My Lord,
‘The letters of this night will paint our misfortunes in black colours, & the truth is we have received a great affront which we shall not quickly be able to wash off …’
The Earl of Arlington to the Duke of Ormonde, from Whitehall, 15 June 1667
The Second Anglo-Dutch War played out between 1665 and 1667. During each of the three years of conflict London suffered a catastrophe of a scale that might be expected, at worst, once in a century. The first calamity struck in 1665, the Great Plague killing a fifth of the capital’s half a million population. The disease, borne by fleas nestling in the fur of black rats, had as its symptoms swollen lymph glands in the groin or armpit. If these burst, and progressed to suppurating sores, the patient could survive. If not, death would occur within a week, the corpse erupting in a welter of black spots.
The Black Death, a distant ancestor of this scourge, first appeared in 1348, killing one in three Englishmen. Similar pestilence had flared up sporadically thereafter. Throughout the seventeenth century, London’s filthy streets provided a fertile habitat for the black rat: in 1603, 30,000 people had died from the bubonic plague and the Coronation of Rupert’s grandfather, James I, had been postponed as a result. But 1665’s outbreak was of a different magnitude to anything that had been suffered for more than 300 years: abetted by an unusually hot summer, it ripped through the capital, choked the cemeteries, caused mass graves to be dug, and spread panic and terror.
There were few effective countermeasures to the plague. The 1646 Anti-Plague Laws instructed communities to seal up households where the disease struck, leaving the occupants to battle through it or to die in isolation. Those who could afford to do so, fled, while the poor awaited their fate. John Evelyn was wealthy enough to send his family away from London, while he chose to stay in the capital. On 7 September he recorded: ‘Came home, there perishing now near ten thousand poor creatures weekly: however I went all along the City & suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage & dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets & the street thin of people, the shops shut up, & all in mournful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.’[fn1]
The restored monarchy struggled to control a situation that threatened to incubate anarchy and aid the enemy: Charles II went to Salisbury, then Oxford, with the Court; his brother James repaired to York, in order to keep the northern counties under control; while Albermarle and the Earl of Craven — the Palatines’ oldest and most loyal supporter — were given command of half the army’s Footguards and a detachment of cavalry, ‘to take care of London,’ the Duke of York recalled, ‘lest the Republicans and fanatics, encouraged by the Dutch, should rise’.[fn2] Together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sheldon, they did an admirable job, seeing that victims’ clothes were burnt and their remains interred in lime. Only doctors and nurses were allowed to venture into houses containing the sick.
Rupert might have undertaken such duties, but his health was poor. His various wounds refused to heal, especially the serious blow to his head, which caused him real and repeated pain. He also was prone to malaria, another souvenir of a youth spent fighting hard, sometimes in exotic climes. Keen to encourage his cousin’s convalescence, the king instructed the prince to join the court in Salisbury, before spending three months at Windsor Castle.
The Great Plague started to abate in the autumn, but it remained a serious threat to health until cauterised by the great disaster of 1666 — the Great Fire of London. What started as an accidental blaze in a Pudding Lane bakery was quickly whipped up into an inferno that cost the nation £10 million. The City suffered particularly badly, the commercial heart of the nation losing the livery halls of forty-four merchant bodies, as well as the Custom House, the Guildhall, and the Royal Exchange. The flames spread under a strong east wind — unchecked, until too late, thanks to the stupidity of the Lord Mayor. The messenger who woke Sir Thomas Bludworth with breathless news of the disaster must have realised that he had failed to transmit its true scale when dismissed with the words: ‘Go and piss on it’. Even when it became clear that more drastic countermeasures were necessary, Bludworth hesitated: ‘The Lord Mayor declined soldiers, and scrupled blowing up houses’, recalled the Duke of York. ‘The fire spread; and, about noon, he sent for the troops.’[fn3] It was too late.
