A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

When the country found itself committed to hostilities with the Dutch at the close of 1664, Parliament had been induced to vote the sum of £2,500,000 for the king's service. Members were in a somewhat gloomy mood when they were summoned to make good their loyal promises to the king by providing so large a sum. But the House had soon been made to understand that war could not be conducted without money. The £2,500,000 was granted. In 1665 the sum of £1,250,000 was asked for by the king's servants, and was obtained from the House. In the early days of 1667 a third vote of £1,800,000 was put at the king's disposal. The total amount, therefore, voted in those three years had been £5,550,000. The fixed revenue of the Crown, though it fell below the estimated amount, was not less than £1,000,000 a year. For the three years counting from late in 1664 to early in 1667 this would make £3,000,000, so that the total amount that had been at the disposal of the Government during these three years had, at least on paper, been no less than £8,550,000. A large allowance must undoubtedly be made for the disturbing effects of the plague and the fire. The king had to put up with delay in obtaining advances from the city on the security of the revenue, and after the fire the whole of the business of the Treasury was disorganised for an interval. Yet the money actually received by the king must have been much the greater part of the £8,550,000. None the less, his crews were a year or more in arrear of their pay, the workmen were running from the dockyards to escape starvation, and the navy was burdened with debt. King Charles was under no necessity to maintain a great army. This obligation had weighed on the Government of the Protector, who had to provide for the Scotch and Irish establishments, and had, moreover, never enjoyed any equivalent revenue. The sea service of the Protector did indeed suffer through the financial difficulties of his Government, but was never so crippled as the navy was in 1667. The religious discontents in Scotland and conspiracies among the Puritans in England undoubtedly made it necessary for the king to maintain a body of troops, yet a very few would have sufficed; and when the king began raising new regiments at the end of 1666, it was not because they were needed for the maintenance of order.

The Dutch war had been a disappointment to the king and Court. They found that they had entirely underestimated the difficulty of defeating Holland. The war was not, as had been hoped, a rich but a poor one. In spite of our victories at sea, our commerce suffered so severely that after the conclusion of hostilities it was found necessary to suspend those provisions of the Navigation Acts which prohibited the purchase of foreign-built vessels. In the meantime, every appeal made to the House of Commons for money had a tendency to strengthen its already deeply-rooted desire to interfere with the king's administration. This combination of disappointments abroad with the rising difficulties at home, ended by thoroughly sickening the king of the Dutch war. He began to think of the dangers menacing him in England, and to long to be free from the control of his House of Commons. He was far too clever a man to imitate the fatal courses of his father. Charles II. would never go far enough to provoke his people into sending him on his travels for a second time, and when Parliament became dangerous he yielded. Till it came to that pass, he would take all he could get, and would prepare, as far as he safely could, to make himself a despotic king on the model of his cousin Louis XIV. One way of bringing about that much-desired consummation was to provide himself with an army. It would have been an act of suicidal folly to go to Parliament with a request for funds for the maintenance of troops. Standing army was a phrase which stank in the nostrils of all Englishmen, and was to none more offensive than to the king's own most loyal subjects, the Cavaliers, who associated regular soldiers with the memories of Oliver's major-generals. But there was one thing the king could do: he could take the money the Parliament had voted for naval armaments against the Dutch, and apply it to the payment of soldiers. There was nothing in the "dry and elegant cynicism" of Charles II. to make him see anything discreditable in such a manœuvre; so towards the end of the war he pocketed the £1,800,000 voted by Parliament for the fleet, and applied it to the general purposes of his Government, of which one was the formation of fresh regiments of troops. The navy in the meantime was laid up, with the exception of a few light squadrons, and the country left without protection against the Dutch. It is no doubt the case that the king was technically justified in spending the money as he saw fit. It was voted for his service, and he was in theory the judge of what constituted his service. What neither the king nor his advisers foresaw sufficiently clearly was, that the House of Commons would draw its own deductions from these facts. It would sooner or later guard itself against the risk of seeing the money given for one service diverted to another by insisting on allotting funds for definite purposes. From the moment it had done that, it had taken the last step which was necessary to give it direct control over every branch of the public administration.

