Sea Control - Sea Control 477 - Scandinavian Responses to Great Power War at Sea with Dr. Steve Murdoch

Episode Date: November 5, 2023

Links1. Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c. 1500-1815, edited by J.D. Davies, Alan James, Gijs Rommelse,Routledge, 2019.

Hey folks, it's Jared. I'm joined by historian Dr. Steve Murdoch today to discuss Scandinavian responses to Great Power War at Sea in the 17th and 18th centuries. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners

in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Steve Murdoch, and we're going to discuss his chapter contribution,

Scandinavian Responses to Great Power, Maritime Warfare, 1651 to 1713. That chapter appears in a larger volume, Ideologies of Western Naval Power, circa 1500 to 1815. Steve, welcome aboard. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, please? Sure. As you introduced me, I'm Steve Murdoch. I'm a professor of military history at the Swedish Defence University for Sparskogskolen. I've been here for two years now.

And before that, I was a professor of history at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where I was based for 17 years. My main academic interests are, I wouldn't define them as military history or maritime history. It's more the 17th century in general. So when I look at war, I look at it through a social perspective. from a migration perspective, obviously the maritime side of things and the military aspects as well. So a real specialization of the Swedish maritime war in the 17th century and from a military perspective, more absolutely the 30 Years' War, 1618, 1640.

Well, as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are around and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I mean, we could probably put together a series on the 30 Years War, but it'd be like 40 episodes based on the minimal reading that I've done about the 30 Years War. I kept having to refer back to a map and bookmark things and try to figure out what was happening and who was on which side. So that is your specialty. I'm not sure whether I should congratulate you or offer my condolences. That is a tough one. I would say that I've got a very niche speciality, which is Scottish migration into the Scandinavian armies in the Thirty Years' War. That's 100,000 guys, you know, they did okay for themselves.

Just 100,000? Yeah, just 100,000. First question, what was the geopolitical situation like for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in the timeframe that you're discussing in the chapter here? It's a complicated thing. Because of the makeup of the Scandinavian countries and people's perceptions of the Scandinavians, people think that you're dealing with two equal nation states or nations. You're not. You're dealing with one ocean-facing state, which is made up of two kingdoms, Denmark and Norway, plus Greenland, plus the Faroe Islands, plus Iceland. And you're then dealing with Kingdom Sweden, which encompasses modern day Finland, which is struggling to liberate itself from not kind of being landlocked, because obviously it faces the Baltic, but it's got no access out into the North Sea, apart from one tiny little port on the West Coast, which is now Gothenburg.

It's a very problematic relationship that Denmark-Norway and Sweden have, because at one point, the whole of the Scandinavian Nordic kingdoms were dominated from Copenhagen. The Swedes broke free after the Stockholm bloodbath in 1520. And it's never really settled then as to what was Sweden and what was Denmark-Norway. And for the next century, over a century and a half perhaps, the Swedes are continually trying to take more from Norway, take bits of Denmark, which they successfully do. So as you come into the 17th century, Denmark-Norway is the military power. It's the maritime power. Sweden is an emerging power, but definitely cowed by Denmark-Norway in 1611 to 1613 during the Kalmar War. But by the time you get to 1650, Sweden is dominant. It's the dominant, or at least on land. But there's still

a discrepancy between the two different maritime forces. Denmark and Norway need an ocean-going, a trans-oceanic fleet to defend its North Atlantic possessions and its possession in Tranquil Bar in India. But Sweden really needs smaller vessels, inshore vessels, galley

fleet, and troop transports to move its army to wherever it needs to go, the Southern Baltic or Eastern Baltic. So So they're not balanced kingdoms in that way. But of the two, Sweden is on the rise and forcing itself as an empire. Denmark, Norway is on decline, certainly by the mid-17th century. What was Sweden's military stature like at this point?

