Mr Vandervelde's Lectures: the Butcher's Bill

The Sole Bay Lectures

By M.W. Vandervelde

Number 2 'The Butcher's Bill'

The most likely estimate of dead and wounded from both sides at the Battle of Sole Bay is about five thousand men. They would have been all ages and from every social class. There'd probably have been several different nationalities as well. Although the English used the pressgang system to man their ships, the Dutch recruited  seamen from the German ports or from Scandinavia and way up into the Baltic.

Most of the battle had taken place within sight of land. There were bodies washed up on the beaches for weeks afterwards or found drifting at sea with the tide. Suffolk people claimed that even the foam was tinged with blood.

The wreck of the Royal James carried on burning for hours. After the other ships had changed tack and were sailing south to avoid the Lowestoft sands, most of them had to make their way round her. Admiral de Ruyter picked up a few survivors and when James Duke of York saw that the water was full of men swimming around clinging to whatever pieces of timber they could find he ordered one of the smaller ships in his division to stop and try to rescue them. He couldn't do it himself as whichever ship he was in – the Prince, the St Michael, the London – attracted attackers like iron filings to a magnet. 

Captain Haddock of the Royal James survived but Admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, didn’t. He and his son-in-law had climbed into one of the smaller boats which was then capsized by the weight of desperate sailors jumping after them. The admiral's body was discovered ten days later, floating miles out to sea, close to the Long Sand Head. It was surrounded by nibbling fish and would have been unrecognisable except for the medals he'd been wearing.

The total casualties after a battle used to be called the Butcher's Bill. The bill for the Battle of Sole Bay was high in terms of money as well as in human life. These 'great ships' were expensive.

The Dutch hadn't built any new warships for several years and the French were only beginning to develop their fleet. But the English Kings seem to have been addicted to ship-building. The Royal James had been the latest in a series of grand and deadly warships and it had been all the money spent on these ships that had pushed England into war.

These ships were designed to impress. Hundreds of pictures of them have survived – from detailed prints at the design phase through action sketches at sea to full scale oil paintings commissioned by governments and rich patrons. And when you look at them you probably can’t help thinking how splendid they are.

Then the next moment you'll think how wasteful and bizarre it was to build such beautifully decorated wooden objects and send them out to sea to smash or burn or sink each other.

The most extravagant ship of all (in my opinion) wasn’t at the battle of Sole Bay though she was back in action the following year. She was called the Sovereign of the Seas and she’d been built by King Charles I of England – the father of King Charles II who started this war.

Charles I believed he was appointed by God to rule over land and sea and demanded a flagship to express this.  Every exterior surface of the Sovereign of the Seas was smothered in decoration. As well as shipwrights and sailmakers Charles employed his court painter, his theatre designer and dozens of artists and craftsmen. But she wasn’t just a floating showcase: she was deadly. The Sovereign of the Seas had one hundred and six guns, more than twice as many as the next biggest ship of her time. 

Before Charles built the Sovereign of the Seas in 1637 the previously most expensive ship had cost £10,000. Normal ships cost £6,000 - £7,000. The Sovereign of the Seas cost £65,000. When Charles demanded a special tax called Ship Money from his subjects, people were outraged. Finally, Parliament declared war against the King He lost his throne and then his life. A high price for a ship.

When Charles II became King in 1660, he appeared to have learned little from his father’s mistakes. He too wanted 'great ships' – enormous floating gun platforms with splendid ornamental carvings and big cabins so that he and his brother and their courtiers and servants could stay on board in comfort. He rebuilt his father’s Sovereign of the Seas and about six others weighing over one thousand tons. And then he built the Prince and the Royal James which were even bigger. The Royal James was less than a year old when she burned to death at Sole Bay.

Like his father Charles II spent so much money on his navy that he couldn't ask Parliament to give him any more. By 1670 he was a million pounds in debt and became so desperate that he entered into an alliance with his official enemy King Louis XIV of France. Louis offered Charles more money to spend on ships if he would use them to attack the Dutch (He offered even more money if Charles would change his religion to Catholic but this had to be kept a secret.)

In the spring of 1672 Charles II made an excuse to declare war on the United Provinces and sent his fleet and his brother out to sea to join up with the French and attack Admiral de Ruyter while the weather was good. If you think of these maritime battles as deadly strategy games, you’ll realise that de Ruyter was a master. His ships were not as large as the English ships and less money had been spent ornamenting them. It was his seamanship and his knowledge of the North Sea that won him so many victories. That, and his ability to take the English by surprise.

Before the Battle of Sole Bay, the United Provinces was a republic. De Ruyter's ships were provided by separate admiralties for each of the provinces and they weren't particularly co-operative. There were no kings demanding ships as status symbols but many of his vessels were sponsored by a particular town and they naturally wanted to look good. They paid extra for carved figureheads and elaborately decorated sterns on which they could show off their coats of arms and locally significant symbols – rather like personalised number plates on cars and the rear window stickers which boast ‘If you can see this then I’m in front of you.”

Captured ships were financially valuable. During the Battle of Sole Bay the Dutch came close to taking two of the big, thousand-ton English ships but both of them escaped. The English gained the Stavoren, a forty-eight-gun ship which was sailing with the Amsterdam admiralty. She took her name from the town of  Stavoren  the Ijsselmeer  in the province of Friesland. Stavoren  had once been a rich and important trading port but had declined as its harbour silted up. Some people said there that there had been witchcraft involved. They blamed a greedy woman – the Lady of Stavoren.

The ship Stavoren had been built in Edam. In the past she'd carried one of the Dutch admirals and the most famous of the Dutch war artists used her as his base at the Battle of the Sound in Sweden. Now she was one of the oldest, smallest and plainest of the Dutch great ships. Her main decoration was her figurehead, a carved red lion, the symbol of the United Provinces.