A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217-1815. Volume II, 1689-1815

by David Hannay

On the 30th April Watson and Clive went on from the coast of Malabar to that of Coromandel on the east. By the 20th June they reached Madras. The French Government, not being as yet ready for war, had recalled Dupleix and had brought a pause in the conflict of the companies. Watson’s next service was to carry Clive to Bengal to revenge the Black Hole of Calcutta, and to begin the conquest of India. But as this service became rapidly connected with the war against France, and as the operations in the eastern seas lay very much apart, I shall turn from them till they can be taken up again, and connected with the general movements of the world-wide conflict.

While Admiral Watson’s squadron was recruiting from its long voyage at Bombay, warlike operations, the forerunners of open war, were beginning on the Atlantic. The appeals of the colonists who found themselves unable to expel the French from the post they had established on the Ohio—Fort Duquesne on the site of what is now Pittsburg—had at last induced the British Government to take action. In December 1754 Commodore Keppel, a gentleman of the Albemarle family, who had sailed as midshipman with Anson and was destined to play a prominent part in coming years, left the Downs with a body of troops under command of Braddock. The expedition reached Hampton Roads by the 20th February 1755. Its disastrous end, in an ill-planned and worse-directed attack on Fort Duquesne in July of this year, is a well-known episode of our colonial history. The sending of Braddock stimulated the French Government to reinforce its garrisons in Canada. On the 3rd May of 1755 the Lieutenant-General Count de Macnémara sailed from Brest with nine sail of the line fully armed and seven frigates. He had under his protection eleven sail of the line fitted as transports and full of troops. These vessels were armed with 24 or 22 guns only, or as the French expression has it, en flûte. To be armed en flûte was to be armed like a flyboat with guns only on the upper deck. Macnémara saw his charge well out into the ocean, and then returned to Brest with six of the liners and three of the frigates. The other warships and the transports held on to Canada under the command of Dubois de Lamotte.

Meanwhile the news that the French were in motion stirred the British Government to counter action. Boscawen was ordered to sail for America with instructions to intercept the French by force. He left on the 27th April, with eleven sail of the line, and two small vessels. After he had gone the cabinet received further reports which gave them an exaggerated idea of the French strength. Admiral Holburne was ordered to follow Boscawen with six sail of the line, and a frigate. He left on the 11th May, and joined his chief on the banks of Newfoundland on the 20th June. But Boscawen had already failed to stop the French. When Dubois de Lamotte approached Newfoundland he divided his squadron and convoy into two. One division was steered to enter St. Lawrence by the Straits of Belleisle, on the north of Newfoundland. The other took the commonly used route to the south between Cape Ray and Cape Breton. Boscawen had stationed himself off Cape Ray. On the 9th June the French were sighted, but the weather was foggy and covered them soon from view. Next day the fog lifted for a space, and three of the French ships were seen. They were the Alcide, 64, the Lys, armed en flûte with 22 guns, and the Dauphin Royal, another of the man-of-war transports. The Alcide was commanded by M. d’Hocquart who had already been twice prisoner of war to Boscawen. In 1744, when he was captain of the Medée, 26, he had been taken by the Dreadnought. This was Boscawen’s first ship, and from it he got his name of “Old Dreadnought” among the sailors. Again M. d’Hocquart had struck to Boscawen in Anson’s battle of 3rd May 1747. When the English officer commanded the Namur and he himself the Diamant, M. d’Hocquart’s ill fortune pursued him. The Alcide was overhauled, hailed by Howe in the Dunkirk, 60, and told to stop. The French captain asked whether it was peace or war, and was told that he had better prepare for war. D’Hocquart made all the defence he could, but the Dunkirk was reinforced by Boscawen’s ship, the Torbay, 74, and he became a prisoner for the third time. The Lys was taken by the Defiance, and the Fougueux. The Dauphin Royal escaped in the fog. No other prizes were taken, so that Dubois de Lamotte carried two fully armed liners, three frigates, and ten transports with their men and stores safe into the French American ports. Boscawen’s expedition was therefore, in the main, a failure. The jail fever was raging in his squadron. It had been manned, according to old custom, in haste on the approach of war, by the press, from the slums and the prisons. Boscawen took his ships to Halifax in the hope of restoring the health of his crews, but with the result that he infected the town. Meanwhile the French commanders, finding the coast clear, sailed for home on the 15th August and reached Brest on the 21st September. Boscawen returned in the autumn, reaching England in November.

