Empire of the Seas. 1/4 HD

on a blustery November day four centuries ago the English were preparing themselves one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen beneath the Domus and poles they gathered to celebrate their tiny nations victory over the world's greatest superpower Spain on the walls hung the captured essence of the Spanish fleet that was even then being dashed on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland the year was 1588 and the back was the Armada today's celebrations mark the centenary of the Fleet Air Arm and it still seems like the most natural thing in the world to devote a great Cathedral to the Royal Navy a tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago 1588 marked a turning point in our national story victory over the Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation and it sparked a myth that would one day become a reality that the nation's new destiny the source of her future wealth and power lay out there on the oceans this series tells the story of how the Navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth of how the need to organize it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy of how it transformed our culture our sense of national identity and our democracy it's a story of heroism and innovation but also of disasters dark chapters in our history it's the remarkable story of a 400 years struggle fought at sea and on land of how the Navy drove Britain into the modern age and changed the world you clear the house England's extraordinary journey for a third-rate nation to global superpower began on a clear October day 20 years before the Armada okay bring on the beer not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors who scurried to and fro in the old Harbor and Plymouth making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea the gangplank groaned as last-minute supplies were brought on board large barrels of fresh water and beer whinnying goats and chickens as well where thing was brought on board they will lash down to the bulkheads an expectation of a bumpy passage the two men in command were cousins on that fine autumn day there was a tea not about making war about making money the elder of the two was John Hawkins who at the age of just 35 was already Plymouth's leading merchants Venturer the younger was his cousin a poor relation who grown up with Hawkins 27 year old Francis Drake they were leaving behind a poor insignificant town on the edge of a poor insignificant country which itself clung to the fringes of Europe but this place had one thing going for it this on the finest natural harbors on earth gateway to the Atlantic and beyond that the New World first discovered only sixty years before the new world of the Americas offered wealth beyond imagining if they could get there and bring it back that is a round trip of 12,000 miles no mean feat in the 1560s - six - six - say take a break now halfway yeah King know this wonderful replica of the tutorship the Matthew gives me a strong sense of what life might have been like on board sailing one who's just so struck by the ingenuity I it's the sort of combination of wood rope bit of metal and you can sew around the other side of the world among the profit hungry investors in the venture was the Queen herself she'd lent two ships that Jesus of Lubeck and the minion both were old spent and rotten as were most of the vessels in her tiny Navy the crew too would get their share of the booty all were young some were just boys among them Hawkins nephew Paul and a 13 year old Myles Phillips whose journal relates the terrors of frequent storms and leaking hulls there were no creature comforts for those on board either the single-minded Hawkins made his men sleep on deck because every inch of hold space was reserved for the cargo that would make the cash on that expedition the cargo was a human one breakn Hawkins had the terrible distinction of being the first Englishman to bind African men women and children in Chains and transport them in the holes of ships like this they were slave traders six weeks out of Plymouth they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea then headed west few Englishmen had ever made this journey England had been slow to spot the opportunities of the new world and the Spanish had got there first now Spain jealously guarded a lucrative American empire stretching from South America through the Caribbean to Mexico and further north Drake and Hawkins just wanted a little slice of the action Nippon sell a few slaves and return home with a hold full of silver the problem was Spanish and banned foreigners from trading within their lucrative empire Hawkins and managed it once or twice before and got away with it we hope to do so again but this time would be different in the Caribbean they traded their human cargo for silver gold and pearls then turned for home but it was hurricane season storms drove them to San Juan on the coast of Mexico were powerful Spanish fleet first promised them safe passage then decided to teach them a violent lesson in the fight that followed Hawkins lost three of his ships including the Jesus of Lubeck and two hundred men killed or captured he managed to escape on the minion with him was the thirteen-year-old Myles Phillips who watched what happened to the prisoners they took our men ashore he wrote and hung them up by their