Battle of Lowestoft, 1665: the day the Eendracht blew up

The Second Anglo-Dutch War was a struggle over trade and the sea. When it began in 1665, both sides had learned from the first war of 1652 to 1654. The English fleet was the larger, with 109 men-of-war and 28 fireships, but since the first war the Dutch had built many bigger ships, and John Rickard notes that their fleet of 103 men-of-war actually carried more guns. The English fleet was commanded by the king's brother, James, Duke of York, the future James II, with Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, leading its White and Blue squadrons.²

The fleets meet off Suffolk

The English put to sea first, in April, and blockaded the Dutch coast for two weeks before going home to Harwich. The Dutch came out in May and on 20 May, by the English calendar, captured an English convoy trading with Hamburg. That forced the English back to sea, and at midday on 1 June the fleets sighted each other. Obdam had the wind, but his fleet was too scattered to attack. For a day the two fleets waited three miles apart. At 2.30 in the morning of 3 June, Old Style, about 14 miles northeast of Lowestoft, the wind turned in the English favor.³

Lines of battle

Naval tactics had changed since the first war, Rickard explains. Fighting now began in lines of battle before it turned into a melee. From about 3.30 in the morning until 1 p.m. the two fleets sailed past each other in opposite directions, firing as they went, then turned and passed again. The Dutch turned ship by ship, keeping the same order; the English turned squadron by squadron, so that the leading squadron on one pass became the rear on the next.⁴ › Battle of Dungeness, 1652

The pattern broke when the Earl of Sandwich saw a gap open in the Dutch line and drove through it, cutting the Dutch fleet in two and bringing on a general melee. Samuel Pepys copied the news into his diary a few days later, including a report that the Dutch had neglected the advantage of the wind and so lost the benefit of their fireships.⁵

The Eendracht

The decisive clash was between the two flagships, the Duke of York's Royal Charles and Obdam's Eendracht. For a time the Duke was in real danger. Pepys recorded that the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Muskerry and Richard Boyle were killed on the Royal Charles by a single shot, "their blood and brains flying in the Duke's face". Then, at about 3 p.m. after a two-hour duel, the Eendracht blew up. The sources differ slightly on the toll. Rickard writes that all but four of her 409 men were lost; the Royal Museums Greenwich says that of a crew of over 400 only five survived. Obdam died with his ship.⁶

The Dutch painter Willem van de Velde the Elder watched the battle from a small galliot and later drew the scene after the explosion; the Royal Museums Greenwich holds that drawing, and a painting by Hendrik van Minderhout shows the two flagships in their last moments, seen from the Dutch side.⁷

A fleet without a commander

The death of the commander in chief threw the Dutch into confusion. Both Jan Evertsen and Cornelis Tromp assumed command, and two days later Tromp still did not know what had become of Evertsen, the senior officer. Vice Admiral Cortenaer, one of Obdam's key advisers, had been killed early in the battle, and when his ship, flag still flying, left the line, a number of others followed. Tromp's squadron fought on, but by 7 p.m. the Dutch were in full retreat. Some of the worst losses came now, as English fireships burned groups of tangled Dutch ships.⁸

Counting the cost

Rickard counts 18 Dutch ships taken, 14 of which reached port, and 14 sunk, for a total of 32. The Royal Museums Greenwich gives a loss of about 30 ships. The English lost only two ships, the Charity and the John and Mary, both captured. The first reports reaching London were wildly inflated: Pepys wrote down that Tromp had been killed, which was false, and that 8,000 or 10,000 Dutchmen had been killed or taken for no more than 700 English, calling it the greatest victory "never known in the world".⁹

The escape

The victory could have been greater. On the night after the battle, Rickard writes, one of the Duke's courtiers ordered the sails slackened while the Duke slept, and the Dutch got away to the Maas and the Texel; the lack of fireships also told. The Duke was soon removed from command, partly for that failure and partly to keep the heir to the throne out of danger. Lowestoft did not set the pattern of the war. In 1666 France and Denmark joined the Dutch, and the next great clash, the Four Days' Battle, was a Dutch victory.¹⁰