At the Admiralty, and in the dockyards, there was activity enough. There was one, the candid pages of whose secret diary have given us a faithful picture of the business, and who was no insignificant part of the administrative machine. Month by month Pepys was earning more of his own genial self-approbation by acquiring new consideration, and by his growing mastery of Admiralty business. Month by month he found his little store waxing larger, by gains more or less legitimate, and his official importance enhanced by devices which were not always very high-principled. But the English fleet would have been far better equipped than it was, had those in higher places shown half the energy of Samuel Pepys, had their peculations been kept within his limits, had their stratagems been controlled even by his occasional respect for principle, and had their characters been tainted by no more than his fantastic vanity, and his schoolboy debauchery. Day by day, with all his uncontrolled propensity for carouses, with all his lively taste for gossip, with all his gallantries and all his petty selfishness, Pepys shows us how manfully he struggled to make his work efficient, how often he strove successfully against profusion, and peculation, and hopeless mismanagement, and how he managed to steer his way safely amidst the jealousies, and corruptions, and gross jobberies of those under whom he served. There is something dramatic in comparing the record of his struggle with details that Pepys has left us, with the picture of hopeless corruption which revealed itself to Clarendon, standing at the other end of the official ladder. Under the patronage of the Duke, there was a little knot of men, who regarded the Admiralty chiefly as a field where they could reap a rich harvest of illegal gains. Coventry had now established for himself a control over all appointments. His agent was Sir William Penn, who had failed to rise to Cromwell's standard of efficiency, and had found himself discarded, and a prisoner in the Tower, after his defeat at St. Domingo, but who had managed to creep back into employment by cultivating the new powers. These two carried on a shameless, although well-recognized, sale of offices, and disarmed all criticism that might be dangerous by sharing their ill-gotten booty amongst a wide circle of confederates, of whom that model of chivalry, Sir Charles Berkeley, was one of the chief.
"This was the best husbandry he (Coventry) could have used; for by this means all men's mouths were stopped, and all clamour secured; whilst the lesser sums for a multitude of officers of all kinds were reserved to himself, which, in the estimation of those who were at no great distance, amounted to a very great sum, and more than any officer under the King could possibly get by all the perquisites of his office in many years." [Footnote: Life, ii. 330.]
Thefts and embezzlements became almost acknowledged practices, and as each ship returned, its equipments were shamelessly sold by the Admiralty representatives, and the proceeds divided amongst the officers.
"When this was discovered (as many times it was) and the criminal person apprehended, it was alleged by him as excuse 'that he had paid so dear for his place, that he could not maintain himself and his family, without practising such shifts;' and none of these fellows were ever brought to exemplary justice, and most of them were restored to their employments." [Footnote: Life, ii. 329.]
We have the picture painted from below and from above; and as we look on it, the wonder is, not that the pressure of the war was great, and its successes meagre, but rather that disasters did not crowd upon us more thickly. The conduct of the war does not, of course, belong to the life of Clarendon. [Footnote: "They who contrived the war had the entire conducting of it, and were the sole causes of all the ill effects of it" (Life, ii. 325).] We have hitherto seen only his efforts to stay its outbreak, and the despairing thoughts, which the prospect of the danger, and the recklessness with which it was met, provoked in him. It was part of his business to try to organize some sort of alliances abroad, which might counteract the influence of De Witt. Denmark and Sweden had every reason to oppose the growing commercial power of the Dutch, and to help in any scheme for checking it. But they were divided by mutual jealousies, and their alliance could hardly be gained jointly for the English Crown. Henry Coventry, whose talents and character Clarendon esteemed very differently from those of his brother Sir William, was envoy to Sweden, and managed to secure at least temporary neutrality from that Power, as did Sir Gilbert Talbot from Denmark. But time soon showed that any hope of effective alliance was vain. The warlike Bishop of Munster did, indeed, find it convenient to avenge his own wrongs by attacking the United Provinces, and by acting in conjunction with England. But such an ally was not a source of much strength, and it might well be doubted whether his co-operation was worth the very considerable subsidy which he demanded, of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. In truth, it soon became evident enough that England must rely upon herself alone, and that a still greater danger lurked in the background, in the doubtful neutrality, and very probable hostility, of France. Amidst this gathering cloud of unfriendliness, a new source of enmity was started by the extensive resort to privateering on the part of England, the danger of which Clarendon fully perceived. He had no words too strong to condemn this practice.
