In the wake of the Great Fire, Charles worked with parliament to prepare for the 1667 campaigning season in the Second Anglo Dutch war. But there was a problem, and the problem was money. In the end a plan was hatched to ride out the year, while a treaty was negotiated. And it seemed to be working.

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Quite a few people have asked about the material on coal (in episode 439) and windows . The principal jumping off point for me (and about Nicholas Barbon) was Bernabas Calder ‘Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency’, Penquin, 2021

Transcript

Last time, we heard about the rebuilding of London after the great Fire; and if you did but know it, we also kicked off the story of the industrial revolution in which the major player, of course, is the escape provided from the Photosynthetic constraint by old King Coal. This time, we are going to cover just a few more items related to the Great fire, and then I think we must return to the business of Kings, which is of course war, and progress, no doubt, to yet another glorious victory of arms, against the Dutch.

Let us start though with a bit of other re-building news, as I warned you last time, because there are just a couple of things I’d like to finish off. The rebuilding was not the only transformation of London in the late 17th century – there are many more, and I assume we’ll keep mentioning stuff, but one particular development I’d like to mention is the West End, on account of the fact that it’s a very famous bit, outside the City. There is a man called Henry Jermyn; we have mentioned him before because he was Queen Henrietta Maria’s very closest courtier, constantly by her side all the way from the start of the civil wars. He never seemed to be very influential with Charles I or the Privy Counsel because all though the Italian diplomat described his physical gifts, in glowing terms

an extremely handsome young man, and for that reason was always pleasing to the ladies

He doesn’t seem to have been so well endowed upstairs, yet another of the chinless aristocratic wonders with which our history is so richly endowed. Jermyn’s life of chinless privilege and success, annoyed Andrew Marvel, who used his legendary poetic powers for a bit of trash talk

Paint then St Albans full of soup and gold,

The new court’s pattern, stallion of the old.

Him neither wit nor courage did exalt,

But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.

St Albans is our Henry Jermyn; and to be fair to the lad he did spend his fortune supporting the royal cause, so when they all came back Charles Junior rewarded him my making him Earl of St Albans; and critically granting him a patch of land west of London of 45 acres called St James Field. It lay very close to St James Palace and so would be a perfect place to live for well connected courtiers – or indeed those who would like to become well-connected. So Jermyn planned a big development, but it was all ary bargy so after the Great Fire so he leased it out to developers – including Nicholas Barbon as it happens and they developed the lovely squares and residential streets you see now, Pall Mall, St James’s square. These were not for the oiks, these were for Jermyn’s PLUs; the south side of Pall Mall overlooking St James Park was particularly exclusive –Nell Gwyn lived there, the cultural polymath the Countess of Ranelagh also. Jermyn’s name of course lent itself to Jermyn Street, and he now has a Blue plaque to him, as the Father of the West end; the were scurrilous rumours at the time that he was actually the father of Charles II, because of course he slept around, but that’s 17th century social media for you.

All this rebuilding, in London and all over England’s urban landscape, began to profit from a development which will add vastly to the sum of human happiness. I am going to speak now of windows. Can you contain your excitement? I do hope so, and here we go.

 

 

The best glass had always come from Venice, for centuries they had been streets ahead of everyone else. For the high performance building, you’d avoid poor quality English glass by and large, because the industry was small scale, using old, and inefficient methods. The process started by producing  big round blobs of molten glass, which were flatten as well as could be while still hot; the result was a glass of uneven thickness, filled with bubbles and impurities. The raw product was then cut up into those small diamond shapes, called quarries, and set into a lead lattice on a casement window.

