A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

The English were no less resolute to maintain and, if possible, improve their advantages. The fleet was not brought back from the coast of Holland, but remained for the purpose of blockading the Dutch in their own ports. Food and munitions of war were sent out from England to Monk, who was again left in sole command by the illness of Blake, whose strength broke down completely under the strain of active service. With Penn as his second in command, and Lawson as his third, Monk was equal to his duties. He may not have been a seaman, though by this time he had been much at sea, but he was in the highest sense of the word a general, a fighter, who did his work thoroughly, used the force of his command to the utmost of its strength, and understood how to strike, with a great compact mass, at the heart of his enemy. Towards the end of July he stood across the North Sea for stores, and then returned at once to his cruising-ground off the Texel, the island which prolongs the State of North Holland, and between which and the mainland runs the chief passage to the Zuyder Zee. Some thirty Dutch warships belonging to the squadron of Amsterdam were at anchor behind the protection of the land. Tromp, with eighty sail, was at Flushing, between Walcheren and the mainland. The object of the Dutch admiral was to unite these two divisions, and thereby raise his force to a slight superiority over the English. Monk's aim was naturally to prevent the junction of the enemy, and, if possible, to crush his divisions in detail while they were endeavouring to unite. Thus the last battle of the war was preceded by skilful manœuvring. In the earlier movements success was fairly won for his flag by the nerve and skill of Tromp. On the 26th of July some of his ships appeared to the south of the English fleet, then riding outside the Texel. Monk started in pursuit on the 28th, and soon sighted the enemy. The wind was at W., and it was too late for any extensive movement. On the 29th the Dutch were still in sight to the south. As the English approached, they fell back. Monk pressed on, with his lighter and better sailing ships in advance. These vessels, the frigates of his fleet, directed their attack on the rear of the Dutch line. Their better sailing powers enabled them to force on an engagement, and so compelled Tromp to turn to the support of the vessels attacked. But it was too late on the 29th for a decisive engagement. At night both fleets anchored near Camperdown. The English, who had in all probability aimed at getting the weather-gage, had apparently stood farther out than Tromp, whose vessels were in any case better able to approach the shore. Thus, when the fleets came to an anchor, the Dutch were nearer in, and it would also seem that the English had somewhat overshot the enemy, for they anchored a little farther to the south. All through the night and the following day it blew a gale with heavy squalls from the W.N.W. The wind was so high that ships under way could scarcely bear their topsails, and, as they were on a lee shore, the fleets had enough to do to keep off it, without attacking one another. During the afternoon of the 30th the Amsterdam squadron joined Tromp, raising his force to something over a hundred and twenty vessels. So far he had effected his purpose, and had shown himself worthy of his great reputation as a skilful captain. On the morning of the 31st both fleets stood off the shore. The wind was still at W.N.W., and Tromp had the weather-gage. The battle began very early in the morning, and surpassed any of the previous engagements of the war both in the fury of the contest and the decisive character of the results. Monk was determined to bring the matter to an issue, and he did not wait for Tromp to bear down upon him, but tacked upon his enemy, and broke through the Dutch line from leeward.

It was six o'clock in the morning when the battle began. Both fleets were heading to the W.S.W., the English somewhat ahead, the Dutch to the northward and windward. By tacking, Monk altered the relative positions of the fleets from parallel to intersecting lines. The bulk of the Dutch weathered the head of the English line, but their rear ships were cut off. We "went through their whole fleet," said Captain Cubitt, "leaving part on one side, and part on the other of us." Tromp was resolved not to lose the weather-gage, and he also tacked when he saw Monk's movement. So did Monk when he had passed through the Dutch line, and the manœuvre was repeated three times by each. On the second tack, all the Dutch appear to have weathered the English line. The two fleets passed very close, engaging with the utmost fury. From the heavy loss suffered in our ships, it may be concluded that in this battle the Dutch fired less to dismast than to kill. Six English captains were slain, one was mortally wounded, and the loss in the lower ranks must have been in proportion. It was counted one of the advantages of the windward position that it facilitated the despatch of fireships against the enemy to leeward. The Dutch did not fail to use a weapon, so terrible in theory, and so dreadfully destructive when it took effect. Experience, however, proved that as against well-handled ships under way, and under control of steady officers, it could rarely be employed successfully. The fireship could generally be avoided by moving vessels, and when that was difficult, or inconvenient to do, then it was taken in charge by the boats which the warship towed astern, and dragged away to leeward, where it burned out harmlessly. On this occasion little hurt was done by the "branders."

