CHAPTER 45

Strategy in the Anglo-Dutch Wars

IN SEVERAL SENSES there was no such thing as naval ‘strategy’ in the seventeenth century. The word itself would not enter the English language until well over a century later. What would later be defined as naval strategy was simply one element in a broader, poorly defined and understood set of policies and priorities that shaped Britain’s relations with the outside world.1 Moreover, the implementation of‘strategy’ was conditioned by the realities of the time. The pace of communication meant that orders might be redundant long before they reached their recipients; commanders on the spot might have acted on their own initiative long before word of their actions reached their rulers. The first Anglo-Dutch war began because the British and Dutch fleets encountered each other off Dover and simply began to fight, despite having no orders to do so from their respective governments, which were not necessarily fully committed to war at that point.²

THE MAKING OF STRATEGY

Decisions on the best use of the fleet were taken largely in secret, by a small group of men at the very pinnacle of the state apparatus. There was hardly any wider public debate about naval strategy, a marked contrast to the situation that pertained in the eighteenth century and afterwards. For one thing, there was no obvious alternative: the arguments that raged from the Duke of Marlborough’s time onwards over the relative merits of deploying great armies on the continent or fleets on the world’s oceans were simply not feasible in the 1650s, when the huge New Model Army had to be retained in Britain for internal security, or after 1660, when the army was simply too small to matter. Between 1660 and 1689, the imposition of censorship restricted the opportunities for ‘pamphlet wars’ in the country at large. In the seventeenth century, too, sittings of Parliament, where alternative strategies might have been aired, were infrequent, and even when Parliament did meet war was still usually regarded as part of the royal prerogative, and thus outside its remit. The only substantive parliamentary discussions of naval strategy took place in 1667–8 and 1674 and took the form of post-mortems into the perceived failings of decisions taken during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars; the chief purpose of these investigations was to bring down an unpopular minister or ministers, not to learn lessons for the conduct of future naval campaigns.³

Under the republic, therefore, strategy was decided by the Rump’s Council of State, and subsequently by the Lord Protector and his council. The decision to go to war with Spain and to launch an invasion of Spanish properties in the Caribbean was effectively taken at a meeting of the council on or about 18 April 1654, when the alternative policies and peace or war with France were weighed and rejected, experts on Spanish defences were called in, the impact on trade was discussed, and the pros and cons of various Spanish targets in the New World were assessed.⁴ After the Restoration, Charles II and his Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, conferred with senior ministers both informally and in such formal forums as the Privy Council’s committees for foreign and naval affairs and (after 1673) the Admiralty. An ad hoc group of senior sea-officers advised the king during the second Anglo-Dutch war, and on several occasions in the second and third wars Charles and James went down to the fleet, accompanied by senior ministers, to discuss strategy directly with their admirals and captains.⁵ The secrecy that surrounded naval deployments can be seen in the despatch of a fleet to evacuate Tangier in 1683. This was commonly believed to be intended for anything from an attack on the Spanish plate fleet to a survey of the Channel Islands; not even the Admiralty Board had the slightest idea of the fleet’s destination.⁶

