A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

The officials could not live on their pay, and were driven to cheat; and as this was nearly as much the case with the seniors as with the juniors, there was no supervision. Some of the cheating took the form of downright lying; thus, of the forty-three ships on the list of the navy, three were not in existence, even in a rotten condition. The Bonaventure was broken up seven years before the Commission was formed, and yet the king had continued to pay £63 a year for her keep. £100, 4s. 5d. was still charged for the Advantage, burnt five years before, and £60, 10s. 10d. for the Charles. Small pilferings were the rule, and the system upon which the men were paid almost invited fraud. Thus the boatswains, whose regular allowance was £10, 17s. 3d., when engaged as caretakers of the king's ships in harbour, were allowed to make a profit by buying what were known as "old mucks" and "brown paper stuff" at a cheap rate. These striking names were applied to cables, moorings, and cordage generally, which were supposed to be too worn out for the king's service. Of this refuse the officials were allowed to make what profit they could. The reader will perceive at once with what delightful facility this system could be worked at the king's expense. Much larger quantities of cable were used than were necessary, and so soon as any part was slightly damaged, the boatswains were allowed to take the whole as "old mucks" and "brown paper stuff." Then they resold it at a very handsome profit. If the little men behaved in this way, it was because their chiefs not only condoned, but shared their malpractices. The king was charged too dear even for the stores he did receive, and he was made to pay for articles never purchased and for work not done for him. As might have been expected, his establishments swarmed with useless servants, the hangers-on of his higher officials. A pathetic interest attaches to the names of some of the useless officials who were detected by the Commissioners. We read, for instance, of John Austin, master, aged and blind, of John Avale, boatswain, aged and blind, of Thomas Butler, gunner, aged and heretofore a man of great service, and may still be an instructor of others, and of John Causton, gunner, maimed in service. These, we may safely believe, were aged men, worn out in the wars of Queen Elizabeth, who were suffered by charity to retain offices for which they were no longer fit. The Commissioners recommend them for reasonable pensions. Though such cases as these were pardonable, yet the system was bad. The fact that one aged seaman or soldier who well deserved a pension had been suffered to retain a post long after he had become unable to perform the duties, was sure to be made an excuse for putting in incompetent persons who had never seen any service at all.

Having drawn this picture of the navy as it was, the Commissioners went on to draft a scheme by which it could again be put on a more creditable footing. They undertook to meet the ordinary and extraordinary expenses for £30,000 a year, to refit the ships which were still capable of being made serviceable, to build new ones, and to do the whole work of re-establishing the navy within five years. Their method was one adopted at all times by administrators who have had to deal with such a state of affairs as is described above. They dismissed superfluous officials and raised the salaries of those that were retained. They set themselves a definite scheme to carry out, and made a careful calculation of the sums of money required to execute it. The establishment of the navy, according to the plan of the Commissioners, was to consist of no more than thirty vessels, but then they were to be, taken together, larger by three thousand and fifty tons than the navy of Queen Elizabeth "when it was greatest and flourished most." The average size of the ships was therefore very much increased. Taking one with another, they measured a little over five hundred and seventy tons. By 1624 this scheme had been fully carried out.

The execution of the reform was accompanied, and indeed we may say was secured, by a change in the administration. It had become impossible that Nottingham should remain any longer Lord High Admiral. His retirement in 1619 was soothed by pensions, and he received the sum of £3000 from his successor as the price of his office. One of the evils of which the Commissioners had to complain was the sale of offices, but the practice continued long, especially in the case of the great men. Nottingham's successor was the showy Duke of Buckingham, one of the best abused personages in English history. It is, however, to his credit that under his administration a great deal was done in the interests of the navy. If he did not do it himself, he at least did not interfere with Sir John Coke and other hard-working subordinates. Nor was the change of Lord High Admiral all. A complete organic change was carried out. The old offices of Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor, and Clerk of the Acts were suppressed, and the members of the committee were entrusted with the whole administration of the navy, under the title of Commissioners.

