The End of the First ‘Royal Navy’, c. 1588–1649
ON 30 JANUARY 1649 KING CHARLES I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace. For the first time in many centuries, England was without a monarch, and within months, a fully republican form of government, the Common-wealth, was in place. Exactly forty years later, on 30 January 1689, the guns of British warships fired a twenty-gun salute and dipped their flags to mark the anniversary of the ‘royal martyrdom’.1 The salute must have had a surreal quality of déjà vu, especially for the oldest witnesses to it, for on that day, and yet again, the three kingdoms in the British Isles had no king: Charles I’s younger son, James II of England and VII of Scotland, had fled his kingdoms in the previous December, and it would be another fortnight before the vacant throne was officially filled. On 30 January 1689, too, the navy was preparing for war. The formal declaration against France did not come until May, but hostilities commenced unofficially much earlier. From that time until the surrender of Napoleon Bonaparte on the deck of hms Bellerophon, 126 years later, war against France came to be perceived by many in the navy, at least, as the natural or desirable order of things; and for much of the time, it usually was. It was the navy of Anson, Rodney, Howe and ultimately Horatio Nelson, culminating in the period from about 1756 to 1815 that has been immortalised by historians, novelists and film-makers alike as the‘classic age’ of British naval history.
Samuel Pepys as secretary to the Admiralty.
(MEZZOTINT BY R WHITE AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY SIR G KNELLER)
This perception has led, consciously or unconsciously, to comparative neglect of the preceding period; what might be called the navy’s ‘long seventeenth century’, from about 1600 to about 1750.2 The naval campaigns of that time tend to be less well known than those that went before or came after, and the key figures in the development of the Royal Navy tend to be less familiar to general readers – with one notable exception, who actually serves to prove, rather than disprove, the point. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is one of the best-loved figures in cultural history, thanks largely to his remarkably frank and moving shorthand diary of the period 1660–9. A mine of information and gossip on music, literature, the theatre, court scandal, the Plague, the Great Fire of London and his own tangled love life, Pepys tends to be known first and foremost as a brilliant social commentator and a flawed but deeply attractive human being. But professionally, Samuel Pepys was a naval administrator, nothing else. Methodical, inquisitive and highly competent, he was also a formidably opinionated self-publicist who made enemies just as easily as he made friends. For almost thirty years, ten of them (1673–9, 1684–9) in the pivotal role of secretary to the Admiralty, Pepys was at the heart of one of the most important periods of transition in British naval history.3 In terms of the evolution of fighting tactics, professional development, administrative structures and procedures, and – much less tangibly – the navy’s perception of itself, the period 1649–89 was debatably the critical stage in its transformation into the fighting force that went on to build up an unprecedented record of victory during its ‘classic age’.
FROM ARMADA TO CIVIL WAR
The victory over the Spanish Armada (1588) was gained by a navy that was still ‘medieval’ in many essentials. Only thirty-four of the 197 English ships were owned by the crown; the rest were supplied as private ventures by wealthy individuals or seaports. Although the best galleons were large, new and technically advanced, many of the other ships that put to sea on behalf of Elizabeth I were small, and of little use in battle against Spain’s floating arsenals. English tactics had moved away from the continental reliance on boarding, instead placing the emphasis on gunnery from longer range, but many soldiers still served on the fleet. The admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, was an aristocrat appointed to the command by virtue of his social and political status alone, although the same was also true of his Spanish counterpart, the Duke of Medina Sidonia.4 The victory over the great Spanish invasion fleet was largely fortuitous, owing more to the weather than any tactical acumen or innate superiority on the part of Howard, his men and his ships, but it helped to create the myth of the English navy as the foremost bulwark of national defence. The Armada was only one campaign in twenty years of naval warfare from 1585 onwards, a collective experience that shaped the consciousness of Englishmen (Samuel Pepys included) for generations to come.5 Moreover, the longevity of several prominent naval men from the ‘Armada era’ ensured that the potent mystique surrounding the service of that time was handed down to succeeding generations. The last surviving captain who had commanded a ship against the Spanish Armada, Edmund Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, died as late as 1646, while a number of men who had commanded at sea under Drake or his contemporaries, the likes of Sir Henry Mainwaring and Sir Robert Mansell, lived on until the 1650s. The last Spanish prize from the Armada year, the Eagle Hulk, was ‘laid ashore for age at the north end of Chatham dock, 1675, and sold December 1683.6 Two heavily rebuilt veterans of the Armada fight, the Vanguard and Rainbow, survived into the Restoration era, the latter lasting until 1680; although the evidence is extremely dubious, the Lion, which survived until 1698, may have been first built in 1557, when England was still Catholic and still possessed Calais. Other Elizabethan warship names were regularly revived to inspire succeeding generations: Victory (1620), Triumph (1623), Tiger (1647), Dreadnought and Revenge (1660), Warspite (1666), Vanguard again (1678).7
The defeat of the Spanish Armada.
(© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
These abiding memories of the supposed ‘golden age’ of the Armada fight created a burden of popular expectation on those who served between 1649 and 1689. For instance, the supposedly ‘Elizabethan’ idea of a self-financing naval war, in which fleets seized control of their enemies’ economic lifelines – in other words, the state-sponsored piracy in which the likes of Drake had indulged – underpinned, at least in part, Oliver Cromwell’s desire to capture the Spanish bullion fleet in the 1650s, and Charles II’s wish to strangle Dutch trade in the 1660s and 1670s.* In reality, though, the ‘golden age’ was far less golden than nostalgia made it out to be, and the idea of the self-financing naval war was always a chimera. Successive campaigns in European waters and the Caribbean from 1589 to 1604 brought relatively little success; some, like the Earl of Essex’s attack on Cadiz in 1596 and Sir Francis Drake’s final voyage in the same year, were ignominious reverses. Only further gusts of‘Protestant wind’ dispersed two more Spanish Armadas, but even such favourable elements could not prevent a damaging Spanish landing in Ireland in 1601.8 The material condition of the navy also suffered, with crews going unpaid for long periods. Queen Elizabeth I, who had presided over it all, finally died in 1603, and England’s new monarch, King James VI of Scotland, wanted to establish a reputation as rexpacificus, a European peacemaker. He also had little real understanding of, or interest in, the navy that he had inherited; his cousin the Earl of Bothwell, hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland, was disparaging about James’s feeble credentials as an admiral.9
James quickly ended the nineteen-year-long war with Spain. Thereafter, and for the duration of his reign, the navy became even more neglected. Some new warships were built, such as the large Prince Royal of 1610, and a few expeditions were undertaken, such as the despatch in 1620 of a fleet under Sir Robert Mansell against the corsairs of Algiers, but on the whole, James’s navy and its Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham (the former Lord Howard of Effingham), were widely suspected of rampant corruption and inefficiency.10 Two major commissions of enquiry, in 1608 and 1618, and a new Lord High Admiral from 1619 onwards – James’s favourite, the future Duke of Buckingham – brought in some reforms, but the overall condition of the fleet remained poor. During his Algiers expedition, Mansell constantly bemoaned the weak and foul condition of his ships, the stinking beer, the ‘piecemeal and torn’ victuals and the constant back-biting and penny-pinching that he knew would be rampant at home.11 These problems re-emerged in the years 1625–9, when Buckingham and the new king, Charles I, embarked on the only large-scale naval wars that England would fight in the halfcentury between 1604 and 1652. Expeditions to the Caribbean, against Cadiz and to relieve the French Protestants at La Rochelle were poorly organised and ineptly commanded, and uniformly failed to achieve their objectives, comprehensively blasting England’s inherited reputation for naval competence and turning the country into the object of bad foreign jokes.12 In 1629 Charles abandoned both the wars and the institution of Parliament, which had proved increasingly fractious. Inevitably, funding of the navy suffered at first, but in the mid-1630s Charles and his Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Portland, extended the old medieval system of Ship Money (by which coastal towns paid for maritime defence) to the whole of the country. Despite some opposition, collection rates were far more impressive than they had been for parliamentary taxation, raising some £800,000 between 1634 and 1638, and Charles could finally embark on a sustained programme of naval reconstruction.