The decisions taken by heads of state and their subordinates often depended on the quality of the intelligence received, and this was often of dubious provenance. News of enemy preparations came from diplomats, who often indulged in wishful thinking (a trait particularly apparent in Sir George Downing, Charles II’s belligerent and not always balanced ambassador in the Netherlands in 1660–5 and 1672), or else from informants in the ports. At sea, word on the enemy’s movements might be picked up from merchantmen or fishing boats. It was often difficult for ministers and naval officers to sift the useful intelligence from the groundless rumour and fiction, and the simple realities of seventeenth-century communications made it equally difficult to respond rapidly to events.⁷ The most significant saga of multiple intelligence failures during the Anglo-Dutch wars led directly to the Four Days’ Battle of 1666, the largest battle in the entire sailing era.⁸ The so-called ‘division of the fleet’ originated in early May 1666 in discussions between Prince Rupert and Charles II and was conceived as a pre-emptive offensive strike against the French; Rupert, who disliked being in joint command with anyone, was also keen to prove himself in an independent mission. By the time Rupert sailed, however, an impressive body of misleading intelligence had transformed the expedition into an effort to forestall a major French landing in Ireland, a possibility which was viewed as an even greater danger than the union of the enemy fleets. For this reason the expedition was allowed to proceed even though the Dutch were known to be ready for sea. Then, after the squadron departed, news came that de Ruyter had actually come out nine days before, along with false but persuasive indications that he had sailed north. It was assumed at Whitehall that if the Dutch were in the north, they must have gone there in the expectation of meeting the French. Therefore, the strategists reasoned, Beaufort (the French admiral) must not be embarking troops for a landing in Ireland after all, but must instead be hastening around Scotland. On the night of 30 May orders were despatched recalling Rupert because, in Coventry’s words, ‘it was beleaved the Dutch & French were about a conjunction by the North’, leaving the prince badly out of position.9 At the time there was no sense of emergency and the main fleet was not thought to be in danger, as Coventry assured Albemarle in a letter the next morning.¹⁰ Thus the recall was quite fortuitous, and itself based on bad intelligence!

Contrary to common belief, a notorious false report that Beaufort had passed Lisbon on 14 May did not precipitate Rupert’s expedition, but was actually an important element in the recall decision – because if the French did not intend an invasion, and had continued on directly from Lisbon to join the Dutch by the northern route, they could already have reached Scottish latitudes by 30 May. Charles II and the Duke of York made the mistake of thinking that Louis XIV would act as resolutely as they would have (or, at least, as they liked to believe they would have). But the King of France, who had planned only a passage up the English Channel, became increasingly nervous over the vulnerability of his fleet during its approach, and finally sent orders for Beaufort to halt at Lisbon. The upshot of this almost surreal misreading of the situation by the British ‘high command’ was that on 1 June the Duke of Albemarle, with only fifty-six ships, found himself facing a Dutch fleet of eighty-six, and the Four Days’ Battle commenced.

THE ‘BATTLEFLEET’

The rapid expansion of the navy in 1649–52, along with subsequent building programmes, gave the state an unprecedentedly large force of purpose-built warships. The adoption of the ‘line of battle’, with its emphasis on broadside gunnery, inevitably encouraged the concentration of these ships into as large a force as possible, intended literally to smash its opponents into submission. Other circumstances drew policy makers towards the same conclusion. Early in the first Anglo-Dutch war, a reasonably substantial squadron was maintained in the Mediterranean, but this was overwhelmed by a much larger Dutch force, and its very existence, thereby weakening the main fleet in home waters, was blamed for the defeat suffered in the battle of Dungeness (October 1652). Thereafter, both republican and royal regimes deliberately withdrew all but a handful of ships from overseas theatres at the beginning of each campaign, leaving British interests there to fend for themselves. This permitted the concentration of the maximum possible number of warships in one great fleet in the North Sea, where it was intended to overwhelm the smaller and more lightly built ships of the United Provinces.¹¹ However, the battlefleet proved to be a remarkably blunt instrument. It was so new, and so large, that policy makers had very little real idea of how to use it effectively. The awesome power of the broadside, when deployed in a line of battle, clearly had the potential to shatter an enemy fleet and perhaps to win a war; but how to ensure that an enemy could be brought to a position where it would become an obliging sitting duck? Ultimately, the Dutch defeated the Stuart regime simply by refusing to be so obliging. The Dutch fleet could always preserve itself by hiding behind its coastal shoals, which were exploited brilliantly for that purpose by de Ruyter in 1673.¹² Indeed, the strategy of the Dutch was wholly defensive, aimed solely at preserving their state and their trade; thus ‘winning’ the Anglo-Dutch wars meant entirely different things to the two protagonists.¹³

