A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (37 page)

The long cruising off shore, waiting for the Dutch to appear, was expensive on rations and wearing on the spirit. The commanders yearned for action. In late July 1665 Sandwich’s squadron was cruising near the Dogger Bank, hoping to catch the rich Indies fleet, when he heard that the Dutch Smyrna fleet, having been forced to come round the northern route, was sheltering at Bergen in Norway – ‘that land of rocks which are terrible to seamen’.
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He decided to head north and attack, urged on by the Duke of York, who stressed the profits to be gained: a single Indiaman could carry goods worth a quarter of a million pounds.
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On board the flagship of Sandwich’s commander, Captain Teddeman, was Rochester, keen for glory. He wrote to his mother from Bergen, heading his letter ‘From the Coast of Norway, amongst the rocks aboard the Revenge’. They sailed to Bergen, he told her, ‘full of hopes and expectation, having allready shared amongst us the rich lading of the Eastindia merchants some for diamonds some for spices others for rich silkes & I for shirts and gould which I had most neede of’.
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Norway was ruled by Denmark which had previously been friendly to the Dutch, and although the English envoy Gilbert Talbot was currently discussing an agreement with the Danish king, Frederick III, the news had not reached the port’s governor. Sir Thomas Clifford was sent ashore to negotiate, but got nowhere. On 2 August the English ships entered the harbour, but the Dutch unloaded their priceless cargoes and stored them in the town’s castle, placed ships across the harbour and mounted a battery on shore. When two English ships fired on the town, killing many inhabitants, they drew a rain of deadly musket fire in return. In a fog of smoke they withdrew, having captured only one ship and leaving dead and wounded citizens and burnt-out houses. Under the barrage of fire 118 men were killed, including Sandwich’s cousin, Edward Montagu, and his friend John Windham. Near the end of the battle Windham trembled so fiercely that Montagu had to hold him up, and then a cannon ball hit them both. Rochester was standing beside them. Before the battle they had been discussing whether there might be life after death, and Windham and Rochester had made a pact that if there was, the first to die would come back and tell the other. But, said Rochester, he never did.
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Sandwich noted Rochester’s courage. The following spring Charles made him a Gentleman of the Bedchamber and gave him rooms in Whitehall and £1,000 a year for life. A few months later Elizabeth Mallet forgave his abduction and married him.

After Bergen, inevitably, Denmark renewed its alliance with the Dutch. As the ill-thought-out attack showed, the itch for action was intensified by the hope of booty. At the end of August, in terrible gales, Sandwich’s fleet did manage to capture twenty-three ships of a Dutch convoy scattered on the Dogger Bank. In theory, such prizes belonged to the crown: when sold, the money went to the Treasury, with some proportion to the capturing vessel’s officers. In practice, since Tudor times the officers had doled out the rewards among themselves, sometimes making fortunes. Charles had already agreed to Ashley’s suggestion that as Chancellor of the Exchequer and ‘treasurer of prize money’ he could account for prizes directly to Charles and dodge the Exchequer. This could bring riches, but also problems. Sandwich’s captured ships included small trading vessels bringing salt from Bordeaux, oil from Gallipoli, sugar and cotton and gunpowder, but two were large Indiamen packed with valuable cargoes.
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Thinking of his unpaid crew, and confident – or so he said – that the king would consent, he began doling out the Indiamen’s goods immediately and selling shares in advance to friends and associates in the navy office, including Pepys. There was uproar at this open profiteering, and the unloading was stopped. For two months or more the great ships lay at anchor, bulging with riches.

Nervously, Pepys withdrew from the deal. When he visited the ships at Erith in November as the new surveyor-victualler to the navy, he bought silks and spices at knock down prices from ‘dirty wretched seamen’ in local pubs. And when he boarded the vessels he saw, to his astonishment, ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world. Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs I walked above the knees, whole rooms full. And silks in bales, and boxes of copper-plate.’
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Meanwhile Sandwich’s opponents in the Commons, among them James, Albemarle and Coventry, demanded his dismissal. He lost his post and was only saved from impeachment by being despatched rapidly to Spain as ambassador. Two years later the whole business would be hotly debated in parliament as a case of embezzlement from the Exchequer.
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Hoping to balance flair with sense, Charles now divided command between the risk-taking Rupert and the solid Albemarle. Both had long experience of battle at sea as well as on land, though on opposite sides. Rupert had pursued and harried the Commonwealth fleet in the early years of the Interregnum, while Monck had commanded Cromwell’s fleet in the first Dutch War of 1652–4. Meanwhile the Dutch proved that Lowestoft had not demolished their fleet, by staging a humiliating three-week blockade of the Thames. Faced with rioting by unpaid sailors, Charles begged loans, appealed to everyone from town corporations to bishops, peers to country magistrates, and raised £300,000 against the security of the promised parliamentary grant. He could not even pay the money he had promised to the Bishop of Munster, who had engaged the Dutch on land, and was sweeping unchecked across the inland provinces.

