“Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.” The hand that penned these words has lain in the grave for over seven centuries; but old William Fitz-Stephen of Canterbury knew what he meant, and meant what he wrote. They are words that our fine “county cruiser” the Kent of to-day—to which the ladies of Kent have presented a silken battle flag and the Men of Kent a silver shield and other gifts, to incite the Kent’s bluejackets to shoot straight—might well adopt and make the ship’s motto. It was from the County of Kent that the initiative came in the movement which has had such excellent results in inducing the county people in other counties all over Great Britain and Ireland to display a practical interest in the warships that bear the county names; and the idea has since spread in other cases throughout the Empire.

The county “Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men” of their own accord took the initial step in the spring of 1899 by approaching the late Lord Goschen, then First Lord of the Admiralty, with a request that one of four cruisers of a new type, to be built under the supplemental programme of the previous August, might be named after the County of Kent. The request was heartily received, and in response the name Kent was announced for the first of the new ships. A little later the Men of Kent made a second proposal. They asked permission to establish among themselves a “county memorial for the new county-cruiser Kent,” expressing their “desire and intention to do something to keep up a continual connection between the county and the good ship, and to cause a sustained interest to be taken in her fortunes and the welfare of those on board.” Lord Goschen acceded to that request, and a county subscription was immediately set on foot by Lord Harris, the president of the Association for the year, to form a Kent county trophy fund for the cruiser Kent. It was proposed to present the ship, on commissioning, with a challenge trophy in silver, to be competed for annually among the gun crews of the ship, the champion gun team for each year to have their names inscribed on the trophy and receive a special monetary reward from a county fund established with the trophy. The trophy itself was to be kept on board and to be displayed on special and festive occasions in the mess of the winning team. Whenever the Kent was out of commission the trophy would be cared for by the Captain of the Royal Naval Barracks, Chatham, or at Greenwich Naval College.[4] The movement received cordial support from Lord Selborne, Lord Goschen’s successor at the Admiralty, and from the late Earl Stanhope, the then Lord Lieutenant of Kent, and the late Lord Salisbury, then Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. More than that, indeed. Interested by the patriotic action taken by the County of Kent on behalf of its cruiser namesake, His Majesty the King was himself graciously pleased to command that in the cases of future ships bearing the names of counties the Lords Lieutenant of the counties concerned were to be requested by the Admiralty to nominate in each case some lady connected with the county to perform the naming and launching ceremony.

The trophy-shield subscribed for by the Men of Kent, together with an album for the names and scores of its winners from time to time, was formally handed over to the captain and ship’s company of the Kent at Sheerness by representatives of the County Association, the gift being received with every mark of regard and genuine welcome. Following on that, a deputation of county ladies, headed by the Countess Stanhope, the wife of the Lord Lieutenant, presented the favoured ship with two flags, a beautiful silken ensign and a silken Union Jack, subscribed for by the County Association of “Maids of Kent and Kentish Maids.” The flags were brought on board in the beautiful box of Kentish Heart of Oak in which they are now kept under the sentry before the captain’s cabin. The ensign was bent on the halyards and ceremoniously hoisted to the peak by Countess Stanhope in the presence of the assembled officers and crew of the Kent, and the Jack was hoisted by the Hon. Secretary of the Ladies’ Committee, Mrs. Bills, the proceedings winding up with a luncheon to the ladies on the after-deck by Captain Gamble and his officers, and an afternoon dance on board.

That the name of the ancient maritime county of England should be borne in the fleet to-day by a modern British warship is in itself a matter of historic interest. There are, indeed, very excellent reasons why the County of Kent should receive distinguished treatment from the Admiralty, why its name deserves to be honourably commemorated in the British fleet of to-day.

Kent has a place of its own in regard to the naval annals of England, old-time associations with the oversea defence of England and the national navy, that stand quite by themselves. The associations indeed go back across fifteen centuries, to the earliest days of our “rough island story”; so far back, indeed, as the old old times of the “Counts of the Saxon Shore.”

Dover and Reculver, the two principal Kentish ports of the days when Britain was a Roman province, were central stations in the widespread line of outposts along the coast whence watch and ward were kept for the coming of the Norseland raiders oversea in the springtime year by year.

