The captain of the Kent’s letter was considered so important that Albemarle at once sent it off by express to the Admiralty. It is still in existence; a stained sheet of yellowish paper with the writing crabbed and not easily decipherable, and brown with age and faded. The letter, with Albemarle’s covering note, was found many years afterwards among some correspondence that had belonged to King James the Second, just as the letter had been filed on its receipt at the Admiralty in 1666, when James, Duke of York, was Lord High Admiral. It is endorsed:—
“For his Grace the Duke of Albemarle, aboard the Royall Charles this ⸺ d.dd. In the Downes.”
Albemarle’s covering letter to the Admiralty bears the curiously scrawled endorsements of the various postmasters on the Dover Road as they passed the courier along on his hurried journey up to London:—“Received ye packett at Canterbury, att past 5 in ye Morneing, by Mee, Edw Wheiston”; “Sittingborne, past 8 in ye morning, by mee Wm Webb”; “Rochester, past ten Before noon, Wm Brooker”; “Gravesend at nowne, Hen White.”
Albemarle was roughly handled and had to beat a retreat for the mouth of the Thames—fighting a rear-guard action, skilfully conducted and gallantly contested. Rupert joined him just in time to avert disaster, but one of the English flagships, the Prince, grounded at the last moment on the Galloper Shoal, and was taken by the Dutch and burned as she lay. This was just as the Kent rejoined the flag, in time for the last day’s battle.
Cromwell, it is curious to note, first gave the name Kent to the navy for a man-of-war; one November day of the year 1652. On that day—Saturday, the 6th of November—an application from the Admiralty Committee as to the names for four frigates, two of which were to be launched in the following week, was laid before the Lord General Cromwell and the Commonwealth Council of State. The reply was that the following would be the names: Kentish, Essex, Hampshire, and Sussex. So a State Paper, now among the national archives in the Record Office, explicitly states. In their selection the Council made thereby a new departure, and introduced a set of man-of-war names entirely different from any before known at sea. The little group of four ships named in November, 1652, leads the way at the head of the long series of British men-of-war which have borne the names of our counties in battle on the sea with distinction on so many historic days.
Why the form “Kentish” was preferred to “Kent” for the first of the four ships, is a matter that is not quite obvious. The name, of course, may have been appointed for no particular reason. The four names chosen were names of four seaboard counties, locally interested in maritime affairs, and it may well have been thought that to call one of the ships the “Kentish” was much the same thing as calling her the “Kent.” On the other hand, there may have been in addition something behind, in regard to the name appointed. Everybody knows, teste Lord Macaulay, why the Puritan authorities put down bull-baiting; not because it hurt the bull, but because it pleased the people. The Puritans rather liked, it is to be feared, making themselves deliberately offensive to those who saw otherwise to them. It is certainly curious, if not significant, that at the Restoration the name “Kentish” disappears forthwith from off the official Navy List, and “Kent” appears instead. This was just at the time, too, that certain distinctly obnoxious names, bestowed on men-of-war by the Puritan authorities, as, for instance, Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, Torrington, Newbury, Dunbar, Tredagh (the vernacular for Drogheda), were replaced by names such as Royal Charles, York, Dunkirk, Dreadnought, Revenge, Henry, and Resolution.
Was any reference intended in the form “Kentish,” as originally appointed for the new ship of 1652, to the “Kentish Rising” of 1648, and its hard fate under the sword blades of Fairfax’s troopers? Was the name designed as a reminder to the Royalists of South-Eastern England? Was it meant as a memento of the penalty that had been paid by so many who, only four years before, had buckled on sword and ridden forth so blithely to the county marching song:—
Kentish men, keep your King,
Long swords and brave hearts bring,
Down with the rebels, and slit their crop ears!