Under a different Treasurer the other officers might have performed their duty sufficiently well. As it was they fell in with the prevailing spirit. Trevor remained Surveyor until 1611 when he was replaced by Sir Richard Bingley and in the same year Sir Guildford Slingsby succeeded Palmer. In the victualling branch Marmaduke Darell, now a knight, surrendered his former patent and received a fresh one, on 16th August 1603, directed to him and Sir Thomas Bludder. As the fee still remained at its original £50 a year the profit came out of the provisions and was unwillingly provided by the men. In 1612 this patent was in turn surrendered and replaced by one of 31st January appointing Sir Allen Apsley in conjunction with Darell. By this new patent all the storehouses and other buildings at Tower Hill, the dockyards, and elsewhere were henceforth attached to the department; hitherto they had been held by the crown and only lent at pleasure. Marmaduke Darell died in 1622, and a new patent of 8th January 1623 nominated his son Sampson Darell to act with Apsley. There was no change in the victualling rate until 1623, when it reached sevenpence halfpenny and eightpence, for harbour and sea rates respectively.
In 1617, shortly before they were superseded, the functions of the officers were thus defined. The Comptroller’s duties were to check the accounts of the Treasurer, and Surveyor of victualling, to inspect stores and storekeepers’ books. The Surveyor to inspect ship, wharves, houses, chain, and ships on return from sea, and draw out indents for ships’ stores. The Clerk to keep minutes of resolutions and attend the yearly general survey. The Treasurer’s duties were financial and involved a general superintendence.[852]
Mansell’s delinquencies can be best treated separately, but both he and Nottingham dealt liberally with officers employed at sea or ashore. Nottingham himself obtained in 1609 and 1611 two pensions from James I, during the supremacy of the Howard faction with the king, amounting together to £2700 a year; and it is characteristic of James that the larger of these pensions, of £1700 a year, was granted when the commission of 1608 was sitting and when its disclosures must have been well known. As though all ranks knew what was coming the festivities commenced with the death of Elizabeth. High festival was held on the ships and the pursers petitioned for an allowance of £200, being the cost of general entertainment given by the captains for a month to all who came on board.[853] When Mansell went to sea, he gave himself, as rear-admiral, thirty shillings a day, although Sir Fulke Grevill, when discharging the same office in 1599, received only sixteen and eightpence a day. Admirals were appointed for the north, south, east, and west coasts, for the narrow seas, and for Ireland, all at liberal rates of pay. In one year, when only seven ships were in commission, there were three admirals and four vice-admirals serving, ‘so that the navy was like an army of generals and colonels.’[854] In 1602, with twenty-six vessels at sea the pay of the superior officers was less than during any one of the four or five years before the storm burst on Mansell and Nottingham in 1618. Again, ‘we find ... that these admirals and vice-admirals with their twenty shillings and ten shillings per diem, together with the allowance of their retinue and other advantages, are ... so contented on land that they cannot brook the seas and get captains under them as substitutes in their absence.’[855]
Lavish travelling expenses were allowed, and even some of the inferior officers were generously permitted to benefit by the stream of wealth circulating among the higher officials. Worn out ships were put in commission both to use up stores and to provide appointments for the dependants of those in place; the only result being that they lay in harbour as a ‘safe sanctuary for loose persons.’ The cost of piloting the thirteen ships which took the Princess Elizabeth over to Flushing was £208, and thereon it is remarked that the whole piloting charges for 286 ships during the last five years of Elizabeth did not amount to more. The Comptroller of the Navy, when he went from London to Chatham, charged £9, 9s 11d for travelling expenses, and the Surveyor required £19, 16s for the same journey, ‘it being the duty of his place,’ the Commissioners indignantly annotate, while even a deputy took £8 or £10 when he went. Mansell himself was almost sublime; he afterwards claimed £10,000 for travelling expenses during his term of office.[856] New posts were freely created and equally freely paid. Besides the various admirals who did nothing, there were a captain-general and two vice-admirals of the narrow seas, a storekeeper at Woolwich at £54, ‘while the store not worth forty shillings,’ and a surveyor of tonnage whose duty it was to survey merchant ships of 100 tons and upwards claiming the bounty, and who was accused on all sides of embezzling half the sums paid by the crown to the merchants.
The Administration:—Sir Robert Mansell.
