Sir Robert Holmes(1622–1692)

Robert Holmes was born at Mallow in north County Cork in 1622, second son of Henry Holmes of an Anglo-Irish Protestant settler family of modest gentry rank. The family was on the wrong side of the 1641 rising; the boys went to England as teenagers and Robert joined the royalist army in 1642 as a cornet of horse. He fought through the English Civil War, served Prince Rupert in the cavalry, followed Rupert into exile after Naseby and the surrender of Oxford, and went to sea with him in 1648 when Rupert took the rump of the Royalist fleet privateering off Africa and the West Indies. The decade as a royalist privateer captain in the West African and Caribbean trades made him a sea-captain and the surviving political problem of his life: he was, by training, a man who took ships and burned them.

The Restoration of 1660 brought him home with Charles II and a captain's commission in the new Royal Navy. He sailed with the Cambridge frigate to West Africa in 1661 and again in 1664 to seize the Dutch West India Company forts at Cape Coast Castle and Cape Verde, the operation that gave the Royal African Company its slave-trade infrastructure on the Gold Coast and the operation, simultaneously, that gave the Dutch their casus belli for the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The same expedition seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in September 1664 and renamed it New York after Charles II's brother James, Duke of York. Holmes himself was not at New Amsterdam, having returned to West Africa, but he carried the same flag and was associated with the entire operation by every contemporary Dutch and English account.

He fought through the four years of the Second Anglo-Dutch War as one of the English flag-officers. The Four Days' Battle in June 1666 went badly for the English. The St James's Day Fight in July 1666 went better. On 8 August 1666 a Dutch defector named Laurens Heemskerck told the English fleet that the entire merchant convoy of the Dutch East India Company, plus the Dutch fishing fleet returning from the North Sea grounds, was lying at anchor in the Vlie roadstead between the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling, defenceless. Holmes was sent in with a squadron of frigates and fireships. On the afternoon and night of 8–9 August he burned a hundred and fifty Dutch merchant ships at anchor; the next morning he landed on Terschelling and burned the village of West-Terschelling and its warehouses. The action passed into Dutch national memory as the cataclysm that justified the response of June 1667, when De Ruyter sailed up the Medway and burned the laid-up English fleet at Chatham. The English called the August 1666 raid Holmes's Bonfire and made him a hero of the war. Three weeks later the Great Fire of London began on the night of 2 September; the proximity of the two fires was not lost on contemporaries.

Charles II made him Governor of the Isle of Wight in 1668 and Holmes settled at Yarmouth on the western Solent. He represented the Isle of Wight in the Cavalier Parliament and the Pension Parliament, rebuilt Yarmouth Castle as a royal residence, and ran the island and the western Solent as his personal fief for the rest of his life. He bought the estate at Thorley near Yarmouth and built the parish church there; he commissioned the Genoese marble statue of himself in armour that stands in the Yarmouth parish church to this day. He fought once more in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) at the Battle of Solebay and the Battle of the Texel, was wounded in the leg at the Texel and never fully recovered the use of it.

He never married. He died at Yarmouth on 18 November 1692, seventy years old, on the day of an Atlantic storm so violent that the church bell at Thorley was said to have rung itself. He was buried in the church he had built. The estate passed to his nephew Henry Holmes who held the governorship after him; the Holmes family ran the Isle of Wight as a hereditary political property through the eighteenth century. The Holmes name in the English-side catalogue is otherwise the Yorkshire-Lancashire farming-and-weaving surname of the Norse holmr root; Sir Robert Holmes came in from Cork and made the name famous in the Royal Navy on a different line, but Holmes' Bonfire and the burning of New Amsterdam to make New York are the seventeenth-century events the surname carries when the question is asked.