The sum for which the Commission undertook to do this work was £400,000 a year. It received the money for two years and a half, from the 25th March 1686 till the 12th of October 1688. The total sum received was £1,015,384, 12s. The money actually spent on the navy was not more than £310,000 a year, leaving a balance of £307,570, 9s. 4d. to the credit of the Commissioners. Pepys records, not without a certain wistful regret, that if the work had been done by contract, the Commissioners would have put all this money into their own pockets, while as a matter of fact they got nothing but their modest salaries. It would be pedantic to demand a too minute accuracy from Pepys or any Englishman of his generation on such a point. Yet it does seem to be the case that the work was thoroughly done. When the Commission was determined in October 1688, amid the fall of the Stuart dynasty, there were 92 ships of the navy in commission, carrying 15,038 men. Its total force was 173 vessels, of which 9 were of the first rate, 11 of the second, 39 of the third, 41 of the fourth, 2 of the fifth, and 6 of the sixth. The fireships were 26 in number, and there were 14 yachts; a few bombs hoys, hulks, ketches, and smacks made up the remainder. It was estimated that 42,003 men were required to man these ships, and that they carried 6930 guns. It is the boast of Pepys that at this date all the officers and men of the navy were paid, nothing was owing to the contractors, and the magazines were full to overflowing of stores. There is a curious similarity between the fortunes of James II. and his father. Both took a keen interest in their navy, both did much to strengthen it, and it was the instrument which mainly served in the ruin of both. Northumberland threw the navy of Charles I. into the hands of Parliament, and thereby gave it the means of cutting the king off from his friends over the sea. The navy went over to the side of the Revolution in 1688, and was henceforth successfully engaged in preventing the return of King James to England.
Great part of the work of the Commission consisted in reducing administrative anarchy to order. The accounts were brought into a proper condition mainly by Hewer. But there was another part of its work, or of the work done through it by the king, which was designed to effect a much-needed reform in the conduct of the naval officer. It has been said already that the king's captains had from old been in the habit of adding to their salaries by carrying cargoes for money. They also seem to have taken money for carrying English merchants abroad. The Parliament had endeavoured to check these practices, which lent themselves to obvious abuses, by its orders in 1652. Under the Council of State and the Protectorate they were kept down by vigilant administrative control. But during the progressive degradation of the reign of Charles II. they had revived till they became a crying abuse. During the later years of the king they reached an intolerable point. Whether they were worse among the ships appointed to protect the trade in the Mediterranean than elsewhere is perhaps doubtful. But for this squadron we have again the testimony of Pepys. In 1683 the king, being now absolutely at the end of his resources, decided to withdraw the costly garrison of Tangier. A squadron was sent out under the command of George Legge, Lord Dartmouth, with orders to bring back the troops and "destroy them all." Pepys accompanied Dartmouth, and the journal of his voyage has been preserved. It contains an astonishing picture of the condition of the squadron then serving in the Straits. This force was commanded by Arthur Herbert, who had been left in command in the Mediterranean by Narbrough. There is a general consensus of opinion among all who knew him, that this man, though personally very brave, was self-indulgent, debauched, and unscrupulous. Under his fostering care the vices of the naval life of the time reached their height. Though he had gone to sea young, he ranks among the gentlemen captains and not among the Tarpaulins. The character of a gentleman captain was this, that he exercised his command for his own pleasure and profit. The Tarpaulin captain or admiral was often more of a gentleman by birth than has commonly been supposed. Yet he was of humbler birth than such a man as Herbert, and the tradition of his class was more wholesome. The difference between them was, that the gentleman captain came of that class of Cavaliers who after the Restoration consoled themselves for the misfortunes of the Civil War by settling like a swarm of bloodsuckers on the Treasury; or, if his family were not Cavaliers, he at least endeavoured to obtain that distinction by assuming what the satirist Butler, himself a Cavalier of the Cavaliers, called the hypocrisy of vice of the time. The Tarpaulin captains were those men whom Pepys had once seen, from Penn downwards, sober, valiant, and loyal to their duty, and whom he saw at Tangier and Cadiz imitating the excesses of the prevailing class.
It is impossible to dismiss the picture drawn by Pepys as a mere exaggeration. It is too consistent with everything else we know. From his account, then, we learn that the squadron at Cadiz was managed for the personal profit of Herbert and his friends. A great part of our trade at Cadiz consisted in the bullion imported by the Spaniards from their silver mines in South America. According to Spanish law, this ought not to have been exported, but as a matter of fact it was generally transferred at sea to Dutch and English vessels. Merchants naturally desired to send home cargoes of such value in armed ships as a security against pirates. They were glad to find a king's ship that would take it, and were ready to pay the captain a percentage. As no captain could sail without leave of the commander of the squadron, it will be seen what opportunities this system placed in Herbert's way. No officer could get a cargo except by sharing the profits with him. The captain who would toady and pay, who would attend the admiral "at his rising and going to bed, combing his periwig, putting on his coat as the king is served," got a cargo. The captain who would not, did not. Herbert in the meantime lived on shore, keeping a harem, "his mistresses visited and attended one after another as the king's are." Drunkenness seems to have been, if Pepys is to be believed, one of the least vices of the squadron.
