THE BATTLE OFF THE GUNFLEET

1666

The decline of Spain as a great power was largely due to the unsuccessful attempt to coerce the Dutch people. Out of the struggle arose the Republic of the United Provinces, and Holland, won from the sea, and almost an amphibious state, became in a few years a great naval power. A hardy race of sailors was trained in the fisheries of the North Sea. Settlements were established in the Far East, and fleets of Dutch East Indiamen broke the Spanish monopoly of Asiatic trade. It was to obtain a depot and watering-place for their East Indiamen that the Dutch founded Cape Town, with far-reaching results on the future development of South Africa.

A Dutch fleet had assisted in defeating the Armada, but the rise of this naval power on the eastern shores of the narrow seas made rivalry with England on the waters inevitable. In the seventeenth century there was a series of hard-fought naval wars between England and the United Provinces.

Under the two first Stuart Kings of England there were quarrels with the Dutch that nearly led to war. The Dutch colonists and traders in the Far Eastern seas had used high-handed measures to prevent English competition. Nearer home there were disputes as to the right claimed by the King’s ships to make any foreign ship lower her flag and salute the English ensign. But it was not till the days of the Commonwealth that the first war broke out. It was a conflict between two republics. Its immediate cause was Cromwell’s Navigation Act, which deprived the Dutch of a considerable part of their carrying trade. The first fight took place before the formal declaration of war, and was the result of a Dutch captain refusing the customary salute to a Commonwealth ship.

In this, as in the later conflicts with Holland, while England was still able to live on its own products, the Dutch were in the position in which we are now, for the command of the sea was vital to their daily life. Their whole wealth depended on their great fishing fleets in the North Sea; their Indiamen which brought the produce of the East to Northern Europe through the Straits of Dover; and the carrying trade, in which they were the carriers of the goods of all Central Europe, which the Rhine and their canals brought into their ports. The mere prolongation of a naval war meant endless loss to the merchants and shipowners of Holland.

The development of ocean-borne commerce had led to great improvements in shipbuilding in the three-quarters of a century since the days of the Armada, and the fleets that met in the Channel and the North Sea during Cromwell’s Dutch war were far more powerful than those of Medina-Sidonia and Howard. The nucleus of the English fleet had been formed by the permanent establishment created by Charles I, but the ships for which he had levied the “Ship Money” were used against him in the Civil War, for the seafaring population and the people of the ports mostly sided with the Parliament. The operations against Rupert in the Mediterranean, the war with the Algerines, and the expeditions to the West Indies had helped to form for the Commonwealth a body of experienced officers and seamen, and in Blake, Cromwell had at least one admiral of the first rank. The fleets on both sides sometimes numbered as many as a hundred sail. The guns mounted in broadside tiers had come to be recognized as the weapons that must decide a sea-fight, and in this first Dutch war we see on both sides attempts to use tactical formations that would give the best scope to gun power.

Though a battle was always likely to develop into an irregular melee, in which the boldest exchanged broadsides and the shirkers hung back, there were attempts to fight in regular lines, the ships giving each other mutual support. Want of traditional experience, marked differences in the speed and manoeuvring power of ships, and the rudimentary character of the signalling, made it difficult to keep the line, but it was early recognized as an ideal to be aimed at.

The old oar-driven galleys, with their heavy batteries in the bows and all the guns pointing ahead, went into battle, as at Lepanto, in line abreast. The broadside battleship would thus have her guns pointed at her consorts. The line abreast was used only to bear down on the enemy. The fighting formation was the line ahead. This was adopted at first as a fleet running down from windward closed upon its enemy. Unless they were actually running away, the other side would be sailing in line ahead with the wind abeam. It was soon realized that in this formation an admiral had his fleet under better control, and gradually the normal formation for fleets became line ahead, and hostile fleets either fought running on parallel courses on the same tack, or passed and repassed each other on opposite tacks. But this was the result of a long evolution, and the typically formal battles fought out by rule in the “close-hauled line ahead” belong to the eighteenth century.

