Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  This separation of enemy forces allowed Rupert and Albermarle to concentrate on de Ruyter in the centre without distraction. The Dutch commander had seen van Tromp disappear in one direction. In the other he could make out his third squadron, sailing away from the battle, defeated — and, unbeknown to de Ruyter, with its admiral slain. De Ruyter fought on with typical resolve, until his 80-gun flagship, the Seven Provinces, had its mast blown away. It was only when the Royal Charles was similarly disabled that de Ruyter was able to limp towards Dutch waters, mustering his remaining vessels around him.

  Lack of wind slowed the English pursuit. As de Ruyter turned for home, he fired on Rupert’s sloop, the tiny Fan Fan, which was assisting repairs to the Royal Charles. One of the Fan Fan’s crew was killed. Although this was a single casualty among the 1,000 suffered by the English that day, it infuriated the prince. He ordered the sloop to row after the Seven Provinces in search of a modicum of revenge. Sir Thomas Clifford recorded the comedy after the carnage, as the diminutive cutter snapped at the heels of the huge, lumbering, Dutch flagship: ‘The little Fan Fan made up with her oars to de Ruyter and brought her two little guns on one side, and for near an hour continued plying broadside and broadside which was so pleasant a sight when no ship of either side could come near. There was so little wind that all ours fell into a laughter, and I believe the Dutch into indignation to see their Admiral so chased.’[577]

  The Dutch made it home, licking their wounds behind harbour defences as the English processed triumphantly up and down the coast-line: although they had lost only two ships, four Dutch admirals had been killed during the defeat. Rupert and Albermarle were determined to capitalise on their victory before returning home. A Dutch deserter told them of a fleet of enemy merchantmen lying behind the Frisian islands of Terschelling and Vlieland. They unleashed Sir Robert Holmes on this unsuspecting prey. His orders were to destroy the enemy ships, but not to take civilian life.

  The result was spectacular: Holmes took the Dutch completely by surprise and succeeded in torching 150 of their merchantmen, before escaping the devastation with only a foot of water under his keel. Two enemy men-of-war also went up, in a conflagration known as ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’. ‘I received a letter from Sir Robert Holmes, giving an account of the exploit he had done at the Ulie [Vlieland],’ Arlington reported to Ormonde, ‘... & I persuade myself we are not deceived in thinking it the greatest loss the Dutch have received since the War began.’[578] Amsterdam went into mourning, its merchants calculating that Holmes had cost them £1 million.

  Success against the Dutch on St James’s Day and at Vlieland won Rupert and Albermarle great popularity. Charles ordered a national Day of Thanksgiving, led by services in St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. At the end of this summer of brutal maritime combat, one poet celebrated the heroics of the prince and the Lord General, who he compared to the Classical heroes, Castor and Pollux:

  Look up, and view in tail o’th’ Waine of Charles

  Two new-found lights, Rupert’s and Albermarle’s.

  Did ever Fortune before loss of eyes

  More justly temper these great Deities

  Unto a pondus valiant? A rare rate,

  Of which Physicians do but fondly prate.

  He placed Rupert’s latest exertions in the context of a quarter of a century of astonishing personal bravery:

  That Valour and Success, which on Edgehill

  Enter’d the Camp, doth rest upon Thee still,

  It is the same with Thee (Nephew of Kings)

  To baffle Squadrons, as thou once didst Wings.[579]

  Rupert spent the autumn vainly attempting to re-engage the Dutch in battle. He was frustrated by the enemy’s reluctance to leave harbour, repeated gales, and the inadequacy of the supplies given his men at sea. ‘From that expedition where we commanded,’ the prince told Parliament, ‘I returned home in the beginning of October; but before I came in with the fleet, I sent it as my humble advice to the King, amongst other things which I thought for his Majesty’s service, that care should be taken to prevent an attempt upon Harwich, which was to be apprehended some time or other from the enemy, after the fleet should he come in, and his Majesty’s commands were accordingly afterwards issued forth for the fortifying [of] both Harwich and Sheerness, which should have prevented any such design.’[580]

  The Duke of York was responsible for naval defences. He increased the number of ships guarding the River Medway, which led to Chatham Docks. He also ordered a platform to be constructed off Sheerness, solid enough to hold twelve heavy cannon. The ships materialised, but the platform was only tackled in a half-hearted manner and was not completed by the following summer. In hearing Rupert’s advice, but failing to act on it, the Lord High Admiral left his prime ships vulnerable to disaster.

