During 1640 and 1641 Charles was fully occupied with his Scotch and parliamentary difficulties, and naval business was again falling into disorder. In July 1641 Northumberland tells Pennington that he does not see how the insubordination the latter reports is to be remedied, as there is no money with which to pay wages.[1036] In October Sir William Russell, one of the Treasurers of the Navy, had been a long time out of town, and the other, Sir Henry Vane (the younger), ‘seeing there is no money in the office, never comes near us.’ Perhaps it was not altogether displeasing to the parliamentary leaders that, in view of the arbitrament towards which King and Parliament were tending, the seamen should be rendered discontented and rebellious. In January 1642, 2000 sailors offered their services and protection to Parliament, and when, in July, the King appointed Pennington, and Parliament Warwick, to the command of the fleet, the men in the Downs, apparently without any hesitation, followed Warwick, although the former must have had with them the influence of a trusted and favourite officer. In several instances the crews of ships on outlying stations forced their captains to submit, or put their royalist officers ashore and themselves took charge. It is difficult to speak with absolute certainty, but an examination of the data available leads to the conclusion that only one small vessel, the Providence, adhered to the royal cause.
We need not conclude that this unanimity implied any deep feeling about the general misgovernment of Charles or the important constitutional questions at issue. The sailor, contrary to the impression apparently prevailing among feminine novelists, is usually an extremely matter-of-fact individual, with the greater portion of his attention fixed on the subjects of his pay and food. All he could associate with the crown were memories of starvation and beggary, of putrid victuals fraught with disease, and wages delayed, in payment of which, when he at last received them, he found a large proportion stick to the hands of minor officials. The Parliament paid him liberally and punctually, and he, on his side, served it honestly and well. For him was not necessary—perhaps he was not capable of feeling—the curious psychical exaltation of the ‘New Model,’ but in a steady, unimaginative way, without much enthusiasm but without a sign of hesitation, he kept his faith and did more to destroy royalist hopes than historians, with few exceptions, have supposed. Under the administration of the Navy Committee there were no recurrences of the confusion and unruliness which had before existed, and until the Rainsborow mutiny of 1648, speedily repented, the seamen showed no symptom, for six years, of discontent or of regret for the part they had chosen.
Parliament and the Seamen.
Without feeling an indignation which would have been in advance of their age at the hardships and dishonesty of which the sailor had been the victim, the position of the parliamentary chiefs compelled them to treat him with a discreet consideration. He was fed decently; wages were raised to nineteen shillings a month, and were given in full from the date of his joining his ship, instead of from that of its sailing; and an attempt was made to raise a sufficient number of men without impressment, the officers responsible being only directed ‘to use their best persuasion.’[1037] Seamen, however, had been too long accustomed to compulsion to enter into the principles of voluntaryism, and an act allowing pressing and punishing contumacy with three months’ imprisonment, must have been received by them as something they could understand.[1038] The utter absence of difficulties or remonstrances during the years of the civil war shows how smoothly the naval administration worked, and Parliament appeared to place even more reliance on the sailors than on their officers, since on 18th Oct. 1644, Warwick issued a proclamation ordering that ‘none shall obey the commands of their superior officers ... if the same commands be tending towards disloyalty towards the Parliament.’ This was a dangerous power to place in the hands of the men, unless it was felt that their discipline and fidelity could be depended upon.
