If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found, by sleeping sound
How England would be strong!
The above lines form the opening to a poem by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1911 along with 22 others in a book called ‘A School History of England.’ The poem can be found in Chapter IX, which has the title ‘The Fall of the Stuarts’. The prose of this book was written by the historian C.R.L. Fletcher, Kipling’s colourful verse serving as iambic study aids. Published during the Coronation year, the book’s preface dedicates itself to ‘all boys and girls who are interested in Great Britain and her Empire’.
The poem itself is titled ‘The Dutch in the Medway’, referring to the Dutch amphibious raid on the River Medway, which took place in July 1667, during the reign of Charles II. In setting the event to verse, albeit in a different metre, Kipling was emulating the poet Andrew Marvell, who had witnessed it contemporaneously. In his School History, the historian Fletcher dismisses the raid, one of the most humiliating defeats in British naval history, in one cursory sentence, and Kipling’s abstractly inserted poem refers to it in only the most oblique terms, which must have been perplexing to even the brightest Edwardian pupil. Without a deeper analysis of the Dutch raid, it’s hard to make any sense of the lines in Kipling’s skillfully constructed critical verse.
By 1667, England was struggling economically in the aftermath of the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, and a costly war with the Dutch Republic. England had already fought one war against the Dutch during the interregnum, and both conflicts were essentially about trade, as the two sea-going nations sought to usurp the waning mercantile dominance of Spain and Portugal in the New World and East Asia.
A major cause of friction between the two nations was the Navigation Act, passed by Cromwell’s ‘Rump’ parliament in 1651. This act commanded that all trade with English colonies be conducted using English vessels. This was a direct challenge to the Dutch government under Johan de Witt, who drew his political support from the merchants of Holland, the Republic’s richest province.
There were other pre-existing political tensions between the two nations. During the English Civil War, the Dutch had given refuge to fleeing royalists including the executed King’s two sons, and the remnants of the Royalist fleet led by his nephew Prince Rupert. Charles I’s sister Mary had married into the powerful House of Orange in 1641, so there was natural sympathy in parts of the Republic for the Stuart cause, in spite of religious differences.
Although possessing a larger fleet of more powerful warships, the First Anglo-Dutch War started badly for the English, with a heavy defeat off Dungeness in December 1652. This led to the introduction of a number of naval reforms including the ‘line of battle’ tactics, which greatly enhanced English fighting abilities. Led by his General-at-Sea Robert Blake, Cromwell’s navy went on to win consecutive victories against Dutch naval forces the following year: in the Channel, off Portland; at the Gabbard, off the northeast coast of Kent; and off the Dutch coast at Scheveningen. However, despite capturing well over a thousand Dutch merchant vessels during more than two years of hostilities, the English failed to weaken the latter’s predominant trading position in the Mediterranean, Africa and East Asia.
Nevertheless, Cromwell was still able to dictate the terms of the Treaty of Westminster in 1654, which formally ended the war. These included a secret condition that Mary’s young son William be excluded from the powerful position of ‘Stadtholder’ of any of the Republic’s seven provinces, a position his father had held in five provinces until his sudden death in 1650. However, Cromwell’s own death in 1658 created a power vacuum in England, leading in 1660 to the Restoration of the House of Stuart. King Charles II was eager to support any military action that would weaken de Witt’s anti-Orangist leadership to an extent that his nephew William might benefit politically. Thus, in 1664 a Second Anglo-Dutch War was engineered.
The Dutch had lost their most gifted naval commander, Maarten Tromp, during the First War. However, in the interim, they had closed the qualitative gap by building larger and more powerful warships. They also had another skilled admiral in Michiel de Ruyter; the only personage directly named in Kipling’s poem. England had lost its greatest naval hero Blake in 1657, but could still count on the warring talents and bravery of Prince Rupert, the new King’s cousin, General George Monck, and Sir Edward Montagu, cousin and patron of Samuel Pepys.
In addition, her navy still possessed some of the most powerful warships afloat. These included the Royal Charles, an 80-gun first-rate launched in 1655 as the Naseby, and the Royal James, another Commonwealth battleship, previously known as the Richard, and renamed in honour of the King’s brother. Both ships were the work of the Pett family of ship-builders, who controlled the dockyards of the lower Thames, the most prominent being Peter Pett, Resident Commissioner of Chatham.
Another skilled English commander, Sir Robert Holmes, had stoked tensions between the two nations in 1663 with an aggressive strike against Dutch possessions in West Africa. His attack was an attempt to supplant the operations of the Dutch West India Company with those of the Royal African Company, a rival enterprise bankrolled by the Duke of York (the future James II) and his courtiers. However, a Dutch fleet under de Ruyter was quick to reclaim their material losses. Further English action against a Dutch convoy in the Mediterranean prompted the Republic to declare war on 14th January 1664.
The Duke of York was himself in command of the English Fleet at The Battle of Lowestoft, the first great naval engagement of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in which a Dutch fleet failed to dislodge the English naval blockade, and lost its most senior officer, Jacob Obdam. More English success followed with the capture of New Amsterdam in July, which was renamed in the Duke’s honour. However, when France declared itself in support of the Dutch; in a calculated effort to evict the Spanish from Flanders; the English navy was faced with threats in the Channel as well as the North Sea, which necessitated a splitting of forces.
With his fleet weakened by this division, Admiral Monck, guarding the east coast, was forced into action with a larger Dutch fleet commanded by de Ruyter. The resulting Four Days Battle, fought over consecutive days from 1st to 4th June 1666 off the northeast coast of Kent, inflicted a costly defeat on the English, who lost 10 ships and 4,000 men. Of particular shock to the nation were the capture and burning of the 92-gun flagship HMS Royal Prince after she ran aground, and the surrender and imprisonment of her commanding officer, Vice-Admiral George Ayscue. Viewing the ‘sad spectacle’ of returned ships at Sheerness, the writer John Evelyn recorded ‘more than half of that gallant bulwark of the kingdom miserably shattered, hardly a vessel entire, but appearing rather so many wracks and hulls, so cruelly had the Dutch mangled us.’
Bow Creek to Anatahan 