A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

John de Witt, who was keenly alive to the dignity of his country, would not have despatched such orders as these to De Ruyter if he had not been under the influence of a great fear. If he sacrificed the feelings of his seamen and the pride of Holland on a point of etiquette, it was because he was then endeavouring to avert the war which the English Court showed every sign of intending to force upon him. The causes of the second Dutch war were, to some extent, those which had led to the first. They were compendiously stated by Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, when he said that it was idle to dispute as to the rights and wrongs of the quarrels between the two nations, since they essentially amounted to this, that the English wanted a larger share of the trade enjoyed by the Dutch. The result of the first war had not been all that Englishmen expected. Oliver Cromwell's policy of hostility to Spain had thrown the whole trade with that country, formerly enjoyed by us, into the hands of Holland. Dutch commerce had revived very rapidly after the disasters of the naval war. The successful intervention of Holland in the war between Sweden and Denmark had restored the prestige of the Republic, while the administration of the Loevenstein Party, however unwise it might be in other respects, was very vigorous, intelligent, and economical in matters of commerce. Thus, when the return of the king brought peace abroad to England, we found the Dutch traders competing with us as successfully as ever. In the Far East, the powerful Dutch East India Company remained as jealous and exclusive as before. However willing the States General may have been to fulfil the promises they had made to Cromwell, they were unable to control the agents of the Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands. English ships trading to the East complained that they were stopped and turned back by the Dutch. Whatever element of truth there was—and in the midst of much exaggeration there was a certain amount of truth—in these complaints, the English Government conducted negotiations with the obvious intention of making the most of their grievances. Our representative at the Hague was Sir George Downing, a man who had formerly served Oliver Cromwell and had then made his peace with the king. Downing, who appears to have been by nature an insolent, overbearing man, knew that he would please his new masters by taking a high tone with the Dutch, and he played his game heartily. He did not scruple to do, as indeed most ambassadors of the time would have done, namely, intrigue with those members of the States General whom he knew to be rivals of John de Witt.

The commercial rivalry of the nations was exasperated by political dislike between the Governments. John de Witt had been forced by Cromwell to pass the Perpetual Edict, a law of the States General, designed to exclude the House of Orange Nassau from the position it had held in the United Provinces. However unwilling the Grand Pensionary may have been to take this step under foreign dictation, the exclusion of the Princes of Orange from the place of Stadtholder, with command of the army and fleet, was so consistent with the interest of the Loevenstein Party that they could not repeal the Edict. But the young Prince of Orange was the nephew of the King of England. Family feeling has rarely induced any prince to abstain from indulging his ambition, but it is a useful pretext for doing what has already been resolved on for less avowable reasons. Charles II. had not forgiven the Dutch for excluding him from their territory at the instance of Oliver Cromwell. When he was recalled in 1660, they had, with some poorness of spirit, endeavoured to pacify him by profuse honours and by a loan of money. Even if Charles II. had been a less cynical man than his education had rendered him, he would hardly have put a high value on courtesies which were manifestly dictated by fear. His jesting remark on the ample table provided for him by the States General shows that he estimated their attentions at their true value. "Their High Mightinesses," he said, "no doubt provided a good dinner, but several of them always came to share it, and he thought that they might be said to entertain themselves at least as much as him." When the king returned, the interest he took in the commerce of his country served to make him share the jealousies of his subjects. The king and his brother became large shareholders in the Royal Guinea Company. This was a trading corporation established for the purpose of supplying slaves in the West Indies and America. It had its agents in our own possessions in the Antilles, and it cherished the hope of monopolising the whole trade in slaves. In the West Indies the local agents were busy in endeavouring to compel the Spaniards to buy their negroes from us. The reluctance of the Spanish authorities to take the business away from the Genoese Company, which already enjoyed the monopoly, and indeed to allow English trade in any form, had much to do with provoking the attacks on their possessions by the buccaneers who were commissioned and sent out by the king's governor in Jamaica. In this field of activity also we had to expect the rivalry of the Dutch, who held several stations on the West Coast of Africa, and were no less eager than ourselves to smuggle blacks into Spanish America. At the same time, they were very well disposed to carry on the trade with our possessions. The English planter, like the Spaniard, preferred to buy his negroes cheap, and, when a Dutchman would sell them for less than an Englishman, had not the slightest scruple in dealing with the foreign interloper. Thus the price of the Guinea Company's negroes was kept down. To get rid of this competition was a very essential object with the Company. It was by an effort to effect the purpose that the second Dutch war began.

