Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  James, Duke of York, to Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albermarle, 22 February 1666

  In 1666 Louis XIV entered the Second Anglo-Dutch War on the side of the United Provinces: his written declaration was announced to a fanfare of trumpets. The three greatest military fleets in the world were now engaged in a conflict whose victors stood to make very real commercial gains. When Denmark also declared against Charles II, England faced an imposing trinity of enemies.

  Rupert and Albermarle were undaunted by the combined strength of their foes: they were both men of action, eager to secure the decisive defeat that had slipped tantalisingly from James’s grasp the previous year. Their joint command began on St George’s Day, 1666. They immediately set about tightening naval discipline. One of their first orders was to: ‘Turn all the women to shore and suffer none to come aboard.’[554] This was in response to the suspicion that a whore had transmitted the plague to a ship, the Princess. She and her colleagues were no longer to be allowed to ply their trade and any captain who failed to see to this was to be replaced immediately.

  Dennis Gauden, Victualler to His Majesty’s Navy, received one of the earliest joint orders from the prince and the duke: ‘We understand by the Flag Officers,’ they wrote during that first April, ‘that many of the ships do spend in vain their sea provisions of beer and bread, we desire you will take care to supply them with such victuals as have been spent of the sea, which we expect should be done, and that you will be blamed very much if you do not keep the ships to this rule of victualling of them, for his Majesty and his Royal Highness expects it, and so do we.’[555]

  The two admirals were also quick to put the Commissioners of the Ordnance on notice, insisting that adequate and appropriate ammunition be provided for the fleet. In particular, Rupert and Albermarle wanted more cannonballs and better waterproofing for the paper cartridges that helped propel them:

  We perceive generally the Fleet is furnished but with 40 rounds of powder and shot. The officers complain much of the small proportion of canvas they have ... for we find that if we fill paper cartridges with powder, that the saltpetre will make them moist, and so, when we come to charge our guns, they will be apt to break and be something dangerous at such a time when there are so many lighted matches about the ships, besides the disappointment if they should break in the gunner’s hands, when they are to charge the guns, and therefore we think it necessary for his Majesty’s service that there be as much canvas again sent down, as is already, and if you please to send 50 rounds to each ship, the same cannot carry it, yet there will be other ships that will be able to take it in for the use of that squadron they sail with, and then it will be ready at hand. We shall earnestly desire, that you will please to grant us our desire in this thing, for there is nothing that can endanger the losing of the victory more than the want of powder and shot.[556]

  Confidence was high: two seasoned veterans were in command of the navy and they were using their battlefield experience to prepare for a campaign that invited optimism. As the squadrons assembled, they provoked admiration from all who saw them. The diarist John Evelyn had responsibility for sick and wounded prisoners of war. These duties took him at this time: ‘To the Buoy of the Nore to my Lord General and Prince Rupert, where was the rendezvous of the most glorious Fleet in the world, now preparing to meet ye Hollander.’[557]

  At the end of May, reports reached the English fleet in the Downs that thirty-six French ships under the Duc de Beaufort had been spotted assembling at Belle Ile, off Brittany. Others were expected to join them from Brest. Rupert was instructed by the king to take thirty ‘good ships’ and prevent either a Franco-Dutch rendezvous or a possible landing of enemy troops in Ireland. Meanwhile, spies in the United Provinces assured Albermarle that de Ruyter’s force would not leave harbour for several weeks. This gave Rupert plenty of time to complete his mission and return, before Albermarle was exposed to the enemy’s superior numbers. Furthermore, in the unlikely event that the Dutch did set sail, Rupert and Albermarle calculated that it would be on a wind that would speed Rupert’s return to the Downs. Albermarle, full of bravado, said: ‘Leave us 60 sail, and we shall do well enough.’[558]

  The division of the fleet was reasonable, provided — as Lord Arlington assumed — ‘our intelligence do not deceive us’.[559] But, in fact, every detail of the information was wrong: the French were far away, near Lisbon (Louis XIV was in no rush to expend French lives when his Dutch allies could take the brunt of English attacks); the ships that had been spotted to the west were Spanish and neutral; and the Dutch fleet was on the point of leaving port, its intention to attack.

