal family; the new Lord High Admiral James, Duke of York, the future King James II & VII, was embarked in her. In 1665 she was armed entirely with brass guns, some of which had been made by a gunfounder coincidentally named Henry Quintyn. The cause of the explosion remains unclear, but both at the time and since, the principal concern was with the loss of so many valuable brass guns. Salvage attempts began almost immediately and some guns were brought up, but the great majority remained on the sea bed. The wreck of the London has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Several TV programmes have been made about it – I took part in the filming of one of them, a short item for BBC’s The One Show, last summer with Dan Snow – and these have inevitably made much of the fact that so many women were aboard the ship when she blew up, although this was not uncommon in the Restoration period. Additionally, the questionable legality of some recent salvages of guns from her has attracted the attention of the authorities. What is likely to become the definitive study of the reasons for the loss of the London and the fate of her guns has been written by my friend and colleague Frank Fox, author of the outstanding The Four Days Battle, 1666 (the setting for the forthcoming ‘Quinton 5′!), and will be published later this year in volume 8 of the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society.

The destruction of the London forms the basis of a chapter in The Blast That Tears The Skies. No spoilers, though – I won’t reveal how Matthew Quinton becomes involved, nor the identity of the distinctly unlikely partner who accompanies him during this particular episode! And the London is only the first of the sky-tearing blasts that give the book its title…


Posted in Naval historical fiction, Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Princes, the Removal Men and the Big Hole in the Ground

19/03/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

It’s been a busy week! On Saturday I chaired the Naval Dockyards Society AGM at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, before joining a party of society members on a walking tour of the site of the old Deptford royal dockyard. This is currently the location of a huge and ongoing archaeological dig preparatory to redevelopment of the site, although the development itself is proving controversial and is about to be redesigned yet again. The tour was certainly a real eye-opener. Although the vast foundations of the Tudor ‘great storehouse’ (left) have now been covered over, work has moved on to other parts of the site, exposing, for example, the dockyard smithy, No. 1 slipway and, most interesting of all from the viewpoint of a Stuart navy buff like myself, the walls of the wet dock, including a fragment of timber from the 16th century wall (below right). This struck a particular chord with me as the wet dock is the setting for an important scene in ‘Quinton 2′, The Mountain of Gold, which seems to be going down really well in the US following its publication there a few weeks ago. To think that this would have been part of the dockyard that Samuel Pepys knew, and where, in my fiction, Matthew Quinton fought the flames threatening the Seraph! It was also reassuring to find that my description of the dimensions of the dockyard, e.g. how long it would have taken people to move from one side of it to the other, which I derived from plans and pictures of the yard, was borne out pretty much completely by the actual experience of walking the site. More photos of Deptford dockyard will be posted on the NDS Facebook page in the next few days.

I was also in Greenwich a couple of days earlier to welcome back to England the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch at Chatham in 1667, which is returning to form part of the forthcoming Royal River exhibition at the NMM (I’ve been invited to the royal opening of this by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, so hopefully will be able to provide a ‘sneak preview’ in a future post). I’ve covered the sternpiece, and provided a picture of it, in an earlier post, so I won’t dwell on the importance of this iconic item here. But the return itself wasn’t quite what I’d expected. We were due to go aboard HNlMS Holland, the newest ship in the Dutch Navy, at moorings off Greenwich, but arrived to find said moorings disconcertingly empty. It transpired that thick fog had prevented her coming up the Thames on time, so the whole event had been moved to the Queen’s House. At this point I still expected the event in question to consist of a few dozen museum and embassy people milling around. Instead, the lawn behind Queen’s House was filled with hundreds of people, large numbers of military and naval folk in dress uniform, a naval guard of honour, along with TV and press galore. We had an announcement that ‘the princes are coming’, and a few minutes later, they duly appeared – Prince Michael of Kent and the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, both in flag officer uniforms. The band played, the dignitaries saluted and up rolled…a typical British furniture van, from which emerged typical British removal men, who proceeded to unload a very large box adorned with a picture of the sternpiece; and as is the way of British removal men, they did so with much grunting, scratching of heads and seemingly coming very close to dropping the whole thing off the back of the van. Nevertheless, the box duly emerged, the speeches were made (I’ll draw a veil over the number of basic historical howlers in one of them in particular) and the audience turned to the champagne, canapes and networking, which in my case involved talking about the volume of views of battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war that I’m editing for the Navy Records Society.