We cannot suppose that the movement of tacking in succession was performed by two fleets, each of over a hundred sail, with absolute uniformity. On this occasion, as in the great battle of the 12th of April 1783, when Rodney pierced the French from leeward, the main line may have broken into smaller ones. But the general course of the battle was in three great zig-zags, ranging along the coast of Holland, from near Egmont towards the mouth of the Maas, which are at a distance of about forty miles from one another. There was no shrinking on the part of the Dutch, and no failure of effort on the part of the English to push the attack home. In many points of the line ships were locked together in desperate attempts to board, or repel boarders. By three in the afternoon victory belonged to the English. A large proportion of the Dutch had been cut off from Tromp, and had fallen to leeward. Most of them were probably too damaged to be in case to do more than put before the wind, and escape as best they could. They fled into Goree and the Maas. The bulk of their fleet was debarred from that refuge by the English, who were still to leeward, and therefore on the line of retreat. It could only head northward and eastward to the Texel. Thither in the afternoon it fled, leaving behind miles of sea covered with the wreckage of the battle, and bearing with it the corpse of its great admiral, who fell by the death he had come to long for—shot mercifully dead by a musket bullet through the heart. He at least had nothing to reproach himself with. All that valour and skill could do to save Holland, he did. If he failed, it was because the mistaken policy of the soldier princes of the House of Nassau, and the unwisdom of the merchant oligarchy, had in false economy supplied him with inferior ships. An Englishman does not undervalue the heroes of his own race, when he acknowledges that not only their valour but skill enabled them to overcome the most famous of the Dutch seamen.

We had no prizes, for we burned or sank the ships taken, and our own damage in the battle had not been small, but the victory was decisive. Holland again sued for peace; and as Cromwell had come to recognise that he must not insist on too much, it was finally signed some months later.

While the main tide of war had been ebbing and flowing through the North Sea and the Channel, there had been minor conflicts at the entry to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. The first is of comparatively little importance in naval history, and is indeed hardly worth mentioning, except on the ground that it illustrates a chronic difficulty of the English Government in all naval wars. We drew a great part of our stores from the Baltic. Pitch and tar, hemp for cordage, and pine wood for spars and planking, as well as part of the oak used in our ships, were supplied by Scandinavia and Russia. At a later period the American plantations entered into competition with the Baltic trade, but in the middle of the seventeenth century these indispensable articles were obtained only in the North of Europe. If they were cut off by the hostility of the Northern Powers, the task of fitting a fleet for sea was rendered almost impossible. The sense that they had it in their power to inflict so heavy a blow upon us, rendered the kingdoms of the North occasionally somewhat exacting. In the first Dutch war, the King of Denmark acted with open hostility to the Commonwealth. He had strong political motives for remaining on good terms with the United Provinces, and it is very possible that he shared the common incredulity of Europe as to our power to overcome the first naval power in the world. If the Dutch proved victorious, they would certainly be obliged to him for any harm he might have done us. Acting under the influence of a desire to please the Dutch, the King of Denmark availed himself of a pretext to arrest an English convoy at Elsinore in the autumn of 1652. A squadron of eighteen ships was despatched under the command of Captain Ball to enforce their release. Ball's force was scattered by a gale, and he was compelled to return without the convoy. A long and angry negotiation followed between the Governments, but the Danish king learned that it was more dangerous to offend England than Holland, before we were compelled to teach him the lesson directly.