It was crucial, Charles thought, to show strength now, since Britain had a glimmer of an edge on the Dutch. They too were suffering from the war and popular feeling against the States General led to a new wave of enthusiasm for the Prince of Orange and his cause. People were heard shouting openly in the streets of Breda, ‘Vivat the Prince of Orange and the Bishop of Munster’.
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To keep this advantage, it was even more vital to keep France from openly supporting the Dutch. In France Henrietta Maria intervened, desperate to prevent a fatal breach between her two countries. Louis drove over to see her and St Albans at Colombes, and Minette joined them for long discussions, rousing intense curiosity in the English ambassador Lord Holles, who complained fiercely to Charles about being kept out. But the talks did not have the outcome Charles hoped for. In the autumn French troops marched openly to help their Dutch allies, driving back the Bishop of Munster’s forces, and in November the
célèbre ambassade
finally went home, enduring a freezing quarantine before they could enter Paris.

The country waited anxiously, clamouring for news. A new newspaper, the
Oxford Gazette
(soon to be the
London Gazette
) appeared on 22 November 1665, edited by Arlington’s right-hand man Joseph Williamson. It was ‘very pretty’, thought Pepys, ‘full of news, and no folly in it’ – a change from the rants of L’Estrange.
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Christmas was tense. At the end of January 1666, Louis announced formally that he would enter the war, supporting the Dutch against the English. This prompted immediate fears of an invasion, especially when General Turenne went ostentatiously to review the troops at Calais. Ten days later Charles wrote briskly to Minette: ‘we have had some kind of alarum, that the troopes which Monsieur de Turenne went to reviewe, were intended to make us a visite here, but we shall be very ready to bid them welcome, whether by sea or land.’
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Messengers were sent post-haste to the coastal counties. In Norfolk, the MP Sir John Holland wrote to a neighbour that he had received the King’s letter apprehending an invasion and calling out the militia, ‘each musketeer to bring half a pound powder and half a pound bullet, each a matchlock, 3 yards of match, and every soldier a knapsack’.
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With this impromptu home guard at the ready, on 10 February 1666, to loud cheering in the streets of London and across the nation, Charles declared war upon France.

THE YEAR
1666 possessed magical numbers, ‘666’ being the sign of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. For a long time almanacs had forecast doom. Some looked forward to the Second Coming, with titles like
Sagrir, or Domesday drawing Nigh.
Pamphlets were full of hints of apocalyptic omens, comets, eclipses and storms. In February Pepys bought an old work of prophecy, Francis Potter’s
An Interpretation of the Number 666
, of 1642, dipping into it as the months went by. He finished it in November, intrigued by its elaborate numerical arguments and deciding that ‘whether it be right or wrong’, it was certainly ‘mighty ingenious’.
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The millenarian spirit even hit London’s Jewish community, abuzz with Messianic fever. Reports arrived that ‘a barque with silken sails and cordage, manned by a crew speaking only Hebrew, had been sighted off Scotland’.
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The arrival of the prophet was believed so sincerely that Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society wrote to Spinoza about it, and one man took a huge bet on the Exchange that the new arrival would be recognised by all the princes in the East.

Nine days before his declaration of war on France, on 1 February 1666, that very earthly prince, Charles II, returned to Whitehall, reassured that the plague was diminishing. A week later his court followed, including the pale queen who had, it was said, miscarried of a baby – a perfect boy – only a week before. Her grief was heightened by her rival’s triumph: on 28 December, in her lodgings at Merton College, Barbara Castlemaine had given birth to a son, George Fitzroy, later Duke of Northumberland. Barbara, the ‘witch’, was the most hated target among all the garish, loud-mouthed courtiers who outraged Oxford’s citizens. A note was pinned to her door in Latin, ‘
Hanc Caesare pressam a fluctu defendit onus
’, translated by some wag: ‘The reason why she is not ducked?/ Because by Caesar she is—’
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Charles offered £1,000 for information about the author. No one came forward.

