It remains to consider the precisely opposite impression we get from English authority.  To begin with, we find on close examination that the whole of it, or nearly so, is to be traced to Pepys or Penn.  The locus classicus is as follows from Pepys’s Diary of July 4th.  ’In the evening Sir W. Penn came to me, and we walked together and talked of the late fight.  I find him very plain, that the whole conduct of the late fight was ill....  He says three things must be remedied, or else we shall be undone by their fleet. 1.  That we must fight in line, whereas we fight promiscuously, to our utter demonstrable ruin:  the Dutch fighting otherwise, and we whenever we beat them. 2.  We must not desert ships of our own in distress, as we did, for that makes a captain desperate, and he will fling away his ship when there are no hopes left him of succour. 3.  That ships when they are a little shattered must not take the liberty to come in of themselves, but refit themselves the best they can and stay out, many of our ships coming in with very little disableness.  He told me that our very commanders, nay, our very flag officers, do stand in need of exercising amongst themselves and discoursing the business of commanding a fleet, he telling me that even one of our flag men in the fleet did not know which tack lost the wind or kept it in the last engagement....  He did talk very rationally to me, insomuch that I took more pleasure this night in hearing him discourse than I ever did in my life in anything that he said.’

Pepys’s enjoyment is easily understood.  He disliked Penn—­thought him a ‘mean rogue,’ a ‘coxcomb,’ and a ‘false rascal,’ but he was very sore over the supersession of his patron, Sandwich, and so long as Penn abused Monck, Pepys was glad enough to listen to him, and ready to believe anything he said in disparagement of the late battle.  Penn was no less bitter against Monck, and when his chief, the Duke of York, was retired he had sulkily refused to serve under the new commander-in-chief.  For this reason Penn had not been present at the action, but he was as ready as Pepys to believe anything he was told against Monck, and we may be sure the stories of grumbling officers lost nothing when he repeated them into willing ears.  That Penn really told Pepys the English had not fought in line is quite incredible, even if he was, as Sir George Carteret, treasurer of the navy, called him, ‘the falsest rascal that ever was in the world.’  The fleet orders and the French testimony make this practically impossible.  But he may well have expressed himself very hotly about the new instruction issued by Monck and Rupert which modified his own, and placed the destruction of the enemy above a pedantic adherence to the line.  Pepys must clearly have forgotten or misunderstood what Penn said on this point, and in any case both men were far too much prejudiced for the passage to have any historical value.  Abuse of Monck by Penn can have little weight enough, but the same abuse filtered through Pepys’s acrid and irresponsible pen can have no weight at all.[11]