The session of Parliament began in September 1666, and took a course well calculated to warn the king of the domestic perils before him. A bill was introduced in the House of Commons for the examination of public accounts. According to the terms of this measure, a Parliamentary Commission was to be appointed, which was to have the power of calling the king's officers before it, and compelling them to give an account of all public money that had passed through their hands. The House was so resolute to give itself this satisfaction that it at first refused to proceed with supply until the bill was passed. The terror felt by the king's officers and by his courtiers was lively. The Diary of Pepys contains ample evidence of the searchings of heart set going in the Navy Office. The terrors of the courtiers were even greater, as they were better founded, than those of the king's officials. Nobody had more to fear from a parliamentary investigation than Lord Ashley, afterwards first Earl of Shaftesbury. He was chairman of the Commissioners of Prizes. According to the law, the Commissioners ought, after satisfying the claims of the officers and men, to have handed over the surplus for the purposes of the war, but it was notorious that the fleet had not been paid either wages or prize-money, and that vast sums of money had been pilfered by the courtiers. Ashley had the king's orders not to reveal what he had done with the proceeds of the prizes, and he had also the king's promise that he would be protected against the House of Commons. The servants of the House of Stuart had the fate of Strafford to teach them the value of such guarantees. The danger passed away, but only because the House of Commons was diverted by other objects. The king had announced that he never would have passed the bill, even if he failed to get it defeated in the House of Lords. The belief that he would refuse his consent to a measure designed to make his servants the servants of the House of Commons was universal. Some members at least were so convinced of his obstinacy that they had recourse to an unchivalrous but effectual method of coercion. They talked of attacking the king's mistress, the Countess of Castlemaine, thereby setting an example to Ashley, who, when he had quarrelled with the king at a later period of his career, cowed his master by threatening to cause the Duchess of Portsmouth to be presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. Clarendon, though no friend to the extravagances of the Court, was opposed to the bill, which he held, and very justly, to constitute a great reduction of the power of the Crown.

Neither the reluctance of the king nor the management of his chancellor would of themselves have checked the House of Commons if it had not been diverted by a quarrel about jurisdiction with the House of Lords. It was getting into that savage state of mind which so often made it dangerous in the seventeenth century. Members felt that the money they had voted had been shamefully wasted. They were filled with suspicion by the increase in the number of troops, and were almost maddened by fears, which we now know to have been well founded, that the king was secretly a Roman Catholic, and was nursing schemes to favour those of his own religion. It must be remembered, too, that the House was very ill informed. To-day every detail of the public service is subject to inspection by Parliament, but in the seventeenth century it had not yet been settled that the king's servants were responsible to Parliament in any other sense than this, that they might be impeached, and, if found guilty, be punished for giving bad advice to the king, or for illegal acts. They were still struggling to maintain the old doctrine of the Tudor dynasty, that the king's servants answered to the king alone. Feeling themselves tricked and eluded, being very ignorant of the facts, it is not wonderful that the members of the House of Commons were liable to get beside themselves with anger. In their frame of mind they were always prepared to clamour for a victim. Pepys has recorded his rueful conviction, not only that the navy officers might be, but that it was reasonable to think that they ought to be, thrown out as a sacrifice to the wolves to save the king and great men. On this occasion, however, they escaped, and it was Clarendon who was thrown out to pacify the House of Commons. The Bill for Examining Public Accounts passed the Commons. The Lords, desirous to help the king, decided to petition him to appoint a committee of inquiry himself. The Commons were furious at what was manifestly a manœuvre to avert a reinvestigation, and a great quarrel arose between the Houses as to the constitutional orthodoxy of the course taken by the Peers. In the general conflict the bill was allowed to lapse, but when the king prorogued Parliament in the beginning of 1667 he found it wise to promise that he would cause inquiry to be made.

