Edward Spragge
admiral of the Royal Navy (1629-1673)
Sir Edward Spragge (c. 1620 – 21 August 1673) was a Royal Navy officer. He was a fiery, brilliantly accomplished seaman who fought in many great actions after the Stuart Restoration of King Charles II of England in 1660.
Life
Spragge was son of Lichfield Spragge of Roscommon, Ireland, by his wife Mary Legge (sister of William Legge), and grandson of John Spragge, who came to Ireland in the Elizabethan period. His father was killed in about 1645 during the Civil War when Royalist Governor of Roscommon.
Edward Spragge is said to have been a slave in Algiers before serving in the English Civil War from 1648 in Prince Rupert's royalist naval squadron. He remained loyal to the Stuarts after the war. When the royalist fleet had been dispersed in 1651, he began to work for the Dutch as a privateer in the First Anglo-Dutch War, which explains why some of his later colleagues had mixed feelings about him. He was very popular with the common sailors though because of his ebullient character; as Samuel Pepys put it, "he was a merry man, singing a pleasant song pleasantly". After 1653, he became a pirate associating himself with the Flemish Collaert family, a group of Dunkirkers that after the French conquest of Dunkirk in 1646, had likewise been forced to seek employment elsewhere. Spragge married Clara, daughter of the famous privateer Jacob Collaert, the Governor of Dunkirk.
“Edward Spragge” enters the record as admiral of the Royal Navy (1629-1673). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edward, Spragge and admiral can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q769602. VIAF identifies the subject as 265057884. The Library of Congress control number is n84233738. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1620, 1673, 1660 and 1645.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Spragge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.