A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

If the most elaborate provisions for standing on guard against fraud could have kept the civil administration of the navy honest, these orders of the Earl of Northumberland, renewed and emphasised by the Duke of York, ought to have effected that wholesome purpose. Nothing can surpass the care taken to check the malpractices of one individual by the vigilance of another. The ideal which has been satirically attributed to certain Continental politicians, namely, the employment of half of the population as police spies on the other, would seem to have been reached in these instructions, and it would appear to be almost impossible for anyone to commit fraud under the vigilant watch of so many competent observers. But we know as a matter of fact that the administration of the navy was very corrupt under Charles II., and that it continued to be corrupt throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, and that the abuses were so flagrant in the beginning of this as to provoke the appointment of a Commission when Lord St. Vincent was head of the Admiralty. The great original cause of this failure was unquestionably a moral one. The most artful provisions for preventing pilfering and waste are useless when the officials whose duty it is to carry them out are themselves wasteful and dishonest. We know that in the reign of Charles II., everybody, from the king downwards, looked to make his pleasure, or his profit, out of his share of the government of the country. The more honest among them were content to get what gifts they could from those who had occasion to frequent their office and thought it worth while to buy their friendship. Samuel Pepys, for instance, who, according to the standard of the time, was rather an honest official, took every penny he could get. Pepys, however, seems to have drawn the line at entering into a conspiracy to steal stores or to supply bad ones. Others who were less scrupulous pushed his practices a step or two further. They were not content with merely taking such gifts as might be made them by a contractor who still supplied good stores. They were ready to help a fraudulent tradesman to sell rubbish to the State, provided he made it worth their while. Even short of this excess a great deal was done which was in reality fraudulent. There came to be a kind of tradition that what was taken from the State was stolen from nobody in particular. Men who were honourable enough in private transactions had no scruple about licking their fingers "like good cooks" when what stuck to them was the money voted for the navy. Such men were not likely to be vigilant in watching the similar offences of other people. They were too conscious that they themselves were vulnerable. Thus a tradition of dishonesty and a habit of waste established themselves in the dockyards, and it at last reached such a height that money disappeared by millions in a few years.

Even if the code of honour had been higher, it would have been difficult to prevent waste and mismanagement altogether. There was a defect in the organisation of the Navy Office which counteracted the purpose of all the instructions. They were drawn up by the Earl of Northumberland at a time when the navy was still a small force and its establishments were very limited. At that time it was not difficult for the four officers of the Navy Board to maintain that personal supervision of every detail of the service contemplated by the instructions. But with the growth of the English Navy in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the great developments of its establishments caused by the construction of the dry dock at Portsmouth, which belongs to the time of the Commonwealth, this had entirely ceased to be the case. It was little less than absurd to expect the treasurer, surveyor, comptroller, and clerk of the acts to be present at all ratings and payments, and to superintend every detail of the receipt and issue of stores of so great a force as the English Navy, yet this is what was contemplated. The truth that the task was beyond the power of the officers was not recognised by the duke and his advisers. In the instructions to the surveyor there is some slight recognition of the fact, but it does not go nearly far enough. The consequence of expecting four men at the head of the civil administration of the navy to superintend personally every detail of its working, down to the mere receipt and issue of stores in the ordinary course of business, was an utter want of direct responsibility for the sufficient execution of the work. The men at the head could not do all that was expected of them in theory. Therefore they in practice left it to their subordinates. The subordinates, again, could do nothing of themselves, but only by the orders of their superiors. Thus nobody was really answerable for carrying out the work. The men at the head escaped responsibility because it was physically impossible for them to attend to everything. The men below escaped because they only acted by order. Between the two a host of makeshift usages grew up, which in their origin were inspired by nothing more lofty than the convenience of the officials. When men found that they could take with impunity, they took. It may be doubtful, if we look at the moral standard of the time, whether any organisation of the office would have prevented dishonesty. It is certain, however, that the organisation, which as a matter of fact did exist, gave corruption every chance. Yet it is advisable not to exaggerate the extent of the evil. That there were robbery and waste is an undeniable fact. Many fine houses were built out of chips, and fortunes were made at the public expense. During the reign of Charles II. and the generation following, when the corruption was at its worst, rotten ships and bad stores were to be found; even then, however, efficient ships were sent to sea. Later on, corruption took the form of spending a great deal more than was necessary, rather than supplying bad goods. The prevailing sentiment of the time looked upon robbing the State very much as otherwise quite honourable people still look upon a little smuggling.

