‘I saw the chirurgeon cut off ye leg of a wounded sailor, the stout and gallant man enduring it with incredible patience, without being bound to his chair as usual on such painful occasions. I had hardly courage enough to be present. Not being cut off high enough, the gangrene prevail’d, and the second operation cost the poor creature his life. Lord! What miseries are mortal men subjected to, and what confusion and mischief do the avarice, anger, and ambition of Princes cause in the world!’
John Evelyn’s Diary, 24 March 1672
The Second Anglo-Dutch War had been expensive for both of the main protagonists: it cost England £5 million, but the United Provinces had spent £11 million scrapping their way to a narrow overall victory. When fighting was concluded, in the summer of 1667, both the States-General and Parliament hoped for a long and prosperous peace. However, the Duke of York secretly planned to resume hostilities. He hoped that, with better preparation and more resources, a third war against the Dutch might secure sufficient bounty to free the Crown from the Commons’s financial control, forever. James waited for the right moment to strike again.
The stain of shame emanating from the Medway debacle gave useful cover to his aggressive intent. Sir Bernard de Gomme, brought over by Rupert from the Continent at the outbreak of the Civil War as his chief engineer, was commissioned to make English harbours safe. In 1668 he erected ‘A new fortification at the old Block House of Tilbury Fort’,[fn1] with a circumference of two-thirds of a mile. The following year de Gomme strengthened three gunnery platforms around Portsmouth and added a fourth, screening them all with mortar made from Isle of Wight stone. De Gomme later improved the sea protection of Gosport and Dublin.
Many in Parliament thought such new defences necessary — but not against the United Provinces. Louis XIV of France was constructing a huge and frightening military machine across the Channel, and it was feared that he intended to use this to export his absolutist, Roman Catholic brand of government overseas. The growing French menace persuaded England, the United Provinces, and Sweden to form the Triple Alliance, in 1668. With the sickly young Carlos II of Spain reportedly near to death, and with France a possible heir to his Spanish Empire, it seemed sensible to form a Protestant shield in case of future Catholic aggression.
Rupert’s sister Sophie had long viewed the enmity of England and the United Provinces as madness. While the Protestant trade rivals exhausted each other in combat, she saw that France was the real beneficiary, quietly stockpiling power on the sidelines. At the conclusion of the second war she wrote to the Earl of Craven: ‘Peace is at last made between England and Holland. I would wish for the honour of your country that it had been made after the death of poor Opdam because then it would have been more glorious, but better late than never, and I am sure that the King will find it preferable to live in peace with Holland than at war, because on sea they [the United Provinces] will always be invincible as long as they hold together; I wish with all my heart both that the arms of the king of France be opposed, and that the Empire might also perform better than it has done, so far.’[fn2]
The French failed to alarm Charles II. He knew Louis XIV well from his time in France after the Civil War and judged that there was nothing to fear, and much to gain, from the increasing power of his cousin. This set him at odds with the majority of his people. ‘The French indeed’, said John Doddington, an English diplomat, in 1670, ‘[are] generally hated to the devil by all the English except the King in the first place & the gentry or noblesse who had seen the world and travelled abroad.’[fn3]
Charles’s relaxed attitude towards France was reinforced by a clandestine annual pension from Louis of £225,000. This sum eased the shackles imposed by a Parliament that, it seemed, would only make extraordinary payments to the Crown in return for political concessions. In 1670, Charles signed the Treaty of Dover, whose secret provisions formalised the Anglo-French union against the United Provinces.