Besides the commercial devastation, the Great Fire destroyed more than 13,000 houses as well as eighty-nine churches — including St Paul’s Cathedral. Shock at London’s fate resonated abroad. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland wrote to the Earl of Anglesey: ‘You will herewith receive a letter from me and the council to the Lord Mayor of London and the Court of Aldermen, expressing in the style of the board the deep sense we have of the calamity befallen that city by the late fire, and informing them that we have thought of by way of contribution from this Kingdom for the relief of such as are most impoverished by that judgement.’[fn4]
It seemed to the superstitious that God was launching thunderbolts at England in order to castigate an indolent, hedonistic king and his debauched court. Although charming, Charles II appeared to his critics to have a fatal lack of ‘gravitas’. The tales of innumerable mistresses and other worldly indulgences played badly with a population at war — particularly because it was a disappointing war. The failure of the much-vaunted navy to finish off the Dutch — a people popularly derided as greedy, cheese-eating misers and ‘Hogen Mogen Ninnies’ married to ‘brawny wenches fat as does’[fn5] — increased the dissatisfaction of a hard-pressed, disenchanted people.
*
The navy in the 1660s provides, in some respects, a microcosm of the fault lines running through the Restoration monarchy in its first years: much was expected of it, but its ability to perform was compromised by a dire lack of funds. At the same time there remained very real tensions between those in positions of authority, for they came from the two creeds that had clashed so fiercely two decades earlier.
The easy cooperation at the head of the navy between Rupert and Albermarle — a Royalist and a Parliamentarian — could not prevent an uneasy tussle between former enemies further down the chain of command. Most of the leading naval officers in the Second Anglo-Dutch War were formerly Commonwealth or Protectorate men: Charles II inherited them with his Crown. Of these, the majority were professional sailors, who had been at sea all their working life. Christopher Myngs, son of a cobbler, had joined as a boy and rose to become a knighted admiral, adored and respected by his men. They were known as ‘tarpaulins’, after the rough protective clothing they wore in stormy seas. A small minority refused to serve the king after the Protectorate’s implosion, but many others were welcomed back into the service at the outbreak of war. As Sir William Coventry, the Duke of York’s secretary, told Pepys: ‘Why … in the sea service it is impossible to do anything without them, there being not more than three men of the whole King’s side that are fit to command almost.’[fn6]
The Stuarts’ return injected a stream of men of nobler birth into the upper echelons of the navy. Those that had accompanied Rupert on his 1650s’ odyssey — such as Sir John Mennes, who became one of Charles II’s admirals and comptroller of the new Navy Board, and Sir Robert Holmes, the fearless captain — came to their posts with useful nautical experience. Many others had none. They were attracted to the navy because of the promise of action, because the army had no place in a sea war, and because they hoped for financial reward.
Ill feeling existed between two groups of men who, until recently, had been active foes. The situation was not helped by the rigid loyalty of patrons such as Monck, Sandwich, Penn, and Lawson on the Commonwealth side, and Prince Rupert on that of the Royalists. These leaders saw it as their duty to reward their ‘following’ of men, over the heads of officers drawn from the opposing faction. Monck’s main recruiting agent was Sir Jeremiah Smith, whose importance was increased after saving the Duke of York from a Dutch fire-ship. Rupert’s man was the redoubtable Holmes.
Among those eager to promote the professional, seasoned naval officer over the opportunist, fighting gentleman was the naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys. He strongly approved of the Duke of York’s determination to improve the service and forget the differing allegiances of the past. James, pragmatic and professional, was happy to employ Cromwellians in his fleet: at the outbreak of war, he had selected Sir John Lawson, a Commonwealth stalwart, to be vice-admiral of his squadron. James regarded his former foes as generally superior to the amateurs who had fought with brave indiscipline for his father’s cause. This philosophy clashed directly with Rupert’s unquestioning loyalty to those who had suffered for the king, regardless of their individual shortcomings. During a meeting, the duke proposed that any captain found drunk aboard ship should face dismissal. This suggestion astonished the prince: ‘God damn me’, he spluttered, ‘if they will turn out every man that will be drunk, he must out all the commanders in the fleet. What is the matter if [he] be drunk, so when he comes to fight he doth his work?’[fn7] Rupert believed in the power of personality and daring, over the confines of uniformity and regulation.
Pepys’s diaries resound with contempt for the prince. His Rupert is a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, cantankerous menace. While Pepys was also vicious in his written attacks on Albermarle and Sir William Penn — both senior Cromwellians — he reserved his strongest criticism for the gentlemen-officers whose increasing influence in the navy he resented. As the most prominent example of this creeping infestation, Rupert attracted the diarist’s most pungent bile.
