*
The rush to war with the Dutch had exacerbated the huge naval debts inherited from Cromwell. The £2.5 million subsidy voted by Parliament to fund the conflict, although a huge sum, was insufficient for anything but a short struggle: indeed, creditors absorbed half this grant immediately. In 1666, the king ordered ten ships to be built, but financial constraints meant only three were completed. By the end of the year, all the money was spent. Charles was now unable to afford to pay for the repairs to, or replacement of, his key ships.
The financial crisis had become evident earlier in the year. Provision for the fleet was so poor that Rupert was forced three times in as many months to place his men on short rations. False economies had been made. It was, for example, known that three tons of fresh water were needed per week for every one hundred men on a ship. However, supplies had foundered when poor quality barrels (with wooden instead of iron-bound casks) had cracked open, spilling some of their contents and leaving the remainder open to contamination. Dysentery stalked the fleet throughout the summer.
Beer was the navy’s other great liquid sustenance. Alcoholic fermented grain was less prone to go sour, but Pepys argued that its value made it more susceptible to the cheating ways of profiteering suppliers: giant barrels of it were received with up to 20 gallons missing from each. But the joint commanders were not prepared to accept Pepys’s excuses: ‘If any thing which hath been sent us hath been miscarried’, they wrote to the Duke of York, who was still their Lord Admiral, ‘or if there hath been a fault or neglect of duty anywhere, it will be better examined, when the fleet comes in, than now when his Majesty’s service is so much concerned in our speedy supplies. In the meantime since Mr Pepys takes the liberty to say, that we are abused wholly by the Pursers, we must take the like humbly to assure your Highness that we do not content ourselves with the brave affirmation of the Pursers, but have made our enquiries by the captains of several ships, and have found the cask to be, as we have represented them unto you, that is to say, that the much greater part of the lower part is of wood-bound case.’[590] Albermarle and the prince also complained that the ships bringing supplies to the fleet dawdled en route: their commanders were paid for their time at sea — a disincentive to rush the delivery. ‘This want of provisions’, Rupert told Parliament, ‘did manifestly tend to the extraordinary prejudice of his Majesty’s service in that whole summer, but most especially after the victory obtained in July fight, when we had carried the fleet on the enemies’ coast, and lay there before the Uly [Vlieland], in the way of all their merchant ships, we were enforced, merely for want of provisions, to quit out of Swold Bay.’[591]
Rupert’s frustration was understandable, his points well made. However, the crisis confronting the navy was not just a question of incompetent or dishonest victuallers, as he suspected, but was more the consequence of insufficient revenue. Partly because public receipts had been halved by disease and fire, the navy’s accumulated debts were nearing £1 million in the autumn of 1666. Pepys was realistic about the shortfall: summoned in his capacity as Surveyor-General of Victualling for the Navy to attend a council containing Charles, James, Rupert, and Albermarle, Pepys insisted that £100,000 was immediately required to keep the fleet afloat. The king, however, could only offer £5,000.
At the same meeting, Rupert was incensed by Pepys’s assertion that, ‘the fleet was come in, the greatest fleet that ever his Majesty had yet together, and that in as bad a condition as the enemy or weather could put it’. Pepys recorded in his diary: ‘I ... made a current and, I thought, a good speech, laying open the ill state of the Navy — by the greatness of the debt — greatness of work to do against next year — the time and materials it would take — and our incapacity, through a total lack of money. I had no sooner done, but Prince Rupert rose up and told the King in a heat that whatever the gentleman had said, he had brought home his fleet in as good a condition as ever any fleet was brought home — the twenty boats would be as many as the fleet would want — and all the anchors and cables left in the storm might be taken up again.’
