Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  The engagement split into two contests between familiar opponents. Van Tromp and Spragge clashed in a ferocious duel, which resulted in the total destruction of both flagships’ masts and rigging. While Spragge was transferring to a new ship, his pinnace was sunk and he drowned. Meanwhile, Rupert and de Ruyter locked horns in the battle’s midst, the prince and his men displaying ‘an incomparable resolution’,[681] according to an eyewitness, against two enemy squadrons. Their fight was brief, however, both commanders breaking off to link up with the rest of their forces.

  What transformed the battle of Texel from a crucial battle into a virtual irrelevance was the performance of d’Estrée’s Frenchmen. By twice slackening their sails at the start of the engagement, they managed to put a considerable distance between themselves and the main action. Despite Rupert’s clear and constant signalling for them to join in the fight, the French stayed aloof from the bloodshed, watching from 6 miles away ‘instead’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘of falling with the fair wind they had upon de Ruyter or Tromp, who were going to attack the English squadrons with a far greater force than theirs; which would have been the entire defeat of the enemy had they been enclosed between his Highness Prince Rupert, & Mons. d’Estrée’.[682] The French decision to become bystanders eliminated Rupert’s numerical advantage at a stroke and enabled de Ruyter to slip away virtually unscathed: he lost just one man-of-war, although two of his vice-admirals were slain.

  The Texel was Rupert’s last battle as admiral or general. As the conclusion of a pulsating fighting career, it was a miserable anti-climax. Despite both sides suffering the same level of casualties, the stalemate ended Rupert’s hopes of a successful invasion in 1673. The prince bewailed the squandering of ‘the plainest and best opportunity’[683] the alliance had had of winning the war. Returning to England, he oversaw the sale of the supplies taken with him to feed his land forces, including cheese for the men and oats for their horses. Fearing criticism, he lashed out at those he believed to be to blame for the failure. He found he was preaching to the converted: nobody in London wanted to hear about de Ruyter’s brilliant cunning; they longed, instead, to learn more about dastardly French treachery.

  Rupert had no respect for the dead and repaid Spragge’s past criticisms by accusing him of having been in cahoots with the French. It seems likely that the cause of Spragge’s unreliability lay closer to home: he was one of the Duke of York’s creatures and such men were apt to cause Rupert great mischief, undermining his command out of loyalty to their master. The prince also revealed that d’Estrée had sent a messenger at the end of the battle to ask the meaning of the flag raised on his mizzen. This proved to Rupert, and to the conspiracy theorists, that the French had seen the signal to attack and chosen to ignore it. Their ignorance was feigned and their guilt surely established.

  Charles’s ministers tried to censor accounts of the battle of the Texel, to spare their controversial alliance from further condemnation. However, English sailors returning home were quick to vent their disgust, and an observer noted that: ‘the citizens of London looked more disconsolate than when their city lay in ashes’[684] on hearing of d’Estrée’s reluctance to fight. ‘All men cried out’, wrote Bishop Burnet, ‘and said, we are engaged in a war by the French, that they might have the pleasure to see the Dutch and us destroy one another, while they knew our seas and ports, and learned all our methods, but took care to preserve themselves.’[685]

  The scandal was given fresh impetus when the Marquis de Martell, d’Estrée’s second-in-command, wrote his account of the battle. William Bridgeman, a correspondent of the Earl of Essex, wrote: ‘The discourse about the behaviour of the French in the last fight continues still, the generality being no ways satisfied with it, which is much augmented by Mons. Martell’s relation, a copy of which I have enclosed here.’[686] This confirmed English suspicions that the French were under instructions not to engage: after a gentle brush with the Dutch, during which he fired only one broadside, d’Estrée ordered his squadron to regroup round his flagship. Martell revealed:

  This being all finished in our station by eleven of the clock in the morning the whole squadron united again, & with a fair wind made toward the place where we left his Highness Prince Rupert, who was above three leagues from us, engaged in a fight with a considerable body of the Enemy’s. His Highness Prince Rupert seeing us come with that fair wind, gave us the signal to bear into his wake, Mons. de Martell laid his sails to the masts expecting that Mons. d’Estrée would advance with his whole squadron & fall all together with this fair wind upon the body of the Enemy & send in fire ships among them; but instead of that he kept the wind and contented himself to give his ships leave to shoot at more than [a] cannon and [a] half distance from the enemy. Mons. de Martell saw very well how shameful this was. But having received an express order to attempt nothing without the particular orders of Mons. d’Estrée, & besides having been so ill attended that morning by the ships of his division that he could have no assurance they would follow him, he shrugged up his shoulders, and only forbid any shooting from his ships, and this hath been all that was acted that day in relation to us.[687]

  Martell was sent to the Bastille for his indiscretion, but his testimony, added to Rupert’s disgust, brought to an end Charles II’s attempts to link England militarily with France. English sailors, who were expected to cheer their allies’ ships as they passed, refused to do so. The Venetian ambassador reported that dummies dressed as Frenchmen were shot on Guy Fawkes’ Night, before being thrown onto bonfires.

  In January 1674, Charles was obliged to summon Parliament. Fumbling his notes, he countered suspicions of a secret agreement with Louis with a lie, claiming that no such arrangement was in place. However, a paper circulated through Westminster claiming that: ‘All the mischiefs we have felt or may hereafter fear from the Hollanders, though ten times greater than what are falsely pretended, cannot possibly be of half that dangerous consequence to us, as the advantages now given to the growth of French power, by this pernicious league.’[688] Parliament refused to grant the king revenue for the continuation of the war. The following month England made unilateral peace with the Dutch: it was agreed to cease hostilities on 20 February. On ii February, learning that a Dutch ship was harbouring in the Shetlands en route for the West Indies, Rupert ordered that she be seized before the war’s end.

  This piece of cheeky opportunism was the final act in the prince’s long and varied military record. Rupert relinquished command of the fleet and returned to Windsor with unprecedented popularity: he had blown the whistle on an alliance that, many believed, had threatened their religion and their freedom. The prince and his friend Lord Shaftesbury were now, reported a contemporary, ‘looked upon to be the great Parliament men, and for the interest of Old England’.[689] Thirty years earlier, people would have laughed at such a notion, but Rupert was now believed to be much changed from the man who had terrorised the Parliamentary cause a generation before.

  Rupert’s mistrust and suspicion of France were proved correct in time. Sir William Coventry told the Commons, in May 1678: ‘If you stay till all Flanders be gone, you will do as King James did in the Palatinate War, treat, and treat, till all was gone, and nobody to treat with him.’[690] This was the platform that William of Orange was able to build on when he stole the English throne in 1688 to become William III. He led the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV’s aggressive expansionism in the 1690s and prepared his adoptive kingdom for the gruelling necessity of standing up to France in the War of the Spanish Succession.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Death of a Cavalier

  All my past Life is mine noe more,

  The flying hours are gone;

  Like transitory Dreams giv’n o’er,

  Whose images are kept in store,

  By Memory alone.’

  ‘Love and Life: A Song’, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80)

  Relative to the frenetic pace of the rest of his life, Rupert’s latter years
were quiet: Windsor Castle provided his principal residence, its laboratories and foundries, together with his collection of old books, stimulating his mind. The reputation of Rupert’s original thought continued to the end. When, aged 60, nobody could break a French cipher that had fallen into English hands, it was sent to the prince. Although he failed to crack the code, he made out the words, ‘Strike, strike, strike’.

  Rupert enjoyed greater popularity during his final, settled years at Windsor than at any other time of his life. ‘In respect of his private life,’ Dr Campbell wrote, half a century after Rupert’s death, ‘he was so just, so beneficent, so courteous that his memory remained dear to all who knew him. This I say of my own knowledge, having often heard old people in Berkshire speak in raptures of Prince Rupert.’[691] The prince’s eulogist was to write of Rupert’s ‘easy good old age, Remov’d from [the] tumultuous stage’.[692]

  We find the punctilious prince of the past now more relaxed, prepared to enjoy the privileges of high rank. He was still an admiral and regularly sent ships to Germany to bring back supplies of his favourite Rhenish wines. These would be shuttled up the Thames in his private yacht, the Rupert. Since some of the shipment was used for the king’s cellar, Rupert charged all of the crews’ wages against the Admiralty. Once the prince went further, diverting a man-of-war to collect some Spanish onions from the Continent.