  Three days into his voyage, on June, Rupert was forced by bad weather to drop anchor in St Helen’s Road. There he received an urgent despatch from the Duke of York, carried by a ketch, which ordered his immediate return to the Downs: the Dutch were closing in on Albermarle, who would be severely outnumbered.

  Albermarle had been commanded to withdraw to the Gunfleet — an anchorage off the Essex coast, south of Harwich — and to meet the Dutch if they encroached. He decided to take a bolder stance: ignoring his captains’ advice, he attacked de Ruyter’s fleet of ninety ships with his sixty. ‘And then began’, wrote Lieutenant Jeremy Roch of the Antelope, without exaggeration, ‘the most terrible, obstinate and bloodiest battle that ever was fought on the seas.’[560] This was not a brief and decisive action, like Trafalgar, the Nile, or Navarino, but a lengthy and gory engagement, its duration reflected in its momentous name: the Four Days’ Fight.

  On the first day, Roch’s ship led the English fleet’s surprise attack against the densest part of the enemy fleet. The Dutch captains cut their ships’ cables as they scrambled to prepare for Albermarle’s second approach. The duke’s fleet was caught between two lines of enemy cannon and remained in this crossfire until ten that night. This, the opening period of the Four Days’ Fight, claimed several English ships, leaving Albermarle with fifty vessels against de Ruyter’s seventy-seven.

  The second day was even more punishing for the English and by nightfall they were left with only twenty-eight battleworthy ships. If it had not been for Albermarle’s disciplined withdrawal, casualties would have been greater: he employed a rolling manoeuvre, protecting his damaged and smaller vessels with the guns of his sixteen most powerful ships. But the outlook was grim and morale was low, one officer reporting: ‘There was nothing to be heard among the common seamen but complaints against deciding our fleet sending away Prince Rupert.’[561] His presence was urgently required or annihilation beckoned.

  Meanwhile, Rupert’s ships had returned to the Downs, expecting to find Albermarle and the Dutch locked in combat. Instead, they found empty seas. ‘The Duke of Albermarle,’ Rupert later reported, ‘it seems by order he had received after my parting from him, was gone thence for the Gunfleet; and in passing met the Dutch upon the said 1st of June, and I, meeting no intelligence in the Downs, steered my course on towards the Gunfleet also; and on Sunday the 3rd of June met the English and Dutch, who had then been some days engaged.’[562]

  It was Whit Sunday, and Rupert’s arrival answered the prayers of Albermarle’s exhausted sailors. ‘When from topmast-head we made a fleet coming towards us’, Sir Thomas Clifford, one of Charles II’s ministers, wrote to the Duke of Ormonde, ‘which we supposed to be (as it was) Prince Rupert and his squadron, there was such shouting in our whole fleet and the English hollow that the Dutch that were all along firing at us made a little pause.’[563] The surge of excitement at the prince’s arrival even touched London. John Evelyn was among those in the capital anxiously following the progress of the battle. He received a letter that contained the thrilling news, ‘that Prince Rupert was come up with his squadron ... and put new courage into our Fleet, now in a manner yielding ground, so that now we were chasing the chaser.’[564]

  The poet Dryden captured English euphoria at the appearance of the prince:

  But now brave Rupert from afar appears,

  Whose w
aving streamers the glad general knows;

  With full-spread sails his eager navy steers,

  And every ship in swift proportion grows...

  Thus reinforced, against the adverse fleet,

  Still doubling ours, brave Rupert leads the way;

  With the first blushes of the morn they meet,

  And bring night back upon the new-born day.

  His presence soon blows up the kindling fight,

  And his loud guns speak thick like angry men;

  It seem’d as slaughter had been breath’d all night,

  And Death new-pointed his dull dart again.