In spite of this vigorous cleansing of the dockyards and the Navy Office, maladministration was by no means at an end with the navy. During the reign of Charles some at least of these evils reappeared. King Charles took a keen interest in his navy, and did much to increase its strength, but there were permanent conditions during all the existence of the Stuart dynasty which militated against efficiency. These kings were always aiming at more than they had the resources to execute. They were at all times on bad terms with their Parliament, and so could not raise a great revenue. Thus they were for ever short of money, and were compelled to connive at malpractices on the part of servants whom they could not pay. Dishonest men were not satisfied with robbing the king of just so much as would make good their own arrears of salary. They repaid themselves with interest, and very often by defrauding the soldiers and sailors of their food and poor wages. There was also a defect in the character of the Stuarts which Lord Dartmouth defined to Pepys very forcibly as they were talking together before dinner on their way home from Tangier. "He," Pepys writes, "besides observed something Spragg had said that our masters the King and Duke of York were good at giving good orders and encouragement to their servants in office to be strict in keeping good order, but were never found stable enough to support officers in the performance of their orders. By which no man was safe in doing them service." This was not less true of the first James and Charles than of the second, and therefore it was that in spite of cleverness, of a distinct understanding of the conditions which made for efficiency, and of the best intentions, their navy was for ever ill supplied, ill fitted, and manned by discontented men. The sailor who starved in the king's service, and saw those who robbed him in the enjoyment of the royal favour, ended by laying the blame on the king.

If all the promises made to them had been kept, neither men nor officers would have had reason to complain. The sailors' wages had risen steadily from the 5s. a month at which they stood at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. They rose to 6s. 8d. under King Edward, and in 1585 they were increased to 10s. Fourteen shillings were given to the crews of the ships sent against Algiers in 1620, and Charles I. fixed 15s. as the regular wage of a sailor. At a time when the purchasing power of money was greater than it is now, this was fair pay. The old system of compensating the officers by "dead pays" disappeared in the reign of Elizabeth. In the reign of Charles I. the captain received from £4, 6s. 8d. to £14 a month, according to the size of his ship; the lieutenant, who was only carried in vessels above the third rate, from £2, 16s. to £3, 10s., and the master from £2, 6s. 8d. to £4, 13s. 9d. Warrant officers were paid from £1, 3s. 4d. to £2, 4s. The allowance of provisions was ample in quantity. Seven lbs. of biscuits, four lbs. of beef, two lbs. of pork, one quart of peas, three pints of oatmeal, six oz. of butter, and twelve oz. of cheese, besides all the fresh fish which was caught, without any deduction for it, were supposed to be served out to the men every week. They were also entitled to an ample allowance of beer. But when a large force was collected for service during any length of time, it was the common rule to divide four men's food among six. At all times, too, the quality of the provisions was liable to be bad. Complaints were particularly common in regard to the beer. The badness of the stores was often largely due to the difficulty of keeping them sweet during prolonged cruises in small wooden vessels, ballasted with sand, into which all the leakage of the beer-barrels drained, and which was soaked in bilge water; but the stores were often bad to begin with.

During this reign we first hear of the division of the king's ships into classes, called rates. At a later period they were classified by armament, but in the reign of Charles I. the division was made by the number of the crews. First rates carried 500 and 400 men, second rates 300 and 250, third rates 200 and 160, fourth rates 120 and 100, fifth rates 70 and 60, and sixth rates 50 and 40.

The long peace which began with the accession of James I. had the effect of throwing back the development of the navy for some time. During the later years of Queen Elizabeth, a separate class of sea officers was beginning to be formed. Sir William Monson, for instance, was as much a naval officer as Lord Hawke. He went to sea young, he passed through all grades of the service, he was a trained seaman, and yet a gentleman who had received the education of his class. Constant war had begun to teach Englishmen that the business of commanding a fighting ship at sea required something more than a knowledge of military discipline and the habit of carrying arms. If King James had pursued the policy of constant hostility with Spain advocated by the small party whose best-known representative was Sir Walter Raleigh, it is probable that a corps of naval officers would soon have been formed by the mere necessities of the case. But when peace was signed with Spain, the necessity for maintaining a great naval force came to an end. The ships were laid up, the crews were disbanded, the officers either retired into private life, or were employed by the king in other ways. The seamen among them betook themselves to the service of the East India Company, to trade, or to colonising ventures in America. Thus, when the time came again to fit out great fleets, no progress had been made in the formation of a body of sea officers. In the reign of James I. and his son, it was not much less the rule than it had been with Henry VIII., that the captain of a king's ship was a gentleman with little or no knowledge of sea affairs, and that the seaman was confined to the inferior position of master. There were exceptions to this rule. Sir John Pennington, who was much employed by Charles as admiral in the Narrow Seas, was a seaman bred, but even he was commonly superseded by some noble whenever the king made a serious effort to fit out a great fleet.

