Hon. Keith Stewart

Stewart was a competent and well-connected Scottish nobleman who was honoured with a commodore’s broad pennant during the latter stages of the American Revolutionary War, but rather tarnished his reputation by failing to tackle a small Dutch squadron in the North Sea.

He was the second surviving son of Alexander Stewart, the 6th Earl of Galloway and his second wife, Lady Catherine Cochrane, the daughter of the 4th Earl of Dundonald. His elder brother, John, was a lieutenant in the Navy before inheriting as the 7th Earl, and his nephew, Admiral George Stewart, (Viscount Garlies), became the 8th Earl of Galloway. His grandnephew, also named Keith Stewart, rose to high rank in the Victorian navy.

Little is known of Stewart’s early career, other than that during the Seven Years War he was commissioned lieutenant of the Nassau 70, Captain Maurice Suckling (Nelson’s uncle), on 2 January 1759, and served in Commodore John Moore’s expedition against Guadeloupe which commenced that month. He left the Nassau in the late summer of 1759.

Captain Stewart was in the thick of the action at the Battle of Ushant in 1778

On 11 February 1761, in his 22nd year, he was promoted commander and appointed to the sloop Speedwell 8, although this commission appears to have been for purposes of rank only, as he retained the post for less than a month, and the vessel was not actually in service . In March he received an appointment to the Lynx 14, which had been built to a new design, being launched at Rotherhithe shortly after he was assigned to her. Attached to the Downs station, she joined Commodore Sir Piercey Brett’s small squadron in June for a cruise off the French coast. In August she came under the orders of the Admiral of the Fleet Lord Anson, whose squadron escorted Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to England for her marriage to King George III. In October the Lynx was off Norway where Stewart soon found himself in legal trouble. On 7 November he captured a British merchant ship, now a French prize, while it was anchored in (neutral) Norwegian waters. When the King of Denmark protested (since Norway was under Danish rule), Stewart was briefly dismissed from the Navy, but almost immediately restored, apparently at the request of the Danish monarch. Despite his faux pas, Stewart retained command of the Lynx until March 1762.

In the meantime, on 19 February 1762 at the behest of his father, he had been elected unopposed in a by-election as the M.P for the Wigtown Boroughs. A month later he surrendered the seat in a political arrangement that saw him rewarded by being posted captain on 7 April 1762, and he was assigned to command the sixth rate Lively 20. For the next ten months Stewart cruised and escorted coastal convoys in the North Sea, based much of the time at Leith, near Edinburgh. At the end of February 1763, with the Seven Years War having concluded, the Lively conveyed two of Queen Charlotte’s brothers to Holland from Harwich, and by April she was at Sheerness, fitting out for foreign service.

In June 1763 the Lively under Stewart’s command sailed from Portsmouth for the Mediterranean, and at the end of November she was at Minorca with Rear-Admiral Prince Edward, the Duke of York. By April 1764, the Lively was cruising around Sardinia and Corsica, and having returned home, she was paid off in February 1765. A few weeks later, Stewart was appointed to the frigate Montreal 32 and returned to the Mediterranean. In August he met James Boswell in Florence, and warned his fellow countryman of the supposed dangers of the island of Corsica, where Boswell planned to visit. Stewart retained on that station until March 1766, presumably enjoying the pleasures of leisurely cruising under peacetime conditions .

In 1768 he was returned as the M.P for the Scottish borough of Wigtownshire, becoming known for his loyal support of the Grafton and North governments. During this period, he was also a groom of the bedchamber to the Duke of Gloucester. He generally resided throughout the remainder of the peace at the 2,000-acre estate of Glasserton in Dumfriesshire, which had been bestowed on him by his father in 1768. He kept socially active in the area, including serving as a steward at the Galloway and Carlisle races, where he sometimes entered his own horses.

After a decade of unemployment, and with the American Revolutionary War escalating, Stewart was appointed to the brand-new ship of the line Berwick 74 in December 1777. Over the next few months her hull was sheathed in copper, a feature that gave British ships a significant speed advantage over their un-coppered opponents. Given this dockyard work and the rush to bring ships into service for the new war, it took Stewart another five months to fully fit out his command and find a crew, although the sixty volunteers from Stranraer in the county of Galloway who joined in April must have helped with the latter problem. The Berwick joined the Grand Fleet and was present in the van at the Battle of Ushant on 27 July 1778, seeing considerable action that resulted in casualties of ten men killed and eleven wounded. During the ensuing political dispute between Admiral Hon. Augustus Keppel and Vice-Admiraal Sir Hugh Palliser, Stewart attempted to remain neutral, though he testified briefly at Keppel’s court-martial. Continuing with the Berwick, he was present in the Channel Fleet retreat of August 1779. In mid-September his ship sailed from St. Helens with a small squadron under the command of Rear-Admiral Sir John Lockhart-Ross in order to investigate rumours of a French invasion force in Cancale Bay near St. Malo, but when no serious threat was found she returned to Spithead at the end of the month.

After fitting for the West Indies, the Berwick sailed in May 1780 for the Leeward Islands under the orders of Commodore Hon. Robert Boyle Walsingham. Arriving in July after a difficult voyage, in August she was later detached to Jamaica with Rear-Admiral Joshua Rowley’s reinforcements. In October the Berwick was one of the men-of-war returning to Jamaica after escorting a convoy that were overtaken by the Great Hurricanes of that month. The Berwick was so badly damaged in these storms that she had to return directly to Europe under jury masts, arriving at Portsmouth on 24 November. Adding to her distress, on the voyage forty of the crew had died of scurvy and dysentery, and two hundred more were sick enough to require hospitalisation on arrival.

