I
ENGLISH AND DUTCH ORDERS ON THE EVE OF THE WAR, 1648-53
INTRODUCTORY
From the foregoing examples it will be seen that at the advent of the Commonwealth, which was to set on foot so sweeping a revolution in the naval art, all attempts to formulate a tactical system had been abandoned. This is confirmed by the following extract from the orders issued by the Long Parliament in 1648. It was the time when the revolt of a part of the fleet and a rising in the South Eastern counties led the government to apprehend a naval coalition of certain foreign powers in favour of Charles. It is printed by Granville Penn in his Memorials of Sir William Penn as having been issued in 1647, but the original copy of the orders amongst the Penn Tracts (Sloane MSS. 1709, f. 55) is marked as having been delivered on May 2, 1648, to 'Captain William Penn, captain of the Assurance frigate and rear-admiral of the Irish Squadron.' They are clearly based on the later precedents of Charles I, but it must be noted that Penn is told 'to expect more particular instructions' in regard to the fighting article. We may assume therefore that the admiralty authorities already recognised the inadequacy of the established fighting instructions, and so soon as the pressure of that critical time permitted intended to amplify them.
Amongst those responsible for the orders however there is no name that can be credited with advanced views. They were signed by five members of the Navy Committee, and at their head is Colonel Edward Mountagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich, but then only twenty-two years old.[1] Whether anything further was done is uncertain. No supplementary orders have been found bearing date previous to the outbreak of the Dutch war. But there exists an undated set which it seems impossible not to attribute to this period. It exists in the Harleian MSS. (1247, ff. 43b), amongst a number of others which appear to have been used by the Duke of York as precedents in drawing up his famous instructions of 1665. To begin with it is clearly later than the orders of 1648, upon which it is an obvious advance. Then the use of the word 'general' for admiral, and of the word 'sign' for 'signal' fixes it to the Commonwealth or very early Restoration. Finally, internal evidence shows it is previous to the orders of 1653, for those orders will be seen to be an expansion of the undated set so far as they go, and further, while these undated orders have no mention of the line, those of 1653 enjoin it. They must therefore lie between 1648 and 1653, and it seems worth while to give them here conjecturally as being possibly the supplementary, or 'more particular instructions,' which the government contemplated; particularly as this hypothesis gains colour from the unusual form of the heading 'Instructions for the better ordering.' Though this form became fixed from this time forward, there is, so far as is known, no previous example of it except in the orders which Lord Wimbledon propounded to his council of war in 1625, and those were also supplementary articles.[2]
Be this as it may, the orders in question do not affect the position that up to the outbreak of the First Dutch War we have no orders enjoining the line ahead as a battle formation. Still we cannot entirely ignore the fact that, in spite of the lack of orders on the subject, traces of a line ahead are to be detected in the earliest action of the war. Gibson, for instance, in his Reminiscences has the following passage relating to Blake's brush with Tromp over the honour of the flag on May 9, 1652, before the outbreak of the war:[3] 'When the general had got half Channel over he could see the Dutch fleet with their starboard tacks aboard standing towards him, having the weather-gage. Upon which the general made a sign for the fleet to tack. After which, having their starboard tacks aboard (the general's ship, the Old James, being the southernmost and sternmost ship in the fleet), the rest of his fleet tacking, first placed themselves in a line ahead of the general, who after tacking hauled up his mainsail in the brails, fitted his ship to fight, slung his yards, and run out his lower tier of guns and clapt his fore topsail upon the mast.' If Gibson could be implicitly trusted this passage would be conclusive on the existence of the line formation earlier than any of the known Fighting Instructions which enjoined it; but unfortunately, as Dr. Gardiner pointed out, Gibson did not write his account till 1702, when he was 67. He is however to some extent corroborated by Blake himself, who in his official despatch of May 20, relating the incident, says that on seeing Tromp bearing down on him 'we lay by and put ourselves into a fighting posture'—i.e. battle order—but what the 'posture' was he does not say. If however this posture was actually the one Gibson describes, we have the important fact that in the first recorded instance of the complete line, it was taken as a defensive formation to await an attack from windward.
