CHAPTER 55

Legacies

IN BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS, the treatment of the Anglo-Dutch wars, and of the naval history of the seventeenth century in general, is very different. The Dutch rightly look on the period as the ‘golden age’ of their naval history and commemorate it accordingly. In Britain, however, the Dutch wars are usually regarded as an embarrassing epoch of naval mediocrity, sandwiched between the more memorable (and successful) eras of Drake and Nelson. The names of the Dutch navy’s largest warships are and always have been redolent of the seventeenth century: de Ruyter, Tromp, De Zeven Provincien. Conversely, the Royal Navy has had no warship named after a battle of the age since the destroyer Solebay was broken up in 1967,1 none after a seaman since the frigate Russell went to the scrap-yard in 1985. There has not even been a hms Blake since the cruiser of that name was scrapped in 1982, and there has never been a hms Pepys.² The ever-diminishing size of the fleet, and rampant ‘political correctness’ in the naming of British warships, means that such illustrious names are unlikely ever to go to sea again under the white ensign. Moreover, the largest surviving relic of a British warship captured by the Dutch, the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, is a prized exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. What has often been suggested as the largest surviving relic of a Dutch warship captured by the British, supposedly the figurehead of the 50-gun Stavoren, captured in 1672, adorns the side wall of a pub in Suffolk.³ Yet despite such disparity of treatment, the period 1649–89 left a substantial legacy to the subsequent development of the Royal Navy.

Charles’s ‘Thirty new ships’ made up almost half the British Fleet at the battle of Barfleur in 1992, and several much older ships were also present.
US NAVAL ACADEMY?

SHIPS

The ships built under the Commonwealth and the reigns of Charles and James constituted the backbone of British fleets for many years. Charles’s ‘thirty new ships’ made up almost half the British fleet at the battle of Barfleur in 1992, and several much older ships were also present. Inevitably, though, old age and attrition during the long wars of 1689–1713 did for many of the ships of‘Pepys’s navy’. A surprising number were lost to disasters of one sort of another. The Sovereign was accidentally burned in 1696, while no fewer than eight major warships, all built before 1689, were overwhelmed during the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703; four of them, the Mary of 1650 and the Restoration, Stirling Castle and Northumberland of 1678–9, were lost together on the Goodwin Sands. Even so, the survivors continued to bear the brunt of the fighting against France and her allies. Gibraltar was captured in 1704 by a combined Anglo-Dutch squadron of twenty-two ships, sixteen of them British, of which only four had been built since 1689. Quite how long the last ship of‘Pepys’s navy’ survived is a moot point, given the nature of ‘rebuilding’ warships in the eighteenth century; sometimes, but not always, this preserved much of the structure of the original ship, but at other times it led to the construction of an almost entirely new one, or was a deliberate fiction. Nevertheless, when hms Torbay sailed into the battles of St Kitts and the Saintes in 1782, as part of the fleet commanded by Sir George Brydges Rodney, she was at least nominally the former Neptune, launched at Deptford in 1683, the penultimate of the ‘thirty new ships’ of 1677. Broken up in 1784, as was the rebuilt Expedition of 1679, she had been the command of Keppel, Duncan and Samuel Hood, and the two battle honours that she earned in 1782 came ninety years after she took part in the battle of Barfleur. Either the Prince of 1670, renamed Royal William in 1692, was broken up in 1714, and a new ship of the same name built in her stead, or else the sometime Prince was rebuilt and continued to serve, depending on one’s point of view; in any event, the ship that emerged from Portsmouth dockyard in 1719 survived until 1813, thereby outlasting Horatio Nelson, six of Charles II’s successors on the throne and eleven of Pepys’s successors as secretary to the Admiralty.⁴

No ship of the period survived to be raised from the seabed or preserved, unlike the Mary Rose of Henry VIII’s navy and the Victory of Nelson’s. No British ship of the period has even been deemed worthy of having a replica of it built, unlike the Golden Hind or Captain Cook’s Endeavour. (The Dutch, on the other hand, are building a full size replica of de Ruyter’s De Zeven Provincien of 1665, and the Russians have a replica of Peter the Great’s Shtandart of 1703, which was modelled on Dutch vessels of the period.5) Nevertheless, a number of ships of the period have proved fruitful destinations for divers and nautical archaeologists; in many cases, relics have been brought ashore and are preserved in maritime museums (see table).