arms until blood burst out from their fingers end in the moment of personal tragedy for Hawkins he realized that his nephew Paul was among them disease and famine followed and by the time they limped home fewer than 20 men were left alive aboard the minion but for the survivors this disaster acted not as a deterrent but as a spur to action experience mark Drake in Hawkins the rest their lives neither would ever forgive the Spanish for their treachery and they threw themselves into a bitter personal crusade against Spain it was fueled by the heavy mix of a lust for cash religious zealotry and a desire for personal revenge in time this crusade would become a national enterprise in doing so it would forge a new idea of English but if england seafarers would have any chance of catching up with spain they would need better ships to do it Hawkins answer was the race built galleon his radical breakthrough in warship design preserved in these original drawings by using maths and geometry instead of rule of thumb by cutting down high decks and by streamlining hulls Hawkins produce the fastest ships of their kind anywhere in the world the first was built in 1570 at the Queen's dock yard in Deptford more were to follow with greater space for guns they were perfectly designed for war but 20 Reis built galleons the most the tutor state could afford would not be enough on their own Hawkins landed a job on the Navy board the committee that ran the Queen's modest fleet and in 1582 the board commissioned a series of extraordinary surveys preserved here at the National Archives yeah I've read about this but I've never seen it before this is a list of every ship in England compiled on the Hawkins leadership and it's actually as you can see broken up by County here Norfolk Suffolk absolutely meticulously written down it's beautiful every single ship art with the tonnage here so these ones Mary Solomon 200 tons absolutely incredible as we go further on here they didn't just lift the ships they list the Masters and then the number of Mariners and seamen there are as well for each port so here we go in Cornwall there 108 masters 626 Mariners and 1184 seamen so precise incredible this information is being gathered centrally in London at the beck and call of the Tudor State it's actually very moving seeing the names of people that lived all those centuries ago and once you have a list like this when war comes whether the national emergency you can go and knock on the door of men like John Cooper and Peter dollar more and say right mate you're coming in the Navy or come to protect the country it does make you wonder whether men like William Bennett William Mort from little and where they end up fighting against the Spanish Armada and this is just fantastic you get right to the end the total number of Mariners available to the Tudor State sixteen thousand two hundred and fifty nine men it could be mobilized to protect little England against the greatest superpower in the world Drake meanwhile was taking his revenge on Spain in a much more direct fashion on an April day in 1587 the residents of Cadiz woke to the sound of gunfire you by the end of the day over 30 Spanish ships lay at the bottom of the harbor and Drake's fleet had sailed away with holds full of treasure it was the culmination of a ten year pillaging spree that had seen Drake circumnavigate the globe attack Spanish colonies and steal their loot belligerent venal a peerless Seafarer he was Protestant England's new hero in Catholic Spain he was anything but standing here looking at it from the Spanish point of view the English appear little different from Vikings men who came from the north and ships bent on plunder and destruction - nothing was sacred most infamous of all was Drake still hated still known as illed Blackie the dragon and now the dragon had pushed the king of Spain take his own terrible revenge on Drake and England that's revenge came in July 1588 when the Armada appeared of England's coast one eyewitness wrote that the ocean groaned under their weight it had taken Spain three years and a Titanic amount of silver to assemble it while the English fleet had been mobilized in just three months the battle raged for several days but the leadership of men like Drake and Hawkins had given the English a decisive edge people have tended to attribute victory with Spanish Armada the courage of the English sailors or the intervention of Divine Wind in fact the Spanish for equally bravely at different stages the campaign the wind favoured both sides the real reason is a lot less glamorous it's the inspired organization of Hawkins he ensured that England had a fleet of fast maneuverable ships each one of which carried something like three times the weight in armament of its Spanish equivalent he laid the foundations for modern naval warfare bringing ships men and cannon together in a decisive combination so when the Great and the good arrived in their finery at some poles on that day in November 1588 they were celebrating not just a victory the beginning of a new future the Queen as one author wrote was carried in a golden chariot through her City of London in robes of triumph while the still bloody heads of Catholic traitors executed for praying for the our modest success stared down from spikes nearby the Tudor PR machine went into overdrive a new portrait showed the Queen triumphant a