Dutch in 1665,’ which has been interpreted to mean the night before the battle of June 3. But Pepys tells us that at an entertainment on the night of January 2, 1665, ‘I occasioned much mirth with a ballad I brought with me, made from the seamen at sea, to their ladies in town; saying Sir William Penn, Sir George Ayscue and Sir John Lawson made them’ (Pepys, _Diary_, ed. Wheatley, iv. 322). There is no reason to doubt that Dorset’s song was the ballad in question. The naval battles which began in June 1665 and ended in the summer of 1666 are the subject of a series of ballads which have fortunately survived. The battle of June 3, 1665, is celebrated in _The Royal Victory_ (p. 58), while _The English Seaman’s Resolution_ clearly belongs to the spring of 1666, when Monck and Rupert had succeeded the Duke of York and the Earl of Sandwich as commanders (p. 61). _England’s Triumph and Holland’s Downfall_ is a narrative of the four days’ battle of June 1666. The writer has no doubt that it was a great victory, but is obliged to own ‘we can’t afford such brunts as these’ (p. 63). Hence the joy with which men welcomed the undoubted and decisive victory of St. James’s Day, July 25, 1666. On it there are three ballads: _The New Ballad of a famous German Prince and a renowned English Duke, England’s Royal Conquest_, and _Holland turned to Tinder_ (pp. 66-79). The series closes with _The Dutch Damnified, or the Butter-Boxes Bobbed_, which narrates the destruction of 160 Dutch merchantmen in their own harbours by Sir Robert Holmes on the eight and ninth of August, 1666 (p. 79). The same tone of ferocious exultation marks them all; the populace liked to hear that, after one battle, the Dutch vessels ‘looked more like shambles than ships,’ that in another, six thousand Dutchmen were sent to feed their cousins the fish, and that in a third, thanks to the effect of the British fireships, you ‘might have had Dutchmen boiled or roast.’ A Dutch captain might be praised as a gallant fighter, but ‘he that caught fishes now fishes catch him’ was the sort of epitaph which pleased the man in the street. ‘Why should my nature or conscience repine at taking his life that fain would take mine?’ asks one writer. If one motive for the war was hatred for the ‘Butter-boxes’ and the ‘Hogan-Mogans,’ as the sailors call the Dutch, another was the desire for plunder. ‘We mean to have some of your dollars before that our fleets do part’ declares one writer, while a second rejoices over the store of plate taken on board the Dutch merchantmen, which makes the cabins of the English captains look “like goldsmiths” shops.’