  Chapter Twenty-Two - ‘Sadtroublesome Times’

  My Lord,

  ‘The letters of this night will paint our misfortunes in black colours, & the truth is we have received a great affront which we shall not quickly be able to wash off …’

  The Earl of Arlington to the Duke of Ormonde, from Whitehall, 15 June 1667

  The Second Anglo-Dutch War played out between 1665 and 1667. During each of the three years of conflict London suffered a catastrophe of a scale that might be expected, at worst, once in a century. The first calamity struck in 1665, the Great Plague killing a fifth of the capital’s half a million population. The disease, borne by fleas nestling in the fur of black rats, had as its symptoms swollen lymph glands in the groin or armpit. If these burst, and progressed to suppurating sores, the patient could survive. If not, death would occur within a week, the corpse erupting in a welter of black spots.

  The Black Death, a distant ancestor of this scourge, first appeared in 1348, killing one in three Englishmen. Similar pestilence had flared up sporadically thereafter. Throughout the seventeenth century, London’s filthy streets provided a fertile habitat for the black rat: in 1603, 30,000 people had died from the bubonic plague and the Coronation of Rupert’s grandfather, James I, had been postponed as a result. But 1665’s outbreak was of a different magnitude to anything that had been suffered for more than 300 years: abetted by an unusually hot summer, it ripped through the capital, choked the cemeteries, caused mass graves to be dug, and spread panic and terror.

  There were few effective countermeasures to the plague. The 1646 Anti-Plague Laws instructed communities to seal up households where the disease struck, leaving the occupants to battle through it or to die in isolation. Those who could afford to do so, fled, while the poor awaited their fate. John Evelyn was wealthy enough to send his family away from London, while he chose to stay in the capital. On 7 September he recorded: ‘Came home, there perishing now near ten thousand poor creatures weekly: however I went all along the City & suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage & dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets & the street thin of people, the shops shut up, & all in mournful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.’[581]

  The restored monarchy struggled to control a situation that threatened to incubate anarchy and aid the enemy: Charles II went to Salisbury, then Oxford, with the Court; his brother James repaired to York, in order to keep the northern counties under control; while Albermarle and the Earl of Craven — the Palatines’ oldest and most loyal supporter — were given command of half the army’s Footguards and a detachment of cavalry, ‘to take care of London,’ the Duke of York recalled, ‘lest the Republicans and fanatics, encouraged by the Dutch, should rise’.[582] Together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sheldon, they did an admirable job, seeing that victims’ clothes were burnt and their remains interred in lime. Only doctors and nurses were allowed to venture into houses containing the sick.

  Rupert might have undertaken such duties, but his health was poor. His various wounds refused to heal, especially the serious blow to his head, which caused him real and repeated pain. He also was prone to malaria, another souvenir of a youth s
pent fighting hard, sometimes in exotic climes. Keen to encourage his cousin’s convalescence, the king instructed the prince to join the court in Salisbury, before spending three months at Windsor Castle.

  The Great Plague started to abate in the autumn, but it remained a serious threat to health until cauterised by the great disaster of 1666 — the Great Fire of London. What started as an accidental blaze in a Pudding Lane bakery was quickly whipped up into an inferno that cost the nation £10 million. The City suffered particularly badly, the commercial heart of the nation losing the livery halls of forty-four merchant bodies, as well as the Custom House, the Guildhall, and the Royal Exchange. The flames spread under a strong east wind — unchecked, until too late, thanks to the stupidity of the Lord Mayor. The messenger who woke Sir Thomas Bludworth with breathless news of the disaster must have realised that he had failed to transmit its true scale when dismissed with the words: ‘Go and piss on it’. Even when it became clear that more drastic countermeasures were necessary, Bludworth hesitated: ‘The Lord Mayor declined soldiers, and scrupled blowing up houses’, recalled the Duke of York. ‘The fire spread; and, about noon, he sent for the troops.’[583] It was too late.