Pepys’s attitude to the prince betrays his strongly Parliamentarian roots. Pepys’s route to office had started via his kinship with Edward. Montagu, the Cromwellian sailor who served the Restoration monarchy as Earl of Sandwich. Pepys had been anti-Royalist as a youth: he claimed to have witnessed Charles I’s execution as a schoolboy and seems to have been thrilled by its spectacle and significance. Although later convinced of the need to return the Stuarts to power, Pepys’s prejudices were never expunged and he appears to have found it impossible to overcome the chauvinism of his formative years. In early 1666, he wrote about a duchess whose views he found odious: ‘But one good thing she said, she cried mightily out against the having of gentlemen Captains with feathers and ribbands, and wished the King would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea Captains, that he served with formerly, that would make their ships swim with blood.’[fn8] The prince epitomised the amateur, dilettante culture that Pepys sought to erase.
The dark image of Rupert, perpetrated by the Puritan pamphleteers of the 1640s, must have affected Pepys as a boy. Now he found himself working alongside the ageing, irascible ‘Prince Robber’. Although other contemporaries, including the king, joked about Rupert’s sombreness and commented on his brooding energy, nobody else wrote as critically of the prince as Pepys.
Pepys lapped up the slander that Rupert’s high profile and controversial character attracted. He recorded with relish a highly partisan recollection of Rupert and Maurice’s ‘mutiny’ at Newark, in 1644: ‘My Lord Bellasis told us how the King having newly put out Prince Rupert of his generalship, upon some miscarriage at Bristol, and Sir Richard Willis from his governorship of Newark, at the entreaty of the gentry of the county, and put in my Lord Bellasis; the great officers of the King’s armies mutinied, and came in that manner with swords drawn into the market-place of the town where the King was; whereupon the King says, “I must horse”. And there himself personally, when everyone expected they should be opposed, the King came, and cried to the head of the mutineers, which was Prince Rupert, “Nephew, I command you be gone.” So the Prince, in all his fury and discontent, withdrew, and his company scattered.’[fn9]
This incident, as we have seen, involved a much richer, deeper context than Pepys allows. There is no mention of Digby’s malice, of Rupert’s justifiable anger at his mistreatment by the king, of his understandable wish to be exonerated of the charge of disloyalty, or of Charles I’s subsequent full forgiveness of his nephews. Neither does Pepys give a balanced assessment of Bellasis — a man of questionable integrity, who wished to place himself in a flattering light, in an episode that, in fairness, reflected well on none of its participants. Pepys swallowed Bellasis’s tale whole, because it dovetailed with his dislike of everything the prince stood for. He wrote it down as fact, without hesitation or balance.
The personality clash between the glamorous, experienced but grizzled prince and the physically unattractive, self-made, insecure bureaucrat was complicated by professional tensions. As the conflict with the Dutch garnered more disappointments than triumphs, heated recriminations flew between the forces at sea and the naval suppliers on land. Pepys was quick to defend his fellow administrators, while Rupert, in his mid forties, had become increasingly outspoken: he would brook no criticism of his men or of his leadership. He remained confident in his abilities and contemptuous of his denigrators. Two proud men, with different hinterlands, labouring to maintain very high standards in their separate spheres, were bound to clash — especially when both were labouring under conditions that made their tasks impossibly hard and which neither could control.
*
The rush to war with the Dutch had exacerbated the huge naval debts inherited from Cromwell. The £2.5 million subsidy voted by Parliament to fund the conflict, although a huge sum, was insufficient for anything but a short struggle: indeed, creditors absorbed half this grant immediately. In 1666, the king ordered ten ships to be built, but financial constraints meant only three were completed. By the end of the year, all the money was spent. Charles was now unable to afford to pay for the repairs to, or replacement of, his key ships.
The financial crisis had become evident earlier in the year. Provision for the fleet was so poor that Rupert was forced three times in as many months to place his men on short rations. False economies had been made. It was, for example, known that three tons of fresh water were needed per week for every one hundred men on a ship. However, supplies had foundered when poor quality barrels (with wooden instead of iron-bound casks) had cracked open, spilling some of their contents and leaving the remainder open to contamination. Dysentery stalked the fleet throughout the summer.