The day after Charles’s return the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, arrived with speeches of welcome, and Charles knighted two sheriffs of the city. Tributes were paid to the officials, clergymen, doctors and others who had stayed through the plague. Charles employed all his charm on them, and on everyone who had endured the terrible months. The previous week, at Hampton Court, Albemarle had presented John Evelyn, who had stayed in London as a commissioner for prisoners of war. ‘He ran towards me,’ Evelyn said, ‘& in most gracious manner gave me his hand to kisse, with many thanks for my care, & faithfulness in his service, in a time of that greate danger, when every body fled their employments, & said he was severall times concern’d for me, & the peril I under-went.’
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Charles talked to him for an hour about his work, and the plague-stricken city.

The sickness did seem to be slackening. In his Essex parish Ralph Josselin wrote in his diary, ‘March 4. Plague through mercy abates at London, 42 pl[ague] total 237, but a great increase at Colchester to 55. Yarmouth cleare. Lord heale our land, and open our trade, in mercy.’
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As the weeks passed Josselin noted the weather, cold and dry and windy, and jotted down the fast days and the bountiful catches of sprats, but his page was still dotted with the weekly plague figures, rising, falling, rising again like mercury in a barometer. Gradually the sickness decreased, flaring slightly in the summer heat and dying away the following autumn.

The French entry into the war spelled the end of Orangist hopes in Holland. Prince William’s popularity had soared over the winter, and when he visited Rotterdam crowds carried him on their shoulders in triumph.
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But de Witt now struck back, purging William’s small court of key supporters. In England, the French declaration also had a dramatic effect. Arguments about Louis’s motives surfaced again: he had incited the war in the first place, he wanted France to grab all the trade, in the Mediterranean, the East and West Indies, the cold coasts of Newfoundland; he already held sway on the continent, blocking all British efforts to make treaties. He wanted, in short, to be master of all. Louis, they cried, was an absolute monarch, fighting in the Catholic cause. There was more reason to fear papists working for the French, than dissenters in league with the Dutch. A new witch hunt began.

Charles’s chief consolation at this point was the strength of his navy. Astoundingly, over the winter the boats had been repaired and made ready, despite a mutiny by workmen in Chatham dockyard, and angry complaints by skilled shipwrights about the money owed them. (In August Sir John Mennes estimated that £18,000 was owed to the men of the yard.
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) Albemarle and Rupert left to take up their joint command on St George’s Day, 23 April.
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At the start of May the fleet gathered off the Nore, and Charles and James, sailing out from Chatham, visited it over three days, inspecting the ships and dining with the captains. Meanwhile the commissioners for the sick and for prisoners of war were commandeering every possible building in advance. Leeds Castle, in Kent, became a temporary prison, while Pepys and Evelyn pressed jointly for a new infirmary at Chatham. James, impressed, passed their plan on to Charles, and also recommended a second hospital be built at Harwich. But once again, there was no money. Before his trip to Chatham Charles wrote in weary tones to Minette, complaining of the terms of negotiation that Louis had offered:

however, I shall always be very ready to harken to peace, as a good Christian ought to do, which is all I can do to advance it, for I have long since had so ill lucke with the advances I made to that end, as I can now only wish for peace, and leave the rest to God.
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The ill luck continued. In mid-May faulty intelligence from Arlington’s spies suggested that the French admiral, the duc de Beaufort, was bringing a fleet from the Mediterranean to join the Dutch off Brest. At the same time, Ormond reported rumours of uprisings in Ireland, to be backed by French troops. Believing that Beaufort’s fleet was on its way from Gibraltar, and fearing that it was heading for landings in Ireland, the Privy Council decided to divide the British fleet in two, despite the weakening of its strength. Rupert was to lead a squadron of twenty ships to patrol off Plymouth, keeping an eye out for the French, and on 31 May, Albemarle sailed out with fifty-six ships to find the Dutch. Even as he sailed, news came that the intelligence about the French Mediterranean fleet was false. At once, James despatched an urgent message to Rupert, to sail north and join Albemarle. In another flurry of government incompetence, his message was fatally delayed in the sending.