hand on a globe the Spanish ships crushed on the rocks behind her the scale of the victory expanded the horizons of a small impoverished nation one commentator wrote the sea had become a means to seek new worlds for gold for praise for glory the English had been given a bright vision of a glittering future of riches beyond imagination of new frontiers that stretch way beyond the shores of tiny England above all it was a future that would be played out on the seas by the ships of the Navy and by a new breed of heroic Seafarer England's view of its place in the world would never be the same again girl Ivana sloped up the Queen's Navy had become a source of national pride as never before and there was an insatiable demand for stories of seafaring adventure and discovery a new national identity aggressive ambitious and Protestant was in the making if Hawkins was the architect of that new identity and Drake its firebrand then Richard Hakluyt was its biographer in 1589 year off the Spanish Armada he wrote this the principal navigations voyages traffics and discoveries of the English nation an account of 1600 years of history containing over 250 seafaring adventures by Englishmen a mix of storytelling and myth making back of this one for example we have Hawkins 'as ill-fated trip to the Caribbean with Myles Phillips gruesome account of the barbarous treatment they received at the hands of the Spaniards in the next volume we have the account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada itself which ends with this incredible paragraph that says thus the Magnificent huge and mighty fleet of the Spaniards in the year 1588 vanished into smoke this was history with a purpose a call to arms to a nation on the verge of a new destiny that destiny could not have been made more obvious than it was in a subsequent edition of Hakluyt work which contained this stunning map this piece paper is four hundred years old it's incredibly beautiful just look at the detail of the world coastlines and ports and rivers what so remarkable at this map is that medieval maps show England as an insignificant island clinging to the edge of Europe but now England's not at the edge it's been picked up and moved right to the heart of the world it's an image of the world we all recognize but this map showed it for the first time it was a potent symbol of a nation that now had global ambitions ships poured out of England bound for the Americas Africa Asia and the Baltic numerous and aggressive these English pioneers steadily eroded Spanish power and founded the colonies that form the beginnings of Britain's future Empire abroad and at home business was booming ports like East loo and Cornwall now had scores of fishing boats trading as far away as North America in these new confident times they called themselves the Western adventurers but economic success brought a new threat that no one had foreseen suddenly whole fleets 10 or 12 ships would head out to sea and simply vanish the reports of ships found floating out there in the Atlantic without their crews who were never seen again on one night in the summer of 1630 one in the village of Baltimore in southern island over a hundred people were removed from their beds leaving the place of ghost town a remarkable letter written in August 1625 reveals the scale and horror of the problem it's from the mayor of Plymouth Thomas Seeley to the Kings counsel one poor maritime town in Cornwall called Lu hath within ten days lost eighty Mariners bound in fishing voyages to the deeps and there have been taken by the Turks back then Turks met Muslims and these were in fact pirates from North Africa Barbary pirates they came to these shores and took people as slaves back to North Africa it was a barbarous practice but it was of course what these West Country would have been doing to Africans for decades now even so it turned the sea here from a source of wealth and prestige for England into a place of terror and slavery the ports and fishing villages it said were filled with the pitiful lamentations of the victims families in the next few years Devon and Cornwall would lose a fifth of their shipping and cruise this extraordinary and little-known episode in English history was to have far-reaching consequences Englishmen were bred on the myth of maritime invincibility but now they had to face hard truths once the Predators they were now the prey and people did what they usually did in the crisis they blame the government and they weren't entirely wrong fishing vessel provides fishing vessel Truffaut's this is protection vessel time calling eternal one city I'm on one of the modern navies fishery protection vessels about 30 miles from Cornwall just the territory where the Barbary pirates were seizing English shipping throws this a tie it's my intention to to send a routine boarding team over to you my team will be with you in that two at zero minutes over in Elizabeth's time the Queen ships and the private vessels of freebooters like Drake had kept these waters safe but the Queen was now dead the new Stewart regime had made peace with Spain and the Navy had been cut back with a predilection for self-aggrandizement the regime had spent its cash some of it raised illegally by notorious ship money on a few grand vanity ships designed to impress the kings of Europe trouble was fishery protection wasn't the kind of job that these