The Duke of York advised against the alliance. Although he remained eager for a profitable war against the Dutch, James appreciated the intensity of Parliament’s anti-Catholic bias better than his brother. He feared that a coalition with Louis would stop Parliament granting the navy the funds necessary for victory. Without them the problems of the previous war would recur: a lack of cash would pull the English fleet up short, when success was within its grasp. James put these concerns to the king and noted Charles’s reply: ‘His Majesty answered, that 50 of his own ships, and 30 from France, would serve for the war. So that there was no danger of running in debt. The charge might easily be supported by the Customs, estimated at £600,000, yet he could not look the Dutch in the face with 80 ships, such as proposed, and fire-ships proportionable; and keep convoys for trade and the preservation of plantations …’[fn4] When James realised that his brother was going to proceed with the alliance, he made Charles insist that an English admiral be placed in command of the combined fleet. James had himself in mind for the position. Charles would then provide 6,000 soldiers, to serve under Louis’s marshals.
Charles was convinced that, with French support, the two kingdoms’ troops would quickly overwhelm the 25,000 soldiers of the United Provinces. Louis XIV’s rampant armies would attack from the east, while the English would land a second force on the North Sea coast. Once the republican Dutch were defeated, Charles’s 22-year-old nephew (and Rupert’s godson), Prince William of Orange, could be installed as a client ruler: William’s parents were both long dead and Charles had been left as the orphan’s guardian. The plan seemed feasible after a one-off Parliamentary grant of £1.3 million, in January 1672. This was enough to fund a short conflict — all that Charles thought would be required.
To help justify this third war, the king combined the sense of effrontery that had ignited the first conflict with the trade grievances that had led to the second. ‘The Hollanders therefore refusing to strike sail, do deny his Majesty’s Sovereignty in the Seas (one of the most precious Jewels of the Crown)’, complained William de Britaine, in 1672, ‘and the principal means of the Trade, Wealth and Safety of this Nation; and which all true English men, with the hazard of their lives and fortunes, are obliged to preserve and maintain.’[fn5] This was enough to spark a conflict that, unlike its predecessors, had little backing from England’s merchant classes: the Third Anglo-Dutch War was about royal greed and opportunism, not the national interest.
Rupert’s champion, Sir Robert Holmes, was first into action, attacking the 60-strong Dutch Smyrna convoy in the Channel on 13 March 1672. Four days later, on the pretext that Dutch ships had fired on Holmes, Charles declared war on the United Provinces. In late May, de Ruyter replied, surprising the Duke of York’s fleet in Southwold Bay. The battle mirrored the titanic clashes of the previous wars, with many casualties from all ranks: 2,500 men were killed on each side. James was extremely lucky to survive the sinking of two of his flagships. Less fortunately, the Earl of Sandwich, recalled from his diplomatic exile, was drowned. The result was a narrow English victory, but the damage inflicted on James’s ships was sufficient to rule out an invasion of Holland during the remainder of the year.
With their religious sensitivities heightened by war, Anglican politicians in London looked to create safeguards against Catholicism. They succeeded in passing the Test Act in the spring of 1673, which allowed only Protestants to hold public office. The next day, Easter Sunday, James declined to take Anglican Communion. This was, according to Evelyn, a decision that caused ‘exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation, that the heir to the throne and son of a martyr to the Protestant religion should apostasise’.[fn6] The duke was obliged to relinquish his naval command in June. Charles decided that the fleet was now to be run by a commission, which he would chair. A substantial figure was required to lead the forces at sea.
