Samuel Graves by James Northcote, probably 1770s/1780s.
Considering yesterday was the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill (17 June 1775), I thought it would be nice to write a little something about the man whose portrait I’ve cropped to make a header and who was involved at Bunker Hill, too. Largely left out of the larger narratives of the Revolutionary War, Samuel Graves, then a vice-admiral, served as Commander-in-Chief of the North American Station from mid-1774 to early 1776.
Because I’ve collected quite a fair bit of information on him, I’m going to split my biographic account up and will focus on his early life in this post.
Early life
Samuel was born the fourth of five children to Jane and Samuel Graves in what’s modern-day Northern Ireland on 17 April 1713. Originally from Yorkshire, Samuel’s great-uncle and grandfather had come to Ireland during the latter half of the 17th century. Samuel Graves Sr. (1674–1727), a reverend, settled in Castledawson, Co. Londonderry on a country estate called Gravesend. Gravesend is still around; today it’s the clubhouse of a local golf club.
His mother, Jane, née Moore (1666–1767), is believed to have lived on the Isle of Man prior to marrying Reverend Graves. When exactly they were married has been lost to time, but the Reverend was eight years his wife’s junior and given that at least three of her children were verifiably born while she was in her forties (46 or 47 when she had Samuel Jr.), she may have married at a somewhat older age than was considered common for a first-time bride at the time.
Young Samuel had three older brothers called Thomas, James and John (c. 1711–1776) and a presumably younger sister, Olivia. Little is known about his siblings; several of John’s sons would follow their uncle into the navy, one of them being the future Sir Thomas Graves, Nelson’s second-in-command at Copenhagen in 1801, and Olivia, married to a Henry Knox of Londonderry City, was widowed at some point in time. Thomas and James remained unmarried, but Thomas, who lived the life of a landed gentleman, appears to have had either one or even two children with his housekeeper. A son from this affair, David Graves, joined the navy as well.
Reverend Graves died aged only 53 in 1727. In his will, he stipulated that he wanted his body to be buried in the graveyard in nearby Magherafelt and provided in different ways for his five children with his wife Jane and oldest son Thomas as executors.
Rather curiously for a fourth son, Samuel Jr. inherited the Gravesend estate. It appears his older brothers already had other plans with their lives that did not involve the family estate; for instance, John Graves, then about 16, planned on following his father’s footsteps and was a student at Trinity College Dublin at the time of his father’s death, and was provided for monetarily in Reverend Graves’ will.
Poignantly, Samuel’s was the second generation of Graves’ to lose their father young; the Reverend Graves’ father James John Graves (b. c. 1654), a captain in the army, fell victim to a holdup murder in 1689 alongside his wife Maria when they were staying overnight at an inn in Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, leaving behind their sons Samuel and Thomas and a daughter called Mary.
It appears that having lost a parent young left a lasting impression on Samuel considering several developments in his later life, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves for the moment.
What exactly he did in the years immediately after his father’s death is unknown; very likely, being only 14, he may have attended a local school or been tutored at home while slowly growing into the care and management of his estate, something he proved to be quite good at later in life.
Early Career
In 1732, he decided to join the Royal Navy and received his lieutenant’s commission in 1739. Again, his whereabouts during the seven year gap between entering the navy and his lieutenant’s commission have been lost in the mists of time, but the fog eventually clears as he slowly starts to step into the light of history during the 1740s. His first recorded active service dates to 1741, serving on board HMS Norfolk (80) during the Battle of Cartagena des Indias, 13 March – 20 May 1741. The captain of said third-rate was his paternal uncle, Captain Thomas Graves, and one of the midshipmen on board HMS Norfolk was a cousin of the same name. Both Midshipman Thomas Graves and Lieutenant Samuel Graves would become Commanders-in-Chief of the North American Station during the 1770s and 1780s.
Left: Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Graves (1677–1755) by an unknown artist; right: Admiral Thomas Graves, 1st Baron Gravesend (1725– 1802) by Thomas Gainsborough, dated 1786. Samuel Graves’ uncle and cousin.
In the next installment, I am going to take a closer look at the beginning of his career and the rather eventful 1750s and 1760s including two marriages, two blackmail letters, two godsons, a court case and one famous battle prior to becoming Commander-in-Chief of the North American Station.
