CHAPTER XIV
THE LAST YEARS OF THE STUART DYNASTY

The main sources of information for the period included in this chapter are Pepys' Memoirs relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England for the Ten Years determined December 1688, and the Diary of his Journey to Tangier, included in Mr. Smith's edition of his Letters. For the naval events of the Revolution we possess the Memoirs of Lord Torrington, edited by Mr. Laughton for the Camden Society.

The fourteen years between the conclusion of the third Dutch war and the Revolution of 1688 saw no new war. The operations against the pirates of the Barbary coast have already been described. The events of this interval were first the fall of the navy to a disgraceful pitch of weakness through pure corruption and mismanagement; then its restoration to a sounder condition through the efforts of King James II.; and lastly, those intrigues which deprived the king of his fleet when the country rose upon him in the autumn of the year of the Revolution. There was, it is true, an alarm of war in 1678, and some show of preparation for hostilities was made. It was directed against France. The country would have been willing enough to see itself engaged in a war with France. It feared the ambition of the French king, and would, moreover, have considered hostilities directed against him as a guarantee against Roman Catholic intrigues at home. Commercial disputes also embittered the relations of the two countries. The third Dutch war had been very disastrous to English shipping. The Dutch, having been compelled to suspend regular commerce, had taken to privateering on a large scale, and in the general inefficiency of our management little had been done to check them. Thus our trade had suffered severely. At the close of the war the Government had allowed English shipowners to buy foreign-built vessels, contrary to the provisions of the Navigation Act. As the war between France and Holland went on for years after England had made peace, it is probable that many Dutch owners took the opportunity to make collusive sales. They, in fact, pretended to sell the vessels when they were only transferring them to an English name, in order to secure protection against French privateers. The French, at anyrate, insisted in treating the transfer of Dutch-built vessels as a mere manœuvre, and in considering them lawful prize. These captures caused great irritation in England, and went to strengthen the general desire for war. But the king would not quarrel with his cousin—at least he would not go further than was necessary to induce the King of France to continue his allowance. The war scare passed over, and the navy was left to rot to within a measurable distance of complete destruction.

It would indeed have been wonderful if a service requiring at once the regular expenditure of money and a constant vigilant administrative control had not fallen into a thoroughly bad condition during the last years of the reign of Charles II. The king never had enough money, and he grew daily less capable of controlling his own Government. His health was worn out for some years before his death, and he could no longer give constant attention to the affairs of the State, even if he had been willing to make the effort. It is true that the king was not left wholly without pecuniary assistance from Parliament. He obtained one grant by consenting to pass the Test Act, and in 1677 Parliament gave him £700,000 to pay for the construction of thirty men-of-war. But these aids were entirely insufficient. The Dutch war, adding to the burdens already upon him, had swollen the king's debt to no less a sum than four millions sterling. The closing of the Exchequer had made it certain that the king could expect no assistance from the commercial class. Thus he suffered from continual penury. It may be allowed that it was his own fault he was not better supplied. It cannot be denied that even what he had, the fixed revenue of the Crown and the pensions doled out to him irregularly by the King of France, was wasted. At a time when he was compelled to reduce the salaries of the servants of his household, and when his troops and his fleet were being starved for want of money, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and other less favoured instruments of his pleasures, drew a very large sum of money. It is a matter of record that they received among them not much less than half of the sum—namely, £400,000 a year—estimated as necessary for the support of the navy in peace. It would be rash indeed to affirm that their gains were limited to the sums of money entered into the accounts. When a treasury is made a prey to harpies of both sexes of this order, there is hardly any limit to be placed to their rapacity. Subordinate officers will profess to have received money for their departments, when, in point of fact, it has really passed into the hands of some courtier who has secured their compliance by a bribe. Pepys, indeed, in his Memoirs relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England for Ten Years determined December 1688, asserts that, during the worst time of King Charles's reign, the Lord High Treasurer did annually pay out £400,000 for the service of the navy. But Pepys was a strong Royalist, and was writing in 1690, at a time when all partisans of the House of Stuart had the most powerful motive for making out a case for the dethroned royal family; and then Pepys could only know that the money was formally paid for that service, and not whether it ever reached the hand of the naval officers for any other purpose than to be immediately returned, in part, if not in whole, to the courtiers and the favourites and their agents.