With Sandwich drowned, and Albermarle having died between the wars, the king announced that the senior commissioner would be Prince Rupert. He was promoted from the rank of Vice-admiral of England, to General at Sea and Land: ‘And with this his Majesty’s purpose,’ a contemporary wrote, ‘there immediately ensued a marvellous concurrence of the people’s affection in city and country, all over the kingdom, as well in regard of the Royal stock from whence his Highness sprang, as of his high courage, conduct, and long experience in affairs military by sea and land, in this, and many other nations; but yet more in respect of his tried constancy to, and zeal for, the Reformed Protestant profession of religion, and all the interests thereof, for the sake whereof he and his Royal family had long suffered the utmost extremity.’[fn7]
It was a shrewd appointment. At a time of insecurity, many found Rupert’s religious and military pedigree deeply reassuring: he would be in charge not only of the English fleet, but also of the auxiliary French squadron. The king and duke used their cousin’s respectability to bolster their own public relations with Charles’s increasingly jittery subjects. At the Lord Mayor’s Day Show in London at the end of 1672, six months into the third war, the royal brothers took pains to appear at the Guildhall accompanied by ‘the duke of Monmouth, Prince Rupert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, [and] all the bishops present in London’.[fn8]
These shows were blatant propaganda exercises by the Court, when messages of policy and belief were transmitted to the masses through easily digestible poetry and pageantry. By associating so visibly with the Anglican elite, Charles and James wished to portray themselves as key participants in, and supporters of, the Protestant hierarchy. This was meant to counter the concerns of a people who watched their king cavorting with a French mistress, Louise de Keroualle — ‘la Belle Bretonne’ — from the end of 1671 (she provided him with a son nine months later); and an heir to the throne who was betrothed to an Italian, Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. James and Mary married by proxy, in September 1672. Modena was pro-French: Mary’s mother was a niece of Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. By entrusting Monmouth with the English brigade fighting alongside French troops against the Dutch, and by choosing Rupert to command the Anglo-French fleet, the Stuarts hoped to distance themselves from the accusation of having secret, Catholic designs.
The prince was 53, an old hand who might have thought he had seen it all. However, his new position of authority was to test his patience to the full. Rupert’s time as a brigade commander in Louis XIV’s army immediately after the Civil War had left him baffled: at times it had seemed as though Marshal Gassion had wanted him dead. The prince’s command of the combined Anglo-French fleet would leave him similarly mystified. Furthermore, despite the widespread relief expressed at his new appointment, Rupert faced powerful enemies at home.
*
Throughout his adulthood Rupert had hankered after independent military command. On joining the Royalists in 1642, the king had given his nephew a surprising degree of autonomy. This led to the regrettable clash with Lindsey before Edgehill, which prompted the earl’s resignation. Many of Rupert’s later problems with Henrietta Maria and Digby stemmed from a belief that they were undermining his authority. Then, at Marston Moor, he insisted on precedence over the head of the affronted Marquess of Newcastle. By the time he received supreme command of the Royalist forces, it was hamstrung by looming defeat and the continuing interference of his enemy Digby.
After the Civil War, during his campaigns at sea, his forces may often have amounted only to a small flotilla, but at least it was his flotilla. The Second Anglo-Dutch War saw Rupert refuse to share control of the fleet with the Earl of Sandwich. He had only accepted the subsequent divided command with Albermarle out of a long-held respect for the duke. Now, in very late middle age, it seemed that Rupert had finally secured his ambition — supreme effective command of the navy. However, he was soon to experience the familiar deflation of disappointment.
Rupert intended to equip the fleet and then seek battle with the Dutch at the earliest opportunity: his every instinct remained aggressive and he wanted to deny the enemy a head start in the campaign. However, it was now that opponents of his appointment made themselves known. Faction fighting had compromised the effectiveness of the fleet during the Second Anglo-Dutch War and it was to prove equally disruptive during the Third.
Rupert was the leading figure in the navy’s Royalist clique. As ever, he was eager to have men serve him whose loyalty was undoubted: ‘If the officers of my fleet have any other way to apply themselves than to me,’ the prince asked, ‘I beseech you to consider how it can be possible for me to bear any command amongst them.’[fn9] However, critics resented his favouring men from his own following over those from rival factions, regardless of merit. They seized on the prince’s promotion of Sir William Reeves, his long-term fighting companion and deputy at Windsor Castle, as an act of irresponsible patronage. Rewarding dilettante adventurers instead of professional naval officers outraged Rupert’s enemies — men identified by one of the prince’s following as: ‘a generation of men of another mind, who, having found all their arts and endeavours of diverting his Majesty from this choice to be in vain, tacked about to the old trick of State, of devising how to take off the chariot-wheels of the Prince’s expedition, and to clap a dead weight to retard him’.[fn10]
The Duke of York resented having to resign his command of the fleet and so made life difficult for his successor. Rupert suspected that Sir John Werden had been recently appointed a commissioner by James to complicate his job, by fermenting dissent. The prince reacted predictably, seeking the removal of officers he felt unable to trust and surrounding himself more tightly with his own men. This led to increasing tensions, which fed the faction fighting in the fleet.