The Mediterranean was the scene of a very much more lively and varied fragment of the great war. It has been said above that when Penn left the Mediterranean at the beginning of 1652 he was replaced by Captain Richard Badiley, who was despatched into those seas with a squadron appointed to protect the merchant ships against an attack by Prince Rupert and the French. The main centres of English trade in the Mediterranean were the Levant,—where the Turkey Company had factories at Smyrna and Scanderoon (Alexandretta),—Venice, and Leghorn. When the Dutch war broke out, there were six English warships in the Mediterranean, stretching widely over it for the purpose of collecting merchant ships at their different ports of departure, and bringing them together into one convoy before passing the Straits on the way home. Badiley himself was at Scanderoon with three ships. Captain Henry Appleton was at Leghorn with two. The sixth, the Constant Warwick, was at Genoa, where she had been sent to careen, because she was very foul and eaten by worms. Appleton had several English ships with him, and he would in the ordinary course of the service wait until he was joined by Badiley before sailing for England. The outbreak of the war with Holland entirely broke up the usual arrangement. The Dutch were represented in the Mediterranean by a force numerically stronger than ours, though the individual ships were smaller than our largest. This advantage they were certain to use for the destruction of our trade. The war began in June, and, as news travelled slowly then, was not known, even in Italy, till the end of that month or the beginning of the next. The Dutch ships in the western half of the Mediterranean were collected in the neighbourhood of Appleton, at Leghorn. They were fourteen in number, and were under the command of an officer named Catz. With such a disproportion of force against him, the English officer had no resource but to seek the protection of a neutral port. Leghorn belonged to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and to him Appleton appealed for protection. The Grand Duke was not very favourably inclined towards the English officer, who had cost him considerable annoyance by capturing a French vessel just outside his port and bringing her in as a prize. The position of a neutral in a great naval war is always more or less disagreeable. The combatants are generally either anxious to make use of its harbours as a refuge, or eager to follow up an enemy in its waters. The ingenuity of international lawyers has invented many pretty and plausible regulations for the guidance of all persons in such a case. But it is the misfortune of international law that nobody is bound to enforce its decrees unless he feels himself injured by the breach of them, while the party who really is injured, and therefore quotes them on his own behalf, is frequently the weaker, and so is unable to supply that sanction which is necessary for the validity of any law. Between the stronger who wishes to crush the weaker, and the weaker who does not wish to be crushed, the neutral is often in a dilemma of great delicacy, since the weaker is often quite strong enough to be able to punish him for inability to enforce respect for his own neutrality. Besides, it is particularly hard to judge from the local strength of belligerents which of them is likely to prove the more powerful on the whole. When, then, Captain Appleton brought the French prize into Leghorn, he caused the Grand Duke very intelligible annoyance. The English might have the upper hand at sea, and yet the French might be quite powerful enough by land to pay themselves for what England had taken on the water, by pillaging the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. A not dissimilar dilemma presented itself when Appleton appealed to the protection of the port against the fourteen ships of Catz. The Grand Duke could hardly tell which of the two was the most dangerous to offend. In spite of the offence given him by Appleton, he endeavoured to hold the balance even between the quarrelsome sea powers. He promised the English that he would not allow the Dutchmen to attack them if they came within the Mole of Leghorn. In regard to the waters beyond he could give no guarantee, since he had no naval force. To make assurance doubly sure, he allowed the English merchant ships to land their cargoes, and put them for safety in the Lazaretto or Quarantine House of Leghorn. Appleton might possibly have increased his force to a point which would have made it comparatively safe for him to give battle to the Dutch, if the merchant ships in the harbour had been willing to help him. They all carried guns, and the crews of that time were comparatively large. The merchant captains displayed the cowardice of the mere trader. They refused to give Appleton any help, alleging as their excuse that they had no orders from home to recognise his authority, and no security that they would be paid for any damage their vessels might suffer in action with the Dutch. During all the summer and autumn of 1652, Appleton and Charles Longland, the agent of the Commonwealth in Florence, were engaged in fruitless efforts to recruit the strength of the squadron from the merchant ships at Leghorn and Venice.