The first Dutch war ended with Blake’s victory off the Kentish Knock. The second war, in the days of Charles II, is best remembered in England in connection with a national disgrace, the Dutch raid on Chatham and the blockade of the Thames. This disaster was the result of a piece of almost incomprehensible folly on the part of the King and his advisers. But it came shortly after a great naval victory, the story of which is by most forgotten. It is worth telling again, if only to show that the disaster in the Thames was not the fault of the British navy, and that even under Charles II there were glorious days for our fleet. It is also interesting as a typical naval battle of the seventeenth century.

Hostilities began in 1664 without a formal declaration of war, the conflict opening with aggressions and reprisals in the colonial sphere of action. English fleets seized Dutch trading ships on the African coast and Dutch islands in the West Indies. In North America the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson, was occupied, annexed, and renamed New York in honour of His Highness the Duke of York, the brother of the King. England drifted into the war as the result of conflicts in the colonies, and was in a state of dangerous unreadiness for the struggle on the sea. “God knows how little fit we are for it,” wrote Pepys, who as Secretary of the Navy knew the whole position. There was the utmost difficulty in obtaining men for the ships that were being got ready for sea. The pressgangs brought in poor creatures whom the captains described as a useless rabble. There were hundreds of desertions. Happily the Dutch preparations were also backward, and England had thus some breathing time.

In June the two fleets, under the Duke of York and the Dutch Admiral Opdam, each numbering nearly a hundred sail, were in the North Sea, and on the 3rd they met in battle, some thirty-five miles south-east of Lowestoft. Opdam was driven back to the Texel with the loss of several ships. The Duke of York had behaved with courage and spirit during the fight, and was covered with splashes of the blood of officers killed beside him on the quarter-deck, where he himself was slightly wounded. But he showed slackness and irresolution in the pursuit, and failed to reap the full results of his victory.

During the rest of the summer there were more or less successful enterprises against Dutch trade; but the plague in London, in the ports and dockyards, and even in the fleet itself, seriously interfered with the prosecution of the war. As usual at that time, the winter months were practically a time of truce. In the spring of 1666 both parties were ready for another North Sea campaign.

The Dutch had fitted out more than eighty ships under Admiral De Ruyter, and the English fleet was put under the command of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, with Prince Rupert, the fiery cavalry leader of the Civil War, as his right-hand man. Both were soldiers who had had some sea experience. It was still the time when it was an ordinary event for a courtier to command a battleship, with a sailor to translate his orders into sea language and look after the navigation for him. Pepys tells how he heard Monk’s wife, the Duchess of Albemarle (perhaps echoing what her husband had said in private), “cry mightily out against the having of gentlemen captains, with feathers and ribbons, and wish the King would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea-captains that he served with formerly.”

Monk and Rupert went to join the fleet that was assembling at the Nore on 23 April. It was not ready for sea till near the end of May. On 1 June, when part of the fleet was detached under Rupert to watch the Straits of Dover, Monk met De Ruyter (who was in superior force) off the Essex coast and began a battle that lasted for four days. The news of the first day’s fighting set London rejoicing, but soon there came disappointing reports of failure.

The four days’ battle had ended in defeat. Outnumbered as he was, Monk had made a splendid fight on the first two days, hoping from hour to hour for Rupert’s arrival. On the third day, the Sunday, he had to retire towards the Thames, covering his retreat with a rearguard of sixteen of his best ships. Several of these touched on the Galloper Sand, and Ascue’s ship, the “Prince,” ran hard aground on the bank. Ascue struck his flag, and the Dutch burned his ship, abandoning an effort to carry her off because at last Rupert’s squadron was in sight. On the fourth day a confused melee of hard fighting off the Thames mouth ended in Monk retiring into the river. He had lost twenty ships and some three thousand men; but he had fought so well that the Dutch bought their victory dearly, and, after attempting for a few days to blockade the Thames, had to return to Holland to refit and make good their losses.

Amid the general discouragement at the failure of the fleet there was an outburst of mutual accusations of misconduct among the captains, and even some bitter attacks on Monk, the “General at Sea.” Fault was found with the dividing of the fleet on a false report; with Monk’s haste to attack the Dutch when he was short of ships; and, finally, with his retreat before the enemy into the Thames. Monk, however, did not bear himself like a beaten man. He spoke of the long battle as, at the worst, an indecisive engagement, and said he had given the Dutch as many hard knocks as he had taken, and now knew how to defeat them. He had sufficient influence at Court to be able to retain his command, and so could look forward to trying his fortune again before long.

