CHAPTER 7
____________________________
Mark Stoyle
On 7 October 1642 a vast host of Cornishmen poured through the gates of Launceston and into the narrow streets of the town. At their head rode Sir Ralph Hopton, the leader of the king’s forces in the west, together with the Sheriff of Cornwall and a phalanx of other prominent Cornish Royalists. A few miles to the east, meanwhile, Parliament’s discomfited Cornish supporters – who had abandoned Launceston only hours before – were fleeing for the safety of Plymouth.1 Within days the whole of Cornwall had been secured for Charles I and within weeks a Cornish Royalist army had been raised here: an army which, in late 1642, would carry the struggle to the Parliamentarians in Devon and, in mid-1643, would help to conquer the whole of south-west England for the king. The contribution which Cornish soldiers made to the Royalist war effort during the first year of the Civil War is difficult to overstate.2 Yet, from Charles I’s point of view, the advantages which possession of Cornwall conferred on him in maritime terms were scarcely less important than the fact that his supporters there had provided him with an army.
Shortly before the Civil War began most of the king’s ships had defected to Parliament. Following the surrender of Portsmouth to his enemies in September 1642, moreover, Charles had been left without a single port along the southern coast. As a result the king had been able to communicate with Ireland and the Continent – and, indeed, with the wider world beyond – only through a handful of ports in Wales and the North. Hopton’s triumph in Cornwall transformed this situation. Now the king could make use of Cornish ports such as Falmouth, Padstow and Fowey to serve as havens for his own vessels; to carry on his correspondence with royal agents abroad; to import all kinds of munitions; and even, perhaps, to bring in foreign forces to assist him in his war against Parliament. This last possibility was one which filled Charles’s opponents with dread and, almost as soon as they had learnt that Cornwall had declared for the king, MPs ordered the despatch of two Parliamentary warships – the Mary and the Happy Entrance – to ply the seas off Cornwall in order to prevent any ‘Welch or Irish’ forces from landing there.3 In the event the Royalists made no attempt to land foreign troops in Cornwall during 1642–43, but the knowledge that they possessed the ability to do so – in theory, at least – was one which was to cause ceaseless anxiety to Parliament’s supporters over the coming years.4
The Cornish Royalists swiftly established communications with the king’s friends abroad and two small vessels bringing in supplies for Hopton from the Netherlands were taken by Parliamentarian ships near Falmouth as early as 16 October.5 In the subsequent month Royalists agents in France sent a vessel loaded with weapons and munitions from St Malo to Penryn, but it was captured by Parliamentarian warships off the Scilly Isles before it could reach its destination.6 Despite the continued vigilance of the Parliamentarian sea-captains other similar shipments clearly managed to get through, for, by 22 November, a correspondent from the Hague could report that a number of ‘foot arms’, ‘horse arms’ and ‘pieces of cannon’ had recently been landed at Falmouth.7 Soon the Cornish Royalists began to impound those merchant ships trading with Parliamentary ports that had been unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. On 6 January 1643 the House of Commons was presented with a petition from thirty-six merchants which complained that they had recently ‘received notice of certain ships that [were forced to] put into Falmouth by contrary winds, laden with merchants’ goods and bound for London . . . [which] those Cavaliers [i.e. Royalists] that command the king’s castles there’ had seized. The Royalists had subsequently ‘taken away the sails from the yards of the said ships and begun to unload some of the goods’, the merchants lamented. Now ‘we pray you to take such order that those ships which are already detained may be released’, they went on, concluding with a request that, in order to ‘prevent the going in of any ships hereafter into Falmouth . . . two [Parliamentarian] pinnaces may be immediately appointed to lie before the harbour to give notice to all ships of the danger of putting in there’.8 Three days later the Venetian Ambassador in London reported that ‘three ships with wine and other goods from Malaga’ had been seized by the Royalists in Falmouth and that the king was claiming ‘the right to use the ships for the transport of munitions’.9
The governor of Pendennis – the Tudor castle which, with its smaller twin, St Mawes, commanded the mouth of the River Fal – was Sir Nicholas Slanning. He was a man who possessed considerable experience of maritime affairs in Devon and Cornwall and who had previously served as vice admiral of the southern shore for both counties. Slanning was to play a vital role in the creation of a Royalist naval organisation in Cornwall.10 A certificate in his name dated 14 January 1643 makes it clear that he was already overseeing the capture of merchantmen and the disposal of their goods by this time.11 Three days later a whole fleet of ships bound for London was driven in under the guns of Pendennis by strong winds. Slanning promptly seized upon these vessels ‘and took their lading into the castle, in which he found some store of arms: and . . . a liberal stock of money’.12 Following the defeat of a Parliamentarian attempt to invade Cornwall on 19 January the Royalists managed to capture yet another enemy vessel. Sweeping down on Saltash – which the Parliamentarians had taken and fortified during their initial advance – Hopton’s men discovered that their opponents had ‘brought up in the river before the towne a goodly shipp, neere 400 tunn, with 16 pieces of ordnance in her’.13 This vessel was intended to provide the Roundhead soldiers in the town with supporting fire, but its presence failed to daunt the Royalists. Surging forward, they stormed the town – and took the ship as well. Thus Cornwall was once again freed of Parliamentarian troops.
