A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

In spite of the ease with which Willoughby established his authority, the Barbadians were not undivided. There was a Parliamentary party among them. Some of the leaders of this section of the inhabitants thought it more prudent to desert the island on the arrival of Lord Willoughby. They had taken refuge in England, and had promised the Parliament support if it could send out a force for the conquest of the island. Several of them accompanied Ayscue. Sir George did not proceed at once to the West Indies, but began his campaign by a cruise on the coasts of Spain and Portugal. It was hoped that before crossing the Atlantic he might do something towards the final suppression of Prince Rupert. But Rupert had by this time given up even the appearance of struggling with the Parliament's navy, and had gone farther to the south. After searching in vain for an enemy who eluded him, Ayscue went on to discharge the second part of his mission. It is possible that he did not wish to reach the West Indies during the hurricane months of July, August, and September. In October that danger is considered to be over. On the 16th of October he appeared off Carlisle Bay, on the western side of Barbadoes. There were several Dutch and some English ships at anchor, and these Ayscue seized, on the ground that they were trading with the enemies of the Parliament. Then he summoned Lord Willoughby to surrender. The Royalist governor made a stout answer, and the planters appeared for a time to be ready to support him. But in truth, as the result showed, they were not prepared to risk much for the cause. Ayscue established a blockade of the island, and put an entire stop to its trade. This threatened the planters with ruin, and a large party among them were soon converted to a conviction of the necessity of bringing Lord Willoughby to reason. A very active leader of this section of the inhabitants was a certain Thomas Modyford, colonel of one of the regiments of colonial militia, a man who had a very strange and varied career to run in the West Indies before he died. He had fought for the king in England, and was a new-comer in Barbadoes, where he had landed only in 1647, but he had brought with him the means of buying a plantation, and now he was not inclined to risk his possessions in the apparently desperate cause of his master's son. He therefore made his peace with Ayscue, and gave the Parliamentary leader assurances of support. Ayscue had but few soldiers with him, and would probably not have risked the landing unless he had been sure of help. In December, two months after his arrival, he received what he had the art to represent as a reinforcement. The West Indian Islands were commonly supplied with food for themselves and their slaves from Virginia. The ships bringing these stores arrived in the month of December. Trading fleets at that time, when the New World swarmed with pirates, preferred to sail together, for the sake of mutual protection. When they reached him, Ayscue made believe that he had received a reinforcement of men, and at once landed at Carlisle Bay. The resistance was so trifling that it is hard to believe the defenders to have been in earnest. Ayscue obtained possession of the forts without the least difficulty. The occupation of the rest of the island would have been beyond his power if the planters had been unanimous in the support of Lord Willoughby. Colonel Modyford had done his work too well, and there were no doubt many other planters as little disposed as himself to lose all for loyalty's sake. They must have known very well that even if they beat off Ayscue, they would only bring a more formidable armament on themselves a little later, while their trade would be ruined in the interval. They soon made Lord Willoughby understand that he must not expect too much from their devotion, and the king's governor surrendered on terms which Ayscue had the generosity, or the good sense, to make liberal. From Barbadoes the fleet sailed to Virginia. There had been some fear that Prince Rupert might reach the Old Dominion, and give trouble; but the prince, as we have seen, was otherwise employed. Virginia, though partly Royalist in sympathies, had already submitted. The plantations farther to the north were thoroughly Puritan; and when Ayscue returned to England, he was able to report that the authority of the Parliament was peacefully acknowledged throughout the whole extent of the American colonies.