Beer was the navy’s other great liquid sustenance. Alcoholic fermented grain was less prone to go sour, but Pepys argued that its value made it more susceptible to the cheating ways of profiteering suppliers: giant barrels of it were received with up to 20 gallons missing from each. But the joint commanders were not prepared to accept Pepys’s excuses: ‘If any thing which hath been sent us hath been miscarried’, they wrote to the Duke of York, who was still their Lord Admiral, ‘or if there hath been a fault or neglect of duty anywhere, it will be better examined, when the fleet comes in, than now when his Majesty’s service is so much concerned in our speedy supplies. In the meantime since Mr Pepys takes the liberty to say, that we are abused wholly by the Pursers, we must take the like humbly to assure your Highness that we do not content ourselves with the brave affirmation of the Pursers, but have made our enquiries by the captains of several ships, and have found the cask to be, as we have represented them unto you, that is to say, that the much greater part of the lower part is of wood-bound case.’[fn10] Albermarle and the prince also complained that the ships bringing supplies to the fleet dawdled en route: their commanders were paid for their time at sea — a disincentive to rush the delivery. ‘This want of provisions’, Rupert told Parliament, ‘did manifestly tend to the extraordinary prejudice of his Majesty’s service in that whole summer, but most especially after the victory obtained in July fight, when we had carried the fleet on the enemies’ coast, and lay there before the Uly [Vlieland], in the way of all their merchant ships, we were enforced, merely for want of provisions, to quit out of Swold Bay.’[fn11]
Rupert’s frustration was understandable, his points well made. However, the crisis confronting the navy was not just a question of incompetent or dishonest victuallers, as he suspected, but was more the consequence of insufficient revenue. Partly because public receipts had been halved by disease and fire, the navy’s accumulated debts were nearing £1 million in the autumn of 1666. Pepys was realistic about the shortfall: summoned in his capacity as Surveyor-General of Victualling for the Navy to attend a council containing Charles, James, Rupert, and Albermarle, Pepys insisted that £100,000 was immediately required to keep the fleet afloat. The king, however, could only offer £5,000.
At the same meeting, Rupert was incensed by Pepys’s assertion that, ‘the fleet was come in, the greatest fleet that ever his Majesty had yet together, and that in as bad a condition as the enemy or weather could put it’. Pepys recorded in his diary: ‘I … made a current and, I thought, a good speech, laying open the ill state of the Navy — by the greatness of the debt — greatness of work to do against next year — the time and materials it would take — and our incapacity, through a total lack of money. I had no sooner done, but Prince Rupert rose up and told the King in a heat that whatever the gentleman had said, he had brought home his fleet in as good a condition as ever any fleet was brought home — the twenty boats would be as many as the fleet would want — and all the anchors and cables left in the storm might be taken up again.’
The force of Rupert’s blast stunned all present, Pepys recalling that: ‘I therefore did only answer that I was sorry for his Highness’s offence, but that what I said was but the report we received from those entrusted in the fleet to inform us. He muttered, and repeated what he had said, and so after a long silence on all hands, nobody, not so much as the Duke of Albermarle, seconding the Prince, nor taking notice of what he said, we withdrew.’[fn12]
In fact, the prince and the diarist had both made fair points. Rupert had done his best at sea in very difficult circumstances, against an able enemy and in often treacherous seas. Pepys, meanwhile, had pointed out the impossibility of providing adequate supplies while being denied funds. Although corruption and incompetence undoubtedly deprived the navy of much needed resources, the key problem for the Crown was the primitive mechanism available to it for raising extraordinary revenue in times of war. This was in cruel contrast to the enemy.
The States-General had an understanding relationship with their bankers, which made it possible for the Dutch to fund their battle fleet with relative ease. Politicians and traders could see where their priorities coincided, and merchants lent their ships for fighting. Citizens also understood where their best interests lay and this partly explains why the Dutch were able at all times to rely on volunteer, rather than pressed, sailors.
In England, however, the Royalist inner circle and the merchant class shared little common ground. The two interest groups were still largely attached to the differing beliefs that had left them as opponents in the Civil War. Although both factions had wanted the fight with the Dutch, the merchants — with their strong representation in Parliament — were wary of supplying a king of questionable trustworthiness with more than the bare minimum of funds. Even Royalists were despairing of their feckless monarch, John Evelyn comparing Charles’s lazy self-indulgence with Cromwell’s dynamism: ‘so much reputation got and preserved by a rebel that went before him’,[fn13] he lamented in his diary.