Pepys' evidence is, at anyrate, conclusive as to this, that whoever stole the money, or whatever sums were set apart for the service of the navy, the king's ships did, during the last years of his reign, sink into abject weakness. Between 1672 and 1679 the king took the administration of the navy into his own hands. In practice, this meant that he was keeping the office of Lord High Admiral open for his brother, if ever the anti-papal excitement of the time made it safe to restore the duke to his office. The king himself could not, even if he would, give his navy the constant attention required from the chief of an administration. What the king could not do was not done at all. The Duke of York, though excluded from office by the Test Act, appears to have exercised a species of informal control over the navy until 1679, but by that year the country had been worked into a paroxysm of madness by the supposed discovery of the Popish Plot in 1678, and the duke was believed to be in so much danger that the king persuaded him to retire to the Netherlands. In the same year, Pepys, who had continued to hold his post on the Navy Board, was imprisoned in the Tower, on a charge of being a convert to Popery and a favourite with the Papists. He lost his office, and had no further connection with the navy for five years. The king, who lived in terror while the Popish Plot was still believed to be a real danger, and whose health began to fail about this time, rid himself of even the appearance of trouble in connection with his navy. He appointed a Commission to discharge the whole office of the Lord High Admiral; in other words, he suspended both the office of Lord High Admiral and the Navy Office, and gave the whole of the administration of the service to such a Board as had ruled the navy for Charles I. between the death of the Duke of Buckingham and the nomination of the Earl of Northumberland.

Under the control of these men the navy was all but destroyed. It would be perhaps unjust to lay the blame entirely on their deficiencies. The king had not the money required to pay the expenses of his Government, and what he had was pilfered on all hands by servants of all ranks and both sexes. But if they cannot be made to bear the blame alone, they certainly must share it. It is significant that during the years this Commission lasted no accounts were kept, nor could any afterwards be obtained. Where no accounts were kept, it was doubtless because nobody concerned ventured to say what had really been done with the money: that it was not spent in maintaining the fleet is certain. When Pepys was committed to prison in 1679, the king had in commission seventy-six ships, carrying 12,040 men. Those of the king's ships that were not in commission could, it was estimated, be put to sea at an expense of £50,000 sterling. The dockyards contained stores to the value of £60,000 over and above the six months' provisions of war served out to the ships in commission. The thirty ships designed to be built out of the money granted by Parliament in 1677 were all in course of construction, and eleven of them had just been launched.

This picture of the state of the navy in 1679 is possibly much flattered. Pepys asserts that it must be accepted as trustworthy, because in 1679 a report was made to the House of Commons which shows the condition of the navy at the time, and is identical with his account of it. He does not add that the report to the Commons was made by the navy officers, and was not checked. It is probable that there were a great many suppressions in Pepys' account. He had made out a plausible case for the Navy Office in 1668, when it was found necessary to throw dust in the eyes of the House of Commons. Yet at that very time he was drawing up a confidential statement for the benefit of the Duke of York, in which he shows that the members of the Board neglected their duty, that the Lord High Admiral's instructions of 1661-62 were disregarded, and that the department was in need of a thorough overhaul if it was to escape falling into total inefficiency. There was exactly the same reverse to the fine portrait which Pepys drew of the navy in 1679. Yet, though it was wastefully maintained and suffered from many defects, there at least was a navy in that year. Five years later there was hardly any navy in existence. Twenty-four ships only were in commission. They were all small, and carried among them only 3070 men. The ships not in commission were so out of repair, not through service, but through pure neglect, that £120,000 would have been required to fit them for sea; while the whole of the stores in the magazines hardly amounted in value to £5000. The state of the thirty new ships in hand when Mr. Pepys was imprisoned was worse even than that of the old vessels. Most of them had never even been in commission, and yet they were ready to sink at their moorings from pure rottenness.