Whilst Sir George Ayscue was bringing the colonial settlements to obedience of the Parliament, the work of utterly extirpating the king's authority had been completed at home. Blake had returned from the Mediterranean in February, leaving Penn to take his place. He was well received by the Council of State, and rewarded not only by thanks, but by a grant of money. The Government had immediate need of his services again. Though completely beaten in England, the Royalists were still struggling in Scotland, and they held possession both of the Scilly and the Channel Isles. From these posts they carried on harassing privateering war against commerce. It was not only the damage they did to trade which made these garrisons highly inconvenient to the Government. They had not been very careful to distinguish between English and foreign property in their captures, and had at least done enough to justify the Dutch in threatening to take the law into their own hands. The fear that Tromp, who commanded the naval forces of the States in the Channel, would seize at least upon Scilly was avowed, and was possibly not wholly unfounded. The most effectual way to put a stop to any enterprise of the kind was manifestly to eject the Royalist garrisons from these posts. In April Blake convoyed a military force sent to take possession of the Scilly Isles. The service was rapidly and effectively performed, with the help of Ayscue, who was starting on his voyage to America, and of Colonel Clarke, a military officer despatched by Desborow. Sir John Grenville, the Royalist governor, held out until the 24th of May, and then brought a resistance, doomed to be unavailing, to an end by surrender. The operations against the Channel Isles were suspended for a short time by the march of the Scots army under Charles II. into England. But after the "crowning mercy" of Worcester in September they were resumed. On this occasion Blake had the sole naval command, and his military colleague was Colonel Hayne. Sir George Carteret was helped to prolong his defence by the bad weather, which made it impossible to land the troops for days. But the end was inevitable. With an overwhelming naval force at their command, and the now completely victorious New Model Army to draw on for reinforcements, it was at best a mere question of time when the Parliament would obtain possession of the islands. So soon as he had done enough for honour, Sir George Carteret saved his estate from confiscation by surrendering his forts. In these operations the share of the navy had in a sense been subordinate. It had comparatively little to do with the fighting, and its work had been almost wholly confined to carrying the troops over and landing them. But in another sense these last Royalist garrisons were in reality taken by the navy. If it had not acquired such a commanding superiority of strength at sea as destroyed every Royalist hope of help, Grenville and Carteret might have held out for long. In this, as in the earlier stages of the war with the king, it was the possession of the navy by his enemies which proved ruinous to him.

The revolutionary party had now done its work effectually in the domestic field of battle. Its enemies, as far as the navy was concerned, were in future to be foreigners. There was no doubt, even before the end of 1651, who the main enemy would be. At that time there was but one possible opponent at sea for England, the United States of the Netherlands. War had been preparing between them for some time, and very little was wanted to bring it on. The passing of the Navigation Act in 1651 was of itself an almost sufficient cause for hostilities. The policy which this law was designed to enforce was not in itself new. As far back as the reign of Henry VII., laws had been passed to support English shipping against foreign competition, but they had either been ill enforced, or ill calculated to secure their purpose. The Navigation Act of 1651 was directed against the carrying trade of Holland, with avowedly hostile intentions. It was drafted for the express purpose of ruining the Dutch shipping as far as we were concerned, by forbidding the importation of goods into England, except in ships belonging to the nation which produced them, or in English vessels. This of itself might not have led to open conflict between the two countries, but there were other causes of hostility. The rivalry of the English and Dutch at sea had not always been peaceful. In the early days of the century the East India Companies of the two countries had combined to assert their right of trading with the East in defiance of the Portuguese. When their feeble opponent had been overcome, a task very easily effected, they had fallen out with one another. The chief scene of their conflict had been in the islands of the Indian Ocean, and the victory had remained with the Dutch, who made these the seat of their Eastern Empire. The most notorious incident of the expulsion of the English from the region which the Dutch desired to reserve to themselves, was the massacre of Amboyna, an island near the Moluccas, in 1623. By the terms of a treaty made in 1619 between England and the United Provinces, it had been agreed that the two nations were to live in peace in these regions, and that their respective factories were to share the trade. According to the English account, which is certainly supported by probability, the Dutch vamped up an accusation of treason against the English factors (i.e. commercial agents) at Amboyna. Under the pretence that they had entered into a plot with the Japanese to massacre their Dutch allies, they were suddenly attacked, thrown into prison, and tortured with abominable cruelty. Then, taking advantage of this supposed discovery of a plot, the Dutch made it a pretext to expel the English factories from the whole of the Spice Islands. During thirty years the memory of the massacre of Amboyna had remained fresh with the English. The Governments of James I. and Charles I. had made several attempts to obtain satisfaction by diplomatic means, but the States had either been unwilling or unable to compel the powerful East India Company to replace the English factories.