  Besides the commercial devastation, the Great Fire destroyed more than 13,000 houses as well as eighty-nine churches — including St Paul’s Cathedral. Shock at London’s fate resonated abroad. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland wrote to the Earl of Anglesey: ‘You will herewith receive a letter from me and the council to the Lord Mayor of London and the Court of Aldermen, expressing in the style of the board the deep sense we have of the calamity befallen that city by the late fire, and informing them that we have thought of by way of contribution from this Kingdom for the relief of such as are most impoverished by that judgement.’[584]

  It seemed to the superstitious that God was launching thunderbolts at England in order to castigate an indolent, hedonistic king and his debauched court. Although charming, Charles II appeared to his critics to have a fatal lack of ‘gravitas’. The tales of innumerable mistresses and other worldly indulgences played badly with a population at war — particularly because it was a disappointing war. The failure of the much-vaunted navy to finish off the Dutch — a people popularly derided as greedy, cheese-eating misers and ‘Hogen Mogen Ninnies’ married to ‘brawny wenches fat as does’[585] — increased the dissatisfaction of a hard-pressed, disenchanted people.

  *

  The navy in the 1660s provides, in some respects, a microcosm of the fault lines running through the Restoration monarchy in its first years: much was expected of it, but its ability to perform was compromised by a dire lack of funds. At the same time there remained very real tensions between those in positions of authority, for they came from the two creeds that had clashed so fiercely two decades earlier.

  The easy cooperation at the head of the navy between Rupert and Albermarle — a Royalist and a Parliamentarian — could not prevent an uneasy tussle between former enemies further down the chain of command. Most of the leading naval officers in the Second Anglo-Dutch War were formerly Commonwealth or Protectorate men: Charles II inherited them with his Crown. Of these, the majority were professional sailors, who had been at sea all their working life. Christopher Myngs, son of a cobbler, had joined as a boy and rose to become a knighted admiral, adored and respected by his men. They were known as ‘tarpaulins’, after the rough protective clothing they wore in stormy seas. A small minority refused to serve the king after the Protectorate’s implosion, but many others were welcomed back into the service at the outbreak of war. As Sir William Coventry, the Duke of York’s secretary, told Pepys: ‘Why ... in the sea service it is impossible to do anything without them, there being not more than three men of the whole King’s side that are fit to command almost.’[586]

  The Stuarts’ return injected a stream of men of nobler birth into the upper echelons of the navy. Those that had accompanied Rupert on his 1650s’ odyssey — such as Sir John Mennes, who became one of Charles II’s admirals and comptroller of the new Navy Board, and Sir Robert Holmes, the fearless captain — came to their posts with useful nautical experience. Many others had none. They were attracted to the navy because of the promise of action, because the army had no place in a sea war, and because they hoped for financial reward.

  Ill feeling existed between two groups of men who, until recently, had been active foes. The situation was not helped by the rigid loyalty of patrons such as Monck, Sandwich, Penn, and Lawson on the Commonwealth side, and Prince Rupert on that of the Royalists. These leaders saw it as their duty to reward their ‘following’ of men, over the heads of officers drawn from the opposing faction. Monck’s main recruiting agent was Sir Jeremiah Smith, whose importance was increased after saving the Duke of York from a Dutch fire-ship. Rupert’s man was the redoubtable Holmes.

  Among those eager to promote the professional, seasoned naval officer over the opportunist, fighting gentleman was the naval bureaucrat Samuel Pepys. He strongly approved of the Duke of York’s determination to improve the service and forget the differing allegiances of the past. James, pragmatic and professional, was happy to employ Cromwellians in his fleet: at the outbreak of war, he had selected Sir John Lawson, a Commonwealth stalwart, to be vice-admiral of his squadron. James regarded his former foes as generally superior to the amateurs who had fought with brave indiscipline for his father’s cause. This philosophy clashed directly with Rupert’s unquestioning loyalty to those who had suffered for the king, regardless of their individual shortcomings. During a meeting, the duke proposed that any captain found drunk aboard ship should face dismissal. This suggestion astonished the prince: ‘God damn me’, he spluttered, ‘if they will turn out every man that will be drunk, he must out all the commanders in the fleet. What is the matter if [he] be drunk, so when he comes to fight he doth his work?’[587] Rupert believed in the power of personality and daring, over the confines of uniformity and regulation.

