CHAPTER 51

The Battle of Lowestoft

LOWESTOFT, fought on 3 June 1665, was one of the most blue-blooded battles of the age of sail. The British fleet was commanded in person by James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, heir to the throne and the first prince to command a fleet in battle since the days of the Plantaganets. His cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine commanded the White, or van, squadron. Command of the Blue, or rear, was in the hands of the Earl of Sandwich, holder of the high honorific office of vice-admiral of England. The prospect of gaining glory in battle, and of coming to the attention of two princes of the blood, drew a horde of young Cavalier volunteers to the fleet, among them Charles Berkeley, newly created Earl of Falmouth and the rapidly rising favourite of King Charles II.1 Falmouth became one of three earls (along with one viscount and an earl’s son) to be killed during the course of the battle, an aristocratic attrition rate that would have been noteworthy even in a battle of the Wars of the Roses. Even the republican Dutch seemed to have caught something of the blue-blooded mood of the 1665 campaign: their commander-in-chief, Jacob, Lord of Wassanaer and Obdam, was a member of the relatively small Dutch noble class, although he was actually an ardent republican and had been de facto commander-in-chief of their fleet for the previous twelve years.

PRELIMINARIES

By late April 1665 both Britain and the United Provinces were ready to go to war once again. Buoyed up by a vast parliamentary subsidy of £2,500,000, Charles II and his ministers sought a quick, decisive victory and its hoped-for concomitant, the destruction of Dutch maritime trade. A fleet of approximately one hundred ships was assembled; as well as York, Rupert and Sandwich in the three chief commands, and the Duke of Albemarle ensconced ashore as deputy to the Lord High Admiral, Sir William Penn, the other surviving Commonwealth general-at-sea, was given a special place as York’s chief advisor aboard the flagship Royal Charles. The subordinate flag officers were some of the best and most experienced of the Commonwealth officers, including Sir John Lawson and Sir George Ayscue, while Falmouth’s brother Sir William Berkeley, rear-admiral of the Red, represented the new ‘gentlemen’. This stellar command group produced the important amendments to the fighting instructions of April 1665,* and eventually, after protracted delays in the victualling system, the fleet sailed on 20 April.² This meant it was at sea well before the Dutch, who were plagued by the usual problem of coordinating the contingents from their five different admiralties. The labyrinthine politics of the Netherlands affected their fleet in other ways: Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, was present during the fitting out and took many of the executive decisions away from Obdam, while provincial jealousies led to the creation of no fewer than seven squadrons, each with three flag officers. Obdam failed to call a council-of-war and did not lay down a coherent strategy. Lacking the clear line tactics laid down for the British fleet, the Dutch depended on their squadrons working as groups in the old way, ‘charging’ in line abreast and then endeavouring to board.³

A vivid drawing of the battle of Lowestoft by Van De Velde, depicting the scene shortly after the destruction of the Eendracht.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)

On paper, though, the two fleets were approximately equal. The Dutch had 107 ships, ninety-two of which carried thirty guns or more, and the fleet as a whole mounted 4,864 guns and was manned by 21,500 men. The British had eighty-eight ships mounting thirty guns or more in a fleet carrying a total of about 4,800 guns and some 24,000 men. But these bare figures concealed a huge disparity in weight of shot: the British had twenty-seven ships capable of firing over 1,000 pounds of shot, the Dutch just one.⁴ Both sides still depended heavily on armed merchantmen. The Dutch had eleven East Indiamen, including the powerful Maarseveen (the largest ship in their fleet), Oranje, Delflant and Huis te Zwieten, all of which mounted more than seventy guns. The British had twenty-four armed merchantmen, but these were much smaller, with only one carrying more than fifty guns. On the eve of the battle, Sandwich proposed that these merchantmen should be moved out of the line and formed into a reserve squadron of their own, partly because he had little confidence in the fighting spirit of their captains. The proposal was rejected, perhaps because it was thought too late in the day to completely revise the order of battle, perhaps because Penn and the Duke of York did not want to create an entire squadron that would be easy prey for the Dutch if the battle went badly.⁵

