Catastrophe at Spithead: The Sinking of the Royal George

By Hilary L. Rubinstein

This fascinating historical inquiry sheds new light on the mysterious sinking of an 18th century warship and its lingering effect on British naval culture.

On August 29th, 1782, the mighty flagship HMS Royal George suddenly capsized while anchored in the calm, familiar waters of Spithead on the English Channel. In one of the most sensational and perplexing incidents in naval history, Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, an outstanding veteran officer, drowned along with more than 800 crew and many civilian visitors.

Catastrophe at Spithead is the first comprehensive account of the sinking, drawn from a variety of archival sources, including reports by survivors and eyewitnesses. Hilary L. Rubinstein examines the mysterious cause and tragic cost of the disaster, as well as its lingering aftereffects, including its treatment in literature.

As well as describing the sinking, Rubenstein uncovers new information on the life and career of Rear Admiral Kempenfelt, ranging from his familial relation to the great Admiral Rodney to accounts of his whereabouts when the ship sank. These call into question the scenario in William Cowper's famous poem, “On the Sinking of the Royal George,” which depicts Kempenfelt writing in his cabin when she foundered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526765000

Book preview

CATASTROPHE AT SPITHEAD

Catastrophe at Spithead

The sinking of the

Royal George

HILARY L RUBINSTEIN

Copyright © Hilary L Rubinstein 2020

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Seaforth Publishing,

A division of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street,

Barnsley S70 2AS

www.seaforthpublishing.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5267 6499 7 (

HARDBACK

)

ISBN 978 1 5267 6500 0 (

EPUB

)

ISBN 978 1 5267 6501 7 (

KINDLE

)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

The right of Hilary L Rubinstein to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Pen & Sword Books Limited incorporates the imprints of Atlas, Archaeology, Aviation, Discovery, Family History, Fiction, History, Maritime, Military, Military Classics, Politics, Select, Transport, True Crime, Air World, Frontline Publishing, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing, The Praetorian Press, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe Transport, Wharncliffe True Crime and White Owl

CONTENTS

Introduction

One The Royal George and Admiral Kempenfelt

Two The Rise of Richard Kempenfelt

Three A Talented Officer

Four Captain of the Fleet

Five Into the Vortex

Six The Court Martial and its Verdict

Seven The Great Enigma: Why Did She Sink?

Eight The Legacy of the Royal George

Nine Clearing the Wreck

Ten The Fate of Survivors

Notes

Bibliography

Colour plate section

INTRODUCTION

Rear-Admiral Richard Kempenfelt was one of the Royal Navy’s outstanding figures. A much-voyaged master tactician, he applied his clever scientific mind to improvements within the naval service – notably devising a flexible numerical signal code, which by enabling more fluent communication between ships at sea reduced the likelihood of fleet commanders’ intentions being misunderstood. The legacy of his labours informed manoeuvres during the conflicts with Revolutionary France and Napoleon.

Kempenfelt sailed through dangerous waters, some unreliably charted, to the other side of the world and back. In one of the most sensational and puzzling incidents in naval history, he drowned along with most of his crew and their many civilian visitors, male and female, one summer morning in a familiar English anchorage. This work examines that tragedy, the sudden capsizing at Spithead on 29 August 1782 of Kempenfelt’s mighty flagship HMS Royal George. It discusses such issues as how and why she sank; on whom, if anyone, the blame should fall; the number and nature of the casualties; and the disaster’s impact on the nation’s psyche. Utilising diverse sources, it evaluates Kempenfelt’s life and career, showing how gifted he was, uncovering his family tie to another famous Georgian admiral, and setting his flagship’s loss in its national context.

‘Kempenfelt was a man whose pen was as mighty as his sword,’ The Times (29 August 1913) observed in an editorial devoted to this remarkable sailor-scholar. ‘As a thinker and naval reformer he had few equals and no superior among the great naval heroes of his time.’ Regrettably, however, William Cowper’s ‘dirge on the loss of the Royal George enshrines all that is now known to most of us about [him]’. Long since generally accepted as an accurate account of Kempenfelt’s final moments, Cowper’s famous scenario of the admiral trapped in his cabin, pen in hand, reflected a newspaper report of 31 August 1782. But as the present work shows, it was not the only contemporary version of Kempenfelt’s whereabouts. Had Cowper read a different newspaper, a rival scenario might have been immortalised and taken as gospel.

