Great Britain (United Kingdom) under George III – King: 25 October 1760 – 29 January 1820 Great Siege of Gibraltar (Blockade) & Warship HMS Royal George Commemorative 1783 Bronze Medal 32mm (11.05 grams) Reference: Eimer 800 Certification: NGC AU 55 BN 5709577-014 ROYAAI GEORGE ADMIRAL KEMPENFELT 1783, Sailing warship HMS Royal George sinking to the bottom of the ocean. ‘T GEBLOQUEFERDI GIBRALTAR, The blockage of Gibraltar scene.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
The Great Siege of Gibraltar was an unsuccessful attempt by Spain and France to capture Gibraltar from the British during the American War of Independence.
The British garrison under George Augustus Eliott were blockaded from June 1779, initially by the Spanish alone, led by Martín Álvarez de Sotomayor. The blockade failed because two relief convoys entered unmolested-the first under Admiral George Rodney in 1780 and the second under Admiral George Darby in 1781-despite the presence of the Spanish fleets. The same year, a major assault was planned by the Spanish, but the Gibraltar garrison sortied in November and destroyed much of the forward batteries. With the siege going nowhere and constant Spanish failures, the besiegers were reinforced by French forces under de Crillon, who took over command in early 1782. After a lull in the siege, during which the allied force gathered more guns, ships and troops, a “Grand Assault” was launched on 18 September 1782. This involved huge numbers-60,000 men, 49 ships of the line and ten specially designed, newly invented floating batteries-against the 5,000 defenders. The assault was a disastrous failure, resulting in heavy losses for the Bourbon allies.
The siege then settled down again to more of a blockade, but the final defeat for the allies came when a crucial British relief convoy under Admiral Richard Howe slipped through the blockading fleet and arrived at the garrison in October 1782. The siege was finally lifted on 7 February 1783 and was a decisive victory for the British forces, being a vital factor in the Peace of Paris, which had been negotiated towards the end of the siege.
This was the largest action fought during the war in terms of numbers, particularly the “Grand Assault”. At three years and seven months, it is the longest siege endured by the British Armed Forces and one of the longest sieges in history.
Relief of Gibraltar by Earl Howe, 11 October 1782, by Richard Paton. Howe’s HMS Victory (centre) enters Gibraltar-the Franco-Spanish fleet are anchored in Bay of Gibraltar
HMS Royal George was a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, built at Woolwich Dockyard and launched on 18 February 1756. The largest warship in the world at the time of launching, she saw service during the Seven Years’ War including being Admiral Sir Edward Hawke’s flagship at the Battle of Quiberon Bay and later taking part in the Battle of Cape St Vincent. She sank undergoing routine maintenance work whilst anchored off Portsmouth on 29 August 1782 with the loss of more than 800 lives, one of the most serious maritime losses to occur in British waters.
Several attempts were made to raise the vessel, both for salvage and because she was a major hazard to navigation. In 1782, Charles Spalding recovered six iron 12-pounder guns and nine brass 12-pounders using a diving bell of his design. From 1834-1836, Charles and John Deane recovered more guns using the surface-air supplied diving helmet which they had invented, and in 1839 Major-General Charles Pasley, at the time a colonel of the Royal Engineers, commenced operations to break up the wreck using barrels of gunpowder.
Pasley’s team recovered more guns and other items between 1839 and 1842. In 1840, the remaining structure of the wreck was destroyed by the Royal Engineers in an explosion that shattered windows as far away as Portsmouth and Gosport.
HMS Royal George, right, shown fictitiously at the launch of HMS Cambridge in 1755 by John Cleveley the Elder (1757)
Richard Kempenfelt (1718 – 29 August 1782) was a British rear admiral who gained a reputation as a naval innovator. He is best known for his victory against the French at the Second Battle of Ushant and for his death when HMS Royal George accidentally sank at Portsmouth the following year.
He was born at Westminster. His father, a Swede, is said to have been in the service of James II, and subsequently to have entered the British Army.
Naval career
Richard Kempenfelt was commissioned a lieutenant in January 1741. He saw service in the West Indies, taking part in the capture of Portobelo during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. In 1746 he returned to Britain, and from then until 1780, when he was made rear admiral, he saw active service in the East Indies with Sir George Pocock and in various quarters of the world.