"The greatest part nevertheless of these Thirty Ships (without having ever yet lookt out of Harbour) were let to sink into such Distress, through Decays contracted in their Buttocks, Quarters, Bows, Thickstuff without Board, and Spirkettings upon their Gun-decks within; their Buttock-Planks some of them started from their Transums, Tree-nails burnt and rotted, and Planks thereby become ready to drop into the Water, as being (with their neighbouring Timbers) in many places perish'd to powder, to the rendring them unable with safety to admit of being breem'd, for fear of taking Fire; and their whole sides more disguised by Shot-boards nail'd, and Plaisters of Canvas pitch'd thereon (for hiding their Defects, and keeping them above Water) than has been usually seen upon the coming in of a Fleet after a Battle; that several of them had been newly reported by the Navy-Board itself, to lye in danger of sinking at their very Moorings."

The breeming or, according to modern spelling, breaming of a ship was the act of cleaning the bottom by burning off the ooze, sedge, shells, or seaweed which adhered to it during a long stay in harbour. When vessels were not coppered, they easily became foul. The fire, applied by faggots of wood or reed, melted the ship's coating of pitch, and whatever adhered to it could easily be scraped off, and the ship covered with a new coating of tar or tallow. Of course, if the ship had been allowed to rot until she was in the condition of tinder, this could not possibly be done without danger. This was the return for £670,000 of money voted by the Parliament and actually paid into the hands of the Treasurer of the Navy. "The strict provision made by Parliament, the repeated injunctions of His Majesty, the orders of the then Lord Treasurer and ampleness of the helps purposely allowed (to the full of their own demands and undertakings) for securing a satisfactory account of the charge and build of the said ships," were all useless. Such was the state of the navy when the king, just before his death, in February 1685, resumed the administration into his own hands, and decided to govern it once more by the advice of his brother, the Duke of York. The duke brought back Pepys, who was living in retirement at Windsor. Nothing could be done during the brief remainder of the life of Charles II., and not much was effected during the first year of King James's reign. In the January of 1686 the condition of the fleet, if not worse, was as bad as ever. Ninety thousand pounds had been spent on the repair of ships, and yet the navy officers were demanding as much more before they could undertake to put the ships in a state of repair. Not a quarter of the ships were graved, that is, docked and cleaned so as to be fit for service. During Monmouth's rebellion the navy could hardly contrive to fit out a squadron; nothing had been done to the thirty new ships, and the magazines of stores were empty. It was clear that, unless strong measures were taken, the navy would perish utterly. King James was certainly not a great commander, and he was a very bad king. Still he had so far a genuine interest in the navy, and the feelings becoming an English king, that he was willing to save the fleet. To say that he did the work himself would be going too far, but he did decide that it should be done. He chose the men who could do it, and he supported them in the discharge of their duty.

Following the precedent set by his grandfather, James I., after the report of the Commission in 1618, the king decided to appoint a special Commission. He did not entirely dismiss the members of the existing naval administration, but he added four to their number. These four were Sir Anthony Deane, the well-known shipbuilder, Sir John Berry, the naval officer who has been mentioned already as serving against the French and Dutch in the West Indies, Mr. Hewer, and Mr. St. Michael. All four, if we may believe his word, were chosen on the recommendation of Pepys. The real power was in the hands of the new members. The old officers, Lord Falkland, Sir J. Tippets, Sir Richard Haddock, and Mr. Southerne, were set apart to endeavour to reduce the accounts for the past five years into some sort of order. They appear to have had no other share in the administration. Lord Falkland, indeed, remained Treasurer of the Navy, but in that capacity he would have little to do except receive money from the Lord High Treasurer, and pass it on to the other departments. Sir P. Pett and Sir R. Beach, who were on the old Commission, were employed only at Chatham and Portsmouth. Sir John Narbrough and Sir J. Godwin, also members of the old Commission, served on the Board with Deane, Berry, and Hewer. St. Michael was commissioner only at Deptford and Woolwich. Pepys did not resume his seat on the Navy Board, but was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty, which, as the king kept the office of Lord High Admiral to himself, meant that for all practical purposes the government of the navy was in his hands. The Commission was appointed in April 1686, and was determined on the 12th of October 1688. During these two years the Commissioners brought the navy into the condition which enabled it to be used as an effective instrument after the Revolution. They did not succeed, and they did not pretend to have succeeded, in removing all the defects caused by so many previous years of corruption and mismanagement.