The Cadiz Fleet of 1625
The accession of Charles led to a more active prosecution of the war with Spain, signalised by the Cadiz expedition of 1625, and the administrative incidents of this voyage enable us to measure the decadence of seamanship and the utter collapse of the official executive during the twenty years of peace. Efforts had been made to get the fleet away during the summer, but owing to want of money, stores, and men, it did not sail till 8th October, too late in the season to do effective service. Disease raged among the soldiers and sailors assembled at Plymouth, and not a boat went ashore but some of its men deserted. Of 2000 recruits sent first to Holland and then to Plymouth only 1500 arrived at the sea-port, of whom 500 were ill;[951] and the few professional sea captains there, who saw the unpromising material in men and supplies being collected, continually warned the Council and Buckingham of the results to be expected from the quality of the men and provisions and the want of clothing.[952] When the expedition finally sailed, its equipment appears to have been rather that of a defeated and disheartened fleet returning home after long service than of a long planned and prepared enterprise. The ships were leaky and their gear defective; the St George was fitted with sails which were used by the Triumph in 1588, while her shrouds were ‘the old Garland’s and all starke rattan.’ The Lion was in such bad condition that she had to be left behind. The cordage supplied was rotten but ‘fairly tard ovar.’ An officer writes: ‘There was great wrong done ... by pretending the ships were fit to go to sea.’[953] Even before they left port the casks were so faulty that beer came up in the ships’ pumps, so that by November they were reduced to beverage of cider ‘that stinks worse than carrion, and have no other drink.’ A few days after leaving Plymouth it was already thought necessary to put five men on four men’s allowance, and by December they were on half rations which ‘stinks so as no dog of Paris Garden would eat it.’ Men ill fed and ill clothed, sent across the Bay in early winter, easily broke down, and when they arrived off Cadiz, after a twenty-one days’ voyage, and before even seeing the enemy, one-fourth of the men on six of the men-of-war were on the sick list.[954] The Convertine had only fifteen men in a watch. In November ‘the sickness is so great that there are not seamen enough to keep the watches,’[955] and a month later there were not ten men fit for duty on board the St George.[956]
Sir Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon, the commander-in-chief, was a soldier of only average capacity accustomed to the methodical Dutch military discipline, and he was aghast at the ways of his officers, who, besides being ignorant of their work, shared with their men what plunder there was. Many of the captains were landsmen who depended on their subordinates to handle their vessels, and these men, unaccustomed to large ships and to sailing in comparatively close order, were constantly in difficulties. If the subordinates were good seamen, they were mostly contemptuous of their commanders. Sir Thos. Love, captain of the Anne Royal, issued orders to the whole fleet without Cecil’s knowledge; the master of the Reformation flatly refused to obey his captain’s commands. It does not seem to have occurred to Cecil or his advisers that any sailing orders were necessary during the voyage out, and the result of independent management was that collisions were frequently occurring; beakheads, galleries, and bowsprits were carried away, and ‘the confusion was such that some had their starboard when other had their larboard tacks on board.’[957] Sometimes the ships chased each other, under the impression that they were enemies, although the differences between the English and Spanish schools of shipbuilding were almost as great as those to be observed in a cruiser of the middle of this century and a merchantman of the same time. Two transports with 300 soldiers on board, perhaps thinking that they had better prospects of success by themselves than with Cecil, deserted and turned pirates.[958]
The flagship was the Anne Royal, Nottingham’s Ark Royal of 1588, of which he lovingly said that she was ‘the odd ship of the world for all conditions.’ She was handy enough for the Elizabethan seamen who built her and knew how to work a ship at sea, but she did not win favour in the eyes of Cecil and his officers, who complained that they could not make her lie to and that she rolled too much for their dainty stomachs. Nottingham’s opinion of them might have been even more scathing than theirs of the Anne Royal. More justly Cecil expressed his astonishment at the amount of theft which prevailed. He could not prevent his captains pillaging the cargoes of prizes, ‘a thing of such custom at sea that I cannot see how it will be remedied.’ The men he considers the worst ever seen; ‘they are so out of order and command and so stupefied that punish them or beat them they will scarce stir.’[959] Sick and starving it was not their fault if they were dull and inefficient, but neither Cecil nor those next him in rank were the men to rouse English sailors to those efforts which, when well led, they can be moved to make under circumstances of surpassing distress.