The Lion, allegedly a rebuilding of a ship first built in 1557; she was finally sold out of the service in 1698.
(RICHARD ENDSOR, BASED ON VARIOUS DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS BY THEVANDEVELDES)
The centrepiece of the ‘Ship Money fleets’ was the vast Sovereign of the Seas of 100 guns, built at Woolwich in 1637 by Phineas Pett. She would be the centrepiece of many subsequent fleets, too, despite her cumbersome sailing qualities; she fought in all three Anglo-Dutch wars and, much later, against the French. All too clearly, though, the Sovereign was wholly inappropriate for the purpose that allegedly underpinned the levying of Ship Money, namely defence against the small, agile raiding craft used by Dunkirkers and the North African corsairs. In fact, her name is the best clue for the purpose that Charles really had in mind for her. It reflected the king’s legal claim to sovereignty over all of the ‘British seas’, which supposedly extended along most of Europe’s western seaboard. The claim originated in a distinctly dubious reading of the naval history of the Anglo-Saxon period, especially the reigns of Kings Alfred and Edgar and, thanks to the Stuart accession in England, of the migration into English law of the Scots concept of‘territorial waters’.13 The claim was given expression in print by John Selden in his Mare Clausum of 1635, written while the Sovereign was under construction. It manifested itself at sea in the ‘salute to the flag’, a supposed right due to English warships and forts from foreign vessels; the salute became one of the most significant catalysts of the later Anglo-Dutch wars.14 Moreover, the king’s ostentatious parading of his ‘Ship Money fleet’ in the Channel every summer from 1635 to 1638 was an obvious but misplaced attempt to impress and intimidate other European states, who were then preoccupied with devastating each other’s territory in the series of vicious and interconnected conflicts known as the Thirty Years War. Not for the last time, the cruises of the ‘Ship Money fleets’ demonstrated conclusively that navies alone can exert precisely no influence on the course of events in central Europe, although it undoubtedly had a certain deterrent value and, even less tangibly, helped to restore the nation’s tattered naval reputation.15
In the end, his substantial investment in the navy did King Charles I little good. When his high-handed religious policy led to war with his homeland of Scotland in 1639–40, ambitious amphibious operations against the Forth and Tay were poorly co-ordinated with land campaigns, and came to nothing.16 Forced to recall his English Parliament in 1640 to fund his Scottish wars, Charles encountered an outpouring of resentment against a whole raft of his policies, of which the levying of Ship Money was one; it was abolished by statute in 1641. Finally, when the conflict with Parliament deteriorated towards open civil war during the summer of 1642, the navy to which Charles had devoted so much care (and money) deserted him. Disillusioned by bad pay, won over by clever Parliamentarian propaganda, and resentful of an inept royal attempt to change their high command, the officers and men of the navy declared almost unanimously for Parliament.17
The notional extent of the ‘British Seas’, from Stadland in Norway to Cape Finisterre.
