CHAPTER 3

Naval Administration

THE OLD ROYAL ADMINISTRATION of the navy fell with King Charles I. Since the reign of Henry VIII, day-to-day running of the service had been in the hands of a Navy Board, consisting of a treasurer, a comptroller, a surveyor and a Clerk of the Acts, or secretary. This body was abolished in September 1642, shortly after the start of the civil war, and Parliament replaced it with a larger Navy Commission which answered to a parliamentary navy committee. Meanwhile the office of Lord High Admiral, in theory the executive and military head of the navy, had nominally been held since 1638 by James, Duke of York, the king’s second son. As James was only a child, the office was held de facto by Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, but King Charles found the earl too unenthusiastic for his cause and dismissed him in the summer of 1642. Parliament initially refused to recognise this act, but North-umberland’s studied neutrality towards both sides eventually led to his replacement on 7 December 1643 by Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick. Warwick, in turn, was forced to give up his post by the Self-Denying Ordinance of 1645, which barred members of Parliament from military and naval commands, but he retained considerable influence in naval affairs and was effectively restored to office in 1648. By the end of the year, though, Warwick was increasingly ambivalent towards the growing radicalism in Parliament, and was suspected of complicity in the revolt that had paralysed the fleet earlier in the year. Consequently, the office of Lord High Admiral was abolished by Act of Parliament on 23 February 1649.1

NAVAL ADMINISTRATION UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE, 1649–1660

In the early days of the new English republic, the military and administrative roles formerly held by the Lord High Admiral were divided. The former was delegated to the new ‘generals-at-sea’, the latter to a new Admiralty and Navy Committee, formed on 12 March 1649 and consisting of twelve to fifteen members. The new committee was an offshoot of the Council of State, the executive arm of the new government, and, like the Council, it was re-formed each year, leading to a rapid turnover of personnel. However, some stability was ensured by the constant and domineering presence of Henry Vane, the treasurer of the navy. Meanwhile, the Navy Commission was expanded by adding loyal parliamentary radicals. The need constantly to refer decisions upwards and downwards between the Council, Parliament’s navy committee and the two commissions of the Admiralty and Navy made the whole system unwieldy and slow, but it survived until the end of 1652, when the parliamentary naval committee was abolished and the Admiralty Commission was streamlined.² To complicate matters further, an additional committee of‘regulators’, composed primarily of London merchants, was set up in January 1649 to investigate the political loyalty of the navy and to eliminate abuses. But the commission itself was charged with corruption and cronyism, even by some of its own members, and its record was mixed at best.³

The history of naval administration during the Interregnum reflected the changes in the national government. When the radical Barebones Parliament came to power in 1653, it appointed an equally radical Admiralty Commission to replace Vane and his colleagues. When Barebones, in turn, was dissolved in December 1653 and replaced by the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, a more conservative Admiralty Commission, dominated by soldiers, was appointed to reflect the tenor of the new regime. Throughout these changes, an important thread of continuity was provided by the growing importance of the Admiralty secretary from 1652, Robert Blackborne, who also served as secretary to the Navy Commission. Efficient and hard-working, Blackborne was able to overcome many of the weaknesses inherent in the cumbersome committee structure. Although his political and religious radicalism disqualified him from continuing in office after the Restoration, he became a trusted mentor for Pepys, his effective successor, and provided him with valuable information about precedents and procedures.⁴

The centralisation of the higher naval administration in London created an obvious need for delegated authority in the major dockyards. The shipbuilder Phineas Pett became a member of the Navy Board in 1630 and served thereafter as a de facto resident commissioner at Chatham. His son Peter succeeded him in the position in 1648 and retained it until 1667, when he became the scapegoat for the Dutch attack on the Medway. The Petts built up a formidable dynasty at Chatham, despite regular attacks on their perceived corruption and nepotism. A resident commissioner was also appointed to Portsmouth: William Willoughby served until 1651 and was eventually succeeded by his son Francis. After the Restoration, Portsmouth was served by the likes of Thomas Middleton (1664–7), John Tippetts (1668–72), Sir Anthony Deane (1672–5) and Richard Beach (1679–90). Pett’s successors at Chatham also included Beach (1672–9), whose splendidly frank and caustic letters provide one of the best sources for the work of the dockyards in this period. The creation of a yard at Harwich led to the appointment of a commissioner there from 1664 to 1667, but this post was not sustained thereafter. Plymouth was not developed as a major dockyard until the 1690s, but from the 1650s the navy had storehouses and maintenance facilities there, under the charge of a naval agent.

