Family and Education

1st s. of William Delaval of Horton, Northumb. by Mary, da. of Sir Peter Riddell of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumb.  m. (1) bef. 1670, Hester Major (bur. 1700) of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Mdx., 2s. d.v.p. 3da. (1 d.v.p.); (2) sis. of Lt.-Col. William Eaton, s.p.  Kntd. 31 May 1690.1

Offices Held

Lt. RN 1666, capt. 1673, v.-adm. and adm., 1690; lt. 1 Ft. Gds. (Grenadier Gds.) 1674–8, capt. 1679–87, lt.-col. 1687–93; capt. King’s Holland regt. 1678–9; ld. of Admiralty 1693–4.2

Commr. reprisals in Barbados, 1693.3

Biography

Coming from a cadet branch of an illustrious Northumbrian family, Delaval was a protégé of James, Duke of York. He began as a naval officer, seeing action in the second and third Dutch wars. Then, having been commissioned in the Grenadier Guards, he served as a volunteer in the Virginia expedition of 1676. During the Popish Plot he had been falsely accused of being a Roman Catholic, whereas he was in fact a staunch Anglican. Although ordered in 1688 to oppose the Prince of Orange’s invasion at sea, and in receipt of favours from King James as late as 10 Nov., he acquiesced in the Revolution and continued to serve thereafter. In the spring of 1690 he conveyed a loyal address from the flag officers to William and Mary, acknowledging them to be ‘undoubted rightful King and Queen of these realms’. On presenting the address Delaval was knighted. He served under Lord Torrington (Arthur Herbert†) in the defeat at Beachy Head, after which Lord Preston (Sir Richard Grahme†) and other Protestant Jacobites entertained hopes that Delaval might join their cause. However Delaval, who blamed the outcome of the battle on the ‘disorderly’ conduct of the Dutch, was appointed president of Torrington’s court martial. He did not approve of the action, believing the admiral to be innocent, and Torrington was duly acquitted.4

While on active service in 1691 one of Delaval’s ships captured a French sloop carrying intercepted letters from England. On 16 Nov. George Rodney Brydges* informed the Commons that he understood these papers included a letter to Delaval from General Ginkel, a copy of the admiral’s orders from Secretary Nottingham (Daniel Finch†), and a letter from Delaval to the secretary. A week later Delaval appeared at the bar of the House and testified that, having no French, he had not been able to ascertain what the papers contained, though his captain perused them and said ‘they imported little’. Thereafter he had dispatched them to Nottingham. Following some debate on this matter, Delaval produced the originals of his letters and orders and was allowed to withdraw, ‘not appearing faulty in the matter’. Both Houses agreed on 15 Dec. that ‘there was not a copy of a letter from Lord Nottingham to Sir Ralph Delaval taken on board the French vessel’, and one commentator concluded that the whole incident had been ‘set up by the Duke of Bolton’s [Charles Powlett†] contrivance and the Whigs to blacken Lord Nottingham, upon some discovery of letters between him and Sir Ralph Delaval . . . but all was madness and knavery’.5

In 1692 Delaval took part in the battle of La Hogue under Edward Russell*, with whom he was not on good terms. Delaval’s subsequent request to succeed to a vacant commissionership of the navy was supported by Nottingham, though the post was given to (Sir) George Rooke*. Delaval then complained to Nottingham that Russell had failed to acknowledge his exploits at La Hogue, and had denied promotion to officers serving under him, despite his ‘having been every winter at sea these four years and no other flag ever taking their turn’.6