The work of refitting the fleet was taken in hand. At any cost, the danger of a blockade of the Thames must be averted, so the merchants of the City combined to help with money, and even some of the rich men of the Court loosed their purse-strings. A fine three-decker launched at Chatham was named the “Loyal London,” in compliment to the exertions of the City, and work was pushed on so rapidly that she was soon ready for commission. Many of the ships had been shorthanded in the four days’ battle. The pressgangs were now set vigorously to work, and, though there was a constant drain of desertions to contend with, the numbers on board the ships at Chatham and in the lower Thames rose day by day.

At the end of June a new impetus was given to the preparations by the reappearance of De Ruyter’s fleet. He had repaired damages more quickly than his opponents, and put to sea to blockade the Thames. It was on 29 June that the fishermen of Margate and Broadstairs saw a great crowd of strange sail off the North Foreland. It was the Dutch fleet of over a hundred ships, great and small, and commanded by De Ruyter, Van Tromp, and Jan Evertszoon. Some of the ships stood in close to Margate. The militia of the county was called out, and the alarm spread along the southern coast, for the rumour ran that the Dutch had come to cover a French invasion. But no Frenchmen came, and the Hollanders themselves did not send even a boat’s crew ashore. They were quite satisfied with stopping all the trade of London by their mere presence off the Thames, and they had the chance too of picking up homecoming ships that had not been duly warned. So, favoured by fine summer weather, the Dutch admirals cruised backwards and forwards in leisurely fashion between the North Foreland and the outer end of the Gunfleet Sand. They watched with their light craft all the channels that traverse the tangle of sandbanks and shallows in the estuary of the river; but their main fleet was generally somewhere off the Essex coast, for on that side of the estuary lay the channels then best known and most used, the Swin and the Black Deep.

The fleet which thus for some three weeks held possession of the very gateway to the Thames numbered seventy-three line-of-battle ships, twenty-six frigates, and some twenty light craft fitted to be used as fireships. By great exertions Monk and Rupert had got together in the lower Thames eighty-seven fighting-ships and a squadron of fireships. Some fifteen more frigates might have been added to the fleet, but it was thought better to leave them unmanned, and use their crews for strengthening those of the larger ships. The fleet assembled at the Nore had full complements this time. The men were eager to meet the enemy, and numbers of young gallants from the Court had volunteered for service as supernumeraries. The “Loyal London,” fresh from the builders’ hands at Chatham yard, with her crew of eight hundred men, was said to be “the best ship in the world, large or small.” Pepys noted that it was the talk of competent men that this was “much the best fleet, for force of guns, greatness and number of ships, that ever England did see.” England had certainly need of a good fleet, for she never met on the sea a more capable and determined enemy than the Dutch. In fact, the republic of the United Provinces was perhaps the only state that ever contended on anything like equal terms against England for the command of the sea.

When at last Monk and Rupert were ready to sail they had to wait for a favourable wind and tide, and, with the help of their pilots, solve a somewhat delicate problem. This problem was something like that which a general on land has to solve when it is a question of moving a large force through defiles of which the other end is watched by the enemy’s main army. But it had special complications that the soldier would not have to take into account.

Monk’s fleet sailing in line ahead, the only order in which it could traverse the narrow channels, would cover about nine miles from van to rear. There were then no accurate charts of the Thames estuary such as we now possess, and the pilots of the time believed the possible ways out for large ships to be fewer and more restricted than we know them to be at present. They advised Monk to take his fleet out from the Nore through the Warp and the West Swin, which form a continuous, fairly deep channel on the Essex side of the estuary along the outer edge of the Maplin Sands. At the outer end of the Maplins a long, narrow sandbank, known as the Middle Ground, with only a few feet of water over it at low tide, divides the channel into two parallel branches, the East Swin and the Middle Deep. At the end of the Middle Ground these two channels and a third (known as the Barrow Deep) unite to form the broad King’s Channel (also known as the East Swin), where there is plenty of sea room, and presently this again expands into the open sea.