There were other causes of dispute between the Governments, such as the not unnatural favour shown by the Prince of Orange to the cause of his father-in-law, King Charles. The prince had indeed recently died in the midst of a constitutional conflict with the Republican party. His opponents were now masters in Holland, but even this served rather to promote discord. The Commonwealth took up with a fantastic scheme for a union between the two republics, and when it was coldly received, as might have been expected, was, not very wisely, angry. The murder of an English envoy at the Hague by Royalist refugees served to exasperate existing ill-feeling. Perhaps not the weakest motive with the Council of State was its knowledge that war with Holland would be popular. Revolutionary Governments have at all times the strongest possible motive for directing the energies of a nation into foreign war. Under the influence of these different motives, England undoubtedly forced a war upon the Dutch Republic. Trade rivalry, the memory of old wrongs, the hope of displacing the Dutch from their commercial supremacy, and the natural instinct of all Governments to do what will tend to their own preservation, combined to make conflict inevitable.

The importance of the first Dutch war as an epoch in the history of the English Navy can hardly be exaggerated. Though short, for it lasted barely twenty-two months, it was singularly fierce and full of battles. Yet its interest is not derived mainly from the mere amount of the fighting, but from the character of it. This was the first of our naval wars conducted by steady, continuous, coherent campaigns. Hitherto our operations on the sea had been of the nature of adventures by single ships and small squadrons, with here and there a great expedition sent out to capture some particular port or island. When we now look back on the long and glorious story of England on the sea during the last three centuries, the grandeur of the later period is liable to mislead us in our estimate of the earlier. In 1652 England was far from enjoying that reputation for superiority in naval warfare she earned in later generations. In fact, the majority of operations undertaken by her fleets had been failures. The defeat of the Armada had always, and not unjustly (whatever our national vanity may say to the contrary), been accounted for by causes other than the strength of Elizabeth's navy. Since then, the Cadiz expedition of 1596, in which we had the co-operation of a Dutch squadron, had been our only signal triumph. The voyage to Portugal in 1589, the last voyage of Drake and Hawkins to the West Indies in 1594, the expedition against Algiers in 1620, the expedition to Cadiz in 1625, the attack on the Ile de Rhé in 1627, had all been either barren or disastrous. The valour and the seamanship of the English was not disputed, but there was nothing to lead the Dutch to believe that they would prove a specially formidable enemy on the sea. If the States hung back from war, it was not so much because they had reason to doubt the capacity of their fleets to contend on equal terms with ours, but because they were a commercial power having much to lose and little to gain by hostilities, because their long war with Spain had burdened them with a heavy national debt, and because the obligation to defend a vulnerable land frontier made it impossible for them to dispense with the burden of a large standing army. This war caused a great change in the estimate of our power at sea. It proved that we could show ourselves superior to what was beyond all question the greatest naval power on the Continent, and thereby raised the position of England in the world.

The novelty of the war no less than its importance makes it convenient to take a survey not only of the material condition of our fleet, but of its moral and intellectual capacity for warfare at sea, before beginning an account of the operations. There is nothing to be added to what has been said at the beginning of this chapter as to the organisation of the navy of the Commonwealth. Experience led to some changes during the progress of the war, but at the beginning the fleet was governed and organised as it had been during the Civil War. It has already been pointed out that between 1648 and 1651 the number of ships fit for service had been substantially doubled, and the quality of the recent additions to the list was excellent. With the help of hired or pressed merchant ships, the Council of State was able to meet the Dutch with equal forces. The size of the squadrons maintained during the Civil Wars, with the nature of their recent service in the Mediterranean and America, had given the fleet practice, and the State the command of a body of proved officers.

