and two half-decks have 13 or 14 ports more within-board, for murdering pieces, besides 10 pieces of chace-ordnance forward, and 10 right aft, and many loopholes in the cabins for musquet-shot. She had eleven anchors, one of 4400 pounds weight. She was of the burthen of 1637 tons. She was built by Peter Pett, Esq., under the direction of his father, Captain Phineas Pett, one of the principal officers of the navy. She hath two galleries besides, and all of most curious carved work, and all the sides of the ship carved with trophies of artillery and types of honour, as well belonging to sea as land, with symbols appertaining to navigation; also their two sacred majesties badges of honour; arms with several angels holding their letters in compartments, all which works are gilded over, and no other colour but gold and black. One tree, or oak, made four of the principal beams, which was 44 feet of strong serviceable timber in length, 3 feet diameter at the top, and 10 feet at the stub or bottom.
"Upon the stem-head a cupid, or child bridling a lion; upon the bulk-head, right forward, stand six statues in sundry postures; these figures represent Concilium, Cura, Conamen, Vis, Virtus, Victoria. Upon the hamers of the water are four figures, Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, Eolus; on the stern, Victory, in the midst of a frontispiece; upon the beak-head sitteth King Edgar on horseback, trampling on seven kings."
According to an ancient custom which at last, when it had outlived its time, became a nuisance, the Sovereign of the Seas was profusely ornamented. Yet she was a strong ship, and under a variety of names, dictated by the principles of her successive masters, took part in all the naval wars of England until she was accidentally burnt at Chatham in 1696.
The method of administering the navy underwent successive modifications during the reign of King Charles. When he ascended the throne, Buckingham held the post of Lord High Admiral, and the work of administering the navy was done in his name by the members of the Commission of 1618. When Buckingham was stabbed in the passage of the little house in the High Street of Portsmouth, which he occupied as his headquarters in 1628, the king had recourse to a method of governing his navy curiously similar to the system now in use. He put the office of Lord High Admiral in Commission. The persons entrusted with the duty seem to have also discharged the work of the Navy Office. The military and the civil functions of the navy were, in fact, joined in the hands of the same body of persons, very much as is the case now. There was, however, one important difference. The Commissioners appointed by Charles also held other great offices. They were Jackson, Bishop of London, who was also Lord High Treasurer; the Earl of Lindsey, the Great Chamberlain; the Earl of Dorset, Chamberlain to the Queen; Lord Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer; the elder Sir Henry Vane, Comptroller of the King's Household; and the two Secretaries of State, Sir John Coke and Sir Francis Windebanke. This Commission, with certain changes in the persons, held office until 1638.
Under this interregnum it was that the two naval demonstrations known as the Ship-money Fleets were fitted out in 1636 and 1637. The object was to make an effective assertion of the King of England's right to the sovereignty of the seas of Britain. They were to put a stop to all warlike operations on the part of Spaniards, Dutch, or French, to compel all fishermen to pay for a licence from the King of England, and in a general way to produce an effect both imposing and terrifying on the minds of all foreign rulers. The fleet of 1636 was perhaps in real power the greatest sent forth by a ruler of England. The command was given to Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, who succeeded the Earl of Lindsey on the Commission of the Navy. Northumberland was a magnificent specimen of a great noble. According to Clarendon, if he had thought the king as much above him as he thought himself above all other considerable men, he would have been a good subject. As it was, he was mainly a great noble who held himself apart, and who lived through a very stormy time without incurring any serious misfortune—a feat, perhaps, partly to be accounted for by the fact that at times of crises he was a little apt to follow the example of the young man who went away sorrowful because he had great possessions. As admiral commanding the Ship-money Fleets, Northumberland had little opportunity to render service. The utmost he could do was to extort the price of a licence from a few unlucky Dutch herring fishermen. The abuses of the navy attracted his attention, and he proposed a scheme for their reform. When it met with no attention, the pride of the noble got the better of the zeal of the reformer. Northumberland declined to put himself again in the way of being snubbed, declaring that he would make no more suggestions till his opinion was asked for. In fact, the abuses of which he complained arose from the very nature of the king's government. Charles, by the help of ship-money and the other devices elaborated by his lawyers, was able to raise money enough to build ships and equip an occasional fleet, but he had not the revenue required to maintain a permanent force. His efforts were necessarily sporadic. His fleets were equipped by fits and starts, and there was no order or coherence in the efforts. In the confusion, the pilferers of the dockyards saw their opportunity, and did not fail to take advantage of it.
In 1638 the king made the second change of his reign in naval administration. In the March of that year he appointed Northumberland Lord High Admiral. It had been intended to keep the office vacant for the little Duke of York, now a boy of five years old. But in 1638 the difficulties of his position induced Charles, who was anxious to please a man so powerful in the North of England, to name Northumberland Lord High Admiral. The commission was, however, only during the good pleasure of the king, and not for life, as in the case of Nottingham and Buckingham. The navy now reverted to the old system of government by an Admiral and the officers of the Navy Board, the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Surveyor, and the Clerk of the Navy, with their subordinate officers.