  The king was also slowing up in middle age. The Yorkshire squire Sir John Reresby, who had glimpsed Charles, James, and Rupert boisterously playing billiards in France during the heyday of the Commonwealth, was struck by the monarch’s quiet life, thirty years on: ‘There was little resort to him, and he passed his day in fishing or walking in the parks which indeed he naturally loved more than to be in a crowd or in business.’[693]

  There was certainly plenty of ‘business’ for the king to attend to. From behind the castle’s walls, Rupert could see that the divisions that had led to the Civil War were still alive and dominated the public life of the nation. The tensions between James, Duke of York, and his increasingly bold critics, became more pronounced as Charles aged, his many offspring illegitimate, his heir an increasingly intractable Catholic. Over the Channel, Louis XIV’s increasing military aggression intensified Anglican paranoia.

  Those who wanted James’s claims to the crown annulled — the ‘Exclusionists’ — dreamed up increasingly wild reasons for meddling in the rightful order of succession. In 1678 an eccentric priest, Israel Tonge, and a bogus doctor of Divinity, Titus Oates, whipped up a hysterical storm by claiming knowledge of a plot to murder the king. This, they insisted, would be followed by an invasion of Jesuits, assisted by Catholic armies from Ireland and Scotland. The ‘Popish Plot’ was fanciful nonsense — Tonge’s and Oates’s evidence differed wildly — but it was believed by the fearful and gullible, until Oates was discredited.

  Oates said that incriminating letters, to be found at Windsor post office, would prove his assertions. But, as soon as they were seen, they were suspected of being forged. The Duke of York insisted that the Committee for Foreign Affairs be allowed to examine them further. ‘The whole committee was then present,’ James recalled, ‘the duke of York, Prince Rupert, Chancellor, Treasurer, Lauderdale, Arlington, Coventry, and Williamson ... After all were delivered to Sir W. Jones, attorney-general, and Sir Robert Southwell, clerk of the council, they compared some of Oates’s writing with these letters, they verily believed one of them was in his handwriting ... The letters sent by post were so ill-worded, that none, but such an illiterate dunce as Oates, could have written them.’[694]

  In September 1679, the king fell worryingly ill with a malarial fever while at Windsor Castle. The Earl of Sunderland — son of Rupert’s comrade, killed at the First Battle of Newbury — was the most devious and canny of politicians. Eager to perpetuate his power into the next reign, he wrote advising James to return from exile in Brussels, in case the throne should suddenly fall vacant. A handful of Charles’s closest allies knew of this invitation, as did the king himself, but it is testimony to Rupert’s political irrelevance by this stage that he was kept in the dark. He was genuinely surprised, one autumn morning, to find James in the castle, accompanied by his right-hand man, John Churchill.

  Doses of ‘the Jesuit’s powder’ — quinine — saved the king on this occasion and James slunk back to Ostend early in October, reluctantly resuming his pariah status. Charles, however, had enjoyed being reunited with his brother and in early 1680 insisted that he return to England. This development brought the differences between the Court and ‘the faction’ into sharp relief. In his memoirs, James recalled the very different reactions to his reinstatement: ‘An address from Norfolk thanking the King for recalling the duke of York. The faction alarmed at his return. Rumours of plots.’[695] James, ever mindful of his friends and foes, noted who supported his return with loyal petitions. ‘In Berkshire,’ he remarked, ‘the petition was presented by Sir J. Stonehouse, Mr Barker, Wood, &c., most of them honest gentlemen; though Prince Rupert was lord lieutenant, and constable of Windsor Castle and Forest.’[696] James was disappointed at his cousin’s reticence: he expected Rupert to be at the forefront of his cause, but in that he was disappointed.