Windows had presented serious problems through the years. Glass was terrifically expensive, the vast majority couldn’t afford it; rural housing would have very small widows, with shutters and stuffed with rags to keep out the weather. As time went on, by the 16th century there were reductions in costs; and more and more people were using glass in casement windows – those being the normal ones which open and shut like doors. The thing is, that ventilation was particularly important, given the air quality both inside houses – with all that smoke – and outside – with all that smoke. The use of coal for domestic heating, and the use of candles filled the inside with dangerous and damaging gases – and often the only way to get rid of it all was to let the outside in, and all your carefully, hard won heat out. Though there was always a problem anyway in keeping warm, because the frames were frighteningly ill fitting, unless you were well off enough to employ seriously expensive master carpenter. Sometimes were made with iron, which rusted and fit poorly and all that. So the window situation meant the vast majority of houses were both cold and poorly ventilated.

Into this situation, head in the air, minding its own business, came coal.  The introduction of coal, with its more intense heat fostered new ways of doing things in glass manufacturing. After a couple of failures in 1616 Robert Mansell managed to establish coal fired glassworks near Newcastle; furnace design changed, and in 1663 George Ravencroft developed a much clearer glass, flint glass, and then with the addition of lead oxide England suddenly began not to produce Europe’s worst glass – but it’s best; then it began actually exporting glass, of the finest quality –  by 1706, it was even being exported to the old masters, Venice, and pupil had become the master. So – Builders now had access to rectangular sheets of glass, clear and easy to see through, with no need be cut up into quarries and held it in place with a lead lattice.

Robert Hooke of the Royal Society played a part in this, working with glass manufacturers to produce better and better glass for telescopes and microscopes. But as far as building was concerned, Hooke’s name is remembered for much more than that – he is remembered for the modern Sash window.

Here was a great opportunity to improve everyone’s quality of life, to replace all though rusty, dim old windows with something much better, which made the most of the new glass tech. He chose the sash design; there has been a sort of horizontal version before, but Hooke made his new design vertical; for a clever reason we’ll come to. First of all he made them much easier to use, and tighter fitting; he invented a super clever system, with lead weights, pulleys, and cords hidden within a box frame. This meant the window could stay open at any height without the need for props or pegs. The reason for this design was ventilation. You could leave the top sash slightly down, and the bottom slightly up. That meant fresh air was drawn in at the bottom into the room, pushing the warmer, muggy and smoky air against the ceiling out at the top of the window. Clever, innit? And given all that pollution and dangerous gases nothing short of a life saver – warmer, safer houses.

There was another advantage though, and a it’s biggie – more light. Hooke used his new window glass tech, when he designed the new HQ for the Royal College of Physicians. Light was obviously a priority. So, he put the main room one floor up so that it would get as much skylight as possible through his sash windows. Apparently there’s a rule of thumb that vertical windows provide useful light to a depth of 1 ½ times their height; fab fact for you; so Hooke raised the ceilings, to enable larger windows. And in the dissection room he even had a glass roof – something that would have been quite impossible before. Hooke’s focus on natural light was important because daylight was still far and away the most effective form of lighting; candles couldn’t even get close. So even with the best beeswax candle, which was over 3 times more expensive than tallow incidentally, you would need 125 of them to generate the same light as single old style 100W lightbulb.[1] Which would clearly have been impractical anyway.

So let’s hear it for Robert Hooke, everyone. And that brings me back to the politics; and the warfare.

Just a quick reminder then; we’d arrived at the end of campaigning in the Autumn of 1666. Just as the Great Fire broke out. The job of Parliament as far as the PC was concerned, was to fund the next year’s campaign, but there were problems with this plan. There was a sort of royal branding problem going on despite the Make Monarchy Majestic campaign. One was a sense that the enormous grant the year before had not been spent very well; for the most part, this is just the long, and continuing story of unreasonable parliamentary expectations, but it was given weight by the news that Charles had siphoned off £400,000 for his own uses – ‘private pleasures’ was the phrase used. Although this news was held by a select few, the public already reckoned they knew where Charles’ priorities lay.