The attempt to make the principal officers of the navy jointly responsible met with the success which, as experience has shown, generally follows on the effort to give a collective character to what from the necessity of the case must needs be individual. It may be laid down as a general rule, that where several men are said to be jointly responsible, one of two things will happen. Either they will all insist upon acting effectively, and in that case nothing will be done; or else one of them will gain a superiority of influence, and then the others, though nominally his equals, will in reality be reduced to the position of subordinates. It was the second of these alternatives which became practically established in the working of the Navy Office. The comptroller, who in theory was empowered only to check the treasurer and surveyor, became gradually the most important officer of the Board. The Lord High Admiral, or the Commissioners who were discharging the office, learned from him what had been done or what it was desirable to do. In the same way the members of our own Admiralty Board, though in theory jointly responsible with the First Lord, have in practice become subordinate to him.

In the course of time, too, other departments began to group themselves around the Navy Board, in proportion as the work grew more complex. The Commonwealth had already found it necessary to establish a special commission for dealing with the Sick and Hurt. The Sick and Hurt Office became a permanent part of the machinery of naval administration. To it was left the management of the Chest at Chatham. This fund, originally established by Sir John Hawkins in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was fed by the fines levied for breach of discipline and by percentages of prizes. It was meant to be devoted to the support of seamen disabled in service, either by sickness or wounds. In the reign of William III. it was reinforced by a sum levied on the pay of all seamen, and in later days the maladministration of this fund grew into an outrageous abuse. The business of victualling the navy had originally been discharged by an official in the department of the surveyor, but it grew beyond his power to discharge. At the very end of the reign of Charles II., in 1683, a special Victualling Board was created. Later on, other departments were made separate, such, for instance, as the Commissioners for Transports, who were established and abolished, and then established again. Then there was a special Pay Office; and it must be understood that, while the main lines remained unchanged, there was much that was fluid, unstable, and tentative in details. When it was fully grown, the old naval administration consisted of no less than fifteen departments. It was a further cause of confusion that they were not even all under one roof. The Navy Office was in Seething Lane, the Sick and Hurt, with the Victualling Board, had their office on Tower Hill. The Pay Office was in Broad Street.

It was another proof of the final formation of the navy in this reign, that a special corps of soldiers was now first established for service in the fleet. This was the Admiral's, or, as it was called from the colour of its uniform, the Yellow Regiment. It was the first corps of marines proper of which we have any notice. Soldiers had been largely employed in the fleet before, but it does not appear that any attempt had been made to distinguish between the soldier who served in the king's ships and the soldier who was available for all military services. The Admiral's Regiment was specially devoted to the fleet. This corps was the predecessor, but not the ancestor, of the modern Marines. It was created partly, as it would seem, by drafts from one of the London trained bands in 1664, at the outbreak of the second Dutch war, and was disbanded at the Revolution. The old belief that the naval officer was rather a fighting man at sea than a seaman, was still so strong that the functions of officer in the Admiral's Regiment and naval officer were still considered interchangeable.

