The Battle of Scheveningen
THE BATTLE OF SCHEVENINGEN, fought on 31 July 1653 and known to the Dutch as Terheide, was one of the most crushing victories in British naval history. Somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 Dutch seamen were captured or killed, and among the latter was the commander-in-chief, Marten Harpertszoon Tromp, one of the greatest seamen of the seventeenth century. At least ten Dutch ships were sunk or captured (though British reports claimed up to thirty, which would have been almost a third of the Dutch fleet). On these counts, Scheveningen dwarfed most of the much-vaunted triumphs of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy; yet the battle is virtually unknown. Perhaps because of the pronunciation issues it would pose for matelots, the name has never been borne by a British warship, not even one of the Battle class destroyers of the 1940s, three of which were named after less conclusive battles of the Anglo-Dutch wars.1 A recent popular history of the Royal Navy gives Scheveningen two brief paragraphs, but omits all mention of it from the index.2 Its comparative obscurity can be attributed at least in part to the fact that, rather than following up the victory and imposing punitive terms on the defeated enemy, a new regime in Whitehall instead agreed to a remarkably lenient peace. It was the approximate equivalent of ending the war with France six months after Trafalgar, and confirming Napoleon in all his conquests.
THE BLOCKADE OF THE DUTCH COAST
Following its defeat at the battle of the Gabbard (2–3 June 1653) the Dutch fleet had retired to its harbours in disarray. Tromp and most of the ships took shelter in the Scheldt and the Zeeland inlets, while Witte de With (1599–1658) commanded a squadron of twenty-seven ships within the Texel sea-gate. As both forces attempted to repair and make good their losses in manpower, the British fleet under Robert Blake and George Monck began a blockade of the Dutch coast. It was difficult to maintain this, given the dangers of the lee shore and the need for the fleet to withdraw occasionally to Solebay to revictual, but it proved effective enough. With inward and outward shipping largely bottled up, the Dutch economy seemed on the verge of collapse, and it became imperative for Tromp to take the fleet to sea once more to break the stranglehold. But that would necessitate joining with Witte de With, and it would be remarkably dangerous for the two Dutch forces to put to sea independently, for their more powerfully armed enemy might then be able to pick off each in turn. The main problem for the British, apart from the perennial difficulty of victualling the fleet, was the illness of Blake. The great general had been seriously wounded at the battle of Portland in February and was then ill with kidney stones for much of the year. He was at Bath, in danger of his life, when the Dutch put to sea at the end of July.3 That left Monck in sole command of the fleet, with William Penn as admiral of the White and John Lawson as admiral of the Blue.
Maerten Tromp, commander of the Dutch fleet at Scheveningen and the most prominent casualty of the battle.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
THE BATTLE
Wind and tide conditions off the Dutch coast made it essential for de With to bring his squadron out into the open sea before Tromp made his own move. Tromp, flying his flag in the Brederode, was off Scheveningen on 28 July and moved slowly up the coast, while Monck, now in sole command of the British fleet, waited off Texel for De With to emerge. Some time after eight on the morning of the 29th, Tromp’s scouts sighted Monck’s fleet, which he estimated at some 120 ships.4 At about eleven the wind came round to the north-west, giving Monck the weather gage, and Tromp turned southwards, hoping to draw the British away from the sea-gate and thus permitting De With to come out.5 By about four in the afternoon, Monck’s faster ships had caught up with the slower ones in Tromp’s rear, and a cannonade began. This lasted for about four hours, though it was six or seven before Monck’s largest ships, including his flagship Resolution (the once and future Prince Royal), came into action. The British kept the weather gage overnight, but Tromp ingeniously managed to tack back northwards, passing Monck and by the morning he had joined with De With, whose flag was flying in the Vrijheid. The Dutch now had 107 ships, the British 104, but severe gales and the proximity of the lee shore prevented any action on the 30th as both fleets strove to keep the sea. In the process, the two fleets changed places once again, with the Dutch ending up to the south of Monck.6