Give the king the Countess of Castlemaine and he cares not what the nation suffers[2]

This was against the context of an agrarian recession which had started with, well with the Restoration really, and so while courtiers revelled and the outrageously privileged and wealthy had returned to public life to parade before the public eye like a never-ending stream of peacocks, free to flout social rules of morality which seemed to apply to all except them, most people were struggling. Plus of course there’s the small fact that 10s of thousands had just been burned out of their houses onto the streets of London. So people were a little miffed, shall we say.

This came out in the rash of by-elections in the second half of 1666; although it would not be dissolved for a general election until 1679, there were elections held as each MP left or died, the Cavalier Parliament was slowly changing its character through replacement. And in the 1666 bye-elections an anti government feeling was clear; ‘No Courtiers’ was the refrain heard at many hustings.

When parliament re-convened then, Charles knew that he would have to throw the dog some bones, so that when they were distracted he could run off with their gold. His representative, the Earl of Coventry made the pitch for the needs of the Navy – we need £1.8m, if you could just see your way clear…

Charles watched the debate and made the very best impression he could. This was no time for flamboyance, he was supposed to be saving money now, and Samuel Pepys excitedly reported his tactics in his diary

The King hath yesterday in Council declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he will never alter. It will be a vest, I know not well how, but it is to teach the nobility thrift, and will do good.”

Teach the nobility thrift. Charles? Seriously? The nerve of the man. You have to hand it to the lad, he’s his hypocrisy is titanium plated. The new dress was a long vest down to the knees, with a robe over it; over time the vest would get shorter, and Charles went for something simple to re-inforce his ‘oh I’m too frugal for your shirt, so frugal it hurts’ approach and demanded it would be made from English textiles. And it did work – courtiers went for it big time – within 9 days, Pepys is reporting that court was ‘full of vests’, and before you could thread a needle Pepys was buying a set – he really was a slave to the latest thing that man. Even more amazingly, the French adopted it too! Can you imagine! Versailles adopting the fashion of les rosbef! Wonders will never cease. Though of course, upon this simple initial idea they visited carafe’s of gallic flair, embroidery and glitter. That then came back over Le Manche, and within a few years that frugal message has got lost. Charles innovation though is credited with being the first step on the path to the three piece suit beloved of Gareth Southgate and others.

It got more serious after that. There were still plenty in parliament convinced that it was some papist who had fired London, and so they demanded of Charles that he order the removal of Catholic priests from the county. Charles hesitated not one moment. It’s yours he declared!

The last bone for the dogs is yet another deeply unhappy affair in English policy towards Ireland, the Cattle Act, designed to help strapped English farmers and protect them from Irish competition. One of the prime movers for this bit of work was one of those courtiers that are so typical of Charles’ reign; this one had been a childhood supporter and confidente of Charles, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham, had fled Worcester with Charles in 1651 but had fallen out, and Charles never really fully trusted him again. And Buckingham had made his peace with the Protectorate, returned to England and married Thomas Fairfax’s daughter Mary. But after the Restoration, Buckingham, had not made it back into a position of power as he had fully expected.

Buckingham was a real type. A real Restoration courtier type. He was intellectually curious, volatile, inclined to radicalism; he’d consorted with the Levellers in the 1650s and remained friendly with John Wildman until his death, which is a weird one; remember Wildman and his Sexby intrigues? Wildman is not yet finished with assassination plots by the way.

Buckingham was also a writer of some talent, of poems and political satire; he was also utterly calculating and unscrupulous, but he had all the skills; witty, handsome…

