Charles II's Empty Treasury: How Johan de Witt Burned the Medway in 1667

A Dutch Raid at Anchor (0:00)

Hey, chibis! I'm Aiwee, and today we're talking about the 1667 Dutch raid that burned the English fleet at anchor. If you enjoy stories like this, hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't already — let's go! In the summer of sixteen sixty-seven, a small boat made its way up a river in Kent, past the smoking remains of what had been, just hours earlier, the most powerful warships of the English Crown. The man in the boat was John Evelyn, a diarist, and he was about to record a scene that would shake the Stuart monarchy to its foundations.

He wrote of a gallant bulwark miserably shattered, of wrecks and hulls where a fleet had been. What he saw was not the result of a sudden ambush or a freak storm. It was the final consequence of a chain of choices made in palaces and counting houses, choices about money, trade, and the dangerous gamble of leaving a kingdom undefended. This is the story of how a fleet was lost not at sea, but at anchor, and how that single week reshaped the balance of power in northern Europe. To understand why those ships were burning, we have to step back from the riverbank and look at a decision made in the winter of sixteen sixty-six.

England had been at war with the Dutch Republic for nearly two years. The fighting had been ferocious and expensive, and the English treasury was empty. Charles the Second depended on Parliament for money, and Parliament was in no mood to provide it. Then, in September, the Great Fire of London had gutted the economic heart of the capital, destroying more than thirteen thousand homes and leaving around a hundred thousand people homeless. The cost of the war and the cost of the fire combined to create a fiscal crisis.

The King needed to cut spending immediately. So he made a fateful choice: he ordered the Royal Navy to be mothballed. The great ships were to be stripped of their guns, their crews sent home, and the vessels moored upriver, out of service. The King’s logic was simple. He believed the Dutch were equally exhausted, equally desperate for peace.

He was wrong. The Dutch Republic was not financially ruined. It was backed by the most sophisticated banking system in the world, centred on Amsterdam. It could borrow money cheaply and sustain a war far longer than the English Crown, which relied on a reluctant Parliament. The man who understood this best was Johan de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of Holland.

He had spent years building a new navy, a permanent force of more than a hundred ships, and he was not about to let it rot at anchor. While Charles the Second was mothballing his fleet, de Witt was preparing his for one more campaign. The war had started as a trade dispute, a bitter competition over the routes to the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and the East Indies. The English had re-imposed the Navigation Acts, laws that banned foreign ships from carrying goods to English colonies. They had seized New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.

The Dutch West India Company was running a hugely profitable operation moving captives from West Africa to English colonies in the Caribbean, and was locked in an undeclared war with English rivals for control of the trade. These were not dynastic quarrels over thrones and religion. This was a war about commerce, and the Dutch were determined to end it on their terms. Peace talks had opened in May sixteen sixty-seven in the city of Breda, a place Charles knew well from his years of exile. The negotiations stalled.

The English, believing the Dutch were desperate for a quick settlement, grew intransigent. They expected concessions. But then, the strategic picture shifted. France invaded the Spanish Netherlands. Suddenly, the Protestant Dutch Republic faced the prospect of an aggressive Catholic superpower on its land border.

De Witt needed the English war to end, and he needed it to end now. But instead of making concessions, he secretly ordered his fleet to prepare for a strike that would force the English to the table. The target was the very heart of English naval power, the rivers Thames and Medway, lying twenty-five miles east of London. On the fourth of June, the Dutch fleet sailed. It was a force of about eighty ships, more than fifty of them men-of-war, carrying around four thousand troops.

The commander was Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, and with him sailed Cornelis de Witt, the Grand Pensionary’s brother, there to ensure the plan was executed without hesitation. When news of the Dutch approach reached London, it was met with a dangerous complacency. The King’s secretary of state, Lord Arlington, dismissed it as sabre-rattling, a bluff linked to the talks at Breda. But on the tenth of June, the Dutch warships attacked the half-built fort at Sheerness, drove off the small English garrison, and landed eight hundred troops. The mood in the capital flipped from arrogance to panic.

Samuel Pepys, the Navy Board official and diarist, recorded a city in despair. He wrote that people were never so dejected, that they looked upon the nation as lost. Pepys sent his wife and his money into the countryside, burying his gold in the garden as a precaution against a Dutch sack of London. The King turned to the one man he believed could save the situation: George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle, the veteran soldier who had engineered the restoration of the monarchy seven years earlier. On the eleventh of June, Albemarle arrived at Chatham, the most important dockyard in England, to take command of its defence.

What Albemarle found was a disaster. Sixteen valuable warships were moored nearby, uncrewed and defenceless. He had only one frigate and two small guardships to face a fleet of eighty. His defence relied on geography and a single engineered obstacle. At Gillingham, a fourteen-and-a-half-ton iron chain had been stretched across the river, supported by two small gun batteries.

Downriver, at Mussel Bank, five fireships had been sunk to block the channel. It was a thin line, and it depended on the chain holding. Albemarle ordered the warships to be moved upriver to safety. The Royal James was towed away. But there were not enough sailors or boats to move the Royal Charles.

This was an eighty-two-gun first-rate ship of the line, one of the most powerful vessels in the navy, and the very ship that had brought Charles the Second home from exile to claim his throne. Now she lay in the path of the Dutch fleet, protected by an iron chain and a handful of guns. On the eleventh of June, a small Dutch scouting force crept up the Medway, reached the sunken blockships at Mussel Bank, and towed one aside to open a channel. The next morning, Admiral Willem van Ghent’s squadron advanced with the flood tide and an easterly wind. By ten o’clock, they had reached the iron chain at Gillingham.

The English defence opened fire.