From a purely personal viewpoint, the return of the Royal Charles sternpiece is remarkably timely. She was the fleet flagship in the 1665 campaign and above all in the Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, which forms the climax of ‘Quinton 3′, The Blast That Tears The Skies. Indeed, her duel with the Dutch flagship Eendracht leads to the dramatic event that gives the book its title. (Incidentally, several people have asked me about the origin of the title; it’s from the third verse of Rule, Britannia.) Several important scenes are set aboard the Royal Charles and quite a number of them are based on real events, such as a council of war that was attended by some of the most famous names of Restoration England and the Restoration Navy: King Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral and the future King James II & VII; Charles’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth; Prince Rupert of the Rhine; the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most famous Restoration rakes; Sir William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania; and of course, in my version by Matthew Quinton too. They would have been sitting literally a few feet from the wonderful relic of the Restoration navy that will be on display at Greenwich this summer and which I strongly urge all of you in the UK to go and see – clutching copies of Blast of course!

Posted in Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Captains and Kings

12/03/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

First, apologies for not posting last week. As I mentioned on Twitter, I paid the price for getting too carried away on ‘Quinton 4′, The Lion of Midnight, and typing over 8,000 words in two days with little regard for ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. The result was that I woke up the next morning with a hand resembling a red balloon, and it stayed that way for the best part of a fortnight. Unsurprisingly the doctor diagnosed RSI and advised me to stop typing for a while. (The hand is much improved– thanks to all those who expressed concern!) So this blog is now brought to you via voice recognition software, and I just hope the neighbours don’t get too annoyed as I dictate emails, tweets, blogs and large chunks of books at strange hours of the day and night.

From next week, I’ll be building up to the UK publication of The Blast That Tears the Skies with a series of posts examining the various contexts of the book: the second Anglo-Dutch war, the years 1665, and the battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665) which forms the climax of the story.

***

In my last post, I looked at the ways in which Samuel Pepys was often presented in an exaggerated way as ‘the founder of the modern Royal Navy’/'the saviour of the Navy’/etc. It’s always seemed to me that Pepys’s principal importance was as a creator of systems and an implementer of policy; when it comes to devising policy,  though, we have to remember that late 17th-century England was still overwhelmingly dominated by royal power, and this was especially true of the Navy. Charles II and his brother James, who served as Lord High Admiral from 1660-67, were genuinely and passionately interested in the Navy, and were largely responsible for a number of the initiatives that have often been attributed to Pepys. I wrote about Charles’s role in detail some 20 years ago in a paper published by the Royal Stuart Society. Here are some of the points I made then, which still seem to me to have stood the test of time:

An Admiralty commission came into being [in 1673], but most of the truly important powers of the Admiralty – notably the power to appoint commissioned officers – were reserved to Charles…there was no revolution in naval administration in 1673. It is even possible to take the view that Charles and James simply swapped jobs, with the duke now playing the part of the informal advisor to the lord admiral [the King]. The key change was the appointment of Pepys, who acted far more as a permanent naval secretary to the King than as secretary to the comparatively insignificant Admiralty commission [of 1673-9]. Although this body met regularly, it served largely…as a vehicle for debate, not as an executive council. Discussions sometimes had to be deferred until the King was present, while the absence of the court or meetings of parliament led to long intervals between meetings of the board. As a result, the daily executive direction of naval affairs rested with Charles, who relied heavily on the advice of James and Pepys.  

The main administrative task was the appointment of officers. Pepys presented to the King shortlists which specified the candidates’ experience and recommendations, and Charles then picked the successful candidate. It might be easy for Pepys’s admirers to create a picture of the Admiralty secretary doing all the work and using the King merely as a rubber stamp, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Charles prided himself on his personal knowledge of his sea-officers; indeed, one of the by-products of this, of the King’s interest in the navy, and of the easy informality of the court, was the ease with which naval officers could gain access to him. Thus for Charles, appointing an officer was not a case of sticking pins in shortlists or pulling names out of hats… [Charles also decided on ships' names, and this was a matter of much greater political significance than one might assume – I'll return to this issue in a future post.]