TRADE, AVARICE AND HONOUR

At the start of the first Anglo-Dutch war, neither side had any real idea of how to fight an entirely new enemy. Both sides experimented with different ways of annoying the other party, and both made serious mistakes; the deployment of Blake to Shetland in July 1652, in a vain attempt to destroy the Dutch fishing fleet, removed the best ships and the best commander far from where they were most needed, in the Channel and southern North Sea, and revealed a glaring ignorance of what might or might not be considered a worthwhile target.¹⁴ Cromwell’s Spanish war, commenced in 1654, was focused unashamedly on the interception of Spain’s bullion shipments from the New World, an objective that it was hoped could be achieved by conquering Spanish possessions (hence the expedition to Hispaniola and subsequent acquisition of Jamaica), by stationing a fleet off the coast of Spain itself, or by a combination of both strategies. Advocates of the war were well aware of the fact that England’s lucrative trade with Old Spain would be damaged in the short term, but hoped that the long-term gains would make the temporary dislocation worthwhile.¹⁵ This reversion to the mindset of Drake and Hawkins almost paid off. Richard Stayner intercepted the Spanish plate fleet off Cadiz in September 1656, but was able to capture only two of the eight ships; although these carried £200,000 of bullion, far more was aboard a ship that was sunk and another that was run ashore. In April 1657 Blake successfully attacked a larger plate fleet in the harbour of Santa Cruz on Tenerife, but the Spanish had prudently moved all the bullion ashore long before he got there. Nevertheless, the two ‘near misses’ perpetuated the myth that a self-financing naval war was achievable.

Charles II and his ministers entered the second Anglo-Dutch war convinced that they could use ‘the greatest naval force of ships royal that ever any prince of Europe was master of’ to end Dutch affronts and disruption of English trade. If the Dutch were defeated and made to pay all the costs of the war, that trade would inevitably increase, and ‘all the princes and states of the world that know the name of the English [would] love or dread the crown of England’.¹⁶ That goal could be attained, it seemed, either by defeating the main Dutch fleet and then mopping up the merchantmen at leisure, or by attacking the rich merchant convoys from the Mediterranean and the East Indies as they returned to the Netherlands. The king and his advisors never decided between these different goals, and switched instead between one short-term objective and another.¹⁷ They also failed to realise that the Dutch were not being as obliging as they had been in the first war, when their disastrous policy of continuing to run their large merchant convoys and individual merchantmen through the English Channel had lost them some 1,500 ships. During the second and third wars, the Dutch sometimes resorted to the longer ‘north-about’ route around Scotland, sometimes abandoned seaborne trade altogether, and often resorted to the use of neutral ‘flags of convenience’. These strategies effectively stymied the royal strategy and meant that the returns from prize money were catastrophically lower than had been forecast. At least 438 prizes were taken during the second war, and these brought in an income of £676,248. Sixty-five of the captures were valued at over £1,500, and the great majority of prize ships were condemned at London, where the proceeds totalled some £260,000. Contrary to the opinion of the court’s critics, some £150,532 of the total was actually spent on the navy, but this was a drop in the ocean when set against the actual cost of the navy during the war. Of the remaining three-quarters of the prize income, large amounts were spent on salaries (£46,987) and garrisons (£44,141), but critics of royal frivolity might have made much of the facts that £56,664 went on services and gifts and another £13,277 on jewels, and that £7,000 went straight into Charles II’s privy purse.18

Charles was more intent than James on using the fleet for naked thievery on the high seas. The king’s proposal (of April 1665) that the whole fleet should go north to intercept a valuable convoy returning from the Mediterranean would have left the whole east coast of England wide open to a Dutch attack, and James and his council-of-war wisely rejected it.¹⁹ Nevertheless, an almost identical scheme to intercept returning East India ships as they sheltered in Norway did win acceptance, even though it carried the same degree of risk. However, the attack on neutral Bergen in September 1665 was not aimed solely at the usual East India cargoes of spices, pepper and other valuable commodities; Charles and James believed that the fleet was carrying five chests of gold, and that the prize was worth the risks involved (which included war with Denmark-Norway, the actual outcome).²⁰ The subsequent capture of two East Indiamen in the North Sea (and of two others serving in the Dutch navy) almost made the campaign worthwhile, but the officers and men of the capturing fleet purloined the cargoes for their own profit long before the prizes were brought back to port.