Not just necessarily versus Denmark, Norway, but also versus England and France. This is a moment where Sweden is constantly at war. Sweden is trying to find itself moving into the East, invading what was then Muscovy, which people often erroneously refer to now as Russia, but it was just the Duchy of Muscovy then. They're trying to expand and take a new possession, which they called Ingria. They eventually move into Estonia, Latvia. There are constant wars against Poland. The king of Poland, Sigismund, was also the king of Sweden at one point in the 1590s. But throughout this period, Sweden is reforming its army constantly. And Gustav Adolf introduces in 1621 his articles of war. And these actually are the first attempt really to lay down and demarcate how the army should be established. Gustav Adolf is key to the development of the Swedish army, but I would say he's sometimes over-celebrated, not least because he dies in 1632, and the Swedish army, which is then at war in Germany,

continues fighting for years, 16 years after Gustav Adolf's killed, and in fact takes more territory after Gustav Adolf's dead than it did before. And the reason he couldn't do that was because Gustav Adolf had professionalized the army to such an extent that when he's killed at the Battle of Lutzen in 1632, the four field armies are not actually affected by it. Any other army at the time that lost a king in battle

would probably have given up. But the Swedish army is now so bureaucratic that it's able to continue fighting in the field without the king and under the regency of Axel Oxenstier. So we haven't actually talked about what's happening at sea in this period. So maybe if you could give us some idea

of what was happening there, because we know that people were seizing Swedish and Danish vessels. What tactics did the Swedes and Danes use initially to attempt to prevent those seizures? Well, I think one of the problems we have in the first half of the 17th century, people talk. And scholars at the time talk, authors will talk about the law of nations. But there is no law of nations.

There's only bilateral treaties between two individual countries. And just because perhaps England and the French have an agreement, and how they will conduct war. That doesn't mean that, say, the Netherlands or the Dutch Republic and England have the same agreement. And one of the problems for Sweden at this point, or Sweden and England, is that England is on the rise as a great maritime power at this point.

Under the Cromwellian regime, then we get the rise of the Cromwellian Navy, which is very successful sometimes against the Dutch, other times not so much. But it's able to project force in a way that the Swedish can't. And a real problem there is that the Swedes have actually not been able to have an agreement with the Cromwellian Republic.

They are, of course, monarchists. They believe in monarchy. Queen Christina supports the cause of Charles II after Charles I is executed. And like every crowned head in Europe, she supports the exiled King Charles II and doesn't recognize the English Republic. And that's problematic because when the English Republic starts to seize Swedish vessels, there's absolutely no recourse in law that says how this should be resolved.

So when, during the First Albo-Dutch War, 1652 to 1654, and in fact slightly before it, the English are now seizing Swedish vessels. The Swedes don't recognize Oliver Cromwell, so why shouldn't the English take their ships? There's no agreement there. But England, like many other places, is constrained for its naval supplies on Swedish tar, Swedish iron, and needs to have some kind of deal with the English to resolve this. How can they keep building up a naval power, especially when they're losing ships to the Dutch themselves, when they're at war with the very place that can actually supply them with the goods they need? So they have to have some kind of compromise. And this is why we get negotiations come along to try and establish some kind of treaty, get some kind of framework that they can actually all agree on. So in the 1650s, we get the first Anglo-Swedish agreement round about 1652, which is enshrined in treaty in 1654. And that's where we get something that will establish the future of English and later British relationships with Sweden. It's formed into an alliance in 1654 and by 1656 it looks like there's an agreement that Swedish ships can trade with anybody they like, even a belligerent fighting England, because it's a free ship and the goods on board are free. Of course, it's more complicated than that, because then it gets down to issues of how many of the crew on the Swedish ship are actually Dutch, how much the cargo is destined for our enemies, and what actually constitutes a free cargo. And that debate doesn't go away until the 18th century. I don't know. I kind of feel like that debate may still be ongoing as we watch some of the things happen in the Strait of Hormuz and other places around the world. But how did the Swedes and Danes respond to the continued seizure of their vessels by the English, Scottish and French? Well, at this point, there was not much that really they could do other than to try economic blackmail, for want of a better word.

If you guys don't stop taking our goods, then we're only going to supply the other side. There is an attempt at the introduction, really, of a first convoy system, which was actually quite an interesting innovation at the time. Nowadays, it seems obvious that, you know, you could convoy ships out. But at this point, the Swedes actually send out convoys to go through the channel between England and the Dutch Republic with about 20 escort ships. So they're now starting to present themselves as a maritime threat. Of course, they're not really. These ships are not of the same caliber as either the English or the Dutch ships, or the French ships for that matter. So they're posturing.