showy vessels were designed to do just as the job that these guys do couldn't be done by an aircraft carrier in the absence of this kind of protection the king subjects particularly down here in the West Country were completely vulnerable they in their cargoes made irresistible targets for North African pirates shocked by the magnitude of the crisis Westcountry MP Sir John Eliot wrote to the King's Council begging for action but the government did nothing Eliot was furious and he wasn't the only one anger also losses from the pages of this a best-seller written around the time of the disappearances from East Lou it's called Sir Francis Drake revived it's written by Drake's nephew and he recounts the glories and successes of what now seemed like a vanished age it's an indictment on the present with it's all pervasive sense of fear and it's insecurity but it's also a call to arms as the author makes very clear on the title page he writes calling upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver so johnelliott caught the mood calling for a return to the aggressive policies of the past England's new king it seemed was listening Charles the first had been on the throne for just a few months and like a modern leader seeking crowd-pleasing policies in troubled times he funded an expedition to attack Spain it set sail from Plymouth in October 1625 waved off by a delighted John Elliot their target was none other than Cadiz their mission a Drake style smash-and-grab returning home with holds full of treasure to public acclaim but it didn't work out that way at all the expedition was commanded by my count Wimbledon a man who never served the sea before we're so indecisive as men quickly gave him the nickname by account sit still confusion range ships collided masts and rigging tumbled overboard when sit still ordered his captains to attack many of them simply ignored him the lack of an experienced charismatic commander like Drake exposed terrible weaknesses in the English fleet even with Drake in charge had been hard enough to impose order now many captains simply did as they wished they were a rabble the chaos continued when they landed two thousand troops on the beach but failed to give them any water the weather was scorching when they finally got into the town these thirsty Englishmen stumbled on a warehouse it was full of wine all hell broke loose the men started drinking and although the officers tried to stop them it was no use the whole army was drunken about one eyewitness and in one common confusion some shooting at one another amongst themselves this wouldn't have course be the last time the drunken English behaved disgracefully while abroad from this occasion with the expedition descending into total farce the commander's had no choice but to call it off on the way home farce turned to tragedy as disease took hold by the time they reached Plymouth hundreds were dead hundreds more were dying and who was standing up here waiting for them none other than Sir John Eliot the man who in October had waved them off with such high hopes now stood on a miserable day just before Christmas 1625 as the fleet limped in the miseries before us our great he wrote as he watched corpses being tossed into the harbor from the ships and later he saw sailors dropped down dead in the streets of Plymouth but soon his compassion for the sailors turned into another emotion rage news of the fiasco soon reached London and when Parliament convened John Eliot was on his feet his anger echoing around since Stephen's Hall our honor is ruined our ships are sunk our men are killed not by the sword nor by the hand of an enemy but by those we trust those words spoken by Eliot in this chamber where the House of Commons used to meet with a sharpest denunciation of royal government ever heard in Parliament Dizz Eliot said proved that the king was unfit to run the Navy in a series of extraordinary speeches in here Elliot demanded that Parliament take a greater role in overseeing the affairs of state when the speaker who sat in his chair on this spot tried to shut him up Eliot tied three thugs to hold him down if it seemed like revolution was in the air it was the Kings failure to run a modern efficient Navy had sparked a constitutional crisis John Eliot was thrown into the tower but a new generation of MPs immortalized here in some Stephens Hall took up his call for liberty relations between King and Parliament collapsed in 1642 Charles fled London and the civil war began by fleeing the capital Charles lost control both of the Navy and of the new burgeoning maritime economy that it supported it made his defeat inevitable and in 1649 on the orders of England's new republic he was executed Parliament acted quickly to secure control over the Navy putting men of proven loyalty in charge they were known as the generals at sea one of them was Robert Blake West country MP hero of the Civil War and a radical Protestant to boot chick-flick carry on SOC famous raju ha sorry Oh Blake had never fought at sea not a brilliant start for a man charged with protecting England's coast against a multitude of foes but Blake understood warfare and men and he knew that chaos and indiscipline or his dangerous at sea as there were on land command problems that a dog's the English expedition to Cadiz still remained in one of his first battles he was appalled to see his captain disobey