The weight of business which fell on the king during this period ensured that, even though he might be able to escape from most other aspects of government when he went to Newmarket, he could not escape from the navy; indeed, for most of the time this seems to have been perhaps the only kind of formal work which he actually did when he went there. In addition to meeting the Admiralty board there on occasions, he regularly signed commissions and warrants there, and his presence ensured that Pepys often had to go to Newmarket himself to carry on the work of the navy…

In addition to being largely responsible for the ‘thirty ships’ programme [of 1677, Charles] initiated several reforms (such as the extension of the principle of ‘half pay’ to officers not on active service) and gave his backing to others, such as the introduction in 1677 of Pepys’s scheme to examine the competence of candidates for lieutenancies. Above all, the King decided on the deployment of warships… [he] personally selected the ships to be employed, sometimes rejecting advice from the Admiralty or Navy Board because of his differing opinion about the relative merits of individual vessels. He took a particular interest in the more unusual and ambitious voyages. When Captain John Narbrough sailed to the South Seas in 1669, he saw the King and Duke of York several times before his departure, and on his return in 1671 the King ordered him to Whitehall on the very day that Narbrough arrived in the Thames, subsequently spending several hours discussing the captain’s voyage with him. In 1677, Narbrough was preparing to go out as admiral to the Mediterranean…between 6 June and 13 July, when he left London for his flagship at Portsmouth, Narbrough met the King alone on three occasions, the Duke of York alone on one, and the royal brothers together once…During the same period, the Admiralty commission met eleven times, chiefly to discuss Narbrough’s instructions for prosecuting the war against Algiers, and Charles attended all but one of these meetings – an attendance record not atypical of the entire period [1673-9].

[Charles continued take an active role in naval affairs even in the year 1679-84, when the powers of the Admiralty were in theory out of his hands and held instead by a commission of opposition parliamentarians – on more than one occasion he even ordered entire squadrons to sea without the Admiralty's knowledge.]

So what I hope all this demonstrates is that the naval history of the Restoration period wasn’t just ‘the Samuel Pepys show’: it was very much a collaboration between Pepys and the royal brothers, with the latter often playing the principal role because of both their status and their personal enthusiasm for the service. Looking at the naval evidence also gives one a very different picture of King Charles II to that of the lazy, womanising rake that still sometimes appears in romantic fiction and even on children’s TV!

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Flash Pepys, Saviour of the Universe

27/02/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Last week saw the anniversary of Samuel Pepys’s birth in 1633, and Twitter was abuzz with the inevitable superlatives – the greatest English diarist! the founder of the modern Royal Navy! One only needed Queen to belt out ‘Pepys, Saviour of the Universe’, with Brian Blessed bellowing ‘Sam’s alive?!’, and the hyperbolic overdose would have been complete. There’s been plenty from this ‘Daily Mail headline’ school of historical analysis of late – witness the hysterical reaction in the Twitterverse to recent defence cuts (‘Navy at its smallest since Henry VIII!’, ‘Army at its smallest since the Zulu war!!/Agincourt!!!/Mount Badon!!!!’ and so forth, as if such comparisons have any validity at all – one might as well come up with such equally astute observations as ‘Fewer novels featuring starving urchins being written now than in Charles Dickens’s day’). No doubt this is all part and parcel of the Anglo-Saxon world’s obsession with rankings. Pepys can’t just be an important diarist or an undoubtedly competent naval administrator – he has to be the best ever, the greatest thing since sliced bread in his particular field. Witness the similarly OTT praise of Dickens during recent weeks (not just a great novelist – the bicentennial boy has to be THE GREATEST!!) and the endless stream of polls in newspapers or programmes on TV, usually produced by bored journalists during slow news days or by TV producers who can’t think of anything more original: the Greatest Briton of All Time, the world’s best bookshops/US presidents/public conveniences, the 50 Greatest TV Meerkats, and so on.