They're using economic devices to try to say, well, look, if you don't actually give us our ships and cargo, or at least the ships back and keep the cargo, if you can prove it's Dutch cargo, okay, fair enough, keep it. But give us the ships and the definite Swedish cargo back, and otherwise we're going to deploy these convoy escort vessels and we will attack you. Now, in the 1650s, there doesn't seem to be that much,

any instance where this actually happened, but it does happen later on. But I think it's the first show of force. Like, you're at war with a different nation, and we've now put convoys into the English Channel. Do you really want to risk that? It's the start of a, not belligerent, but certainly posturing stance that there will be retribution

if any Swedish ships are taken. Well, let me ask a follow-up to this, and if you can't answer, just tell me and we'll move on. But what sort of instructions were the Swedish vessels sailing with? You talk about organizing a convoy. And yes, I am doing this in my mind sort of from a modern perspective, but it's quite an undertaking because the ships themselves are commercial entities owned by other people who have to basically consent to a convoy system unless you effectively nationalize their vessels. So is that what is happening at this point? Is that all these commercial entities are saying is like, well, it's best for us to sail with this convoy. So we are consenting to do this.

Or is the Swedish Crown saying is like, hey, you're a Swedish flag vessel. You shall sail in company with these other entities because your cargo is going to wind up being Crown cargo for the various industries that you describe. It's a very good question. And I think the honest answer to that is that there's no duress put on to the skippers of the ships that they have to sail under convoy. However, some of the letters from the English representatives in Gothenburg Harbor in the 1650s make it quite clear that outside the harbor of Gothenburg, at least within sight of land, there are English privateers who are waiting. And basically, it's the English ambassador who writes back to London and says, pull those guys out of here because they're actually holding up our trade. But the converse of that is, if you were a Swedish vessel about to leave Gothenburg and you could see the privateers out on the horizon, would you sail out or would you pay a little bit of commission to the escort guys and say, okay, we'll sail with you? And it's not just the Swedes, by the way.

It's also other neutrals who are going out as well. So Lubeck ships, Hamburg ships, Brandt, anybody who wants to leave the port with goods is actually basically saying, yeah, you can join that onboard, but it's going to cost you something. And I think later on, we have the actual figures when it comes to the 1660s and 1670s, we get the actual figures of how much that is. And it's about 2.5% of cargo. But at this point, I'm not so clear on how much they're doing it. But it's quite clear that it's consensual and they don't have to. It's up to them. You mentioned Lubeck, Hamburg, and I think there are one or two others in there. Did the Hanseatic League have a role to play in any of this here, or was that no longer in existence really?

The Hanseatic League is still there in May, but it's got no real maritime power in the way that it used to have. I mean, Sweden owes its existence to the Hansa, or at least the city of Lubeck in particular, which is very good at supplying ships and munitions and capital in the 1520s. By this period, the Hansa has really lost its way.

We're now talking about a post-Westphalian situation where the power plays have really changed, certainly in the Southern Baltic. Now you've got Brandenburg rising as a power. You've got all sorts of other entities, Courland, putting a fleet out to sea. So it's not really a Hanseatic situation that we're looking at here. Well, in shifting gears to talk about maritime law a little bit, what was the new interpretation of maritime law in the 1690s that underpinned the right to neutrality?

Well, that takes a while to get there because on the road to that process, you've got a series of wars. So you've got the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch War, and then you get to the war against France by the Williamites, and that's both the Dutch and the British combined. But one of the things that they try to do when you get to the Restoration, 1660, is they try to reform the laws that Cromwell had put in place. So now you've got this really bizarre situation where 1661 becomes the most cited treaty in all Anglo-Swedish relations. Right through until the 18th century, people talk about the 1661 Treaty of Whitehall, which is in a sense nearly identical to the Cromwellian laws. But of course, this is a period where Charles II is trying to strip out all Cromwellian legislation. But he actually likes two things that Cromwell introduced. One is the Navigation Acts from 1651, which basically means only English ships and goods can be traded to English colonies.