  Thousands were there, in darker fame that dwell,

  Whose deeds some nobler poem shall adorn;

  And though to me unknown, they sure fought well

  Whom Rupert led, and who were British born.[565]

  However, Rupert could not stop further losses, the most shocking of which was the torching of the stranded Royal Prince, the second best ship in the navy: ‘The sight of which’, Sir Thomas Clifford wrote, ‘was a sensible touch to every man’s heart in our fleet ... She was like a Castle in the Sea.’[566] Her admiral, Sir George Ayscue, was taken prisoner and was later humiliatingly paraded in the street by his captors, the most senior English naval officer ever captured in battle.

  Rupert first joined with Albermarle, before leading his squadron — which included a ship commanded by his disciple in destruction, Sir Robert Holmes — into the teeth of the enemy. For two hours the prince attacked, until he managed to prise open the Dutch line. His vessel only narrowly avoided being clapped between two fire-ships. Meanwhile, she took hits from both sides, causing masts and rigging to tumble: ‘Yet,’ said an eyewitness, ‘he answered the shot they poured on him, with as many close returns, which the Enemy felt and carried away with them; and in that whole day, to say no more, the Prince did manifest a Courage and Conduct answerable to the other great Actions, which belong to the story of his Life, whereby he gave spirit to his friends and terror to the Enemy.’[567]

  This sounds like the brave and impetuous prince of old, but experience had added refinement to Rupert’s natural aggression. Sir Thomas Clifford was struck by the maturity of Rupert’s leadership: ‘Prince Rupert behaved himself in the whole action with such conduct that it is hard to say which was most remarkable, either his prudence or courage.’[568]

  The Four Days’ Fight has been recognised as: ‘the greatest naval battle of the age of sail’.[569] Despite Rupert’s belated intervention, it ended in Dutch victory. There were 6,000 English casualties, some the victims of enemy fire-ships: many of those who escaped incineration were drowned. Johan de Witt, leader of the States-General was generous in victory: ‘If the English were beat, their defeat did them more honour than all their former victories; our own fleet could never have been brought [back into the battle] after the first day’s fight, if they had been in the other’s place; and I believe none but the English could. All that we discovered was, that Englishmen might be killed, and English ships burnt, but that English courage was invincible.’[570] Establishing this fact cost de Witt 2,000 Dutchmen.

  There had been real hope in England that Albermarle and Prince Rupert would finish off an enemy so badly mauled the previous year. Indeed, Charles had misinterpreted messages from the fleet as reporting victory and had ordered a Day of Thanksgiving. It was soon clear that this was inappropriate: ‘There was however,’ Evelyn recalled, ‘order given for bonfires and bells; but God knows it was rather a deliverance than a triumph. So much it pleased God to humble our late over-confidence.’[571] News arrived that the body of one of the slain English admirals, Sir William Berkeley, was being displayed in The Hague in a sugar chest. Ten days later, Evelyn mourned the ‘sad spectacle, namely more than half of the gallant bulwark of the kingdom miserably shattered, hardly a vessel entire, but appearing rather so many wracks and hulls, so cruelly had the Dutch mangled us.’[572] Samuel Pepys recorded the pervading disappointment at the defeat. This centred on Albermarle’s decision to fight when severely outnumbered and advised not to do so by his senior officers. At the same time Pepys criticised the prince, although he tempered his attack by recording that Rupert, ‘was counted always unlucky.’[573]

  Just as typical as his bad luck was Rupert’s ability to bounce back quickly from defeat. He and Albermarle understood that, however bad the result, things could have been substantially worse. They had both been on the losing side before — indeed, both had been prisoners of war — and they knew the narrow margin between defeat and victory. They immediately set about repairing their squadrons for further action and sent an urgent request for more fire-ships, having been impressed by the effectiveness of the enemy’s during the recent battle: there was still plenty left of the fighting season.

