These shows were blatant propaganda exercises by the Court, when messages of policy and belief were transmitted to the masses through easily digestible poetry and pageantry. By associating so visibly with the Anglican elite, Charles and James wished to portray themselves as key participants in, and supporters of, the Protestant hierarchy. This was meant to counter the concerns of a people who watched their king cavorting with a French mistress, Louise de Keroualle — ‘la Belle Bretonne’ — from the end of 1671 (she provided him with a son nine months later); and an heir to the throne who was betrothed to an Italian, Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. James and Mary married by proxy, in September 1672. Modena was pro-French: Mary’s mother was a niece of Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. By entrusting Monmouth with the English brigade fighting alongside French troops against the Dutch, and by choosing Rupert to command the Anglo-French fleet, the Stuarts hoped to distance themselves from the accusation of having secret, Catholic designs.
The prince was 53, an old hand who might have thought he had seen it all. However, his new position of authority was to test his patience to the full. Rupert’s time as a brigade commander in Louis XIV’s army immediately after the Civil War had left him baffled: at times it had seemed as though Marshal Gassion had wanted him dead. The prince’s command of the combined Anglo-French fleet would leave him similarly mystified. Furthermore, despite the widespread relief expressed at his new appointment, Rupert faced powerful enemies at home.
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Throughout his adulthood Rupert had hankered after independent military command. On joining the Royalists in 1642, the king had given his nephew a surprising degree of autonomy. This led to the regrettable clash with Lindsey before Edgehill, which prompted the earl’s resignation. Many of Rupert’s later problems with Henrietta Maria and Digby stemmed from a belief that they were undermining his authority. Then, at Marston Moor, he insisted on precedence over the head of the affronted Marquess of Newcastle. By the time he received supreme command of the Royalist forces, it was hamstrung by looming defeat and the continuing interference of his enemy Digby.
After the Civil War, during his campaigns at sea, his forces may often have amounted only to a small flotilla, but at least it was his flotilla. The Second Anglo-Dutch War saw Rupert refuse to share control of the fleet with the Earl of Sandwich. He had only accepted the subsequent divided command with Albermarle out of a long-held respect for the duke. Now, in very late middle age, it seemed that Rupert had finally secured his ambition — supreme effective command of the navy. However, he was soon to experience the familiar deflation of disappointment.
Rupert intended to equip the fleet and then seek battle with the Dutch at the earliest opportunity: his every instinct remained aggressive and he wanted to deny the enemy a head start in the campaign. However, it was now that opponents of his appointment made themselves known. Faction fighting had compromised the effectiveness of the fleet during the Second Anglo-Dutch War and it was to prove equally disruptive during the Third.
Rupert was the leading figure in the navy’s Royalist clique. As ever, he was eager to have men serve him whose loyalty was undoubted: ‘If the officers of my fleet have any other way to apply themselves than to me,’ the prince asked, ‘I beseech you to consider how it can be possible for me to bear any command amongst them.’[672] However, critics resented his favouring men from his own following over those from rival factions, regardless of merit. They seized on the prince’s promotion of Sir William Reeves, his long-term fighting companion and deputy at Windsor Castle, as an act of irresponsible patronage. Rewarding dilettante adventurers instead of professional naval officers outraged Rupert’s enemies — men identified by one of the prince’s following as: ‘a generation of men of another mind, who, having found all their arts and endeavours of diverting his Majesty from this choice to be in vain, tacked about to the old trick of State, of devising how to take off the chariot-wheels of the Prince’s expedition, and to clap a dead weight to retard him’.[673]
The Duke of York resented having to resign his command of the fleet and so made life difficult for his successor. Rupert suspected that Sir John Werden had been recently appointed a commissioner by James to complicate his job, by fermenting dissent. The prince reacted predictably, seeking the removal of officers he felt unable to trust and surrounding himself more tightly with his own men. This led to increasing tensions, which fed the faction fighting in the fleet.