At the end of 1692 Delaval was appointed to command the fleet in commission with Killigrew and the Whig Sir Clowdesley Shovell*. The two Tory admirals were in an even stronger position in April, when they were made lords of the Admiralty. The Jacobites had high hopes of them because of their professional debt to King James, and ‘moreover, they hate the Prince of Orange on account of his insolence, of which they think he has been guilty, towards the nation’. These hopes were realized when Lord Ailesbury (Thomas Bruce†) made contact with Delaval. The admiral’s inclinations were reinforced, Ailesbury recalled, by his mistress (later to be his second wife), a zealous Jacobite on her own account. Delaval supposedly undertook to obtain Killigrew’s consent and co-operation. Shovel was to be kept in the dark until the moment came to act when, ‘being two to one, he knew what to do in that case’. According to Ailesbury, Delaval’s plan was that the two admirals would pretend to have secret orders for taking the fleet 200 leagues out to sea, leaving the coast clear for King James to land with an army at Portsmouth. Delaval’s chief motive was said to be his conviction that better terms for the nation could be extracted from James II than from William III. After consulting James at St. Germain, Ailesbury was given an audience with Louis XIV, where he explained Delaval’s plan. However, Louis insisted that Delaval and Killigrew wait for James at Portsmouth, under pretence of wanting supplies. This was impossible, since they had only just revictualled. Even more decisive was the fact that the French had already settled plans for a campaign in Flanders and for a naval attack on the immensely valuable Smyrna convoy. Not knowing the upshot of Ailesbury’s negotiations, Delaval and Killigrew, waiting for a signal that never came, ‘dallied out much of their time’, and ‘in fine . . . did nothing that summer’.7

However, the loss of the Smyrna convoy brought Delaval’s career to an end. Together with Killigrew he took the blame for the loss of the convoy. The two admirals suffered further by the fall from power of Nottingham, and the arrest of their secretary Abraham Anselme on a charge of high treason. On 17 Nov. 1693 the Whig majority in the Commons voted that there had been ‘notorious and treacherous mismanagement’ over the loss of the convoy, defeating Tory efforts to delete the word ‘treacherous’. On 6 Dec., after Delaval had been questioned at the bar, a motion was narrowly defeated which would have declared that the admirals were ‘guilty of a high breach of the trust that was put in them, to the great loss and dishonour of the nation’. Four days later the King forbade Delaval and Killigrew to attend the Admiralty Board, though they were not removed until the following year. The Lords, on the other hand, carrying out their own investigation, found that a key witness had been lying, and voted to exonerate Delaval and Killigrew.8

On Russell’s reinstatement to the Admiralty Board in the spring of 1694, Delaval was turned out, never to see active service again. The following year he stood for election at Great Bedwyn, possibly on the interest of Ailesbury, and was returned unopposed. On 4 Jan. 1696 he wrote to Sir William Trumbull* about the consequences of the failure to protect trade:

I hope the question about the commission [of trade] that was carried at the committee [on the state of the nation] will be some way diverted, and it was and is still my opinion it were much better for the King to [?break] this Admiralty, (though for my own part, I desire not to be one) than to give way to the lessening his prerogative in so dangerous a point as this. For my part I neither can, nor ever will, give my opinion for such a commission, and to avoid being named, think it best not to appear in the House.

He was forecast as likely to oppose the Court in the division on the proposed council of trade on 31 Jan. 1696, though he signed the Association promptly. At this time he was petitioning for arrears of his salary as a lord of the Admiralty, payment of which was ordered in March. There were unsubstantiated rumours in May that he was to command the fleet that summer with Shovel and Rooke. Yet another Jacobite plot was afoot, and Ailesbury noted that Sir John Fenwick† had hopes of Delaval. Fenwick’s confession actually implicated Delaval, along with Killigrew and Russell, but speaking in his own defence on 6 Nov. Delaval denied the charge, or indeed ‘any knowledge of Sir John’. He appears to have been absent from the division on the 25th on Fenwick’s attainder. In the 1697–8 session, in the debate on 8 Jan. 1698 on reducing the army, he spoke in support of the Court when he ‘showed what uncertainties a fleet must be subject to, so that they ought not to make it their only reliance’. He was included in July 1698 in a list of placemen, presumably as a half-pay naval officer, and was subsequently listed as a Court placeman ‘left out’ of the new Parliament. He did not contest the 1698 election, and in May 1699 was granted a yearly pension of £637 as a reward for ‘good service at sea’. He lived in retirement at Seaton Delaval until his death in January 1707, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 23rd of that month. As he had died intestate, administration was granted to his two daughters by his first wife, his widow renouncing any claim.9