About midday on Friday 1 June the Dutch fleet was sighted at anchor off Ostend, a great force of eighty-six ships, several carrying eighty or ninety guns. Albemarle ordered his fleet to strip for action, furling their extra topsails and keeping only their ‘fighting sails’ so that they could manoeuvre more easily. Instead of retreating into the mouth of the Thames to wait for reinforcements, he opened fire on the rear of the Dutch fleet. De Ruyter and Admiral Jan Evertsen, commanding the centre and van of the Dutch, turned their ships about to come to the aid of Cornelis Tromp in the rear, and fierce fighting began, ‘the most terrible, obstinate and bloodiest battle that ever was fought on the seas’, as one lieutenant remembered it.
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The battle raged all day, driving the ships near to the Flanders coast, and many British vessels were badly mauled. The
Swiftsure
, the flagship of the Blue squadron which was leading the attack, sailed too far into the Dutch lines and was cut off from the rest of the fleet, overtaken and boarded. Her captain, vice admiral of the Blue, was the twenty-seven-year-old Sir William Berkeley, the younger brother of Charles Berkeley. He had been accused of cowardice for leaving the fray at Lowestoft after his brother was killed, and was determined to prove himself. Although shot in the throat he refused to surrender. When they boarded, the Dutch found him dead in his cabin.

The Dutch also cut off the ship of the rear admiral, Sir John Harman, and attacked it with fireships, but Harman fought clear. At ten at night the English fleet sailed wearily westwards. Next day at seven, at the start of an unusually hot summer day, the guns boomed again. For many hours the ships tacked in their parallel lines, lurching and rolling as they trimmed their sails to turn and crash through the enemy line. Their billowing sails and fat-bellied hulls, rolling through the haze of smoke and fire, were brilliantly caught by the Dutch artist William van de Velde, who was with the Dutch fleet. Once again, as in the battles of the previous year, people on the outskirts of London could hear the guns, and Charles and James took their barge down to Greenwich and walked up into the park to listen. All they could hope was that Rupert’s squadron would join the fleet, and that two hundred extra sailors now embarking in yachts from the Thames would also reach the battle in time. ‘But Lord’, wrote Pepys, ‘to see how the poor fellows kissed their wifes and sweethearts in that simple manner at their going off, and shouted and let off their guns, was strange sport.’
¹¹

William van de Velde the elder was with the Dutch fleet as an official war artist. Here he shows the start of the Four Days Battle, with the English bearing down on the Dutch. The
Swiftsure
is on the left, the
Royal Prince
in the centre, and Monck’s
Royal Charles
in the middle distance on the right.

Many English ships had been so badly hit that next morning Albemarle placed sixteen heavy men-of-war between the Dutch and the damaged vessels.
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But just as the enemy came within range, Rupert’s squadron appeared on the horizon. His support stopped a rout, but could not halt the retreat completely, and as the English fled, the first-rate
Royal Prince
, with ninety guns, a veteran of many battles over fifty years, ran aground on the Galloper Sands. Although the tide floated her off, her rudder was broken and she was forced to surrender. De Ruyter ordered her crew of eight hundred men to be taken prisoner and then set her ablaze. ‘She was like a castle in the sea,’ wrote Clifford, ‘and I believe the best ship that was ever built in the world to endure battering, but she is gone.’
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On the final day the exhausted fleets clashed again. Low on gunpowder, the Dutch eventually turned for home, knowing that the English were too weak to pursue them. After Rupert’s flagship lost its mast the English too limped back to port. Evelyn saw the proud fleet a week later, ‘miserably shattered, hardly a vessel intire, but appearing rather so many wracks and hulls, so cruelly had the
Dutch
mangled us…none knowing for what reason we first ingagd in this ungratefull warr’.
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Reports reached those on land fitfully, through different messengers, with different messages. ‘Rumours of a great fight,’ wrote Josselin on 3 June; ‘wee prayd heartily for successe, & hope it, though some cry a losse.’
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Two young sailors, Lieutenant John Daniel of the
Royal Charles
and a companion, who had both been sent ashore wounded, rode post to London, arriving with their faces still blackened and covered with pitch and tar and powder. Hearing of their arrival from Pepys, Charles took his hand, talked anxiously of the battle and asked to see them. When the sailors told him, in the Vane Room at Whitehall, that Rupert had reached the fleet, his relief was so great that he pulled out gold from his pocket and gave it to them. There were many stories of unlikely heroes, including Rochester, who had joined Sir Edward Spragge’s flagship the
Dreadnought
on the eve of the battle, without telling anyone. At the fiercest point of the fighting, when Spragge could not find anyone willing to risk rowing through the fire to carry a message to his captains, Rochester volunteered, bobbing in his small boat while cannon balls and shot and burning spars whistled around him – no sober man, it was later said, would be brave enough to ‘venture into a crazy Cock-boat out of a sound Ship, when ’tis but barely possible he may be saved’.
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