Perhaps this Cadiz expedition indicates the low water mark of English seamanship. There have been many previous and subsequent occasions when fleets were sent to sea equally ill found and ill provided, but never, before or since, have we such accounts of utter incapacity in the mere everyday work of a sailor’s duties. The shameful picture of that confused mass of ships crowded together helplessly, without order or plan, colliding with each other, chasing or deserting at their own will, the officers losing spars and sails from ignorance of the elementary principles of their art, is the indictment against the government of James I which had allowed the seamanship of Elizabeth to die out in this generation. It was the first time that the new system of the commissionership had been tried by conditions of active service, and on the side of stores and provisions, for which they were mainly responsible, the breakdown was as complete as on the side of navigation. Assuming their honesty, which was probable, but of which some of their contemporaries hint doubts, they were mostly merchants or court officials, unacquainted with naval matters, and evidently unable to adapt the routine peace control to which they were accustomed to the wider requirements of war time. As even the normal method of inspection was almost nominal, depending mainly on subordinate officials of little character, capacity, or responsibility, such stores as were now bought, under the pressure of immediate necessity, usually proved expensive and bad. Among the higher officials the impression given by the State Papers, now and afterwards, is that their chief desire was to get money sent to them on some pretext—purchase of clothes or arms, payment of wages, etc.—and that they could then trust to their own ingenuity to account for its expenditure, possibly for the benefit of the service, certainly for their own. Not even a nominal system of inspection existed in the victualling department. The two contractors, Apsley and Darrell, appear, when the Commissioners had once given their orders, to have sent what provisions they pleased on board the ships, quite independently of any supervision or of any way of calling them to account, for supplies infinitely more deadly to our men than the steel and lead of the enemy.[960]
The Disorganisation:—The Return of the Fleet.
Naval historians have usually considered the condition of the seaman, a mere pawn in the game, as of little account compared with graphic descriptions of sea fights and the tactics of opposing fleets. He had, however, not only existence but memories, and an examination of his treatment under the government of Charles I, will systematise scattered references, and may go far to explain why the Royal Navy ‘went solid’ for the Parliament in 1642. We have seen that there was little demand for his services during the reign of James I, though the few men employed had reason to be mutinous and discontented under their scanty fare and uncertain wages. With Charles on the throne the seagoing population was called away from the fisheries and trading voyages to man the royal fleets, although the attitude of Parliament caused smaller resources to be available to support their cost. The sailor, being a despised and inarticulate quantity, soon felt the result. When the ships of the Cadiz fleet straggled ignominiously home in midwinter, some to Kinsale, some to Milford, Falmouth, Plymouth, and other western ports, a cry for help went up from the captains and officials concerned. The Anne Royal with 130 dead and 160 sick, had scarcely fifteen men in a watch; a vessel at Milford had not sufficient to man her long boat, and the dried fish remaining was ‘so corrupt and bad that the very savour thereof is contagious.’[961] Pennington, who was usually more intelligible than grammatical, wrote from Plymouth that ‘the greatest part of the seamen being sick or dead, so that few of them have sufficient sound men to bring their ships about,’[962] and ‘a miserable infection among them, and they die very fast.’ St Leger told Conway that it would not be possible to move the men till they had recovered some strength, ‘they stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten, and ready to fall off,’ and that many of the officers were in nearly as bad case as their men.[963] But the government had expended all its available means in the preparation, such as it was, of the expedition, and could neither pay the men off nor provide them with clothes, victuals, or medical aid. Moreover, the attention of Buckingham was fixed rather on the equipment of another fleet than on the plight of the men, a condition which he doubtless regarded as one they should accept naturally, and a detail unworthy of la haute politique in which he and his master intrepidly considered themselves such proficients. Pennington had orders to collect forty sail at Plymouth, but as yet had only four ships.[964] There were no stores, no surgeons, and no drugs, he reported; and everything on board the returned vessels would have to be replaced, even the hammocks being ‘infected and loathsome;’ the mayor of the town would not permit the sick men to be put ashore, so that contagion spread among the few healthy remaining. He hints that there is little hope of getting fresh men to go when they had their probable fate before their eyes. All the remedy the Council seemed to find was to order the Commissioners to prepare estimates for fleets of various strengths, while the Anne Royal and four other ships were lying in the Downs with ‘their companies almost grown desperate,’ the men dying daily and the survivors mutinous. In March, Pennington, who was an honest, straightforward man and a good seaman, and who wrote to Buckingham in an independent and even reproving way, which reflects some credit on both of them in that servile age, says that he has twenty-nine ships, but neither victuals, clothes, nor men; that those sent down run away as fast as they are pressed. ‘I wish you were a spectator a little, to hear their cries and exclamations; here die eight or ten daily,’ and, if something is not done ‘you will break my heart.’[965] Under James the men considered that the galleys were better than the royal service; thus early in the reign of his son they had come to the conclusion that hanging was preferable.[966]