The period during which the sea service was growing to its full stature was also one of strenuous and varied fighting. When King Charles II. was restored to his throne in what is officially counted as the twelfth year of his reign, the unstable adventurers who had temporarily held, or professed to hold, power in England had a considerable armament at sea. Richard Cromwell sent a force to the north, under the command of Edward Montagu. The object of this expedition was to intervene in the war between the Kings of Sweden and Denmark. A Commission, including Algernon Sidney, was sent to keep a watch on the admiral. But Montagu was too anxious as to his own fortunes in the prevailing confusion at home to have the heart to act so far away, and his subordinate officers were of the same way of thinking. They took a pretext to return home, leaving the Commissioners behind them. In England, where Richard Cromwell had been upset, there was no definite authority to call them to account. Montagu indeed retired from the command for a time, and was replaced by John Lawson. This seaman was an Anabaptist. From his own account he had begun life as skipper and part owner of a small trading vessel in the north of England. Clarendon called his trade by its name when he described Lawson as a collier. During the Civil War he had fought both on land and sea for the Parliament. It might be supposed that with this past, and with what was then called his fanatical principles, Lawson would have been an opponent of the Restoration of the king. Yet he was found agreeing with, if not promoting, a petition from the fleet in favour of the Restoration, and he co-operated with Monk. When the king's Government was established, some of the Royalists were disposed to visit Lawson's earlier sins upon him, but he and the other experienced seamen of the Commonwealth were too useful to the Crown to be dispensed with. King Charles II., with characteristic wit, described them as men who having had the pest already and been cured of it, were therefore the less likely to be infected again. The high praise given by Clarendon to the character of Lawson shows that, in the opinion of a thorough Cavalier, the Anabaptist seaman had accepted the monarchy without reserve.

There was much work for the king's sea officers to do. It was impossible, to begin with, for the restored monarchy to neglect the work of protecting commerce in the Mediterranean, and the navy was hardly established on its new footing under the Duke of York before a naval force was despatched against the Barbary pirates. The latter part of 1660 and the whole of 1661 had been spent in the work of settling the new Government. Parliament had to vote money for the payment of arrears, and it was indeed impossible for the new rulers to take all in hand very speedily. So soon, however, as Parliament had supplied necessary funds, and as the work of new modelling the list of officers—that is, of removing all who were too Puritan, and re-establishing as many Royalists as it was safe to employ—had been completed, a squadron was sent abroad, under the command of Montagu, now created Earl of Sandwich, with Lawson as second. It had a double duty to perform. The first part of its work was to chastise the Barbary pirates, who had recovered from the scare caused by Blake's attack on Tunis, and were again engaged in searching and plundering English ships in the Mediterranean. Then the fleet had to bring home the king's wife, Catharine of Braganza, after taking possession of the post on the coast of Africa ceded as part of her dower.

The attempt to bring the Barbary pirates to order met with very indifferent success. Sandwich sailed to Algiers, with eighteen men-of-war and two fireships. He appeared before Algiers in July, and began negotiating through the English Consul, Mr. Brown. The negotiations came to very little, for the Algerines refused to relinquish their right of search, and the fleet was not strong enough to bombard the town. In this dilemma, Sandwich decided on dividing the fleet, and devoting each part of it to one of the missions he had to fulfil. Lawson was left with twelve ships to prosecute the war against the pirates, while the earl carried out the more diplomatic half of his mission. The station on the coast of Africa, ceded to England as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, was the town of Tangier, which lies just outside of the Straits of Gibraltar, and then passed for a good port. The Government of Charles II. is open to severe criticism on many grounds, but it cannot be said to have habitually neglected what were then considered the commercial interests of the nation. One of these was held to be the possession of a useful seaport, either in, or close to, the mouth of the Mediterranean. As far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, some of her officers had lamented the evacuation of Cadiz, on the ground that it would have been of the greatest possible use to us if we had decided to keep it. Cromwell had directed his officers commanding his fleet on the coast of Spain to consider the possibility of seizing on Gibraltar. When the Government of the king asked for the possession of Tangier as part of the dowry of the Portuguese princess, it took the best possible means of reconciling Englishmen to a Roman Catholic marriage, and gave them something to set off against the subsequent surrender of Dunkirk to the French king. A less conspicuous gain, in the opinion of the time, was the transfer to England of the island of Bombay, which also formed part of the queen's dower. The occupation of these two posts marked another step forward in the development of the English Navy. Bombay was not destined to become a royal naval station for some time. It was taken possession of by the Earl of Marlborough, James Ley, for the king, but was soon after handed over to the East India Company. For that very reason it had a better chance of remaining a permanent part of the dominion of England. Tangier, which at the time seemed much the greater possession, was destined to be handed back to the Moors by the English king, by whom it had been received from the Portuguese. Yet the mere fact that these two posts over sea were accepted by the king, was a sign that he was prepared to employ his navy at all distances, and in all climates, in the general interests of the State. This, again, implied the maintenance of a permanent efficient force. It is possible that if Sandwich had delayed taking possession of Tangier a little longer, it might not have been in the power of the Portuguese to hand it over. When the English admiral reached the bay, the white garrison had just been wholly destroyed in an ambush by the Moors. Sandwich withdrew the survivors of the Portuguese garrison, and left an English force to hold the town, under command of the Earl of Peterborough. He then went on to Lisbon, for the purpose of embarking the queen and escorting her to England. His functions were as much diplomatic as naval, for he was charged with receiving the money of the young queen's dower and making the final arrangements with the Portuguese Government. This part of his work gave Sandwich more trouble than the Algerine pirates or the besiegers of Tangier. The Government at Lisbon had promised more than it could pay, and when it did at last produce a part of the queen's dower, the payment was made in goods and not in money. When he reached England with the queen, Sandwich fell into temporary disgrace, not because he had failed in his duty, but because the poor young queen did not bring as much money as her impecunious husband had hoped for, and then because she for a time rebelled against the necessity of receiving her husband's numerous mistresses; and all who had a hand in the marriage suffered from the king's irritation.