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: Eveline Cruickshanks

Notes

• 1. New Hist. Northumb. ix. 175; Le Neve’s Knights (Harl. Soc. viii), 432; Westminster Abbey Reg. (Harl. Soc. x), 258.
• 2. Bodl. Don. c.40, f. 158.
• 3. CSP Dom. 1693, p. 216.
• 4. DNB; Charnock, Biog. Navalis, ii. 4–10; PRO, Adm. 10/15/37 (ex inf. Dr J. D. Davies); Magdalene Coll. Camb. Pepys mss 2856, pp. 269, 273–5 (ex inf. Dr Davies); Add. 15903, f. 100; Luttrell, Brief Relation, ii. 49; D. Ogg, Eng. in Reigns of Jas. II and Wm. III, 326; Howell, State Trials, xii. 724; HMC Downshire, i. 363, 382–3, 493, 495; J. Ehrman, Navy in War of Wm. III, 365–6; HMC Finch, ii. 495.
• 5. CSP Dom. 1690–1, p. 289; Luttrell, ii. 194, 203, 305; Luttrell Diary, 22, 27, 35–37, 79; Grey, x. 171, 175, 181–3, 217; Cobbett, Parlty. Hist. v. 657; Chandler, ii. 391; Centre Kentish Stud. Stanhope mss U1590/054/1, Richard Warre to Alexander Stanhope, 24 Nov. 1691; HMC Downshire, i. 390.
• 6. Luttrell, ii. 450, 464; CSP Dom. 1691–2, pp. 284, 297; HMC Finch, iii. 284, 306; iv. 155, 162, 174, 182, 235; Dalrymple, Mems. iii(2), pp. 237–8, 242, 245; Sir Ralph Delaval’s Letter to Earl of Nottingham (1692).
• 7. HMC Finch, iv. pp. xxiv, xxviii; H. Horwitz, Revolution Politicks, 132; Nat. Archs. Ire. Wyche mss 1/67, William Ball to Sir Cyril Wyche*, 24 Jan. 1693; Dalrymple, iii(2), p. 227; iii(3), p. 17; Evelyn Diary, v. 131; Burnet, iv. 186; Burnet, Supp. ed. Foxcroft, 380; Orig. Pprs. ed. Macpherson, i. 457–62; Ailesbury Mems. 312–15, 331, 333, 341–2; Hopkins thesis, 118, 217, 344–6; BN, Renaudot mss N. Ac. Fr. 7487, f. 83.
• 8. CSP Dom. 1693, pp. 127–8, 135–7; Add. 35898, f. 65; Egerton 2618, ff. 178–9; Ehrman, 341–67; BL, Althorp mss, Halifax pprs. Robert Harley* to Ld. Halifax [Sir George Savile†], 1 July 1693; Ranke, v. 66–68; Horwitz, Parl. and Pol. Wm. III, 125, 132; Horwitz, Revolution Politicks, 147–8; Cobbett, 779, 782, 800, 827; Grey, 318, 322, 338, 347–8; Chandler, 418, 422; Macaulay, Hist. Eng. 2413; DZA, Bonet despatches 7/17 Nov., 12/22 Dec. 1693; HMC Lords, n.s. i. 295, 297.
• 9. CSP Dom. 1694–5, p. 114; 1699–1700, p. 197; BL, Trumbull Misc. mss 29, Delaval to Trumbull, 4 Jan. 1695[–6]; Stanhope mss U1590/059/5, Robert Yard* to Stanhope, 17 Nov. 1696; Ailesbury Mems. 376; Luttrell, iv. 52, 136; Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, i. 47; Cobbett, 999, 1052; Chandler, iii. 31; Northants. RO, Montagu (Boughton) mss 46/177, James Vernon I* to Duke of Shrewsbury, 8 Jan. 1697[–8]; HMC Buccleuch, ii. 396; DNB; Westminster Abbey Reg. 258–9.