The force of Rupert’s blast stunned all present, Pepys recalling that: ‘I therefore did only answer that I was sorry for his Highness’s offence, but that what I said was but the report we received from those entrusted in the fleet to inform us. He muttered, and repeated what he had said, and so after a long silence on all hands, nobody, not so much as the Duke of Albermarle, seconding the Prince, nor taking notice of what he said, we withdrew.’[592]
In fact, the prince and the diarist had both made fair points. Rupert had done his best at sea in very difficult circumstances, against an able enemy and in often treacherous seas. Pepys, meanwhile, had pointed out the impossibility of providing adequate supplies while being denied funds. Although corruption and incompetence undoubtedly deprived the navy of much needed resources, the key problem for the Crown was the primitive mechanism available to it for raising extraordinary revenue in times of war. This was in cruel contrast to the enemy.
The States-General had an understanding relationship with their bankers, which made it possible for the Dutch to fund their battle fleet with relative ease. Politicians and traders could see where their priorities coincided, and merchants lent their ships for fighting. Citizens also understood where their best interests lay and this partly explains why the Dutch were able at all times to rely on volunteer, rather than pressed, sailors.
In England, however, the Royalist inner circle and the merchant class shared little common ground. The two interest groups were still largely attached to the differing beliefs that had left them as opponents in the Civil War. Although both factions had wanted the fight with the Dutch, the merchants — with their strong representation in Parliament — were wary of supplying a king of questionable trustworthiness with more than the bare minimum of funds. Even Royalists were despairing of their feckless monarch, John Evelyn comparing Charles’s lazy self-indulgence with Cromwell’s dynamism: ‘so much reputation got and preserved by a rebel that went before him’,[593] he lamented in his diary.
As a result, when the king sought a permanent excise tax from Parliament, the Commons refused. Members declined to grant a source of income that would outlive the war and which might give the Crown dangerous independence. For their part, MPs tried to take advantage of the monarch’s financial hiatus, offering to buy out one of his constant revenue streams, the deeply unpopular Hearth Tax. The king refused. Next, Members established a special committee to investigate whether the king had used any of the funds granted him for the prosecution of the war for other purposes. Charles I would have recognised the insult and concern felt by his son, at this squeezing of the royal prerogative. The upshot of this political wrangling was simple: Parliament in the autumn of 1666 would grant no more money for the following year.
By 1667 the situation was desperate. In the spring, crews of two of the few vessels that reported for duty, the Pearl and the Little Victory, refused to go to sea because they had not been paid for more than two years. The men’s wages were met in the form of written ‘tickets’ — paper vouchers that were extremely hard to redeem for cash, and which were often available at a discounted rate to officers and others with access to ready money.
Conditions for harbour workers were similarly dire. The dockyards at Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich employed 1,400 men, who were charged with replacing, repairing, and maintaining the fleet, on an evaporating budget. The importance of their job was matched only by the shoddiness of their treatment. Rupert drew Parliament’s attention to this national disgrace: ‘I must remember’, he told the Members, ‘the horrible neglect of his Majesty’s officers, and the workmen of his yards.’[594] Desperately impoverished artisans struggled to find food. Sometimes, though, relief arrived too late: ‘I am more sorry to see men really perish for want of wherewithal to get nourishment,’ a commissioner reported to Pepys. ‘One yesterday came to me crying to get something to relieve him. I ordered him 10 shillings. He went and got hot drink
and something to help him, and so drank it, and died within two hours’.[595] Faced with such deprivation, the workforce felt the bond of loyalty had been cut and became mutinous. At the same time, it became ever more difficult to recruit sailors: press-gangs roved around England’s coastal towns and then turned inland, trawling for men to serve in a dangerous, brutal, and bankrupt navy.
In March 1667, with dockyard employees starving to death, Parliament unwilling to grant more money, and the king’s reserves gone, a truly astonishing decision was made: the navy would not put to sea, but would be placed in mothballs. Only frigates were to sail, to distract the enemy’s warships and harry her merchantmen while the English first rates, the pride of the fleet, remained in harbour. Rupert was not party to this decision because he was busy battling his dangerously declining health.
