The Dutch Raid on the Medway, 1667

Entry

This is a fanciful depiction of the daring raid during the Second Anglo-Dutch war (1665-67) by the United Provinces’s navy on the river Medway, Kent, on 22-23 June 1667, which brought humiliation on the British royal navy. The latter’s fleet was moored above what proved to be an ineffectual, protective boom. Shown is the scene on Gillingham Reach, east and downstream of Chatham and below Upnor Castle.² In the centre is the Royal Charles with only her lower masts in place, a third of her guns on board and the Dutch tricolour at her main mast; she has just been boarded by Captain Thomas Tobiasz and his men and still flies the red ensign and union flag. To the left and right the British guardships Mathias and Carolus V have been grappled and set fire to by the Dutch fireships Pro Patria and Schiedam respectively.³

Beyond are three British frigates ablaze, one of which the Royal Oak, on the right, is half scuttled; the other two are probably intended as the Royal James and Loyal London. In the centre middle distance is the Dutch frigate Jonathon, a red ensign struck at her stern. In the distance are other British warships, and left, a flotilla of Dutch warships; in the distance Upnor Castle.

After the first assault, the British were further disabled when a Dutch squadron returned on the incoming tide in the afternoon of 23 June. At this juncture, Lieutenant Admiral Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676), who, with Cornelis de Witt (1623-1672), was in command of the whole operation, and other senior officers went out in longboats to encourage the Dutch effort. In the foreground Dutch mariners attack their fleeing opponents.

The prototype used here for the configuration of the action remains unidentified. Of other accounts painted by Jan van Leyden (SK-A-1386, Willem Schellinks ((SK-A-1393) and Pieter Cornelisz van Soest (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich),⁴ the present picture most resembles the last, which may suggest a common source. A less competent variant of SK-A-307 in the National Maritime Museum⁵ would seem to bear this out. Two contemporary drawings giving the disposition of the English ships,⁶ show that the Royal Charles was anchored upstream of the two guardships with the Royal Oak beyond her. The Dutch flotilla on the far left is pure fantasy as are the inscriptions on the tafferels identifying the ships. The vantage point is that of the Dutch, which indicates a Dutch origin for the – most likely printed – source.

Of the capital ships, the great prize for the Dutch was the Royal Charles built during the Commonwealth as the Naseby and renamed so as to transport Prince Charles from Scheveningen to England in 1660. Brought down the Medway with great skill by the Dutch, she was kept moored at Hellevoetsluis until she was sold at auction in 1673. The guardships Mathias and Carolus V were both Dutch prizes that had been captured in 1653 and 1665 respectively.⁷

The partially visible name on the tafferel of the half-submerged ship to the right can be explained as a Dutch rendering of Royal Oak, the presumed first syllable of the first word ‘Roy’ being under water, while the Dutch ‘boom’ – tree – may be a muddled reference to an oak tree – as depicted above the inscription – allusive to the oak tree in which Prince Charles hid after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester, 1651.

In the far centre is the Dutch frigate Jonathon, whose struck red ensign flies at her stern. Jonathon was the ship’s original name before its capture by the royal navy when it was renamed the Unity. She had been recaptured by Captain Jan van Brakel (c. 1618-1690) at the beginning of the action.⁸

The Dutch operation on the Medway was undertaken to exert pressure on King Charles II (r. 1660-85) in the peace negotiations between the belligerents then taking place at Breda. Dutch naval operations in the English Channel continued until the official ending of hostilities on 26 August 1667.⁹

The attribution of this painting remains to be resolved. It was acquired as by Bonaventura Peeters (1614-1652; see SK-A-1949 and SK-A-2818), but, presumably because the action depicted took place long after his death, it was then given to or associated with his son/brother Jan (1624-1678). Recognition that the hand was most likely the same as that responsible for The Battle of Sound (SK-A-3271), given to the museum in 1938, which was thought to be signed by Peter van den Velde (1634-after 1687), led in 1956 to an attribution to this artist; indeed the 1960 museum catalogue also claimed that it was signed with his initials. This is not the case; nor is the signature on SK-A-3271 certainly his.

An attribution to Van den Velde can anyway be ruled out as his naive manner bears no resemblance (see the discussion under SK-A-3271) to the work under discussion here. The claim of Jan Peeters merits consideration as he visited the northern Netherlands in 1659, which could explain the reflection here of the art of the Willem van de Veldes (I 1611-1693, II 1633-1707), but Jan’s extant painted oeuvre is small and the few naval battle scenes by him are different in handling and conception.¹⁰ Our artist has an idiosyncratic manner, showing some facility in handling figures on a small scale. However, the occasional, high-lit silhouettes of the ships and the lack of a convincing spatial relationship between them at close quarters betrays an artist not of the first order, who as yet remains anonymous. Most likely he was here at work not long after the event, when the support of oak (from the west German/Netherlandish region) was already available for use, after seasoning, presumably with a Dutch purchaser in mind. See further under SK-A-3271.

Gregory Martin, 2022