Courteous, affable, generous, magnanimous…

Wrote one contemporary. But also

violent, cruel and infamous for his licentiousness

So – a mixed bag then, Curate’s egg of a man! On the licentiousness thing, his story is of the tiresome restoration type, mistresses left right and centre, paraded publicly in front of his wife Mary Buckingham. I have to examine myself here, for this Restoration thing which tends to be looked on as a bit of a hoot seems a bit gross to me; maybe I would have been a puritan, but it’s the thought of the likes of Queen Catherine with Barbara Castlemaine lording it over her and so on. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t do to be too judgy. Many of the women involved, like Castlemaine herself, were players every bit as much as the men, or appear to have been so; they might very well compete against each other, get involved in all the sexual politics, and seek to win the best possible lover – financially speaking and in terms of social or political influence. Buckingham’s squeeze, was Anna-Maria Brudenell, countess of Shrewsbury. She was a society beauty who played the field with some enthusiasm

I would take a wager she might have a man killed for her every day, and she would only hold her head the higher for it’

Was the opinion written about her, and the facts of her story seem to bear that out; by the time she hooked up with Buckingham men had indeed died for her; Henry Jermyn, father of the West End we just heard about, was challenged several times by one Charles Howard – the purpose appears to have been to win Anna Maria’s favours. Is that the way it’s done? Eventually Jermyn said, ‘oh go on then, if we must’ , and they met up at the place which would soon be covered in exclusive houses, St James Field. The net result was that Jermyn was left for dead – though he wasn’t really – and his second was left for dead too – which he really was. Howard and his second fled the country. Golly.

Anway the other thing about this is that Mary Buckingham despite presumably constant feelings of humiliation, remained thoroughly attached and loyal to her husband, and maybe just accepted things as the way the world was, and bearable as long as she was set up suitably, and left them to rule their own interests – whether that be politics, family, their own circle of friends or whatever. So it’s complicated I guess, but the evidence is that the excesses were not so happily accepted by the GP, the General Public.

Anyway, Buckingham had flounced off to his estates, upset and hurt that Charles didn’t seem to trust him, and didn’t give him the influence he thought he so richly deserved, but instead preferred the likes of Clarendon – whom Buckingham rounded hated. But in 1666 he changed his tack. He rejoined the House of Lords. And he made trouble. He’d make himself so difficult he thought, that Charles would have no choice but to bring him inside the tent. And he saw an opportunity in the Irish Cattle trade. Let me explain.

I mentioned an agrarian recession; and one of the things causing the English farmer grief was yummy cattle from Ireland. It also just so happened that the Irish parliament had been scrupulously loyal in voting Charles money and supply; and a poor king, was a the kind of king that needed friends. So Buckingham decided to make himself a nuisance by supporting a parliamentary ban on the import of Irish cattle into England.

It was a nasty piece of work. Ormonde the governor in Ireland was furious – by destroying this successful trade, parliament was destroying the best chance of the Irish becoming reconciled to English rule, mutual prosperity being a powerful argument. Charles did resist this; but he needed that English supply bill passed, so in the end waved it through. The only saving grace was that the Privy Council exercised its authority to exempt the Irish from the Navigation acts, and allow exports to other countries in any ship available; and Irish farmers innovated and identified new produce for market. But it was a mean minded act.

During the debate, incidentally, things became so heated that an Irish peer challenged Buckingham to a duel, and both were sent to the Tower to cool off. In February 1667, sick of Buckingham’s campaign to undermine him, Charles lost his rag and ordered his arrest – on frankly trumped up charges. But the bailiffs failed to catch him – because Mary Buckingham, had caught wind of the plans, rushed home and barred the gates against the baliffs before they could seize Buckingham – a surely almost saintly act of loyalty. I’d have gone along and shown them the best way to get there if I were her. Anyway – Buckingham, went into hiding. But we haven’t seen the last of him.

Anyway, after all that; so it was, that by changing his fashion, and throwing Catholics and Irish under the bus – Charles achieved his aim of getting the £1.8m supply act passed, and the English navy had its money for the coming campaigning season.

