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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

15. A Favorable Peace

The Dutch setting English ship on fire at Chatham, by Jan van Leyden. Sailing Warships

The daring Dutch Raid on the Medway accomplished all that its planners had hoped for. It inflicted serious material losses upon England’s Royal Navy. It also publicly demonstrated that the English were unable to protect their own coastline or their own fleet within their own borders. It was one of the greatest humiliations ever suffered by the Royal Navy and England.

So great was the debacle that there were rife speculations about the imminent collapse of the monarchy. It had been restored only seven years earlier, after a decade of rule without a king during the period of the English Commonwealth. The humiliation inflicted by the Dutch did nothing to enhance the restored monarchy’s prestige. Chagrined, broke, and with a monarch seated atop a tottering throne, the English hurried to sign a peace treaty favorable to the Dutch the following month and exited the war.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.