 The defeat of 1667 was a national humiliation. The English were convinced they'd pretty much won the war. They'd won the Great Battle of previous year. There had been some attritional fighting and really they thought they were in charge now. But unfortunately the King had run out of money and in England in the 17th century they could fight for two years but not for three. So the money runs out, the King pays off the fleet, these talks have started, the war is over, it'll all be settled and then out of the blue comes this shocking, humiliating fiasco. The Dutch turn up, terrible things happen and fortunately for the King people are minded to think about other things quite quickly but the Navy is deeply scarred by this. Nobody imagined at the time that anybody dared to go up the river to do a raid like this. The whole point of having the dockyard at Chatham was that it was a long way up a river. It wasn't an easy navigation, there were forts, there was a chain across the river. It really should have been a safe place to park the fleet when it wasn't being used. That's why all of the great ships with the fleet are there. That is a safe place to leave your Navy. Was it well defended? While the River Medway was a navigationally difficult river it wasn't particularly well fortified. There was a new fortress being built at Sheerness at the point where the Thames and the Medway meet but it wasn't finished. There weren't that many soldiers in the batteries that were there and really only Upner Castle was particularly well armed and Upner was an old castle and wouldn't have stood much attack even then. So it was not well defended because the same financial weaknesses that the fleet was paid off meant there was no money for the soldiers either. And the English Army was always a very, very small army reduced to only a few regiments at this time. And how did that compare with the finances of the Dutch Republic at the time? The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century exposed a very serious truth. The only way to fight wars is with money. It's not with ships or guns or men, you need cash and you need lots of it and then you need a strong credit line. And the Dutch Republic had a very strong credit line. It had access to money and it could borrow for years and years at relatively stable interest. The English Crown was not a trustworthy borrower. People wouldn't lend to the English Crown, they charged high rates of interest and the King was reluctant to ask Parliament to sanction tax rises because he didn't want to share power with the House of Commons. The English State really can't raise money in the way that the Dutch can raise money. And it was preceded by a year of difficulties for the English to fire of London, one of them? The problem in the Second Anglo-Dutch War was that the English had suffered two catastrophic blows not in war but in London. There was a plague and then the Great Fire of London burnt down large sections of the commercial heart of the city. It reached between the Tower of London and right the way through the commercial centre halfway to Westminster and this had taken everybody's eye off the Navy and the war. It meant that all the effort was going into rebuilding the city and a lot of financiers had lost their houses, they had lost their books. It was difficult to work in this period. This raid has been described as extremely daring which suggests it was very risky in a sense but wasn't it at the same time a very calculated move? The Medway raid can be seen in two ways. It could be portrayed as brave, heroic, speculative, risky manoeuvre but the men involved are not men who take risks. These are men like De Reuter and Johan Duet. These are men who think about what they're doing. This is a calculated, well-organised, pre-planned operation. They've seen the enemy's weakness, they know the enemy's coast, they know the river, they have the pilots, they have the manpower. This is going to change the balance of the peace settlement. The whole object of this raid is not to defeat England but to change the Treaty of Breda to make sure that it works more in the favour of the Dutch. That's exactly what happens. Yeah, and what it results to. The Medway raid means that England's negotiating position at Breda deteriorates and the English have to make more concessions than they'd planned so the war ends up being more of a Dutch success than an English one. In hindsight, could you say that the Dutch made one big mistake? They left the Chatham Dockyard untouched. In operations like this, particularly ones that involve difficult navigation inside the enemy's country, there's a point beyond which it would be foolish to take further risks. And the Dutch commanders took, I think, a logical decision. They'd been very successful, they'd done real damage to the English. They would certainly have an enormous psychological effect on the English. Had they landed and captured the main British dockyard and Chatham was the dockyard and destroyed it might not have been in the interest of the Dutch Republic to do that. The real threat for both countries was not each other but France. So teaching the English Alassan, scoring a psychologically important victory, very good, destroying England as a serious potential ally against the French, probably not in the long term a good idea. Because could have that been a result of if they had destroyed the dockyards? It seems that by