At the time that this promise was given, the king was in hopes of a speedy settlement with Holland, which might help him to huddle up the war. Informal negotiations had been going on since the close of the summer of 1666. Occasion for them had been given by an act of humanity and courtesy on the part of John de Witt. He caused the body of Sir William Berkeley, who had fallen in the first day of the Four Days' Battle, to be skilfully embalmed, and returned it to England under a flag of truce. Charles had replied by taking the first step towards the settlement of a peace. Some months passed before they progressed so far as to become definite negotiations, but it was so much the interest of both parties to put a stop to hostilities that they were not allowed to drop. If England, or rather, if the English Treasury, was exhausted, Holland had begun to be conscious of a danger menacing her very existence. Her ally, Louis XIV., was entering on a course of aggression against the Spanish Netherlands, which, if unchecked, must very soon bring his armies to the borders of the United Provinces, and thereby reduce them to entire dependence on his mercy. To face this peril while hampered with a war with England was impossible, and John de Witt was eager for peace. The King of England for his part was already engaged in underhand schemes with his cousin Louis XIV., which had for their ultimate object the destruction of the Dutch Republics, but some time had to pass before their plans could be ripened. In the interval it was desirable to make peace, and so, by putting a stop to hostilities between England and France, leave the two Courts free to act together. When, therefore, the King of Sweden came forward with offers to act as mediator, he was accepted by both powers. The Conference appointed to settle the treaty of peace met at Breda in May.

While the diplomatists were sitting in their different rooms at Breda, drawing up protocols and sending them to the Swedish ambassador, who acted as umpire, it was perfectly understood on both sides that the war was to go on. This was first dishonestly, and then foolishly, denied on our side. But the actions of our Government prove to demonstration that it was perfectly well aware that hostilities were not to be suspended. In May, when the Conference at Breda was just about to meet, the king, in a letter addressed to the Duke of York as Lord High Admiral, declared that as London was well supplied with coal, there was no need to keep at sea more than a few light squadrons, which might distract the enemy and disturb his trade. These were operations of war. In fact, so little did the English Government trust to the peace negotiations for protection, that when it was decided not to send a fleet to sea, measures were ordered to be taken for the fortification of the coast. In March the works undertaken for the purpose were already patent to all the world, and were, in fact, perfectly well known in Holland. At a later time, when the disastrous consequences of this decision had been seen, the king threw the blame on his councillors, and the Duke of York asserted that he had opposed the policy. These were after-thoughts of men anxious to screen themselves at the expense of others. From the account given by Pepys of the meeting of the Council at Whitehall on the 24th of March, it appears that the Duke of York was very well satisfied with the fortifications. When he was told that they were known of in Holland, and might be taken for a sign of fear, "the King and Duke of York both laughed at it and made no matter, but said, 'Let us be safe and let them talk, for there is nothing that will trouble them more, nor will prevent their coming over more, than to hear we are fortifying ourselves.' And the Duke of York said further, 'What said Marshal Turenne when some in vanity said that the enemies were afraid, for they entrenched themselves? "Well," says he, "I would that they were not afraid, for then they would not entrench themselves, and so we could deal with them the better."'" The difference between the Government of England and that of Holland in these months was not that the first relied on negotiations for peace to suspend hostilities, and that the second took a base advantage of its confidence, but that England was governed by cunning men of no wisdom, intent on their own amusements, and that Holland was governed by an energetic and judicious statesman, who ranked her glory far above any personal aims of his own.

The light squadrons sent out from England were two. The less interesting and important was sent into the higher latitudes of the North Sea under the command of Sir J. Smith, to cruise against the Baltic commerce of the Dutch, and it is reported to have been fairly successful in taking prizes. It remained there till peace was actually signed, and then returned, having made some profit for those who could secure a share in the prizes, but having certainly done nothing to distract Michael de Ruyter.