I owe much gratitude to Julian Mannering of Seaforth Publishing, and thank my editor Paul Middleton. I happily acknowledge the staff of various institutions for their kind and helpful responses to queries: Simon Bird, Curator, Ministry of Defence Art Collection, and his colleague Kelly Williams; Anne Delaney, Portsmouth History Centre; Jon Earle, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum; Heather Johnson, Archives Collections Officer, National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth; Alison Metcalfe, Curator of Missionary & Military Collections, Archives and Manuscript Collections, National Library of Scotland; Christine Reynolds, Assistant Keeper of Muniments, The Library, Westminster Abbey; Faye Rolland, National Records of Scotland; Carol Smith, State Library of Western Australia; Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck, Curator of Art, National Maritime Museum.

Sincere thanks also to Professor Timothy Wilson, together with Evelyn Lee and Margaret Woodcock, to naval and military records investigators RW (Bob) O’Hara and Susan Leggett for information from the National Archives, Kew, and to G Ian Goodson, Dr Michael A Jolles, Antoine Vanner, the late Peter Carlton Jones, and, last but certainly not least, my chief inspiration, my husband Bill.

One

THE ROYAL GEORGE AND ADMIRAL KEMPENFELT

Late August 1782. Britain was in the seventh year and fifth month of war with its rebellious American colonies. The Tory Lord North, following a vote of no confidence in his government over the loss of Yorktown the previous year, had resigned as prime minister in March. His replacement Lord Rockingham, a Whig, had died in July, and now another Whig, Lord Shelburne, held the post. North’s fall had meant a change of first lord of the Admiralty, with Admiral Augustus Keppel succeeding John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich in that role. The Comte de Grasse, defeated by Admiral Sir George Rodney at the battle of the Saintes in April, had just been brought a prisoner of war to England, the first commander-in-chief of a French force so held on British soil since the reign of Queen Anne. On parts of the southern English landscape drenching rains had left their compensatory effect. ‘[T]he country never was in such beauty; the herbage and leafage are luxurious,’ wrote art collector and man of letters Horace Walpole, son of Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, from his ‘little Gothic castle’ at Twickenham near London. ‘The Thames gives itself Rhône airs, and almost foams.’ ¹

Meanwhile, all was hustle and bustle at Portsmouth, Britain’s premier naval port, where de Grasse had landed on the first of the month and, reaping the courtesy due to an honourable enemy, had been entertained to a ‘most sumptuous dinner’ at the George Inn days later paid for by Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Parker, aboard whose ship he had arrived.² At Spithead, the capacious sheltered roadstead between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, the Channel Fleet (also known as the Western Squadron, and colloquially as the ‘Grand Fleet’) had gathered, under the overall command of Admiral Lord Howe. It was making final preparations for sailing to the relief of Gibraltar, besieged from 1779 by France and Spain. Blockaded by a Franco–Spanish fleet and threatened by a huge land army, its British garrison, commanded by General George Elliot, was running out of food and supplies. Twice since the siege began British fleets had managed to enter the Bay with stores – in January 1780 under Admiral Rodney and in April 1781 under Vice-Admiral George Darby. But, although the garrison’s morale remained high, conditions had deteriorated again following Spain’s seizure of Minorca in July 1781, which put a stop to Minorca-based privateers under British colours running the Gibraltar blockade to the garrison’s benefit.