As a result, when the king sought a permanent excise tax from Parliament, the Commons refused. Members declined to grant a source of income that would outlive the war and which might give the Crown dangerous independence. For their part, MPs tried to take advantage of the monarch’s financial hiatus, offering to buy out one of his constant revenue streams, the deeply unpopular Hearth Tax. The king refused. Next, Members established a special committee to investigate whether the king had used any of the funds granted him for the prosecution of the war for other purposes. Charles I would have recognised the insult and concern felt by his son, at this squeezing of the royal prerogative. The upshot of this political wrangling was simple: Parliament in the autumn of 1666 would grant no more money for the following year.
By 1667 the situation was desperate. In the spring, crews of two of the few vessels that reported for duty, the Pearl and the Little Victory, refused to go to sea because they had not been paid for more than two years. The men’s wages were met in the form of written ‘tickets’ — paper vouchers that were extremely hard to redeem for cash, and which were often available at a discounted rate to officers and others with access to ready money.
Conditions for harbour workers were similarly dire. The dockyards at Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich employed 1,400 men, who were charged with replacing, repairing, and maintaining the fleet, on an evaporating budget. The importance of their job was matched only by the shoddiness of their treatment. Rupert drew Parliament’s attention to this national disgrace: ‘I must remember’, he told the Members, ‘the horrible neglect of his Majesty’s officers, and the workmen of his yards.’[fn14] Desperately impoverished artisans struggled to find food. Sometimes, though, relief arrived too late: ‘I am more sorry to see men really perish for want of wherewithal to get nourishment,’ a commissioner reported to Pepys. ‘One yesterday came to me crying to get something to relieve him. I ordered him 10 shillings. He went and got hot drink and something to help him, and so drank it, and died within two hours’.[fn15] Faced with such deprivation, the workforce felt the bond of loyalty had been cut and became mutinous. At the same time, it became ever more difficult to recruit sailors: press-gangs roved around England’s coastal towns and then turned inland, trawling for men to serve in a dangerous, brutal, and bankrupt navy.
In March 1667, with dockyard employees starving to death, Parliament unwilling to grant more money, and the king’s reserves gone, a truly astonishing decision was made: the navy would not put to sea, but would be placed in mothballs. Only frigates were to sail, to distract the enemy’s warships and harry her merchantmen while the English first rates, the pride of the fleet, remained in harbour. Rupert was not party to this decision because he was busy battling his dangerously declining health.
*
The prince had a lifelong aversion to doctors and surgery, but he was obliged to look to both when his old head wound violently erupted during the winter of 1666-7. It had been in a dangerous condition for two years, Pepys writing in early 1665 of a friend’s tales of ‘Prince Rupert’s disease telling the horrible degree of its breaking out on his head’. It seems likely that a fragment of bone had detached from his damaged skull, causing a dangerous inflammation that was agonising and stopped him from sleeping. Rupert had been convinced that he would die, but then suddenly his condition improved. ‘Since we told him that we believe he would overcome his disease’, Pepys wrote, ‘he is as merry and swears and laughs and curses, and do all the things of a man in health, as ever he did in his life.’[fn16] Now, though, the infection had returned, in an even more vicious form. So serious was the prince’s condition that gossips on the Royal Exchange erroneously reported him dead. Since the treatment recommended to him was trepanning, it would be understandable if the prince had wished himself so.
Trepanning has been performed on human skulls since at least 2000 BC: we know that the Incas trepanned and there is evidence of it in Neolithic remains. By the mid seventeenth century in England, the procedure had progressed little from its roots. The treatment of head wounds was largely a mystery to Rupert’s contemporaries, a learned surgeon writing in 1678: ‘Wounds of the head being received in the winter do suffer the patient to live longer than those made in the summer, for herein the native heat is … most copious and strong … in summer, the natural heat is expanded and exploded to the external parts, and as it were there dissolved and dissipated, the which in winter is contracted and cohabited.’[fn17] This was a theory based on Classical sources and flawed logic. Similar Restoration medical manuals help to build up a picture of Rupert’s ordeal.
The area around Rupert’s wound was shaved and then the skin cut in a vertical and a horizontal incision, to form the shape of a cross. His ears were stopped with cotton, both to deaden the sound of the surgeon’s drilling and to soak up excess blood. Assistants held the prince’s head still and his arms back. His wound was infected and raw, but the surgeon’s point of attack would have been close to its centre. There was no anaesthetic, no antiseptic, and little understanding of the need for hygiene. The surgeon sliced through the rotten flesh, scooping it out in order to have a clear run at the exposed skull beneath.