The second squadron had a much more varied and brilliant history. It was commanded by that Sir John Harman who had been captain of the flagship of the Lord High Admiral in the battle of Lowestoft, and had afterwards fought with such conspicuous valour in the Four Days' Battle. Harman came from that part of England which was to the reign of Charles II. what Devonshire had been to the age of Queen Elizabeth—a nursery of brave and skilful seamen. The more famous of the Tarpaulin Admirals, as the regular-bred seamen were nicknamed, were East Anglians. Harman's people belonged to Suffolk, and from his portrait he was of that type of eastern county men with sharp, almost hatchet faces and black hair, who perhaps represent the black Danes. The station to which he was destined was the West Indies. However languidly the war had been conducted in Europe by Louis XIV., the French and English had come to very fierce blows in the Antilles. At this period the French already possessed Guadaloupe, Martinique, and some smaller islands. They divided the island of St. Christopher with us. England had Barbadoes, Antigua, Nevis, which lies immediately next St. Christopher, on the other half of that island. The Commonwealth had given us possession of Jamaica. Whether in the French or in the English islands, the control of the Home Government was very inefficient. There were conflicts as to jurisdiction between the Crown and the Lords Proprietors who had secured concessions for settling the islands, and with the companies which had secured trade monopolies. The islands were the home of a vast floating population of adventurers, mostly scoundrels. The Civil War in England had consigned herds of Scotch and Irish prisoners to what was really slavery in the West Indies. It had also been the custom both of France and England to supply the planters with labour by drafting out criminals who were bound to give so many years of labour. An active trade of kidnapping conducted by rascals who were known by the cant name of "The Spirits" tended to recruit this curious nondescript population, which not unnaturally produced a large proportion of men incapable of regular work. When it is remembered that the rich Spanish colonies were close at hand, and that Spain was very weak, no demonstration is required to prove that the West Indies were swarming with pirates. Under the names of "Brethren of the Coast," "flibutiers," and buccaneers, and under the pretext of asserting the freedom of the rest of the world to share in the possession of America, these adventurers carried on an incessant piratical warfare against Spain.

The French king's declaration of war had introduced a new element into this scene of organised disorder. The French, English, and Dutch had hitherto worked pretty harmoniously together for the purpose of plundering the Spaniards. They were now divided, the French and Dutch being banded together against the English. The first collision in the war took place, as might have been supposed, in the island of St. Christopher. The French colonists had generally an advantage over ours on these occasions. That want of industry which in the end ruined their chance of establishing an empire in America, made them more ready for martial adventure. In St. Christopher's it is said that they were guilty of a breach of faith, a charge continually made and retorted on both sides. It was probably produced on this occasion the more readily, because the French gained an instantaneous and complete success. The defeat of the English may be accounted for without having recourse to the supposition of illegitimate manœuvres on the part of the French. The planters among the English were peaceful persons who did not want to fight. They had some buccaneers, who were no doubt in their way courageous, under the command of one William Morgan (not to be confounded with the renowned Sir Henry Morgan); but these men, if they were brave, were very drunken and undisciplined. There were also some Irish, victims, no doubt, of the great exportations of the Civil War, who are described by the narrator of these events as a bloody and perfidious people, always hostile to the Protestant interest. It is said they fired into the backs of the English while they were engaged with the French in the front. The end of it was, that our colony was destroyed, and the English wholly expelled from the island. Some of them took refuge in Virginia, others fortified themselves in the island of Nevis, and there contrived to hold out till they were relieved.

Little help came from Jamaica, where Modyford, the governor, could not get that part of the population which was prepared to fight, to serve against anybody but the Spaniards. But Lord Willoughby, who was again governor of Barbadoes, exerted himself with energy, and appeals were made for help from home.