SIR RICHARD GOODWIN KEATS,
Vice-Admiral of the Red; Knight Grand Cross of the most honourable Military Order of the Bath; Governor of Greenwich Hospital; and a Commissioner of the Board of Longitude.
This officer is a son of the late Rev. Richard Keats, Rector of Bideford and King’s Nympton, in Devonshire, a clergyman, who for many years filled the highly respectable and eminently useful station of Head Master of the Free Grammar School at Tiverton, in the same county; a seminary from which many of those gentlemen, whose learning and talents have become so conspicuous in the western part of this kingdom, derived the first principles of their education.
The subject of this memoir was a Lieutenant of the Ramillies, 74, in the action between Keppel and d’Orvilliers, July 27, 1778[1]; and subsequently of the Prince George, 98, bearing the flag of Rear-Admiral Digby. This latter ship formed part of the fleet under Sir George B. Rodney, at the capture of a Spanish convoy, the defeat of Don Juan de Langara, and the relief of Gibraltar, in Jan. 1780[2]. She was also particularly distinguished by being the vessel in which Prince William Henry, now Duke of Clarence, commenced his naval career as a Midshipman; and upon this occasion Lieutenant Keats had the honour of being selected as a proper officer to whom the person, and indeed in a considerable degree the professional tuition of H.R.H. might be safely entrusted[3].
Lieutenant Keats was promoted to the rank of Commander, in the Bonetta sloop, about 1782, and served with great credit on the American station during the remainder of the colonial war. He was made a Post-Captain, June 24, 1789; and in the following year we find him commanding the Southampton, of 32 guns, from which ship he removed at the period of the Russian armament, into the Niger, another frigate of the same force. Early in 1793, when the National Convention de-
- ↑ See note †, at p. 195.
- ↑ See note †, at p. 3.
- ↑ See pp. 8, and 158.