The only other description we have of English tactics at this time occurs in a despatch of the Dutch commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, Van Galen, in which he describes how Captain Richard Badiley, then commanding a squadron on the station, engaged him with an inferior force and covered his convoy off Monte Christo in August 1652. When the fleets were in contact, he says, as though he were speaking of something that was quite unfamiliar to him, 'then every captain bore up from leeward close to us to get into range, and so all gave their broadsides first of the one side and then again of the other, and then bore away with their ships before the wind till they were ready again; and then as before with the guns of the whole broadside they fired into my flagship, one after the other, meaning to shoot my masts overboard.'[4] From this it would seem that Badiley attacked in succession in the time-honoured way, and that the old rudimentary form of the line ahead was still the ordinary practice. The evidence however is far from strong, but really little is needed. Experience teaches us that the line ahead formation would never have been adopted as a standing order unless there had been some previous practice in the service to justify it or unless the idea was borrowed from abroad. But, as we shall see, the oft-repeated assertion that it was imitated from the Dutch is contrary to all the evidence and quite untenable. The only experience the framers of the order of 1653 can have had of a line ahead formation must have been in our own service.
The clearest proof of this lies in the annexed orders which Tromp issued on June 20, 1652, immediately before the declaration of war, and after he had had his brush with Blake, in which, if Gibson is to be trusted, Tromp had seen Blake's line. From these orders it is clear that the Dutch conception of a naval action was still practically identical with that of Lindsey's instructions of 1635, that is, mutual support of squadrons or groups, with no trace of a regular battle formation. In the detailed 'organisation' of the fleet each of the three squadrons has its own three flag officers—that is to say, it was organised, like that of Lord Wimbledon in 1625, in three squadrons and nine sub-squadrons, and was therefore clearly designed for group tactics. It is on this point alone, if at all, that it can be said to show any advance on the tactics which had obtained throughout the century, or on those which Tromp himself had adopted against Oquendo in 1639.
Yet further proof is to be found in the orders issued by Witte Corneliszoon de With to his captains in October 1652, as commander-in-chief of the Dutch fleet. In these he very strictly enjoins, as a matter of real importance, 'that they shall all keep close up by the others and as near together as possible, to the end that thereby they may act with united force … and prevent any isolation or cutting off of ships occurring in time of fight;' adding 'that it behoved them to stand by and relieve one another loyally, and rescue such as might be hotly attacked.' This is clearly no more than an amplification of Tromp's order of the previous June. It introduces no new principle, and is obviously based on the time-honoured idea of group tactics and mutual support. It is true that De Jonghe, the learned historian of the Dutch navy, regards it as conclusive that the line was then in use by the Dutch, because, as he says, several Dutch captains, after the next action, were found guilty and condemned for not having observed their instructions. But really there is nothing in it from which a line can be inferred. It is all explained on the theory of groups. And in spite of De Jonghe's deep research and his anxiety to show that the line was practised by his countrymen as well as by the English in the first Dutch War, he is quite unable to produce any orders like the English instructions of 1653, in which a line formation is clearly laid down.
But whether or not we can accept De Jonghe's conclusions as to the time the line was introduced into the Dutch service, one thing is clear enough—that he never ventured to suggest that the English copied the idea from his own countrymen. It is evident that he found nothing either in the Dutch archives or elsewhere even to raise such an idea in his mind. But, on the other hand, his conspicuous impartiality leads him to give abundant testimony that throughout these wars thoughtful Dutch officers were continually praising the order and precision of the English tactics, and lamenting the blundering and confusion of their own. It may be added that Dr. Gardiner's recent researches in the same field equally failed to produce any document upon which we can credit the Dutch admirals with serious tactical reforms. Even De Ruyter's improvements in squadronal organisation consisted mainly in superseding a multiplicity of small squadrons by a system of two or three large squadrons, divided into sub-Squadrons, a system which was already in use with the English, and was presumably imitated by De Ruyter, if it was indeed he who introduced it and not Tromp, from the well-established Commonwealth practice.[5]