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

by David Hannay

One other great change directly affecting the navy was brought about by the Revolution. The expulsion of King James left England free to become the leader, and the main promoter, of the opposition to Louis XIV. From that time forward our enemy was always France. When we met the Spaniard or the Dutchman again, it was with very rare exceptions because they were allies of the French. The resistance to Louis XIV. grew into a general colonial and political rivalry between France and England. The fight was prolonged throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Some knowledge of the navy we were to meet in every sea and in so many battles during a century and a quarter is necessary in any history of the Royal Navy.

The French Navy is marked off very sharply from our own by the fact that it was always, and solely, the handiwork of the Crown. In England necessity taught the nation that it must have a fleet, and the nation either forced attention to its wants on the Crown at times when the king was indifferent, or provided itself with a naval force when the royal authority was suspended or subordinate. France is admirably placed for commerce, but it has not the same need for trade as England. It is a great corn-growing and wine-producing country, and its inhabitants have grown rich by constant industry and thrift. They have rarely shown much faculty for trade on a great scale. In such conditions the navy fell into neglect, except when the ruler wished to possess one for political reasons. When Louis XIV. attained his majority vigorous efforts were made to form a powerful fleet. In 1669 the king restored the office of Admiral, which had been suspended by Richelieu, in favour of his natural son the Count of Vermandois. The Count was a child and the navy was governed in his name by a Minister of Marine and a Council. The Minister of Marine for some years was M. de Lyonne, who worked under the supervision of Colbert. This great administrator, who laboured hard to supply France with foreign commerce and colonies, applied an almost feverish activity to the work of creating a fleet. Five military ports were established, namely, Dunkirk, Havre, Brest, Rochefort, on the Channel and the Ocean, and Toulon on the Mediterranean. Dunkirk and Havre were too shallow for ships of great burden. The long stretch of coast from Brest to the frontier of Spain is ill provided with harbours. The old port of Brouage, which had been used in the Middle Ages, had become silted up, and was useless. Colbert was compelled to create a harbour and an arsenal at Rochefort, where there had formerly not even been a village, though the place has great natural aptitude. Yet Rochefort has always been of subordinate importance. The great naval station of France on the Ocean has been at the magnificent harbour of Brest. Toulon, the naval station of the Mediterranean, is also a fine natural harbour. The mechanical ingenuity of the French has always been shown in shipbuilding. It was comparatively easy for Colbert to provide fine vessels. Some of the noblest warships of the time were built under his directions. These were the ships which excited the admiration of Charles II. and his brother, when the Count D’Estrées brought his squadron to Portsmouth at the beginning of the Third Dutch War.

It was less easy to form a corps of officers and to collect crews. Although France possesses some excellent seamen in Normandy and Brittany, the maritime population has never been large. There were few experienced officers, either gentleman or tarpaulin, to command the king’s ships. The seamen of Dieppe, St. Malo, or Havre were daring. They had invaded the Spanish West Indies before Hawkins made his first voyage, but they were not numerous enough to supply the king with an equivalent for the large body of ship’s captains trained among ourselves by the Civil War and the wars with the Dutch. Besides, they were hardly the men to whom a king of France would have cared to entrust the honour of his flag. In the early years of the king’s reign it was found necessary to give the command of fleets and individual ships to mere gentlemen who were not only not seamen, but who looked down upon those who were, with all the contempt usually shown by the French noblesse for mechanics. This partly accounts for the ineptitude shown by French naval officers during the naval campaigns of 1672 and 1673. The exertions of Colbert did much to remedy this defect. By twenty years of hard work and the most energetic driving, he formed a naval organisation. The orders issued for this purpose were so numerous that it was found necessary to reduce them to a Code. Colbert began the work, but did not live to finish it. On his death in 1683 he was succeeded by his son Colbert de Seignelay, who continued what his father had begun. The famous Ordonnance, or Code of Law of the old French Royal Navy, was at last completed, and by a curious coincidence it was promulgated in April 1689, in the month before the beginning of the war with England.

This body of laws, or regulations, was very French in its completeness, its air of logical coherence, and its excessive regulation, of every detail of the service. It was contained in twenty-three books. It divided the French Navy into four branches, three civil and one military. The three civil branches, collectively known as La Plume, or the Pen, were divided between the purchase, manufacture, and care of materials. The administration of the dockyards was in the hands of the Pen. At the head of each dockyard was a civil officer, called the Intendant de la marine. The military branch, called L’Epée, or the Sword, consisted of the naval officers. It was entrusted with the navigation and the fighting of the ships. Under the old organisation established by Richelieu, the control of the dockyards had been given to the Sword; but Colbert, who was a civilian, and who cherished a lively jealousy of the military officers, had reversed this arrangement. The Sword was never quite reconciled to its degradation, and its feuds with the Pen went on until the French Royal Navy was destroyed by the Revolution. While Colbert lived and the king was young, the central authority was strong enough to compel obedience, but in later years all the parade of precision in the language of the Ordonnance, and all the power of the king, could not keep the civil and military officials from quarrelling, from disobeying orders, and disputing the meaning of the most exactly worded regulations.