*
The prince had a lifelong aversion to doctors and surgery, but he was obliged to look to both when his old head wound violently erupted during the winter of 1666-7. It had been in a dangerous condition for two years, Pepys writing in early 1665 of a friend’s tales of ‘Prince Rupert’s disease telling the horrible degree of its breaking out on his head’. It seems likely that a fragment of bone had detached from his damaged skull, causing a dangerous inflammation that was agonising and stopped him from sleeping. Rupert had been convinced that he would die, but then suddenly his condition improved. ‘Since we told him that we believe he would overcome his disease’, Pepys wrote, ‘he is as merry and swears and laughs and curses, and do all the things of a man in health, as ever he did in his life.’[596] Now, though, the infection had returned, in an even more vicious form. So serious was the prince’s condition that gossips on the Royal Exchange erroneously reported him dead. Since the treatment recommended to him was trepanning, it would be understandable if the prince had wished himself so.
Trepanning has been performed on human skulls since at least 2000 BC: we know that the Incas trepanned and there is evidence of it in Neolithic remains. By the mid seventeenth century in England, the procedure had progressed little from its roots. The treatment of head wounds was largely a mystery to Rupert’s contemporaries, a learned surgeon writing in 1678: ‘Wounds of the head being received in the winter do suffer the patient to live longer than those made in the summer, for herein the native heat is ... most copious and strong ... in summer, the natural heat is expanded and exploded to the external parts, and as it were there dissolved and dissipated, the which in winter is contracted and cohabited.’[597] This was a theory based on Classical sources and flawed logic. Similar Restoration medical manuals help to build up a picture of Rupert’s ordeal.
The area around Rupert’s wound was shaved and then the skin cut in a vertical and a horizontal incision, to form the shape of a cross. His ears were stopped with cotton, both to deaden the sound of the surgeon’s drilling and to soak up excess blood. Assistants held the prince’s head still and his arms back. His wound was infected and raw, but the surgeon’s point of attack would have been close to its centre. There was no anaesthetic, no antiseptic, and little understanding of the need for hygiene. The surgeon sliced through the rotten flesh, scooping it out in order to have a clear run at the exposed skull beneath.
A pin was then inserted where the drill was to go and the surgeon gently twisted it into the bone, until it was fixed at some depth. It was then unscrewed and the opening was used as the starting point for the invasion of the skull. The drilling was the job of the trepan, an instrument that looked and acted like a corkscrew — except, instead of a twisting piece of thin and tapering metal, it had a solid and cylindrical stem with a circular, serrated blade at its base. While the surgeon held the shaft firm in his left hand, he turned the blade with his right, boring the trepan’s teeth into the bone.
At this stage he may have used a Hey saw or a bone file — the former like a small tomahawk, the latter more like a package cutting knife — to tidy up the bone. Then he would have bored deeper with the trepan, using a brush to remove dry bone flakes from around the widening, deepening cavity. Splinters that were sodden with blood or pus were swabbed away with a cloth.
The trepan was removed occasionally and doused in oil or water: oil eased the rotation of the blade; water helped to cool the overheated metal after prolonged friction. John Brown, a Restoration surgeon, wrote of the extra caution needed once the trepan had penetrated the skull: ‘If any blood appear’, he advised, ‘it is a certain sign that it hath penetrated the first table, and this directs you to be very careful how you proceed, lest you hurt and wound the Meninges by an unhappy slip, being a very great cause of Death. When you perceive the piece of bone is loosed by the trepan, you may with a fine lavatory or small instrument free it by degrees from the other parts of the cranium, so as you may without danger take it up with your forcipes, if any ragged pieces appear, which may hurt the Meninges, you are to remove them.’[598]
The operation was slow and agonising. Rupert would have indicated when he could take no more and would have been allowed recovery time before the drilling restarted. At the trepanning’s conclusion, a piece of taffeta or satin was dipped in Mel Rosarum and Oleum Rosarum, and used to swab the wound. The prince would probably not have noticed this, because of the shock of the pain. He would have been laid out on a bed while he and his surgeon waited anxiously to see how the head reacted to the trepan’s assault: as John Evelyn recorded, after watching five contemporaries being operated on for another invasive procedure, ‘The danger is fever, and gangrene, some wounds never closing.’[599] These were common dangers during an era of ignorant surgery. The surgeon’s powders and potions often did more harm than good.