While Sandwich was taking possession of Tangier, and haggling with Portuguese ministers over the queen's dower, Lawson had been prosecuting the war against the Algerine pirates. He met on the whole with more success than might have been expected. The lesser pirate States of Tunis and Tripoli were comparatively easy to cow, but Algiers was a formidable opponent. There were two ways of dealing with it effectually, and Lawson was not able to use either to the full. One was to bombard it with a fleet capable of beating down the fortifications and firing the town. The other was to establish a blockade which could put an entire stop to piratical voyages. Lawson's fleet was not strong enough for the first, nor was it either numerous enough or well enough supplied for the second. Yet, by pertinacity and vigilance he brought the Government of the Dey so far to submission that he undertook to give up some hundred and fifty English and Scotch prisoners, who were then in slavery in the town. Some vessels also were returned—a concession to which the Algerines were no doubt more readily brought, because English-built craft were of little use for piratical purposes. When, however, Lawson went on to make a demand for the captured goods, he was refused peremptorily. He was not the man to endure the arrogance of the pirates while it was in his power to chastise them. An opportunity presented itself for teaching them a lesson. One of their vessels, a cruiser of thirty-four guns, allowed herself to be caught out of the protection of the fortifications. Lawson immediately seized her, and retaliated for the wrong done to English captives by selling all the Turks or Moors who formed part of her crew, as slaves to work in the galleys of the Duke of Beaufort, the French admiral, who was then cruising in the Mediterranean. This vigorous measure brought the Algerines to reason for the moment; but it was only for the moment, and several expeditions were required during the reign of Charles II. before this pirate State was made to understand that English ships must be left alone.

Lawson remained in the Mediterranean until 1663. During the latter part of his stay in that sea he co-operated for a time with the Dutch admiral, Michael de Ruyter, who also had been sent into the Mediterranean on the never-ending duty of cowing the Algerines. The causes which put a stop to the combined action of the Christian admirals go far to explain why what has been justly described as the disgrace of Christendom was allowed to endure until the present century. The Powers of Europe were, in fact, too bitterly divided by rivalries and quarrels of their own, either to combine for the purpose of suppressing Mohammedan piracy, or even to allow one another to act with energy. When De Ruyter met Lawson, he saluted the English flag with guns and lowered his own. Lawson returned the guns, but not the salute with the flag. The Dutch admiral not unnaturally considered this an insult. The pretension of the English to the sovereignty of the seas around Great Britain had been accepted by the Hollanders in 1653, but they did not suppose that they would be compelled to acknowledge themselves inferior to the English in all waters. De Ruyter considered himself aggrieved, and made a complaint to the Grand Pensionary John de Witt. His own determination was not to salute Lawson again if they met, but he was instructed from home to lower his flag whenever he came across the English admiral, taking care, however, to avoid him as much as he could. When a man has to keep out of the way of another for fear of being insulted by him, the two can hardly co-operate effectively against a common enemy.