The ‘Grand Fleet’ at Spithead was always an arresting spectacle – especially from such venues as the ramparts at Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight fishing village of Ryde, and the chalky ridge of the South Downs known as Portsdown Hill. Spithead ‘is capable of holding a thousand ships at a time, without the least difficulty or danger: it is defended from all the winds blowing from the west to the south-east, by the high lands of the Isle of Wight; and from the winds of the opposite quarter by the mainland of Hampshire, the town of Portsmouth fronting the middle of [Spithead],’ enthused a prolific Scots-born author in a work published in 1774. ‘The limits of this road are exactly distinguishable by buoys properly placed; so that here as well as in respect to the King’s Yard and the harbour, the singular security and admirable congruity has induced the sailors … to express the ease and safety they enjoy, by calling it the King’s Bedchamber.’ Just west of the naval anchorage was the gathering place of East Indiamen and vessels in quarantine; this anchorage took its name from the Motherbank, a shallow sandbar between Ryde and Cowes.³

A northern clergyman wrote of his initial visit to Portsmouth around the same time: ‘The ample harbour is so land-locked on every side, that the wind must be very high, to give even the least motion to the larger ships which anchor in it. We were on board … a first-rate, which lay like a castle on the water, though there was both a current and a considerable wind.’ Besides ‘innumerable skiffs and smaller vessels’ there were ‘between fifty and sixty sail of the line. Some of them appeared lying unrigged in the water: others in commission with their colours flying.’ Not surprisingly, the great three-deckers of 100 guns made the grandest sights of all. ‘Were I a King of England,’ declared Welsh naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, who twice visited Portsmouth and had married a lieutenant’s daughter, ‘I would never receive an ambassador with any solemnity but in the cabin of a first-rate man of war: there is the true seat of Empire!’⁴

Ships at anchor at Spithead, beyond Portsmouth Harbour.

(© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PAH2006)

Seventy-three miles from London by stagecoach making five stops along the way, Portsmouth had, in August 1782, its share of visitors. Some were content to view the seascape from the land, but others went out in hired craft for a closer look. Of all the ships of war then assembled at Spithead, none made a more splendid impression than the big old-fashioned Royal George, her upper and middle decks’ exteriors painted red ochre, anchored not very far from the red buoy that marked the spot where the remains of Vice-Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker’s flagship Edgar (70) – which blew up in 1711 when her magazine accidentally caught fire, dooming about 500 on board – lay in fourteen fathoms of water.⁵

‘In the year 1756,’ someone at Gosport wrote of the Royal George now, she ‘was looked upon by every officer in the Navy to be the finest ship that had ever been seen, but the ships we have at present of the same rate excel her greatly.’ Even so, in 1782 she – the oldest first-rate in commission – still made a rewarding sight. Witness the impact she had the previous year on future admiral (Sir) Thomas Byam Martin, the young son of Captain Henry Martin, the Navy Board’s resident commissioner at Portsmouth:

In going across the harbour [from Gosport to Portsmouth] we passed close under the stern of the old Royal George. It was the first time I ever floated on salt water, the first hundred-gun ship I ever saw. Ye gods! What a sight – what a sensation! I feel it now as I write, and if I live to the age of Methuselah it will remain unimpaired … It is impossible to forget the breathless astonishment and delight with which my eyes were fixed upon this ship. Nothing so exquisitely touching has ever occurred to me since to produce the same frantic joy. After the first exclamation of ecstasy I for a time spoke not a word, overwhelmed by a thousand feelings, and almost motionless, until presently, as we approached nearer to the Royal George, and went closely under her richly carved stern, I broke into a rapid succession of questions, and jumping about, and almost springing out of the hands of the strokesman of the boat, who held me as I stood on the seat, I was told I should tumble into the sea if I was not quiet …

⁶

The Royal George, as depicted for the General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, June 1756.

(© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PU5958)

Pierced for 100 guns, by 1782 she mounted 108 including carronades. Originally she carried the heaviest metal of any ship in the fleet but owing to her advancing age, at her refit in 1778 her brass 42- and 32-pdrs had been replaced by iron 32-pdrs and brass 24- and 12-pdrs. She had been ordered on 29 August 1746 and was laid down at Woolwich Dockyard on 8 January 1747. Almost a decade on the stocks, she cost £65,274 to build and fit (about £7 million in today’s money), and as one of Britain’s essential ‘wooden walls’ came cheap at the price. Intended to be called the Royal Anne, she was named more appropriately after the then reigning monarch, George II. Her nominal complement was 850. Commissioned in October 1755 under Captain Richard Dorrill and launched on 18 February 1756, when the whiff of overdue war with France was sniffable, she was the first Royal Navy ship to exceed (by 47 tons) 2,000 tons burden (the equivalent of 3,745 by modern standards) and measured 212ft 9in from her figurehead to her taffrail. She was the largest man of war that a British dockyard had ever up to that time built, and something of a wonder, with the tallest masts and squarest sails of any English-built ship in the Royal Navy. Although ‘rather short and high’ by later standards, with a somewhat pear-shaped hull, in her prime she ‘was considered the paragon of beauty, the ne plus ultra of perfection in the science of marine architecture, and one of the finest vessels in Europe’.⁷