LOCATED AND INVESTIGATED WRECK SITES

In particular, the ‘Great Storm’ wrecks on the Goodwin Sands have yielded a large number of artefacts; many, particularly from the Stirling Castle of 1679, are displayed at Ramsgate Maritime Museum.⁶ The Anne of 1678, lost at the battle of Beachy Head in 1690, has the entire bottom half of her hull still partly preserved in the sand at Pett Level, although currents and waves are steadily breaking her up. She forms the centrepiece of a maritime heritage centre at Hastings, and tentative plans have been made to raise and display her remains, money permitting.⁷ Warships of the period continue to be found and identified; in 2005 a wreck strongly suspected to be that of the Resolution, built at Harwich in 1667 by Anthony Deane, was found off the coast of Sussex, while hms Sussex of 1693, suspected to have gone down off the coast of Andalucia in February 1694 with ten tons of gold coins aboard, became the subject of a prolonged treasure hunt and salvage dispute.⁸ Additionally, the hull and several guns of the 54-gun prize Matthias, which blew up at Chatham during the Dutch attack in 1667, were discovered when the dockyard was being extended in 1876.⁹

MEN AND METHODS

Like the ships on which they served, the officers and men who had served the Stuart brothers, and in some cases Cromwell too, formed the backbone of the navy for many years after the downfall of James II and VII. All but a handful of those appointed to flag posts during the wars of 1689–1713, even at the very end of that period, had been captains or lieutenants before the Revolution.¹⁰ Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, who first went to sea in 1666, was still first Lord of the Admiralty sixty years later, and when he died he was succeeded by George Byng, Viscount Torrington, who had first gone to sea in 1678. Long-lived veterans, naval families, and patronage networks all passed on the received wisdom of‘Pepys’s navy’ to later generations. Byng’s son John fatally disregarded his father’s advice to avoid reliance on councils-of-war, and was shot to death in 1757 after accepting a council’s advice to abandon Minorca to its fate; his gaoler was Admiral Isaac Townsend, nephew of the eponymous first lieutenant of Lord Dartmouth’s flagship in 1688. Sir Richard Haddock, who had served in the navy in one capacity or another from 1653 onwards (and was himself the son and grandson of naval captains), survived until 1715, and two of his sons were still serving in the 1740s. Sir John Norris, who commanded the fleet that guarded Britain against French invasion in 1744, had first entered the navy in 1680.¹¹

If anything, the same continuity and passing-on of experience were even more marked on the civil side of the navy. Samuel Pepys himself, of course, was driven from office in 1689, suspected of Jacobitism, but he retained his interest in naval affairs until the end of his life in 1703. But the working methods that he had developed were retained and passed on. This was due in part to the remarkable longevity of some of Pepys’s successors. Charles Sergison, a clerk in the Navy Office from 1677 and secretary to Pepys’s ‘special commission’ of 1686–8, became the longest-serving Clerk of the Acts in the history of the Navy Board, holding the office from 1690 to 1719. Pepys continued to look on Sergison as a friend and acted as an informal advisor to him throughout the 1690s. His relationship with Josiah Burchett, who had become his servant in about 1680 and then an Admiralty clerk in 1684, was much frostier. Pepys accused Burchett of accepting bribes and sacked him in 1687, but Burchett found favour successively with Admirals Lord Dartmouth and Edward Russell, became secretary of the Admiralty in 1694, and served in that capacity for over half a century until his death in 1746. Burchett’s length of service finally established the principle that the secretary to the Admiralty was an impartial civil servant, not a political appointee to be ejected when the government changed, as Pepys had been. Burchett and Sergison both retained and improved many of the working methods developed by Pepys, and these are still reflected in the organisation of the Admiralty and Navy Board papers among the National Archives at Kew.¹²

Many of the reforms with which Pepys has often been credited, but which were often the ideas of Charles, James or the sea officers themselves, became important keystones of the navy in later years. The system of‘young gentlemen’ entering the navy, gaining experience and certificates testifying to their competence and eventually qualifying to become lieutenants after a formal examination, became the established route to a first commission in the navy. Although there were many ways of corrupting the system, it survived virtually unchanged from the time of the first successful candidate (George St Lo on 2 January 167813) to Horatio Nelson (who passed his examination on 9 April 1777, a year young) and beyond, eventually becoming a staple of the naval fiction genre through the imaginary careers of Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey and the rest. The concept of promotion to flag rank by virtue of seniority of appointment as a post-captain, which evolved during the 1670s and 1680s and was rapidly codified during the 1690s, became both a boon and a bane in the eighteenth-century navy. Political interference and the influences of patronage were theoretically eliminated from such promotions, but instead a mediocre career would inevitably be rewarded with eventual elevation to flag rank if an officer lived long enough. In later years ingenious means had to be found to sideline ineffective officers and promote the effective, but these were not always foolproof.¹⁴