From the pharos on the Foreland in those strenuous times of long ago keen-sighted men of Kent kept look-out daily, scanning the horizon from sunrise to sunset; ever on the alert to start the alarm and pass it on to where the Roman coast defence galleys lay at their moorings off the mouth of the Wantsum Channel by Richborough Castle.

Alike on land and sea theirs was the post of honour. At Hastings, led by the stout Earl Leofwine, as we know—

And centuries after that, whenever the King of England was in the field, they claimed the right to lead the van—“The Kentishe Menne in front!”

The Kentish contingent—the “Eastern Ports” contingent—formed the bulk and the backbone of the Cinque Ports fleets of the Middle Ages, both in ships and men. Four of the five “Head Ports” in the famous confederation were Kentish ports—Sandwich, Dover, Romney, and Hythe. The “Eastern Ports” counted twenty-one limbs, “Members”; the “Western Ports”—Hastings with the two “Ancient Towns” attached—ten “Members.” The old Cinque Ports Navy, in these times of ours it may be, is little more than a name, a faded memory of a dim and distant past, a perished institution of a dead old time; yet it was once an actual fact, a living hot-blooded reality, the chief guarantee of our national existence, a very real bulwark, the foremost defence of England from foreign invasion. “The courage of those sailors who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible on the seas.” For all that we have to thank, in the first place, the Men of Kent, that Kent of which old twelfth-century Fitz-Stephen, monk of Canterbury and historian of his own times, was thinking when he wrote, “Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.”

The Kentish ships of the Cinque Ports, “Ships of Kent” they are explicitly called, took a leading part with the Crusaders’ fleet which on its way to the Holy Land for the Second Crusade, in the year 1147, captured Lisbon from the Moors. Kentish men fought with that fine leader, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, “Warden of the Cinque,” when he fell on the French King’s fleet at Damme—just three years before King John put his mark to Magna Charta.

It was a squadron of the Kentish ships of the Ports’ federation that, in the year after Magna Charta, under one of England’s finest heroes and greatest men, that grand fellow, stout-hearted Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, Chief Justiciar of England and Constable of Dover Castle, Cœur de Lion’s favourite pupil in arms, saved England from invasion by rounding up the fleet with which the renegade leader Eustace the Monk—“pirata nequissimus” one old chronicler calls him—was making for the Thames, and dealing the French the first of the series of knock-down blows of which Nelson struck the last at Trafalgar. The story of the “Battle of Bartholomew’s Day,” the 24th of August, 1217, is one we ought not willingly to let die. There is hardly a finer tale in all our history than that which tells how De Burgh’s sixteen Cinque Port warships from Dover, with nineteen or twenty small craft, stood out to meet the Monk’s hundred and odd ships—eighty of them the largest vessels of the time—off the North Foreland; swept round them astern, weathered them and closed, grappled them fast, under cover of a stinging fire of archery and crossbow bolts, cut down their sails, and then, flinging up in the air handfuls of quicklime to blow into the faces of the Frenchmen, boarded and overpowered the enemy in hand-to-hand fight with falchion and pike and battle-axe. They fought it out from early morning until the afternoon was spent, when fifty-five ships of the Monk’s fleet had been taken, and the rest, except fifteen ships that ran away, all sent to the bottom.

Again, in the tremendous Midsummer Day’s battle in the harbour of Sluys, the “Trafalgar of the Middle Ages,” although to most people the event is barely a schoolbook memory—the great naval victory that made Creçy possible—once more the Ship-and-Lion flag at the masthead of vessels from the four Kent ports was to the fore, well up in the van of King Edward’s attacking fleet and in the thickest of the fighting. And at the battle of “Espagnols-sur-Mer,” off Winchelsea, where again Edward the Third fought in person, together with the Black Prince; off St. Mahé; and at Harfleur, covering Henry the Fifth’s landing for the march that ended at Agincourt, and in many another hard-fought action in the Narrow Seas after that, Kentish men in the Kentish ships of the Ports’ Navy full well played their part.