The prince found that his orders were met with delay and obstruction. When he asked for supplies for his ships, they were unavailable. When they finally arrived, they did so in inadequate quantities. The prince’s instructions to press men into service were greeted with a similar lack of urgency: an operation that usually, in time of war, took place in November, was delayed until March. When the press finally took place, thousands of those who would have been most useful to the navy — fishermen, watermen and merchant seamen — were granted dispensation from their duties. Meanwhile, the prince’s enemies deprived him of a commander’s right to appoint officers: he must rather submit his recommendations to the commission, for approval. The slights seemed endless. When Rupert proposed raising a regiment of marines in Ireland — a fertile recruiting ground for him during the Civil War — the idea was rejected.
The prince’s ambitions were also blocked by budgetary constraints. In his foundry in Windsor he had invented a new gun, the ‘Rupertinoe’, which he was convinced would give the navy the edge over the Dutch. ‘This was a pattern of gun which was first cast, then annealed in a furnace and machined on a lathe to finish it, giving a piece of very high quality.’[674] The intricacy of the process meant that each gun cost more than twice the rate of the ordinary, iron gun: indeed, Pepys investigated the prince’s bills, in the hope that he could expose fraud. Because of the expense, only three of the first rate ships used in the Third Anglo-Dutch War — the Royal Charles, Royal James, and Royal Oak — were fitted with Rupert’s guns.
The Dutch fleet arrived off the English coast before Rupert’s ships were properly equipped with provisions or crews. De Ruyter began to sink obstructions in the mouth of the Thames, hoping to keep the main English force hemmed in so he could deal with the French and the navy’s Portsmouth squadron, at a numerical advantage. However, the prince interrupted de Ruyter, boldly sending a force of frigates and fire-ships through shoal waters that were only passable on a spring tide. The Dutch were dispersed, leaving the channels clear for Rupert’s great ships.
Fearing de Ruyter’s return, Rupert felt compelled to leave port immediately. He took with him marines, soldiers, and artillery, which he intended to land on the Dutch coast. Six of his larger ships were laden with ‘great stores of War, viz. of granadoes [grenades] for mortar-pieces and hand, firearms, pikes, powder, shot, scaling ladders, turnpikes, and many other chargeable stores for land service’.[675] However, everyday supplies for the fleet were inadequate for a summer at sea. In May the prince led out his amphibious force, reluctantly relying on his naval commissioners’ assurances that more provisions and men would be forwarded to him as soon as they became available.
The prince found the enemy unwilling to fight: the French successes on land meant de Ruyter’s marines were sent to reinforce the army, so his weakened force was now obliged to employ defensive, guerrilla tactics at sea. The Dutch watched the English from behind the supposed safety of the Schooneveld’s sandbanks, on the Zeeland coast. But Rupert was not to be denied: fearing a summer of frustrating watching and waiting, he sent scouts to sound out the enemy water. He then presented a plan for an audacious attack to Charles II, which the king approved.
On the morning of 28 May, the Dutch were riding at anchor when they heard a distant cannon shot. It was from Rupert’s flagship, the Royal Charles — newly built, to replace the vessel carried off from the Medway, and untried in battle. The prince then raised the Union Flag, the signal to bear down on the enemy. Rupert’s attack force was comprised of thirty-five sha
llow-bottomed frigates, assisted by thirteen fire-ships. It approached the Dutch with loosened fore-top sails, easing past Stony Bank in a stiff south-southwest breeze. A French squadron, commanded by one of Louis XIV’s court favourites, the Comte d’Estrée, also dropped its sails and followed the English advance. When Rupert was through the initial shallows, he raised the red flag, which was the sign for the assault to start in earnest.