Or did it mean they had their money? I mean there’s voting a grant and there’s collecting it, it takes a while at the best of times. And the grant had been based on a budget that had assumed a certain level of income from excise and customs and while in 2003 the Peas might ask ‘Where is the love?’ in 1667 they’d have been asking ‘where is the trade?’ Or maybe ‘Where  is the cash?’. Normal revenue was a third of where it had been a couple of years before. There was the fire, plague, agrarian recessions – and in the north sea, French privateers had joined the game of hunting English merchantmen.

Plus the Navy in wartime needed more even than that massive grant of £2.5m back in 1665, and certainly more than £1.8m; somewhere along the line parliament was going to have to learn that being a major power cost money, big money. The Navy’s bills were £3.2m a year, and they were running a deficit of close to a million.

In February 1667 the Navy board presented its head, James Duke of York, with the state of play. They had been able to pay the princely total of £1,315 of the £150,000 due immediately to suppliers – and don’t even start on the level of outstanding longer term debt to suppliers. Interest premiums were sky high – 20-30% because no one considered them a good bet. So the Navy board could pay no more. Worse, they could not pay their own seamen either – they’d been able to pay just £140,000 of the £903,000 owed in wages.

Pepys and his colleagues saw the impact of that daily, it was all around them. Pepys had to report that the dock and rope yard workers had downed tools, declaring

They would work no longer without money

Which doesn’t seem unreasonable to be fair. Soon he would report that the whole company of one ship was breaking the windows on the offices he was working in, demanding their pay. In March 1667, he records

This day a poor seaman, almost starved for food, lay in our yard a-dying

Commissioner Taylor from the port of Harwich

I am more sorry to see men really perish for the want of the wherewithal to get nourishment

At Portsmouth Middleton wrote of his workmen

Turned out of doors by their landlords, they perish more like dogs than men

And meanwhile Parliament were a bit suspicious that their grants might not be really needed; or not used for the purpose intended; they feared that Charles had secretly gone cold on the war and was looking to take the money for use in his own nest.  Now Charles promised them faithfully that he was definitely not searching for any kind of peace treaty, no way, he was hot to trot, get that fleet out there and let’s get at those Dutch losers, let slip the dogs of war, dog leash slipper, that’s me.

…

He was kind of fibbing. The whole PC had joined Clarendon in looking for peace now; Clarendon favoured a separate peace with France, Arlington, another of the big hitters in the PC wanted, one with the Dutch. But, long and short, several on the PC were looking for a way out and discussing it in Council with Charles. Conversations had been going on with both since October 1666.

Part of the war going on was across the Atlantic to the west; and it seems the rules of the diplomatic game with Spain included the unwritten idea of ‘no peace west of the line’ – the line in question being the treaty of Tordesillas back in the 15th century when the Pope had carved the world up between Spain and Portugal. For the moment this unofficial wart hadn’t gone very well; Antigua and Monserrat had been taken by the French, and Surinam by the Dutch. As an aside this is the time of the Buccaneers, the unofficial warfare in the Caribbean, on a very thin line indeed between privateer and piracy. Many operated from Jamaica, where Thomas Modyford had been made Governor in 1664; Modyford was a planter, in Barbados, and arrived in Jamaica with several hundred planters and also the people they owned, enslaved into a life of misery; it was Modyford who introduced the slave based economy and society into Jamaica wholesale – when he died, he owned over 600 enslaved Africans and indentured servants.

I don’t intend to cover the buccaneers in any great depth later on, so let me summarise the story here if that would be not too great a distraction. Modyford actively connived with buccaneers like  Captain Myngs and most famously, Henry Morgan, and used them to launch often brutal attacks on Spanish towns and shipping. All of this made for a complicated relationship with the English crown. For much of the 1660s it was one of connivance, accepting buccaneers as a useful way of carrying war to the Spanish on the cheap and on the quiet. Nonetheless there was a periodic reaction in England – in 1668 the 5th rate ship Oxford was sent officially to ‘restrain the Buccaneers’; and was ironically co-opted by Modyford for a great assault on Cartagena. When England and Spain made  peace in September 1667, Morgan kept right on going and in 1669 destroyed a Spanish squadron in battle. Charles had the grace to be a bit embarrassed by this and had Morgan arrested in 1670 to placate the Spanish crown…and then when he arrived back home, duly knighted him! But the basic politics and economics of the Caribbean were changing; it was becoming better to trade rather than make war in the Caribbean; so in 1671 Morgan was sent back – but he was sent back as Governor. And became a scourge of the Buccaneers. On the ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’ principle, I suppose.