A young black slave belonging to a sea officer who in 1757 was briefly on her muster roll, would recall that she ‘was the largest ship I had ever seen; so that when I came on board of her I was surprised at the number of people, men, women, and children, of every denomination; and the largeness of the guns, many of them also of brass, which I had never seen before. Here were also shops or stalls of every kind of goods, and people crying their different commodities about the ship as in a town.’ A seaman wrote: ‘[H]er lanterns were so big, that the men used to go into them to clean them.’⁸

While she was still at Woolwich it was reported that: ‘People resort almost daily to see her.’ What awed them, besides her imposing size and lofty masts – the great mainmast, with its topmast and topgallant mast, stood 114ft 3in high – was the gilded carving on her bow depicting a warrior in Roman garb with a white-painted horse on either side of him, his saddlecloth bearing the crowned monogram G.R., and the grand ornate embellishments (‘gingerbread work’) decorating her broad three-storeyed stern. Moreover, as she was intended for ‘an admiral of the first rank’ – expected to be Lord Anson, although as things turned out Edward Boscawen would fly his flag in her first – ‘she is fitted and decorated in a very extraordinary manner, by the most able carver and painter in England, particularly her cabins and state rooms in basso relievo’. Among those curious to view the ship had been the brand-new Moroccan ambassador – who made that ambition clear as soon as he disembarked at Plymouth, and received his wish shortly afterwards – as well as, on a separate occasion, seven people from Essex who were drowned when a brig struck their boat in the Thames as they made their way towards the great ship.⁹

The ship sailed so well that ‘she has had more [admirals’] flags on board her than any vessel in the service’. The colour of the flag depended upon whichever of the three nominal squadrons – red, white, or blue in descending order of importance – each individual admiral belonged. And the mast from which the flag flew was determined by that particular officer’s rank in the admirals’ hierarchy – rear-admiral (mizzen), vice-admiral (fore), or full admiral (main). She had been Vice-Admiral Boscawen’s flagship, 1757–58; Admiral Lord Anson’s, 1758–59; Rear-Admiral Francis Geary’s very briefly in 1759 when his normal flagship was refitting; and Admiral Sir Edward Hawke’s, 1759–62. Her apotheosis was as Hawke’s flagship at his famous victory of 20 November 1759 over the Comte de Conflans in gale-force winds amid the reefs and shoals of Quiberon Bay on the Breton coast, a triumph seen as the Trafalgar of the Seven Years’ War.

Following that war she underwent a substantial repair at Plymouth in 1765–68, and was laid up in ordinary at the Hamoaze, the estuarine stretch of the River Tamar, for the ensuing ten years, being refitted at Portsmouth for Channel service. She was Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Harland’s flagship, 1778–79; Vice-Admiral George Darby’s during the summer of 1779; Rear-Admiral Sir John Lockhart Ross’s after that, and from early April 1782 Kempenfelt’s.¹⁰

While Howe’s Gibraltar-bound fleet was gathering and provisioning at Spithead in the late summer of 1782, a macabre occurrence transfixed the district. David Tyrie, a Scot who had been working as a clerk in the Portsmouth Navy Office, was convicted at Winchester Assizes of sending information regarding the current strength and movements of the Royal Navy to the French. The offence was treason (‘falsely, wickedly, and traitorously’ endangering the King’s person and realm and ‘unlawfully adhering to the king’s enemies’). The consequent sentence, carried out on 24 August at Southsea Common near the beach before a vast crowd, entailed – to the revulsion of town officials charged with carrying it out – the full medieval penalty: hanging until almost dead, disembowelling while still alive, his heart torn out and burned, his genitals cut off, and his body quartered by four horses pulling in different directions. Frenzied souvenir-hunters then hacked off Tyrie’s fingers, toes and ribs, while the turnkey at Gosport’s bridewell carried away his head, intent on exhibiting it for personal gain.¹¹