At the end of March 1781, with the Dutch now having entered the war against Britain, Stewart was appointed a commodore to command a squadron to patrol northward from the Firth of Forth. On 12 April, still aboard the Berwick, but now with a captain under him to command the ship (John Ferguson), he departed Portsmouth for Leith with two frigates in company. Five days later off St. Abb’s Head to the south of the Firth of Forth they were approached in the gloom by the powerful Dunkirk privateer (Calonne 32) under the command of an Irishman, Luke Ryan. The privateer apparently had been deliberately misinformed by the captain of an Aberdeen ship he had captured that the Berwick was a Greenland whaler. Having realised his mistake, Ryan attempted to escape but was run down and engaged by the Belle Poule 36, Captain Philip Patton; once the Berwick came up the Calonne surrendered.

The Battle of the Doggersbank 1781

In July 1781 Stewart joined Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker’s fleet, which had been engaged in convoy duty in the North Sea. This put him in an awkward position, since one of the captains in Parker’s force (Captain Richard Braithwaite of the Bienfaisant 64) was senior to him on the post captain’s list. This meant Stewart could no longer hold the post of commodore, and since Captain Ferguson now commanded the Berwick, he was obliged to continue as a ‘volunteer’ on what had been for several years his own ship. Fighting at the inconclusive Battle of the Doggersbank on 5 August, the Berwick was the first ship into the action, and having temporarily dropped out of the line when her mizzen mast was shot away, she returned to slug it out with the leading Dutch ship, sustaining casualties of 18 men killed and 58 wounded.

On 22 August 1781 Stewart attended a levee with Admiral Parker, and when that officer’s fury at the inadequate level of Admiralty support induced him to resign, he assumed the command of the North Sea station in his place, holding a long conference with the King at the end of September. The appointment of a senior captain to command in the North Sea, normally a post for an admiral, indicates the lack of flag officers willing to serve under the current government. Shifting his broad pennant as commodore into the Fortitude 74, he was soon cruising off the Texel with eight sail of the line and four frigates, employing such ruses as capturing a fishing boat and using it manned by his own men dressed as fishermen, to reconnoitre the Dutch fleet. Soon his force was increased to twelve sail of the line in the expectation that the Dutch would come out, but with this not proving to be the case he brought his ships back to the Downs towards the end of October and on the 29th arrived in London.

On 24 November 1781 Stewart’s squadron was anchored in the Downs when four large ships, recognised as enemies, were seen on the other side of the Goodwin Sands. Two hours passed before he signalled his ships to slip their cables and go in pursuit, but ten minutes later the signal was countermanded. While he remained at anchor, the commander-in-chief of the Downs station, Rear-Admiral Sir Richard Hughes, sent two frigates and some smaller vessels from his own force to reconnoitre the strangers. One of the frigates got close enough to positively identify them as Dutch sail of the line, but even then it was not until 9 a.m. the following day that Stewart’s squadron got underway, by which time the Dutch were long gone. After remaining at sea for a short time, Stewart returned to London in mid-December for a meeting with the Admiralty. He then travelled to Bath for a long stay over the winter. Although the Deal pilots were blamed for the delay in getting to sea, Stewart was severely criticised for failing to force an engagement with the Dutch, and in March 1782 he struck his broad pennant.

On 13 May 1782 Stewart married Georgina Isabella d’Aguilar, the daughter of an eccentric Holy Roman baron and a Portuguese Jew. The couple would have a daughter and four sons, including James Alexander Stewart-Mackenzie, the future governor of Ceylon.

Following a change of government, in mid-June Stewart took command of the Cambridge 80, which was attached to the Channel Fleet. His ship was present at the relief of Gibraltar on 18 October, losing four men killed and six wounded in the subsequent engagement with the Spanish fleet off Cape Spartel. At the end of the year the Cambridge received orders to go out to the Leeward Islands, at which point her captain resigned the command.

An M.P. since 1768, during the American Revolutionary War, Stewart enjoyed good relations with the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich. Rarely opposing the Tory government led by Lord North, he also supported the brief Whig ministries of 1782-83, and subsequently became a supporter of the Pitt administration. Stewart defended the peace agreement that ended the American War in 1783 on the basis that the British fleet was not in as dominant a position as many politicians and contemporaries were suggesting. He retained his seat until July 1784 when he accepted the lucrative role of the receiver general of the land tax in Scotland – this appointment meant that he could no longer sit in Parliament.

Towards the end of the Dutch Armament in 1787 he commissioned the Formidable 98, and he raised a commissioning pennant on the same vessel from May 1790 during the Spanish Armament. In his fiftieth year he was advanced to the rank of rear-admiral on 21 September 1790, the most junior officer in the promotion other than the naval royal, Prince William. He was on the active list at the commencement of the French Revolutionary War in 1793, but he was not employed, though he was further promoted a vice-admiral on 12 April 1794.

Vice-Admiral Hon. Keith Stewart died at his seat of Glasserton, near Dumfries, Wigtownshire, on 3 March 1795. Three months later his eldest son, Archibald Keith Stewart, a midshipman aboard the Queen Charlotte 100, drowned after falling overboard from that ship on the day after the Battle of Groix on 23 June while endeavouring to observe the carpenter’s crew stopping the shot-holes. Two years later, Admiral Stewart’s widow, Georgina Isabella, married army Captain Richard Fitzgerald, a man who was a dozen years her junior. Fitzgerald was killed at Waterloo, leaving Georgina Isabella a widow once more.

Stewart was a fine seaman, and so in a good position to assess the navigational skills of William Bligh who served under him as sailing master in 1782, before Bligh was given command of the Bounty. He spent a considerable amount of his time ashore developing his coal and iron mining holdings, and his technical interests are demonstrated by his 1782 recommendation to the Admiralty for carronades to be fitted to the Rainbow 40.