his orders and flee he knew he had to find a way to assert his control his solution was to produce the Navy's first-ever set of rules and regulations the laws of war and ordinances of the sea in 1652 for the first time it gave English commanders a fighting chance of issuing orders that would be obeyed or fifteen it was a list of thirty-nine offenses from stealing to spying from cowardice to sleeping on duty most were punishable by death Blake even sacked his own brother for Discipline offenses the laws of war offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea that would later be applied through all areas of government blake was just what the Navy needed a tough outsider he could see that over the previous 50 years the Navy in vacillated wildly between great successes like the Armada and total failures like it is but there was no reliability under charismatic leadership men like Drake the English could be great successes but otherwise denied that leadership failure was often the result break imposed order and discipline he ensured that no matter who is in charge the Navy would be effective Blake left behind a navy that was larger and more disciplined than the country had ever known before the powerful fleet had protected the young Republic from its foreign enemies but it could not fill the vacuum created when Cromwell the English dictator died a new era was coming on May the 26th 1660 one of the Navy's grandest ships the Royal Charles came within sight of England on board was a man making his triumphant return home after years in exile it was charmed son of the murdered King soon to be crowned king charles ii the journey was the result of weeks of plotting between senior naval officers and exiled Royalists to bring back the monarchy the new king was eager to lay claim to England's potent Navy he gave gold to the sailors and rebranded the fleet it was now the Royal Navy disembarking with the royal party was the younger cousin and newly appointed secretary to the ship's commander the young man was honored to be given the job of taking the king's spaniel off the ship he wrote in his diary it [ __ ] the boat which made us laugh and we think that the King and all that belong to him are but just as others are as they came ashore the young man saw huge crowds of nobles and citizens alike who all turn out to welcome their king the shouting and joy expressed by all he wrote was past imagination the 27 year old from London had just completed his second sea voyage he didn't know it then but this was just the start of an extraordinary naval career his name was Samuel peace peeps was from humble origins the son of a poor tailor and a washer woman but he left behind two extraordinary legacies he would transform the administration of the Navy like no one before him and leave behind one of the most vivid and colorful Diaries of all time here it is volume 1 of samuel peeps his diary started on January the 1st 1660 possibly in response to a New Year's resolution it's in shorthand so it takes a bit of deciphering but it's an incredibly honest account of a colourful life there are descriptions of his trips the theater drinking his affairs music money and even arguments with his wife it's all interspersed with descriptions of a job he loved or at least he came to love it when he first landed the job of clerk of the acts to the Navy board he hadn't the foggiest idea what it entailed but he was delighted with the pay three hundred and fifty pounds a year more than he'd ever earned in his life eager to learn peeps threw himself into the complex new world of the Navy's dockyards at Chatham bullets and Deptford all are now long gone but this yard on the Dutch coast is building a replica ship of the same era the Dutch had overtaken Spain to become England's new maritime rivals they were aggressive Protestant and organized just like the English to combat the Dutch threat England was now spending a mighty 25% of the national budget on her Navy making it by far the country's largest industrial enterprise the dockyards consumed materials in vast quantities 150 tons of iron a year 100 miles of rope and had a vast workforce to match and as Pete soon discovered corruption was rife beeps reported corrupt officials the Navy board but he soon realized that the worst corruption was actually on the Navy board itself he refers to his colleagues as old fools and rogues and realize that one of them was even stealing from the sailors pension fund known as the Chatham chest the problem was that the Navy had become a vast receptacle of public funds though no systems in place to spend that money and if a few thousand went missing who would care peep scared and realize that every aspect of the Navy had ballooned except for the central administration the fleet had grown far beyond the ability of the medieval Navy board to manage it back in the office peeps hired a team of Clark's who gave them desks at regular hours and together they set out imposing some order they spent a lot of time making lists this one here is an alphabetical list of all naval officers that served in the Navy during peak time in office starting up here with a coming all the way down to zoom down here the amazing thing is it contains fair amount of information about their service records the dates on which they're in different ships in fact some case it even has their fate so for example this man