The prince found that his orders were met with delay and obstruction. When he asked for supplies for his ships, they were unavailable. When they finally arrived, they did so in inadequate quantities. The prince’s instructions to press men into service were greeted with a similar lack of urgency: an operation that usually, in time of war, took place in November, was delayed until March. When the press finally took place, thousands of those who would have been most useful to the navy — fishermen, watermen and merchant seamen — were granted dispensation from their duties. Meanwhile, the prince’s enemies deprived him of a commander’s right to appoint officers: he must rather submit his recommendations to the commission, for approval. The slights seemed endless. When Rupert proposed raising a regiment of marines in Ireland — a fertile recruiting ground for him during the Civil War — the idea was rejected.
The prince’s ambitions were also blocked by budgetary constraints. In his foundry in Windsor he had invented a new gun, the ‘Rupertinoe’, which he was convinced would give the navy the edge over the Dutch. ‘This was a pattern of gun which was first cast, then annealed in a furnace and machined on a lathe to finish it, giving a piece of very high quality.’[fn11] The intricacy of the process meant that each gun cost more than twice the rate of the ordinary, iron gun: indeed, Pepys investigated the prince’s bills, in the hope that he could expose fraud. Because of the expense, only three of the first rate ships used in the Third Anglo-Dutch War — the Royal Charles, Royal James, and Royal Oak — were fitted with Rupert’s guns.
The Dutch fleet arrived off the English coast before Rupert’s ships were properly equipped with provisions or crews. De Ruyter began to sink obstructions in the mouth of the Thames, hoping to keep the main English force hemmed in so he could deal with the French and the navy’s Portsmouth squadron, at a numerical advantage. However, the prince interrupted de Ruyter, boldly sending a force of frigates and fire-ships through shoal waters that were only passable on a spring tide. The Dutch were dispersed, leaving the channels clear for Rupert’s great ships.
Fearing de Ruyter’s return, Rupert felt compelled to leave port immediately. He took with him marines, soldiers, and artillery, which he intended to land on the Dutch coast. Six of his larger ships were laden with ‘great stores of War, viz. of granadoes [grenades] for mortar-pieces and hand, firearms, pikes, powder, shot, scaling ladders, turnpikes, and many other chargeable stores for land service’.[fn12] However, everyday supplies for the fleet were inadequate for a summer at sea. In May the prince led out his amphibious force, reluctantly relying on his naval commissioners’ assurances that more provisions and men would be forwarded to him as soon as they became available.
The prince found the enemy unwilling to fight: the French successes on land meant de Ruyter’s marines were sent to reinforce the army, so his weakened force was now obliged to employ defensive, guerrilla tactics at sea. The Dutch watched the English from behind the supposed safety of the Schooneveld’s sandbanks, on the Zeeland coast. But Rupert was not to be denied: fearing a summer of frustrating watching and waiting, he sent scouts to sound out the enemy water. He then presented a plan for an audacious attack to Charles II, which the king approved.
On the morning of 28 May, the Dutch were riding at anchor when they heard a distant cannon shot. It was from Rupert’s flagship, the Royal Charles — newly built, to replace the vessel carried off from the Medway, and untried in battle. The prince then raised the Union Flag, the signal to bear down on the enemy. Rupert’s attack force was comprised of thirty-five shallow-bottomed frigates, assisted by thirteen fire-ships. It approached the Dutch with loosened fore-top sails, easing past Stony Bank in a stiff south-southwest breeze. A French squadron, commanded by one of Louis XIV’s court favourites, the Comte d’Estrée, also dropped its sails and followed the English advance. When Rupert was through the initial shallows, he raised the red flag, which was the sign for the assault to start in earnest.