The habit of conducting colonial ventures by great chartered companies lent itself very easily to the promotion of international quarrels. Rival traders who had the command of an armed force were particularly likely to come to blows, when they enjoyed a position of semi-sovereignty, and were divided from all control on the part of their Government by a distance of thousands of miles. The check which even the Company itself could keep on its agents, when news took from six months to a year to reach home, and eighteen months or two years might pass before the superior's comment on the subordinate's actions could reach its destination at the other side of the world, was weak. The control of the State was illusory. It was first informed of the real or imaginary excesses of its subjects in a complaint from a foreign ambassador. It could not act without further evidence, which was not to be obtained till after months of delay, and was then sure to be vitiated by the partiality of the witness. Thus wars on a considerable scale could be carried on by trading companies. The motive was hardly ever wanting, since there were sure to be disputes as to the respective rights, possessions, and, as we should now say, spheres of influence of the parties. Even in our own time it has required all the infinitely greater power of the central Government to prevent collisions between bodies of adventurers in remote regions. Sometimes the central Government has acted too late. In the seventeenth century the utmost good-will on the part of the States General and the Crown of England could hardly have availed to avert conflict between Englishmen and Dutchmen, on the West Coast of Africa and in the more remote Spice Islands. When national sentiment was loud in favour of the adventurers on one side, a collision was inevitable. There can be no question that sentiment in England was strongly hostile to the Dutch. If the king was disposed to promote a war with the United Provinces, he was certainly well supported by his subjects. The complaints of the merchants who considered themselves aggrieved by the Dutch were favourably listened to by the House of Commons. Both Houses joined in an address to the king, calling on him to take vengeance for the wrongs done by the Dutch to English traders. The amount of the injury was put at the certainly enormously exaggerated figure of seven or eight hundred thousand pounds.

When the State was disposed to allow a trading company to conduct wars on its own account, it was easy to take a further step. The next thing to do was to help the Company to fight, without going to the length of declaring war against the nation to which the Company's rivals belonged. We have seen, in the case of Oliver Cromwell's expedition to the West Indies, that the practice of the time allowed of what may be called partial war—that is to say, it was thought legitimate to conduct aggressive hostilities in one part of the world, without making a general war. The king and the Duke of York, when they found that war with the States would be popular, decided to follow Cromwell's example. A squadron was fitted out to attack the Dutch possessions on the West Coast of Africa, and was placed under the command of Sir Robert Holmes. Holmes has been mentioned already as one of the Royalist officers who had followed Prince Rupert. In the course of that cruise he had visited the West Coast of Africa, and had then been encouraged by the Dutch to attack his own countrymen. In the course of his operations, Holmes must have become well acquainted with the coast, and it was doubtless this knowledge that marked him out for the command. He sailed from England with a small squadron in October 1663. His instructions were to avoid fighting as far as possible.

We do the king and Duke of York no injustice in supposing that these orders were rather meant to be quoted for diplomatic purposes than to be strictly acted upon by the admiral. The whole history of Sir Robert Holmes's cruise shows clearly that he knew beforehand that he would not be blamed for fighting if he could find a plausible excuse for hostilities, and that, when once the fighting had begun, he would not be expected to confine himself to moderate reprisals. A plausible excuse could hardly be wanting. When Holmes reached the river Gambia, he found the English traders and the Portuguese, who were now our allies, full of bitter complaints of the excesses of the Dutch. On his way he had come across a Dutch ship, and, on searching her, found, as he alleged, orders to the Dutch governor, Valckenburg, to seize the English fort at Cape Cormantin. How Sir Robert Holmes reconciled the act of searching a Dutch ship in time of peace, and on the high seas, with his instructions to avoid hostilities, we are not told. From the Dutch point of view he acted on the principles of the wolf, and assailed the lamb for troubling the water. The rival accounts of Dutch governors and English naval officers are utterly irreconcilable, and perhaps not worth reconciling. When Englishmen had made their minds up, as they had, that they wanted more of the trade enjoyed by the Dutch, and when the Dutch were, as might have been expected, thoroughly resolved to keep all the trade they enjoyed, it was a matter of course either that aggressions would be committed, or that one of the two parties would believe that they had been committed. Sir Robert Holmes made a number of prizes in the neighbourhood of the Cape de Verd Islands, and then swept the coast as far down as Sierra Leone. An attack on the Dutch post at St. George da Mina was repulsed, but he took possession of some other minor posts. His next step supplies overwhelming evidence to show that he had not been sent out to avoid hostilities, and had not only been driven into fighting against his will. He stood across the Atlantic and attacked the Dutch on the mainland of America. He fell with his squadron on the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, and had no difficulty in mastering it. Then he returned to England, where he was thrown into the Tower on the demand of the Dutch ambassador—a step which proves that the Government was not ready to declare war on Holland, and would much have preferred that the declaration should come from the other side, but by no means establishes a presumption that Holmes had exceeded his confidential instructions.