But Buckingham was quite superior to all such particulars. Complaints had been made to him that merchantmen were chased into the Downs by Dunkirkers, while the men-of-war lying there did not even weigh anchor. He sharply censured Palmer, who was in command, but Palmer’s reply was a variation of the old legal defence; they had not been chased, and if they had been he was without victuals or necessaries enabling him to move.[967] As the captain of one of his ships wrote to Nicholas that he had no sails, and that he could not obtain their delivery without cash payment, the second portion of his statement was probably true. The greatest stress, however, fell upon Pennington at Plymouth. It need hardly be said that there was not yet a dockyard there; but there was not even a government storehouse, the lack of which mattered less as there were no stores, such provisions as were procured being urgently needed for the daily requirements of the crews. In April Pennington heard that there was £2000 coming down, but he was already indebted £2500 for which he had pledged his own credit, and his estate ran risk of foreclosure unless the mortgage was cleared.[968] He adds: ‘I pray you to consider what these poor souls have endured for the space of these thirteen or fourteen months by sickness, badness of victuals, and nakedness.’
Official routine worked, in some respects, smoothly enough. If some of the officers and men—like those of the St Peter, a prize in the royal service—petitioned Buckingham direct, begging for their discharge, saying that they could get neither pay nor food, and would have perished from want if they had not been supplied by their friends, they were referred to the Commissioners, who suavely remarked: ‘there are many other ships in the same predicament.’[969] If others applied direct to the Commissioners, they were told to go to those who hired them, as the Navy Board would ‘neither meddle nor make’ with them, ‘which answer of theirs I find strange,’ says Pennington.[970] One day the crew of the Swiftsure mutinied and went ashore, intending to desert in a body. He went after them and persuaded them to return, but ‘their cases are so lamentable that they are not much to be blamed for when men have endured misery at sea and cannot be relieved at home in their own country, what a misery of miseries is it!‘[971] Not all the officers of rank were as kindly as Pennington; Sir John Watts could only see in the clamour of ragged and starving men ‘insolent misdemeanours.’ At Harwich the mutineers vowed that they would no longer shiver on board, but would lie in the best beds in the town, all the elysium the poor fellows aspired to. It almost seemed as though the naval service was disintegrating and that such organisation as it had attained, was to be broken up, since the shipwrights and labourers at the dockyards were also unpaid, although they did not find it so difficult to obtain credit. Pennington was now almost despairing, and said that having kept the men together by promises as long as he could, only immediate payment would prevent them deserting en masse, and ‘it would grieve any man’s heart to hear their lamentations, to see their wants and nakedness, and not to be able to help them.’[972] There is a curious resemblance between these words and those used nearly forty years before by Nottingham in describing the condition of the men who had saved England from the Armada, and who were likewise left to starve and die, their work being done. But any comparison is, within certain limits, in favour of Charles and Buckingham. Elizabeth had money, but all through her life held that men were cheaper than gold. In 1626 the sailors were the first victims of the quarrel between King and Parliament, a struggle in which, and in its legacy of foreign wars, they bore a heavy share of the burden, and from which even to-day they have reaped less benefit than any other class of the community.
The original estimate for the Cadiz fleet was under £300,000, but in 1631 it was calculated that altogether, for the land and sea forces, it had amounted to half a million,[973] and as the government found it impossible to procure this or any serviceable sum they resorted to the expedient of nominally raising wages all round.[974] The seaman’s monthly pay, ten shillings during the reign of James, had been temporarily raised to fourteen for the attack on Cadiz; in future it was to be permanently fifteen shillings, subject to a deduction of sixpence for the Chatham chest, fourpence for a preacher, and twopence for a surgeon, and as the scale remained in force till the civil war, and was eventually paid with comparative punctuality, the full list for all ranks, per month may be appended here:[975]