the time the Dutch fleet got to Chatham the English resistance was growing quite rapidly and it's likely that the decision not to attack Chatham was based on the stiffening English resistance. Up in a castle stopped the fleet going any further so it would have been an operation involving landing troops from open boats and crossing difficult terrain to get into a fortified dockyard. It was becoming more and more difficult to do this operation. It's all about speed and getting down the river is not easy and in the period between the Dutch taking Chatham and arriving at Chatham the English would be able to gather in a lot of manpower. Was an immediate success for the Dutch? Change is for the Dutch. Was an immediate success for the Dutch? What was the long term effect of this raid? In the long term the Medway raid is held up by the English as a national humiliation and every time people talk about running down the navy or paying off ships and not having enough naval power they always say remember the Medway raid. It's an example of this very intense rivalry between these two maritime nations in the 17th century. The English always took the Dutch as a great naval nation who it was an honour to fight. They never thought of the French in the same way or the Spanish. So it put the Dutch up there at the top of the Premier League as opponents. Fighting the Dutch was a very honourable thing. But of course within a decade or so England and Holland were allies Louis XIV was the problem and when Louis XIV invades the Netherlands everything changes. In 1688 these two countries go from being enemies to being necessary allies and they will be allies for 20 years and they will stop Louis XIV ruling the whole of Europe. So the Anglo-Dutch moment is not the moment of warfare between them it's the moment when they ally themselves against the hegemonic ambitions of Louis XIV and that was in the background even in 1667. It was clear to both sides that the French weren't playing the same game as everyone else. The French had been Britain's allies but they did nothing. In the Second War they were the allies of the Dutch and they did nothing. They weren't the kind of people you wanted to have on your side so both the British and the Dutch could see the French with a long-term problem. But it did kick the English into gear in terms of rebuilding the fleet very rapidly. The immediate response of the English is to build more ships, to build another Royal Charles, to build more first-rate fighting ships and to restore their sense of pride. It was fortunate for the English that while the Royal Charles was taken the real flagship of the English fleet the Royal Sovereign was not because the Royal Sovereign says everything about the English view of the navy, sovereign of the seas, connected to the crown. It's about English dominion over the oceans. This is the ship that tells you everything about the English and it survives. So the fleet is rebuilt and in the next Anglo-Dutch war the English once again have more and bigger ships but in the Third Anglo-Dutch war they have to fight Mikilda Reuter again and they can't beat him. It's a score draw. It's two goals apiece to the English and the Dutch and the French are standing around watching hoping that both will damage each other so badly that France can just pick up the pieces. HMS Royal Charles was taken by Admiral de Reuter as a trophy, arguably the biggest military trophy the Dutch ever seized. Its stern has been on display in the Reich's Museum. It's going to be back in England. What does that mean? I think it's hugely symbolic that this last fragment of Charles II's flagship is going to come back to England to commemorate not the event in which it was seized but everything that's happened since when these two countries have in the main been very much on the same side. These are the countries that invented Northern European concepts like democracy, tax-raising bureaucratic states, responsible government. The Dutch got there first, the English borrowed all of that and the shared heritage is something that we can now celebrate. Our monarchies are intertwined, our political systems are intertwined and these are two of the great maritime nations of the world even now. They're not great economies in scale but they're certainly in terms of their maritime connection. They still have that shared vision. It's always worth remembering of course that the Royal Charles didn't start life as the Royal Charles. She was actually Cromwell's flagship and her name was the Naysby after a battle when Cromwell defeated Charles I and her original figurehead was Cromwell trampling on the four nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. So she was a ship with a checkered history. But a unique moment after almost 350 years to be back here. The fact that this trophy has been preserved tells us a great deal about the significance of the event. The fact that in 1672 Charles II made the public exhibition of the Royal Charles one of the reasons for going to war. This was a national insult, it was a personal insult. King's Own Ship was in Amsterdam and for a few guilders you could go on board and have a laugh at the English. This was a national humiliation. It was a trophy but a very public trophy. It was a big ship, you couldn't avoid it. If you're in Amsterdam, there it was. And gradually it came down to that one little piece that's coming back. The Royal Alms of Charles II.