When Mansell resigned, he sent in to the Commissioners of 1618, only an uncertified abstract of his payments for the preceding five years. The Commissioners remarked that ‘they being noways vouched or subscribed by the officers we can give no satisfaction of the state of his accounts, being only his own assertions,’[857] and the criticism fairly generalises Mansell’s system of financial control even where not tainted with absolute fraud. Notwithstanding his defiance of the abortive order for inquiry issued in 1613, and his consequent temporary imprisonment, he was sufficiently in favour three years later to receive a present of £10,000 from the king on the occasion of his marriage.[858] Proved dishonesty or incapacity barred no one from the favour of James I, provided the culprit was sufficiently good-looking or had influential friends; and although the evidence laid before the Commission of 1608 and the Commissioners’ report thereon should have amply sufficed to send Mansell to the Tower, his ascendancy with Nottingham enabled him to continue in office for a further ten years. Shortly after his appointment he and Sir John Trevor, the Surveyor of the Navy took steps to provide all the requisite stores themselves, thus making large gains on the articles sold by them to the king, and in direct contempt of the rules made by Burleigh twenty years before. Not only was timber ordered three or four times over for the same purpose,[859] but on that item alone Mansell was accused of making a fraudulent profit of £5000 in some four years, and, in conjunction with Sir John Trevor, of obtaining upwards of £7000 in the same time by the differences between the prices paid for pitch, tar, masts, etc., and those charged to the crown.[860] He, Pett, and Trevor, were joint owners of a ship built of government materials and furnished with government stores, which was hired to the king as a transport to go to Spain when Nottingham went there as ambassador in 1605, and for which the State paid, but ‘the same ship was at that time employed in a merchant’s voyage and so entered in the custom-house books.’[861]
Hawkyns had introduced the practice of paying over money at once to merchants supplying the various requisites for the Navy on deduction of threepence in the pound, an allowance they were well pleased to make in view of the prompt payment, while he had to wait long for his accounts to be settled. Mansell still deducted the threepence but did not pay. He stopped sixpence a month from the seamen’s wages for the Chatham Chest, but ‘falls presently into raging passions and pangs when they call for it.’[862] But Mansell was by no means the only one of the superior officers who helped himself out of this fund. Charges of embezzlement, in its crudest form, were made against him in that he certified for more wages than were actually paid—£1000 in one year alone—and that he retained the proceeds of such government stores as were sold.[863] It must be remembered that these accusations were not anonymous attacks, such as were made against Hawkyns, but charges deliberately formulated by a court of inquiry which he never dared to face. It may be truer to say that he was indifferent; it is possible that a portion of his ill-earned fortune went in purchasing immunity. And it is an argument in favour of this view that his dismissal from office did not destroy his influence at court. He was chosen to command the expensive and resultless Algiers expedition of 1620-21, and his subsequent disgrace was due to causes independent of his failure as a seaman or his dishonesty as an administrator.
The Administration:—Abuses and Remedies.
Norreys, writing to Sir John Coke about the Navy in 1603, says ‘To say truth the whole body is so corrupted as there is no sound part almost from the head to the foot; the great ones feed on the less and enforce them to steal both for themselves and their commanders.’[864] Abuses unknown during the lifetime of Hawkyns had sprung into existence shortly after his death, although they might have been then easily checked had Grevill been succeeded by one determined to destroy them. Delay in paying off ships, to the discontent of the men and extra expense of the government, combinations between captains, pursers, and victuallers to return false musters, and the practice of selling appointments to minor posts were all, according to reliable evidence begun about 1597 or 1598.[865] We know that theft was prevalent enough under Elizabeth, but it occurred in the shape of peddling offences, committed by the delinquents at their peril, that the authorities did their best to crush, instead of an organised system in which the latter took the lion’s share. Under James ‘the chief Officers bear themselves insolently, depending on powerful friends at court;’ and ‘the shipwrights and others are ordered, commanded, and countermanded in their work by chief Officers who know nothing about it, so that the meanest merchantman is better rigged and canvassed than the royal ships.’ The insolence and ignorance here described speak of conditions very different from those that had obtained under the iron hand of Elizabeth. In 1608 the scandal caused by these and other circumstances was so great as to compel inquiry, whether the determining cause was the contrivance of Sir Robert Cotton or of others. A commission was issued to the Earls of Nottingham and Northampton, Lord Zouch, Sir Ed. Wotton, Sir Julius Cæsar, Cotton, and others, of whom only Nottingham was an experienced seaman, and he never attended their meetings.[866] The sittings of the commission extended from May 1608 until June 1609; they commenced with an ‘elegant’ speech from the Earl of Northampton, a voluminous report was compiled, and the only punishment the culprits experienced was that of suffering ‘an oration’ from James, in which he trusted that the guilty persons would behave better in future, and with that patient and saintly hope the proceedings ended. How some of his hearers must have longed for one hour of the dead Queen.