While fighting had begun in America we were at home in a state of war which was no war. The Duke of Newcastle was driven by dread of unpopularity to appear to do something. The country, thoroughly persuaded that the time had come when it must make the decisive fight for its trade and colonies, was burning for war. But continental complications, and above all his own vacillating timid character, made Newcastle shrink from vigorous action. There was indeed an immense bustle of preparation. Ships were ordered into commission by the score from the beginning of the year, and the work of putting the fleet on a war footing was accompanied by the inseparable offers of bounty and press-warrants. On the 23rd January 1755 there came out one proclamation offering a bounty of thirty shillings to every able seaman between twenty and fifty years of age who would volunteer, and twenty shillings to every ordinary seaman. On the 8th February another followed recalling all seamen serving abroad, and raising the bounties to £3 and £2, while the common informer was stimulated by rewards of £2 to whomsoever would tell where an able seaman was in hiding, and of £1, 10s. to the betrayer of an ordinary. A hot press went on in all the ports. The war was a merchants’ war, and the traders of London and the outports offered bounties in addition to those given by the state. By this combination of persuasion and force the fleet was manned after a fashion. Yet the mere fact that the competition for men sent up the wages of merchant seamen by leaps and bounds made the work of filling up the warships very difficult. It was necessary to have recourse to the prisoners in the jails, who were allowed to volunteer into the navy, or were sent there as punishment. Parliament suspended the provisions of the Navigation Laws, which limited the number of foreigners who could serve in a British ship to one-fourth. It even tempted them to serve under our flag by allowing them to obtain letters of naturalisation at the end of two years, instead of the usual limit of eight. By this act the Crown was empowered to suspend the manning clauses of the Navigation Laws whenever war should break out in future.

The dire need for men led to the adoption of two measures, one of private enterprise, which did good work in its time, one administrative of which we feel the benefit to this day. In 1756 was founded the Marine Society. This body was formed to take charge of destitute boys, whom it fed, clothed, and sent into the navy, where they were trained as seamen. The spring of 1755 is a notable epoch in the history of the Royal Navy, for it saw the foundation of the present corps of Marines. The regiments raised hitherto had always been “disbanded” or “broken” at the end of the wars. They had never held a properly settled position, and there had been a constant tendency to rob the force of its best men by rating them as able seamen so soon as they had been long enough at sea to learn the business. At the end of the War of the Austrian Succession the Duke of Cumberland had recommended the formation of a permanent military corps to be placed entirely under the authority of the Admiralty. Nothing, however, was done till the 3rd April 1755, when the Lords Justices, who governed during the absence of the king in Hanover, issued a warrant authorising the formation of fifty companies of one hundred men each, which were to have their headquarters at Chatham, Portsmouth, and Plymouth. The value of the Marines (the title Royal was not granted till 1802) was rapidly demonstrated, and their numbers were increased. Thirty companies were added before the end of 1755. Twenty more were ordered to be raised in July 1756, and another thirty in March 1757. Two years later, on 3rd March 1759, one lieutenant, one corporal, one drummer, and twenty-three privates were added to every company. By the end of the war the total strength of the force was 18,000.

All this stress of preparation was presided over by mere infirmity of will. In July the Ministry, still guided by Newcastle, sent Sir Edward Hawke to sea with twenty-one sail of the line, but with no definite orders to begin hostilities. He was told to intercept a French squadron from the West Indies and to capture French merchant ships. The squadron put into Cadiz, got warning which enabled it to avoid the English fleet, and reached Brest safely. But 300 merchant ships manned by 8000 men were taken, and carried into our ports. This seizure of trading ships in a time of nominal peace gave the French Government an opportunity to denounce us to Europe as pirates. Many Englishmen thought it would have been more for our honour to make war openly, since we were about making it at all. Yet the French had little right to complain after the example they had set in India and America. The vessels were not condemned as prize, and as they were largely loaded with fish their cargoes rotted, so that it was necessary to tow them out to sea and sink them. Hawke returned to port, ill pleased with the work he had been set to do, and was replaced in the Channel command by Admiral Byng. Then Byng was sent out to convince the country that something was being done. He took a French line-of-battle ship, the Esperance, but still war was not proclaimed. The French Government professed a wish to keep the peace. Yet at the end of 1755 and the beginning of 1756 it marched troops down to the Channel. As the Duke of Newcastle had succeeded for a time in infecting the nation with his own cowardice, we were thrown into an unutterably shameful panic by fear of invasion, though we had a powerful fleet in commission at home, and the French had not the means of fitting out a dozen ships at Brest. Under cover of this diversion the French invaded Minorca in April. Then at last the Government was brought to confess that war was war. Our proclamation appeared on the 17th May, and was answered by the French on the 9th of June.

