'BILLY BLUE': A BALLAD OF THE FLEET
ONE OF THE ROYAL SOVEREIGN'S DAYS
Slowly they mov'd, and wedged in firm array,
The close compacted squadron won its way.
Homer, Iliad (Pope's version).
Could common prudence have allowed me to let loose their valour on the enemy, I hardly know what might not have been accomplished by such men.—Admiral Cornwallis, June 17, 1795. (From the official despatch.)
Fighting days abound in the story of the Royal Sovereign. There is hardly a more famous name in the annals of the Royal Navy, and its record goes back to a hundred years before the Spanish Armada.
Our first Sovereign was one of the consorts of the Great Harry in Henry the Eighth's Navy, and fought the French in battle side by side with that 'greate shipp.'
The second was Charles the First's Sovereign of the Seas, built out of the ship-money tax which began the quarrel with Parliament that in the end brought the King's head to the block. 'Her building,' says Evelyn, 'cost his Ma'tie the affections of his subjects, who quarrell'd with him for a trifle, refusing to contribute either to their own safety or to his glory.'[67] The ship did brilliant service with Blake and Monk against Tromp and Ruyter, and won from the Dutch the sobriquet of the 'Golden Devil,' in allusion to her gorgeous ornamentation and the death-dealing broadsides from her heavy guns. As the Royal Sovereign, the name bestowed on her by Charles the Second at the Restoration, in place of the original form, the ship added laurels to her fame. She was in the thick of the fray in the 'Four Days' Fight' of 1666—the 'Four Days' Fight' was what the courtiers of Whitehall called the battle, the ruder 'tarpaulins' who fought the guns called it the 'Four Days' Bloody Blunder';—in the 'St. James's Day Fight' of the same year; at Solebay; and in all the other fleet battles of the Second and Third Dutch Wars. Among the men of note who flew their flags on board the Royal Sovereign in battle were James, Duke of York (afterwards King James the Second), and Prince Rupert. This same man-of-war, too, in William the Third's time, was one of the flagships at La Hogue, where she had 'a very hott dispute' with one of the French flagships. She was also flagship of the admiral in command at the burning of the famous Soleil Royal and two other French first-rates in Cherbourg Bay. A sleepy old bo'sun's mate, one January night, four years after La Hogue, left a lighted candle-end in his cabin in the Royal Sovereign, and then went on deck to keep his watch, forgetting all about it. So the quondam Sovereign of the Seas came to her end. In accordance with the sentence of the court-martial[68] on the wretched man, he was rowed up the Medway past the fleet lying there with a halter round his neck, and was then publicly flogged on his bare back, after which he was landed at Chatham dockyard with every mark of degradation, and taken off to be imprisoned in the Marshalsea for life.
The third Royal Sovereign, partly built, in accordance with an Admiralty order, out of as much of the timbers of the old ship as could be saved—'such part of the remains of the said ship as shall be serviceable'[69]—was launched in the presence of the great Duke of Marlborough, who presided on the occasion. It was in the cabin of this Royal Sovereign that Admiral Rooke planned his swoop on the Vigo galleons, and the ship also served as flagship to Sir Clowdisley Shovell.[70] She lasted long enough to be flagship at Portsmouth during the Seven Years' War, and it was on board her, one stormy March morning, that Admiral Boscawen signed the order for the firing party that shot Admiral Byng.