The Disorganisation:—Its Continuance.
Despite all these drawbacks Buckingham had contrived to get together the Rhé fleet of 1627, by various means, although the pecuniary receipts were not nearly adequate to the requirements. Some 3800 seamen were employed, and when they came home were worse off than ever, and the monotonous sequence of complaints was continued with greater intensity. The crew of the Assurance deserted in a body; the sailors at Plymouth were stealing the soldiers’ arms and selling them to obtain bread,[997] and wages were running on at the rate of £5000 a month, because there was no money wherewith to pay off the men.[998] By December 500 sailors of the returned fleet had died at Plymouth, and both there and at Portsmouth the townspeople refused to have the sick men billeted ashore, for at Plymouth they professed to have never shaken off the infectious fever spread by the men of the Cadiz fleet. If we had any statistics at all of the death and disease on board the fleets of 1625-8, the figures would probably be ghastly in the terrible mental and physical suffering they would represent. In this century the ‘wailing-place’ on the quays of Amsterdam, where the friends and relatives of Dutch sailors bid them farewell, was well known, but in another sense, and too often for a longer farewell, every royal ship was a wailing-place for English wives and mothers. Nicholas, as Buckingham’s secretary, sometimes had franker communications than were sent to his master. Mervyn wrote to him that the king would shortly have more ships than men, there being commonly twenty or thirty fresh cases of sickness every day, and
‘the more than miserable condition of the men, who have neither shoes, stockings, nor rags to cover their nakedness ... all the ships are so infectious that I fear if we hold the sea one month we shall not bring men enough home to moor the ships. You may think I make it worse, but I vow to God that I cannot deliver it in words.... The poor men bear all as patiently as they can.... I much wonder that so little care be taken to preserve men that are so hardly bred. I have used my best cunning to make the Vanguard wholesome. I have caused her to be washed all over, fore and aft, every second day; to be perfumed with tar burnt and frankincense; to be aired ’twixt decks with pans of charcoal; to be twice a week washed with vinegar.... Yet if to-day we get together 200 men within four days afterwards we have not one hundred.’[999]
Watts, at Portsmouth, who, in the intervals of solicitation of money for himself and preferment for his son, wrote abusively of men who asked at least food and clothing in midwinter, was a man after Charles’s own heart, for he also had arranged with the governor of the town to use ‘shot,’ if necessary, when the seamen came showing their tattered clothes and making ‘scandalous speeches.’[1000] Mervyn, in the letter to Nicholas quoted above, admits that he has overdrawn his pay, but asks for another advance, and doubtless officers who had friends at court, or who could afford to bribe, had little difficulty in obtaining their salaries. Nicholas, for instance, who subsequently developed into a knight and secretary of state, had an itching palm on occasion. On the other hand, even in later years, when the pressure was not so great, if the paymaster or pursers advanced any portion of the wages already due to the mere sailor, a discount of 20 per cent. was deducted for the favour. The merchant was also competing with the royal service, owners paying 30s a month; therefore the need for men caused boys and weakly adults to be pressed, and during the winter the mortality among them was great.[1001] In January 1628 Mervyn reported from Plymouth that there were no hammocks, and
‘the men lodge on the bare decks ... their condition miserable beyond relation; many are so naked and exposed to the weather in doing their duties that their toes and feet miserably rot and fall away piecemeal, being mortified with extreme cold.’[1002]
A few days later he said that things were worse than ever, that the vessels were full of sick men, they being refused ashore.[1003] Notwithstanding the refusal to have them ashore their diseases spread so rapidly on land that both Plymouth and Portsmouth were ‘like to perish.’
A striking feature in this wretched story is the want of sympathy shown by nearly all the officials, high or low. These extracts are taken principally from the letters of those officers who felt for their men and endeavoured to obtain some alleviation of their distress, but many of the despatches contain only dry formal details or, as in the instances of Watts and Sir James Bagg—Eliot’s defamer and, from his absorptive capacity in relation to government money, known as the Bottomless Bagg—are filled with cowardly gibes and threats directed at men who could not obtain even their daily bread from the crown. It has long been held a point of honour with officers to share the dangers and hardships of those under their command, but in those years the superiors to whom the men looked for guidance and support left them to suffer alone, ‘the infection so strong that few of the captains or officers durst lie on board.’[1004] The sailors in the river were somewhat better off. Perhaps their proximity to the court, and potentialities of active protest, stirred the most sensitive portion of Charles’s conscience, and arrangements were made to billet them on the riverside parishes, at the rate of 3s 6d a man per week, till money could be provided to pay them. This was a plan which relieved the crown at the expense of the householder; nor does it appear to have been very successful, since a proclamation was issued on 17th February to repress the disorderliness of such billeted mariners and warning them not to presume to address the Commissioners. In March the pressed men at Plymouth armed themselves, seized the Guildhall, and there prepared to stand a siege.[1005] The issue is not stated, but although mutinies were continually happening they usually had little result, for if the men got away from the ship or town the endeavour to reach their homes would have been almost hopeless. They were only frantic outbursts of desperation by isolated bodies of a class which has always lacked the gift of facile expression, and has never learnt to combine. An official describes plainly the causes of these mutinies, and his paper is worth quoting in full:[1006]
‘1st. They say they are used like dogs, forced to keep aboard without being suffered to come ashore to refresh themselves. 2nd. That they have not means to put clothes on their backs to defend themselves from cold or to keep them in health, much less to relieve their poor wives and children. 3rd. That when they happen to fall sick they have not any allowance of fresh victuals to comfort them, or medicines to help recover them. 4th. That some of their sick fellows being put ashore in houses erected for them are suffered to perish for want of being looked unto, their toes and feet rotting from their bodies, and so smelling that none are able to come into the room where they are. 5th. That some provisions put aboard them is neither fit nor wholesome for men to live on. 6th. That therefore they had as lief be hanged as dealt with as they are.’
Gorges suggests that some of these complaints are frivolous and some untrue, and recommends the remedy, dear to the official soul, of a commission. The commission of 1626 had hardly ceased sitting, and how far the complaints were frivolous and untrue, can be judged by the evidence brought forward here.
Murder of Buckingham.