Rupert reacted badly to the trepanning. He had to return for a second operation, the surgeon going wider and deeper in a bid to complete the job he had previously botched. ‘Prince Rupert has again been trepanned,’ wrote a pamphleteer, ‘the former [operation] not having gone down deep enough; this gave him present ease, by letting out a great quantity of corrupt matter, since when he has slept better, and is amending.’ The second trepanning had worked.
Relieved of constant pain and granted rest, Rupert’s inquisitive mind sprang into action. He was intrigued by medical gadgetry and it was noted that, during his recuperation, ‘he often diverts himself in his work house [laboratory], where, among other curiosities, he had made instruments which the surgeons use in dressing him, which do it with more ease than any formerly used’.[600]
Rupert’s recovery took many weeks, his steady improvement occasionally commented on by Pepys. In the spring of 1667, after the decision had been made not to put the fleet to water, the diarist spotted a peculiar-looking convalescent: ‘This day I saw Prince Rupert abroad in the Vane-room, pretty well as he used to be, and looks as well, only something appears to be under his periwig on the crown of his head.’[601] Perhaps this was a thick medical dressing, or possibly the prince had invented a device to keep the weight of the wig from the tender scars of his successful second operation.
*
Although Clarendon wrote otherwise, it seems impossible that the incapacitated prince was party to the decision to lay up the fleet. ‘In the beginning of 1667’, his nineteenth-century biographer Warburton wrote, ‘the Dutch determined to make reprisals on our commerce in the very face of London. The imbecile ministry of Charles was easily blinded.’ Indeed, it was Clarendon and his political allies who selected this option, because they were convinced that the end of the war was near: the dramatic clashes of the previous two years persuaded them that the peace explorations taking place in Breda would lead to terms. Surely the States-General would opt for profitable peace over costly war?
Warburton also pointed the finger at Rupert’s old adversary, whose meddling had troubled him before: ‘The Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, lent her fatal assistance to deceive her son. On the strength of her information and advice, England was left almost defenceless; ... the Navy remained cradled in winter quarters, and two small squadrons alone were left at sea.’[
602]
The English severely underestimated a resourceful and stubborn enemy. Dutch knowledge of the Thames Estuary matched that of the English due to the amount of peacetime trade between the United Provinces and London. The president of the States-General, Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, was aware of the vulnerability of his enemies’ dockyards. In 1664 he sent a spy to see if an attack on the dry docks at Chatham was feasible. Three years later, with the English ships laid up, he unleashed his ships on a sleeping enemy.
Cornelis de Witt, Johan’s brother, stood with de Ruyter in a longboat, directing operations. The Dutch were assisted by the terrible morale of the defenders: as they made their way up river, English seamen’s wives screamed at those in authority that this disaster was the consequence of failing to pay their husbands. The invading vessels — some piloted by British navigators, happy to serve masters who remunerated them — proceeded from Gravesend to Sheerness. The English fled before them and the partially built fort at Sheerness was overrun. The ship stationed at the entrance to the river, the Unity, failed to pull tight the heavy protective chain that guarded the Medway and although the first Dutch ship was snagged on it, the second cut through, allowing its colleagues a free punch at the exposed English solar plexus. Fire-ships destroyed three of the navy’s great ships, the Loyal London, the Royal Oak, and the Royal James. The true catastrophe, however, was the overpowering of the small force guarding the Royal Charles. This mighty ship, which had carried the restored monarch back to England and bore his name, was soon sailed to the United Provinces, the finest imaginable reward for de Witt’s daring.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 38