And secondly, the Treaty of Whitehall reaffirms the English-Swedish relationship, but it's actually problematic because it doesn't take any cognizance of the two maritime jurisdictions. Charles II was not fond of the Scots after his coronation in 1651, so he separates England and Scotland, he breaks the Cornwallian Union. But what that means is you've now got two maritime jurisdictions. You've got English maritime jurisdiction, which is common law, and you've got Scottish maritime jurisdiction, which is Roman law. But the Treaty of Whitehall only takes in the Kingdom of England. It doesn't include the Kingdom of Scotland, depending how you read it. Certainly the Scots choose to read it, that they are not comprehended into the agreement. And this gives the Swedes a real headache, because when they try to show the Treaty of Whitehall, Scots go after their ships in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch War. Of course, the Scots can turn around and say, but we're not signed as part of the Treaty of Whitehall. And so Sweden's response to all this is a continual clarification through the 1660s, 1670s, even as late as 16 into the 1680s, trying to understand what English slash British maritime law actually is. There is no bank implementation of convoys. There's no real clarification. It's just continually, it's a diplomatic bombardment to try to resolve the problems. And the problem in this case being, there are very few English seizures of Swedish ships in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch War. The Scots privateers go for them in numbers which are actually quite astonishing, more than the First Anglo-Dutch War, and there's several reasons why this might be. Charles II can plausibly deny that he had anything to do with those seizures, or it's a genuine attempt to disrupt Dutch trade by the Scots, and certainly most of the ships that are taken and condemned are crewed by Dutch and do have Dutch carboids.

But really, it's not until the Nine Years' War, 1688 to 1697, that you get a new geopolitical dynamic with the British and Dutch Confederation under William III. And this is the time when the great maritime powers, if you think about it, this combined Dutch-British Confederation going after the French, it is no surprise that price was through the roof. And the Swedes lose a lot of ships in the first few years of this war. They lose 80 to the English, 43 to the French, 18 to the Dutch, 142 in total in only a few years. And this means that they have to do something about it. And this really is where we come down to answering your question. The Danes and the Swedes, these traditional enemies, sign a defensive alliance in 1690, which is where they're going to put out convoys at sea, six vessels each.

But they also reiterate this in 1693 with a militant league. And this is where it's going to be aggressive defiance of maritime violence against them. So if you come near a Scandinavian vessel or a Scandinavian guarded convoy, there will be an act of aggression follows and make it quite clear that they've had enough of the English and the Dutch claiming dominance at sea. And this comes down to the flag disputes where some of the Swedes are being asked to dip They're top sales for whenever they see an English ship. And they're actually just sailing middle.

So by 1694, they're getting full engagement of Danish and Swedish warships against the British Royal Navy or the English Royal Navy. Casualties on both sides, 60 vessels involved in one skirmish, although only two actually take part in the fighting. And this actually reduces price-taking against the Scandinavian powers radically. It drops to nearly zero. And this is where it's underpinned by a book by Johann Gröning called La Vigatio Libera, where he takes on Hugo Grotius and claims that just law as Grotius saw it, where you cannot be an ally. He says that's all out of the window now, that it is a right of any sovereign nation to trade with anybody in time of war.

And if you don't agree with us, we will fight you for it. And this leads to some remarkable exchanges. The 1693 publication of Navigatio Libera comes and is always seen as a prompt for this aggressive action that comes later. although the actual correlation where the king says, I've read Navigatio Libera, go to war now. We haven't bought that link. But the timing of it is very, very suggestive that the two are influenced by each other.

And the point is made, Anglo price-taking, English price-taking of Swedish vessels drops to nothing until just the very end of the war, 1697. The point's made that you do not attack neutral convoys. They're a free ship and carry free goods. And if you don't believe this, we'll fight you for it. But a really curious bit about this is Sweden is not a neutral nation. Sweden's at war on land at this stage all the time.

So they're actually arguing for a neutrality at sea, specifically not neutrality on land. And they also talk about how it's hypocritical of the English to say anything other because during the wars of the 1670s, the English themselves had claimed that they had the right to trade with the Danes in the Baltic whilst Sweden and Denmark were at war. So they're actually citing back precedence to English law and saying, you've claimed this, you started this, you used this argument against us, have it back,

and we're prepared to go to war. Not to war about it, but we'll fight you to the death in some cases. So that doesn't actually happen until 1704, but there are fights to the death. I was going to ask, their fights on land, were they fighting with the belligerents who were attacking their vessels at sea, or were they fighting with a third party, if you will?

Fighting with third parties. So they could be fighting against some of the German states who were fighting against Sweden. You could almost call these proxy wars because it might be the Dutch are supplying the Swedes with some goods, the English are supplying Brandenburg. I mean, it doesn't really matter which. Then there's so many people involved.

By the 1700s, it gets really ugly. The Danes and the Swedes go to war in part of the Great Northern. They're not at war for long. The Swedes actually win against a coalition. But yeah, the majority of the land wars are simple imperial expansion. I mean, the Swedes and the Danes went to war in the 1670s, where the Danes are trying to get territories back that they lost in the 1650s. So there's a lot of ongoing conflict.

