CHAPTER 24

Prisoners of War

THE UNPRECEDENTED SIZE of the fleets that fought in the three Anglo-Dutch wars inevitably meant that on both sides, many more prisoners were taken than in earlier conflicts. In both Britain and the Netherlands, entirely new arrangements had to be introduced to cope with large numbers of prisoners of war. Even so, pragmatism largely prevailed. It was in neither side’s interests to detain its prisoners indefinitely, so exchanges took place whenever they could be arranged. The first exchange of the second Anglo-Dutch war took place as early as April 1665.1 There was then no exchange until a treaty was agreed in October 1665, by which each side was given twenty days to arrange the return of its own men.² In 1666 the atmosphere between the two sides was frostier, and large-scale exchanges were impossible. In January 1667, the admiralty of Zeeland proposed an exchange to Charles II’s government, and this was agreed; a little later, the French sent six ships from Rouen to collect their prisoners from England.³ In September 1672 all English prisoners in the Netherlands were discharged, and an order was therefore issued to release all the Dutch prisoners being held in England.⁴ It was also possible to obtain individual exchanges. James Yonge, a Plymouth surgeon captured in 1666, obtained his exchange by obtaining parole for a kinsman of the secretary of the Rotterdam admiralty, being held prisoner near Harwich; Yonge returned to England under bond to his captors, and after a fortnight’s attendance at the Commissioners for the Sick and Wounded at Westminster he obtained an order for the Dutchman’s release, upon which Yonge’s own bond to his captors was surrendered back to him.⁵

There was nothing like a ‘Geneva convention’ to regulate the treatment of prisoners, but as one order of 1653 put it, officers in particular were to be treated ‘with safety yet with civil respect’, and this was usually the case.⁶ The only British flag officer captured by the Dutch (in 1666), Sir George Ayscue, was said to have been painted and paraded through The Hague with a tail stuck to him, but this was simply a propaganda myth.⁷ Indeed, some of the ways in which prisoners were treated seem bizarre by later standards. The difficulties of manning English merchant shipping during the Anglo-Dutch wars led the government to agree to the release of any Dutch prisoners who were willing to sign on as crew, and others were released if they volunteered to work in linen manufacture.⁸ Much of this relatively good treatment undoubtedly stemmed from a sense of‘do as you would be done by’. In 1665 Dutch prisoners at Colchester and Winchester signed letters testifying to their good treatment, and this was clearly driven by a wish to ensure that the Dutch, in turn, did not mistreat the British prisoners that they took (there had been stories of prisoners in the Netherlands being dragged through towns in chains). As in similar situations in later wars, such propaganda was not entirely effective: the letters painted the lives of the prisoners as so idyllic that they immediately attracted suspicion.⁹ As it was, there were to be many claims of mistreatment of British prisoners in the Netherlands, although some of these need to be taken with a pinch of salt; many were generated by Charles II’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir George Downing, who became increasingly anti-Dutch over time, or were second-hand rumours circulated by commentators within Britain.¹⁰ Away from the North Sea and the control of central governments, treatment of prisoners could certainly be harsher. Edward Barlow, captured on a merchantman in the East Indies in 1672, was forced to work for the Batavia for the Dutch, who often beat and abused their prisoners, called them ‘English dogs’, and gave them inadequate victuals.¹¹

A Dutch broadsheet of 1666 portraying a group of their prisoners being marched under duress from Portsmouth to Winchester.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

BRITISH PRISONERS OVERSEAS

Naval and mercantile personnel captured at sea were usually held in the maritime towns of the Netherlands. James Yonge was held initially in the ‘West India packhouse’ at Amsterdam, in a stinking room with 160 ‘nasty and lousy’ fellow prisoners and an open toilet at the end of it. He was able to buy brandy and tobacco, and found the victuals of small beer, butter, cheese and various stews perfectly adequate. After a week, though, he and some of the others were transferred to a much smaller room in the admiralty building at Rotterdam, which had no bedding, far worse victuals and an even more rudimentary toilet.12 Like other English prisoners, once his money ran out Yonge had to rely on donations from home, but unlike most others, Yonge was fortunate that his father knew an English merchant at Rotterdam who was able to bail him. A prisoner in Zeeland in July 1666 wrote home to complain that he and his fellows had ‘little more upon us than the bare skin to cover our bones’; every second day they each received a ‘threepenny loaf’, two ounces of butter and three ounces of cheese, and they were given only 2½d a day for other provisions, including beer.¹³ Officers had better conditions. In 1672 Captain Fletcher of the Little Victory had to share a room in Rotterdam with a French merchant captain, but in 1666 Sir George Ayscue was accommodated in the castle of Louvestein, normally reserved for the Dutch state’s most prominent political prisoners.¹⁴ At first, prisoners in the Netherlands had to pay their own way (as Yonge did), but in November 1665 Charles II decided to fund his prisoners abroad rather than the foreign prisoners in England, after which they notionally received an allowance of 5d a day.¹⁵

The castle of Louvestein in Holland, used to imprison Admiral Sir George Ayscue in 1666.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

For many prisoners, the experience of getting home after their release or exchange could be even more traumatic than their confinement, primarily because they had to find their own means for the journey. In April 1666 a Mrs Gill petitioned Trinity House for relief on the grounds that if she could not raise enough money to pay for the return journey of her husband, who had been exchanged, then he would have to remain in Holland. Trinity House rejected the petition on the grounds that its constitution forbade it to provide for such cases.¹⁶ In June, though, large numbers of English prisoners fetched up in Ostend on their way home, but found no ships waiting to collect them and no money for their relief.¹⁷ The master of Trinity House went to the Privy Council, which failed to agree a response, so the brethren organised their own collection.¹⁸ One of the most astonishing stories of prisoners returning against all the odds was that of the six men of the Leopard captured by the Dutch at the battle of Leghorn in 1653, who lost all their possessions and yet made their way home overland through Germany – a journey that they estimated at 1,300 miles.¹⁹