The head of the Sword was naturally the Admiral of France, who was a member of the royal family, and except in the case of the Count of Toulouse, a dignified figurehead, and not an effective chief. His administrative work was done by the Minister of Marine and the Council. Next to the Admiral came the two Vice-Admirals, Du Levant the Mediterranean, and Du Ponant the Ocean, who commanded in chief when he was absent, each in his own sea. The next rank was that of Lieutenant-General. We may say for purposes of comparison that the Admiral of France answered to our Lord High Admiral, and the Vice-Admirals to our Admirals, while the Lieutenants-General answered to our Vice-Admirals. Next came an officer happily unparalleled in our service. This was the Intendant des armées navales, who is not to be confounded with the Intendant de marine. He was a civilian who accompanied every French squadron, and had supreme authority over the Commissaires, or Pursers, and the civil work in all its branches. But he had also a right to sit on councils of war, and was authorised to report on the behaviour of the naval chief in action. The Intendant des armées navales was in fact a French equivalent for the Dutch Field Deputies, and he acted in exactly the same way, by hampering the fighting chief when he was an energetic man, and by reducing him to submission when he was a weak one, and of course by irritating and exaggerating the jealousies of the Pen and the Sword. He was a spy whose word could make or mar the fortunes of a naval officer, and yet was not a competent judge of the naval officer’s work. That Colbert should have created such a rank, and that it should have been preserved by the very able men who succeeded him in the government of the French Navy, shows that they were all blinded by the professional jealousy of the civil official for the fighting man, and by the Frenchman’s mania for over-governing.

The next in rank was the Chef d’Escadre, Rear-Admiral or Commodore. Then we have another civil official, the Commissaire Général à la suite des armées navales, a subordinate of the Intendant des armées navales, who watched the Captain as his superior did the Admiral. The order of precedence in a French ship could not offer much novelty. There was the Capitaine du Vaisseau, or Post-Captain, and the Capitaine du Brûlot, or Captain of a fireship. The second in command was called the Major. He commanded the soldiers in the ship’s company, and all landing parties. Then came the Lieutenant, and after him the Enseigne. The recruiting of the corps of officers was provided for by the Gardes de la marine. There were three companies of the Gardes: one at Brest, one at Rochefort, and one at Toulon. They were mostly young men of gentle birth—that is, members of the noblesse who had a right to a coat of arms and to the privileges of their caste,—but members of respectable families who had received the education of gentlemen were admitted. They were supposed to receive a very thorough professional training, and to be drafted into the ships when qualified. The fact did not always square with the theory. It was found that young gentlemen of good family and some influence were kept to their books with great difficulty. A certain number of them did no doubt attain to a level of book-knowledge very rare among our officers, but the whole history of the eighteenth century is at hand to prove that as a class they were inferior in practical capacity to the men brought up in the rough school of the English Navy.

The crews were raised by the classes, the predecessors of the Inscription maritime, a great system of naval conscription. Like so much else in France, this also was founded by Richelieu, but it was perfected by Lyonne and Colbert, and was finally established by the Ordonnance of 1689. All Frenchmen engaged in working in ships or boats throughout the whole coast of France, and on the banks of rivers large enough to carry a lighter, were held to be subject to serve in the classes. They were divided into seven, which were to serve successively for periods of four years. All seafaring men, waterman or lighterman, were inscribed on the lists of the Commissioner of the District. During the four years of their liability to serve the king they were not allowed to engage with private employers. It was calculated that the total number subject to service was 60,000. The obligation began at the age of ten, and lasted till the man was too old to work. As a compensation for this unlimited obligation a retaining fee was promised to men not serving, and those who had served at sea were entitled to a small pension when their period of liability to service was over; while hospitals were established at all the ports, and employment in the dockyards was promised to all who were so severely hurt as to be unable to go to sea, but were still capable of doing some work. This famous institution exists in a modified form to-day, and has often been the subject of admiration among ourselves. On paper it no doubt possessed immense advantages over our rough-and-ready system, or no system, of raising crews by bounties and impressment. Yet whenever the French Crown endeavoured to use all the resources provided by the classes, the neatly constructed machine broke down. The seafaring population rebelled against its severity, and in practice the king was constantly driven to impress men very much in the English fashion, without regard to their class. In the last years of the reign of King Louis and until the Revolution, the financial distress of the French Government made it impossible to provide half pay, and the hospitals were neglected. The classes was in fact a more uniform and grinding oppression than our own impressment, and was not more efficient in producing crews.