THE RESTORATION: LORD HIGH ADMIRAL AND NAVY BOARD, 1660–1673

On 16 May 1660 James, Duke of York, was formally appointed Lord High Admiral of England, Ireland and the Plantations by his brother Charles II, effectively confirming the original appointment made by their father when James was four. Following the royal family’s triumphant return to London from exile on 29 May 1660, the serving Admiralty and navy commissioners, along with the secretary, Blackborne, were continued in office pro tem while a committee under York investigated a new form for the government of the navy. This reported at the end of June, and on 2 July the new structure for the higher naval administration came into being. This was essentially a compromise between pre- and post-1642 practice. The traditional structure of four principal officers of the navy was restored: three veteran sea-officers, Sir George Carteret, Sir William Batten and Sir Robert Slyngsbie, were appointed Treasurer, Surveyor and Controller (or ‘comptroller’) respectively, while the twenty-seven-year-old Samuel Pepys became Clerk of the Acts at the behest of his patron, Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, fighting off two rival candidates to secure the place.5 However, the principal officers were to be joined by three additional commissioners without portfolio, following Interregnum practice. These were the ubiquitous Peter Pett, the former general-at-sea Sir William Penn and the veteran Royalist soldier Lord Berkeley of Stratton. The role of Robert Blackborne was effectively divided between Pepys and Sir William Coventry, James’s secretary, whose workload became dominated by naval business and who became additionally a commissioner of the navy in 1662.

ANNUAL SALARIES OF NAVY BOARD OFFICERS AND COMMISSIONERS, 1660–88

Treasurer	1660–7:	£2,000
	1668–73:	£2,500 (divided equally between two joint treasurers)
	1673–88:	£3,000
Controller		£500
Surveyor		£490
Clerk of the Acts		£350
Commissioners		£500
Resident commissioners at Chatham		£350 (from 1686, £500)

Source: Cat. Pepys MSS, i. 8–9.

There was some turnover in personnel in the years that followed. Coventry resigned in 1667, and his successors as James’s secretary, Matthew Wren (1667–72) and Sir John Werden (1672–3), were less knowledgeable of, and less involved in, naval affairs. At the Navy Board, Slyngsbie’s death in 1661 led to the appointment as Controller of Sir John Mennes, another former sea-officer. Batten was succeeded as Surveyor in November 1667 by Thomas Middleton, formerly the resident commissioner at Portsmouth, who in turn was succeeded in 1672 by John Tippetts. The principal officers and resident commissioners of the yards were usually former seamen, but the new extra commissioners tended to be drawn from the ranks of court and Parliament: these included the scholar and scientist Lord Brouncker in 1664, Sir Thomas Harvey in 1665, Edward Seymour (soon to be speaker of the House of Commons) in 1672. One merchant, James Puckle, was appointed in 1673, but he seems not to have served.⁶ Judgements of many of these men have often been shaped by the fact that the earlier appointees were Samuel Pepys’s professional colleagues, and during the years in which he kept his famous diary (1660–9) he studiously recorded his impressions of them.⁷ Pepys came to regard Penn as a lazy, corrupt rogue, and they clashed on several occasions. The diarist damned Mennes as an amiable old incompetent. Even laying aside Pepys’s criticisms of him, Mennes certainly became less capable of exercising his office effectively as he got older: he was sixty-eight in 1667, when two of his duties were taken over by a Controller of Treasurer’s Accounts (Brouncker) and a Controller of Victualling Accounts (initially Penn, then Sir Jeremiah Smith from 1669 to 1675).⁸ In Mennes’s defence, though, the fact that these two new offices were continued for over a century after his death provides proof that the notional responsibilities of the controller had actually become too much for any one man.

Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Lord High Admiral from 1660 to 1667 and an important role model for Samuel Pepys.

AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The Lord High Admiral was never wholly autonomous in naval affairs, and the patent of office was notoriously vague.⁹ As king, Charles II often intervened in matters of strategy and high policy, but his personal enthusiasm for all things naval also led him to get involved in such minutiae as the appointment of officers and ship design, leading to occasional tensions between himself and his brother. These became more frequent after 1668, when Charles took several key decisions on naval appointments himself; the king later interfered with, or overrode, the nominally independent Admiralty Board of 1679–84 in a similar way.10 Other branches of government also impacted more or less directly on the naval administration. As early as 1661, for example, the new victualling contract with Sir Denis Gauden was drawn up by the Lord Treasurer and the Privy Council, with hardly any reference to the Navy Board. The Privy Council as a whole, and its Committee for Foreign Affairs (the precursor of the modern Cabinet), made significant decisions on naval policy in wartime. The Council also had a dedicated Navy Committee, which debated naval issues and gave force to some of the decisions of the Lord Admiral and the Navy Board.¹¹ By the time of the third Anglo-Dutch war, the committee included all the most prominent members of Charles II’s government, including Prince Rupert, the Dukes of Buckingham, Lauderdale, Monmouth and Ormonde, and the Earls of Anglesey, Arlington and Shaftesbury. Following its reorganisation into a commission in 1667, the Treasury exerted a growing hold over the navy, particularly in the period 1679–84, when it dictated, or attempted to dictate, on matters ranging from the manning of ships to the construction of new docks.¹² The secretaries of state also involved themselves in aspects of naval administration, the extent depending on their own inclinations and on Charles II’s willingness to delegate to them.

In contrast to the overlapping and vague jurisdictions that existed above them, the Navy Board’s responsibilities were clearly defined; in theory, at least. In January 1662 the Duke of York issued a substantial set of new instructions to the board. Its primary responsibilities were specified as the building, repairing and setting out ships; paying, clothing and victualling the seamen; and making contracts with suppliers.¹³ Financial matters were the remit of the treasurer, and the sheer size of the sums allocated to the navy ensured that holders of this office were invariably of a higher status than their colleagues (Anglesey, treasurer in 1667–8, was an earl), although this also meant that they rarely attended the board. The controller was essentially the auditor of all aspects of the board’s work, but as the division of the office after 1667 demonstrated, the huge increase in the size of the navy since the office had been first established a century earlier made this an increasingly unrealistic proposition. The surveyor had responsibility for the ships themselves, as well as the stores, dockyards and buildings. The Clerk of the Acts, the most junior of the posts, was nominally only the board’s secretary, but Pepys interpreted his brief broadly and was soon master of almost all aspects of the office’s work.¹⁴ As such, he became the principal spokesman for the board, for example in the defence of its record before the parliamentary ‘Brooke House committee’, which sat in 1668–9 to investigate alleged maladministration and corruption by the Navy Board during the second Anglo-Dutch war. Pepys was also responsible for a detailed remonstrance issued by the Duke of York in 1668 to the other members of the Navy Board, criticising the way in which they had neglected many aspects of the 1662 instructions (although the Clerk of the Acts was exonerated of all blame).¹⁵

ADMIRALTY COMMISSIONS, 1673–1689

James, Duke of York, converted to Roman Catholicism at some time during 1668–9. This became public knowledge within four years, and caused a political storm in an England, where a large part of the population was virulently anti-Catholic. The passing of a Test Act, removing Catholics from public office, necessitated the duke’s resignation as Lord High Admiral of England on 15 June 1673. Contrary to appearances, this did not constitute a revolution in the naval administration. Charles himself nominally replaced his younger brother as Lord High Admiral of England, and on 9 July a new Admiralty Commission was appointed to assist him, with Prince Rupert as ‘first lord’; but in practice, this was simply the existing Privy Council Committee of the Navy, reconstituted with the same personnel under a different name. Pepys moved from the Navy Board to become secretary to the ‘new’ body, but he served just as much as a personal naval secretary to the king. James continued to have a significant, but now unofficial, input into naval policy. This regime survived from 1673 to 1679 and oversaw some significant developments in naval policy, notably the start of an unprecedentedly large shipbuilding programme (the ‘thirty new ships’ authorised in 1677) and the introduction of a qualifying examination for lieutenants in 1677, one of the most important steps in the professionalisation of the officer corps. Throughout, though, the initiative was taken by the royal brothers, with Pepys acting as their executive agent and the Admiralty Commission in very much a subordinate role.¹⁶