The late Mrs Everett Green speaks of ‘the inherent loyalty of the sailors to their King,’[1039] making this remark in connection with, and as explanatory of, the difficulty experienced by the Council of State in obtaining men in 1653. I must confess that, notwithstanding the weight justly attaching to her opinions, I am quite unable to see during these years any sign of this loyalty. Under the government of Charles they had been compelled to serve by force, and had lost no opportunity of venting their anger and discontent; when the occasion came they eagerly and unanimously fought against the sovereign to whom they were supposed to be inherently loyal, without one instance of desertion or dissatisfaction of sufficient mark to be noticed in the State Papers. When a mutiny did at last occur it was due to circumstances connected not with the rights of the King, but with the narrower personal jealousies of naval command; it happened when the fighting was done, and, in all probability, would not have happened at all under the stress of conflict. During the Commonwealth they continued to serve the state under conditions of great strain and trial, which might well have tried men of greater foresight and self-control than seamen, without, with perhaps one exception, more than slight and unimportant outbursts of insubordination of a character which, allowing for the looser discipline of that time, occur to-day in all large standing forces. Whatever, at any time, their momentary irritation against the Parliament, it never took the form of loyalty to Charles II. It may be suggested that a more likely explanation of the difficulties of 1653 lies in the fact that the estimates required 16,000 men against the 3000 or 4000 sufficient for the fleets of Charles I.[1040] At the most liberal computation the returns of 1628,[1041] do not give, allowing for omissions, more than 18,000 men available for the royal and merchant marine; at least double that number would have been necessary to supply easily the demands of the two services in 1653. In no case under the Commonwealth did the men show that despairing recklessness of consequences which characterised their outbreaks between 1625 and 1642. More significant still is the fact that the savage fighting of the first Dutch war, against the most formidable maritime antagonist we have ever faced, was performed in a fashion very different from the perfunctory and half-hearted service rendered to Charles I. And it is a further curious illustration of their hereditary loyalty that while they endured much hardship and privation rather than serve either under Rupert or Tromp against the Commonwealth, we are told by Pepys that they manned the Dutch ships by hundreds—perhaps thousands—during the wars of Charles II.
If, on the other hand, we are to really believe that ‘inherent loyalty’ was continuously latent in the English sailor, what words are fitting for the selfish and reckless indifference to the simplest human rights which tortured him into twenty years of consistent rebellion? On sea as on land Charles’s misdeeds followed him home. In his days of power he had been deaf to the appeals of men who perished that he might attempt to be great, and to the cries of their suffering wives and children. In 1642 the sailors were deaf to his commands. What might—in all human probability would—have been the result after Edgehill if, during the winter of 1642-3, he had been able to blockade the Thames?
Merchant Seamen.
Private shipowners have always paid higher wages than the crown, and for several centuries the latter offered no compensatory advantages. From various chance allusions the rates of merchant seamen’s wages during this period are found to vary between 22s and 30s a month. The stores provided for them could not have been worse than those of a man-of-war; but they had special difficulties, peculiar to the merchant service, to expect when in private employment. In 1628 among their grievances they complained that they were liable to make good any damage done to cargo, even after it had left the ship, until it was safely stored in the merchant’s warehouse.[1042] In 1634 they petitioned, in view of the dulness of trade, that exportation of merchandise in foreign bottoms should be prohibited,[1043] but a year later a more important matter occupied their attention. All engagements were made by verbal contract, and it often happened at the end of the voyage that the owner disputed the terms, when the sailor was left helpless, having no proof to bring forward.[1044] Moreover, if, as frequently occurred, he was pressed out of a homeward bound vessel, his position was still more hopeless, while if he died at sea there was small chance of his family obtaining anything. In 1638 it was intended to form a Trinity House fund, on the plan of the Chatham Chest, for the benefit of merchant seamen and officers; one shilling a month was to be deducted for this purpose, from the wages of officers, and fourpence from the pay of the men, except those belonging to coasters, who were to give sixpence.[1045] The matter progressed so far that there was a proclamation issued in accordance with these views,[1046] but the scheme did not come into operation till 1694. In that year it was enforced in connection with Greenwich Hospital at the rate of sixpence a man; in 1747 this was raised to one shilling and so continued until 1834. The whole story belongs to a later volume, but the merchant sailor never received the least benefit from the levy extorted from his scanty earnings, and at a moderate computation was robbed of at least £2,500,000 during that period. But he helped to endow many fat sinecures and to thus support the Constitution.
If from one case referred to a court of law we may infer others, the form and amount of punishment on a trader was left to the discretion of the captain. On a Virginia ship an insubordinate boy was hung up by his wrists with 2 cwt. tied to his feet, with what results we are not told. The boy’s complaint came before Sir H. Martin, judge of the Admiralty court, who refused any redress, because of the necessary ‘maintenance of sea discipline.’[1047] But notwithstanding hard fare, hard usage, and sometimes doubtful wages, the position of the sailor on a merchantman was infinitely preferable to his fate when compelled to exchange it for a man-of-war. We meet with no instances of mutiny on merchant ships until they are hired by the crown, and the traditional hardihood and courage of the English seaman were always evinced when he was free of the crushing burden of the royal service. Sir Kenelm Digby, when commanding a squadron in the Mediterranean in 1628, noticed that while foreigners invariably ran from him, the English, without knowing his nationality, always stopped and prepared to fight ‘were they never so little or contemptible vessels.’[1048]