Among the crowd was William Trimmer, a twelve-year-old from Ealing belonging to HMS Ganges. ‘I say [sic; saw] Tyrie hanged the day I was on shore,’ he informed his mother, ‘but I say [sic; saw?] nothing of the inhumanity of the soldiers and sailors.’

Then, just five days later, another local sensation, one altogether more devastating than a reviled traitor’s ignominious end, left Portsmouth, the Royal Navy, and the entire country shaken – the abrupt sinking of the Royal George at her Spithead moorings on 29 August, dooming most of her company and numerous visitors. The casualties ranged from infants to Richard Kempenfelt, the elderly rear-admiral whose blue flag adorned her mizzen mast. ‘Admiral Kempenfelt is a loss indeed,’ wrote Walpole, ‘but I confess I feel more for the hundreds of poor babes who have lost their parents!’

Observed Trimmer: ‘[I]t was the [most] shocking sight that I think ever could be to see dead men and women floting [sic] by, hammocks, hats, ducks, pigs floting [sic] on pieces of spare masts, fowls, geese, hen coops, chests, blocks, boats keel upwards …’

In a lively memoir written in 1836 when he was a retired commander, James Anthony Gardner, a midshipman on the Panther (60), which picked up twenty-seven survivors, recalled the general ‘astonishment’ that met the news that the Royal George had foundered with the loss of ‘two-thirds of her crew’. ‘It was a sad sight to see the dead bodies floating about Spithead by scores until we sailed [for Gibraltar].’¹²

Even great three-deckers could test the snugness of the ‘King’s Bedchamber’ when winds blew furious: early in 1781 ‘during ‘a ferocious gale of wind from the NW to the NNW’ the Royal George and four other big ships broke from their moorings, and had it not been daylight ‘would soon have sunk each other’.

‘The gale was so violent, that the ships in the harbour drove with two anchors a-head’; a man-of-war at the Motherbank, preparing for convoy duty, ‘ran foul of another ship and was obliged to cut away her masts’; certain vessels lost their bowsprits or were otherwise injured, including one that, driven onto the large shoal known as the Horse Sand, ‘lost her rudder, and received considerable damage’.

But no violent gale portended calamity the morning the Royal George went down, going from seaborne to seabed in under ten minutes. ‘Nothing beside this awful circumstance could for some time occupy the conversation of either inhabitant or visitor,’ recalled a local resident. ‘[T]he consternation depicted on the countenances of the inhabitants … is more easily conceived than described … Volcanoes, earthquakes, and shipwrecks are usually preceded or attended with fearful indications and concomitants; while in the present instance all was calm and still.’¹³

Lord Howe hurriedly informed the Admiralty: ‘It is with inexpressible concern that I have occasion to inform you of the loss of the Royal George, which ship, being upon the heel this morning, suddenly overset, filled, and sunk. The captain is much bruised, and some of the people (I fear not many) have been saved: but I have not the satisfaction to hear that the rear-admiral is among the number.

‘Much as this misfortune is to be lamented, I esteem the loss of that officer the most interesting circumstance attending it, as regards the detriment to the King’s naval service. A fresh wind and a lee tide prevent me, by this express, to add any particulars respecting this unhappy event.’

He followed this up with a list of 331 personnel known to be safe (only those of warrant rank and above were listed by name), including the captain, six lieutenants (two of them acting), three warrant officers (boatswain, gunner, and purser), thirteen midshipmen, two marine lieutenants, two marine sergeants, one of the surgeon’s mates, and the captain’s clerk.¹⁴

An officer on a ship within sight of the Royal George informed a friend of ‘as fine a morning as ever rose … the water as smooth as a duckpond’, and of the scornful laughter that greeted a midshipman who burst into the wardroom to tell the breakfasters there that she ‘had turned over and sunk’.