 

 

I’m so sorry I keep wandering from the main story. So, to summarise; England and the English Navy were flat broke, and the seemingly generous parliamentary grants were nowhere near enough to cover the shortfall even if they could be collected. So Charles and the PC needed a way out; but couldn’t admit it to the house of Commons, who then might not be so keen to raise the money, and might start asking questions about how it had been spent. Tricky. So; in the background in 1667 they were urgently seeking peace with the Dutch and French while preparations for war continued. Meanwhile, Charles had a private chat with James and told him that the biggest warships would have to be laid up – Bro’, we couldn’t afford them. Instead they came up with a plan – to send out only the frigates to patrol the coasts and concentrate on Privateers. By the time the Dutch and French realised the Big guns were in mothballs, hopefully they’d have a peace treaty and all would be well.

Well this resolution had to be taken to the house of lords for discussion. And when it did, everyone was a bit surprised – and indeed a good number of the Government ministers on the PC actually voted against it. They assumed it must be some malicious bit of politicking by the likes of Buckingham and his cronies. Charles had done what Charles was prone to do; have a private chat with one of his advisors, make a decision and fail to tell anyone else or put it to the whole PC. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last.

But the strategy seemed to work – and anyway was simply the only thing they could afford to do. The English frigates had some success clearing away Privateers, a squadron sent west and to the mediterranean similarly had some good success. Result! Charles had cleverly managed to steer between Scylla and Charybdis.

While this was going on, I think I should take you to Brussels, and one Castelo Rodrigo. Castelo was the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, sandwiched there between France and the Dutch. Castelo had been nervous for over a year now because his agents and contacts kept talking about the growing numbers of French troops, hanging around spookily close to the borders. He managed to persuade Madrid to send a bit more money and build his army up to 27,000, so that should put Louis off trying any funny business, and anyway, they had massive, modern fortresses all over the Spanish Netherlands – Fortress building was definitely the business to be in. So – that done, all safe and sound, he threw a whopping great wedding for his daughter.

But. On 8th May 1667 every French Ambassador read out a declaration. He said that actually Louis XIV was the rightful owner of the Spanish Netherlands, and everyone knew this, and it was an outrage he’d been denied his rights, and he was coming to claim justice. The claim was based on some obscure and obviously dodgy local Brabantine custom about devolution of inheritance. And so, when Louis and his generals crossed in force into the Spanish Netherlands on 24th May 1667, this became known as the War of Devolution.

Everyone started running around like headless chickens. Before long the Spanish would make peace with both Portugal and England to concentrate on this new threat. While obviously morally outraged at this contravention of right and justice in a way England would never be guilty of – Charles was cock a hoop. Because the Dutch must surely be under pressure and in a complete panic. Because it seemed not unlikely that their loyal, trusty French allies would just keep on going until Louis could attend the courses at Groningen University. Commiserations of course, and we don’t like to kick a man when he’s down, but English envoys negotiating peace terms with the Dutch, regretfully informed them that the price of peace had just gone up. The English were to find out how the Dutch reacted when someone tried to give them a kicking when they appeared to be down and out.

On the 10th June, the frigate Unity was hanging around near the Isle of Sheppey as you do, minding your own business, not much going on, when suddenly a massive Dutch fleet appeared. There were over 60 ships and more fireships. Well, the Unity knew just what to do. It fired a single broadside and then legged it up the River Medway towards the safety of the forts at Gillingham, and of course no harm could come to them, this after all was the centre of English naval power. It would be impregnable.