It is probable that the report Pepys brought back from Tangier had much to do with persuading the king to make an effort to cleanse the navy of these excesses by so improving the pay of his captains as to raise them above the temptation of seeking dishonourable profit. Bad pay is certainly no excuse for the conduct described by Pepys, but an officer who could not live on his salary was strongly tempted to make the deficiency good by irregular means. The king decided to make an allowance to his captains calculated on a very liberal scale. This is the list as given by Pepys.
A Table of the Annual Allowance of a Sea-Commander of each Rate.
| Rate. | Present Wages. | Present Victualling. | Additional Grant for Table. |
| £ s. d. | £ s. d. | £ s. d. | |
| 1 | 273 15 0 | 12 3 4 | 250 0 0 |
| 2 | 219 0 0 | 12 3 4 | 200 0 0 |
| 3 | 182 0 0 | 12 3 4 | 166 5 0 |
| 4 | 136 10 0 | 12 3 4 | 124 5 0 |
| 5 | 109 10 0 | 12 3 4 | 100 0 0 |
| 6 | 91 10 0 | 12 3 4 | 83 0 0 |
It will be seen that this grant of table-money had the effect of nearly doubling the pay of every captain on active service. The object of the king was to make it from henceforward unpardonable in any naval officer to neglect his duty for the sake of profit. He did not confine himself merely to increasing the salaries, but promised that in future the captains engaged in service against his enemies should have the whole benefit of the prizes taken from the enemy. They were to be "divided between the commander or commanders of such our ship or ships (with their officers and companies) as were concerned in the chase and capture of the said prizes according to the law and practice of the sea." In conclusion, the king promised to give special rewards to such officers as gave "any signal instances of their industry, courage, conduct, or frugality." This order was issued by the king at Windsor, on the 16th of July 1686.
It was not without reason that the king thought he had attached his navy firmly to himself, and that he could rely implicitly on its loyalty. Yet before two years were past his fleet was turning against him, and a few months later it failed him no less completely than his army. The navy, no doubt, moved with the nation, but the men in command might have been expected to prove personally loyal to the king, who had treated them with signal kindness. Yet, as a body, and with few exceptions, they deserted him in his need. Their motives were no doubt similar to those of other Englishmen of the time. Some were frightened by the favour he showed to the Roman Catholics, and rebelled out of zeal to the Church. Others came, like Churchill, to the conclusion that in the long-run no man who was not prepared to become an apostate could expect favour from the king. There were certainly not a few who remained perfectly loyal till they discovered the whole extent of the king's danger, and who then hastened to make their peace with his enemies. The sailors as a class were, as they had been in the Civil War, strongly Protestant. The majority of them still came from the southern and eastern counties, the most Puritan parts of England. So soon as the opposition to the king's Government became general, and leaders were found to appeal to the sailors, there could be very little doubt that the fleet would go with the rest of the country.
During 1687 and the early months of 1688 the king was steadily alienating the mass of his subjects. Sailors felt as other men did, and they were conspicuous in the crowd which applauded the acquittal of the Seven Bishops. There was no want of leaders to bring them over to the side of those who were preparing to upset the king's Government. The two chiefs of the sailors who played conspicuous parts in the Revolution were gentlemen captains. Edward Russell was the grandson of the Earl of Bedford, and the first cousin of the Lord William Russell executed for his share in the Rye House conspiracy. He had gone to sea young, and had seen much service. But the importance of the part he played was due less to his personal influence and reputation than to the dignity of his family. The part he took was natural enough, for the Russells were leaders of the Whigs. The action of Arthur Herbert was less to have been expected. His family were strong Royalists. His father had been Attorney-General to Charles I., and his brother, Sir Edward Herbert, was a very Royalist Judge. Sir Edward did indeed lose the favour of his master by opposition to the king's arbitrary treatment of the Fellows of Magdalen, but he remained loyal. Under a similar provocation Arthur Herbert took a very different course. It is said that the king, who at one time had been largely influenced by him in the management of naval matters, had transferred much of his favour to George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth. Dartmouth also was a gentleman captain bred to the sea. It may be that the stories he brought back from Tangier had done something to turn the king against Herbert. The fact that Pepys (whose opinion of Herbert had already been given) was Secretary of the Admiralty must also be allowed for. Yet the king made him Master of the Robes and Rear-Admiral of England. In 1687, when James was endeavouring to persuade all men of mark in England to support his claim to be entitled to dispense with penal statutes, he appealed to Herbert among others. The admiral, according to the well-known story, replied that his honour and conscience would not allow him to do what the king wished. The answer of the king, which seems to have been really given, is one of the innumerable proofs that he must have been a very silly man. He told Herbert that a gentleman of his habits of life had no right to talk of his conscience, which, coming from the master of the notorious Brouncker to a courtier who was perfectly aware of the facts, was portentously foolish. Herbert made the obvious reply that there were people whose lives were no cleaner than his who made a much greater profession of religion. This in the circumstances was a richly-deserved piece of impertinence. Provoked perhaps as much by the snub as by the admiral's refusal to support his policy, the king dismissed Herbert from his places, and caused his accounts as Master of the Robes to be severely examined. The admiral was not the man to submit to the displeasure of the king as his brother Sir Edward had done. He applied himself to making the Lord's anointed pay for depriving him of four thousand pounds a year. He went over to Holland, and there organised the naval part of the conspiracy. Russell remained in England, where he formed part of the Whig Council, but made occasional trips in disguise across the North Sea.