(FROM JOHN SELDEN’S MARE CLAUSUM, 1635)
The navy’s decision to align with Parliament instead of the king had important consequences for the outcome of the civil war, though the navy’s role was largely unsung and tends to be overlooked. The navy’s allegiance to Parliament deterred any potential intervention by European powers on behalf of the king, and although those powers were largely preoccupied with their own wars, France, Spain and the Netherlands either contemplated such intervention or were invited to do so by Charles. Its command of the seas also enabled Parliament to supply beleaguered garrisons, such as Plymouth, Hull and Lyme Regis, to intercept Royalist privateers operating from the West Country, Ireland and the Channel Islands, and to mount amphibious operations, such as those carried out in Milford Haven in 1643–4. But there were failures, too – notably the failures to intercept both the arms convoy that Queen Henrietta Maria brought in person into Bridlington Bay in February 1643 and the Royalist army that was ferried across from Ireland later in the same year. The Royalists were also able to build their own miniature navy and mercantile marine, centred on Ireland and western ports such as Bristol, Exeter and Dartmouth.18 Although Parliament neglected the navy because of the more pressing demands (and political importance) of its army, it did pay more attention to merchant interests than had Charles I’s regime, whose perceived neglect of trade had lost him much support in London in particular. A proper convoy system was instituted by 1650, and merchants were strongly represented both in the restructured naval administration that was created shortly afterwards and in commands in the navy itself, which was forced to draw on politically sound merchant captains to replace the Royalist officers purged from 1642 onwards.
1648 also saw a major crisis in naval affairs. Like the army, the navy had suffered steadily mounting arrears of pay following the end of the first civil war in 1646, but the navy lacked the army’s political clout and its ability physically to occupy the City of London to press its demands on Parliament. Discontent over growing political and religious radicalism also motivated many in the fleet. A serious riot in Canterbury in December 1647 protested against Parliament’s recent decision to abolish Christmas, felt to be a papist and pagan festival, and in the spring the anger spread west to the dockyard towns along the Medway and east to the coast. The consequence was a large-scale naval revolt, beginning in the Downs on 27 May 1648. Ultimately, nine warships sailed to the Netherlands and offered their services to Charles, Prince of Wales, who delegated their command to his cousin, the former cavalry general Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619–82); Rupert would later become one of the prominent admirals of the Restoration period, and was an underrated but effective First Lord of the Admiralty from 1673 to 1679. Although the Royalists found it impossible to retain (or rather, to pay for) the loyalty of their new fleet, they still had ten ships at sea when Charles I was executed, and his son became King Charles II, if only in name.19 The younger Charles was at The Hague when he received the news of his father’s death; eleven years later, he was there again when he received the news that he had been restored to his father’s throne. The paths of the Stuarts and the Netherlands were to have a habit of crossing.
The Sovereign of the Seas (1637); the elaborate beakhead was removed in 1651.
(CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVING BY J PAYNE)
THE ‘NATURAL ENEMY’? RELATIONS WITH THE DUTCH TO 1650
Until the sixteenth century, Britain and the Netherlands enjoyed a close, almost symbiotic, economic relationship. English and Scottish wool was exported for finishing in the Low Countries; there was a Scottish staple at Veere in Zeeland, and the wealth generated by the trade is still apparent, for example, in the scale of such great East Anglian churches as those at Long Melford and Lavenham and in the cloth halls of Flanders. But in the 1560s the Dutch rebelled against the rule of Philip II of Spain, and in due course this became both a war of independence and an ideological civil war. The Catholic south (roughly equivalent to modern Belgium) eventually chose to remain under Spanish rule, while the largely Calvinist north opted for independence as the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The strategic and economic importance of the Netherlands to England, and growing English hostility to Spain, forced Elizabeth I to provide more and more aid to the rebels, at first informally, but from 1585 formally under the terms of the Treaty of Nonsuch. An English army went to the Netherlands and remained there until 1604, while in return, four cautionary towns on the Scheldt estuary were placed under English control. They were returned to the Dutch only in 1616, a move that later English monarchs regretted; indeed, Charles II was to make the recapture of at least two of the cautionary towns one of his key strategic objectives in the third Anglo-Dutch war (1672–4).