It was oak from the Weald of Kent for the most part that built the men-of-war of Queen Elizabeth’s fleet which drove the Spanish Armada through the Channel and North Sea to its doom on the reefs of Stornaway and the quicksands of Connemara—ships timbered and planked with oak from the Kentish Weald, and shaped and framed and clamped together in the Kentish Dockyards of Deptford and Woolwich. Phineas Pett, a Kentish man by birth, designed and built the famous Sovereign of the Seas; and his grandson, Sir Phineas Pett, designed and built our first Britannia. The Great Harry was mostly built of Kentish oak; as was, at a later day, Sir Richard Grenville’s “little” Revenge, and, at a still later day, Nelson’s Victory, launched at Chatham.

It was a Man of Kent who, as admiral in chief command, planned and gave the order for the capture of Gibraltar. It was another Man of Kent who, as admiral second in command, carried that order out. Sir George Rooke, one of the Rookes of Monk’s Horton, Kent—by far the ablest sea-officer in the British service in the hundred years between Blake and Hawke—was the Commander-in-Chief before Gibraltar. Byng, Sir George Byng, was the second in command—the elder of the two Byngs known to naval history, “Mediterranean Byng,” as he was called in the Navy in connection with a later exploit of his, and remembered nowadays as the Byng who beat the enemy and was not shot. He became Lord Viscount Torrington, and may, in like manner, be distinguished from the other Lord Torrington of naval history (Arthur Herbert) as the Torrington who beat the enemy and was not court-martialled and broke.

A famous family of old-time Kent were the Byngs, seated at Wrotham ever since the fifteenth century, more than one member of which came to the front in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and the Stuart kings. Such as, for instance, the fine old Kentish cavalier of Browning’s rousing song:

Other Kentish men of note associated directly with the Old Navy were Sir Thomas Spert, founder of Trinity House, and captain of the Harry Grace à Dieu when Henry the Eighth crossed the Straits of Dover in her to the Field of the Cloth of Gold; Sir William Hervey, of Kidbrooke, “who greatly distinguished himself in boarding one of the vessels composing the Spanish Armada,” and was raised to the peerage as Lord Hervey; old Captain Dick Fogg, of Repton, near Ashford, captain under Charles the First of the tenth whelp and the Victory and of other men-of-war of note; Kit Fogg, his son, who fought for England in half a score of sea-fights under Charles the Second and down to the time of Queen Anne; Christopher Gunman, a bold fireship and frigate captain in the Dutch wars, captain of the Duke of York’s flagship at Solebay, who later on nearly drowned the future James the Second; George Legge, afterwards the Earl of Dartmouth, whose valour in battle at Solebay made his fortune, a member of a Kent county family of long descent; two notable Commodores, two St. Lo’s of Northfleet; Commodore Boys of the Luxborough galley; Sir Piercey Brett, who as a lieutenant went round the world with Anson, and lived to be one of the most distinguished officers of his day; Sir Thomas Boulden Thompson, who fought under Nelson at Teneriffe, at the Nile, and at Copenhagen. These are a few names taken at random.

Sir Sidney Smith, the “Hero of Acre,” the man who made Bonaparte, as the Emperor himself put it, “miss his destiny,” was of Kentish birth and family, and learned his “three R’s” at Tunbridge School; and it was to Lord Barham, as First Lord of the Admiralty, that Nelson reported himself in September, 1805, when he volunteered to shorten his leave at home and go out at once to fight the enemy at Trafalgar.

It was Kent, too, that gave England Captain John Harvey—one of the Harveys of Eastrey, a family that for generations had sent its sons into the Navy—captain of the Brunswick on Lord Howe’s famous day, the “Glorious First of June,” 1794, who fell mortally wounded in close action with the French Vengeur. When the two ships first collided, the master of the Brunswick proposed to cut the Vengeur clear. “No,” answered Captain Harvey; “we’ve got her, and we’ll keep her!” After he received his mortal wound he refused to let himself be carried off the quarter-deck. He dragged himself down to the cockpit, saying as he went off the deck, “Remember my last words: the colours of the Brunswick must never be struck!” A brother, Henry Harvey, was the admiral whose name is still to be met with on old tavern signboards here and there in East Kent. Henry Harvey, captain of the Ramillies, came to his brother’s aid on the 1st of June, and with three terrific broadsides finished off the Vengeur for the Brunswick, amid resounding cheers from the Brunswick’s men, and giving occasion to an officer in another ship who was looking on to improvise on King David: “Behold how good and joyful a thing it is for brethren to fight together in unity!”