A British cannonball fired during the action of September 1665 is still lodged in the west wall of the Domkirken, Bergen.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPHS)

‘Strategy’ was also very much bound up with perceptions of national honour. The insistence on the ‘salute to the flag’ in the British seas was one element of this, but there was also a strong element of ‘keeping up appearances’. In 1665 Sandwich advised that the fleet should sail to the Dutch coast as soon as possible, ‘it being of reputation both at home and abroad’.²¹ In July 1672 Charles II was determined to take some form of action against the Dutch so that he retained ‘the reputation and advantage of this summer’, but he was unclear on how to actually achieve this; he was keen to pursue the returning East India fleet, which was said to have taken refuge in the Faroes, but also wished to make a landing somewhere on the Dutch coast.²² The greatest blow to the king’s and the country’s reputation was, of course, the successful Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667. Within days it was being said that Charles intended to set out a substantial fleet in 1668 (as he eventually did) as it was ‘necessary after the affronts we have received to show we resolve still to be masters of the sea’.²³ Ultimately, the wish to avenge the humiliation of Chatham probably played a significant part in deciding Charles on the controversial French alliance created by the Treaty of Dover (1670) and launching the subsequent third Anglo-Dutch war, which had as its avowed aim the outright destruction of the Dutch state.²⁴

BLOCKADE AND INVASION

The most effective way of stifling Dutch trade, and of intercepting the rich fleets returning from the Mediterranean and the Indies, was to maintain a blockade off the Dutch coast. However, the maximum time for which such a blockade could be sustained was only about a month; wind, wear and tear, and the inability of the victualling system to sustain the fleet for any longer, all precluded longer blockades.²⁵ In practice, though, a month was ample time to wreak havoc on the prosperity of the United Provinces, especially if that month covered the crucial period in August or September when the rich retoorvloten (returning fleets), especially that from the East Indies, were due back at their home ports. Monck achieved this aim in 1653, and exactly twenty years later the implications of permitting the Anglo-French naval blockade to continue drew de Ruyter out from behind his shoals to fight a battle that he had sought desperately to avoid. However, undoubtedly the most impressive use of blockade during the period was that undertaken by Blake off the coast of Spain over the winter of 1656–7. Despite the logistical difficulties that it presented, this was a spectacular success which almost brought off the great coup of capturing the bullion fleet from the Americas.26

A royal visit to the fleet (following page), 1672. Van de Velde’s great painting shows the fleet flagship Prince, with the Duke of York’s standard at the main and the Lord High Admiral’s flag at the fore; at left, two of the royal yachts, including the Cleveland, which had brought Charles II to the fleet.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)

‘Holmes’s Bonfire’, from a contemporary broadsheet.

In 1673 Charles and James added an additional dimension to the strategy of the Anglo-Dutch wars: an invasion of Zeeland, which was to be permanently annexed to Britain. An army was assembled at Blackheath, and a motley amphibious flotilla of transports and ‘landing craft’ was made ready. Bringing about a successful invasion begged several questions. The fleet would have to lie on the Dutch coast for some time to cover the landing; but given the constraints on blockade, could it sustain that cover for long enough, and would it not lose valuable opportunities to attack Dutch trade in the mean time? Should the Dutch fleet be brought to battle before the invasion commenced? In the end, the weather and Admiral de Ruyter’s brilliant defensive tactics stymied the scheme, and the invasion army got no further than Great Yarmouth.²⁷

There were very few‘combined’ or‘amphibious’ operations during the period. Warships supported Cromwell’s army in Scotland and Ireland in the early 1650s, but the first Anglo-Dutch war saw no attempts to land on Dutch territory. The largest ‘combined operation’ of the age, Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ against the West Indies in 1654–5, degenerated into an ignominious squabble between the army and navy commanders, and subsequent operations in that theatre during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars were undertaken mainly by small local land and sea forces. In September and October 1667, for example, Sir John Harman’s squadron in the West Indies transported an army of 900 men for a series of operations against French and Dutch colonies which culminated in the capture of Surinam.²⁸ Apart from the abortive Zeeland invasion scheme, though, the only serious operation against Dutch territory in Europe during the second and third wars was the attack on the island of Vlie in September 1666. Dozens of merchantmen in the anchorage were burned, and the pacifist Mennonite village of Terschelling was razed.²⁹