In April, 1628, Denbigh sailed to relieve Rochelle, and returned without having effected his purpose. Preparations then went on apace for the great fleet Buckingham proposed to command himself in August. The difficulty in obtaining provisions, and their quality, may be inferred from a petition of Sir Allen Apsley’s addressed directly to the king. He says that he has sold and mortgaged all his property, and that he and his friends had pledged their credit to the extent of £100,000.[1007] These were unpromising conditions under which to engage to supply a fleet which was intended to be as large as that of 1625, and as the crown could not suddenly replace the mechanism organised by the Victualler and his deputies, it was practically dependent on his efforts. It was probably due to the poverty of Sir Allen Apsley that in this fleet water was, for the first time, taken from a home port as what may be called a primary store.[1008] Hitherto, although water had been taken for cooking purposes, beer, as has been shown, had always been the recognised drink on ship board. In June the ships were being collected at Portsmouth, but with the usual troubles. There were two mutinies. ‘God be thanked, they are quieted,’ writes Coke, but the men ‘have no shift of clothes. Some have no shirts, and others but one for the whole year.’ There were few surgeons, and those few ‘haunt the taverns every day.’[1009] In one party of 150 pressed men sent down in July there were to be found saddlers, ploughmen, and other mechanics; some were old and weak and the majority useless. Pettifogging tricks were employed to trap the men. In one instance Buckingham ordered that certain vessels were not to be paid off till the Swiftsure and other ships were ready, and that then Peter White was to be present to at once press the crews for further service.[1010] Fire ships were required, but Coke found that they could not be had without £350 in cash, as no one would trust the Crown.[1011]
Buckingham himself did not intend to share the hardships of the beings of coarser clay under his command. A transport was fitted to serve as a kitchen and store ship for him, and the bill for his supplies came to £1056, 4s. It included such items as cards and dice, £2; wine, etc., £164; eight bullocks and a cow, £59; eighty sheep, £60; fifteen goats, £10; ten young porklings, £5; two sows with pig, £3; 980 head of poultry, £63, 1s.; 2000 eggs, £2, 10s; and pickled oysters, lemons, damask tapestry, and turkey carpets.[1012] Then came Felton’s knife, and we may hope that some of the sailors made an unwonted feast on the more perishable articles of this liberal collection. In any case, Buckingham’s murder was an unmixed good for them, although had he spared to the men some of that energy and care he gave, at least with good intention, to the improvement of the matériel of the navy, the verdict might have been different. But in his neglect of their rights or welfare he was not below the standard of his age, in which the feudal feeling remained without its sense of reciprocal obligation, and in which only a very few were impelled by conscience to more than the defence of their own rights.
Its Results.
One result of the shuffling of the political pack which followed Buckingham’s death was the appointment of Weston as Lord Treasurer. Weston, Mr Gardiner tells us, was neither honest, nor amiable, nor popular, but he was at any rate determined to re-introduce some order into the finances, and the sailors were among the first to reap the benefit. When the Rochelle fleet, which had sailed under Lindsey, returned, the men were as surprised as they were delighted to find that they were to be paid. ‘The seamen are much joyed with the Lord Treasurer’s care to pay them so suddenly.’[1013] All the same the civic authorities of Plymouth desired that the ships should be paid off somewhere else. They wrote to the Council that when the Cadiz expedition came back, 1600 of the townspeople died of diseases contracted from the soldiers and sailors, that many also perished after the return of the Rhé fleet, and that they heard that this Rochelle one was also very sickly, and if so, ‘it will utterly disable this place.’[1014] Either there was a relaxation of Weston’s alacrity in paying, or mutinous habits had become too natural to be suddenly discarded, as in November the crews of three of the largest of the men-of-war were robbing openly, for want of victuals, they said. Nevertheless we do not hear of many difficulties in connexion with the Rochelle fleet, and the work of payment may be assumed to have progressed with unexpected smoothness.
After Buckingham.
With the cessation of ambitious enterprises the demand for the services of the maritime population became less, although the smaller number of men employed were treated no better than when the government had the excuse, such as it was, of large expenditure. In 1629, Mervyn, commanding in the narrow seas, wrote to the Lords of Admiralty: ‘Foul winter weather, naked bodies, and empty bellies make the men voice the King’s service worse than a galley slavery.’[1015] It should be remarked that although hammocks were provided for over-sea service in the proportion of one for every two men, they were not yet furnished to ships stationed in home waters, a want which must have affected the health and contentment of the seamen even when they were properly fed. Again, Mervyn protests:—
‘I have written the state of six ships here in the Downs, two of which, the Dreadnought and 3rd whelp, have neither meat nor drink. The 10th whelp hath drunk water these three days. The shore affords soldiers relief or hope, the sea neither. Now with what confidence can punishment be inflicted on men who mutiny in these wants?... These neglects be the cause that mariners fly to the service of foreign nations to avoid his majesty’s.... His majesty will lose the honour of his seas, the love and loyalty of his sailors, and his royal navy will droop.’[1016]
They were prophetic words, and as another illustration of the methods which were to secure the sailors’ love and loyalty we find in October, among the notes of business to be considered by the Lords of the Admiralty, ‘poor men’s petitions presented above six months, and never read.’ Mutiny had become merely a form of protest, and captains looked forward to it as only a sign of dissatisfaction. One of them writes to Nicholas that his crew are in ‘an uproar’ about their offensive beer, and that if he finds no fresh supply at Plymouth he is sure of a mutiny;[1017] another commander was forced to pawn his spare sails and anchors to buy food for his men.[1018] Apsley died in 1630, leaving his affairs deeply involved, the crown still owing him large sums. His coadjutor, and then sole successor, Sir Sampson Darell, did not fare better at the hands of the government, although his requirements were so much less. In June 1632 he informed Nicholas that he would be unable to continue victualling unless he was paid, having raised all the money he could on his own estate.[1019] If he received anything on account it was evidently not enough to insure permanent improvement, since a year later we hear that the cruisers are ‘tied by the teeth’ in the Downs for want of provisions.[1020] During these years the debts incurred from the early expeditions of the reign were being slowly discharged, and the scantiness of the available resources for fresh efforts is shown by the way Pennington complains that six or seven weeks of preparation were needed to collect three months’ victuals for four ships.[1021]
From the absence of references in the State Papers to the non-payment of wages it would seem as though they were now paid with comparative regularity, but the expressions of disgust at the quality of the provisions are as continuous and vigorous as before. Besides methods of cheating in the quantities served out, for which the victuallers and pursers were answerable, ‘the brewers’—of course with the connivance of the victuallers—‘have gotten the art to sophisticate beer with broom instead of hops, and ashes instead of malt, and (to make it look the more lively) to pickle it with salt water, so that while it is new it shall seem to be worthy of praise, but in one month wax worse than stinking water.’[1022] The same writer says that the English were the unhealthiest of all ships, in consequence of the practical application of the proverb that ‘nothing will poison a sailor.’ Then he laments that English mariners, formerly renowned for patience and endurance, were now physically weak, impatient, and mutinous—and blames the sailor for the change.
The Ship-money Fleets.