The one important naval expedition of King James's reign was directed against the pirates of Algiers in 1620. The despatch of this force was of the nature of an innovation on the usual policy of James's Government. It had not hitherto been the custom even to try to afford English traders effective protection beyond the Narrow Seas. There was no such permanent naval force as could have done the work, even if the Government had been disposed to make the attempt. According to the establishment drafted by the Commission of 1618, the guard to be maintained at home was to consist of only four vessels, of which the largest was 120 tons. This trifling squadron was not to be expected to do more than cope with such pirates "of base condition" as the ex-boatswain's mate Clarke, whom Sir William Monson hunted in the Shetlands and the Hebrides. It was utterly unable to afford protection to English traders beyond the Narrow Seas, nor indeed did they expect to be protected. Trade to the East and the Levant was conducted by great privileged companies, who sent their ships out well armed, and maintained agents at foreign courts. As regards the East Indies, it was long before a king's ship made its appearance in the waters frequented by the Company's squadrons. But the Turkish Company, which traded to the Levant, was less strong, and was also subject to attack by more formidable enemies. The Algerine pirates were then, in even a greater degree than was the case later, a standing menace to all ships trading in the Mediterranean, and even in the more accessible parts of the Atlantic. On one occasion they carried off a great part of the population of the Canary Islands, on another they sacked Baltimore in the south of Ireland. The vessels of the Turkey Company were to a certain extent able to protect themselves, and on several occasions they beat off the attacks of the pirates. But the smaller traders fell easy victims. To the disgrace of Europe, a large proportion of the pirates were renegades; one of them was an Englishman of the name of Ward, formerly a boatswain in the navy. The seaports of the time were full of stories of Englishmen who had been carried off by these rovers, and had in the majority of cases remained in slavery, unless they were ransomed by their relations. Now and then some English sailors who had been taken would escape by turning the tables on their captors. Thus, for instance, the Jacob of Bristol, a ship of 120 tons, was recaptured by four of her men who had been left on board with the prize-crew. They took the opportunity of a storm, when they were called upon to help the Moslem pirates, who were clumsy sailors. As the prize-master was lending a hand to strike the sails, the four Englishmen deftly gave him "a toss overboard." As he tried to clamber up again by the help of a rope which was trailing alongside, he was knocked down "by the handle of a pump." The prize-crew were then overpowered in detail, and the vessel carried into San Lucar in Spain, where the captive Mohammedans were themselves promptly sold for slaves. A somewhat similar story is told of one John Rawlings, skipper of a small vessel of forty tons, named the Nicholas of Plymouth. He was taken prisoner outside the Straits of Gibraltar and carried to Algiers, where he was sold as a slave to an English renegade of the name of John Goodall. Goodall employed him in the crew of one of the various pirate craft he owned, and Rawlings had the good fortune and dexterity to organise and carry through a conspiracy among the Christian slaves, who overpowered the Mohammedan masters and carried the ship into Plymouth. These, however, were exceptional cases, and of those who fell into the hands of these pirates there were few who ever saw an end to their captivity, unless they had friends to ransom them or were prepared to become renegades.

In 1620 a fleet was at last fitted out against these enemies of the human race. King James acted at least as much under the influence of the Spaniards, to whom Algiers was a perpetual menace, as in the interest of his own subjects. Neither the Spaniard nor the English trader profited by this solitary example of King James's naval enterprise. The expedition was too futile to deserve detailed notice in the history of the English Navy, when so many and such very different events lie close ahead of us. Yet the constitution of the squadron is interesting, as showing within a moderate space how the fleets of that time were composed.