The modest Somerset town of Bridgwater exhibits what is almost a one man history. With Blake Street, Blake Hall, Blake Gardens, the Bridgwater Blake Museum, Robert Blake Science College, and even the Blake Fish Bar, it hardly conceals its enthusiasm. So who was its favourite son? He was the remarkable English 17th century sailor - or General-at-Sea as he was officially known - whose endeavours and achievements seem grossly underappreciated. Admiral Jellicoe was a huge fan, and Nelson himself remarked “I shall never be the equal of Blake”. So who was this largely forgotten hero, what did he do, and why is he not better known?
Many historians regard Blake as the father of the British Navy. Starting with a smallish battle fleet he tripled its strength to over 100. When he died, British sea power was feared and respected throughout the world. He drafted the first official Articles of War and Fighting Instructions to naval commanders. Aside from his numerous battle victories, he was the first to keep a fleet at sea through a whole winter. He was among the first to develop techniques of naval blockade and amphibious landing, and was one of few commanders of the age to get his captains to do as they were told. He also earned his men’s respect without using brutal punishments.
Early years
Robert Blake was born in August 1598 and baptised on 27th September at St Mary’s church, Bridgwater. He was the eldest surviving son of 13 children born to Humphrey and his wife Sara. Four of these died in infancy. The Blake family had been a presence in the area for several generations, from at least the reign of Henry VIII. They were Lords of the Manor of Tuxwell, in the parish of Bishops Lydeard, near Bridgwater. Robert’s grandfather had in his time been chief magistrate and Member of Parliament for Bridgwater. Humphrey, Robert’s father, also held lands at Puriton to the north east of the town and other nearby manors, and later came into his wife’s estate at Plainsfield, west of Bridgwater. Besides running the Blake properties, he was a merchant with overseas trade interests. This was a solid Somerset family, prosperous and active in the local community.
Robert attended Bridgwater Grammar School for Boys until the age of 16 when he was sent to St Alban Hall, Oxford and later to Wadham College. A clever student with an appetite for a wide range of books, he had hoped to follow an academic career but failed to secure a fellowship at Merton College. Was this perhaps due to his radical political and religious views? Strangely some say it was due to his height. College warden Sir Henry Savile was supposedly prejudiced against short men. At five feet six inches Blake hardly met his ‘standard of manly beauty’. But more on this later.
Thwarted in his career plans, Robert returned home in 1624 on family instructions. His father was close to financial ruin, with the business having suffered in the Spanish wars. The following year he died and Robert took on the role of head of the family for a time. About 1631 he went overseas. The evidence suggests he probably spent five or six years at Schiedam, near Rotterdam, engaged as a factor in freighting ships. He returned in 1638 on the death of his mother. In a devoutly Puritan family, his younger brother had emigrated to America on religious grounds. Against rising political and religious tension, in 1640 Robert, a republican, was elected MP for Bridgwater. Three weeks later he was beaten at the election by Royalist Col Wyndham, though he in turn then lost the seat due to a scandal over a soap monopoly.
Parliamentary soldier
When the Civil War broke out in 1642, Blake signed up for the Parliamentary cause, despite his lack of military experience. As a captain he may have seen action at Bodmin and Bath, though it’s more likely he stayed in largely Parliamentarian Somerset with the county militia under Alexander Popham. What is well documented is that he distinguished himself in July 1643 at the siege of Bristol, despite the city eventually surrendering to the Royalists.
Promoted to Lt Colonel, Blake had a leading role in April 1644 holding Lyme (Regis). Now regarded as a hero, he was sent to Taunton which he captured from the Royalists. There he recruited his own trusted local troops. Blake survived three separate sieges, holding out for months on end before being relieved by units of the New Model. He famously declared he would eat three of his four pairs of boots before surrendering. The siege prevented additional Royalist troops from joining the Naseby fight. Later in 1645, after capturing Barnstaple and Dunster, he returned to Bridgwater to become its MP again.
Blake was worried about growing sectarian influence in the army. Extremists were competing for power in the English state but he seems not to have taken part in the fighting of 1648, as Somerset was peaceful during the ‘Second Civil War’. Like many, Blake was angered by Charles I's’ double dealing, but he seems to have avoided the Parliament versus army conflicts, and those of Independents and Presbyterians. Neither was he involved in Pride’s Purge or Charles' trial.