Following their victory at Saltash the Royalists advanced into Devon. Here they were joined by George Carteret, a Jersey man who had been comptroller of the king’s Navy before the Civil War. Carteret had originally come over to Cornwall with the intention of raising a troop of horse for the king. Yet, as soon as he rode into the Cornish Army’s headquarters, Carteret found himself besieged by Hopton’s commanders, who, ‘after they had acquainted him with their . . . desperate want of [gun] powder’, begged him ‘to assist them in that manner, that the many good ports in their power might be made of some use to them in the supply of powder’. Realising that his wealth, his connections and his extensive naval experience did indeed make him perfectly qualified to undertake this vital task, Carteret quickly agreed. Soon afterwards he ‘returned into France; and first upon his own credit, and then upon return of such commodities out of Cornwall as they [i.e. the Cornish Royalists] could well spare, he supplied them with so great proportions of all kinds of ammunitions that they never found want after’.14 The Royalist munition trade which Carteret subsequently helped to mastermind was an extremely complex operation. It relied for its success on a network of Royalist agents in the Netherlands and France who ‘arranged the sale of [Cornish] tin and prizes, purchased munitions abroad and hired French and Dutch merchantmen to transport them to Cornwall’.15 Carteret initially established himself at St Malo, on the Breton coast, but later that year he managed to seize the island of Jersey for the king.16 Like the Scilly Isles – which Charles I’s supporters had held since the beginning of the war – Jersey now became one of the crucial links in the maritime chain which connected the Cornish Royalists with their continental arms suppliers.
As well as straining every nerve to secure munitions from abroad, the king’s Cornish supporters also had to guard themselves against attacks from the Parliamentarian ships which hovered off their coasts. The existing castles at Pendennis, St Mawes and St Michael’s Mount were all provided with permanent garrisons, while new ‘bulwarks’, or earthwork fortifications, were erected at various points along the coast. Hopton was especially concerned to secure the mouth of the Helford River, and a permanent fort was eventually built there at Dennis Head.17 Despite the Royalists’ preparations it is clear that Parliamentarian ships continued to cause alarms along many parts of the Cornish coast throughout early 1643. On 8 May, for example, Alexander Daniel of Larigan near Penzance recorded in his journal that ‘a few of the militia [i.e. the Parliamentarians] . . . landed at Whitsandbay, stole a bullock & a few sheep & ran away’. Two days later Daniel observed that ‘eleven militia ships’, which had been attempting to enter Mount’s Bay, had forced a Royalist warship ‘to run on ground by Pensance quay’, while two days after this he reported that ‘the bulwarks between Lirigan bridge and Nuland river’ had been newly ‘made up’ by the inhabitants: a step which must have been taken in anticipation of a further Parliamentarian attack.18 Fortunately for the coastal communities of West Cornwall, the Roundheads’ attentions were about to be drawn elsewhere. On 16 May Hopton destroyed Parliament’s Western army at Stratton in north-east Cornwall, subsequently chasing the demoralised Parliamentarian forces back into Devon and beyond. Over the following weeks the Royalists managed to conquer much of south-west England, and – with the Parliamentarians reeling – Charles I launched a bid to regain control of his Navy.