But when a lieutenant, deathly pale, arrived to confirm the news, they all rushed upon deck. ‘What an altered scene in a few short moments! This fine, this noble ship that so often had borne our heroes to victory, and whose one broadside could sink a French seventy-four [a reference to the short work she had made of the Superbe in 1759] was gone, and not in battle!’

All the boats cast off – unhappily two of theirs were ‘quite loaded at the Dockyard’ – and ‘from every ship and from the shore all the small craft was soon in motion to save the drowning men; and 200 or 250 men were saved in this way, but near 1200 must have gone down in her’. For on board were ‘a large number of artisans and workmen from the Yard to expedite her repairs – some 200 or 300 women and children come to see husbands and fathers – and 100 or 200 ladies from the Point, who, though seeking neither husbands nor fathers, yet visit our newly-arrived ships of war – and also a due proportion of the Jewish tribe with their various tempting baubles.’¹⁵

Citing a high estimate, a twentieth-century author noted ‘an odd coincidence’: besides the seamen and marines, ‘four hundred prostitutes or other women of the town, and … four hundred Bibles just received, the day before, from the … Bible Society’ also went down. ‘The Bibles were the first shipment ever made to a British man of war.’ The Bible Society’s annual report, printed in a newspaper earlier in August, indicates that the Society, not long founded, and dependent upon donations, had, so far, distributed 10,900 free Bibles to many ships and regiments: the Royal George – Kempenfelt believed strongly in encouraging piety among seamen – headed the list.¹⁶

Howe’s grievous news reached the Admiralty on the tragic day. The recipients could scarcely credit it, and when it circulated the following morning the wider public was startled. As the principal topic of Londoners’ conversation the disaster replaced a rumour that George III’s midshipman son, Prince William Henry, had died in New York.

‘[T]he upsetting of the Royal George whilst at anchor at Spithead was not believed in London by many experienced naval officers and others until it could no longer be doubted,’ the commanding officer of a 50-gun ship anchored half a mile from the vessel would recall.

‘The gloom and consternation’ the news spread over London ‘are hardly to be conceived, and the incredibility of the fact increased the sense of the disaster’, remembered a former official of the East India Company who was an MP when the ship sank.¹⁷

‘Yesterday forenoon the whole metropolis was exceedingly agitated,’ reported the Whitehall Evening Post (31 August 1782):

The annals of this country do not afford so unexpected an accident, nor scarcely one more dreadful in its consequences … The great loss the nation hath sustained … lies chiefly in the death of the brave Admiral Kempenfelt and his gallant crew … The loss of so large a ship, in such a manner at Spithead, is a matter unparalleled in the maritime history of England.

(In 1545, with Henry VIII looking on from Southsea Castle, Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew’s Mary Rose had capsized very near the same spot with the loss of virtually all her crew of at least 400 when she suddenly heeled, flooded and sank. She, however, was not at anchor, but leading the English fleet into battle against a French fleet that had entered the Solent intent on invasion.)

The Royal George’s captain, Martin Waghorn, was ‘almost out of his mind with the shock of losing his friend Admiral Kempenfelt, and so many brave fellows, in so simple a way’. He, ‘in the very alarming moment of great consternation for the loss of the [ship], was so exceedingly affected, as to have lost all power of utterance, his change of countenance and distorted features were the only language which expressed the feelings of his heart’.¹⁸

Poet William Cowper’s little-known Latin ode on the tragedy, ‘In Submersionem Navigii’, appeared in the Public Advertiser of 23 August 1783. But the well-known English poem (one is not a translation of the other) was published posthumously – in the opening years of the nineteenth century. When Thomas Wright’s biography of Cowper appeared in 1892 an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend AA Isaacs, recalled that the Reverend Henry Tacey, rector of Swanton Morley, Norfolk, knew many details of Cowper’s life and had told him that: ‘Cowper and his family were friends of Admiral Kempenfelt.’ The poet, in one of his depressed moods, was ‘pacing up and down his room in an undertone humming the March in Scipio’ when Mary Unwin, his widowed landlady and companion,

burst into the room, exclaiming, ‘Oh, Mr Cowper, this morning’s paper gives the most terrible news. Our dear friend Admiral Kempenfelt, &c.’ Then, sitting down, so absorbed in the tragic occurrence as to be insensible to Cowper’s emotion, she proceeded to read the account from the beginning to the end. It was while she was so engaged and the poet was pacing up and down, to the measured cadences of the March, that he composed the well-known ‘Ad Memoriam,’ ‘Toll for the brave – brave Kempenfelt is gone’.