General-at-Sea
In 1649 the new Commonwealth government appointed Blake as one of three navy commissioners, or ’generals-at-sea’. The others were Richard Deane and Edward Popham. This organisational split was designed to ensure no one commander could carry the fleet off as its previous head, the Earl of Warwick may have planned to do. Popham and Blake were erstwhile colleagues, moderate republicans and Presbyterians. The more hard-line Deane became a friend. None had any naval experience. Their loyalty and proven merit as fighting men was what counted.
Prince Rupert meanwhile had led eight undermanned privateers to Kinsale to try to prevent Parliament taking Ireland from the Royalists. Blake held them in port, though after a storm Rupert escaped with 13 ships to Lisbon. Blake chased and blockaded him, and then engaged with 23 Portuguese ships, capturing seven of them. He subsequently defeated Rupert’s diminished fleet off Malaga. While hardly the fearsome force Blake would later face, he returned home with eight more ships than he set out with. By securing Parliament’s sea supremacy he won recognition of the Commonwealth government by some European states.
With Fairfax retiring as army head in 1650, Blake was sounded out to replace him. Cromwell, emerging strongman of the new government, felt he was maybe not using Blake to best advantage. But when offered command of the New Model Army, Blake declined. He was fully focused on re-building the navy, and having started he wanted to see it through. Introducing welfare for sailors and proper regulations he built up better motivated crews. Men were for the first time promoted from within their ranks and appointed on merit. During his service Blake would increase the strength of the fleet from about 30 vessels to over 100. In 1651 he captured the last Royalist naval outpost in the Scilly Isles and received Parliament’s thanks, being appointed to the Council of State.
First Dutch War
A trade war with the Dutch broke out in June 1652. Before it had even begun, Blake, with only 12 ships, attacked a Dutch fleet that refused a courteous salute. Now with 60 ships, he defeated Vice-Admiral de With in the Channel. De With had underestimated the English fleet’s strength, and Blake was lucky with the weather. Thinking the war was over, the English government sent ships to the Mediterranean. As a result, in December 1652 Blake’s 42 strong fleet was defeated by Tromp’s 80 odd vessels off Dungeness. England lost control of the Channel to the Dutch. It was Blake’s only defeat.
Blake offered his resignation but it was refused. He promptly demanded major reforms and a tactical review from the Admiralty. They complied by, among other things, enacting his Articles of War and Fighting Instructions to bolster the authoritry of a commander over his captains. They also increased pay for active sailors. In March 1653 Blake re-engaged Tromp off Portland with some 75 refitted ships, but the Dutch fleet cleverly escaped during the night. Finally in June at the Battle of the Gabbard, off the Suffolk coast, Blake defeated the Dutch fleet, sinking or capturing 17 ships without loss. Both the Channel and the North Sea thus came under English control. Peace with Holland was then secured.
First Dutch War Abraham Willaerts
Mediterranean and Canaries
In 1654 Blake was sent to the Mediterranean, and deterred a French attack on Naples led by the Duke de Guise. The next year he returned there, forcing the disruptive North African corsair states to pay reparations for pirate attacks on English shipping. The Dey of Tunis alone refused compensation and with 15 ships Blake attacked and destroyed two shore batteries and the nine ships of an Algerian squadron in Porto Farina harbour. The English guns showed their mettle again. This was the first time naval gunnery had taken out shore batteries without landing men ashore.
In 1656 Cromwell embarked on a war with Spain. He felt Spanish Catholicism was a threat to the European Protestant cause. Spain was a traditional opponent of course, but there was a big element of commercial opportunism against its trade and colonial interests. Things went badly for the Protectorate against the Spanish in the Caribbean, but Blake, dispatched to Cadiz and the Canaries, had spectacular results. Blake’s subordinate Capt Richard Stayner captured a massive Spanish treasure fleet, worth over £2 million (perhaps £10 billion in today’s equivalent). For the first time in naval history Blake, despite himself suffering from wounds and illness, kept the fleet at sea over the winter to maintain the Cadiz blockade.
In April 1657 Blake destroyed another armed merchant treasure convoy at Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The port was thought to be impregnable to attack from the sea. But English gunnery was again superior. Astonishingly, sailing his fleet into the harbour itself, Blake’s guns took out the shore batteries and destroyed the whole Spanish fleet with damage to only one of his vessels. He then withdrew on the tide. While most of the silver had already been landed, its final delivery to the Spanish treasury was badly disrupted, as indeed was Spain's naval power. Cromwell rewarded Blake with an expensive diamond ring.
