Cloudesley Shovell’s a grand name for a chap who doesn’t have to spell it out every time he talks to a call centre. He could be the central character in a series by Patrick O’Brian, for he spent most of his life at sea.
Aren’t we all these days, not knowing if we are are on our head or our heels. Lord Ickenham, sometimes a fount of common sense, recommends checking to see where the ceiling is; but to business.
Young Cloudesley, called after his maternal grandmother, went to sea as a cabin boy aged thirteen and, unpromisingly, only became a midshipman, usually a rank held by teenagers, when he was twenty-two. After that it was, as it were, plain sailing. His career in the Royal Navy was distinguished and he dabbled in politics like Jack Aubrey. As an aside he had the good fortune to marry a Hill, perhaps an antecedent of mine. (Brenda, please investigate.)
He was appointed Admiral of the Fleet in 1705; he is the fourth holder of this title created in 1688. Interestingly for me the first Lord Aylmer is the seventh holder of the rank. I never suspected the Aylmers had sea legs – Colonel Aylmer was my commanding officer in the Irish Guards and the present Lord Aylmer likewise seems not to want a life on the ocean wave.
How Cloudesley survived so many battles at sea is a mystery but he did not survive a calamitous shipwreck off the Isles of Scilly in 1707. Four Royal Navy ships ran onto rocks and foundered; some 2,000 lives were lost. He is remembered today by his funerary monument in the South Aisle at Westminster Abbey. The portrait at the top of this post does him credit; the sculpture by Grinling Gibbons is less satisfactory.
It met with immediate opprobrium. If you keep back copies of The Spectator turn to the letters in the 30th March 1711 edition.
Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s monument has very often given me great offence: instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing character of that plain gallant man, he is represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig, and reposing himself upon velvet cushions under a canopy of state. The inscription is answerable to he monument; for instead of celebrating the many remarkable actions he had performed in the service of his country, it acquaints us only with the manner of his death, in which it was impossible for him to reap any honour. Joseph Addison.
Dr Clive Easter appended this letter in his article about Grinling Gibbons and thoroughly agrees. “Unfortunately, the figure, in Roman armour, is rather clumsy and it is placed on a sarcophagus that is too small for it.”
Here is a Grinling Gibbons tomb of which Easter approves. (I am adopting the new house style of The Times, today. All honorifics and first names are dropped after the first mention.) It is in memory of Denzil Holles, sorry Holles, slipped up, installed in 1699 in Dorchester. If you are foxed about him I’m not surprised. Go to Google, I will just say when he was eighteen he paid £10,000 for a barony and upped his game in 1624, chipping in £5,00 for an earldom. That was a lot of money then, even now.