Our fathers were at ease in their minds on the subject, for about 1730 they—and here we come back to the King’s-letter boy—saw the abolition of the only approach to an organisation by which a regular corps of candidates for a lieutenant’s commission had till then been provided; and they saw it with indifference. During the Restoration, and in the early part of the eighteenth century, it had been the custom to send a certain number of boys on board ship with a King’s “Letter of Service.” These lads were considered to have a better right to be made lieutenants than others. They answered, in fact, to the modern cadet. It does not seem that they were held to be entitled to a commission, but they were more likely to get it than another. As a Letter of Service would not be given except to those who had some interest, they probably did get their commissions as a rule. In this way some regular provision was made for the supply of a corps of officers. About 1730, however, the elder Byng, he who won the battle off Cape Passaro, being then a commissioner at the Admiralty, decided to abolish the King’s Letter, and to establish a naval school at Portsmouth in which boys might be trained for the sea service. This sounds very modern, but Byng carried out his reform in the genuine spirit of the eighteenth century. He did not declare that only those should become lieutenants who had passed through the naval school, and he did leave the expense of supporting the boys who went to study there wholly to their families. It was therefore not the interest of a parent who could get his boy sent straight on board ship to send him to the naval school. So, though the place went on it was much neglected, and many of the most famous naval officers who entered the service after it had been established had never belonged to it. Rodney was, it has been said already, the last of those who entered the navy in the old way.
When he first went to sea we were in the middle of the long peace maintained by Walpole. A considerable naval force was kept up, for though Sir Robert would not use the fleet, he never allowed foreigners to forget it was there to be used in case of need. Little notice was taken of midshipmen in those days—so little, in fact, that it is often impossible to tell when an officer first went to sea. The actual date of the entry into the service of so famous a man as Lord Hawke was long unknown. According to General Mundy, Rodney’s first captain was Medley, afterwards an admiral, and he passed most of his early years of service on the Newfoundland station. He became an officer when he was “made” by Haddock in the Mediterranean on February 15th, 1739. It would seem, therefore, that Rodney’s interest was not strong enough to get him a commission till after an apprenticeship of nine years, or nearly thrice the period required by the rules of the service. In this respect he was far less lucky than his contemporary Howe, who was in command of a ship before he was twenty.
In 1739 the long peace was at an end, and England had entered on the three-quarters of a century of fighting, relieved by uneasy truces, which were to leave her the uncontested mistress of the seas. The war which began about Jenkins’ Ear and developed into the Austrian Succession had just broken out. A fleet was sent into the Mediterranean under Nicholas Haddock, member of an Essex family which had been distinguished in the navy from the Commonwealth time. Haddock’s duty was to look after any Spanish squadron which might put to sea, to support our garrison at Minorca, to take prizes, and to ravage the coast. The work was well done, but it afforded few opportunities of distinction. Spain was too weak to meet us openly, and the English fleet was mostly engaged in blockading Don José Navarro at Cadiz, and in endeavouring to keep the Straits of Gibraltar free from privateers. Towards the close of 1741 the Spaniards succeeded in slipping to sea while Haddock was at Gibraltar, and in covering the despatch of Spanish troops from Barcelona to Northern Italy, where they were to operate against the Austrians for the purpose of putting the Milanese into the possession of the Infante Don Felipe. The escape of Don José and the passage of the Spaniards was a famous incident of the times, and the cause of much clamour; but it has no connection with the life of Rodney, and may be left alone here. It was almost a matter of course that the retreat of Haddock should be put down to the profound cunning which, to the unending joy of all Englishmen of humour, is attributed to us by the sagacious foreigner. We went away to gain our private ends. The true explanation was simpler. Ships grew rapidly foul in the time before the value of copper-sheeting had been discovered. Haddock’s vessels wanted scraping, and, moreover, had been knocked about by the autumn storms; so he retired to Gibraltar to refit. While he was there Navarro slipped out and ran through the Gut. As soon as the squadron was ready for sea Haddock followed. When he came up with the Spaniards he found them in company with a French squadron under M. de Court. The French Admiral informed him that the Italian enterprise was undertaken in alliance with his master, and that no attack on the Spaniards could be permitted. England and France were still nominally at peace, though they were actively opposed to one another in the character of allies to Austria or Prussia. The position was an extraordinary one, and Haddock very pardonably shrank from the responsibility of attacking the allies. He retired to Minorca and waited for orders.