The administration of Northumberland, which lasted till June 1642, when he was dismissed by the king in bitter wrath, is of great importance in the history of England. It contains nearly, if not quite, the most discreditable incident in naval history. In the September of 1639 the Spaniards sent out a great fleet with reinforcements for their garrisons in Flanders. It arrived at the mouth of the Channel on the 7th of the month, and was at once attacked by the Dutch. A running fight took place along the Channel, in which the Dutch, who were constantly reinforced, soon gained the advantage. The Spanish admiral, Don Antonio de Oquendo, the son of the Don Miguel de Oquendo who had served in the Armada, took refuge in the Downs. His Government was acting by arrangement with the king's, and he had reason to believe that he would be helped, or would at least be protected from attack, in English waters. As a matter of fact, King Charles made an effort, which no Englishman can think of without shame, to turn the necessities of the Spaniards into ready money, by alternately offering to let the Dutch destroy them, or to afford them protection, according to which of the courses he happened to think would prove most profitable. Northumberland, in London, could not make out what the king would be at, and said so to Pennington, who was at Dover with a squadron far too weak to inspire any respect in the Dutch. They, again, were encouraged by the great French Minister Richelieu, who was now triumphantly carrying out his anti-Spanish policy, and were commanded by a man for whose courage no risk was too great, the indomitable Martin Harpertz (Herbertson) Tromp. The peddling vacillations of the unlucky English king were all cut short, and his hopes of profit blown to the four winds of heaven, when Tromp on the 11th of October fell upon the Spaniards, and destroyed at least three-fourths of them, with the most absolute and insolent disregard of Pennington's squadron. The great Ship-money Fleet, for the sake of which the poor king had strained his prerogative and had forfeited so much of the confidence of his subjects, had proved totally incapable of defending the honour of England when it was seriously attacked, though no doubt it had been able to extort a few fees from the skippers of Dutch herring busses.
Whether the anger which Northumberland undoubtedly felt at being made to play the poor figure he had cut in this shameful transaction had anything to do with the course he followed four years later, must necessarily be a mere matter of guess-work. Certainly, if he meant to be revenged on his master, he could not well have taken a course more effectual than that which he actually adopted. It was this representative of the great feudal house of Percy who did more than any other single man to seal the king's fate by putting the fleet into the hands of his domestic enemy. In the Long Parliament, Northumberland sided with the Opposition. He had been loaded with favours by the king, and was always profuse in declarations of loyalty. Yet he put the fleet into the hands of the king's enemies, by an act which no sophistry can show to have been one of other than deliberate hostility to his master. When Parliament made its demand on the king for the control of the "militia," that is to say, of the whole armed force of the nation, it naturally included the fleet. The command of the sea was vital to it. If the king could have obtained help from abroad, his position would have been far stronger than it was. For this very reason, the king was eager to retain possession of his ships. While they were at the orders of Northumberland, the king could hope to make little use of them. The obvious course would have been to dismiss the earl and put the fleet into trustworthy hands. But in the summer of 1642, on the very eve of the Civil War, and when the last despairing efforts were being made to arrange a compromise, this would have been an act of open hostility against the Parliament. The king shrank from it, and adopted an alternative which seemed to offer him some reasonable prospect of obtaining the same practical result without provoking an immediate conflict. The Lord High Admiral was not necessarily what we should call the executive officer in command of the fleet. The direct command of a squadron might be given, and pretty commonly was given, to a vice-admiral, acting on the commission of the Lord High Admiral. A devoted vice-admiral would have served the purposes of Charles very well. There was some talk of selecting the veteran Sir Robert Mansel for the post, but the king rejected him as too old. The officer whom he finally decided to direct Northumberland to appoint, was Sir John Pennington. Parliament in the meantime had called upon the earl to appoint Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Northumberland referred to Parliament to ask whether he should obey the king's orders, and was immediately instructed to appoint the Earl of Warwick. He obeyed, and the nominee of Parliament was duly accepted by the fleet as its admiral. The care the king had taken to provide England with a naval force turned against himself. The loss of the fleet was one of the main causes of the final defeat of the Crown in the approaching struggle with Parliament.
There can, of course, be no doubt that this revolutionary measure—for it was no less—could never have been carried out if the sympathies of the seafaring classes had not been largely with the Parliament. There is no question that they were. The bulk of the seamen belonged to the southern and eastern counties, where the Puritans were strong. They shared the opinions of their neighbours. The sailors had been conspicuous in the excited mobs which collected to protect the privileges of Parliament after the king's futile attempt to arrest the five members. London was very Puritan, while the baseness of Goring, who spent his life in disgracing or betraying both sides, had thrown Portsmouth into the hands of the Parliament. It therefore held actual possession of the dockyards both in the Thames and Channel. Yet, in spite of the advantages of its position and the sympathy of the population, it is very doubtful whether Parliament could have obtained such complete command of the naval resources of the kingdom if it had not had the assistance of Northumberland. The evil fortune of King Charles spared him nothing. He had formed a strong fleet to maintain his power, and it was made a principal instrument of his ruin. He had, in his own bitter words, courted Northumberland like a mistress, and that haughtiest of nobles repaid him by striking him a cruel blow. When it was too late, the king dismissed Northumberland from his post. It would have been better for the king if he had thought less of what Northumberland might do if he chose, and more of what Sir John Pennington would certainly do when he was ordered, and had named him Lord High Admiral in 1638.