The ‘Popish plot’ of 1678, an alleged Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and replace him with James, caused a political revolution that saw both the fall of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ that had sat since 1661 and the appointment (in May 1679) of a new Admiralty Commission consisting of opposition politicians with no previous experience of naval administration, notably Henry Capel (the new First Lord) and Sir Thomas Meres. Pepys resigned as secretary, and suffered a brief period of imprisonment in the Tower of London; he was replaced by his former clerk Thomas Hayter, but after only nine months in office Hayter was replaced by the markedly less competent John Brisbane. The king initially hoped to reserve many of the Admiralty’s powers to himself, leaving the commission as ‘window dressing’ to placate his opponents (as he did with the Privy Council), but he was soon forced to concede all the powers of a Lord High Admiral to the inexperienced commissioners. The Admiralty Commission of 1679–84 was damned by contemporaries and posterity alike, found guilty of incompetence, of failing to set out enough ships to protect English trade and of allowing the ‘thirty new ships’ to rot at their moorings. But most of these charges originated with Samuel Pepys, the commission’s bitterest critic. Pepys had an obvious vested interest in denigrating its performance, and mercilessly manipulated statistics in order to do so. In truth, the commission fought a valiant but unsuccessful rearguard action against a king determined to interfere in its affairs as often as he could, and against a Treasury tasked with imposing massive cuts in the budget of the largest spending department of the state, so that Charles II would not be forced to go to an obstreperous Parliament for money. Its track record on sending out warships to convoy trade, and on enforcing discipline in the officer corps, was actually rather better than Pepys’s own during his two stints as Admiralty secretary.¹⁷

Having successfully fought off a concerted parliamentary attempt to exclude his brother James from the succession, Charles II gradually reshaped the naval administration into a more amenable form. In 1681 the conservative Daniel Finch, soon to be Earl of Nottingham, became First Lord, and the political complexion of the commission was altered by the addition of like-minded courtiers and sea-officers such as Admirals Sir John Chicheley and Arthur Herbert. Finally, on 19 May 1684 Charles revoked the commission’s patent and took the Admiralty back into his own hands, with James resuming his position as de facto chief advisor in naval matters, and Pepys gaining the enhanced role of Secretary for Admiralty Affairs. James became king on Charles’s death (6 February 1685), and the vehemently loyal Parliament that met shortly afterwards voted substantial funds for the repair of the navy. To implement this programme, James and Pepys effectively suspended the existing structure of the Navy Board, replacing it with a special commission of five members ‘without portfolio’, tasked with spending £400,000 a year for three years. However, the old officers remained in place to settle the old accounts. Several of the new commissioners were former sea-officers who had previously served on the board, such as Sir John Berry and Sir John Narbrough; another was Pepys’s former servant and friend (and Robert Blackborne’s nephew), Will Hewer. The efficient Charles Sergison, formerly the chief clerk to the old board, became secretary of the new commission. By October 1688 the commission had completed its work, and at its dissolution the old structure of the board was restored. This change had barely taken effect before William of Orange’s invasion, and the flight of James II, ushered in another revolution in the naval administration. Pepys was the principal casualty, resigning in February 1689, and the Admiralty reverted to the sort of commission that had existed between 1679 and 1684, with some of the same personnel. This became the pattern for the Admiralty boards that survived until ultimately the department was subsumed into the Ministry of Defence in 1964.