In 1779 he was made Chief of Staff or Captain of the Fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Hardy on HMS Victory which was to lead a hastily assembled fleet to oppose an invasion of England set to begin with the destruction of the Portsmouth naval base by the French and Spanish Armada of 1779.[1]
In 1781 he won the Battle of Ushant, with a vastly inferior force, defeating the French fleet under De Guichen and capturing 20 ships.
Royal George
In 1782 he hoisted his flag on HMS Royal George, which formed part of the fleet under Lord Howe. In August this fleet was ordered to proceed to the relief of Gibraltar, and underwent a refit at top speed at Portsmouth.
On 29 August 1782, Royal George was being heeled off Portsmouth to allow repairs to be made to the water intake for the deck wash pump, which was three feet below water level. The larboard guns had been run out and the starboard guns moved into the centre of the deck to heel over the ship until her lowest gun ports were close to the surface of the water. A supply vessel, Lark, approached Royal George on her low side to transfer a cargo of rum. According to an Admiralty report – not made public until early the next century – the larboard cannons’ weight on the ship’s central frame caused excessively decayed timbers to break. This caused the ship to heel to such a degree that the sea washed in at her gunports, and she soon began to ship water in her hold. A sudden breeze on the raised side of the ship forced her further over and the water rushed in. The crew were ordered to right the ship but the fallen cannon could not be moved. Within a couple of minutes she rolled on to her side and sank before any distress signal could be given.
Nine hundred people were estimated to have lost their lives, for besides the crew there were a large number of tradesmen and women and children on board. About 230 people were saved, some by running up the rigging, while others were picked up by boats from other vessels. Kempenfelt was writing in his cabin when the ship sank; the cabin doors had jammed due to the ship heeling, and he perished with the rest. William Cowper’s poem the “Loss of the Royal George” commemorates this disaster. Kempenfelt had effected radical alterations and improvements in the signalling system then existing in the British navy. A painting of the loss of Royal George is in the Royal United Service Institution, London.
He took a great interest in evangelism. His hymns were published in “Original Hymns and Poems” By Philotheorus (Exeter, England: B. Thorn, 1777). Kempenfelt Bay on Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Canada, is named for him.
See Charnock’s Biog. Nav., vi, 246, and Ralfe’s Naval Biographies, i, 215.
Memorials
A memorial to Kempenfelt, by the sculptor John Bacon the younger, was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1808.[2]
Kempenfelt Bay, part of Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Canada was named for him.
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg (“Hanover”) in the Holy Roman Empire before becoming King of Hanover on 12 October 1814. He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, but unlike his two predecessors, he was born in England, spoke English as his first language, and never visited Hanover.
His life and with it his reign, which were longer than those of any of his predecessors, were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdoms, much of the rest of Europe, and places farther afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of Britain’s American colonies were soon lost in the American War of Independence. Further wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 concluded in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In the later part of his life, George III had recurrent, and eventually permanent, mental illness. Although it has since been suggested that he had the blood disease porphyria, the cause of his illness remains unknown. After a final relapse in 1810, a regency was established, and George III’s eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, ruled as Prince Regent. On George III’s death, the Prince Regent succeeded his father as George IV.
Historical analysis of George III’s life has gone through a “kaleidoscope of changing views” that have depended heavily on the prejudices of his biographers and the sources available to them. Until it was reassessed in the second half of the 20th century, his reputation in the United States was one of a tyrant; and in Britain he became “the scapegoat for the failure of imperialism”.
Great Britain, also known as Britain, is an island in the North Atlantic off the north-west coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km2 (80,823 sq mi), it is the largest island in Europe and the ninth-largest in the world. In 2011 the island had a population of about 61 million people, making it the third-most populous island in the world, after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan. The island is the largest in the British Isles archipelago, which also includes the island of Ireland to its west and over 1,000 smaller surrounding islands.
The island is dominated by an oceanic climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, the island is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, constituting most of its territory: most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island, with their respective capital cities, London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. The term Great Britain often extends to include surrounding islands that form part of England, Scotland, and Wales.
A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the Union of Scotland and England (which already comprised the present-day countries of England and Wales) in 1707. More than a hundred years before, in 1603, King James VI, King of Scots, had inherited the throne of England, but it was not until 1707 that the Parliaments of the two countries agreed to form a unified state. In 1801, Great Britain united with the neighboring Kingdom of Ireland, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the Irish Free State seceded in 1922.
|