Sir Robert Holmes(1622–1692)

Robert Holmes was born at Mallow in north County Cork in 1622, second son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry family. He went to England as a young man and joined the royalist army in 1642, fought through the English Civil War in the cavalry under Prince Rupert, and followed Rupert into exile and to sea, learning his trade as a captain in the years the Royalist fleet spent at sea off Africa and the West Indies.

The Restoration of 1660 brought him home with Charles II and a captain's commission in the new Royal Navy. He sailed twice to West Africa, in 1661 and 1664, on the king's service, and the 1664 expedition with which he sailed seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York after the Duke of York, the moment from which the modern city takes its name.

He fought through the Second Anglo-Dutch War as one of the English flag-officers. On 8 to 9 August 1666, on intelligence that the Dutch merchant fleet lay at anchor in the Vlie roadstead, Holmes was sent in with a squadron of frigates and fireships and burned a hundred and fifty enemy ships in a single action. The raid passed into English memory as Holmes's Bonfire and made him one of the celebrated commanders of the war. He was knighted for it that year and rose to Vice-Admiral.

Charles II made him Governor of the Isle of Wight in 1668 and Holmes settled at Yarmouth on the western Solent, representing the island in two Parliaments and rebuilding Yarmouth Castle as a royal residence. He bought the estate at Thorley near Yarmouth, built the parish church there, and fought once more, at the battles of Solebay and the Texel, in the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

He died at Yarmouth on 18 November 1692, seventy years old, and was buried in the church he had built, where the Genoese marble statue of him in armour stands to this day. The governorship passed to his nephew, and the Holmes family ran the Isle of Wight as a hereditary political property through the eighteenth century. The Holmes name in the English catalogue is otherwise the Yorkshire and Lancashire farming-and-weaving surname of the Norse holmr root; Sir Robert Holmes came in from Cork and made it famous in the Royal Navy.