FOREIGN PRISONERS IN BRITAIN

The successes of the Commonwealth’s navy in the first Anglo-Dutch war led to a sudden influx of large numbers of Dutch prisoners, which tested the resources of the state and local communities alike. At first, ad hoc arrangements were made by which responsibility for prisoners was taken by coastal towns, such as Portsmouth and Chichester, although several large buildings, notably Chelsea College and Colchester Castle, were taken over as ‘prisoner of war camps’. A formal system was only just being put into place under a new Commission for the Sick and Wounded, and for the Care of Prisoners, when the war abruptly ended.20 Large numbers of prisoners were again taken in the second Anglo-Dutch war: in the summer of 1665 alone, 1,300 were taken at the battle of Lowestoft and 1,000 more at Bergen. Responsibility for prisoners again lay with the newly reconstituted Commission for the Sick and Wounded, but this had clearly learned from the experiences of the first war and implemented a revised strategy. Chelsea College was employed once again, but this procedure had to be abandoned in August 1665 when it became infested with the plague and hasty arrangements were made to transfer the inmates to Portchester and Leeds castles.²¹ In October 1665 the Privy Council decided to take over Sudbury Priory, if possible by persuading the owners to release it; if they refused, it would be requisitioned anyway.²² Within six months, though, the inhabitants of Sudbury were petitioning to complain that the town had been overrun by 1,300 foreigners, and simply couldn’t cope.²³ Winchester, too, protested at the large numbers of prisoners allocated to it.²⁴ In outlying parts of the British Isles, prisoners often had to be accommodated in whatever facilities were available, no matter how unsuitable. In 1666 thirty-three Dutch prisoners who had initially been held in Galway were taken to Kilkenny and put up in two of the town’s best inns.²⁵ There were even precursors of the ‘prison hulks’ of later centuries. In 1665 many Dutch prisoners were accommodated in their own prize ships, moored in the Thames; one was the Seven Oaks, lying at Erith with forty guards and 200 prisoners.²⁶

Chelsea College. Employed as a prisoner-of-war camp in the Anglo-Dutch wars, it was subsequently demolished to make way for Chelsea Hospital.

Portchester Castle, at the north end of Portsmouth Harbour, was used as a prisoner-of-war camp in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and later in the Anglo-French wars of the eighteenth century.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

Dutch prisoners in Britain were paid an allowance of 4d a day in the first Anglo-Dutch war and 5d in 1665 (a shilling for officers), but this was reduced to a bread-and-water allowance of 2d in 1666 (5d for French prisoners) and then to only 1d from that September (2d for the French). This reflected Charles II’s change of policy in November 1665.²⁷ Living conditions in ancient castles and aboard prison ships were often very bad, and overcrowding led to disease. In 1653 Dutch prisoners were said to be lying on straw in the open air, and seventeen inmates of Chelsea College were buried on one day in September.²⁸ Of the 1,008 Dutch and 198 French prisoners of war held at Leeds Castle between October 1665 and September 1666, no fewer than 402 died in captivity.²⁹ Inevitably, there were attempts to escape. In May 1665 some prisoners at Dover Castle tried to escape through the magazine (their room was directly above it) and had to be moved to a less dangerous part of the castle. There was a successful escape from the castle a few months later, when the prisoners were spirited away by sympathetic citizens of‘that disaffected town’.³⁰ A successful but somewhat pungent getaway was made at Chatham in January 1666, when eight crewmen of a Dutch privateer escaped through their prison’s toilet chute.³¹ At Leeds, several prisoners drowned when they tried to swim the moat, and others were shot attempting to escape. Even so, sixty men escaped from Leeds between October 1665 and September 1666.³² Dutch officers, like their British counterparts in the Netherlands, were treated well once they had given the paroles of men of honour. In 1665 several were given the liberty of their ambassador’s house, while others lodged with English captains.³³

The cost of maintaining enemy prisoners could be crippling, particularly at the heights of the 1653, 1665 and 1666 campaigns, when there were many in custody. The government had optimistically assumed that they would capture more than enough prizes to cover all such expenses, but the accounts never remotely tallied, and a series of hand-to-mouth arrangements was made instead.³⁴ The charge of the 723 prisoners held at Leeds Castle alone in only the five months from October 1665 onwards came to well over £900, and at one point that year the Commission for the Sick and Wounded was spending well over £1,000 a month. In September, the Lord Treasurer’s secretary bemoaned the crippling financial burden generated by the Dutch prisoners, the allowances paid to them and the apparent lack of prospect of an immediate exchange: ‘our task masters exacted brick without allowing us straw … is his Majesty resolved to maintain the armies of his enemies in his own bosom? Whose idleness makes them sick, and their sickness redoubles the charge?’.³⁵ At the end of the war, the British immediately released their Dutch prisoners, only to find that the Dutch were insisting on payment for the release of theirs.³⁶ Ultimately, the only solution to the problem was a simple one: less successful naval campaigns meant fewer prisoners and less expense, so the failure during the third Anglo-Dutch war to capture Dutch warships and merchantmen on anything like the scale that had been witnessed during the first and second wars was something of a blessing in disguise.