In those old days of sailing-ships a fleet working its way out of the narrower channels inside the Middle Deep in presence of an enemy would court destruction if the whole of its fighting strength could not be brought out into the wide waters of the King’s Channel on a single tide. If only part of it got out before the tide turned, the van might be destroyed during the long hours of waiting for the rearward ships to get out and join in.

On 19 July Monk brought his ships out to the Middle Ground, beside which they remained anchored in a long line till the 21st, waiting for a favourable wind and a full tide. The ebb flows fast through the narrows from west to east, and weighing shortly before high water on the 22nd, the fleet spread all sail to a fair wind, and led by the “Royal Charles” with Monk and Rupert on her quarter-deck, the long procession of heavy battleships worked out into King’s Channel, soon helped by a racing ebb. Those who saw the sight said that no finer spectacle had ever been witnessed on the seas, and certainly England had never till then challenged battle with a more powerful fleet. Officers and men were in high spirits and confident of victory, Rupert as eager as when in his younger days he led his wild charges of cavaliers, Monk impatient with prudent counsels urged by timid pilots, and using sharp, strong language to encourage them to take risks which he as a landsman did not appreciate. Not a ship touched ground. Some Dutch ships were sighted on the look-out off the edge of the Gunfleet, but they drew off when Captain Elliot, in the “Revenge,” led a squadron of nine ships-of-the-line and some fireships to attack them. De Ruyter, who had been waiting with his main fleet off the Naze, stood out to sea, having no intention of beginning a battle till there were long hours of daylight before him. As the sun went down the English fleet anchored in the seaward opening of the King’s Channel, with the “Royal Charles” near the buoy that marked the outer end of the Gunfleet Sands, and on both sides men turned in with the expectation of hard fighting next morning.

At daybreak the English fleet weighed anchor. The Dutch fleet was seen some miles to seaward and more to the south, sailing in three divisions in line ahead. Evertszoon was in command of the van; De Ruyter of the centre; Van Tromp of the rear. There were more than a hundred sail. Monk stood towards them before a light breeze, challenging battle in the fashion of the time with much sounding of trumpets and beating of drums. But De Ruyter kept his distance, working to the southward outside the tangle of shallows in the Thames estuary. All day the fleets drifted slowly, keeping out of gunshot range. Towards evening the wind fell to a sullen calm with a cloudy sky, and Monk and De Ruyter both anchored outside the Long Sand. After sunset there came a summer storm, vivid flashes of lightning, heavy thunder-peals, and wild, tempestuous gusts of wind. The anchors held, but Monk lost one of his best ships, the “Jersey.” She was struck by lightning, which brought down a mass of spars and rigging on her decks, and so crippled her that she had to leave the fleet at dawn.

The Dutch fleet had disappeared. De Ruyter had weighed anchor during the storm and run out to sea. Monk suspected that he had gone back to his old cruising ground off the Naze, and when the wind fell and the weather cleared up in the afternoon of the 24th he weighed and sailed for the end of the Gunfleet to look for the enemy in that neighbourhood. He found no trace of him, and anchored again off the Gunfleet that evening, getting under way again at two in the morning of the 25th.

De Ruyter’s light craft had kept him informed of Monk’s movements. The Dutch admiral had avoided battle, when it was first offered, because he hoped to manoeuvre for the weather gage, but the failing wind before the storm had made it hopeless to attempt to work to windward of the English. At a council of war held on board De Ruyter’s flagship on the evening of the 24th it was decided to accept battle next day, even if the Dutch had to fight to leeward. When the sun rose the two fleets were in sight, “eight leagues off the Naze,” De Ruyter in his old position to seaward and southward of Monk.

The English “general at sea” had ninety-two battleships and seventeen fireships at his disposal. Following the custom of the time, the English was, like the Dutch fleet, organized in three divisions. The van, distinguished by white ensigns, was commanded by Sir Thomas Allen; the centre, or red division, flew the red ensign (now the flag of our merchant marine), and was under the personal command of Monk and Rupert; the rear, under Sir Jeremy Smith, flew the blue ensign. Battles at sea were now beginning to be fought under formal rules which soon developed into a system of pedantic rigidity. It was a point of honour that van should encounter van; centre, centre; and rear, rear. The Dutch were moving slowly under shortened sail in line ahead to the south-east of the English. Monk formed his fleet in line abreast on the port tack. The orders were that as they closed with the enemy the ships were to bear up on to a course parallel to that of the Dutch and engage in line ahead, division to division and broadside to broadside. Training cruises and fleet manoeuvres were still things of a far-off future, and the ships of Monk’s three divisions were all unequal in speed and handiness, so the manoeuvre was not executed with the machine-like regularity of a modern fleet. The van and centre came into action fairly together, but the rearward ships straggled into position, and Tromp was able to give some of the first comers a severe hammering before their consorts came into action and relieved them of some of the brunt of his fire.