In July 1643 the king issued a proclamation ordering all naval officers and seamen to return to their allegiance by bringing their ships into Falmouth. In return, Charles promised, he would offer them employment, their arrears of pay and pardon for their past ‘traiterous’ actions.19 The king’s original plan was that Falmouth should serve as the base for a new Royalist Navy under the command of Sir John Pennington. However, following the Royalist capture of Bristol on 26 July it was decided that Pennington should base his naval operations on the Severn instead.20 Over the next three months the king’s generals captured a string of other south-western ports, including Weymouth, Barnstaple, Bideford and Dartmouth. In each of these places ships were seized for the king’s service and, as a result, the strength of the Royalist Navy in the South West continued to grow. Soon, swarms of Royalists ‘privateers’ – vessels owned by private individuals who had been issued with royal ‘letters of marque’ which permitted them to attack and capture hostile shipping – were cruising the waters off Devon and Cornwall in search of prizes. By October 1643 Royalist mariners operating out of Falmouth had grown bold enough to attack Parliamentarian ships carrying men and supplies to Plymouth, Parliament’s last remaining garrison in the far South West.21 And, despite the best efforts of Robert Rich, earl of Warwick – Parliament’s Lord High Admiral – munitions from French ports such as Roscoff, Bordeaux and La Rochelle continued to pour into Cornwall during the first half of 1644.22
In July 1644 the king’s naval commanders in Cornwall were charged with the most daunting responsibility that they had assumed in the conflict so far: that of conveying Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, safely across the Channel to France. Having recently given birth to a daughter in Exeter the queen had been forced to flee the city when Parliament’s main field army, under the earl of Essex, had advanced into Devon. Now, with Essex clearly preparing to follow the queen into Cornwall, it was imperative that she should be spirited away before her enemies could catch her. Warwick was well aware of what the Royalists were planning and had sent his Vice-Admiral, William Batten, to ‘plye about Falmouth’ in order to prevent the queen’s escape.23 Yet in the end the Royalists proved too slippery for their opponents. On the morning of 14 July Henrietta’s flotilla of ten ships emerged from Falmouth harbour, led by ‘a Flemmish man of warre’ that quickly ‘got to windward’ of the Parliamentarian vessels. The other Royalist ships followed suit and, ‘getting the advantage of the wind’, swiftly pulled away. As the Royalist vessels passed by Batten’s seamen glimpsed among them a sixteen-oar galley which had been provided for the ‘securer escape’ of the queen, lest ‘those other vessels should have beene worsted’. Eventually ‘a nimble frigot’ did manage to engage the Royalists ships but, as one Roundhead witness lamented, ‘they comming out tallowed and trained for so important a service, had a maine advantage in flight’. Though Batten pursued the Royalist ships ‘to the very borders of France’, he was unable to prevent them from putting in at Brest, where they promptly ‘landed her Majestie’.24 Warwick was left to gnash his teeth and to lament that it was ‘want of shipping’ that had ‘disappointed that service at Falmouth’.25
7.1 Map of South Cornwall showing the Fowey peninsula
Within a fortnight of Henrietta Maria’s escape Cornwall was invaded by the Parliamentarian army. Historians continue to debate precisely why Essex took the momentous decision to advance across the Tamar at this time, but it is clear that he sought first to reduce Cornwall itself and second to close off the supplies of munitions from abroad which had long been reaching the king through the Cornish ports. As Essex’s army marched westwards it was shadowed by Parliamentarian ships in the Channel and, by late July, the earl of Warwick was anchored in Plymouth Sound, holding himself in readiness to assist Essex’s troops from the sea.26 At first it seemed that the combined Parliamentarian forces would sweep everything before them, but Essex’s high hopes swiftly turned to dust. Already facing a Royalist army under Sir Richard Grenville to the west, Essex now learned that the king’s forces were bearing down on him from the east. To make matters even worse, the Cornish people were almost unanimously hostile to the Roundhead troops and were refusing to supply them with food. The Venetian ambassador summed up Essex’s plight well: ‘Plunging into Cornwall’, he wrote, ‘[Essex] has been surrounded, so that, with the unfriendly attitude of the country people, he has to get his supplies by sea.’27 On 2 August Essex moved south from Bodmin to Lostwithiel in order to secure the harbour of Fowey. As his men settled themselves into their new positions, with the sea at their backs, Essex sent a series of increasingly desperate pleas to Parliament for help. Warwick did what he could to assist the beleaguered Parliamentarian troops and sent a number of ships with ammunition and food. On 6 August, for example, the Providence of Plymouth carried a cargo of livestock into Fowey to help feed Essex’s men, because – as one of the ship’s company recorded bitterly – ‘all that countrye is soe rotten, & would bring in noe provisions to our Army’.28
Over the following days Essex’s position went from bad to worse as the Cavalier noose slowly tightened around him. First the Royalists captured the blockhouse at Polruan, on the east bank of the River Fowey opposite Fowey town. As a result it became much more dangerous for Parliamentary ships to make their way into the harbour. Then the wind swung round to the west, making it impossible for Warwick to send in any further supplies. On 18 August the Lord Admiral wrote to the Committee of Both Kingdoms from Plymouth Sound, informing them that ‘the wind hath been long at west and blown so hard that we could send no relief to the Lord General’s army, which receives all its provision from this town’.29 Essex still controlled the harbour of Par and the coves of Polkerris and Menabilly, on which small boats could beach, but on 26 August even Par was denied him when Royalist troops wrenched it from the Parliamentarians in order ‘to stopp their landing of provisions by sea’.30 Faced with remorseless Royalist pressure on every side, the weary Roundhead foot soldiers could no longer maintain their defensive perimeter and on 30 August they stumbled back to Fowey, Polkerris and Menabilly, ‘there to await transportation by the Parliamentarian fleet at sea’.31 Unfortunately for them, the ships which they were expecting never arrived, ‘it being very wyndy, and crosse wind for Essex[’s] shipping of his men’, as one gleeful Royalist officer observed.32 Essex now gave up all hopes of evacuating his troops en masse and decided to shift for himself. That night he and a couple of his senior officers were rowed out in a fishing boat to one of Warwick’s ships, which was lying off the shore, and borne away to Plymouth in safety. The foot-soldiers whom Essex had left behind – some 6,000 men in all – had no choice but to surrender to the king two days later. It was the most abject Parliamentarian defeat of the war – and one which made the true limitations of contemporary sea-power very clear.
