Historic environment: the Dutch Raid on the Medway, June 1667 (2027 exams)

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A is the fort at Sheerness, which was still being built and was taken by the Dutch on 10 June 1667. B is Chatham Dockyard, the navy's main base on the Medway.

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The English defence of the Medway was poorly prepared and largely failed, although it did stop the Dutch going further.

Before the raid, the government relied on a few fixed defences. The great ships, laid up 'in ordinary', lay above an iron chain stretched across the river at Gillingham, guarded by ships including the Unity, the Matthias and the Charles V. At the mouth of the river a new fort was being built at Sheerness, and Upnor Castle, an Elizabethan fort opposite Chatham Dockyard, guarded the anchorage. These defences were weak because of the shortage of money: Sheerness was unfinished and had few guns.

When the Dutch arrived, the first defence collapsed quickly. On 10 June they bombarded Sheerness and landed, and the small garrison fled. On 11 June the Duke of Albemarle, George Monck, reached Chatham. He found chaos: few men, little ammunition and unpaid dockyard workers who had stayed away. He ordered ships to be sunk as blockships to close the channel near the chain and set up gun batteries, but there was too little time. The Commissioner at Chatham, Peter Pett, had not moved the Royal Charles to safety upriver.

On 12 June the Dutch broke through the chain, captured the Unity and the Royal Charles and burned the Matthias and the Charles V. The blockships had not closed the channel. On 13 June the guns of Upnor Castle and the shore batteries fired on the Dutch, but they still burned the Royal Oak, the Loyal London and the Royal James; Captain Archibald Douglas refused to leave the burning Royal Oak and died on board. The defence did achieve something: the Dutch did not land at the dockyard or push further upstream, and they withdrew on 14 June. But the lack of money, men and preparation meant that the English could not save their fleet.

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The Treaty of Breda was important for England because it ended a war England could no longer afford, but on terms that showed how weak the raid had left it.

Firstly, the treaty ended the war. Peace talks had begun at Breda in May 1667, but the raid on the Medway in June left England with its best ships burned or captured and the Dutch blockading the Thames. After the plague and the Great Fire, the Crown had no money to rebuild the fleet quickly, so England's negotiators accepted terms within weeks, and the treaty was signed in July 1667.

Secondly, England kept its most important gain of the war. As the table shows, it kept New Netherland, captured in 1664, whose main town, New Amsterdam, had been renamed New York after the Duke of York. This joined England's colonies in New England to those further south and became a valuable port, so in the long run it was a significant gain.

However, England also made important concessions. The Dutch kept Surinam, with its sugar plantations, and England gave up its claim to the spice island of Run. The Navigation Act was relaxed so that Dutch ships could bring goods from Germany into England, which was a retreat from the trading policy that had caused the war. Many people saw these terms as the price of the humiliation at the Medway, and they added to the attacks on the Earl of Clarendon, who was dismissed in August.

Finally, the treaty did not end the rivalry. England joined the Dutch in the Triple Alliance of 1668, but Charles II still resented the humiliation, and in 1672 he went to war with the Dutch again, allied with France. Overall, Breda mattered because it ended an unaffordable war and kept New York, but its terms reflected the weakness exposed by the raid.

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The Dutch Raid on the Medway was certainly one of the most humiliating events of Charles II's reign. A study of the raid supports the statement to a large extent, because it was a national, public and very visible disgrace. However, other events, especially the crises of the 1670s and the Exclusion Crisis, were more serious threats to the King, even if he survived them.

The raid humiliated Charles in many ways. It is often described as the worst defeat in the history of the Royal Navy. An enemy fleet sailed into the Thames estuary, took the fort at Sheerness on 10 June 1667, broke the chain across the Medway at Gillingham and burned three of the navy's greatest ships, the Royal Oak, the Loyal London and the Royal James, close to Upnor Castle and Chatham Dockyard. Most humiliating of all, the Dutch captured the flagship Royal Charles, which, as the Naseby, had carried Charles home from exile in 1660. It was towed away to the Netherlands as a trophy, and its carved stern with the royal arms can still be seen in Amsterdam. The humiliation was public. Londoners panicked: Samuel Pepys sent his gold out of the city and feared that 'the whole kingdom is undone', and John Evelyn called the raid a dishonour never to be wiped off. The Dutch blockaded the Thames for weeks, and England had to make peace at Breda on terms favourable to the Dutch.

The raid also humiliated the King politically. Gossip claimed that he had spent the night the ships burned at supper with his mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and satirists such as Andrew Marvell attacked his court. Charles had to sacrifice his chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon, and Parliament investigated the failures of the war and how the money had been spent.

However, there were other humiliations. The sale of Dunkirk to France in 1662 was deeply unpopular, and crowds remembered it in 1667 with the rhyme 'Three sights to be seen: Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen'. In 1672 the Crown's debts forced the Stop of the Exchequer, effectively a royal bankruptcy. In 1673 Parliament forced Charles to withdraw his Declaration of Indulgence and accept the Test Act, which drove his brother James out of his post as Lord High Admiral. The Third Anglo-Dutch War, fought with French help, ended in 1674 without the victory Charles wanted. Tangier, part of the Queen's dowry, was abandoned in 1684 after costing huge sums.

The most serious challenge of all was the Popish Plot of 1678 and the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81. Parliament tried to exclude James from the succession, which threatened the hereditary monarchy itself, and Charles's minister Danby was impeached. These crises were more dangerous than the raid because they challenged the King's authority and the future of the dynasty. However, Charles won in the end: he dissolved the Oxford Parliament in 1681 and ruled without Parliament until his death in 1685. The raid, by contrast, was a defeat he could never reverse.

Overall, a study of the Dutch Raid on the Medway supports the statement to a large extent. The Exclusion Crisis was a greater threat to the monarchy, but Charles emerged from it stronger. The raid was the greatest humiliation, because it was a complete, public defeat by a foreign enemy in the King's own river, symbolised by the loss of the very ship that had restored him.