The title page of Pepys’s only published work, the Memoires, intended to damn the record of the Admiralty commission of 1679-84 when measured against that of Pepys’s brainchild, the special commission of 1686-8.
(AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

OFFICES, CLERKS AND PAPERS

The Admiralty had no settled home until 1655, when it was established in Derby House. At the Restoration, the department was effectively wherever the Duke of York was (usually his apartment in Whitehall Palace), and there was no dedicated Admiralty secretary, as Blackborne had been; Coventry and his successors were first and foremost James’s personal secretaries, not officials of a department of state. In a sense, there was no ‘Admiralty’ at all: it ‘was a personal office, not an institution’.18 This blurring of the private and public roles of the Admiralty continued even after James left office in 1673. Meetings of the Admiralty Commission were held in several different locations, including the Treasury and Robes Chambers, the houses of various ministers and even at Newmarket.¹⁹ In 1673 the ‘department’ itself returned to Derby House, but in 1684 Pepys moved it to his own house in York Buildings, and when he left the Admiralty in 1689 he simply refused to move out, forcing the government to find alternative accommodation.²⁰ Pepys also insisted that some of the papers from his time in office were his personal property, generating a long and acrimonious correspondence with his successors.²¹ Throughout the period, the Admiralty’s ‘staff’ was minute: even in 1687, it consisted only of four clerks, a messenger and a doorkeeper.²²

The Navy Board’s establishment was larger, and it was also more settled geographically. It occupied part of the victualling site at Tower Hill until 1654, when it moved to a large house near the junction of Seething Lane and Crutched Friars. Here the members of the board both lived and worked, as Pepys’s diary records. This building was destroyed by fire on 29 January 1673; many of the records were lost, one of the reasons why many of the surviving runs of Navy Board papers at the National Archives begin only in that year. The board then occupied temporary quarters until 1684, when the new Wren-designed replacement was opened on the same site, opening onto Crutched Friars.²³ The navy treasury was on a different site, in Leadenhall Street from 1654 to 1664 and then in Broad Street.²⁴ The Navy Office had a reasonably large and settled staff, at least by the standards of the amorphous Admiralty. In 1660 each of the seven principal officers and commissioners was allocated two clerks, and more clerks were taken on before 1679, when a swingeing retrenchment took place (too swingeing, for many of the cutbacks soon had to be reversed). The board also employed a number of purveyors who handled the purchase of commodities (especially timber), a messenger, a housekeeper and a labourer.²⁵ The principal officers and commissioners had their own entrance and pew at the neighbouring St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, and it was there that Pepys buried his wife and was himself interred.

PARLIAMENT

For most of the period, Parliament had no direct or even indirect role in naval affairs; the navy fell within the crown’s prerogative powers, as did foreign policy as a whole. However, this situation was overturned in the 1650s. From 1649 to 1653 Parliament combined in itself the entire executive and legislative authority of the state, including, by definition, all the prerogatives of the defunct monarchy. There was something of a reversion to the old separation of powers under the Protectorate from 1653 to 1659, but Parliament resumed its direct authority over the navy during the confused period from 1659 to 1660. The restored monarchy resumed all its traditional prerogative powers, but in practice, Charles II continued to permit MPs a degree of scrutiny over naval affairs: after all, they voted the taxes to pay for it, especially in wartime, and were therefore entitled to some say in judging whether or not their money had been well spent. Parliament’s enquiry into the naval miscarriages of the second Anglo-Dutch war, conducted intermittently in 1667–8, was occasionally searching, if not always consistent or well managed, and it caused Pepys considerable angst, despite the undoubted impact of his great speech on 5 March 1668 in defence of the Navy Board’s conduct. A similar enquiry was held in 1673–4, and strenuous debates took place in 1675 and 1677 over the size, nature and very need for the massive building programme that was being proposed.26 Some of the most trenchant parliamentary critics of naval management were former Commonwealth MPs who could recall the days when Parliament itself controlled the navy: Colonel John Birch, whom Pepys once called ‘the high man that do examine and trouble everybody with his questions, served in most of the parliaments between 1646 and 1691.²⁷

The Palace of Whitehall, de facto centre of the naval administration for much of the period.
(© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