A pin was then inserted where the drill was to go and the surgeon gently twisted it into the bone, until it was fixed at some depth. It was then unscrewed and the opening was used as the starting point for the invasion of the skull. The drilling was the job of the trepan, an instrument that looked and acted like a corkscrew — except, instead of a twisting piece of thin and tapering metal, it had a solid and cylindrical stem with a circular, serrated blade at its base. While the surgeon held the shaft firm in his left hand, he turned the blade with his right, boring the trepan’s teeth into the bone.
At this stage he may have used a Hey saw or a bone file — the former like a small tomahawk, the latter more like a package cutting knife — to tidy up the bone. Then he would have bored deeper with the trepan, using a brush to remove dry bone flakes from around the widening, deepening cavity. Splinters that were sodden with blood or pus were swabbed away with a cloth.
The trepan was removed occasionally and doused in oil or water: oil eased the rotation of the blade; water helped to cool the overheated metal after prolonged friction. John Brown, a Restoration surgeon, wrote of the extra caution needed once the trepan had penetrated the skull: ‘If any blood appear’, he advised, ‘it is a certain sign that it hath penetrated the first table, and this directs you to be very careful how you proceed, lest you hurt and wound the Meninges by an unhappy slip, being a very great cause of Death. When you perceive the piece of bone is loosed by the trepan, you may with a fine lavatory or small instrument free it by degrees from the other parts of the cranium, so as you may without danger take it up with your forcipes, if any ragged pieces appear, which may hurt the Meninges, you are to remove them.’[fn18]
The operation was slow and agonising. Rupert would have indicated when he could take no more and would have been allowed recovery time before the drilling restarted. At the trepanning’s conclusion, a piece of taffeta or satin was dipped in Mel Rosarum and Oleum Rosarum, and used to swab the wound. The prince would probably not have noticed this, because of the shock of the pain. He would have been laid out on a bed while he and his surgeon waited anxiously to see how the head reacted to the trepan’s assault: as John Evelyn recorded, after watching five contemporaries being operated on for another invasive procedure, ‘The danger is fever, and gangrene, some wounds never closing.’[fn19] These were common dangers during an era of ignorant surgery. The surgeon’s powders and potions often did more harm than good.
Rupert reacted badly to the trepanning. He had to return for a second operation, the surgeon going wider and deeper in a bid to complete the job he had previously botched. ‘Prince Rupert has again been trepanned,’ wrote a pamphleteer, ‘the former [operation] not having gone down deep enough; this gave him present ease, by letting out a great quantity of corrupt matter, since when he has slept better, and is amending.’ The second trepanning had worked.
Relieved of constant pain and granted rest, Rupert’s inquisitive mind sprang into action. He was intrigued by medical gadgetry and it was noted that, during his recuperation, ‘he often diverts himself in his work house [laboratory], where, among other curiosities, he had made instruments which the surgeons use in dressing him, which do it with more ease than any formerly used’.[fn20]
Rupert’s recovery took many weeks, his steady improvement occasionally commented on by Pepys. In the spring of 1667, after the decision had been made not to put the fleet to water, the diarist spotted a peculiar-looking convalescent: ‘This day I saw Prince Rupert abroad in the Vane-room, pretty well as he used to be, and looks as well, only something appears to be under his periwig on the crown of his head.’[fn21] Perhaps this was a thick medical dressing, or possibly the prince had invented a device to keep the weight of the wig from the tender scars of his successful second operation.
*
Although Clarendon wrote otherwise, it seems impossible that the incapacitated prince was party to the decision to lay up the fleet. ‘In the beginning of 1667’, his nineteenth-century biographer Warburton wrote, ‘the Dutch determined to make reprisals on our commerce in the very face of London. The imbecile ministry of Charles was easily blinded.’ Indeed, it was Clarendon and his political allies who selected this option, because they were convinced that the end of the war was near: the dramatic clashes of the previous two years persuaded them that the peace explorations taking place in Breda would lead to terms. Surely the States-General would opt for profitable peace over costly war?