For a period of more than a year after this the English, French, and Spaniards remained in a state of war which was no war, and peace which was not peace. The allies lay at Toulon quarrelling and fighting duels. The English watched them from Minorca or Hyères Bay. The French would not allow us to attack the Spanish squadron, but they left us at full liberty to obtain water and provisions in their territory. They even went so far as to tolerate the destruction of five Spanish galleys by our fire-ships in St. Tropez Bay, but they were notoriously preparing to fight us a little later on. Altogether, the diplomatic and military situation was one to which it would be hard to find a parallel. In this, as in the previous stage of the naval war, few opportunities for real service were afforded, and, such as they were, none of them came in Rodney’s way.
Early in 1742 Haddock’s health broke down and he returned to England. After a brief period, during which Rear-Admiral Lestock held the command, Admiral Mathews arrived from England with reinforcements to take it over. The change did no harm to Rodney, who was appointed by the new commander to the Plymouth, sixty-four, on a vacancy made by the transfer of Captain Watson to the Dragon. Immediately afterwards he was sent home with a convoy, and so escaped having to bear a part in the most inglorious passage in the history of the English navy—the battle of February 11th, 1744, off Toulon, and the long series of scandalous court-martials which arose out of it. We have happily no concern with the miserable Mathews and Lestock quarrel except to note that as the Admiral was afterwards dismissed the service for bearing down on the enemy out of his line of battle, it served to harden that hide-bound system of tactics which made naval engagements so utterly indecisive till Rodney himself broke through it thirty-eight years later in the West Indies. The acting rank as post-captain conferred by the command of the Plymouth was confirmed on his arrival in England, and he was now firmly established on the ladder. A man rose from lieutenant to captain by selection, from captain to admiral by seniority, and if post-rank did not come too late, was tolerably sure of reaching flag-rank. Whether he would ever actually hoist his flag at sea would still depend on luck and merit. Rodney had passed from the great class below lieutenant which had no rights, and from the rank of lieutenant which was the highest reached by many men, not so rapidly as some of his contemporaries, but still speedily. At five-and-twenty years of age, and with twelve years of service, he stood on his own quarter-deck with the best of prospects that he might one day command a fleet.
Although these years of apprenticeship contain no incident of interest in Rodney’s career, they—and particularly the last three of them—must have been of vital importance to him. They had taught him his business as a matter of course, and had hardened him to the sea life. How hard it was we know from Roderick Random. There is a certain amount of deliberate exaggeration for purposes of literary effect in Smollett’s great book, but its essential truth is beyond dispute. A ship is never for those who have to work her, or fight her, a luxurious dwelling-place, but in the early eighteenth century the interval between what would be counted decent comfort on shore and the utmost attainable comfort at sea was indeed great. Ships were small, and crowded with men and guns. The between-decks were low, ill ventilated, and abounding in stenches. Officers of all ranks slept in hammocks, and captains who were anxious for the efficiency of their ships would not tolerate standing cabins. It may be asserted with confidence that the officers of His Majesty’s ships were worse lodged, about 1740, than the crew of a sailing merchant-vessel of to-day. A man had to be made of tough stuff to stand it all. When Rodney was captain of the Eagle he took his brother to sea with him. One cruise was enough for James Rodney, and he went ashore for good on his return to port. Even those who were made of sterner fibre could not endure the hardships of the life. They broke down with gout, rheumatism, and diseases of the nature of scurvy, brought on by exposure, bad air, and bad food. Habitual indulgence in fiery liquors had something to do with the prevalence of gout and stone among naval men, but the fiery liquors were not only the fashion of the time, they were also the natural refuge of men whose nerves were affected by stinks and whose palates were exasperated by salt food. In the matter of liquor, Rodney probably went with the multitude around him to do evil, taking his share of whatever bumbo or hypsy (dreadful compounds of rum or brandy and wine, all young and all fiery, disguised in spices) was going on board or ashore. At least he never shrank from more fashionable dissipations in later times, and probably did not care to be singular in earlier days. When he was famous there were old men who boasted that they had shared in the carouses of his youth. Then, too, he had tell-tale sufferings in later years from the gout, the prevailing disease of that hard-drinking generation.