Death and funeral
In England the victory aroused admiration and pride, even seasoned royalists cheering. On his way home ill in August, Blake was only an hour away from Plymouth on his flagship George when he succumbed to a fever and died. His internal organs were removed and buried in Plymouth, but his corpse went by sea to Greenwich where it lay in the Queen’s House for two weeks. On 4th September 1657 his state funeral procession along the river was followed by huge crowds and he was interred in Westminster Abbey’s Henry VII chapel. Cromwell and all the Council of State were present with senior military officers and Blake family members. Soldiers fired three volleys in salute.
The irony is that Blake wanted a modest funeral. In his will he gave money to his family, servants and to the poor of Bridgwater. A selfless man, he left sums he had been awarded but never took up. Four years later, after the Restoration, and under the vengeful Cavalier Parliament, Blake’s remains were disinterred from the Abbey and thrown into a pit outside. His body was soon re-buried in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, alongside the Abbey. This more modest site would probably have met with his approval. In 1888 a commemorative stained glass window to him was unveiled.
Assessing Blake
What sort of man was Blake? At Oxford he would actually have had problems qualifying for a Fellowship as he was not a Scholar, only a Fellow Commoner. His brother William was elected a Fellow seven years after taking his BA - a fairly common pattern. Robert didn’t bother to take an MA and tried for a Fellowship only a year after his BA. So as modern biographer Michael Baumber points out “the surprise is, not that he failed, but that he had the temerity to try”.
Later as a man of action, it seems strange that Blake should at first have sought a life of scholarship. But Fellows were forbidden marriage, and indeed he never married or had children. As the eldest son of an established rural family with heritable assets this was unusual. He had several brothers but only one sister. He never sought female company and Puritan culture did not encourage it outside marriage. An all-male community with a common interest or purpose suited Blake, whether it be the Fellows of a college, comrades in the Parliamentary Army or his captains in the Navy. This was why he could endure the long months away from home. Says Baumber, “There was no wife and family waiting for him. He had no home but the fleet”.
Due to deliberate attempts to airbrush Parliamentarians from history after the 1660 Restoration, Blake’s achievements have not been generally appreciated. His successes were ’never excelled, not even by Nelson’ wrote Lionel Yexley, an earlier biographer. The stained glass memorial window in St Margaret’s church includes scenes depicting Blake’s life. A plaque on the wall reads ‘Chief founder of England’s naval supremacy’. And indeed he’s well regarded in the navy with a division at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth bearing his name. Scholar, businessman, soldier, sailor and politician, he was a man of parts. His great ability was in ‘getting things done’.
His experience in the Netherlands perhaps showed him that, in reality, a monarchy was not a sine qua non of a modern state. Says Baumber, “Blake was a political admiral. He joined the Parliamentary army in 1642, not because he wanted to make soldiering his profession, but because he wanted to destroy the Church of England and replace it with a national Presbyterian Church”. A heroic soldier on land, he later turned down the lucrative position of General of Infantry in the New Model to stay with the fleet. Blake impressed everyone who met him with his integrity. Baumber concludes, “No one else represented the virtues of the Puritan warrior in the way he did”.
Conclusion
So how to sum up Blake? An under-appreciated historical figure certainly, but maybe against common wisdom not really as a seaman. Admirals Tromp, de With and de Ruijter all outmanoeuvred him at times during the First Dutch War. Nor was he a particularly innovative tactician. Broadside firing, which some credit him with, was already standard practice, and fighting in line, used by Tromp, evolved during a bout of illness while Blake was on shore.
Blake’s true greatness lay in his phenomenal application - never giving up once he’d started - and in his steep learning curve. He benefited from his mistakes, and rarely repeated them. He also recognised and absorbed others’ discoveries. His low key, rather sarcastic brand of humour was famous, but he had the priceless ability to inspire people with what had to be done. Having refused to set sail until his crews’ pay was raised after Dungeness, the sailors would follow him anywhere. Blake’s huge legacy was the British navy, the most powerful fleet in history. He laid the foundations that gave the country primacy over the seas for centuries. A truly honest man, he wanted nothing for himself.
Sources: There are some rather hagiographical sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries, plus lots of Admiralty papers and other official records. Blake himself was self effacing and no self publicist at all.
The best relatively recent detailed work, to which I'm highly indebted, is by Michael Baumber: General-At-Sea - Robert Blake and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution in Naval Warfare, London 1989.