It was this same Henry Harvey who, as a rear-admiral, later in the Great War (in 1797), took Trinidad. That the conquest proved an easy business was not his fault. The Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish squadron at Trinidad, Admiral Apodoca, when he saw Admiral Harvey coming, without clearing for action or firing a shot set fire to his ships and escaped ashore. He took horse and galloped off, and presented himself, excited and panting with his exertions, before the Governor of the island, General Chacon. “I have burnt my ships, sir,” he burst in with, “in case they should fall into the power of the English.” “Burnt them?” exclaimed the astonished Governor; “destroyed them! Have you saved nothing?” “Oh, yes I have!” Apodoca replied. “Yes I have! I have! I have saved”—drawing a carved and painted wooden image, some fifteen inches long, from under his cloak as he spoke—“my flagship’s patron saint—I have saved San Juan de Compostella!” That Apodoca’s flagship was the San Vincente, and that there was no San Juan de Compostella on the Spanish Navy List at the time, are details the story does not concern itself with.

Yet another interesting connection between Kent and the sea service of bygone times is this. H.M.S. Kent’s name is not the only man-of-war name associated with the county that has figured in the fighting days of old. No fewer than eighteen other man-of-war names connected with the county of Kent have from time to time been borne on the roll of the British fleet. It was on board a Canterbury that a notable naval officer of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Captain George Walton, penned words which have been quoted over and over again as a masterpiece of conciseness. He had been in pursuit of a Spanish squadron, and on his return, as most of us have read, reported as follows:—

As a fact, unfortunately, Captain Walton’s “dispatch” was written in quite another way. The captain of the Canterbury really sent the admiral a letter of two pages. What is passed off as his whole “dispatch,” is actually only the concluding sentence of the letter, excerpted and dressed up. An unscrupulous admiralty official, for the purposes of a book on the campaign, manipulated the letter and printed its last paragraph by itself as the entire despatch. Historians following one another have since then simply copied Secretary Corbett.

Our first Sandwich broke the French line at the battle of La Hogue, and lost her gallant captain in doing it. Another bore Rodney’s flag in five battles—two with the Spaniards and three with the French—and was at the first relief of Gibraltar during the Great Siege. Our first Dover was present at the taking of Jamaica. Another won fame as Captain Cloudesley Shovell’s ship. Commodore Trunnion served on board another Dover, if Smollett spoke by the card in making him express a wish to be buried “in the red jacket which I wore when I boarded the Renummy.” Apart from the taking of Louis the Fifteenth’s frigate Renommée, if we count in other French and Spanish frigates and privateers taken, our various Dovers, in their time, must have brought home captured flags enough to deck the town out from end to end. All, of course, have long since rotted out of existence. People in old times set little store by such trophies. “What are you going to do with all these flags?” a friend once asked of a frigate captain who, in his barge, gaily decorated from bows to stern with the colours of ships taken during the commission, was being pulled in from Spithead to land at the old Sally Port, Portsmouth. “Do with them?” came the reply. “Why, take ’em home and hang ’em on the trees round father’s garden.”

It was a Chatham whose twenty-four pounders, one May morning, just a hundred and forty-eight years ago, gave the Royal Navy our first, and the original, “Saucy” Arethusa. One Maidstone fought with Blake at Santa Cruz de Teneriffe. Another, acting as “guide of the fleet,” led Hawke to victory on that stormy November afternoon among the reefs of Quiberon Bay, which the French Navy, pillorying the memory of its unfortunate admiral, has ever since called “la journée de M. Conflans.”

A Greenwich fought at La Hogue, and was one of Benbow’s squadron in his last fight. One Deptford was also at La Hogue, and another with Byng off Minorca, where the Deptford, at any rate, did her duty. A Romney, in Queen Anne’s war, after a career of distinction, went down with all on board to westward of St. Agnes, Scilly, on the night of the catastrophe to Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Rochester, and Medway, and Sheerness, are also man-of-war names that have attaching to them interesting memories of the fighting days of old, as have too, in one way or other, in differing degrees, the remaining names of the group, Woolwich and Faversham, Eltham and Deal Castle, Margate, Queenborough, and Folkestone.