The first shots had been fired between nine and ten a.m. Till after two in the afternoon there was a close engagement, a steady, well-sustained cannonade, with no attempt at manoeuvring on either side, the fleets drifting slowly before the light wind, wrapped in powder smoke, in the midst of which both sides made attempts to use their fireships against each other. The only success was secured by the Dutch, who set the “Resolution” ablaze. She drifted out of the line and burned to the water’s edge after her crew had abandoned her. There was heavy loss of life in both fleets.

For want of anything but the most rudimentary system of signalling, admirals had little control of a fight once it was begun. Monk, in the “Royal Charles,” had to content himself with marking out De Ruyter’s flagship, the “Seven Provinces,” as his immediate opponent, and fighting a prolonged duel with her. He walked his quarter-deck chewing tobacco, a habit he had acquired as a precaution against infection during the London plague. He spoke at the outset with undeserved contempt of his opponent. “Now,” he said, “you shall see this fellow come and give me two broadsides and then run.” But De Ruyter’s broadsides thundered for hour after hour. However, the dogged persistency of the Dutch was met with persistent courage as steady as their own.

London listened anxiously to the far-off rumbling of the cannonade on the North Sea waters. Mr. Pepys went to Whitehall and found the Court “gone to chapel, it being St. James’s Day.” Then he tells how

“by and by, while they are at chapel and we waiting chapel being done, come people out of the park, telling us that the guns are heard plainly. And so everybody to the park, and by and by the chapel done, the King and Duke into the bowling-green and upon the leads, whither I went, and there the guns were plain to be heard; though it was pretty to hear how confident some would be in the loudness of the guns, which it was as much as ever I could do to hear them.”

All the Eastern counties must have heard the cannon-thunder droning and rumbling like a far-off summer storm through the anxious hours of that July day. As the afternoon went on even Dutch endurance found it hard to stand up against the steadily sustained cannonade of Monk’s centre and van divisions, and De Ruyter and Evertszoon began to make sail and work further out to sea, as if anxious to break off the fight. Monk, Rupert, and Allen, with the White and Red Divisions, followed them up closely, making, however, no attempt to board, but keeping up the fire of their batteries, and waiting for a chance to capture any crippled ship that might fall astern. Four of the enemy were thus taken. So the main bodies of both fleets worked out into the North Sea on parallel courses, making no great way, for the wind was falling.

The rear divisions, Tromp’s and Jeremy Smith’s ships, did not follow the general movement, for Tromp had never quite lost the advantage he had gained in the opening stage of the battle. He kept his ships under shortened sail, and hammered away doggedly at the Blue Division. This was the moment when Monk might well have either reinforced Smith, or turned with all his force on Tromp, and overwhelmed and destroyed his squadron. It was made up of twenty-five line-of-battle ships and six frigates, and its loss would have been a heavy blow to Holland. But on sea as on land there was still little of the spirit of ordered combination. Just as Rupert at Marston Moor had destroyed the opposing wing of the Roundheads with a fierce charge of his cavaliers, and then pursued, without a thought of using his advantage to fall upon the outnumbered and exposed centre of the enemy, so now Monk and Rupert pressed upon De Ruyter and Evertszoon, though Tromp was at their mercy, and Smith was in serious peril. Thus the engagement broke into two separate battles as the summer evening drew on.