The fleets closed at noon, the Dutch startled by this unprecedented attack: they had always viewed these waters as their sanctuary. Van Tromp faced Rupert, while de Ruyter greeted d’Estrée. The prince got the upper hand in his sector of the battle, driving his opponents close to the shore, where some ran aground. However, the French were less successful, their disarray allowing de Ruyter to come to van Tromp’s aid. Rupert had to fight both enemy formations simultaneously, his efforts hampered by ‘his Highness’s own ship,’ an eyewitness recalled, ‘which proved so crank-sided, and fetched so much water in at the ports, that her lower tier of guns could not he made use of, though it was a very easy gale we had’.[fn13] Despite this handicap, Rupert and his frigates lost few men and no ships, while the United Provinces had two ships sunk, one burnt, two disabled, and three run aground. The prince had the pleasure of seeing de Ruyter and van Tromp flee for safety, in the face of his blazing fire-ships.
Although this was a minor victory, it gave Rupert the satisfaction of justifying his suitability for supreme, independent command. Charles acknowledged this soon afterwards, when appointing him Admiral of the Fleet. Rupert had done what no English admiral had managed in the previous maritime wars: he had shown the United Provinces that no place was safe, outside their harbours, in the face of determination and bold piloting.
*
Rupert led the fleet in a further engagement a few days later, which followed an ambush by de Ruyter. This was a scrappy affair, which neither side could claim to have won. The prince’s conduct during this battle was subsequently criticised by one of his admirals, Sir Edward Spragge — like Holmes, an Irish Protestant who had spent time as a Royalist privateer. De Ruyter had caught the Anglo-French off guard and Spragge was aboard Rupert’s ship when the attack began. The prince ordered Spragge back to his flagship, with instructions to lead the counterattack as soon as he could: Spragge’s squadron was to be in the van, with Rupert’s in the middle of the formation. But Spragge took an age to reach his vessel and Rupert could wait no longer. Without being able to communicate his change of plan, he chose to lead the fleet with his own squadron to the fore.
Spragge was incensed. ‘The Prince placing himself in the van’, he recorded, in his journal, ‘the French in the middle, the line-of-battle, being of 89 men-of-war and small frigates, fire-ships and tenders, is so very long that I cannot see any sign the general admiral makes, being quite contrary to any custom ever used at sea before, and may prove of ill consequence to us. I know not any reason he has for it except being singular and positive.’[fn14] Although Rupert had strayed from the diktats of the training manual, Spragge’s critique made no allowances for de Ruyter’s exceptional skills in his home waters, which had cleverly hurried the prince into action earlier than he had planned.
For Rupert, the most worrying aspect of these engagements was the behaviour of the French: they had been little more than onlookers throughout. The suspicion was beginning to form that Louis wanted the two maritime powers to damage each other, while not exposing his ships in battle. Unhappy with his allies, disappointed that his new flagship was like ‘a mere table’[fn15] in the wind, and angered by the promised supplies failing to appear, Rupert returned to England and demanded an audience with the king. Charles felt obliged to accompany his cousin to the coast, where the prince showed him the pitiful condition of his ships. Rupert suggested that those responsible for the inadequate provisions should be forced to sail with the fleet and suffer the consequences of their incompetence and corruption. The prince also told the king of the unacceptable conduct of the French.
Rupert’s opinion of his coalition partners continued to decline. On land, the French had performed magnificently in 1672: marshals Conde, Luxembourg, and Turenne had made quick and decisive inroads against the Dutch defences, overwhelming the tiny army and committing atrocities against civilians. While one of Charles II’s natural sons, the Duke of Monmouth, commanded a British brigade on land, England’s role in the coalition was primarily at sea, although the French navy was expected to play its part, too. Louis’s navy had grown from fourteen ships of the line in 1663 to seventy-three in 1671. The prince expected it to pull its weight.