All this, however, was the life of his time and his service which he shared with other men. To him, who was born to be a great commander, the spectacle afforded by the fleet during his three years’ service must indeed have been especially instructive. It must have taught him what a squadron ought not to be, and how it ought not to be managed. The navy of that time was the navy of Hawser Trunnion, Esquire. Now one may have a real affection for Hawser Trunnion personally, and yet be compelled to acknowledge that the generation of officers of which he is the type fought less well than English naval men have done before or since. It was not that they were not brave, for they often were; nor yet that they were not seamen, for that also they were; but there was far too often something which they preferred to the discharge of their duty. It was often party politics, for they were very Whig and very Tory. Too many of them were members of Parliament, and owed their commands to their seats. In that case they carried on the party battle with one another in presence of the enemy. Perhaps they did not actually betray one another, but they believed one another to be capable of treason. The Tory officer saw the Whig in a mess with a certain complacency, and the Whig was pleased when baffling winds gave him an excuse for not coming to the help of the Tory. As an inevitable consequence their fighting was apt to be slack, and their recriminations furious. Personal quarrels were carried to a pitch of rancour not to be rivalled out of a cloister. Mathews was brutally insolent to Lestock, and Lestock hated Mathews with the concentrated fury of Mr. Browning’s Spanish Monk. When one turns over the pamphlets they wrote against one another, the picture of Commodore Trunnion as he listened to the report that Admiral Bower was to be made a British peer, rises at once. The mug, we remember, fell from his hand, and shivered into a thousand fragments; his eye glistened like that of a rattlesnake. Even so may Lestock have behaved when he heard that his enemy Mathews was coming to command him. His pamphlets were certainly written with the venom of a rattlesnake. Many years later, when Rodney was himself a peer, and at the head of the profession, he deliberately recorded on the margin of a copy of Clerk’s Tactics his belief that Lestock had betrayed his superior officer. The judgment was too harsh, but it shows what an impression the factions in the fleet had made on Rodney’s mind. When he was afterwards in command he showed a distinct readiness to believe that some of his subordinates were capable of the same conduct, and he resented their conduct fiercely. It is premature to discuss his justice on this occasion, but, no doubt, the memory of what he had seen in the Mediterranean was very present with him in those days, exasperating his suspicions and animating him to stamp the bad spirit out.
CHAPTER II
SERVICE AS CAPTAIN TILL 1752
On his arrival in England Rodney’s post-rank was confirmed, and he was appointed to the Sheerness. She was a much smaller ship than the Plymouth, but a post-ship none the less—that is, a vessel large enough to be commanded by a post-captain and not by a commander. Over this intermediate rank, which every officer must now pass through on his way from lieutenant to captain, Rodney appears to have skipped in the free and easy way the time allowed to those who had luck or interest. Interest Rodney certainly did not want. If his own words, written many years later, are to be understood in their literal sense, it was the best a man could then have—the interest of the Pelhams. In 1756 Rodney declared in a letter to the famous electioneering Duke of Newcastle, the “noodle” who would allow nobody to govern England without him, that he owed all his preferment in the navy to His Grace. This statement was, however, made in a private note, at a time when the writer was in lively expectation of future electoral favours, and need not be taken as rigidly accurate. It is at all events certain that Rodney did not want for friends at Court, for he was in command of sea-going ships, mostly on home stations, for the next ten years without a break. A man may use interest in two ways. He can either get comfortable billets on shore, or can avail himself of it to be put in the way of seeing service, and must be judged by the use he makes of a good thing.
On the whole the use Rodney made of it was honourable. It is true that he did not go to the East Indies, or to the Mediterranean, then the scene of mere dull cruising, and not the model station as it became in the Napoleonic wars. Neither did he go to the West Indies, which he was to make the “station for honour” in future years. He stayed steadily at home in the Channel doing such service as the nature of the war he was engaged in permitted. This, it must be acknowledged, was for the most part not brilliant. The war of Jenkins’ Ear, or of the Austrian Succession, was the dullest we ever fought. At sea it was first and foremost a privateer war. The navy was poorer in spirit than it ever had or has been. Failures and courts-martial were numerous, and the decisions of some of these last were so scandalous that Parliament was driven into passing the drastic act which left the officers who tried Byng no alternative but to condemn him to death for want of spirit. Part of our sins was the fault of our enemies. They were never strong or spirited enough to make us stretch ourselves. The Spaniard would never fight unless his back was against a wall, and then to be sure, as we found at Carthagena, he could make a desperate stand. Now and then a Spanish liner would bear a tremendous amount of hammering before she struck—witness the Glorioso, which kept a whole swarm of our warships and privateers at work for days before they got her. But their fleets were contemptible. Their courage and efficiency were of the passive kind. The French fleet was at its lowest in strength if not in courage. Cardinal Fleury had persistently neglected it, and France herself had hardly begun to recover from the terrible exhaustion caused by the wars of Louis the Fourteenth. Neither Spaniards nor Frenchmen could put our fleets on their mettle, and so the natural tendency of a dull time was unchecked.