This close alliance of two embattled Protestant nations against the might of Catholic Spain was breaking down even before King James I and VI withdrew from the war. The United Provinces quickly established itself as a new economic power in Europe, largely winning control of the carrying trades into the Baltic and Mediterranean. Antwerp, long the greatest port in Europe, lay far up the River Scheldt, and was easily blockaded by the Dutch who controlled one side of the river; their own chief harbour at Amsterdam grew concomitantly as a substitute for Antwerp. The Dutch overran the ramshackle but lucrative Portuguese possessions in the East Indies, which England also coveted.20 During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, competition between the English and Dutch East India Companies, the EIC and the VOC (which had been founded at roughly the same time), became bitter and sometimes violent. There were also clashes over the North Sea fisheries, and one of the purposes originally intended for the Ship Money fleets was to bully the Dutch out of these lucrative fishing grounds. The Dutch were also building up a formidable reputation as a naval power, defeating the Spanish in several major encounters, most notably off Gibraltar in 1607 and in the Downs in 1639, literally under the noses of Charles I’s captains. The Dutch were particularly expansive and successful between 1609 and 1621, during a twelve years’ truce in their endless war of independence with Spain, but the resumption of that conflict, and England’s withdrawal from European war in 1629, allowed neutral English merchants to make inroads into Dutch markets, recapturing much of the carrying trade.
‘Atrocity stories’ recounting Dutch massacres in the East Indies became a staple of anti-Dutch propaganda throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars. The ‘Amboyna massacre’ of 1623 was dramatised by Dryden half a century later, and was still being used to blacken the reputation of the Dutch late in the eighteenth century.
In 1647–9, though, three important developments entirely altered the political and economic relationship between the two states. Firstly, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) brought both an end to eighty years of hostilities and grudging Spanish recognition of Dutch independence. Dutch merchants rapidly resumed their dominance of the carrying trades thanks to their ability to undercut the costs of all their rivals, especially the English.21 Secondly, the execution of Charles I in 1649 led to the creation of a new regime in England that seemed superficially to have much in common with its fellow Protestant republic of the United Provinces. In reality, though, the English Commonwealth was driven by a very different political and religious ideology, and detested both the perennial Dutch tolerance of other faiths (especially Catholicism) and their apparent economic success at England’s expense.22 Merchants were strongly represented in the new regime and its naval administration, and many of them were driven by the relatively new economic doctrine of‘mercantilism’, a belief that the amount of trade in the world was limited and that aggressive economic policies could thus increase the wealth and power of the state. Thirdly, in 1647 William II of Orange had become stadholder* of the United Provinces. The son-in-law of Charles I of England, he naturally sympathised with his Stuart relations, but his autocratic and centralising tendencies brought to a head the long-running power struggle between the House of Orange and the republican factions headed by the prosperous merchant class of Amsterdam, the ‘regents’, soon to be led by Johan de Witt, the brilliant and dynamic Grand Pensionary of Holland.23
William II’s pro-Stuart agenda and his powerful position in the government of the Netherlands gave the new English Commonwealth yet more cause to be deeply suspicious of the United Provinces, but in 1650 William died suddenly of smallpox, leaving only a posthumous son, William. The republican factions seized control of the Dutch state and promptly rejected an offer of closer political union from the ‘Rump Parliament’ that ruled the Commonwealth: the humiliating treatment that the Rump’s commissioners received determined them, and their political masters, on coming to a reckoning with the United Provinces. Within two years, the two great Protestant republics of Western Europe were at war with each other, and in naval terms, the quarter-century that followed would become defined as the era of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Ultimately, in 1688, a massive Dutch-led invasion of Britain ousted the senior line of the Stuart royal family, and when England’s new joint monarchs were finally proclaimed on 13 February 1689, they were Queen Mary II, daughter of the ousted James II, and her Dutch husband King William III, the posthumous child born at the Binnenhof palace in The Hague in December 1650.
* See Part Eleven, Chapter 48, pp224-5.
* Stadholder = originally a kind of viceroy of the Spanish monarch; after independence, a de facto head of state, appointed separately (and sometimes intermittently) in each of the seven provinces of the Netherlands.