vessels led by the famous De Ruyter. He and
Tromp had tormented and insulted us long
enough, and we owed him and Van Ghent one
for having in 1667 taken Sheerness, sailed up
the Medway, and burnt six men-of-war. The
Dutch, too, had had their wrongs; and they
were savage with us for having tried so hard to
swoop down on their Smyrna fleet and its two
millions of treasure. They were stolid dogged
old enemies, who had learned to disregard our
self-assumed sovereignty of the seas, and they
took a good deal of "punishment." De Wit was
eager to give us a final crippling blow at sea
and leave him free to pour the musketeers of
Utrecht and Guelderland on the French, who
under Turenne and Condé were then taking
and subduing Holland, town by town, and
preparing for the famous passage of the Rhine.
Pepys' friend, the Earl of Sandwich, had warned
the duke of the danger of being netted in
Southwold Bay, where the Dutch fire-ships
could have burnt us like so many chips in a
grate. The duke (never very sweet tempered)
replied to the earl's cautions by a sneer at his
timidity. The taunts rankled in the earl's soul,
and he resolved to conquer or perish. The
moment the Dutch appeared, closing their nets
in upon us, he bore out of the bay to give the
duke and the French admiral time to debouche,
and went straight at the enemy like a mad
lion. He killed our old foe Van Ghent, and
beat off his ship after a furious fight. He then
sank a Dutch man-of-war and three fire-ships
that grappled with him. His own vessel was
now shattered and pierced, and two-thirds of
his nine hundred men were killed or wounded,
yet he still continued to blaze at the enemy till
a third fire-ship closed upon him, and refusing
to escape, he then perished fighting to the last.
Nor was the duke all this time idle. He bore
down on De Ruyter, and hammered at him for
two hours till night came. Two-and-thirty
battles the grey old Dutch veteran had fought,
but never, he declared, so hard a one as this.
In the morning the Duke of York (certainly
not a Nelson) thought it prudent to retire. The
Dutch, though disabled, beginning, however, to
harass his retreat, he turned on them, and
renewed the fight, while Sir Joseph Jordan,
who led our van, got the weather gauge of
De Ruyter, who then fairly fled, pursued by
the duke to the coast of Holland. We
were close at his rear, and only a timely
Dutch fog saved fifteen of his leaky and
lagging vessels. The French took little part
in the fray, their captains being instructed by
Louis the Fourteenth to leave the English and
the Dutch to fight it out between them. The
French, however, lost two ships and their rear
admiral; we six ships (one taken, two burned,
three sunk) and two thousand men. The Dutch
lost three large vessels. It was not much of a
victory, that must be confessed, and far
unlike the tremendous overthrow of the Dutch
by Monk in 1653, when Van Tromp perished.
It is a curious fact about this battle of Solebay
that the sound of the cannonading was heard
thirty miles. The Earl of Ossory, then at
Euston, eight miles north of Bury St. Edmunds,
hearing the firing, instantly took horse
and galloped the thirty miles to join the fleet.

But this story is quite surpassed by a
Cambridge tradition of Newton. In June, 1666—
those three days that the English and Dutch
fleets were incessantly wrangling and fighting
between the Naze and the North Foreland,
distant at least seventy miles from Cambridge
—Newton, then a Bachelor of Arts at Trinity,
and just commencing his optical discoveries,
came one day into the hall and told the fellows
that a battle was being fought between the
Dutch and the English, and that the latter
were having the worst of it. He had been
studying, he said, in the observatory over the
gateway, and had there heard the vibration of
cannon. It seemed to grow louder as it came
nearer our coast; he therefore concluded that
we had had the worst of it. A recent writer
on Solebay quotes the following fine old naval
ballad:

I cannot stay to name the names
Of all the ships that fought with James,
Their number or their tonnage;
But this I say, the noble host
Right gallantly did take its post,
And cover'd all the hollow coast
From Walderswyck to Dunwich.

Well might you hear their guns I guess
From Sizewell Gap to Easton ness.
The show was rare and sightly:
They batter'd without let or stay
Until the evening of that day—
'Twas then the Dutchmen ran away,
The Duke had beat them tightly.

Of all the battles gained at sea,
This was the rarest victory
Since Philip's grand Armada.
I will not name the rebel Blake;
He fought for Roundhead Cromwell's sake,
And yet was forced three days to take
To quell the Dutch bravado.

So now we've seen them take to flight—
This way and that where'er they might,
To windward or to leeward.
Here's to King Charles, and here's to James,
And here's to all the captains' names,
And here's to all the Suffolk dames,
And here's to the house of Stuart.

Up the Waveney now for the crow; Waveney,
"the waving water" of the Saxons, the stream
that winds through broad green tranquil
meadows spotted red with cattle, and past
rushy flats and draining mills, and rows of
poplars, and heathy slopes, and patches of fir,
and golden swaying oceans of corn, with towers
and spires for distant landmarks. Bungay "le
bon Eye" (the beautiful island) we strike for,
a sleepy old East Anglian town, with a round-
towered church, and old flint walls of Hugh
Bigod's Castle that are now embowered in the
"King's Head" gardens. Hugh Bigod was one
of those proud barons who rebelled against
Henry the Second. It was in 1174 that the
King sent for Hugh Bigod, and the story still
lives in a ballad. The very old chant (so old it
can hardly go alone) says:

The king has sent for Bigod bold,
In Essex whereat he lay;
But Lord Bigod laughed at his poursuivant,
And stoutly thus did say,