Rupert was further disappointed when Charles II appointed one of Louis XIV’s marshals as captain general of English land forces. Marshal de Schomberg was a Palatine German whose family had served Rupert’s father, Frederick, in Heidelberg. Schomberg had, like Rupert, found military employment abroad after the electorate was overrun. However, to many, he was a French appointment foisted on their king by an overseas tyrant. To the prince, he was an inferior who was now assuming equality.
Waiting to embark on Rupert’s ships for the planned invasion of the United Provinces, Schomberg and his men camped at Blackheath. Preferring to be at sea, Schomberg transferred to the frigate Greyhound. His senior officers advised him that, from the land, they could not tell which was their commander’s vessel. Schomberg therefore decided to fly his family’s standard from the main mast, to assist identification. To Rupert, this was an intolerable insolence: only admirals were allowed to hoist their own flags. He fired two of his cannon, as a signal that the marshal should lower the flag immediately. At the same time, he dispatched an officer to confiscate the standard and to insist that it never again be raised aboard one of his Majesty’s ships. Now it was Schomberg’s turn to be outraged: as captain general he was Rupert’s equal in rank (the prince was Lord Admiral) and was not prepared to obey orders from his peer. Schomberg sent his frigate’s captain to protest at Rupert’s highhandedness and ordered that the offending flag remain in place.
This was a clash of two proud and passionate leaders, which soon escalated from the bad tempered to the absurd. The prince was in a rage: Schomberg was aboard one of his ships and he was the overall commander of every vessel. The marshal had, in Rupert’s eyes, compounded his arrogance with disobedience. He ordered that the marshal’s messenger be arrested as soon as he came aboard. Rupert then sailed his flagship towards the Greyhound and threatened to sink her unless the flag was immediately taken down. Schomberg realised that Rupert was not bluffing and ordered his standard to be lowered. Both commanders then sent their version of events to Charles II, who chose not to side with either man. No doubt he found the whole affair remarkably childish.
This spat aside, Rupert’s overall concern about his allies coincided with a growing anxiety in England about the coalition with France. As early as the summer of 1672, the Bishop of Lincoln had written of the marshals’ Blitzkrieg through the United Provinces: ‘Holland deservedly suffers all the miseries it now lies under … [but] if it submits to France, where are we? I am persuaded France will treat and conquer on, till there be little left to treat for.’[fn16] The conduct of the French navy in 1673 added to this fear and suspicion.
After the two small June engagements, Rupert was obliged to return to the Thames for provisioning. On returning to duty, he wanted to attack the Dutch behind their sandbanks. However, Charles — probably as a result of his brother’s continuing meddling — insisted that all initiatives be passed by James, for approval: the Duke of York had been relieved of his command, but could not resist covert involvement in the workings of the fleet. The king, though, failed to appreciate the urgency of the situation. Rupert must now have felt the same disappointment that Sir William Coventry had expressed so poignantly, when resigning from the Navy Board at the end of 1667: ‘The serving a prince that minds not his business is most unhappy for them that serve him well.’[fn17]
The result was everything that Rupert detested about subordination: he saw opportunities of sudden and decisive action disappear, during the last days of July and the first week of August, because he was forced to await the king’s instructions from England. The prince, meanwhile, concentrated on trying to lure de Ruyter out of the Schooneveld, which English officers now referred to as de Ruyter’s ‘hole’. The prince led his Anglo-French fleet off the Texel, an island whose main channel, the Marsdiep, was the route for the ships of three of the United Provinces’ five admiralties — those of Amsterdam, Friesland, and the ‘North Quarter’ (the latter’s command centre alternating between Enkhuizen and Hoorn) — to reach the North Sea. Rupert sailed up and down the coastline between this, the principal Dutch naval base, and Camperdown, hoping to tempt the enemy to attack.
