The Lion of Sole Bay (Strong Winds)

by Julia Jones

  (And just in case you’re sufficiently interested in the great de Ruyter to wonder what happened to him, I can tell you that he was fatally wounded by a cannonball in 1676, just four years later, when the Dutch and Spanish fleets had joined together to fight the French.)

  When historians ask what difference a battle made, however, they’re not usually asking about the 55,234 differences. They’re more likely to be thinking about issues such as the balance of power between countries or the effects on an economy.

  Initially the Battle of Sole Bay looked like bad news for the English. They’d only taken that single prize, the Stavoren, and many of their larger ships had suffered too much damage to go out again soon. James Duke of York spent the next two months trying unsuccessfully to find and capture some of the rich Dutch merchant ships.

  Charles II had been given the money for this war by the Catholic King Louis XIV. England was a Protestant country and it wasn’t too long after the battle that people began to grumble about taking Catholic money to fight another Protestant country. Maybe the ordinary people in London and the East Coast ports had watched too many boatloads of wounded being brought home. There was no system of care for the ordinary seaman. They were dumped ‘on the parish’. In Southwold they were left looking after 800 sick and wounded crewmen. There were only 157 households in the town.

  James, Duke of York, who was already not-very-secretly a Catholic, couldn’t continue as Lord High Admiral. When the English fought the Dutch in 1673 James had been replaced by his protestant cousin, Prince Rupert.

  This time de Ruyter stayed close to home. He knew the English were frightened of running aground on the shoals off the Dutch and Flemish coasts and he played on this. ‘They will fight with me when I please but I won’t when they please,’ he said, removing the channel marks and putting small boats in place so his own ships knew where to go.

  The English lost again and finally made peace with the Dutch. This was bad for the ship-builders and the gun-powder factories and the officers who made fighting their career, but good for the economy of the whole country once the King stopped getting into debt for the sake of his staggeringly expensive warships.

  What about the Dutch? What happened to them once the English gave up fighting? After the Battle of Sole Bay they’d been invaded by the French; they’d had to flood a large part of their country; the de Witt brothers had been murdered; 22 year old Willem III was in charge.

  It’s almost another story – but not quite. The events of 1672 kick-started Dutch Willem’s career in a way that no-one could have expected. The royal families of Europe were closely intermarried. Willem was already Charles and James’s nephew as his mother had been their sister. After the war, in 1677, he made the relationship even closer by marrying James’s oldest daughter, Mary, who was his first cousin.

  Mary cried all day when she heard she’d got to marry Willem and live in the United Provinces but politically it was a shrewd move. Neither Charles nor James had any legitimate sons – which meant that Mary was heir to the English throne after her father. And she’d been brought up as a Protestant…

  When Catholic James had become King James II and had a baby Catholic son, Willem crossed the North Sea and invaded England with his own ships and army. He was greeted by a political sigh of relief. James fled. Willem and Mary became joint King and Queen. Now he was William III of England as well as Willem III of the United Provinces. It was almost as small a name-change as when the Dutch Stavoren had become the English Stavoreen.

  King William III was soon re-building the English navy to help him fight the French but the new war came too late for HMS Stavoreen. She’d already been sold to a ship-breaker. This could have been in Harwich; it could have been in Ipswich. Her masts and cannon would have been taken out of her: all her rigging and equipment sold in some massive boat jumble. Her timbers might have been used in other ships or even in people’s houses. The only thing we do know is that her carved wooden figurehead ended up at the Red Lion pub in Martlesham.

  We don’t know why. The Red Lion was a coaching inn. Its owner would have been quite well off. Maybe his family had a connection with the sea or maybe he just fancied it. The carving became locally famous. ‘That’s as red as the lion of Martlesham,’ Suffolk people used to tell each other. Gradually they forgot to remember that the red lion of Martlesham, a local landmark for more three hundred years, is also the last known survivor of the Battle of Sole Bay.

  The Lady of Stavoren

  There is little direct reference to the Swallows and Amazons series in this story – though expert readers may detect some trace of The Picts and the Martyrs. The obvious borrowing is from Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales where the storyteller lives in the woods with his grandchildren, Vanya and Maroosia, and their dog Bayan. The folk tales surrounding the Lady of Stavoren are not in Ransome’s collection as they are Dutch not Russian.

  Stavoren is the oldest city in Friesland and was an important trading port until a sandbar developed across the harbour entrance and eventually blocked access to all but the smallest vessels. A story was told that a rich and spoiled lady merchant had instructed her captain to bring her the most precious thing in the world. When he returned home with a cargo of wheat – food being the most precious thing in the world – she was so angry that she ordered him to tip it into the sea. She refused even to allow it to be given to the hungry. According to the story the wheat swelled and began to send out shoots and that was when the harbour silted up.

