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The Battles of Schooneveld were two naval battles of the Franco-Dutch War, fought off the coast of the Netherlands on 7 June and 14 June 1673 (New Style; 28 May and 4 June in the Julian calendar then in use in England) between an allied Anglo-French fleet commanded by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and the fleet of the United Provinces, commanded by Michiel de Ruyter. The Dutch victories in the two battles, and at the Battle of Texel that followed in August, saved their country from an Anglo-French invasion. ==Background== The Franco-Dutch War of 1672–1678 resulted from the attempts of Louis XIV of France to annex the Spanish Netherlands. In 1672, troops from France, Münster and Cologne invaded the Netherlands by land, while England's navy attacked Dutch shipping and threatened a seaborne invasion. The conflict between England and The Republic is commonly called the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The years 1672-1673 were particularly desperate for the Dutch, with the French stopped only by The Dutch Water Line, a deliberate flooding of large parts of the Dutch countryside, and the withdrawing of guns and men from the fleet to augment the army of William III of Orange, now Admiral-General of the fleet. A surprise attack by De Ruyter in June 1672, resulting in the Battle of Solebay, had however prevented the allies from establishing naval superiority on the North Sea, keeping open the sea lanes so vital to Dutch trade. When the French invaded, the Orangist party took power, falsely accusing the former leading politician Johan de Witt and his personal friend Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel de Ruyter of plotting to betray the Republic to the French. The Orangists themselves were in fact subsidised by the English. Both England and France hoped to create a Dutch puppet state, using the enormous Dutch mercantile assets to gain world trade dominance, each expecting that any moment the Dutch might surrender to either one of them, but greatly fearing he wouldn't be the main beneficiary. Therefore during the battles mutual suspicion between the French and the English was enormous: the English were wary that De Ruyter might suddenly team up with the French; the French thought the Orangist Lieutenant-Admiral Cornelis Tromp, readmitted to the Dutch fleet early in 1673, might well do the same with the English. In fact De Ruyter didn't feel too sure about Tromp himself, but his fears proved to be unfounded. Tromp cared for battle honours above anything else. Michiel de Ruyter, since February 1673 Lieutenant-Admiral-General of the confederate Dutch fleet, planned to blockade the main English fleet in the River Thames by sinking blockships in its narrowest part, and then to deal with the remaining English squadrons at his leisure. But the English fleet took sea in time to prevent the blocking operation, and De Ruyter retreated on 15 May to the Schooneveld, the coastal waters at the mouth of the Schelde River, near the island of Walcheren, to prevent the allies from establishing the naval superiority needed for the transport and landing of a force of 6,000 soldiers waiting at Yarmouth. The Schooneveld basin, between two shoals, was so narrow the allies couldn't take advantage of their numerical superiority. There he was joined by Tromp, adding the squadrons of the admiralties of Amsterdam and the Northern Quarter to that of the Admiralty of de Maze and the Zealandic fleet. De Ruyter read a message from the stadtholder to his captains, informing them they were not only the champions of their nation but of the whole of christendom and that for any cowards "the least safe place will be the ports of the State for there they shall escape neither the severe hand of Justice nor the curse and hatred of their compatriots", many later being overheard repeating these words to themselves. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Battle of Schooneveld」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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