7.2 Polruan Blockhouse from which the Royalists controlled the entrance to Fowey Harbour
(Ward Jackson collection)
With Cornwall safely back in the king’s hands, Royalist mariners now resumed their gun running and privateering activities from the Cornish ports. One wealthy shipowner, Sir Nicholas Crisp, ‘set out a force of 15 privateers in the king’s name’ during early 1645 and found that ‘Devon and Cornwall provided ideal bases from which to scour the western approaches, the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel’.33 Many of those who served aboard the ships operating out of the Cornish ports at this time were foreigners and the most prominent of them all was Jan Van Haesdonck, a Flemish military entrepreneur.34 In May 1645 Sir John Arundell – who had succeeded to the command of Pendennis Castle following Slanning’s death – wrote to the king’s secretary, George Digby, informing him that ‘since my last there arrived in this port Captain Haesdonck from Dunkirk and two other commanders with him, in three frigates bravely manned’. Arundell was most impressed by the new arrivals. ‘These men, it would seem, are very hearty for his majesty’, he wrote, ‘having brought in with them 8 prizes . . . whereof one is a man of war of the Parliament’s party, laden with 10 pieces of ordnance’. ‘If we can keep these frigates here’, Arundell concluded, ‘I believe his Majesty’s sea-service will be much advanced in these western parts by their employment’.35 As it turned out, Van Haesdonck was quite prepared to stay on in Cornwall and over the following months he proved himself highly active in the Royalist cause. In September, for example, Warwick was informed that ‘John Van Haesdonck, commander of the fleet for his Majesty now in Falmouth’, was planning to launch an attack on the Parliamentarian-held island of Guernsey with some twenty or thirty ships.36 Later that month a list drawn up by a senior Royalist showed that Van Haesdonck had recently captured five Scottish ships and at least one other vessel as well.37
In November 1645 more ships from the Netherlands arrived when the earl of Antrim, an Irish Royalist, sailed into Falmouth with two Dutch frigates. Antrim had brought all sorts of munitions with him and these were subsequently distributed to Royalist troops throughout the whole of Cornwall. Yet the chief purpose of Antrim’s mission may well have been to put his ships at the disposal of Charles, Prince of Wales, then the titular commander of the Royalist forces in the South West.38 Following the defeat of Charles I’s main field army at Naseby in June 1645 it had become clear that the tide of war was turning against the king and when Parliament’s New Model Army marched into Devon and established itself in the countryside around Exeter a few months later the thoughts of those about the prince must have begun to turn to possible ways of wafting their royal charge abroad. In January 1646 the Parliamentarians resumed their westward march, sweeping through the South Hams and laying siege to Dartmouth. Batten, who had previously been patrolling the coasts of Cornwall, now sailed eastwards in order to assist Sir Thomas Fairfax, the commander of the New Model Army, in his attack upon the town. But Batten did not leave the Cornish ports unguarded: in a letter of 17 January he reported that he had left five ships off Falmouth ‘to attend . . . [the prince’s] motion, and to secure our merchant ships out and home’.39
Within days Fairfax had captured Dartmouth and within a month he was preparing to advance into Cornwall itself. With defeat staring them in the face, the last hope of the Royalist diehards in Cornwall was that thousands of troops would shortly arrive to reinforce them from Ireland and France. Yet Fairfax was determined to prevent this from happening and on 25 February his forces advanced across the Tamar, pushing the Royalists before them as they went. The Cornish people – seeing that the war was lost and terrified that hordes of foreign Catholics might descend on their shores at any moment – now began to desert the king’s cause in droves. The Royalist commanders realised that their position was collapsing and that the prince’s departure could no longer be delayed. On the evening of 2 March Prince Charles finally boarded the warship Phoenix off Land’s End and sailed for the Isles of Scilly.40 Within three weeks of his departure the entire Royalist army in Cornwall had surrendered, as had most of the Cornish garrisons. Pendennis continued to hold out for some months, but – with the surrender of St Mawes – Falmouth no longer provided a safe anchorage for Royalist ships. Instead, the king’s privateers were forced to transfer their base of operations: first to the Scilly Isles and then to the safer ports of Jersey and south-western Ireland.41 March 1646 did not mark the end of the Civil War at sea – but it did mark the end of ‘His Majestie’s sea-service’ in Cornwall.