The fleets closed at noon, the Dutch startled by this unprecedented attack: they had always viewed these waters as their sanctuary. Van Tromp faced Rupert, while de Ruyter greeted d’Estrée. The prince got the upper hand in his sector of the battle, driving his opponents close to the shore, where some ran aground. However, the French were less successful, their disarray allowing de Ruyter to come to van Tromp’s aid. Rupert had to fight both enemy formations simultaneously, his efforts hampered by ‘his Highness’s own ship,’ an eyewitness recalled, ‘which proved so crank-sided, and fetched so much water in at the ports, that her lower tier of guns could not he made use of, though it was a very easy gale we had’.[676] Despite this handicap, Rupert and his frigates lost few men and no ships, while the United Provinces had two ships sunk, one burnt, two disabled, and three run aground. The prince had the pleasure of seeing de Ruyter and van Tromp flee for safety, in the face of his blazing fire-ships.
Although this was a minor victory, it gave Rupert the satisfaction of justifying his suitability for supreme, independent command. Charles acknowledged this soon afterwards, when appointing him Admiral of the Fleet. Rupert had done what no English admiral had managed in the previous maritime wars: he had shown the United Provinces that no place was safe, outside their harbours, in the face of determination and bold piloting.
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Rupert led the fleet in a further engagement a few days later, which followed an ambush by de Ruyter. This was a scrappy affair, which neither side could claim to have won. The prince’s conduct during this battle was subsequently criticised by one of his admirals, Sir Edward Spragge — like Holmes, an Irish Protestant who had spent time as a Royalist privateer. De Ruyter had caught the Anglo-French off guard and Spragge was aboard Rupert’s ship when the attack began. The prince ordered Spragge back to his flagship, with instructions to lead the counterattack as soon as he could: Spragge’s squadron was to be in the van, with Rupert’s in the middle of the formation. But Spragge took an age to reach his vessel and Rupert could wait no longer. Without being able to communicate his change of plan, he chose to lead the fleet with his own squadron to the fore.
Spragge was incensed. ‘The Prince placing himself in the van’, he recorded, in his journal, ‘the French in the middle, the line-of-battle, being of 89 men-of-war and small frigates, fire-ships and tenders, is so very long that I cannot see any sign the general admiral makes, being quite contrary to any custom ever used at sea before, and may prove of ill consequence to us. I know not any reason he has for it except being singular and positive.’[677] Although Rupert had strayed from the diktats of the training manual, Spragge’s critique made no allowances for de Ruyter’s exceptional skills in his home waters, which had cleverly hurried the prince into action earlier than he had planned.
For Rupert, the most worrying aspect of these engagements was the behaviour of the French: they had been little more than onlookers throughout. The suspicion was beginning to form that Louis wanted the two maritime powers to damage each other, while not exposing his ships in battle. Unhappy with his allies, disappointed that his new flagship was like ‘a mere table’[678] in the wind, and angered by the promised supplies failing to appear, Rupert returned to England and demanded an audience with the king. Charles felt obliged to accompany his cousin to the coast, where the prince showed him the pitiful condition of his ships. Rupert suggested that those responsible for the inadequate provisions should be forced to sail with the fleet and suffer the consequences of their incompetence and corruption. The prince also told the king of the unacceptable conduct of the French.
Rupert’s opinion of his coalition partners continued to decline. On land, the French had performed magnificently in 1672: marshals Conde, Luxembourg, and Turenne had made quick and decisive inroads against the Dutch defences, overwhelming the tiny army and committing atrocities against civilians. While one of Charles II’s natural sons, the Duke of Monmouth, commanded a British brigade on land, England’s role in the coalition was primarily at sea, although the French navy was expected to play its part, too. Louis’s navy had grown from fourteen ships of the line in 1663 to seventy-three in 1671. The prince expected it to pull its weight.
Rupert was further disappointed when Charles II appointed one of Louis XIV’s marshals as captain general of English land forces. Marshal de Schomberg was a Palatine German whose family had served Rupert’s father, Frederick, in Heidelberg. Schomberg had, like Rupert, found military employment abroad after the electorate was overrun. However, to many, he was a French appointment foisted on their king by an overseas tyrant. To the prince, he was an inferior who was now assuming equality.
