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The Battle of Lowestoft was the first battle of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, fought in the English Channel off the coast of Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1665.

Following the Restoration in 1660, King Charles II of England was advised by a House of Commons committee that a supposed depression in English maritime commerce menat that Dutch commercial competition had to be stifled, even if it meant war with the United Provinces. The English began to aggressively seize Dutch ships and attack Dutch possessions in West Africa in 1664, and King Charles' agents also entered into secret negotiations with the Orangist opposition in the Netherlands with the objective of overthrowing Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt's republican faction, which had come to power at the end of the First Anglo-Dutch War. Charles and his naval officers both saw a lucrative foreign war at sea as a tool of making names and winning prestige for themselves. On 4 March 1665, the Dutch government declared war on England in response to English privateering actions against their ships.

Grand Pensionary de Witt ordered the naval commander-in-chief Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam to attack the English aggressively, but Obdam was given little guidance otherwise. His fleet of 103 ships and 21,613 men in seven squadrons attacked the English fleet of 109 ships and 22,055 men in three squadrons as it anchored off Lowestoft, Suffolk, resulting in the first battle of the war. The two ships sailed in the same direction as they battled, and, in the ensuing heavy fighting, the Dutch lost Lieutenant-Admiral Auke Stellingwerf and Lieutenant-Admiral Egbert Bartholomeusz Kortenaer, while English divisional commander John Lawson was mortally wounded. The Dutch ships failed to remain in a coherent line of battle, and, during the afternoon, casualties continued to mount on both sides as England lost Charles MacCarty, Viscount Muskerry and Charles Berkeley, 1st Earl of Falmouth aboard the Duke of York's flagship Royal Charles, and Obdam was killed by a cannonball before his flagship Eendracht exploded, killing all but five of its crew.

The battle devolved into a shapeless slaughter on a massive scale, and Johan Evertsen and Cornelis Tromp led a fighting retreat. The English only lost HMS Great Charity, which was captured by the Dutch, while the English captured Hilversum, Delft, Zeelandia, Wapen van Edam, Jonge Prins, Nagelboom, Carolus Quintus, Mars, and Geldersche Ruyter. The battle was, along with the Battle of the Gabbard, the worst naval defeat in Dutch history, but the escape of the bulk of the Dutch fleet prevented England from ending the war quickly with a single decisive victory. Obdam was replaced by Michiel de Ruyter, who led the United Provinces' newly-built fleet to several victories during the remainder of the war.

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