To be fair, of course, this isn’t entirely a failing of glib modern culture. I blame the Victorians and their obsession with classifying and ranking anything and everything – positions in class at school (no longer politically correct, of course, which begs the question of why ranking the schools themselves in exactly the same way is acceptable…), league tables for all sports, and so on. Not long ago I studied the Admiralty lists of those who sat the examinations to become apprentices in the royal dockyards just after World War I, and they were listed in result order, by dockyard, from the very best, who obtained 600/600, down to the very worst, an intellectual titan at Devonport who scored 17. (These days, the results would be anonymised and circulated only internally to spare candidates stress-related conditions, to keep their personal data confidential and to avoid infringing their human rights; then, the candidates were listed by name and the results printed and published. That must have brought joy unbounded to a certain Devon household in the spring of 1919…) Another manifestation of the tendency to classify, rank and affix hyperbolic labels is probably the worst naval history book I’ve ever read – and trust me, there’s a lot of competition for that particular ‘Daily Mail’ title – Evelyn Berckman’s Creators and Destroyers of the English Navy, published in 1974. This took the 17th century rulers of Britain, then rigidly classified them alternately as ‘creators’ and ‘destroyers’. The breathtaking legerdemain required to classify Charles I as a ‘creator’ and Oliver Cromwell as a ‘destroyer’ is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces of historical writing I’ve ever encountered.

Returning to Pepys, it was Sir Arthur Bryant, about as reactionary a historian as one could imagine, who in 1938 coined the term ‘the saviour of the Navy’ to describe him (can one be simultaneously the founder and the saviour of something, I wonder?), and a wonderful Admiralty information film of 1941 took very much the same line. I know plenty of people today who still hold Pepys in this sort of regard. Indeed, I sit on the committee of the Samuel Pepys Club, which exists to revere his memory, and am very proud to have won the Samuel Pepys Award, so I’m certainly not going to knock ‘Pepysians’. Moreover, having spent an unconscionably large percentage of my life working on Pepys’s manuscripts, both in the glorious library he created in Cambridge and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I probably have a better awareness of and respect for what he achieved than a great many people. Let’s not equivocate about it: Samuel Pepys was both an utterly fascinating, if deeply flawed, human being and, professionally, a truly great man. But it’s always seemed to me that the virtual canonisation of Pepys and the consequent exaggeration of his achievements have done a disservice both to him and to those who were just as responsible as he was, and frequently rather more responsible, for those achievements.

An example. Why did Bryant describe Pepys as the ‘saviour of the navy’? Essentially because of the evidence contained in one book*, written by that disinterested author, S. Pepys, based on original documents and statistics largely drawn up by the equally disinterested civil servant, S. Pepys, with the sole purpose of exculpating the record in office of the entirely disinterested politician, S. Pepys. If you imagine that in 300 years time Peter Mandelson’s memoirs have become the sole accepted authority on the record of the Blair/Brown government, then you’re getting pretty close to equivalence; although not even the noble Baron of Hartlepool and Foy had the audacity to cook his own statistics quite as brazenly as Pepys did. Then again, why would anyone – yes, even on Twitter – claim that Pepys might be the founder of the modern Royal Navy, rather than, say, a certain short admiral from Norfolk, whose legacy permeates today’s fighting force in an overt and all-pervasive way that Pepys’s certainly does not? (If you’re in doubt try asking the denizens of any naval mess, even wardrooms, what they know about [a] Pepys as against [b] Nelson. I’ve done it, and the results are both revealing and depressing.) It’s essentially because Pepys is regarded as the creator of systems, of structures, of methods; in other words, of the navy as an institution, rather than as a fighting force. So does he actually deserve that accolade, that particular ‘Daily Mail headline’ – and if not, who does? I’ll return to that question next week!

(* The Memoires of the Royal Navy, 1690: I contributed the introduction to a new edition of this, published in 2010. Certain online bookshops list Pepys and I as co-authors – probably one of the greatest but most bizarre accolades I’ve ever received!)

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