Since there was no hope from this source, nothing remained but to wait for the arrival of Badiley, in the hope that when all the six English warships were together, they might prove more capable of dealing with the enemy. It was a desperate chance, since all the probabilities were that Badiley would sail into the middle of the Dutch blockading ships. In order to reduce this danger as far as possible, Appleton despatched Captain Owen Cox with the Constant Warwick to meet the ships coming from the Levant, and warn them of the danger. The usual course for an officer bringing a convoy from the Levant would be to touch at Zante, picking up other merchant ships, then to go on to Messina and Naples for the same purpose, to range the coast of Italy as high as Leghorn, and then sail for the Straits, where he would pick up the Spanish trade. The Constant Warwick found Badiley at Zante, the most southerly of the Ionian Islands, where he was waiting for ships still on their way from Smyrna and Cyprus. On receipt of the news of war and the danger of Appleton, he came straight on, without making the usual stoppages at Messina and Naples. His energy did not avert disaster. The Dutch blockading squadron had in the meantime passed from the command of Catz to that of Jan Van Galen, who came overland to supersede his predecessor. Galen was sufficiently alert to make himself aware of the approach of Badiley while the English ships were between the islands of Elba and Corsica. His own squadron had been so far reinforced that he was able to leave six ships to keep a watch on Appleton, while he sailed with eleven for the purpose of attacking Badiley. On the afternoon of the 27th of August, Galen attacked the English convoy. It consisted of eight vessels in all, but of these only three were warships; the other five were merchant vessels, sufficiently well armed to be able to beat off a small privateer or Algerine pirate, but hardly able to encounter a man-of-war of any size. Yet the Dutch were generally small; and as Badiley's own ship, the Paragon, was heavier than any of them, it may well be that if the Turkey Company's ships had shown a manlier spirit, they might have given a fairly good account of the enemy. As a matter of fact, not only the traders, but the two warships with Badiley supported him either not at all, or very little. The encounter on the afternoon of the 27th was confined to distant cannonading, but next morning the Dutch attacked with energy, and the Paragon had to make a desperate fight for the protection of her convoy. The whole weight of the action fell upon her. She was greatly shattered in her rigging, and the loss in killed and wounded amounted to no less than eighty-one, a very large proportion of a crew of about three hundred men. In the meantime the merchant ships did very little, and the Paragon's two consorts not very much. One of them did worse, for she fell into the hands of the enemy. This was the Phenix, which was destined to be the cause of some exciting events further on. If Captain Badiley told the truth, she was lost by blundering management and the misconduct of her men. Thirty of the crew got into the long-boat towing astern, and fled to the Paragon, where they spread so violent a panic that Captain Badiley considered his own ship in danger of being lost. Fortunately for him, it fell a dead calm, and when the wind rose he was able to carry the Paragon, her one remaining consort, and the five merchant vessels into Porto Longone, at the south-east end of the island of Elba.

Here the governor offered him protection, and even remained loyal to his promises, although offered a heavy bribe by the Dutch if he would allow them to plunder the English vessels. But though Badiley escaped destruction, both English squadrons were now blockaded. Jan Van Galen was further reinforced, and was able to watch both Appleton at Leghorn and Badiley at Porto Longone. The second of these officers had been appointed to the general command. In co-operation with Charles Longland, he kept making strenuous efforts, throughout the last months of this year and the early months of the next, to raise his own force so far that he could attack the Dutch with some hope of success, or at least reunite the two squadrons. He failed to do either one or the other. He and Longland were in want of money, the merchant captains were in want of courage, and the vigilance of the Dutch kept the English apart and impotent. The watch on Porto Longone was not so close but that Badiley was able to go to and fro between that port and Leghorn. The Constant Warwick, too, re-entered Leghorn, but no general movement was possible. So the year wore away. It was noted that when the news of Blake's defeat off Dungeness reached Italy, the Grand Duke showed himself even less friendly than before. There were many Royalist exiles at his court who spared no effort to injure the Parliament's officers. Dutch diplomacy was active, and an envoy from "the person called Charles II.," as Captain Badiley described his king, appeared in time to support their representations.