died George colt drowned and Humphrey Connors B was discharged by His Royal Highness lists like these imposed manageable symmetry on the anarchic world that peeps found himself in and he became an expert in the complex gathering and storage of information he was determined to professionalize every aspect of the navy's operations he designed a core book to keep records of Dockyard hours worked compiled an alphabetical list of all contracts and kept detailed notes of everything he did peeps wasn't the first naval administrator to make lists but he was the most systematic the most brilliant the most obsessive he was a man who adored the Navy not because he loved storming aboard enemy ships with the smell of gun smoke in his nostrils but because he loved the bureaucracy he delighted he wrote in the neatness of everything but the Samuel Peaks of the diary emerges as a man who was far from being a dull paper pusher and list maker here's a not untypical entry he has an orgy with the wife of one of his colleagues on the Navy board and her daughter he wrote there are great many women in the chamber my lady pen and her daughter among them whereupon my lady pen flung me down upon the bed and herself and others one after another upon me and very Merry we were well I'm not surprised every man has his voice they say had four peaks it was definitely the ladies well and bounce of heavy drinking and fine dining and nice clothes and music they loved the theatre of course and well you get the idea the point is peeps was a man who lived life to the full but what really shines out in these Diaries is his love of his work my business he wrote is all my delight the Navy's office of training college here at Dartmouth was built long after pizzas time but the idea of professionally trained and qualified officers was his anyone with the right connections Peaks realized could become an officer leaving the Navy's valuable ships in often unreliable hands there was no quality control which wire's sir picks a solution exams the verbal test that he introduced for all would be left tenants still exists these days they call it fleet board first question is what are the responsibilities of the CBM at state one airs on upper deck roaming sir looking mostly for firefighting events the whole idea of assessment and interview seems deeply familiar to us what items of scene ship rigging must always be fully real that'd be the safety now underneath sir that's because of peeps when he introduced his exam for leftenant it was the first time any employee of the English state had ever been tested in this way and where is it located quickly smart boy sir as usually found on the quarterdeck okay thank you very much mission for brass please carry on using pen paper in a tidy mind peeps are done for the Navy as an institution what Hawkins are done for it ships and Blake for the discipline of its crews but could it survive the ultimate test war in 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch a series of English victories early on seemed to or go well but Peaks was worried he'd said from the start that Parliament hadn't voted enough money to fund the war and just as he predicted the money was soon gone the Navy lunged from triumph to crisis things soon reached boiling point the Navy was terribly in debt and sailors went unpaid in the dockyards peaks saw workers walking around like ghosts and he heard the lamentable moans of sailors that lay destitute in the street a sight which he said troubled him to his heart to add to the sense of crisis plague broke out in London and peeps and his clerks came down here to Greenwich where they took up residence in this one of Charles the seconds unfinished palaces but that put them in the heart of the fleet with all disgruntled sailors around them one day their windows were broken and Peaks and his staff were threatened with physical violence peeps spent 24 hours composing a desperate letter to the king it's ambiguous and it would've made very disturbing reading for his royal master peeps begins by apologizing for being troublesome he says troubling his majesty on the subject which we often have done the want of money the effects of that want under which his majesty service under our care hath long been sinking so Peaks in no doubt that his Navy is facing utter ruin and he comes up with a typically peep seein solution he gives a list carefully costed of everything that he thinks is necessary to prevent that he starts up here by saying fifty five anchors of various weights eight hundred bells sailcloth 4,000 loads of plank four hundred dozen oars twelve tons of brimstone 10,000 spars of all sorts and he comes up with the incredibly precise figure as only Peaks could do of the money required to stave off disaster for the Navy and for England and that sum is a hundred and seventy nine thousand seven hundred and ninety-three pounds and ten shillings but the King had nothing to give and would not humiliate himself by going cap in hand to Parliament to ask for more just a few months later came the naval disaster peeps had predicted it was the Summer of 1667 the fleet had been laid up because there was no money to pay cruise to man it apnic ASSEL 30 miles up the Thames from London had been built and Elizabeth's time to protect the fleet across the River Medway at Chatham the exhausted and unpaid garrison were not at their best on that June