Warburton also pointed the finger at Rupert’s old adversary, whose meddling had troubled him before: ‘The Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, lent her fatal assistance to deceive her son. On the strength of her information and advice, England was left almost defenceless; … the Navy remained cradled in winter quarters, and two small squadrons alone were left at sea.’[fn22]
The English severely underestimated a resourceful and stubborn enemy. Dutch knowledge of the Thames Estuary matched that of the English due to the amount of peacetime trade between the United Provinces and London. The president of the States-General, Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, was aware of the vulnerability of his enemies’ dockyards. In 1664 he sent a spy to see if an attack on the dry docks at Chatham was feasible. Three years later, with the English ships laid up, he unleashed his ships on a sleeping enemy.
Cornelis de Witt, Johan’s brother, stood with de Ruyter in a longboat, directing operations. The Dutch were assisted by the terrible morale of the defenders: as they made their way up river, English seamen’s wives screamed at those in authority that this disaster was the consequence of failing to pay their husbands. The invading vessels — some piloted by British navigators, happy to serve masters who remunerated them — proceeded from Gravesend to Sheerness. The English fled before them and the partially built fort at Sheerness was overrun. The ship stationed at the entrance to the river, the Unity, failed to pull tight the heavy protective chain that guarded the Medway and although the first Dutch ship was snagged on it, the second cut through, allowing its colleagues a free punch at the exposed English solar plexus. Fire-ships destroyed three of the navy’s great ships, the Loyal London, the Royal Oak, and the Royal James. The true catastrophe, however, was the overpowering of the small force guarding the Royal Charles. This mighty ship, which had carried the restored monarch back to England and bore his name, was soon sailed to the United Provinces, the finest imaginable reward for de Witt’s daring.
Rupert was summoned to help meet the Dutch encroachment. His skull was barely recovered from the double trepanning, but he joined the dukes of York and Albermarle as they summoned troops and took them to Upnor Castle. Pepys sneered at the sight of gentlemen volunteers — ‘young Hectors’ — assembling to meet the expected Dutch invasion. While these men rushed to the front line, the diarist enjoyed (in turn) a fine dinner, his mistress, and a good book. The next day Pepys gave further vent to his inferiority complex, mocking Albermarle for riding ‘with a great many idle lords and gentlemen, with their pistols and fooleries’.[fn23] As these men were fighting the Dutch, Pepys was planning how to get his personal savings out of London to a safe place. Meanwhile, Prince Rupert, who Pepys so despised, deployed a battery of artillery at Woolwich, covering a point in the river where he knew the enemy must pass. ‘On Thursday they came on again with 6 men of war and 5 fire ships’, Arlington wrote on 15 June, ‘… but were so warmly received by Upper [sic] Castle and battery on the shore that they were forced to retire, with great damage beside the burning of their 5 fire ships.’[fn24]
Although the Dutch hovered at the entrance to the Thames for several days, and controlled the Channel for the next few weeks, they chose not to run the gauntlet of the Upnor and Woolwich gunners again. Warburton wrote that the Dutch were within point-blank range when the prince gave his first order to discharge at the enemy: ‘The sudden fire was maintained so fiercely, that there was no thought of resistance for a moment; as soon as the ships could be got about, they fled.’[fn25] John Evelyn recorded the aftermath of Rupert’s bombardment: ‘I went to see the Work at Woolwich, a battery to prevent them from coming up to London which Prince Rupert commanded, & [which] sunk some ships in the river.’[fn26]
There were few consolations to accompany this humiliation. Because she was in Portsmouth, the Royal Sovereign was the only one of the navy’s five great ships to survive. And, thanks to the land-based defences commanded by James, Albermarle, and Rupert, Chatham dockyard was saved from destruction. However, following hard on the heels of the Great Plague and the Fire of London, the Dutch incursion up the Medway made a grim trinity of reversals for Restoration England. Feeling ‘dismally melancholy’, Ormonde expressed a commonly held sentiment when he wrote to the Earl of Anglesey: ‘God give us time and understanding to see and mend our faults of all sorts.’[fn27]
The Second Anglo-Dutch War ended the following month, with both sides winning trading concessions, and most crucially, New York remained British. ‘Thus in all things,’ Pepys wrote, exaggerating the enemy’s overall ascendancy, ‘in wisdom — courage — force — knowledge of our own streams — and success — the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side.’[fn28] While England’s Parliament and the United Provinces’ States-General signed the treaty with sincerity, the Duke of York and his following of warmongers saw this peace as an unwanted but inevitable interlude. They planned to resume hostilities as soon as a favourable opportunity presented itself.