In the meantime the English at Leghorn were subject to a perpetual blistering irritation. The Dutch brought the Phenix into the roadstead, and began ostentatiously to fit her as a man-of-war. When she was ready, the command was given to Cornelius van Tromp, the son of the famous admiral. The sight of this vessel was an eyesore to the English, and in particular to Captain Owen Cox, who had been transferred to the command of the Bonaventure on the death of her captain, Witheridge. Cox began to plot schemes for retaking the Phenix. Appleton, who was afraid of offending the Grand Duke, was very angry with his subordinate's excess of zeal, and even went so far as to put him under arrest, but Badiley restored him to his command. At the same time, he certainly gave his approval to schemes for retaking the prize. He justified this strong measure in the immediate neighbourhood of the Grand Duke's harbour by arguments which no doubt appeared convincing to himself, but are mainly remarkable for a rather childlike simplicity. "If two people," said Captain Badiley, "who are at enmity with one another, go into the house of a third on the promise that they will not make a disturbance, of course they ought to keep quiet, but if one of them filches the sword of the other, the gentleman robbed has surely a right to recover his stolen property. Now the Dutch have filched our ship the Phenix, and so the Grand Duke cannot reasonably object if we take her back again." The English captains were not so convinced of the unanswerable character of their interpretation of international law as to present it for the Grand Duke's consideration before they took the Phenix. The argument was pretty, but it was better to expound the law after the Phenix had changed hands. They also decided that the more quietly the thing was done the better. According to their exposition of the practice of nations, it was quite legitimate to take an enemy in neutral waters, provided that the ship were taken in the small hours, and that no pistols were fired to disturb the slumbers of the citizens.

The capture was effected in this way, but not until Cornelius van Tromp had given the English further intolerable provocation. About the middle of November he put to sea on a cruise, and returned a few days later with his prize. By way of insult and glorification over his enemy, Cornelius van Tromp had entered the roadstead trailing the English flag in the water under his stern. On the night of the 20th November he was punished for this piece of unmannerly brag. A cutting-out party was prepared in Appleton's flagship, the Leopard. It consisted of three boats. Captain Cox, who was very properly entrusted with the execution of his favourite enterprise, took the first, with fourteen men, Lieutenant Young of the Leopard had the second, with thirty-three, and Lieutenant Lynn of the Bonaventure the third, with the same number of men. The opportunity had been well chosen. It was St. Andrew's Eve, and the Dutch were carousing. Captain Badiley was informed that in order to ingratiate themselves with the Italians the Dutch captains heard a sermon from a friar before dinner. He preached upon the text, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men"; for which sin "nearly a hundred of their men were fished from them that night in the Phenix." The boats lost one another in the dark after leaving the Leopard, and it was not until "the appearing of the morning stars" that they were all alongside the prize. The capture was easily effected, for a large part of the Dutch crew was drinking on shore, and the other was more or less drunk on the ship. Young Tromp was finishing a carouse in the cabin when the English broke in. He escaped capture by diving from the stern-port and swimming to another Dutch ship, but, although he was very quick, he did not get off till one of the English sailors had given him a wipe with a cutlass, telling him that that was for trailing the English flag under his stern. From the moment he was in possession of the deck, Captain Cox cut cable and set sail. There was a good deal of scuffling and fighting between decks, in which Lieutenant Young was killed, but the English finally drove the Dutch into the hold, and would have quelled the resistance much sooner if they had not fulfilled their obligations to the Grand Duke by rigidly abstaining from the use of firearms. Several of the Dutch ships pursued, but they might as well have spared themselves the trouble. The Phenix easily out sailed them all, and Captain Cox carried her to Naples.