William Batten

Sir William Batten (1600/1601 – c. 1667) was an English naval officer and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1661 to 1667. As Surveyor of the Navy, he was a colleague of Samuel Pepys, who disliked him and regularly disparaged him in his famous Diary.

Batten was the son of Andrew Batten of Somerset, master in the Royal Navy. In 1625 he was stated to be one of the commanders of two ships sent on a whaling voyage to Spitsbergen by the Yarmouth merchant Thomas Horth. In August 1626 he took out letters of marque for the Salutation of London, owned by Andrew Hawes and others. He was master of the Salutation again in 1628, and in April of the following year Batten, along with Horth and Hawes, was ordered by the Privy Council not to send up the Salutation, now of Yarmouth, to "Greenland" (Spitsbergen), but they sent her and another ship up anyway. The ships of the Muscovy Company seized both ships at Spitsbergen and drove them away clean (empty). In 1630 he was master and part-owner of the Charles of London, and in 1635 was still serving as a master in the merchant service. In 1638 he obtained the post of surveyor of the Navy, probably by purchase.

In March 1642 Batten was appointed second-in-command under Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, the Parliamentary admiral who took the fleet out of the king's hands, and up to the end of the First Civil War showed himself a steady partisan of Parliament. It was Vice-Admiral Batten's squadron which bombarded Scarborough when Henrietta Maria landed there. He was accused (it appears unjustly) by the Royalists of directing his fire particularly on the house occupied by the queen. In 1643 he was appointed Captain of Deal Castle. In 1644 he was at Plymouth, where he fortified the tip of the peninsula, which has been known since as Mount Batten. Batten continued to patrol the English seas until the end of the First Civil War. His action in 1647 in bringing into Portsmouth a number of Swedish warships and merchantmen which had refused the customary salute to the flag, was approved by Parliament.

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