THE START OF THE BATTLE

The two fleets sighted each other on 1 June, but on that and the next day Obdam refused to attack, despite the apparent advantage that the easterly wind gave him. It is possible that his disparate fleet, with its twenty-one flagmen and ships of widely differing sailing qualities set out by five different admiralties, was simply too uncontrollable for him to contemplate an immediate attack, or else that he feared being trapped by that same easterly if he had to retreat.⁶ By the morning of the third, though, the wind had come round more to the south-south-west, favouring the British, and at 2am the fleets were about five miles apart.⁷ From dawn (about 4am) onwards, both sides manoeuvred to gain the weather gage, a contest that was won by Vice-Admiral Christopher Myngs, flying his flag in the Triumph, and the van division of the Red. The two fleets then passed each other on opposite tacks, too far apart to do any real damage to each other. Any semblance of tactical cohesion had already disappeared. Sandwich recorded how even at the beginning of the battle many British ships failed to keep their place in the line, so that groups of three to five ships formed up instead in line abreast, often firing into each other as a result.⁸ The Charity was cut off, compounded her error by tacking directly into the path of the Dutch fleet, and was taken. Once the two lines had passed each other, at about 5.30, the Dutch began to tack, and York intended his fleet to tack from the rear, according to his new fighting instruction; but it took so long for his flagship to hoist the correct signal that Rupert, commanding the van or White squadron, used his initiative and tacked first. This seemingly confused Lawson, leading the van of the Red in the Royal Oak, who did not tack in his turn, thereby opening up a gap between the White, now heading north-west, and the Red, still heading south-east. To remedy the situation, Penn took the flagship Royal Charles out of the line, followed by Sandwich’s Blue squadron. The manoeuvre was made smartly enough to prevent the Dutch breaking through the fleet as it tacked, although Sandwich almost became entangled in a mass of confused ships.⁹ The two squadrons then formed a second line to windward, the Red covering Rupert and the White while the Blue fell in behind the latter. Obdam attempted to break through to gain the weather gage at about 7.00 but was deterred by the presence of the Red, and as the two lines came abreast on opposite tacks, at about 8.00, James again ordered his fleet to tack from the rear, this time with better success. Carrying out this remarkably difficult manoeuvre while under fire was an astonishing achievement, never to be repeated in the rest of the age of sail, and much of the responsibility for its success has to be given to Sir William Penn. By accomplishing this stunning feat, the British fleet was able to replicate the situation that had brought it victory at the Gabbard twelve years before. With the two fleets now on the same tack, the British could bombard while keeping the Dutch at a distance, where they could not implement their own preferred tactic of boarding.¹⁰

THE ARTILLERY DUEL

At about 10am both sides began a terrific bombardment that lasted for some eight hours and could be heard plainly in London.¹¹ The Dutch ships were mainly larger than their equivalents in the first war and proved better able to withstand the onslaught. Lawson, leading the van again, was wounded (mortally, as it later transpired); his ship dropped out of the line, and his division fell into confusion. He was effectively replaced in command by the veteran Commonwealth flag officer Joseph Jordan, who left the disabled Saint George to assume command of the new Royal Oak. The centre and rear divisions of the Red remained to windward, effectively out of the action, leading the commander of the latter (Berkeley of the Swiftsure) to be publicly derided for cowardice; the commander of the former, the Duke of York, also came in for criticism after the battle, though it is possible that Penn, making the decisions on the flagship, sought to keep the Red apart as a reserve, ready to support any part of the line that required it.12 Sandwich’s vast but cumbersome Royal Prince and her seconds came under such heavy attack from Obdam’s 84-gun flagship Eendracht and the 76-gun East Indiaman Oranje that James and the Red finally committed to the action and sailed down to relieve them. Sandwich and Rupert both then launched their squadrons into the heart of the Dutch fleet, Sandwich noting that he hoisted ‘my blue flag on the mizzen peak, a sign for my squadron to follow me’.¹³ York’s Royal Charles then fell in alongside the Eendracht, and the two flagships began a murderous duel. At about noon three courtiers standing next to James on the quarterdeck were killed by one chain-shot, and the heir to the throne was splattered with their brains. Obdam, too, was killed, and a little later, at about 2.30, the magazine of the Eendracht exploded, killing all but five of the 409 men on board.¹⁴ The blast, which was probably caused by an error in handling powder, shook houses and blew open windows in The Hague.¹⁵

Medal commemorating the Battle of Lowestoft.

The destruction of the Eendracht fully exposed the weaknesses in the Dutch command structure and the inter-provincial jealousies that blighted the Dutch fleet. Kortenaer, Obdam’s nominal deputy, was severely wounded and unable to assume command, but his flag captain kept his pendant flying. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam contingent, led by Cornelis Tromp (son of the great Maarten, killed at Scheveningen), would not accept orders from the next in seniority, Jan Evertsen, a Zeelander, so the afternoon ended in chaos, with three separate ships flying the commander-in-chief’s pendant of distinction. Many ships simply turned and fled. The Dutch were pursued relentlessly by the British squadrons, although the Red was held up for some time by the astonishing attack of the lone East Indiaman Oranje, which took on the Royal Charles herself before gradually succumbing to the steady stream of the duke’s seconds as they came up in turn. Small groups of Dutch ships were cut off and forced to surrender, or were destroyed by fireships. The most controversial incident was the destruction of the Maarseveen, the largest ship in the Dutch fleet, which had surrendered to Sandwich but was still set ablaze by the Dolphin Fireship commanded by Captain William Gregory. Barely a hundred of her crew survived, and Gregory’s actions were roundly condemned by Sandwich as ‘not beseeming Christians’.¹⁶