day the horrified defenders of this fort watched as sixty-two Dutch ships made their way up the river on the rising tide anchored here was much of Charles's fleet including four of his finest battleships in a desperate measure the English sank some of their own ships here to try and block the river but that didn't work and their cannon on shore opened up try and turn the Dutch back but unbelievably someone had delivered the wrong ammunition and many of the cannonballs didn't even fit down the barrel the duck ships plowed in amongst the English ships with impunity capturing them burning others including three of the finest battleships in the land the river was covered in wreckage and in the sky was a pall of smoke one of pizzas Clark's who lived and worked down here wrote and said the destruction of those three glorious ships was one of the most dismal sites my eyes have ever beheld it was enough he said to make the heart of every true Englishman bleed in a final humiliation the Dutch towed back to Holland the Royal Charles itself a moment immortalized on canvas showing the pride of England's fleet flying the Dutch flag the Dutch raid here on the Midway was at the time and remained to this day the most embarrassing defeat in the history of the Royal Navy not even the brilliant peeps could avert this catastrophe the simple fact was that King Charles just couldn't afford a modern Navy the Medway disaster set the King and Parliament on another collision course over how the Navy was to be funded and controlled when Charles died in 6085 relations between King and Parliament were at their lowest ever since the Civil War he was succeeded by his brother James now he had a rather successful career as an admiral in the Royal Navy could he be the man to work together with politicians and Finance ears and businessman to build a new kind of constitutional monarchy well no and this extraordinary portrait tells us why James has had himself painted in the garb of a Roman Emperor with a haughty stare his golden tunic magnificent purple robe flowing off his shoulders and decked out in jewels at his throat sword hilt and sandals and out at sea his Navy his plaything the Royal banner flying from the main top mast this was not how the English wanted their Kings to see themselves to make matters worse James was openly proudly Catholic he appointed Catholics to key positions in the armed forces he even put one of them in charge of the Royal Navy this was clearly a man who wouldn't send His Royal Navy out to attack the great Catholic powers of Europe this was not a man to protect the legacy of Drake and Hawkins he would have to go in July 1688 a figure dressed as a common sailor arrived in Holland beneath the disguise was England's premier naval officer Admiral Arthur Herbert or rather ex Admiral he'd resigned weeks before refusing to serve under King James Herbert was carrying an extraordinary letter it was signed by seven Englishmen all Grandy's in the Armed Forces church and state and it was addressed to the Dutch Prince William of Orange who was not only Protestant but he was married to James the second daughter Mary it was an appeal for William's help against their tyrannical King this was high treason but Herbert and his fellow conspirators were the desperate men from an exasperated nation and in William they'd found their man on November the 1st 1688 a vast Dutch invasion fleet 463 vessels 40,000 men left Holland bound for England it was almost exactly a hundred years as the Spanish Armada but this time not a single shot was fired from the top mast of Williams flagship he flew a banner with his family motto on I will maintain but he added in letters three feet high the liberties of the English and the Protestant religion the message was clear and when William landed here on the south coast of England he was greeted with Cheers over the next few weeks became obvious that the English weren't gonna fight for James the second and he fled the country and was replaced as king by William James like his brother and his father before him had proved himself incompatible with the new idea of Englishness that had crystallized since the days of the Armada that idea was opposed absolutism and Catholicism and proud of Parliament Liberty and of sending the English Navy out against England traditional enemies William's invasion of 1688 represented the final victory of those values it was the myth of the Armada made real a little over a hundred years a Ravel of West country seafarers and a few royal ships had become a recognizably modern institution with staff and systems to manage a vast efficient Navy this was England's heart evoke a navy that now lay the center of the national project and its future you

Channel: Voluspa / Astrid

Views: 565,908

Rating: 4.7377429 out of 5

Keywords: British Navy, English Navy, Seapower, Sea Power, History Documentary, Royal Navy (Armed Force), Dan Snow, English History, Empire of the Seas, Naval History, Royal Navy (Organization)

Id: j1-OxNSjmh0

Length: 57min 28sec (3448 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Incendio88]

Great doc, watched it a few times

[u/raven9999]

I just watch the first of four parts of this documentary. It is a well done and informative doc starting in the year of 1560 up to WW I. It does help though to have a basic understanding of british history to fully appreciate this documentary.