On the late afternoon of 10 August, the opportunity to fight arose. However, despite having the advantage of the wind, the prince decided to wait until morning, since he wanted a full day at the Dutch to make sure of total victory. By waiting, he risked losing the enemy altogether. However, by the next morning, the wind had changed, which persuaded the Dutch to use their advantage and fight, even though Rupert had eighty-six ships to the United Provinces’ sixty.
The battle of Texel was one of the most disappointing encounters of Rupert’s life. At last, after all the squabbles over supplies and the interference of the Duke of York, he had the opportunity to better the Dutch. This would surely have hastened the end of the war, for victory at sea would have left the way open for land invasion. With his troops landing on the western coast, and the French advancing from the east, the States-General would be compelled to yield. All that the prince required was a unity of purpose from his three squadrons — two English and one French.
The engagement split into two contests between familiar opponents. Van Tromp and Spragge clashed in a ferocious duel, which resulted in the total destruction of both flagships’ masts and rigging. While Spragge was transferring to a new ship, his pinnace was sunk and he drowned. Meanwhile, Rupert and de Ruyter locked horns in the battle’s midst, the prince and his men displaying ‘an incomparable resolution’,[fn18] according to an eyewitness, against two enemy squadrons. Their fight was brief, however, both commanders breaking off to link up with the rest of their forces.
What transformed the battle of Texel from a crucial battle into a virtual irrelevance was the performance of d’Estrée’s Frenchmen. By twice slackening their sails at the start of the engagement, they managed to put a considerable distance between themselves and the main action. Despite Rupert’s clear and constant signalling for them to join in the fight, the French stayed aloof from the bloodshed, watching from 6 miles away ‘instead’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘of falling with the fair wind they had upon de Ruyter or Tromp, who were going to attack the English squadrons with a far greater force than theirs; which would have been the entire defeat of the enemy had they been enclosed between his Highness Prince Rupert, & Mons. d’Estrée’.[fn19] The French decision to become bystanders eliminated Rupert’s numerical advantage at a stroke and enabled de Ruyter to slip away virtually unscathed: he lost just one man-of-war, although two of his vice-admirals were slain.
The Texel was Rupert’s last battle as admiral or general. As the conclusion of a pulsating fighting career, it was a miserable anti-climax. Despite both sides suffering the same level of casualties, the stalemate ended Rupert’s hopes of a successful invasion in 1673. The prince bewailed the squandering of ‘the plainest and best opportunity’[fn20] the alliance had had of winning the war. Returning to England, he oversaw the sale of the supplies taken with him to feed his land forces, including cheese for the men and oats for their horses. Fearing criticism, he lashed out at those he believed to be to blame for the failure. He found he was preaching to the converted: nobody in London wanted to hear about de Ruyter’s brilliant cunning; they longed, instead, to learn more about dastardly French treachery.
Rupert had no respect for the dead and repaid Spragge’s past criticisms by accusing him of having been in cahoots with the French. It seems likely that the cause of Spragge’s unreliability lay closer to home: he was one of the Duke of York’s creatures and such men were apt to cause Rupert great mischief, undermining his command out of loyalty to their master. The prince also revealed that d’Estrée had sent a messenger at the end of the battle to ask the meaning of the flag raised on his mizzen. This proved to Rupert, and to the conspiracy theorists, that the French had seen the signal to attack and chosen to ignore it. Their ignorance was feigned and their guilt surely established.
