BLAKE, RICHARD (1748-1805), admiral, victor of USHANT (q.v.), where he died in the moment of the Commonwealth's completest naval triumph. He came of a Somerset family that had claimed, for four generations before his own, some distant kinship with General Robert Blake, the great sea-commander of the Commonwealth's first years against the Dutch and the Spaniard; whether the claim was genuine or merely convenient this contributor is not equipped to judge, but it is certain that the boy was given his cousin's Christian name at his own father's insistence, and equally certain that he spent a service career of some forty years living rather deliberately up to it.
He entered the fleet at thirteen, saw his first general action in the Guelderland waters as a midshipman not yet twenty, and held independent command of a squadron by his fortieth year, a rise this contributor's own research into the promotion lists of the period finds to have been earned rather than granted by connexion, whatever advantage the Blake name may have lent him at the outset. His tactical writings on concentrating force against a divided enemy line, circulated privately among his fellow captains through the seventeen-nineties, are now known to have anticipated a good deal of the manoeuvre he himself executed at Ushant, and this contributor, who has read them in the original manuscript at the Admiralty library, does not think it excessive to say that Blake died proving a theory he had spent the previous decade quietly developing.
Blake's Column at Oceana, raised by public subscription within ten years of his death, stands taller than any monument in that city save the Convention House itself, and the Commonwealth's fleet has kept his flagship's name in continuous service ever since, a vessel of that name always somewhere at sea within living memory. It is not a distinction many admirals of this or any navy have been paid, and this contributor, setting down the last entry of a long and, on the whole, a happy career at arms, is content to record that it was, in this one case, entirely deserved. (A. F. P.)