There is more doubt as to how far the navy was prepared for a great war by the possession of a definite system or order of battle. According to the prevailing opinion, an English fleet was a collection of ships which fought pell-mell, each as it best could, and as the spirit of its captain caused it to be handled. This is a view which I find myself unable to accept. It has, in my opinion, both probability and direct evidence against it. In the first place, it is difficult to conceive that any force consisting of ships ranging in number from forty to nearly a hundred can possibly have been moved about, directed against an enemy, and led to victory, unless it had had some understood formation which the commander could use, and the individual captains were familiar with. A fighting force which goes in no kind of order is a thing one finds it hard to imagine—provided, of course, that it is also supposed to be efficient. The most barbarous tribes of warriors have some method of marshalling a host. The most rudimentary common-sense will teach the most backward of mankind that they cannot fight at all unless they move together on the enemy, help one another, and put each individual of their body in such a position that he can use his weapons. The same experience must have taught the seamen of the middle of the seventeenth century the same lesson. Unless they had been incredibly stupid, they could not possibly think of rushing into battle with an enemy so formidable as the Dutch, without some more or less definite idea how they were to bring their whole power to bear upon him. It is true that they did not write essays on tactics, but this only proves that the time was not given to writing about the operations of war at sea, while the want of minutely precise fighting orders may, in the light of the later history of our navy, be considered as rather a proof of sagacity than of the want of knowledge.

We are not, however, left to draw our deductions as to the existence of a recognised formation of battle in the English Navy from probability only. There is direct evidence that the natural order of a fleet which fights with its broadside, the famous line of battle, was familiar to the generation of Blake. Fourteen years after this war, Penn, in speaking to Pepys, declared that the Dutch always fight in a line, "and we, whenever we beat them." As this was said at the beginning of the second Dutch war, it is impossible to believe that Penn was not thinking of the previous struggle. Then we had been repeatedly successful against the Dutch, and it seems to follow that it had been for the reason given by the veteran admiral, among others. His words in conversation to Pepys are not Penn's only contribution to the evidence of the existence of a line of battle. In a letter describing his share in the battle off the Kentish Knock, he says: "We ran a fair berth against the head of our general to give room for my squadron to be between him and us." It is to be presumed that when the ships forming that squadron filled the place left vacant for them, they were understood to do so in such a way as to be able to use their broadsides. This implies that none of them were to be so placed as to get between a comrade and the Dutch; in other words, they were to be in "line ahead," i.e. one behind the other, the only position in which a number of vessels carrying their guns on their sides could all fire without running the risk of hurting one another. We hear, too, of fleets tacking together, which presupposes that they were so placed as to allow them freedom of movement, and that there was some system by which a general order could be conveyed. But there are two pieces of still stronger evidence which I cannot but think must be held to settle the question. The first is to be found in a letter from Captain Joseph Cubitt of the Tulip, and gives an account of the last battle of the war.

"The 31st, the weather being fair, and both standing to sea, we tacked upon them, and went through their whole fleet, leaving part on one side, and part on the other of us; and in passing through, we lamed several and sunk more. As soon as we had passed, we tacked upon them again, and they on us, and as we passed each other very near, we did very good execution on them, and some of their ships that had lost all their masts struck their colours, and put out a white handkerchief on a staff, and hauled in all their guns. My men were very desirous to go to them, there being two of them very close, but the fight being but then begun, I would not suffer it; they were fired by others after the fight was over.

"As soon as we had passed each other, both tacked, the Hollander having still the wind, and we keeping close by, we passed very near and did very great execution upon each other. In this bout we cut off some of his fleet, which could not weather us, and therefore forsook him, and some of them were sunk, and we had the Oak fired by one of their Branders. We again tacked upon them and they upon us, and in this bout we fought most desperately, almost at push of pike. A Flushinger was sunk close by the Victory. He intending to board the Victory, had entered three or four of his men with their pole-axes, but the Victory's carpenter's axe cut them down on the side of the ship."