 

 

But when the panicky news reached him, Peter Pett, the Naval Commissioner at Chatham Dockyard, knew enough to be worried. There was a fort, of course, and a defensive chain which usually did the trick, but to make doubly sure they would be OK he scuttled a bunch of fireships in front of the chain. And then watched as the Dutch came down the River Medway, pulverised the fort, moved the scuttled ships, destroyed the chain and came on into the heart of English Naval power. Where the pride of the English Navy was all mothballed up.

Obviously England went wild – there were rumours of Dutch attacks all over south East England; famously the surveyor of the navy Sir William Batten cried out in desperation

By God . . . I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.’

The city of London were all panicking

never were people so dejected as they are in the City all over at this day; and do talk most loudly, even treason; as, that we are bought and sold

wrote Pepys. And he was himself among the panickers, sending his wife and father away into the countryside with a good packet of gold for safekeeping

And, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone”

Over the next couple of days England watched helplessly as de Ruyter dismantled the English fleet. Unity had to stop running, and was captured, the Charles V and Mattias were burned. Next day, after a nice breakfast and some cheese, the Loyal London, The Royal James and Royal Oak were burned to sticks. And then there was the biggest of them all – the massive floating castle, the Royal Charles. Obviously, De Ruyter couldn’t leave that lying around, and so rather than burn it, they towed it. Towed it all the way back to the Netherlands, where it became a tourist attraction. The poor old Naseby, built in 1654, finished it’s chequered career as the Royal Charles when in 1672 it was sold for scrap – the massive Coat of Arms is still in the Rijksmuseum I think.

4 of England’s five leading flagships had been sunk. It could have been worse actually – the Dutch never actually reached all the way to the Chatham Naval Dockyard. The English Navy would recover of course, but Charles’ prestige never quite would. The size of the carnage was most definitely of secondary importance to the national humiliation, and the Make Monarchy Majestic lay grovelling in the mud. By July 1667, peace had been signed at Breda, and the terms were nothing like Charles had hoped when his enemy appeared satisfyingly down; the Dutch kept places like Surinam, Tobago – but did return New York as it happens. The English and French also signed a treaty in which the Acadia was returned to the French, Acadia being the future Nova Scotia, so that’s a bad moment for us. But Charles could consider himself lucky; the Dutch might have imposed harsher terms, but all their eyes were now of course turned on Louis.

One of the most dispiriting things to many, was the sight of English sailors, staying happily on the ships being towed away by the Dutch. Formally prisoners, but frankly, they were happy to be gone. They smiled and waved, and some shouted to the shore

‘We did heretofore fight for tickets; now we fight for dollars!’

Patriotism is all very well, but it doesn’t pay the bills or put food on the table. The English state had been unable to feed its seamen, and had paid the penalty. I would figure any scorecard of the overall naval encounters in the second Anglo Dutch war, up to and including the raid on the Medway pretty much honours even, with the English maybe even a bowsprit ahead with some impressive naval victories. In the end,  what defeated the English was not naval skill or strategy.  Charles had been able to spend £5.5 million on this war; the Dutch had spent twice that, £11m, and the French at this point had an annual budget surplus of £9m to spend as they would. It was money that lost this war.

But it was a national humiliation make no mistake. It was also a royal humiliation. Someone must pay, musty take the blame for the Make Monarchy Majestic Project to get back on track, a sacrificial lamb to takeaway the sins of this national humiliation from the shoulders of the king. And as the ink dried on the treaty of Breda, Charles knew who the lamb would be.

You, on the other hand, will not know until next time – it’s no use looking at me like that, it’s time to wrap up. Except to quickly remind you of the exciting member’s app at History of England.co.uk. It will help you get the most out of your membership.

[1] Calder, B: ‘Architecture’, pp207-214

[2] Hutton, R: ‘Charles II’, p234