Felixstowe sits on a low shingle spit between the rivers Stour and Orwell, where they meet the North Sea. From the air the spit looks almost incidental - a thin tongue of land enclosing the great natural harbour at Harwich. In the summer of 1667 the Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter, fresh from his triumph at the Medway, anchored his fleet off this shore and ordered fifteen hundred marines to row to the beach at Cobbold's Point. They were the spearhead of an invasion intended to cripple the English Royal Navy at Harwich. They never reached the fort they had come to take. The English garrison held; the Dutch withdrew; the war ended in negotiations within four weeks. Landguard Fort is, by the conventional historical reckoning, the last place on English soil where an opposed invasion was attempted - and repelled.
The Second Anglo-Dutch War was a contest for trade, navies, and colonies. The English fleet had been humbled the month before at the Raid on the Medway, when Dutch warships had sailed up the Thames and Medway and burned much of the moored English navy at Chatham. De Ruyter, the architect of that raid, wanted to extend the pressure. Harwich, on the north Essex coast, was the navy's secondary anchorage - and it was lightly defended. The mouth of the estuary, however, was watched by Landguard Fort, a five-bastioned artillery fort built on the spit of land projecting south from Felixstowe. The fort's governor was Captain Nathaniel Darell. His garrison consisted of approximately 400 musketeers of the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment - a unit raised in 1664, one of the earliest precursors of what would become the Royal Marines - together with around 100 gun-crew manning the fort's fifty-four cannon. Until Landguard was neutralised, no Dutch warship could approach Harwich.
De Ruyter divided his squadrons. One was to enter the estuary and bombard the fort from the river; the other was to attack from the sea side. Naval gunfire would soften the fortifications before infantry landed. The plan ran almost immediately into the realities of the Suffolk coast. The estuary squadron found water far shallower than its charts indicated and was forced to abandon its line of attack entirely. The seaward squadron could only fire at extreme range. The artillery preparation that was supposed to break the fort's defenders never happened. De Ruyter, who had built a reputation on aggression, pressed on anyway. The infantry would have to do the work alone.
On 2 July 1667, around 1,500 Dutch marines and 500 sailors were rowed ashore at Cobbold's Point, north of the fort on the Felixstowe coast. Their commander on land was Colonel Thomas Dolman - an Englishman, a hardline Parliamentarian who had taken Dutch service after the Restoration and now found himself leading foreign troops against his own countrymen. The Dutch landing site was beyond the range of Landguard's guns, which protected the marines from artillery as they came ashore - but it also forced them to split. Some marched down the spit to attack the fort from the north; others tried to work around its flanks. The fort, prepared and provisioned, met them with concentrated musket fire from the ramparts. The Dutch had brought scaling ladders that turned out to be too short for the fort's walls. Without naval gunfire to suppress the defenders, the marines were exposed on the beach below the ramparts.
The Dutch made repeated attempts. They could not get over the walls. The fort's cannon, finally in range as the attackers closed, opened up with grape and canister. Captain Darell was wounded in the shoulder by a musket ball but continued to direct the defence. The English losses were small - fewer than ten men killed or wounded. Dutch casualties were heavier, though not catastrophic by the standards of seventeenth-century amphibious warfare: under 150 killed, wounded or captured. By evening it was obvious to Dolman that the assault had failed. The Dutch withdrew to their ships, leaving wounded behind. De Ruyter abandoned the planned attack on Harwich. His fleet shifted south to blockade the Thames Estuary for the rest of the month.
Twenty-nine days later, on 31 July 1667, the Treaty of Breda formally ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The repulse at Landguard had taken Harwich off the negotiating table; the diplomatic terms reflected a draw rather than the Dutch superiority their Medway victory had seemed to promise. The action carries unusual weight in regimental history. For the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment, the defence of Landguard was the first battle honour - and that regiment is reckoned among the earliest ancestors of the Royal Marines, which still claim the day. For the Dutch attackers - the Regiment de Marine, founded by de Ruyter himself in 1665 - their first battle honour had come a month earlier at Chatham; Landguard was their second. Two of the world's oldest marine corps had their early identities forged on opposite sides of this small Suffolk beach. Landguard Fort itself remained in military use into the twentieth century. Today it is in the care of English Heritage, open to visitors who can walk the ramparts and look out across the Stour to Harwich, the harbour the Dutch never reached.
Landguard Fort sits at approximately 51.94 N, 1.32 E, on the southern tip of the Felixstowe peninsula in Suffolk, projecting south into the mouth of the Stour and Orwell estuaries opposite Harwich, Essex. Recommended viewing altitude is 1,500-2,500 ft AGL; the fort appears as a five-bastioned pentagonal earthwork at the tip of the spit, with the container port of Felixstowe immediately north. London Stansted (EGSS) is 45 nm west-south-west; Norwich (EGSH) 38 nm north-north-west. Avoid restricted port airspace and dock crane areas.