Both [the Scillies and the Channel Islands] were alive with Royalist privateers. The very completeness of Warwick's success in securing the navy for the Parliament at the beginning of the war had meant that when, as a result of Hopton's victories in the West, the King acquired ships and bases there was no question of forming a fleet to challenge Parliament to battle. Instead the Royalists used their sea power in the strategy that all the major enemies of the Royal Navy except the Dutch were to employ in the succeeding centuries: that of the guerre de course. Unlike pitched battles which were likely to be bloody and certain to be expensive the guerre de course offers the prospect of fast, easy and enormous wealth. There were plenty of mongrels in the kennels of Dunkirk and the Breton ports eager for a licence to fall on the fat sheep of England's trade wintering the Western Approaches or coming up the Channel. This the King's letter of marque provided. Its holder and his crew were entitled to the same legal and personal rights as those who served in a properly constituted navy. The effect was to legalize piracy. At the height of Royalist sea power Warwick calculated that he had two hundred and fifty ships to deal with and that about a third of these were Dunkirkers or Bretons.
It was in one of these vessels that the future Charles II had his first taste of naval life. The frigate that bore him from Pendennis to the Scillies belonged to Jan van Hæsdonck, a Dunkirker who controlled a small fleet of privateers. She was commanded by Baldwin Wake, one of the three or four captains of the Royal Navy who had escaped to join the King when the fleet was taken over by Parliament. The discipline, however, appears to have been that of a privateer. The distinguished passengers were plundered and their baggage rifled by Hæsdonck's ruffians on the short and stormy passage to Scilly. The royal party disembarked on the afternoon of 4 March [1646] and were little pleased by what they saw. The Scillies were ideal as a base for commerce raiding, but they were not much good for anything else. Accomodation was primitive; communications were bad. As the news gradually came in of surrender after surrender, it became plain that the Scillies might prove a trap. With all the Cornish bases and ports in their hands Parliament could soon establish local command of the sea. Sure enough on 12 April nine ships commanded by William Batten, Warwick's vice-admiral who had succeeding him on the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance, were sighted in the offing. Fortunately for the Prince and his party a violent storm blew up almost at one and drove the fleet off its station. The moment the wind fell enough to permit a ship to put to sea, the Prince and his party sailed for Jersey in Baldwin Wake's own frigate The Proud Black Eagle, arriving safely the next day, 17 April.
More history of John Van Haesdonck: Venice