Additionally, some naval men became MPs, establishing a pattern which became increasingly common during the eighteenth century. Nineteen sea-officers served in the Commons between 1660 and 1690, and they were complemented by administrators like Pepys, who served for Castle Rising in 1673–9 and for Harwich in 1679 and 1685.²⁸ Some were elected for constituencies where the government’s influence was palpable. In addition to Harwich, which also elected the shipbuilder Sir Anthony Deane, these seats included Rochester, which elected Sir William Batten; Dover, which elected General-at-Sea Edward Montagu as well as Admirals Edward Spragge and Arthur Herbert; and Portsmouth, which elected Sir George Carteret, Sir John Kempthorne and Colonel George Legge (later Lord Dartmouth). Sir Robert Holmes, governor of the Isle of Wight, served as MP for the island seats of Newport and Yarmouth, and got his brother Sir John elected for Newtown.²⁹ Other ‘gentleman captains’ were elected for seats where their families had traditionally been influential; Sir Frescheville Holles served for Great Grimsby from 1667 to 1672, while Sir John Chicheley was elected for Newton, Lancashire, in every parliament from 1679 to 1691 thanks to his brother-in-law’s effective control of the seat.³⁰ Naval MPs were usually regarded as ‘lobby fodder’ for the court interest, although Sir Frescheville Holles became a vociferous critic of the administration in 1667–8.³¹

THE HIGH COURT OF ADMIRALTY, ‘VICE-ADMIRALS OF THE COAST’ AND PRIZE COMMISSIONS

Many naval men would have encountered the Admiralty court in prize cases, over which it had held jurisdiction as effectively the judicial arm of the Lord High Admiral’s authority since its foundation in the 1580s. Until about 1676 such cases were heard in a building at St Margaret’s Hill, Southwark, after which time the court moved to Doctors’ Commons. The court was also involved in other aspects of maritime affairs, notably the issuing of letters of marque and reprisal to privateers. The judges of the Admiralty court included some of the most successful civil lawyers of the day: Sir Leoline Jenkins, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, joined the court in 1665, became its judge in 1668, and eventually became Secretary of State. However, the court was swamped by the demands of war, and after the Restoration, too, there was considerable uncertainty about the extent of the Admiralty’s jurisdiction over prize vis-à-vis the monarch’s, ‘through the long intermission of any war at sea by his Majesty’s authority’ (the wars fought under Cromwell and the Commonwealth evidently did not count).32 Because of this, and thanks to expectations of an endless procession of Dutch prizes into English harbours, a powerful prize commission was appointed to handle the anticipated proceeds. This had essentially the same composition as the Privy Council’s Committee of the Navy, which in turn transmuted into the Admiralty Commission in 1673.³³

The Navy Office of 1682, as rebuilt by Christopher Wren.
(FROM A CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVING)

Since the Middle Ages, vice-admirals of the coast had been appointed for individual counties or regions. The system was re-established at the Restoration, and the posts were invariably given to important local magnates: the Earls of Derby in Lancashire, the Earl of Winchilsea in Kent, Viscount Castleton in Lincolnshire. Although they had no direct responsibility for naval operations or logistics, they held vague but extensive jurisdiction over wreck and prize cases in their localities, and in wartime the government provided them with quotas of seamen and used them as one of the methods for manning the fleet.³⁴ War also saw the delegation of prize powers to local sub-commissions, subordinate to the central prize commission and Admiralty court: in 1665 these were based at London, Hull, Newcastle, Dover, Portsmouth (from where it was moved to Cowes in 1666), Plymouth and Bristol.³⁵ The outbreak of war between England and France early in 1666 led to the estab-lishment of a new prize commission in the Channel Islands, and an influx of French prizes also seems to have been responsible for the establishment of an additional sub-commission at Southampton.³⁶

St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, the regular place of worship for the Navy Board and Samuel Pepys.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

SCOTLAND, IRELAND – AND FRANCE

Scotland remained an independent state, sharing only her monarch with England, and she retained a separate Admiralty jurisdiction. Since the 1590s the Dukes of Lennox, cousins of the Stuart kings, had been hereditary Lord Admirals, and in 1660 the position was inherited by the last of the line, Charles Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox. In practice, the ineffectual young duke’s role was limited to enforcing his perquisites from wrecks and prizes, although during the second Anglo-Dutch War he (or the Scots Privy Council, acting in his name) also issued many letters of marque to privateers.³⁷ The childless Richmond died suddenly in tragic-comic circumstances on December 1672: while serving as ambassador to Denmark, he accepted rather too much hospitality on a visiting British frigate, drunkenly missed his footing on the way down to his boat, fell into the bitterly cold sea, and died soon afterwards. James, Duke of York (and, in Scotland, of Albany), succeeded him and retained the position, along with that of Lord High Admiral of the Plantations, after he gave up the English Admiralty in 1673. He immediately brought Scottish prize practice more into line with English procedures and reasserted the prerogatives of the Scottish Lord Admiral, and in 1681 the corrupt and inefficient local vice-admiralties were effectively downgraded in favour of a central prize court at Edinburgh.³⁸