The course taken by John de Witt, when he found that the English had committed an aggression on the West India Company, was to play them a return match at the same game. He did not use his influence to persuade the States General to declare war, though he must have known that war was now inevitable. The commercial oligarchy which formed the Loevenstein Party was very averse to war. It would infinitely have preferred to soothe the King of England by concessions, if it could have succeeded at any tolerable cost. If this could not be done, it preferred to confine war to the colonies as long as possible. Even this was difficult for it. The insolent and overbearing Downing maintained a vigilant watch on the actions of the States General. He would have been informed immediately if a squadron had been prepared in the Dutch harbours to follow Sir Robert Holmes, and in that case an instant declaration of war from England was to be feared. The fleet of Michael de Ruyter was at the disposal of the States. It was cruising in the Mediterranean, and ready to start at a moment's notice. But here the same difficulty presented itself. Downing was sure to be informed if orders were sent to the admiral. John de Witt escaped that risk by a piece of ingenious management. He contrived to get the question what ought to be done in consequence of Sir Robert Holmes's cruise referred to a select committee of his own partisans. The orders were drafted by them, and were then slipped through at a general meeting of the States without attracting attention. By the terms of these orders De Ruyter was directed to fill up a year's provisions on the coast of Spain, and to follow in the track of Holmes, retaking the places he had seized, and retaliating for the damage he had done to Dutch commerce. De Ruyter carried out his instructions to the letter. He re-established the Dutch on the West Coast of Africa, then he stood across to the West Indies. An attack made by his fleet on Barbadoes proved unsuccessful, but the damage done to English trade was considerable. Then De Ruyter stretched along the coast of North America as far as Newfoundland. He failed to retake New Amsterdam, which, under the name of New York, remained in our hands at the close of the war. From Newfoundland he returned home.

This counter-stroke provoked a furious outcry of anger in England, for it is perhaps more the custom of the English than any other nation to be seized with unaffected moral indignation when another does unto them the disagreeable thing which they have just been doing to someone else. Letters of marque and reprisal were now issued on both sides, and a privateering war of plunder preceded regular hostilities. The Dutch oligarchy would still have made peace if they could, but the English Court had at last found its pretext, and was resolved to force on the quarrel. The terms upon which it insisted were such as a people far less courageous and less powerful than the Dutch could not possibly have accepted. The formal declaration of war was delayed until March 1665.

No great change had taken place in the relative strength of the two navies since the conclusion of the first Dutch war. The English still had the superiority which they derived from unity of command and the greater strength of their ships. The Loevenstein Party had done nothing to remove the fatal defects of organisation in the fleets of the United Provinces. Indeed it could do nothing, since the only way in which unity of command could be given to the different squadrons of the Provinces was by again naming a Stadtholder, and allowing the office to carry with it the post of Admiral-General. But to ask the Loevenstein Party to do this was to ask them to commit suicide. So we find the same divisions of authority in the Dutch fleet in this as in the former war. The commercial government of the Republic had done nothing, and perhaps from its character could do nothing, to establish a higher standard of military spirit among its officers.