Waiting to embark on Rupert’s ships for the planned invasion of the United Provinces, Schomberg and his men camped at Blackheath. Preferring to be at sea, Schomberg transferred to the frigate Greyhound. His senior officers advised him that, from the land, they could not tell which was their commander’s vessel. Schomberg therefore decided to fly his family’s standard from the main mast, to assist identification. To Rupert, this was an intolerable insolence: only admirals were allowed to hoist their own flags. He fired two of his cannon, as a signal that the marshal should lower the flag immediately. At the same time, he dispatched an officer to confiscate the standard and to insist that it never again be raised aboard one of his Majesty’s ships. Now it was Schomberg’s turn to be outraged: as captain general he was Rupert’s equal in rank (the prince was Lord Admiral) and was not prepared to obey orders from his peer. Schomberg sent his frigate’s captain to protest at Rupert’s highhandedness and ordered that the offending flag remain in place.
This was a clash of two proud and passionate leaders, which soon escalated from the bad tempered to the absurd. The prince was in a rage: Schomberg was aboard one of his ships and he was the overall commander of every vessel. The marshal had, in Rupert’s eyes, compounded his arrogance with disobedience. He ordered that the marshal’s messenger be arrested as soon as he came aboard. Rupert then sailed his flagship towards the Greyhound and threatened to sink her unless the flag was immediately taken down. Schomberg realised that Rupert was not bluffing and ordered his standard to be lowered. Both commanders then sent their version of events to Charles II, who chose not to side with either man. No doubt he found the whole affair remarkably childish.
This spat aside, Rupert’s overall concern about his allies coincided with a growing anxiety in England about the coalition with France. As early as the summer of 1672, the Bishop of Lincoln had written of the marshals’ Blitzkrieg through the United Provinces: ‘Holland deservedly suffers all the miseries it now lies under ... [but] if it submits to France, where are we? I am persuaded France will treat and conquer on, till there be little left to treat for.’[679] The conduct of the French navy in 1673 added to this fear and suspicion.
After the two small June engagements, Rupert was obliged to return to the Thames for provisioning. On returning to duty, he wanted to attack the Dutch behind their sandbanks. However, Charles — probably as a result of his brother’s continuing meddling — insisted that all initiatives be passed by James, for approval: the Duke of York had been relieved of his command, but could not resist covert involvement in the workings of the fleet. The king, though, failed to appreciate the urgency of the situation. Rupert must now have felt the same disappointment that Sir William Coventry had expressed so poignantly, when resigning from the Navy Board at the end of 1667: ‘The serving a prince that minds not his business is most unhappy for them that serve him well.’[680]
The result was everything that Rupert detested about subordination: he saw
opportunities of sudden and decisive action disappear, during the last days of July and the first week of August, because he was forced to await the king’s instructions from England. The prince, meanwhile, concentrated on trying to lure de Ruyter out of the Schooneveld, which English officers now referred to as de Ruyter’s ‘hole’. The prince led his Anglo-French fleet off the Texel, an island whose main channel, the Marsdiep, was the route for the ships of three of the United Provinces’ five admiralties — those of Amsterdam, Friesland, and the ‘North Quarter’ (the latter’s command centre alternating between Enkhuizen and Hoorn) — to reach the North Sea. Rupert sailed up and down the coastline between this, the principal Dutch naval base, and Camperdown, hoping to tempt the enemy to attack.
On the late afternoon of 10 August, the opportunity to fight arose. However, despite having the advantage of the wind, the prince decided to wait until morning, since he wanted a full day at the Dutch to make sure of total victory. By waiting, he risked losing the enemy altogether. However, by the next morning, the wind had changed, which persuaded the Dutch to use their advantage and fight, even though Rupert had eighty-six ships to the United Provinces’ sixty.
The battle of Texel was one of the most disappointing encounters of Rupert’s life. At last, after all the squabbles over supplies and the interference of the Duke of York, he had the opportunity to better the Dutch. This would surely have hastened the end of the war, for victory at sea would have left the way open for land invasion. With his troops landing on the western coast, and the French advancing from the east, the States-General would be compelled to yield. All that the prince required was a unity of purpose from his three squadrons — two English and one French.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 44