  Some versions of the story go on to say that the Lady herself was so arrogant that she threw a ring into the water, boasting that she would never be poor or hungry until that ring returned to her. The very next day she found her ring in the mouth of the fish that was served for her dinner.

  The town of Stavoren was on the Zuider Zee, which has now been enclosed into the IJsselmeer. In 1657, a few years after the warship Stavoren had been built, it suffered a devastating flood and was almost destroyed. Today it’s an attractive small town, mainly focussed on holiday-makers, with a marina, camping and access to both the the Ijsselmeer and the Frisian lakes. If my character Helen decides to settle in Stavoren with her grandparents I think she’ll be very happy.

  From the Wheelhouse

  I think that the first time that I passed the Red Lion of Martlesham must have been late in April 1954. I was less than two weeks old and I was visiting my grandmother who lived in Waldringfield. Our home was in Woodbridge and the quickest way to drive from one place to the other was to take the turning opposite the Red Lion pub. “Red wo-wo, red wo-wo!” my brothers and I used to shout as we made that same journey almost every weekend throughout our childhoods. Somehow it was always an exciting moment when we turned off the (then) main road and onto the narrow, twisting lanes. It wasn’t just Granny and our uncle Jack Jones who lived in Waldringfield – from 1957 the most important resident, as far as we were concerned, was our family yacht, Peter Duck.

  But for most of the next half century that was all the red lion meant to me – a welcome signpost on a favourite journey. Then two things happened. The first was that my youngest brother, Ned, moored his sailing boat Gingerbread Man at the top end of Martlesham Creek for a few months. I was immediately attracted by Gingerbread Man’s new location, full of eccentricity and atmosphere and with all those wonderful walks over the hill and onwards to the Deben but my mother, in her late eighties, declared that it was “too spooky”.

  Then, at about the same time, I happened to read Swatchway Magic by Paul Antrobus and Charles Scoones. Their identification of our “red wo-wo” as a seventeenth-century ship’s figurehead from the Battle of Sole Bay came as a shock. I’d been born in Woodbridge, educated in Ipswich and in Southwold – studied A level history even – yet I knew almost nothing about the Anglo-Dutch wars that had been fought so near our coast. I have since spent happy hours pouring over the National Maritime Museum’s catalogue of the Van der
Velde drawings and reading the different first hand accounts of the battle that have been collected with the Journals of John Narborough by the Naval Records Society. These provide most of the quotes in the Sole Bay Lectures. I feel doubly fortunate that my friend Richard Woodman has not only checked my facts with his usual generous stringency but has also recently written his own seventeenth-century trilogy. Richard’s Kit Faulkner novels take the adult reader from the reign of King Charles I, through the Civil War and the Restoration of King Charles II to the end of hostilities with the Dutch in 1674.

  My partner Francis owns Goldenray. She’s a former fishing boat, now a houseboat, and is moored in the Ferry Dock, Woodbridge, next to the Dutch barge Cromarty. They’ve been neighbours for several years and heaven know what they whisper to each other when the humans aren’t around. Both of them are work boats: Cromarty transported eels in her past life, Goldenray fished the turbulent waters off the Scottish coast. They have loaned some of their outer attributes to this story but not their personalities or even their interiors. Goldenray has been transformed since Claudia Myatt has been living on board: Cromarty is a warm and glowing family home – as unlike Drie Vrouwen as she could possibly be.

  Ever since Peter Duck has been my responsibility I’ve taken comfort from the fact that whenever I’m uncertain about something I’ve only to take a couple of walks up and down the Woodbridge river wall and I’ll find someone who’ll give me their advice. Add the Facebook messaging system and the same is true of book research. Thanks to Art Butler (Deben Marine), Julie Cochrane (National Maritime Museum), Gill and Tim (Twee Gebroeders), Roland Mann (Cromarty), Rob Lusher (Red Lion, Martlesham), Polly Robinson (Food Safari), James Wheen and everyone else who has shared their knowledge so generously. Conversations with children at Alton Park Junior School, Frobisher Primary School and Kessingland CE Primary School have also been most helpful. I’m especially grateful to my friend Fiona Freeth who talked about the problems of families with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and epilepsy.

  I couldn’t put a book together without the professional expertise of Megan Trudell (book design), Matti Gardner (ebook conversion), Nicky Prentis (Berforts printers), Jim Sheehan (Signature book reps) and the friendship of the Authors Electric group. Particular thanks to Heidi Carhart, Peter Dowden, Ruth Elias Jones, Frank Thorogood, Peter Willis, Richard Woodman and Francis Wheen for reading, advising, fault-spotting (especially Peter Dowden!) and encouraging. Claudia Myatt, you are a wonderful illustrator and friend.