Charles’s ministers tried to censor accounts of the battle of the Texel, to spare their controversial alliance from further condemnation. However, English sailors returning home were quick to vent their disgust, and an observer noted that: ‘the citizens of London looked more disconsolate than when their city lay in ashes’[fn21] on hearing of d’Estrée’s reluctance to fight. ‘All men cried out’, wrote Bishop Burnet, ‘and said, we are engaged in a war by the French, that they might have the pleasure to see the Dutch and us destroy one another, while they knew our seas and ports, and learned all our methods, but took care to preserve themselves.’[fn22]
The scandal was given fresh impetus when the Marquis de Martell, d’Estrée’s second-in-command, wrote his account of the battle. William Bridgeman, a correspondent of the Earl of Essex, wrote: ‘The discourse about the behaviour of the French in the last fight continues still, the generality being no ways satisfied with it, which is much augmented by Mons. Martell’s relation, a copy of which I have enclosed here.’[fn23] This confirmed English suspicions that the French were under instructions not to engage: after a gentle brush with the Dutch, during which he fired only one broadside, d’Estrée ordered his squadron to regroup round his flagship. Martell revealed:
This being all finished in our station by eleven of the clock in the morning the whole squadron united again, & with a fair wind made toward the place where we left his Highness Prince Rupert, who was above three leagues from us, engaged in a fight with a considerable body of the Enemy’s. His Highness Prince Rupert seeing us come with that fair wind, gave us the signal to bear into his wake, Mons. de Martell laid his sails to the masts expecting that Mons. d’Estrée would advance with his whole squadron & fall all together with this fair wind upon the body of the Enemy & send in fire ships among them; but instead of that he kept the wind and contented himself to give his ships leave to shoot at more than [a] cannon and [a] half distance from the enemy. Mons. de Martell saw very well how shameful this was. But having received an express order to attempt nothing without the particular orders of Mons. d’Estrée, & besides having been so ill attended that morning by the ships of his division that he could have no assurance they would follow him, he shrugged up his shoulders, and only forbid any shooting from his ships, and this hath been all that was acted that day in relation to us.[fn24]
Martell was sent to the Bastille for his indiscretion, but his testimony, added to Rupert’s disgust, brought to an end Charles II’s attempts to link England militarily with France. English sailors, who were expected to cheer their allies’ ships as they passed, refused to do so. The Venetian ambassador reported that dummies dressed as Frenchmen were shot on Guy Fawkes’ Night, before being thrown onto bonfires.
In January 1674, Charles was obliged to summon Parliament. Fumbling his notes, he countered suspicions of a secret agreement with Louis with a lie, claiming that no such arrangement was in place. However, a paper circulated through Westminster claiming that: ‘All the mischiefs we have felt or may hereafter fear from the Hollanders, though ten times greater than what are falsely pretended, cannot possibly be of half that dangerous consequence to us, as the advantages now given to the growth of French power, by this pernicious league.’[fn25] Parliament refused to grant the king revenue for the continuation of the war. The following month England made unilateral peace with the Dutch: it was agreed to cease hostilities on 20 February. On 11 February, learning that a Dutch ship was harbouring in the Shetlands en route for the West Indies, Rupert ordered that she be seized before the war’s end.
This piece of cheeky opportunism was the final act in the prince’s long and varied military record. Rupert relinquished command of the fleet and returned to Windsor with unprecedented popularity: he had blown the whistle on an alliance that, many believed, had threatened their religion and their freedom. The prince and his friend Lord Shaftesbury were now, reported a contemporary, ‘looked upon to be the great Parliament men, and for the interest of Old England’.[fn26] Thirty years earlier, people would have laughed at such a notion, but Rupert was now believed to be much changed from the man who had terrorised the Parliamentary cause a generation before.
Rupert’s mistrust and suspicion of France were proved correct in time. Sir William Coventry told the Commons, in May 1678: ‘If you stay till all Flanders be gone, you will do as King James did in the Palatinate War, treat, and treat, till all was gone, and nobody to treat with him.’[fn27] This was the platform that William of Orange was able to build on when he stole the English throne in 1688 to become William III. He led the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV’s aggressive expansionism in the 1690s and prepared his adoptive kingdom for the gruelling necessity of standing up to France in the War of the Spanish Succession.