The panic of the country in the early months of 1756 was to some extent justified. Yet its underlying belief, that if it could only find a man to rule it had the strength to assert its maritime and colonial supremacy, was well founded. In point of mere material force the navy was far superior to the French. At the beginning of 1756 we had, including the 50-gun ships which were still counted as fit to lie in a line of battle, 142 liners. The smaller vessels were 125, taking frigates and sloops together. When the bombs, fireships, and other craft such as hospital ships were included, the total was 320. The quality of our vessels, though still not all it ought to have been, had improved greatly under the new establishment of 1745. The discipline of the navy had bettered with the vessels. Some of the old leaven still remained, and in one respect much was left to be done. We had yet to learn how shameful it was that a fine squadron should be paralysed by disease as Boscawen’s had been. But we were on the right path. The intellect of the navy was awake, and was beginning to apply itself to improving its armament and its discipline. There was as yet no revolt against the Fighting Orders.

Want of numbers was the least of the evils which weighed on our enemy. In 1754 the navy of France included only 60 line-of-battle ships. Of these, 8 were in need of thorough repair, and 4 were still in the stocks. During the brief administration of M. de Rouille efforts were made to reinforce this list. Fifteen new line-of-battle ships were launched by 1756. We may suppose that they included the vessels building in 1754. If the eight in need of repair were thoroughly overhauled by the same date, this would give France 71 line-of-battle ships. But the French did not include the 50-gun ships, of which they had 10, in the list, and they had therefore about 81 vessels to oppose to our 142. Of ships of 20 to 44 guns they had only some 40 to oppose to our 83. Their navy was therefore about one-half as numerous as ours. It must be remembered that at this time France still held Canada and important stations on the coast of Coromandel. She was under the same obligations as ourselves to scatter her forces all over the world, and that with the prospect of being everywhere outnumbered. With such a task to overcome, the French had need of the very highest efficiency in every branch of the naval service. But their navy had as much to seek in quality as in quantity. The corrupt and careless government of Louis XV. had allowed the storehouses to become nearly empty. During the years of peace no attempt had been made to give the officers practice. In 1756 it was calculated that of 914 officers 700 had nothing to do except mount guard for twenty-four hours in the dockyards eight or ten times a year. The old feud between the Pen and the Sword—that is, the civil and military branches of the navy—raged furiously. On the ships there was mutual hostility between the officers of the regular corps and the supplementary officers taken in on the outbreak of war, and known as officiers bleus. None of the corporations of the old French monarchy was more aristocratic or more jealous than the Corps de la marine. The so-called despotic King of France had far less power of choosing his officers than the constitutional King of Great Britain. M. de Rouille endeavoured to revive the professional spirit of the officers, dulled by years of dawdling about the dockyards, by establishing the Académie de la marine, with the well-known writer on tactics, Bigot de Morogue, as its first head. But it was years before this could bear fruit, and France began the Seven Years’ War with all the conditions internal and external against her. How came it, then, that her navy was not mewed up in port at once? The answer is easy. Because the British Navy had its arms tied behind its back by the incapacity of the men who ruled, till Pitt freed it.

The first great operation of the war was conducted under a fatal combination of administrative stupidity in London and of the old leaven in the fleet. Reports that the French were preparing a powerful squadron at Toulon began to reach England before the end of 1755. The orders to prepare had been given in August, but in the destitution of the French dockyards eight months passed before it was ready. The boasted classes failed to produce men, and the French were driven to offers of bounty, and to attempts to recruit Italian sailors at Genoa. It was long before the urgent representations of our Consul at Genoa, and of General Blakeney at Minorca, could make the Ministry see that the island was in danger. Blakeney was a gallant old Anglo-Irishman born in 1672, who had fought against the Rapparees in 1690, and served under King William and Marlborough, had been at Carthagena with Vernon, and had defended Stirling Castle against the Jacobites in the ’45. He commanded the place, though bedridden with gout, in the absence of Lord Tyrawley the Governor, who according to the easy practice of the day drew his salary at home. It was not less characteristic of the time that many officers of this threatened garrison were absent on leave when the French invaded the island.