Our modern-day cruiser the Kent has her own story also as a man-of-war, a notable and interesting historic reputation of her own, to uphold. This summary will give its points, the “battle honours” which the Kent would be entitled to bear on her ship’s flag were our ships authorized to follow the practice of the army in regard to regimental flags.

H.M.S. KENT.

A peculiarly interesting memento of the Kent in connection with one of these battles is in existence. It refers to the part played by the Kent of Charles the Second’s navy just before the battle of June, 1666, “The Four Days’ Fight,” in which Monk, Duke of Albemarle, during Prince Rupert’s temporary absence with a third of the fleet in the Channel, without waiting for Rupert to rejoin, rashly flung his weaker force on De Ruyter with the whole of the Dutch fleet at hand and brought about a general engagement.

The Kent had been sent off on the 27th of May on a scouting cruise between “Blackness” (the old name for Cape Grisnez) and Ostend. Late in the evening of the 30th of May the following letter was handed to the Duke of Albemarle from the captain of the Kent, sent across by a Dutch ketch that the Kent had taken:—

The captain of the Kent’s letter was considered so important that Albemarle at once sent it off by express to the Admiralty. It is still in existence; a stained sheet of yellowish paper with the writing crabbed and not easily decipherable, and brown with age and faded. The letter, with Albemarle’s covering note, was found many years afterwards among some correspondence that had belonged to King James the Second, just as the letter had been filed on its receipt at the Admiralty in 1666, when James, Duke of York, was Lord High Admiral. It is endorsed:—

“For his Grace the Duke of Albemarle, aboard the Royall Charles this — d.dd. In the Downes.”

Albemarle’s covering letter to the Admiralty bears the curiously scrawled endorsements of the various postmasters on the Dover Road as they passed the courier along on his hurried journey up to London:—“Received ye packett at Canterbury, att past 5 in ye Morneing, by Mee, Edw Wheiston”; “Sittingborne, past 8 in ye morning, by mee Wm Webb”; “Rochester, past ten Before noon, Wm Brooker”; “Gravesend at nowne, Hen White.”

Albemarle was roughly handled and had to beat a retreat for the mouth of the Thames—fighting a rear-guard action, skilfully conducted and gallantly contested. Rupert joined him just in time to avert disaster, but one of the English flagships, the Prince, grounded at the last moment on the Galloper Shoal, and was taken by the Dutch and burned as she lay. This was just as the Kent rejoined the flag, in time for the last day’s battle.

Cromwell, it is curious to note, first gave the name Kent to the navy for a man-of-war; one November day of the year 1652. On that day—Saturday, the 6th of November—an application from the Admiralty Committee as to the names for four frigates, two of which were to be launched in the following week, was laid before the Lord General Cromwell and the Commonwealth Council of State. The reply was that the following would be the names: Kentish, Essex, Hampshire, and Sussex. So a State Paper, now among the national archives in the Record Office, explicitly states. In their selection the Council made thereby a new departure, and introduced a set of man-of-war names entirely different from any before known at sea. The little group of four ships named in November, 1652, leads the way at the head of the long series of British men-of-war which have borne the names of our counties in battle on the sea with distinction on so many historic days.

Why the form “Kentish” was preferred to “Kent” for the first of the four ships, is a matter that is not quite obvious. The name, of course, may have been appointed for no particular reason. The four names chosen were names of four seaboard counties, locally interested in maritime affairs, and it may well have been thought that to call one of the ships the “Kentish” was much the same thing as calling her the “Kent.” On the other hand, there may have been in addition something behind, in regard to the name appointed. Everybody knows, teste Lord Macaulay, why the Puritan authorities put down bull-baiting; not because it hurt the bull, but because it pleased the people. The Puritans rather liked, it is to be feared, making themselves deliberately offensive to those who saw otherwise to them. It is certainly curious, if not significant, that at the Restoration the name “Kentish” disappears forthwith from off the official Navy List, and “Kent” appears instead. This was just at the time, too, that certain distinctly obnoxious names, bestowed on men-of-war by the Puritan authorities, as, for instance, Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, Torrington, Newbury, Dunbar, Tredagh (the vernacular for Drogheda), were replaced by names such as Royal Charles, York, Dunkirk, Dreadnought, Revenge, Henry, and Resolution.