  Pepys’s diaries resound with contempt for the prince. His Rupert is a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, cantankerous menace. While Pepys was also vicious in his written attacks on Albermarle and Sir William Penn — both senior Cromwellians — he reserved his strongest criticism for the gentlemen-officers whose increasing influence in the navy he resented. As the most prominent example of this creeping infestation, Rupert attracted the diarist’s most pungent bile.

  Pepys’s attitude to the prince betrays his strongly Parliamentarian roots. Pepys’s route to office had started via his kinship with Edward. Montagu, the Cromwellian sailor who served the Restoration monarchy as Earl of Sandwich. Pepys had been anti-Royalist as a youth: he claimed to have witnessed Charles I’s execution as a schoolboy and seems to have been thrilled by its spectacle and significance. Although later convinced of the need to return the Stuarts to power, Pepys’s prejudices were never expunged and he appears to have found it impossible to overcome the chauvinism of his formative years. In early 1666, he wrote about a duchess whose views he found odious: ‘But one good thing she said, she cried mightily out against the having of gentlemen Captains with feathers and ribbands, and wished the King would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea Captains, that he served with formerly, that would make their ships swim with blood.’[588] The prince epitomised the amateur, dilettante culture that Pepys sought to erase.

  The dark image of Rupert, perpetrated by the Puritan pamphleteers of the 1640s, must have affected Pepys as a boy. Now he found himself working alongside the ageing, irascible ‘Prince Robber’. Although other contemporaries, including the king, joked about Rupert’s sombreness and commented on his brooding energy, nobody else wrote as critically of the prince as Pepys.

  Pepys lapped up the slander that Rupert’s high profile and controversial character attracted. He recorded with relish a highly partisan recollection of Rupert and Maurice’s ‘mutiny’ at Newark, in 1644: ‘My Lord Bellasis told us how the King having newly put out Prince Rupert of his generalship, upon some miscarriage at Bristol, and Sir
Richard Willis from his governorship of Newark, at the entreaty of the gentry of the county, and put in my Lord Bellasis; the great officers of the King’s armies mutinied, and came in that manner with swords drawn into the market-place of the town where the King was; whereupon the King says, “I must horse”. And there himself personally, when everyone expected they should be opposed, the King came, and cried to the head of the mutineers, which was Prince Rupert, “Nephew, I command you be gone.” So the Prince, in all his fury and discontent, withdrew, and his company scattered.’[589]

  This incident, as we have seen, involved a much richer, deeper context than Pepys allows. There is no mention of Digby’s malice, of Rupert’s justifiable anger at his mistreatment by the king, of his understandable wish to be exonerated of the charge of disloyalty, or of Charles I’s subsequent full forgiveness of his nephews. Neither does Pepys give a balanced assessment of Bellasis — a man of questionable integrity, who wished to place himself in a flattering light, in an episode that, in fairness, reflected well on none of its participants. Pepys swallowed Bellasis’s tale whole, because it dovetailed with his dislike of everything the prince stood for. He wrote it down as fact, without hesitation or balance.

  The personality clash between the glamorous, experienced but grizzled prince and the physically unattractive, self-made, insecure bureaucrat was complicated by professional tensions. As the conflict with the Dutch garnered more disappointments than triumphs, heated recriminations flew between the forces at sea and the naval suppliers on land. Pepys was quick to defend his fellow administrators, while Rupert, in his mid forties, had become increasingly outspoken: he would brook no criticism of his men or of his leadership. He remained confident in his abilities and contemptuous of his denigrators. Two proud men, with different hinterlands, labouring to maintain very high standards in their separate spheres, were bound to clash — especially when both were labouring under conditions that made their tasks impossibly hard and which neither could control.