What happened at the Battle of Dungeness?
On 30 November 1652 by the English calendar, 10 December by the Dutch, Maarten Tromp's Dutch fleet, which was escorting a huge merchant convoy, caught Robert Blake's outnumbered English fleet off Dungeness in Kent. In a short winter fight the Dutch captured two English ships, Blake drew off toward Dover at nightfall, and for some weeks the Dutch controlled the Channel.1
In the autumn of 1652 the English Council of State believed it had won the naval war with the Dutch Republic and sent its ships away to other duties. Then a Dutch fleet twice the size of what was left came down the Channel. Off the headland of Dungeness it handed Robert Blake the only defeat of his career at sea, as HistoryNet's profile of him has it, and John Rickard calls it the most significant Dutch victory of the First Anglo-Dutch War.2
Background: two trading nations at war
The war grew out of a struggle over trade. England's Navigation Act of 1651 was aimed at the Dutch carrying trade, and the English claim to sovereignty over the seas, with its demand that foreign ships salute English warships, rankled in the Netherlands. In May 1652 a clash between Blake and Tromp off Dover, after the Dutch admiral failed to make the customary salute, started the war. Tromp had about 42 ships that day and Blake only a dozen or so at first, and the two fleets fought until evening.3
That summer Blake took his fleet north to break up the Dutch herring fishery off Shetland. Tromp followed him, but a violent storm scattered the Dutch ships, and the States-General removed Tromp from command and gave the fleet to Witte de With.4
The two navies were built differently. The Dutch fleet relied on fast, lightly armed warships and hired merchantmen, while the English built larger and heavier ships. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, editing the papers of the war in 1906, noted that at Dungeness the English ships outweighed an equal number of Dutch ones in firepower.5
In the first months the English had the better of it. On 28 September 1652 Blake beat the Dutch under Witte de With off the Kentish Knock. Believing the war at sea won, the Council of State scattered the fleet: ships went to the Baltic, to guard the colliers from Newcastle and to the Mediterranean, and money to pay the crews and repair storm damage ran short.6
Armies and commanders
Maarten Tromp, lieutenant admiral of Holland, was the Republic's leading admiral. In 1639 he had trapped and destroyed a Spanish armada that had taken refuge in the Downs, the anchorage off the Kent coast. Censured after a fruitless summer in 1652 and kept from command for some months, he was restored at the head of the fleet, with Jan Evertsen beside him and Michiel de Ruyter among his flag officers.7
Robert Blake had come to the sea late. Born in 1599 in Bridgwater, Somerset, he was a merchant and member of Parliament before the Civil War made him a soldier, famous for holding Lyme and Taunton against the Royalists. In 1649 the Commonwealth made him one of its generals at sea, and he hunted Prince Rupert's squadron from Ireland to Portugal and the Mediterranean.8
Their strength is reported differently. For the Dutch, the BCW Project and HistoryNet give 85 warships, Rickard 73 and a few fireships, and Gardiner thinks about 80 the likeliest number, although Blake counted 95. The convoy behind them numbered over 250 merchantmen by the BCW Project's count and 300 by Rickard's. Blake had around forty ships in the Downs: 37 according to Rickard, 42 according to Gardiner and HistoryNet.9
The battle in phases
Convoy and fleet. Tromp's ships were seen off the North Foreland on 24 November, but bad weather drove them back for several days. Escorting a convoy and hunting a fleet at the same time was hard, and Tromp said so: he wished, he wrote, "to have only one of the two duties, to seek out the enemy, or to give convoy; for to do both is attended with great difficulties."10
Out of the Downs. Leaving the convoy behind, Tromp's warships came up to the Downs on 29 November. After a council of war aboard his flagship, the Triumph, Blake sailed out to meet them, although they outnumbered him about two to one. Why he did so is unclear. He may have misjudged the size of the Dutch fleet in poor visibility, or he may have remembered 1639 and refused to be trapped in the same anchorage.11
A night off Dover. The wind then swung round to the northwest and blew hard, which kept Blake from returning to the Downs and kept both fleets from fighting. At nightfall the English anchored in Dover Road, with the Dutch some two miles to leeward.12
The run to Dungeness. On the morning of 30 November the wind eased and both fleets sailed southwest along the Kent coast, the English inshore and to windward, the Dutch further out. As the coast curved toward the point of Dungeness, Blake's leading ships were forced toward the enemy. The BCW Project has the fight begin shortly after noon; Gardiner, reading the dispatches, finds a few shots about one and the real clash only at three, which left little daylight.13
The fight in the van. Only part of each fleet came into action. Tromp's Brederode went for the English van, where the Garland and the armed merchantman Anthony Bonaventure engaged him. Evertsen came to Tromp's aid and took the Bonaventure, and Tromp took the Garland. Blake turned the Triumph back to rescue them, but she lost her foremast and was badly damaged, and could do nothing. The Victory and the Vanguard, hard pressed, fought their way clear.14
Turning point: the ships that stayed away
What decided the day was not only the odds. Many English captains, all three main accounts agree, kept their ships out of the fight. Blake himself, in his report to the Council of State, complained of "much baseness of spirit, not among the merchantmen only, but many of the State's ships," and of the want of men. Gardiner shows that the two were linked: undermanned ships gave their captains a reason, or an excuse, to hang back.15
Darkness ended the battle, and Blake drew off toward Dover. On the English losses the sources differ: the BCW Project counts the two captured ships, while Rickard adds three more sunk in the fighting. The one Dutch loss was a ship destroyed by an accidental fire and explosion in the night. The Hercules, coming up the Channel from Portsmouth to join Blake, was run aground and taken.16
Aftermath
Tromp saw his convoy safely west and went on toward the French Atlantic coast to meet the homeward-bound merchantmen. For a few weeks the Channel lay open to Dutch shipping.17
Blake offered to resign, and the Council of State refused. Instead it looked for culprits and remedies. Captains who had stayed out of the fight were removed and sent for trial, and new Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea were drawn up within weeks to enforce discipline. The practice of letting merchant captains command their own hired ships in battle was ended.18
The Dutch hold did not last. In February 1653 a rebuilt English fleet caught Tromp bringing the next convoy home and fought him for three days off Portland and up the Channel. Britannica dates that battle to March by the Dutch calendar. The Dutch lost heavily, and the Channel closed to their trade again. Tromp was beaten again off the Gabbard in June and was killed in the battle off Scheveningen, on 31 July 1653 by the English calendar and 9 August by the Dutch.19› Battle of Lowestoft, 1665
Legacy and memory
Dungeness is best remembered for a story that may never have happened. Tromp is said to have hoisted a broom at his masthead to show that he had swept the English from the sea. The BCW Project thinks the tale probably apocryphal, and Gardiner, who read the papers of the campaign, notes that no word of the "fabulous broom" appears in any of them.20
Its real legacy was in England's navy. The defeat exposed the weakness of hired merchantmen and of an underpaid service, and the reforms that followed, above all the Laws of War, became in Gardiner's words "the foundation of all subsequent regulations." Blake recovered his reputation. He beat Tromp off Portland in 1653 and destroyed a Spanish treasure fleet at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in April 1657, and he died at sea in August 1657 as his ships came within sight of Plymouth, to be given a state funeral. HistoryNet ranks him, until Nelson, as England's greatest admiral.21
Two calendars
The battle carries two dates. England still used the Julian calendar, which in the 17th century ran ten days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the Dutch Republic. So the battle was fought on 30 November 1652 by English reckoning and on 10 December 1652 by Dutch, and both dates appear in the sources, as on the Dutch prints of the battle.22
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