In that war, they're backed by allies who've got a grudge against the Swedes, but Swedes are backed by allies who've got a grudge against it, etc. So it goes on. So these are multi-dimensional wars. But for the most part, the legal argument is that if a Swede is neutral, as in has no part against a belligerent conflict between, say, the English and the French or the English and the Dutch, then they have the right to trade their goods to the other side. And so all the laws written, the reinterpretations of the Treaty of Whitehall, there's clauses rewritten and rewritten. What do you mean by this is an illegal cargo that could be condemned? Are we talking about a nail or are we talking about bar iron that could be used to make swords? Be specific. So that's the kind of nuance that we're getting to. So the bilateral agreement, which in 1654 basically said, please don't shoot us up, by the 1690s is really nuanced into what do you mean? How many crew have to be Dutch before you can take us? What do you mean if the ship was built in the Netherlands, you can say it's a Dutch ship even if it's a Swedish-owned ship

commissioned by Swedes and crewed by Swedes? They're really nuancing the law here. So we're actually seeing not just an increase in a nuancing of maritime law, We're seeing a nuancing of what the very term contraband means. What does it mean to be contraband? And of course, the Scots threw in one completely left-field one, which then becomes enshrined in British maritime law a century later, which is if you can prove that the cargo,

a Swedish ship sails to the Netherlands and unloads iron during a war between the Dutch and the English, but then it sails on to the Caribbean with a different cargo. but if you can prove from the manifest or any other device that it had characterized the man, then you can still seize the ship. It's called the Law of Continuous Voyage, which

actually has everybody's head shaking. The Swedes don't understand it. Lialyne Jenkins, the chief Swedish English lawyer, he doesn't understand it, but by the middle of the 18th century, it's law for all sites. So the Law of Continuous Voyage has its origins in this period.

The idea of armed defiance of the great militant powers doesn't really kick off until the War of Spanish Succession, 1702 to 1713. And again, we see English prize taking against the Swedes,

72 prizes taken in two years, 59 Danish prizes. And even though those two countries have just been at war, the English are now saying, but what if they do what they did in the last war? What if they reactivate the militant alliance? Can we actually tolerate that?

And then two episodes happen which seal the deal. This is where the Swedes make their ultimate statement. The first is a Irishman called Captain George Pickering who's on a ship called the St. George and he's being pursued in the Mediterranean by three Royal Navy warships and he turns around and engages them in what is virtually a fight to the death.

His crew is reduced, slaughtered And his defense is that he thinks they're Turkish Ottoman corsairs who are going to enslave them. But how you could confuse three Royal Navy warships for Ottoman corsairs? It's his defense, and he gets away with it. But that's nothing compared to Gustav Ceylan. He's escorting ships to England carrying goods for the English Navy. So the whole convoy is destined for the Royal Navy,

and he's confronted by eight English 50 gunners. and one frigate, and he's asked to drop his top sail, and he opens fire. And in a battle that lasts for a good couple of hours, reduces his crew by about 70%, he manages to disable three Royal Navy 50 gunners and is then taken in as a prize, but then they don't know what to do with him.

Then they actually refit the ship and send it back to Sweden, and he's released and ennobled into the Swedish nobility for his troubles, and it turns out he was carrying a warrant which says fight to the death. if you're asked to drop the Swedish colours to the English, because we are a sovereign nation just like England. And so we have the right to trade in the sea just like England. And this puts the English into a quandary, because if the very power that's supplying them with naval goods

is now prepared to wreck English ships, which are needed to fight the French, what's the cost? What's the worth of that? And so the Stilander case is seen as the absolute seal to the Swedish policy of armed defiance at sea. From that point on, again, the English and later the British, they don't go near the Swedes or the Danes. They're quite content just to take a step back and say they can trade with who they like. It's not worth losing those naval supplies. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Steve Murdoch. Steve, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? I'm currently working on artillery innovation in the Thirty Years' War and looking at the way that patent law is enforced, as you can find patents for certain artillery pieces for use on land and sea being transferred between Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden. the guy behind that is a guy called William Douglas and I'm looking at how patent law

is enforced so this is real niche stuff now you can find me online at prof underscore murdoch on twitter my webpage is available through the Swedish Defense University website yeah we'll keep a link to both the larger volume

that this is from in our show notes as well as your website there but thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for tuning in We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.