Talk:Four Days' Battle

A Decisive Strategic Victory?
Dear 83.117.15.212, excellent source you gave! But can't you see the line of reasoning? Precisely the outcome of the St James's Day Fight shows Britain now couldn't even afford a victory unless it would entail knocking the Dutch out of the war by destroying at least the larger part of their fleet. So the Four Days' Battle was a major strategic victory indeed for the Dutch: it put Britain in a position of basically having lost the war unless it could smash the enemy fleet — a very unlikely event. By "strategic" we mean: "effecting the final outcome of the war". This is the fundamental sense of the word. Of course it's often used indicating a derived aspect of this: "effecting the size of the forces". Now in purely numerical terms British losses weren't too severe: a mere ten ships. They still had a powerful fleet afterwards. But this obscures the fact that in the real strategic sense for them the battle was a complete disaster. They had to scrape the financial barrel to put out a fleet again for a last effort at full force; when that effort failed, for the fleet a process began of inexorable deterioration. The Great Fire of London only hastened the inevitable. We also have to consider the British war aims: the Second Anglo-Dutch War was an unabashed war of aggression to reduce The Republic to the status of a British protectorate and to take over all Dutch colonial possessions in order to gain the coveted World Trade Primacy. All that proud ambition was shown to be an empty dream in July 1666. Just as we rightly consider all the tactical draws of the Third Anglo-Dutch War strategic Dutch victories as the Dutch fleet thwarted British intentions by merely surviving, so with even more justification we may call the Four Days' Battle a great strategic victory because the Dutch Navy not merely survived — though that would have been enough — but destroyed for Britain any reasonable hope of winning the war.

--MWAK 15:37, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

another painting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Storck%2C_Four_Days_Battle.jpg

English fleet
Were there 56 or 79 English ships? This should be clarified.


 * The number of 79 includes the Green Squadron, joining the battle on the third day. --MWAK 11:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I see Tjerk Hiddes de Vries is added; great one! -)-(-H- (&#124;-&#124;) -O-)-(- 06:24, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Sovereign of the Seas
I have deleted the sentence stating that this vessel was 'knocked out of the battle'. Firstly, because the vessel in question had not carried that name since 1650, when the Sovereign of the Seas was renamed just Sovereign by the Commonwealth Navy; at the Restoration in 1660 she became HMS Royal Sovereign and bore that name thereafter. Secondly, and more importantly, ignoring the error over the name, this vessel wasn't knocked out of the battle; she couldn't be, as she was never present, but was sitting in port at Sheerness throughout the battle! Rif Winfield (talk) 09:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Aldborough
HMS Henry escaped to Aldborough - this is probably a misspelling of Aldeburgh, not an inland village in Norfolk. Mjroots (talk) 18:18, 27 July 2021 (UTC)