One of the longest-lasting legacies of‘Pepys’s navy’ was the wage that it paid its seamen. The sums of twenty-four shillings for an able and nineteen shillings for an ordinary seaman, set by the Rump Parliament in the reforms that followed the defeat at Dungeness at the end of 1652, remained unchanged for over 140 years. The consequences of this parsimony were mollified slightly in the eighteenth century by better opportunities for prize money, but wartime was still the exception rather than the rule. Eventually, the inadequacy of naval pay became one of the key causes of the naval mutinies of 1797.

Sir Richard Haddock, who survived every change of regime during seven decades.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

SYMBOLS AND SURVIVALS

Few buildings associated with ‘Pepys’s navy’ have survived. Whitehall Palace was swept away in a fire on 4 January 1698, a disaster that eventually prompted the building of the Ripley Admiralty building, completed in 1726 but now home to mundane government departments and virtually inaccessible to the public. Pepys’s London homes, which effectively ‘doubled’ as the Admiralty Office in the 1670s and 1680s, are also long gone, unlike the house at Brampton, near Huntingdon, that he inherited from his uncle (although he never lived there for more than a few weeks at a time). The Navy Office, as rebuilt in the 1680s, was demolished in 1788, when the department moved to Somerset House. However, the Navy Board’s church, St Olave’s in Hart Street, survives, as does probably the most evocative building connected with Pepys, the library built at Magdalene College, Cambridge, to house his vast and eclectic collection of books.¹⁵ Almost all of the dockyard buildings and infrastructure of the seventeenth century were swept away in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century expansions, or else thanks to the depredations of Luftwaffe aircrews and post-war urban planners. The worst case was the wanton demolition of the Great Storehouse at Deptford, where much of Henry VIII’s building of 1513 survived within an enlarged structure completed in 1720–1; despite its importance, three sides of the quadrangular storehouse were flattened in 1952, followed some years later by the southern block (though the clock tower and bell which had surmounted this ended up incongruously in Thamesmead shopping centre).¹⁶ A very few nearly contemporary survivals remain. The dockyard commissioner’s house at Chatham, the oldest surviving building at the oldest yard, was not built until 1703, followed in 1708 by the master shipwright’s house at Deptford, which has just managed to survive the massive redevelopment of the dockyard site that followed the destruction of the Great Storehouse. At Plymouth, one end of the terrace of officers’ houses, built when the dockyard was founded in 1690, survived both the devastating air raid of 22 April 1941 and subsequent redevelopments of the dockyard. The oldest surviving dry docks at Portsmouth, numbers 5 and 6, were built in 1698 and 1700; older docks at Chatham, dating from 1623 and 1686, were altered beyond recognition in the eighteenth century, when they were transformed into covered building slips numbers 2 and 3. Harwich claims to have an original treadwheel crane of 1667, which continued in use until 1927 simply because the small dockyard at Harwich was always a comparative backwater. Unfortunately, dendrochronology has dated this crane firmly to the eighteenth century, exploding its claim to be the last and best survival of a seventeenth-century dockyard.17

The master shipwright’s house at Deptford, a rare survival of a nearly contemporary dockyard building.
(ANN COATS)

The treadwheel crane at Harwich, originally thought to date from the 1660s, but now proved to be of eighteenth-century construction.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