The fight resumed on the morning of 31 July. The wind had come round southerly, so Tromp still had the weather gage, and at about seven he turned his fleet towards the British and fell towards them on the wind. Monck had other ideas. He ordered his fleet, which seems to have been in the new line formation7, to tack towards the Dutch and smash through their formation, thereby regaining the weather gage; or as Monck put it, his flagship Resolution, along with the Worcester, led a ‘desperate and gallant charge’ through the Dutch fleet.8 Once the British were through, the Dutch tacked back against them, and the formations then passed through each other four times. The first pass was calamitous enough for the Dutch: a lucky musket shot from the Tulip struck the left breast of Tromp, who was carried below and died shortly afterwards. His death was kept secret in order to preserve morale, and at the instigation of the flag captain, Kortenaer, the Brederode continued to fly the admiral’s flag.9 Tromp did not witness the calamity that befell his fleet. On each succeeding pass, the greater firepower of Monck’s ships told, especially as the range was almost point blank; ‘most desperately fought by either almost at push of pike’, as one witness put it.10 A French witness described ‘the horrible noise of the cannon with which the air resounded, and … mountains of fire which every now and then were seen rising out of the smoke’.11 The drawings of the battle by Willem Van de Velde the elder, who was present, show the Dutch being reduced to dismasted, smouldering hulks as the British, maintaining a reasonably ordered formation, pounded them time after time.12 Some time after one in the afternoon, about twenty-five Dutch ships (chiefly hired merchantmen) dropped out of the battle, much to Witte de With’s disgust.13 This soon turned into a wholesale retreat, and de With formed a rearguard to save as much of the fleet as possible. But Monck pursued them relentlessly, until nightfall and shoal waters finally put an end to the pursuit. The general reported his victory in the religious language of the times: ‘truly may we say, “great was the Lord and marvellous, worthy to be praised”, for his glorious appearance on our behalf’.14
THE IMPACT OF THE BATTLE
Scheveningen demonstrated conclusively the power of the line of battle when allied to the overwhelming superiority in weight of ordnance that the British possessed. A comparison of the flagships alone suggests the scale of the mismatch. Tromp’s Brederode, with fifty-eight guns, had confronted Monck’s Resolution, with eighty-eight. Witte de With’s Vrijheid, with forty-four guns, was heavily outgunned by Penn’s James, with sixty-six. The Noorderkwartier flagship, Pieter Florissen’s Monnikendam, with only thirty-six guns, barely stood comparison with John Lawson’s George, which mounted fifty-eight. All the other Dutch flagships that are known carried between thirty and forty guns; none of the others on the British side carried fewer than fifty-six. Unsurprisingly, the butcher’s bill on the Dutch side was horrific. de Ruyter’s flagship, the Witte Lam, had seventy-eight dead or dying, Evertsen’s another fifty.15 Many of the Dutch ships were in a dire state. The Campen had taken two shots beneath the waterline, her bowsprit, foremast and spritsail yard all needed replacement, and two of her guns had blown up; the de Vreede, which had fifteen killed and twenty wounded, had ‘all the round timbers and walls of the ship shattered’, and had thirty-six cannonballs lodged in her.16
The battle of Scheveningen as portrayed by Willem Van De Velde the Elder, who was present.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
A Dutch broadside illustrating the battle of Scheveningen and wrongly showing Blake as the British admiral.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
The British, too, had suffered losses, though these were on nothing like the same scale. A few hundred were killed (no more precise figure is available), among them one flag officer (Thomas Graves, rear-admiral of the White) and five captains. One ship, the 32-gun Oak, was lost, along with one fireship.17 The Tulip, the ship that had done for Tromp, had taken about thirty balls in her hull but had only one man killed, whose ‘brains spoilt [the captain’s] suit, all my back and hat being full of it and of blood’.18 For the Dutch, far and away the greatest loss was that of their talismanic admiral, Tromp, who was given a spectacular state funeral in the church at Delft.19 Ironically, the need for Monck’s fleet to withdraw to carry out repairs effectively ended the blockade, the original objective of Tromp’s expedition, and De With was able to convoy vital outward-bound shipping into the Atlantic before returning with some 400 incoming ships. Consequently, the Dutch were able to claim Scheveningen as a strategic victory of their own. But a ferocious storm off Texel on 20 October destroyed fifteen of De With’s ships, making it a worse calamity for the Dutch then the battle of Scheveningen, and it was clear that both the Dutch navy and economy would find it desperately hard to fight a campaign in 1654. Fortunately for them, the British also had severe financial problems of their own, and the new regime of Oliver Cromwell was determined to make peace, even if on terms that were arguably very generous to an enemy that had clearly been defeated.20 In that sense, the battle of Scheveningen proved to be something of a chimera.