¹⁹

Wright’s book ignores the poem concerned, which is usually said to have been written to Handel’s Scipio at the request of another of Cowper’s female friends, Lady Austen, widow of a baronet and army officer. However, as Isaacs was led to believe, there may well have been a link between Kempenfelt and Cowper. For in his will, made and probated in 1709, the admiral’s great-uncle, Nathaniel Hunt of Clifford’s Inn, an inn of court abolished in 1903, declared: ‘I hereby forgive my late clerk John Cowper the debt he owes me and I give unto him the sum of one hundred pounds and all my books and I desire him to assist my executors in settling my accounts and getting in such debts as are now owed to me.’ Perhaps this John was a relative of Cowper’s father, a Hertfordshire rector and judge’s son who intended William himself for a career practising law.²⁰

There were conflicting reports regarding the reason the Royal George capsized, the numbers who perished, and the exact whereabouts of the admiral when he drowned. But the version of events Cowper read and then incorporated into a poem contained in Victorian and Edwardian school poetry textbooks and popular anthologies came to define the disaster.

Toll for the brave!

The brave that are no more;

All sunk beneath the wave,

Fast by their native shore!

Eight hundred of the brave,

Whose courage well was tried,

Had made the vessel heel,

And laid her on her side.

A land-breeze shook the shrouds,

And she was overset;

Down went the Royal George,

With all her crew complete.

Toll for the brave!

Brave Kempenfelt is gone;

His last sea-fight is fought;

His work of glory done.

It was not in the battle;

No tempest gave the shock;

She sprang no fatal leak;

She ran upon no rock.

His sword was in its sheath;

His fingers held the pen,

When Kempenfelt went down

With twice four hundred men.

Weigh the vessel up,

Once dreaded by our foes!

And mingle with our cup

The tear that England owes.

Her timbers yet are sound,

And she may float again,

Full charged with England’s thunder,

And plough the distant main.

But Kempenfelt is gone,

His victories are o’er;

And he and his eight hundred

Must plough the wave no more.

²¹

So astounding was the ship’s sudden sinking that the fledgling American republic’s representative in Brussels interpreted it as an ill omen for Britain. ‘Is there not, sir, something ominous in the loss of the Royal George?’ he wrote on 5 September to his country’s future president John Adams, then American ambassador to the Dutch Republic. ‘They no sooner attempt to clean her foul bottom but she oversets. What a number of whores sank with her!’ Later, an ‘ugly report’ – though ‘rather too wicked for credibility’ – gained currency: that the initial divers who investigated the wreck found bodies of ‘three hundred lewd women’ and their seafaring clients ‘in [copulating] pairs’.²²

‘The most melancholy scene my eyes ever beheld, has happened here this morning, about half past nine o’clock … The alarm and confusion at an event so unexpected and so horrid is indescribable,’ wrote an unidentified officer in the fleet to a friend in London on 29 August. ‘The beach, and houses about the Point, are now filled with the dying and the dead, men and women promiscuously tumbled in a heap; nothing is to be seen but objects of woe, and images of dejection … I just now saw on the Point a most poignant scene of anguish and distress, exhibited by a respectable looking old woman, whose daughter and five children had gone on board the same morning to see their father.’²³

‘For some days the three towns of Portsmouth, Gosport, and Common [the burgeoning residential district near the Dockyard later officially named Portsea] were in a commotion. Almost everyone had lost some relation, friend or acquaintance,’ noted John Ker, surgeon of HMS Queen, in his journal:

Every hour corpses were coming ashore on the beach. Every hour the bell was tolling and the long procession winding along the streets.