Perhaps the most tangible and powerful legacies of‘Pepys’s navy’ are visual, artistic and literary. The red, white and blue ensigns, a consequence of the reorganisations of the fleet in 1652–3 and 1665, still distinguish the largest, smallest and most lethal British ships and boats, from cruise liners to dinghies to Trident submarines. The naval church pennant still carries the British and Dutch colours to commemorate the ferocious Four Days’ Battle of 1666. The iconic image of‘Britannia’ first appeared in its accepted modern form in Charles II’s reign, as part of a deliberate propaganda projection of‘Britishness’ and British claims to sovereignty of the seas; Charles was also the first to give the name to a ship, the 100-gun First Rate launched in 1682. The Anglo-Dutch wars, and the men who served in them, were well served by their artists. The Willem Van de Veldes, father and son, produced some of the most vivid paintings of warfare at sea in any period, while Sir Peter Lely commemorated the admirals of the 1660s – the ‘flagmen of Lowestoft’ – in a memorable set of portraits, an accolade that would never again be accorded to a single group of naval officers (not even Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’). Pepys witnessed the painting of the ‘flagmen’ on 18 April 1666, and was rightly ‘very well satisfied with this sight’.¹⁸ These works of art are still on permanent public display in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, giving the navy of 1649–89 a prominence at that institution not always accorded to other, often much better-known, periods of naval history. Several of those who served in the navy of the period are commemorated by important funerary monuments: Clement Cottrell and Charles Harbord, who perished together at the battle of Solebay on 28 May 1672, by an impressive memorial in Westminster Abbey, not far inside the West Door; Colonel Richard Nicholls, who captured New York in 1664 and was also killed at Solebay, by a memorial in Ampthill Church, Bedfordshire, which is capped by the cannonball that killed him; Admiral Sir John Narbrough by a splendid tomb in Knowlton Church, Kent; and Sir Robert Holmes by a splendidly flamboyant classical marble statue in Yarmouth church, Isle of Wight (allegedly originally intended for and depicting King Louis XIV, but ‘liberated’ by Holmes from a French shipwreck on the island and topped with his head instead of the Sun King’s).

The memorial to Colonel Richard Nicholls at St Andrew’s Church, Ampthill, Bedfordshire, capped by the cannonball that killed him.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

The characteristically flamboyant memorial to Sir Robert Holmes at Yarmouth church, Isle of Wight.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

In music, Henry Purcell wrote ‘Britons Strike Home’ for the play Bonduca a little after the end of the period (in 1695), but it became the battle hymn of choice for British crews sailing into action in the eighteenth century, proving more popular in inspiring men to blood-lust and victory than even ‘Hearts of Oak’ and ‘Rule, Britannia’. A few other naval ballads outlasted the immediate context of their creation, including ‘To All You Ladies Now at Land’, written by the Earl of Dorset just before the battle of Lowestoft in 1665, and ‘Admiral Russell Scowering the French Fleet’, exalting the battle of Barfleur, which was still being sung on the lower deck in the middle of the eighteenth century.19 In literature, naval events – particularly naval calamities – brought forth some of the finest and most acerbic verses from two of the greatest English poets of the seventeenth century, Andrew Marvell and John Dryden. Marvell’s lines on the catastrophic Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667 encapsulate the fevered determination of both ministers of state and the public at large to scapegoat the resident commissioner of the navy at Chatham, Peter Pett. Marvell captures perfectly the fate of the ‘little men’ who have always taken the blame for the incompetence of others far greater than themselves:

All our miscarriages on Pett must fall,

His name alone seems fit to answer all.

Whose counsel first did this mad war beget?

Who all commands sold through the navy? Pett.

Who would not follow when the Dutch were beat?

Who treated out the time at Bergen? Pett.

Who the Dutch fleet with storms disabled met?

And, rifling prizes, them neglected? Pett.

Who with false news prevented the Gazette?

The fleet divided? writ for Rupert? Pett.

Who all our seamen cheated of their debt,

And all our prizes who did swallow? Pett.

Who did advise no navy out to set?

And who the forts left unprepared? Pett.

Who to supply with powder did forget

Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor? Pett.

Who all our ships exposed in Chatham net?

Who should it be but the fanatic Pett?

Pett, the sea-architect, in making ships,

Was the first cause of all these naval slips;

Had he not built, none of these faults had been;

If no creation, there had been no sin …²⁰

Finally, the diary of Samuel Pepys still remains one of the best-loved works in English literature, ensuring that the sights, doings, personalities and sense of the navy of the 1660s are familiar to many readers.²¹ The likes of Sir William Penn, Sir Robert Holmes and Pepys’s ‘good lord’, the Earl of Sandwich, are thus more widely known to ‘non-naval’ audiences than many far greater officers of later years, such as Rodney, Howe or Hood. Pepys himself remains uniquely attractive in the popular imagination, thanks to his humanity, his foibles and his sheer curiosity. He was deservedly the pre-eminent figure in the naval history of his age.