In all, and including several captures of fleeing ships made on the following morning, the Dutch had lost seventeen ships. Eight had been destroyed, including the three largest, and nine captured. There were about 5,000 casualties, 20 per cent of the fleet’s manpower, which included the commander-in-chief and two other flag officers killed. In all 2,844 prisoners of war were landed in Suffolk in the immediate aftermath of the battle.¹⁷ By contrast, the British had lost one ship and only some 700 men, though these included two flag officers, including Lawson (whose wound turned gangrenous) and the royal favourite Falmouth, one of the three young men scythed down alongside the Duke of York.¹⁸

AFTERMATH

The narrow escape of the heir to the throne may explain the strange failure to follow up the crushing victory of Lowestoft, and to turn it into a complete annihilation of Dutch maritime power. The British fleet shortened sail during the night, supposedly because a courtier on the flagship, Henry Brouncker, deluded the flag captain, John Harman, and the ship’s master, John Cox, into believing that he was relaying the (sleeping) duke’s orders to that effect. It was subsequently suggested by the Earl of Clarendon that Brouncker, ‘a disreputable friend (and alleged pimp) of James’, had promised Clarendon’s daughter, the Duchess of York, that he would bring her husband home safely, or else that he acted unilaterally to preserve the life of the heir to the throne (and, by implication, his own, as satirists and politicians were quick to point out).¹⁹ The matter was investigated in Parliament in October 1667 and April 1668, when, with the finger of suspicion pointing firmly in his direction, Brouncker panicked and fled abroad.²⁰ His ex post facto defence, written from Paris in June 1668, made no mention of the duchess, but accused Harman, Cox and the other witnesses of perjury and contradicting each other. Brouncker implied that he was merely passing on the duke’s order not to engage during the night, which was then misinterpreted by Harman and Cox as an order to shorten sail; he also claimed that Cox did not sooner put on sail again because the night was so dark, and it was impossible to distinguish enemy and friendly lights.²¹

Regardless of Brouncker’s actions and subsequent justifications of them, it was clear that some ships on the British side would have found it difficult to mount a hot pursuit on the night of 3–4 June. Sandwich’s Royal Prince had to slow down to replace her main topsail, which had been ‘shot to pieces’, while the Bonadventure, which had spent almost all her powder and shot, had to lay by in the night to mend her rigging, ‘having every running rope in the ship shot, and [i.e. as well as] most of our main yard and bowsprit and spritsail yard’.²² Even so, none of this should have been sufficient to prevent a general chase being ordered. Up to a point, the failure to do so can be attributed to the clearly confused chain of command aboard the flagship and to Brouncker himself; whether he was acting maliciously or inadvertently is effectively irrelevant. However, Brouncker’s suggestion that James, who must have been exhausted and in some degree of shock after his narrow escape, gave an ambiguous order and then expected his subordinates to second-guess his meaning is entirely in keeping with the duke’s personality and subsequent track record as an admiral (he did something similar at Solebay23) and as king. As it was, the fleet returned to a ‘running posture’ only at about 4am on 4 June, too late to prevent the more northerly remnant of the Dutch fleet, commanded by Tromp and Evertsen, getting through the Texel seagate at about noon.²⁴

The battles of the Anglo-Dutch wars were reported all over Europe, with both countries’ representatives attempting to exaggerate their own successes. The dramatic explosion of the Eendracht at Lowestoft provided excellent copy’, even for neutrals far removed from the action; this Italian artist let his imagination run away with him and portrayed several other ships blowing up simultaneously, together with bodies blasted many yards into the air.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

Despite the unfortunate saga of the shortening of sail, Lowestoft was regarded at the time as ‘a great victory, never known in the world’ (as Pepys put it), and a sure sign that the war as a whole would go Britain’s way.²⁵ But the ravages of the Plague ensured that any triumphant afterglow was short-lived; Pepys was still to receive a definitive account of the battle when, on 7 June, he saw in Drury Lane ‘two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw’.²⁶ Within days, too, the long-standing jealousies among the British officers erupted into a vicious faction-fight which culminated in the resignation of Prince Rupert’s favourite, Sir Robert Holmes, when another was promoted over his head to a vacant flag post.²⁷ Moreover, the Dutch avoided major action for the remainder of the 1665 campaign (assisted by some remarkably inclement weather), and by the following year they had replaced their losses, commissioned new ships with heavier armaments, gained French and Danish allies, and resolved the perennial political squabble over the supreme command by elevating the most indisputably able and apolitical of their flag officers, Michiel de Ruyter.²⁸

* See Part Twelve, Chapter 49, pp251-2.