On the side of England the monarchy was still profiting by the work of the Council of State and Oliver Cromwell. The corruption which in the later years of King Charles's reign invaded every detail of the administration of the navy had not yet got the upper hand. Although the practice of giving the command of ships to young gentlemen who had absolutely no qualification beyond their interest at Court was already followed, still the bulk of the captains and all the flag-officers, with few exceptions, were the veterans of the first Dutch war. These men were already accustomed to act together; they had fought side by side in many battles, and had cruised in company for months. They had the tradition of the last war fresh in their minds. To this must be attributed the general good discipline and efficiency displayed in the coming struggle.

The fleet left by the Protector to the restored monarchy was estimated at 154 ships of 57,463 tons. The average size of vessels was therefore about 370 tons, and had not increased during the century. Some twenty or thirty of these vessels were foreign built—that is to say, were prizes taken from the Dutch, French, or Spanish. But the great majority were built by the Petts and their school. It is somewhat curious that although the reign of Charles II. was a time of great scientific curiosity and activity, and although the king took an intelligent interest in the forms and qualities of his vessels, yet the art of shipbuilding in England appears to have rather lost than gained ground. If we did not become positively worse, we allowed ourselves to be outstripped by the French. During this reign we constantly hear of English shipbuilders as imitating French models, and that not always with success. In the time of Charles I. Phineas Pett built the finest vessels in the world, on his own lines, and by his own calculations. In the reign of Charles II. this superiority had been lost. Even the Dutch, taught by experience, began to build their vessels much higher and stronger. Pepys, who is an unanswerable authority, noted that "in 1663 and 1664 the Dutch and French built ships with two decks, which carried from sixty to seventy guns, and so contrived that they carried their lower guns four feet from the water, and to stow four months' provisions, whereas our frigates from the Dunkirk-build, which were narrower and sharper, carried their guns but little more than three feet from the water, and for ten weeks' provisions. Observing this, Sir Anthony Deane built the Rupert and Resolution, Mr. Shish the Cambridge, Mr. Johnson the Warspight, and Mr. Castle the Defiance. The two latter were, by contract of the Commissioners of the Navy, bound to carry six months' provisions, and their guns to lie four and a half feet from the water. This was another great step and improvement to our navy put in practice by Sir Anthony Deane." Yet this stimulus seems to have exhausted itself very soon, for eight or nine years afterwards, in the third Dutch war, when a French squadron of thirty-five ships came to Spithead, several of them were found to excel ours of the same nominal rate in size and quality. It was once more seen to be the case that ours were narrower, could stow less provisions, and carried their guns nearer the water. Again, we took a French ship for a model; this time it was the Superbe, a 74-gun ship. The Harwich was built in imitation of her by Sir Anthony Deane. An attempt was made to improve the models of our navy in the thirty ships which were built by the special Parliamentary grant in those years. The corruption which had by this time overwhelmed the navy made these efforts of little avail. The vessels built out of the grant were so ill-constructed, so carelessly looked after, and put together of such very poor material, that they rotted at their moorings before they were used. Perhaps the desire to possess a great many vessels had a bad effect. When a definite sum of money has to be spent, when it is not sufficient to pay for both number and size, and when number is strongly desired, it will inevitably follow that vessels will be built of the smallest size required to carry the desired number of guns. It is certainly the case that during the latter part of the seventeenth century and nearly the whole of the eighteenth our ships were, rate for rate, smaller than the French. At one time in the eighteenth century we allowed ourselves to be outstripped so far that two English 74's were hardly more than a match in strength and tonnage for one Spanish ship of the same nominal strength. A French 80-gun ship was as large as an English man-of-war of 100 guns. This, however, was a later development. In the earlier part of the reign of Charles II. we were still superior on the whole to the Dutch in all but numbers, which in every generation and in every kind of war is the least valuable of the elements of strength. At the beginning of the second Dutch war the Duke of York wrote from Portsmouth to complain that the vessels then being built were designed on too small a scale. He argued that the Dutch could always excel us in point of number, and that it was desirable to possess a counterbalancing advantage in the size, and what followed from size, the broadside weight of fire of our individual ships. The duke's view did not prevail, but it is well worth quoting, if only to show how old is this conflict between the two schools of naval critics—those who rely on number and those who rely on individual strength.