Darkness ended the fight, and in the night the wind fell almost to a calm. Sunrise on the 26th showed the fleets drifting in disorder on a smooth sea, with their heavy sails hanging loose from the yards, only filled now and then by disappointing flaws of wind. The crews were busy repairing damages and transferring the wounded to the lighter craft. All day the only shots fired were discharged by a couple of brass toy cannon mounted on a pleasure yacht which Rupert had brought with him. Taking advantage of a mere ruffle of wind, so light that it could not move the big ships, the Cavalier Prince ran his yacht under the stern of the huge flagship of De Ruyter, and fired into him. The Dutchman had no guns bearing dead aft, and the Prince was able to worry him for a while, till there came one of those stronger gusts of wind that filled the sails of the “Seven Provinces,” and she swung round, showing a broadside that could blow the yacht out of the water. But before a gun could be fired the yacht, with all sails spread, was racing back to the English fleet, and Rupert returned to the “Royal Charles” as pleased as a schoolboy with his frolic.

During the night of the 26th the wind rose, and De Ruyter steered for the Scheldt, followed up by Monk’s two divisions. The Dutch admiral covered his retreat with his best ships, and a running fight began at dawn. Even before the sun rose the sounds of a heavy cannonade had come through the darkness, telling that Tromp and Smith were hard at it again in their detached battle. Early in the day Monk abandoned the chase of the Dutch, and steered towards the sound of the cannonade. Soon the fleet came in distant sight of the battle. Tromp with the “Zealand squadron” was making a dogged retreat, working to the south-east, close-hauled on the wind from the north-east. Monk tacked and made more than one attempt to place himself across the course of the Dutchmen, hoping to catch them between his fleet and Smith’s Blue Division as between hammer and anvil. But Tromp slipped between his enemies and was before long in full sail for Holland, with the three English divisions combined in a stern chase. Monk said that if Smith had pressed Tromp closer early in the day, his retreat would have certainly been cut off. Smith and his friends protested that if the “general at sea” had laid his fleet on a better course, Tromp would have been taken. The honours of this last move in the game were with the Dutchman.

A substantial victory had been gained, though there were few trophies to show for it. The enemy had been met and forced by sheer hard knocks to abandon his station off the mouth of the Thames, and take refuge in his own ports. Monk was on the Dutch coast, picking up returning merchantmen as prizes, blockading the outgoing trade, and keeping the great fishing fleet in ruinous idleness. With the help of information supplied by a Dutch traitor, Monk reaped further advantage from his victory and inflicted heavy additional loss on the enemy. On 8 August the fleet sailed into the roadstead behind the long island of Terschelling, one of the chain of islands at the mouth of the Zuyder Zee, and burned at their anchors a hundred and sixty Dutch merchantmen that had taken shelter there, including several great East Indiamen. Next day landing-parties burned and plundered the ranges of warehouses on the island, and destroyed the town of Terschelling. The loss to the Dutch traders was estimated at over a million sterling.

The victorious battle off the Thames in July, 1666, is practically forgotten, so far as the popular tradition of our naval successes goes. It has not even a name by which it might live in the memory of our people. But it practically broke the power of Holland and brought the war to an end. What men do remember, and what has banished from their minds the living tradition of the great North Sea battle, is the ugly fact that in the following year De Ruyter sailed unopposed into the Thames, and captured and burned in the Medway dismantled ships that had fought victoriously against him in the North Sea battle the “Royal Charles” being among his prizes.

The fleets had, as usual at the time, been laid up for the winter. The money available for fitting them out in the following spring was diverted to other purposes and squandered by the King and the Court. Charles counted on having no need to commission a great fleet in the summer. He knew the Dutch were feeling the strain of the war and the destruction of their trade, and would soon have to patch up a peace, and he opened preliminary negotiations. Such negotiations must be prudently backed by an effective force on the war footing. The King had practically disarmed as soon as there was a prospect of peace. But the Dutch had fitted out the fleet in view of possible contingencies, and De Witt and De Ruyter could not resist the temptation of revenging the defeat of 1666 and the sack of Terschelling by a raid on the Thames and Medway. It was the dishonesty and incapacity of the King and his parasite Court that laid England open to the shameful disaster that dimmed for all time the glory of Monk and Rupert’s victory. But even after De Ruyter’s exploits at Chatham the Dutch had no hope of continuing the war, and within a few weeks of the disaster peace was signed at Breda. The story of the Dutch raid is a lasting lesson on the necessity of an island power never for a moment relaxing the armed guard of the sea.