An Empty English Treasury (7:30)

The frigate Unity and the guardships Matthias and Charles the Fifth, supported by the shore batteries, poured shot into the head of the Dutch line. The narrow river meant the Dutch could only advance in single file, unable to concentrate their firepower. The attack stalled. It looked as though the chain would hold. But then, the impasse was broken by a single Dutch captain who had begun the day in disgrace.

Captain Jan van Brakel of the Vrede had spent the morning in the brig of the flagship Agatha, punished because his crew had been caught looting at Sheerness. De Witt had imposed a strict ban on looting, and van Brakel was desperate to redeem himself. He volunteered to lead the charge. His ship, the forty-six-gun Vrede, moved up the line and engaged the thirty-two-gun Unity. Under heavy fire, van Brakel closed the distance, came alongside, and boarded.

The Unity was captured. The path to the chain was open. Dutch fireships were now sent at the chain. The second, named Pro Patria, struck it at speed and snapped it. The barrier was broken.

The guardships Matthias and Charles the Fifth were set ablaze by more fireships. The English defence collapsed. Half a mile upriver lay the Royal Charles. The few sailors aboard fled as the Dutch approached. The ship that bore the King’s name was boarded without a fight, her colours struck.

She was towed away as a prize, a humiliation that would soon become a tourist attraction in Amsterdam, her stern displayed to the public. But the raid was not over. Two miles further upriver lay three more great ships, the Royal Oak, the Royal James, and the Loyal London, all with skeleton crews. Beyond them was Chatham dockyard itself. If the Dutch reached it and set it ablaze, English naval power would be set back for a generation.

The Duke of Albemarle, watching the disaster unfold, ordered more ships to be scuttled in the shallows to deny them as prizes. Then all eyes turned to the last line of defence: Upnor Castle. Upnor Castle was not a medieval relic. It was an Elizabethan artillery fort, armed with around twenty guns, built to guard the approach to Chatham. Now it was reinforced with three new batteries, equipped with sixty guns taken from ships and docks.

It was a hasty defence, but it was all that stood between the Dutch and the dockyard. On the thirteenth of June, Admiral de Ruyter himself led the next stage of the attack. Four men-of-war and five fireships moved upriver in the early afternoon and came under heavy fire from the castle and the new batteries. The narrow river amplified the violence of the cannonade. De Ruyter, frustrated by the slow progress, boarded a small boat and moved up the line to urge his captains to greater boldness.

The English gunners fought back with everything they had. But they could not stop the fireships. One came alongside the Royal Oak and set her ablaze. Aboard, Captain Archibald Douglas commanded a small detachment of troops. As the flames took hold, his men begged him to abandon ship.

He refused, saying that it would never be told that a Douglas quit his post without orders. He died in the fire. Soon, the Loyal London and the Royal James were also burning fiercely. Three of the Royal Navy’s largest warships were ablaze less than a mile from its most important dockyard. But the resistance at Upnor was not in vain.

The English gunners had forced the Dutch to expend all of their fireships. There were none left for a further attack on the scuttled ships or the dockyard itself. The hastily built defences had held by the most slender of margins. The next day, the fourteenth of June, the Dutch fleet departed on the ebb tide, leaving behind a scene of devastation. Of the Royal Navy’s five largest warships, three had been burned and one captured.

Only the Royal Sovereign, absent at Portsmouth, escaped. The diarist John Evelyn visited the aftermath and recorded a scene of ruin, a gallant bulwark miserably shattered, hardly a vessel intact. The English had no choice but to make peace on Dutch terms. The Treaty of Breda was signed in July sixteen sixty-seven. The English agreed to amend the Navigation Acts, allowing Dutch ships to carry goods to England, and to return captured East Indies colonies.

They were allowed to keep what was seen as a lesser prize: New York. The raid on the Medway was not a total catastrophe. The dockyard at Chatham was saved. The Dutch had not destroyed English naval power permanently. But the psychological impact was profound.

The English state had been shown to be financially fragile and strategically overconfident. The Dutch had demonstrated that they could strike at the very heart of their enemy’s territory and force a peace on their own terms. The aftermath brought reforms. New fortifications were built along the Medway. The Royal Navy introduced greater discipline and professionalism, and future officers would be required to pass examinations of competence.

The captured Royal Charles became a spectacle in Amsterdam, a physical symbol of Dutch victory. Her stern, gilded and ornate, remains on display in the Rijksmuseum to this day, a tangible remnant of a week that humbled a monarchy. The story of the Medway raid is not really a story about ships or chains or even about a single daring captain. It is a story about the relationship between money and power. Charles the Second mothballed his fleet because he had run out of funds, and he assumed his enemy had too.

That assumption, born of a financial system that depended on a reluctant Parliament, was the root cause of the disaster. The Dutch Republic, with its sophisticated banking system, could sustain the war and seize the opportunity when it came. The raid was the consequence of that imbalance, a moment when the abstract world of credit and debt translated directly into burning ships on a Kentish river. The peace that followed did not end the Anglo-Dutch rivalry. A third war would follow.

But the events of June sixteen sixty-seven had permanently altered the calculus. England had learned a hard lesson about the cost of neglecting its navy. The Dutch had shown what a well-financed, well-led fleet could achieve. And the great ship that had carried a king home from exile ended her days as a trophy in a foreign city, a lasting reminder that the sea is never truly at peace. If you want to understand how a single decision can echo through centuries, look to the Medway.

De Witt's Trade War (15:00)

The ships are gone, but the questions they raise about preparedness, about the gap between perception and reality, and about the true cost of a war economy, are as urgent now as they were in sixteen sixty-seven. History is not just a record of what happened. It is a map of the choices that led us here. Thank you for watching.