References:
David Graves on morethannelson [accessed 18 June 2021].
Jane (Moore) Graves (1666 - 1767) on Wikitree [accessed 18 June 2021].
Kearsley, George, Kearsley’s Complete Peerage, of England, Scotland and Ireland (Vol. II), 1802 [accessed 18 June 2021].
Public Record office Northern Ireland (PRONI), ref. D1062/4/B/3, referenced here [accessed 18 June 2021].
Samuel Graves on threedecks.com [accessed 18 June 2021].
The Graves Family of Yorkshire and Mickleton Manor, Gloucestershire, England (Family tree/overview, not always entirely accurate) [accessed 18 June 2021].
Image credits:
Samuel Graves by James Northcote, Wikimedia Commons, photograph by Christie’s [accessed 18 June 2021].
Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Graves, 1677-1755 by an unknown artist, image property of the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) [accessed 18 June 2021].
Admiral Lord Graves, 1st Baron Graves by Thomas Gainsborough, dated 1786, Wikimedia Commons, photograph by Sotheby’s [accessed 18 June 2021].
The Battle of the Boyne (Irish: Cath na Bóinne IPA: [ˈkah n̪ˠə ˈbˠoːn̠ʲə]) took place in 1690 between the forces of the deposed King James II, and those of King William III who, with his wife Queen Mary II (his cousin and James's daughter), had acceded to the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1689. The battle was fought across the River Boyne close to the town of Drogheda in the Kingdom of Ireland, modern-day Republic of Ireland, and resulted in a victory for William. This turned the tide in James's failed attempt to regain the British crown and ultimately aided in ensuring the continued Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
The battle took place on 1 July 1690 O.S. William's forces defeated James's army, which consisted mostly of raw recruits. Although the Williamite War in Ireland continued until the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in October 1691, James fled to France after the Boyne, never to return.
He wrote about the Williamite War in his book, 'Labour in Irish History':
"It is unfortunately beyond all question that the Irish Catholics shed their blood like water and wasted their wealth like dirt in an effort to retain King James upon the throne. But it is equally beyond all question that the whole struggle was no earthly concern of theirs; that King James was one of the most worthless representatives of a race that ever sat upon the throne; that the "pious, glorious and immortal" William was a mere adventurer fighting for his own hand, and his army recruited from the impecunious swordsmen of Europe who cared as little for Protestantism as they did for human life; and that neither army had the slightest claim to be considered as a patriot army combating for the freedom of the Irish race."
"The war between William and James (Connolly continues) offered a splendid opportunity to the subject people of Ireland to make a bid for freedom while the forces of their oppressors were rent in civil war. The opportunity was cast aside, and the subject people took sides on behalf of the opposing factions of their enemiesÉÉÉ. The Catholic gentlemen and nobles who had the leadership of the people of Ireland at the time were, one and all, men who possessed considerable property in the country, property to which they had, notwithstanding their Catholicity, no more right to title than the merest Cromwellian or Williamite adventurer. The lands they held were lands which in former times belonged to the Irish people - in other words, they were tribe-lands."
He also said:
"The forces which battled beneath the walls of Derry or Limerick were not the forces of England and Ireland but were the forces of two English political parties fighting for the possession of the powers of government; and the leaders of the Irish Wild Geese on the battlefields of Europe were not shedding their blood because of their fidelity to Ireland, as our historians pretend to believe, but because they had attached themselves to the defeated side in English politics. This fact was fully illustrated by the action of the old Franco-Irish at the time of the French Revolution. They in a body volunteered into the English army to help put down the new French Republic, and as a result Europe witnessed the spectacle of the new republican Irish exiles fighting for the French Revolution, and the sons of the old aristocratic Irish exiles fighting under the banner of England to put down that Revolution. It is time we learned to appreciate and value the truth upon such matters, and to brush from our eyes the cobwebs woven across them by our ignorant or unscrupulous history-writing politicians."
Battlefield Britain - Episode 6: A Clash of Kings: Battle of the Boyne.
This is actually a pretty important video if people want to understand why there is animosity between the English and Irish and also between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.
Focuses more on the battle proper than the politics behind it, but still something worth seeing if you want to understand British and Irish history.