In truth, the merit of the French organisation was altogether more on paper than in reality. It looked very coherent and beautifully divided, but its distinctions and divisions answered to no natural classifications in the work to be done. For instance, to make the Sword responsible for fitting out the ships and yet to leave the control of the dockyards to the Pen was simply to provide for incessant conflicts of authority between the two, and to divide the responsibility. The English system of putting a retired naval officer at the head of the dockyard as Commissioner was incomparably simpler and better. It is needless to point out that nothing could be more fatal to the independence of character of an officer commanding a fleet than the presence of the Intendant des armées navales. But the spirit of the Ordonnance is best shown by the article which forbade the captain to make any kind of changes in the armament of his ship. It was no doubt necessary to guard against mere eccentricity, but if such a regulation as this had been enforced in the English Navy it might never have had the carronade, and would certainly have had to do without the many improvements in gunnery introduced by Sir Charles Douglas in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Ordonnance was full of that over-regulation which is the ruin of all independence of character and originality of mind. Other faults the French Navy had which arose out of the social condition of France. The officers were one of the many privileged corps which ended by destroying the French monarchy. They stood much on their rights, and were above all extremely jealous of the admission of colleagues who were not of noble birth.

When King William’s Government was able to settle down after the confusion of the Revolution, one of its first duties was the reconquest of Ireland, which was still holding out for King James. Louis XIV. was giving open support to his cousin, and war had really begun in March, two months before the formal declaration, when a French squadron under the command of Louis Gabaret landed King James at Kinsale. The material force at the disposal of the English Government was considerable. It consisted of 173 vessels of 101,892 tons, carrying 6930 guns, and requiring when fully manned 42,003 men. Of the 173 vessels 108 were rated. The rating of English ships, which had first been settled according to the number of their crews, was now based on the number of guns. There were six rates in all—the first carrying 90 guns and upwards, the sixth 18 guns or less; unrated ships were little craft such as sloops, ketches, smacks, yachts, etc. With the help of the Dutch fleet, this was more than enough to be a match for the French, but Parliament was justly persuaded of the necessity for increasing the Navy. In 1690 it voted £570,000, to be employed in the building of 17 ships of 80 guns and 10 ships of 60. Three of 70 were also ordered to be built, making the total addition of 30 vessels. The 80-gun ships of that time were three-deckers, and of a burden of 1100 tons. The 60-gun ships were of 900 tons. The time allowed for completing this list was four years. In spite of the wear and tear of the war, and the limited number of prizes we were able to take from the French, the additions made to the navy in the reign of William III. were very considerable. It increased from 108 to 174 rated ships, and in tonnage from 101,000 to 158,999. The increase was greatest in vessels of the fourth and fifth rates—that is, in vessels carrying from 30 to 60 guns. The political confusion of the early years of the king’s reign combined with corruption to neutralise the material strength of the navy to some extent. It was the policy of the king to divide employments between the two parties to which he looked for support, the Whigs, and those Tories who had accepted the Revolution. In pursuit of this policy his first Board of Admiralty was chosen from both. Arthur Herbert, who was a Tory, was made First Commissioner. Other members of the Board belonged to the same party, but it included William Sacheverell, who was a strong Whig. The presence of men belonging to different factions in the same governing body was sure to lead to dissensions, and it was not long before the quarrels of the Admiralty Board became very violent. In order to facilitate the manning of the fleet two new regiments of marines were raised. The admiral’s regiment had been disbanded because it was suspected of being too much attached to the deposed king. The new corps were formally established in 1690, but the work of recruiting them was begun in 1689. They were raised by Herbert, who had been created Earl of Torrington after an action about to be mentioned, and by the Earl of Pembroke, and were named, according to the custom of the time, after their colonels. By the first establishment they were to consist of 12 companies each of 200 men; but the number of companies was afterwards increased to 15.

As for the sailors, it is needless to say that they were raised in the usual manner. Although much was done for the officers in this reign, the men were no better paid than before. Their wages remained throughout the century at the figure fixed in the reign of Charles II., and were not increased till a rise was extorted by the mutinies of 1797. The main grievance of the seamen was not so much the amount as the irregular payment of their wages. In the earlier times after the Revolution they were kept waiting because the Government was in want of money, but the system of pay subjected them to long delays even when the resources at the disposal of the Government were ample. It had been the custom in the old days of the Winter and Summer Guard to pay the men only at the end of the commission. This was no hardship when the term of service lasted only a few months. But the practice was continued when we had begun to maintain fleets abroad for years together. In King William’s reign the injustice did not reach the height it was destined to attain later on, yet the men were often driven to sell their pay tickets at a heavy discount because the distresses of the Treasury, or the delays due to a complicated system of accounts, kept them waiting during months for their hard-earned wages.