Was any reference intended in the form “Kentish,” as originally appointed for the new ship of 1652, to the “Kentish Rising” of 1648, and its hard fate under the sword blades of Fairfax’s troopers? Was the name designed as a reminder to the Royalists of South-Eastern England? Was it meant as a memento of the penalty that had been paid by so many who, only four years before, had buckled on sword and ridden forth so blithely to the county marching song:—

The name “Kentish,” if introduced with such intention, would help in serving to recall in the stately mansions of the squires of Kent, and in many a humble yeoman’s home as well, why there were vacant places round the family board.

A brief comparison between Cromwell’s Kentish and her lineal successor of our own day, His Majesty’s ship the Kent, may be of interest in conclusion.

The Kentish was of 601 tons burthen, 187 feet in length of hull, 32½ feet beam, and 15 feet draught. Our modern Kent is 440 feet between perpendiculars (463½ feet over all), 66 feet beam, and 24½ feet depth. The first Kent, under full sail, might perhaps do nine knots at her best speed; the present Kent, with her engines of 22,000 horse power, has done twenty-three knots an hour. The first Kent’s guns, forty in number, were identical with the guns that Queen Elizabeth’s fleet carried when it fought the Spanish Armada; the same kind of guns, practically, that Henry the Eighth’s Mary Rose had on board when she capsized at Spithead. The same quaint old mediæval style of nomenclature, indeed, was still in vogue for the Kentish’s guns. They were called culverins (18-pounders), demi-culverins (9-pounders), and sakers (6-pounders). The heaviest of them, the culverins, weighed 48 cwt. each, and were 5½ inches in calibre. The Kentish’s guns also were of brass, specially cast for her; refounded, for the most part, according to an existing Ordnance order, out of condemned pieces and captured Royalist cannon. According to a curious manuscript list of the ship’s equipment, the Kentish when ready for sea had on board as her establishment of war stores—908 round shot, 468 double-headed shot, 100 barrels of powder, 60 muskets; and for close-quarter fighting, 7 blunderbusses, 60 pikes, and 40 hatchets. The modern Kent carries as her main armament 6-inch quick-firing steel guns, each firing 100-pounder shot and shell, and able to discharge, each piece in half a minute, heavier metal than the whole broadside (270 lb.) of the original Kentish. The old ship, of course, was built of wood, oak timber; most of which, as a curious fact, seems to have been cut on the confiscated estates of delinquent Royalists in the County of Kent. The new Kent, built of steel, and with 4-inch Krupp armour along her water line, cost to complete for sea upwards of three-quarters of a million sterling; the Kentish frigate, guns and all, cost £5000, or in present-day money from £20,000 to £25,000.

That the gallant “Kents” of His Majesty’s navy at the present hour are quite ready to give a satisfactory account of themselves before the enemy, should occasion arise, may be judged from their firing record in the “gunlayers competition” for 1907. With the 12-pounder, the average per gun for the whole ship was 11·18 hits a minute. Petty Officer Nash achieved fourteen hits in fourteen rounds, the run, during which the score was made, being only of fifty-five seconds duration. In his fifty-five seconds Able Seaman Ramsden fired fifteen rounds, the time taken to load and fire each time being just over three and a half seconds, and he hit the target thirteen times. During the light quick-firing gunlayers’ test, the Kent fired, in the short space of fifty-five seconds, 107 rounds, scoring 83 hits, from her 12-pounders; and 42 rounds, scoring 35 hits, from her 3-pounders. Some of the guns hit the target with every shot they fired, and the loading was wonderfully smart, averaging 15 rounds per gun for the fifty-five seconds.

The Kent of King Edward’s fleet was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on the 12th of February, 1900, as a first-class armoured cruiser, and launched on Wednesday, the 6th of March, 1901, Lady Hotham, the wife of the Admiral Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, naming the ship in the orthodox way, with wine grown and produced within the British Empire, and specially presented for the ceremony by the Agent General of South Australia. The Kent was the first to be launched of our modern set of County Cruisers. She was also the first to hoist the pennant and join the fleet at sea.