Did you know on 5 April 1684, the evacuated Tangier Garrison landed in Portsmouth. How did this country come to have a garrison in North Africa?

When Charles II married Catherine of Braganza in 1662, she brought with her from Portugal a substantial dowry including the seaport of Tangiers, in what is now Morocco. King Charles soon discovered that the hills surrounding the town were in the hands of Moorish tribes who, together with pirates, frequently attacked the port. Anxious to maintain control of the harbour, Charles declared himself its Master - even before receiving his bride! 

At the same time, he sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV of France for £400,000, thus providing capital and freeing up troops to safeguard Tangiers. Charles constructed a defensive breakwater, or ‘mole’, and installed a garrison to protect Tangier. In 1680 fighting broke out again. Charles petitioned Parliament for more funds to strengthen the garrison; but Parliament’s refusal to invest further ‘blood and treasure’ in Tangiers left the King with no alternative but to abandon the sea-port.

He commissioned Lord Dartmouth, Captain and Warden of Portsmouth, to lead an expeditionary force that would destroy the mole and evacuate the garrison. This force left England in August 1683, accompanied by the diarist Samuel Pepys, and, as Chaplain, Thomas Ken who was then a Prebendary of Winchester.  Dartmouth and Ken are both the subject of stained-glass windows, above the tomb of the Mary Rose sailor, and depict Dartmouth, bearing the keys to the city gates, and Ken holding a flagon, part of the set of communion vessels he recovered from the church that served the garrison, St Charles the Martyr.

This set, known as the ‘Tangier Plate’, comprised two flagons, two patens (communion plates) and a communion cup. Lord Dartmouth himself wrote to Thomas Heather, Vicar of St Thomas’s, to advise him of the imminent arrival of ‘the plate and some Bookes for the use and Service of the Chappell of his Majesties house in this his Garrison of Portsmouth’.

Further instructions came three years later, on 12 November 1687. The new King James II required the plate to be handed over for use in the parish church. At this time the congregation was still worshipping in the chapel of the Garrison Church, as the Civil War damage to St Thomas’s Church (45 years earlier) had still not been repaired. The pieces of plate are listed on the reverse of the entry in the Parish Register recording the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza.

The pictures show: a contemporary map of ‘,’; ; and a Tangier flagon.

Article by Paul Sandham