Notes and References
1 See M. Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, 1642–60 (Truro: Bradford Barton, 1963), p. 37; M. Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), p. 70; and C.E.H. Chadwyck-Healey (ed.), Bellum Civile: Sir Ralph Hopton’s Narrative of his Campaign in the West, 1642–44, Somerset Record Society 18 (Barnicoll, 1902), pp. 21–22.
2 See M. Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (Yale, 2005), ch. 2.
3 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. II, 1640–42 (London, 1802), p. 818.
4 See, for example, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland MSS, I (London, 1892), p. 101.
5 British Library, Thomason Tracts, E.126 (11), Most Joyfull Newes by Sea and Land (London, 25 October 1642).
6 British Library, Thomason Tracts, E.128 (4), True Newes from our Navie now at Sea (London, 24 November 1642).
7 J.R. Powell and E.K. Timings (eds), Documents Relating to the Civil War, 1642–48 (London: Navy Records Society, 1963), p. 46.
8 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic [hereafter CSPD], 1641–43 (London, 1887), p. 437.
9 Calendar of State Papers, Venetian [hereafter CSPV], 1642–43 (London, 1925), p. 226.
10 On Slanning, see F.T.R. Edgar, Sir Ralph Hopton: The King’s Man in the West, 1642–52 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 54; and Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, pp. 38–39 and 117.
11 CSPD, 1641–43, p. 449.
12 Powell and Timings, Documents Relating to the Civil War, p. 58.
13 Chadwyck-Healey, Bellum Civile, p. 31.
14 ‘George Carteret’, Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter DNB]; and E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), vol. II, pp. 458–59.
15 Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, p. 39.
16 ‘Carteret’, DNB.
17 C. Vyvyan, ‘Defence of the Helford River’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 18:1 (1910), passim, especially pp. 69, 79, 81.
18 Cornwall Record Office [hereafter CRO]: Daniel MSS, DD EN 2469, Book 1 (Alexander Daniel’s diary), f. 39.
19 J.F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume II: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–46 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 927–30.
20 B. Capp, ‘Naval Operations’, in J. Kenyon and J. Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–60 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 166.
21 Powell and Timings, Documents Relating to the Civil War, p. 100.
22 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon MSS, volume 23, no. 1755.
23 British Library, Thomason Tracts, E.2 (29), The True Relation of the Queene’s Departure from Falmouth (London, 22 July 1644).
24 Ibid.
25 Powell and Timings, Documents Relating to the Civil War, p. 164.
26 Capp, ‘Naval Operations’, p. 170; and Powell and Timings, Documents Relating to the Civil War, p. 167.
27 CSPV, 1643–47, p. 129.
28 British Library, Add. MS 35297 (Daybook of John Syms), ff. 40v–41.
29 CSPD, 1644 (London, 1888), p. 436.
30 Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, p. 145; and I. Roy (ed.), Richard Symonds’s Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 58.
31 Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, p. 147.
32 Roy (ed.), Richard Symonds’s Diary, p. 65.
33 Capp, ‘Naval Operations’, p. 173.
34 For Van Haesdonck, see P. Edwards, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 117, 187, 202–3, 214, 220; and Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, pp. 93, 96, 220.
35 CSPD, 1644–45 (London, 1890), p. 494.
36 Powell and Timings, Documents Relating to the Civil War, p. 212.
37 Ibid., p. 213.
38 J.H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 163.
39 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland MSS, I, p. 339.
40 Coate, Cornwall in the Great Civil War and Interregnum, p. 205; and ‘N.H.N.’ (ed.), Memoirs of [Anne] Lady Fanshawe (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), p. 73.
41 Capp, ‘Naval Operations’, pp. 174–75.