M. Oppenheim

“ Ships might be replaced and open peculation checked, but the deeper wounds of spirit and discipline caused by fourteen years of license among the higher officials, and fourteen years of heartless chicanery suffered by those more lowly placed were not so readily healed, and bore their fruits for long afterwards in the habitual dishonesty of officials and workmen, in the disloyalty and half-heartedness of the seamen, and later, in the shameless knaveries that disgraced the Navy office at the close of the century, many of which had their origin under Mansell’s rule. ”

“ Ralegh writes, ‘They go with as great a grudging to serve in his Majesty’s ships as if it were to be slaves in the galleys.’ James I made no use of the Navy beyond fitting out the Algiers expedition of 1620, and commissioning a few ships, year by year, to serve in the narrow seas; but for these few vessels it was found equally difficult to obtain men and to retain them when caught, now that the incitements of Spanish prizes were wanting, while the mortality afloat was equal to that of the worst days of Elizabeth. ”

“ To a man with Henry’s clear perception of the needs of the growing Navy, and his liking for systematic and responsible management, the haphazard method of a dozen agents acting independently and uncontrolled by any central authority, must have been peculiarly hateful. Edward Baeshe who, until 1547, had been merely one of the many agents employed, was chosen in that year to act with Richard Wattes, the two being appointed ‘surveyors of victuals within the city of London,’ with power to press workmen, seamen, and ships, and with a general superintendence over their local subordinates. ”

“ But now other and more dangerous rivals were to be faced in France and the United Provinces, both wealthier than England, the former temporarily strong in a centralised monarchy of which the resources were to be wielded by Richelieu, and in an army reorganised and a navy created by him, the latter spiritually strong from the same sources as had stirred English thought, with traditions of mercantile supremacy reaching back to the dawn of European commerce, and proud of a successful contest with the greatest of European states. ”

“ In the absence of a verdict proceeding from a judicial inquiry, their evidence must be allowed more weight than that made up of the stabs of anonymous slanderers, jealous rivals, and envious subordinates.
Hawkyns was doubtless a rough, masterful man, readier with the iron hand than with the velvet glove, more popular with the seamen whose ranks he had left than with the officials whose ranks he had joined. He was not a great man, but his services to England were great, and entitle him to kindly consideration at the hands of all Englishmen. ”

“ The life of Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham and Earl of Nottingham, commander of the English fleet in 1588, and for thirty-three years Lord Admiral of England, may be regarded as the link between the mediæval and the modern navy. Born in 1536, and dying in 1624, his era connects the cogs and crayers, carracks and balingers of the Plantagenets, then hardly out of use, with the established Royal Navy of James I, a fleet divided into rates; controlled on present principles, and differing but little in essentials from that existing up to the introduction of armour and machine guns. ”

“ For the moment English mercantile effort took a direction that did not bring it into conflict with larger interests, but when the natural expansion of trade and shipping brought the country into collision with other powers the struggles of centuries, which had shaped and hardened a skilful and dauntless maritime population, bore their natural fruit in a school of seamen able to use and direct the instruments which the increasing wealth and ambition of the nation placed in their hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Mary Rose and Sovereign were in 1509, the two most powerfully armed ships which had yet existed in the English navy, perhaps the most powerfully armed ships afloat anywhere that year, and it is curious to notice that the Peter Pomegranate built with them was fitted in the old style, with innumerable serpentines which could have been of little more effect than toy guns, appearing almost as though the contrast was an intentional experiment. ”

“ If Borough did not incite them to mutiny the men of the Lion must have been for some time full of discontent and ready to desert. The chase of the Bark of Lyme, which took them from under the guns of the rest of the fleet, gave them their opportunity. On 30th May, Drake constituted a court-martial on the Bonaventure, of himself and the other superior officers, at which most of the mutineers were condemned to death in their absence. The account of this inquiry gives a vivid picture of the modes of thought among the men, and their ideas of their rights and duties. ”

“ There is no sign in the policy of the early kings of any perception of the value of a navy as a militant instrument like an army, or any sense of the importance of a real continuity in its maintenance and use. Society was based on a military organisation, but there was no place in that organisation for the Navy except as a subsidiary and dependent force. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Many, again, had risen from the forecastle, and possibly brought with them reminiscences of the habits existing in the Caroline Navy: others had been privateer captains, an occupation which did not tend to make their moral sense more delicate. Professional honour was not yet a living force, and, in some orders issued by Monk to the captains of a detached squadron, the threat of loss of wages as a punishment for disobedience came after, and was obviously intended as a more impressive deterrent than, the disgrace of being cashiered. ”

“ Neither now nor afterwards, neither in official papers nor in the sheaves of ephemeral publications which enlightened this and the succeeding century, does it seem, with one exception, to have entered into the minds of those who ruled or those who tried to teach that the cost of providing for the wants or age of men disabled by service should in justice fall upon the country they had spent their youth and health in protecting, instead of on an accident fund maintained from their own meagre earnings. ”

“ Tunnage and poundage had been granted for ‘the safe keeping of the sea,’ but the application of the money was at the discretion of the king. He might use it to pay hired merchantmen or he might build ships of his own with it, or with the revenue of the crown estates to fulfil the same purpose; in neither case had Parliament any voice in the employment of the money. While calling upon the Cinque Ports to fulfil the conditions of their charters and impressing merchant ships throughout the country, he might keep his own navy idle; there was no national right to profit by its existence. ”