  Although Rupert was a close friend and business partner of James’s most persistent critic, the Earl of Shaftesbury, it stretches credulity to think that, after a lifetime of loyalty to the Crown, Rupert flirted with Shaftesbury’s republicanism. However, the prince remained a devoted Calvinist and had not expended so much of his adult energy supporting a dynasty to see it now threaten to foist Catholicism on a reluctant, Protestant nation. When Charles dismissed Shaftesbury, Rupert displayed solidarity with a very public visit to the former chancellor.

  Rupert, in old age, felt able to behave as he wished and certainly had no fear of Charles II. It was Rupert, in 1679, who headed the petition to the king to dissolve the Cavalier Parliament. It had sat since 1660 and no longer reflected the will of the electorate. When one of the Members of the Cavalier Parliament, Speke — a Somerset man — was arrested on false charges of disloyalty and faced possible execution, Rupert spoke on his behalf. The prince told of a loan of 1,000 crowns that Speke had given him for the defence of Bridgwater, late in the Civil War. Speke, Rupert pointed out, had never publicised his generosity, nor sought repayment: far from being disloyal, the prince concluded, this was a man of noble dependability. Speke was released and that evening Rupert invited him to dinner as his guest of honour.

  The question of James, his Catholicism, and his right to succeed his brother, remained the burning issue in English politics during the remainder of Rupert’s life and beyond. By the end of 1680, Charles II was forced to place his brother in exile once more, rather than risk the duke’s impeachment. James’s more radical critics wanted him ‘banned for the King’s life to some place five hundred miles from England; to forfeit his revenues if he came nearer, and his life if he returned to any of the King’s dominions’.[697] Charles rejected these extreme demands, allowing James to reside in Scotland.

  The year 1681 saw the Exclusionists push further. They concocted another in a line of false conspiracy theories, this time claiming that an Italian envoy had tried to arrange the murder of the king with James’s compliance. The Duke of York was falsely alleged to have claimed that a French army would then come to his aid, so he could boil his Parliamentary enemies alive, setting aside the tallow from their bones for use as anointment oil at his and his descendants’ coronations.

  Charles felt compelled to summon Parliament in Oxford, rather than risk unrest in London. At the opening session, the Commons pressed forward their Exclusion Bill. The king, determined to deal decisively with dangerous opposition, summoned the Commons to the House of Lords. They found him seated in his robes, and were astonished and enraged to hear him dissolve Parliament. Immediately afterwards, the king got into his coach and headed for Windsor Castle.

  The backdrop of Rupert’s final year saw James return to England in March �
� he spent part of the spring at Windsor — but his rival Monmouth gaining popularity locally, as he progressed towards Cheshire. ‘A Monmouth and no York’[698] was the Exclusionists’ mantra. Soon, this would lead to Monmouth’s Rebellion — the 1685 attempt to overthrow the main Stuart line.

  *

  Largely sidelined from politics, Rupert busied himself with matters that intrigued him. His efforts on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company were unstinting. The year before his death, he negotiated sweeping customs’ privileges to give his enterprise an edge over its rivals. And, in his final year, the company sent its largest flotilla to date — five ships, including the Prince Rupert — to trade in the bay. By this stage the traders had established their own permanent office, in Scrivener’s Hall. Sir George Clark concluded that: ‘The old hero of so many fights on land and sea, with his high station, his many interests, and his chequered, adventurous memories, had stood up for the Company well.’[699]

  If proof were needed of his key role in the eventual success of this venture, it can be found in the near-fatal result of his successor’s indolence: during a mercifully brief tenure of the governorship of the company, James, Duke of York, failed to champion his shareholders’ or his people’s interests. He was worried that denying French access to Hudson’s Bay’s trade would upset Louis XIV. His timidity saw the loss of four of the company’s five forts to France. It was the third governor, John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, who from 1685 retrieved the situation. In the process he honoured the enterprising and daring legacy of the prince. At its peak, the Hudson’s Bay Company covered an expanse of land ten times the size of the Holy Roman Empire, from which Prince Rupert had sprung.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company remained true to its original business intentions until 1991, when it stopped trading in fur and continued as a chain of department stores. The company remains the world’s oldest surviving commercial enterprise.