  Two weeks after the Four Days’ Fight, Arlington wrote of a royal meeting, presided over by Charles II: ‘His Majesty returned last night from the fleet very well satisfied with the diligence employed to fit it to sea again, towards which assisted with his R. H. [the Duke of York] he did take all the other necessary resolutions with Prince Robert & my Lord General who are very well together now in one ship with a purpose to continue so, having observed the disadvantage of being separated in this last fight.’[574]

  The folly of dividing the fleet was one of many lessons learnt. In the aftermath of defeat, Rupert’s analytical mind helped construct a series of new orders for the navy, which would not be significantly modified or improved till 1749. Building on the Instructions for the Better Ordering of the Fleet in Fighting that had evolved during the First Anglo-Dutch War, Rupert and Albermarle established the following clear set of principles: that the commander of every ship was to fight for the common good; that the flagship would give the signal for attack, which all must follow as soon as they saw it; that if a flagship should be damaged, then all ships in that squadron should look to the admiral of the fleet for their subsequent orders; and that the flag officer should move to another vessel if his ship was disabled making that his new command centre. Rupert was seeking a clarity and continuity of command, even in the maelstrom of battle. He believed a concerted thrust at the enemy with the bulk of his vessels was the best way of tearing through the protracted enemy line.

  Although now an admiral, the prince remained at heart a Cavalier. He trusted that courageous men, bravely led, could win any battle, regardless of the odds.

  *

  Both fleets were quickly refitted after the Four Days’ Fight. There were rumours at the end of June that the Dutch were at sea again, off the North Foreland coast. Rupert and Albermarle were overseeing the repair of their damaged vessels in Chatham, Harwich, and Sheerness. At the same time, they were finding it extremely difficult to man their ships and had to deploy soldiers around the ports to prevent desertion. They also enforced ‘a severe press’ to try to replenish their crews, but the quality of the men gleaned by the press-gangs was disappointing. The prince complained that suitable seamen would much prefer to work on merchantmen or colliers, rather than risk all in naval warfare. Meanwhile, the trained bands of the coastal counties were placed on alert, in case of invasion.

  On 19 July, Rupert and Albermarle weighed anchor and left to meet the enemy: the English fleet, sailing in a single line, was nearly 10 miles long. ‘Our last news from the coast’, Arlington informed Ormonde, ‘assuring us that the Dutch continued in their station when they saw ours move, we conclude they will stay to fight us. God give us good success for we play for a great stake.’[575] Three days later de Ruyter was spotted near the Gunfleet, and Albermarle and Rupert scrambled to meet him. They cussed as foul weather hid the enemy from view. However, the foes eventually hunted one another down and on 25 July — the Feast of St James the Apostle — they closed on each other.

  The combined fleets numbered 160 ships, promising another day of extravagant carnage. ‘As soon, however, as the bloody flag was set up…’, an eyewitness recalled of the prince in the prelude to battle, ‘Mr Sav
ille and another gentleman-volunteer, being on the quarter-deck, observed him charging a very small pocket-pistol and putting it in his pocket, which was so odd a sort of weapon on such an occasion, that they could imagine no other reason for it except his having taken a resolution of going into the powder-room to blow up the ship, in case at any time she should be in danger of being taken; for his Grace had often been heard to say that he would answer for nothing but that they should never be carried into Holland. Therefore, Saville and his companions, in a laughing way, most mutinously resolved to throw him overboard in case they should catch him going down to the powder-room.’[576] Rupert had no intention of following Sir George Ayscue’s humiliation after the Four Days’ Fight: he would not be paraded like a slave through Ancient Rome.

  The St James’s Day Fight took place about 35 miles east of Orfordness. The English formation was solid, in accordance with Rupert’s recent instructions, while the Dutch deployment was less tidy, snaking vulnerably across a long front. Such weaknesses were compounded by the disobedience of Cornelis van Tromp, the headstrong admiral of the Dutch rear squadron. Son of the great maritime commander Martin van Tromp (who had been knighted by Charles I in 1642, when Anglo-Dutch relationships were more cordial), Cornelis strayed from de Ruyter’s battle-plan. He botched a difficult manoeuvre in unfriendly seas and ended up far from the main action. When he tried to return, he found his route blocked by Sir Jeremiah Smith’s Blue squadron, and the two admirals began their own private battle.