"They (the privateers) are a people, how countenanced so ever or thought necessary, that do bring an unavoidable scandal, and it is to be feared a curse, upon the justest war that was ever made at sea. A sail! A sail! is the word with them: friend or foe is the same; they possess all they can master, and run with it to any obscure place where they can sell it (which retreats are never wanting) and never attend the ceremony of an adjudication." [Footnote: Life, ii. 335. We must not forget that Clarendon had himself suffered from these licensed robbers, and bore them a grudge.]
The resort to privateering drew upon England the hatred of every trading company in Europe; but what was still worse, the career it opened was a far more lucrative one than that offered by the royal navy, and recruiting was fatally injured so long as the prospect of uncounted booty lay open to those who sailed as privateers. More fatal still, any opposition to it was interpreted by the little knot of the Duke's protégés as a personal disloyalty. "Whoever spake against those lewd people, upon any case whatsoever, was thought to have no regard for the Duke's profit, nor to desire to weaken the enemy." [Footnote: Life, ii. 336.]
There was another innovation, adopted in the interests of this nest of shameless pilferers, who throve under the Duke's protection. It was in vain that Clarendon remonstrated, and appealed either to constitutional precedent, or to the prudence and the self-interest of the King. Heavy as had been the burden of taxation caused by the war, hopes had been raised that the prices realized by the sale of captured vessels and goods would, soon after the beginning of the war, yield revenue enough to go far to meet the cost. "After one good fleet should be set out to beat the Dutch, the prizes, which would every day after be taken, would plentifully do all the rest"—such was the confident prediction. It would, under no circumstances, have been realized. But in previous wars a strict account had been kept. Commissioners were appointed for the sale of prizes, and they were bound to account for every penny received. Such a course no longer met the views of Charles and of those who now had his confidence.
The new design for dealing with these prizes of war was sprung without warning upon the Chancellor, and with circumstances that might have stirred a temper less quick than his. One evening a servant of Lord Ashley brought to the Chancellor a warrant, the object of which was to constitute Lord Ashley Treasurer of all the monies raised upon prizes of war, to assign to him the patronage of all offices necessary for the service, to make him accountable to none but the King, and to direct him to pay out all such monies as the King should order. To this warrant the Chancellor was requested to affix the seal that evening. Clarendon replied that he would speak with the King before he sealed the grant.
The purport of such an order was only too clear. The prize money was not to be spent in mitigating the heavy burden of taxation, but was to be administered according to the caprices of the King, in the ignoble expenses of his Court, and through the hands of an unscrupulous clique, whose peculations would thus be completely concealed. It is an indication of the inveterate prejudice which has infected the Whig historians of the period, that this scandalous iniquity has been glozed over, or, at the most, timidly criticized. Ashley was a Whig, and the friend of Whig philosophers. His falsehoods, his treacheries, his flagrant acts of peculation, are therefore to be veiled under a discreet silence, or visited with condemnation that is lightened by profuse apology. It is surely time that this pharisaicism of party prejudice should be shaken off. [Footnote: It is a perpetual amusement to contrast the timid condemnation with which such a Whig as Lister visits the turpitudes of such as Ashley, with the solemn lectures poured out over any deviation in the case of Clarendon from the accepted standard of Whig orthodoxy.] Ashley was primarily responsible for a scandalous fraud and an indecent robbery of the public purse, for which not a shadow of defence can be offered. He became the head of a gang of ignoble tricksters, who stooped to be pandars to their royal master's pleasures, at the price of sharing the fruits of public plunder, and with the aim of undermining the influence of the Minister whose rectitude shamed them. The fact that Ashley was a friend of John Locke does not lessen his turpitude by one jot.