HMS Monmouth (F235): The Black Duke, Named in Disgrace, Retired With More Battle Honours Than Any Ship in the Fleet

Named for a Traitor, Painted in Black

HMS Monmouth, the sixth Duke-class Type 23 frigate, was launched by Lady Eaton in 1991 and commissioned in 1993, and carried a particularly unusual distinction among Royal Navy warships.

Named for the Duke of Monmouth, executed for treason after leading the failed 1685 rebellion against King James II, the ship's name was painted in black rather than the standard red, and she flew a plain black flag, a lasting reflection of the blacking out of the Duke's own coat of arms following his rebellion and execution.

The rebellion itself was a fairly hopeless affair from the start. Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis with barely eighty men, scraped together a peasant army armed with little more than pitchforks and farm tools, and was routed by a professional Royalist force at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. He was captured, taken to London and beheaded on Tower Hill just nine days later, in an execution so botched it reportedly took the headsman five strikes of the axe, plus a knife, to finish the job. Several hundred of his followers were later hanged, drawn and quartered in the notorious Bloody Assizes, or transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations, so the Duke's disgrace ran a good deal deeper than a name simply painted in black.

This earned her the affectionate nickname The Black Duke throughout her service, and, in a wonderfully ironic twist, until her decommissioning she carried more battle honours than any other ship name then serving in the Royal Navy, a name once disgraced going on to become one of the fleet's most decorated.

Those honours were not free, and the most expensive of them was not an honour at all. On 1 November 1914 an earlier HMS Monmouth, a fourteen-year-old armoured cruiser with a crew made up largely of reservists who had barely worked her up, met Vice Admiral von Spee's East Asia Squadron off Coronel on the Chilean coast, in a sea heavy enough that she could not fight most of her guns at all.

An 8.2-inch shell from the Gneisenau went through the armour of her forward turret and set her forecastle on fire. Burning and drifting, she was found in the dark by the light cruiser Nurnberg, which put something like seventy-five shells into her from close range. She went down with every man aboard, upwards of seven hundred and thirty of them, two of whom were civilian canteen staff. The flagship Good Hope went the same way. Between the two ships about fifteen hundred and seventy men were lost and not one was picked up.

The full account of that day, and of the squadron sent south to settle it five weeks later, is in the article on HMS Inflexible (1907). It is worth holding on to when reading about the most decorated name in the fleet: a name accumulates honours by being present, and being present is not always survivable.

Dublin, New Zealand, and Sierra Leone

HMS Monmouth made the first UK or US warship visit to New Zealand since the 1985 ANZUS dispute in June 1995, and went on to take part in Operation Kingfisher off West Africa and Operation Resilient, providing humanitarian assistance in Sierra Leone, between 1997 and 1998.

That dispute had been no minor diplomatic huff. New Zealand's government had refused entry to the American destroyer USS Buchanan in February 1985 over Washington's usual refusal to confirm or deny whether she carried nuclear weapons, a stand-off that saw the United States sever military ties and effectively suspend its defence guarantee to New Zealand within days. A decade on, Monmouth's visit was as much a quiet diplomatic thaw as it was a courtesy call.

In 1999 she became the first major Royal Navy vessel to visit Dublin since the 1960s, a properly notable piece of naval diplomacy given the historically fraught relationship between Britain and Ireland.

Circumnavigating the Globe

HMS Monmouth served on the Atlantic Patrol Task North between 2004 and 2006 under the command of Jerry Kyd, and in 2007 completed a full global circumnavigation, taking in Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii along the way, alongside Five Power Defence Arrangements exercises with regional partners.

Escorting the Little Ships

HMS Monmouth deployed to the Persian Gulf between 2009 and 2010, and that same year took on a rather more sentimental duty, escorting the flotilla of little ships commemorating the 70th anniversary of Operation Dynamo, the evacuation from Dunkirk, a remarkably moving link between a modern frigate and one of the defining episodes of the Second World War.

Piracy, Drugs, and a Rescue at Sea

HMS Monmouth patrolled against piracy off Somalia in 2011 and took part in Seychelles independence celebrations that same year, before returning to the Gulf for a seven-month deployment in 2013.

She took part in NATO's Exercise Dynamic Guard in Norwegian waters in 2016, rescuing an injured Canadian fisherman during the deployment, and in 2017, during a further Gulf and Indian Ocean deployment, spotted a dhow fishing in an area dhows had no obvious business fishing in, sent Royal Marines from 43 Commando and Royal Navy search specialists across by fast inflatable, and after a gruelling 60-hour search found 455 kilograms of cannabis and 266 kilograms of heroin hidden in a freezer under three tonnes of ice. The haul was valued at £65 million, and the ship's commanding officer, Commander Ian Feasey, noted it would deal a significant blow to a trade known to help fund terrorism, part of a wider Combined Task Force 150 operation that pulled roughly £400 million of narcotics out of circulation that year alone. She also rescued a crewman from the sunken tanker Rama 2 during the same deployment, a truly productive tour combining hard security work with straightforward lifesaving.

Making History Alongside HMS Queen Elizabeth

HMS Monmouth escorted the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the eastern seaboard of the United States in 2018 for the Westlant 18 deployment, which included the first F-35 fighter trials aboard the carrier, and on 3 September that year her own Wildcat helicopter, nicknamed Blackjack, became the first Wildcat ever to land aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, a proud little footnote in the history of Britain's newest and largest warship.

There was a neat piece of symmetry to the whole deployment, too. Queen Elizabeth's commanding officer for that voyage, Captain Jerry Kyd, was the very same officer who had commanded Monmouth herself back in 2004 and 2006. Whatever he taught her ship's company all those years earlier evidently stuck; twelve years on, she was there escorting his new command across the Atlantic.

Decommissioned Without a Sea Ceptor

HMS Monmouth was decommissioned on 30 June 2021, following an accelerated retirement decision announced that March as part of the Ministry of Defence's Integrated Review, and never received the life extension refit that upgraded most of her sister ships, leaving her the only Type 23 frigate, British or Chilean, never to be fitted with the Sea Ceptor missile system.

HMS Monmouth left Portsmouth for the final time in April 2025, bound for Aliağa in Turkey to be broken up, closing the career of a ship whose disgraced namesake would surely have been astonished to learn just how honoured his name eventually became.

Something else ended with her. Monmouth was the only ship in the Royal Navy carrying her name in black instead of red, and the only one flying a plain black flag alongside the White Ensign. When she left Portsmouth for the last time in April 2025 that went with her, and the Royal Navy stopped having a ship in mourning for a seventeenth-century traitor. Three hundred and forty years is a long time to hold a grudge, and rather a good one to give it up.