“ It was equally natural that men who had paid heavily for their employments were unscrupulous in recouping themselves. ‘The captains being for the most part poor gentlemen did mend their fortunes by combining with the pursers,’ who were in league with the victuallers to send in returns of more men than were on board the ships. Boatswains and gunners sold their stores, shipwrights stole timber, and captains sheltered and took bribes from pirates, or turned their vessels into merchantmen to enable owners of goods to evade payment of customs. ”

“ The military organisation had been systematised for centuries and would go on working more or less easily whatever the personal qualities of the ruler. The Navy was not yet to the same extent an organised and permanent force, and its strength in any reign was still dependent on the initiative of the sovereign. Henry obtained canonisation at the expense of the lives and prosperity of his subjects, of his followers, and of his son. It had been better for them if he had possessed more of the sinful strength of a man and less of the flaccid virtue of a saint. ”

“ The altered situation brought to the front a band of men who, in the preceding century, would have been military adventurers in France, but who now, half traders, half pirates, handled their ships with the same strategic and tactical skill their ancestors exercised on land, and who, if they had been allowed a free hand, would have brought Spain down in ruin instead of merely reducing her to a condition of baffled impotence. ”

“ It must be remembered that they are not schedules of the total available reserves drawn up during a naval war, with an enemy’s fleet at sea, or under the pressure of a threatened invasion, but merely represent the number of vessels required to transport a certain military force, and form only a proportion—whether large or small we know not—of the maritime strength of the country. Certainly the numbers for Bristol did not represent the total resources of that city, and Newcastle and Yarmouth, to name only two flourishing ports, do not occur in either list. ”

“ There is no understanding shewn of the ceaseless pressure a navy is capable of exercising, and the disbandment of all, or the greater part, of the fleet was usually the first step which followed the disembarkation of troops or a successful fleet action. ”

“ More disastrous to merchants than the losses due to warfare were the operations of the pirates who swarmed on the Northern Coasts of Europe during these centuries, and who appear to have become unbearably successful during the reign of Henry IV. This king appears to have cared little for his titular sovereignty of the seas, ignored every petition of Parliament for redress of the especial grievances affecting shipowners, and used such fleets as he got together, as his predecessors had used them, simply as a means of transporting troops to make weak and useless attacks at isolated points. ”

“ The escape of Rupert from Kinsale with the fleet, of which three of the revolted ships formed the nucleus, together with the encouragement his presence at sea gave to individual privateering, necessitated an immediate and large increase in the Navy, which then had to protect the trade routes as well as chase or blockade him. Rupert’s career made it obvious that the area of the civil war had widened, and that henceforth it would be the duty of the Navy to deal with the enemies of the republic at the circumference of the circle, its internal foes being helpless without aid from abroad. ”

“ Privateers were equipped not with large objects but to secure profits for owners and crews. It sometimes happened that this purpose was at issue with the wider views of the admiral in command, and the voyage became ineffective where a similar number of men-of-war subject to discipline might have done important service. The enormous increase in the merchant marine which, it will be shown, characterised the reign, was in one way disadvantageous since it induced the government to rely more on a guerre de course than on the sustained and systematised action of the Royal Navy. ”

“ The introduction of portholes in, or perhaps before the reign of Henry VII, differentiated the man-of-war, involved radical alterations in build and armament, and made the future line-of-battle ship possible; the establishment of the Navy Board by Henry VIII, made the organisation of fleets feasible and ensured a certain, if slow, progress because henceforward cumulative and, in the long run, independent of the energy and foresight of any one man under whom, as under Henry V, the Navy might largely advance, to sink back at his death into decay. ”

“ Although the conditions were, in reality, not at all unequal, an attack made on the richest and greatest maritime power in the world by a nearly bankrupt state which, with the exception of the passable success of 1596, had failed in every important naval enterprise undertaken since 1588, and which in that year had only succeeded—so far as the fruits of victory were concerned—by the chance of wind and wave and the aid of the very nation now assailed, must have seemed to many contemporaries a more than hazardous venture. ”

“ Whole libraries have been written about fleets and expeditions, but there has never yet been any systematic history of the organisation that rendered action on a large scale possible, or of the naval administration generally, and although its record does not appear to the writer to be a matter for national pride, it has its importance as a corollary of—and if only as a foil to—that of the Navy proper. ”

“ In another sense the good or ill fame of a national worthy is of the highest importance as interwoven with national history, and therefore a factor in the memories which make for the self-respect of a nation. As in the Dictionary of National Biography, a work which will be the standard authority for posterity, Hawkyns is considered to have been guilty, it is fitting that, in a study of Elizabethan naval administration, the charges should be examined somewhat minutely. ”

“ For Holland then, as would be the case for England now, it was not sufficient to merely hold her own, for anything short of absolute maritime supremacy is ruin to a nation whose existence depends on an unlimited carrying trade and the unchecked export and import of material. The Dutch did not hold their own, but their flag was by no means driven off the seas, and the Dutch navy certainly not incapable of further action, when the miseries undergone by a teeming population brought the republic to its knees in 1654. ”

“ A court-martial would not enable the Treasurer to pay wages and prize money too long over-due, or silence men of whom one, who knew them well, said that they were ‘an unruly and untamed generation,’ and that he found ‘no hope to satisfy them without their full pay.’ [1294] But there are signs that, notwithstanding delays in payment, the men gave heartier obedience to the Commonwealth than they had given to the crown under similar circumstances. ”