James was also Lord High Admiral of Ireland, though in practice local naval administration there was devolved to the Lord Deputy or Lord Lieutenant. For most of the Restoration period this was the formidable James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, who served as Lord Lieutenant in 1660–69 and 1677–88. When politics took him to London, Ormonde delegated the Irish government to his charismatic son Thomas, Earl of Ossory (1634–80), who built a European reputation as a soldier and sailor and in 1673 briefly commanded the entire English fleet. There was a small base at Kinsale, and a few small warships were based in Ireland on a permanent or semi-permanent basis under the operational control of Ormonde or his short-lived replacements. Ireland had also possessed its own admiralty court since the 1570s, alongwith a system of local ‘vice-admiralties of the coast’ for Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht. This set of structures had no clear relationship to the English Admiralty, nor, indeed, to other institutions in Ireland; consequently, one of the demands made by the rebel Confederation of Kilkenny in 1648 was for the creation of an Irish Lord Admiral with the same powers and rights as the existing holder of the equivalent office in England. This proposal was never implemented, and Ireland regained its peculiarly semi-detached admiralty in 1656.39 Nevertheless, ongoing disputes over prize jurisdiction in both Ireland and Scotland led to the establishment in 1672 of prize offices at Kinsale and Leith, subordinate to the English prize commission.

Although the naval administration in London was centralised and increasingly bureaucratic, it co-existed with archaic institutions and jurisdictions that harked back to the Middle Ages: even the Prince-Bishops of Durham claimed to be an entirely independent admiralty, although their claim got short shrift from Charles II. From 1660 to 1673 Duke James was also Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and governor of Portsmouth and Dover Castle, offices that gave him both very real military authority over key strategic points and, in the case of the wardenship, rather more vague admiralty rights over the eastern English Channel.⁴⁰ The Cinque Ports raised seamen under its own auspices throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars, and retained its independent prize jurisdiction until 1702.⁴¹ Meanwhile, in a breathtaking reassertion of claims to sovereignty over large parts of France that would not have displeased his predecessor King Henry V, James’s patent of appointment, ratified on 29 January 1661, also named him as Lord High Admiral of Normandy, Calais, Gascony and Aquitaine, and a further patent of 20 February 1662 added Dunkirk, barely nine months before Charles II (whose titles still included ‘King of France’, the legal basis for James’s appointments) sold the town to Louis XIV.⁴² This was not just quaint legalism, nor nostalgia for lost glories. When hostilities with the Dutch loomed and eventually broke out openly in 1664–5, James was able to use his splendid medieval titles to issue letters of marque and reprisal to local privateers from Dunkirk and Honfleur, a strategically astute act which threatened any Dutch shipping that attempted to run up or down the English Channel by hugging the neutral French coast.⁴³

OTHER INSTITUTIONS: VICTUALLING, ORDNANCE AND TRINITY HOUSE

For over a century, a discrete victualling office had served the needs of the navy. Based at Tower Hill, it was contracted out to individuals or consortia for most of the period, but in 1683 it was placed under the control of a salaried board, and this remained the pattern for the rest of the board’s life.* Unlike the victualling, the Board of Ordnance was entirely independent of the Navy Board (although it was sub-ordinated to the Admiralty during the 1650s), and had responsibility for supplying guns to both the army and the navy, as well as control of all fortifications (from 1667). Based at the Tower, the board was at the centre of a complex operation which included contracting for, testing and transporting guns and gunpowder from a variety of locations around the country.44 Although it was to survive as an independent entity until 1855, there had been criticism of the fact that the navy did not have control of its own ordnance, leading to delays, duplication and confusion, at least since 1639, and Sir Robert Slyngsbie, Charles II’s first Controller of the Navy, reiterated the charge in 1660.⁴⁵ The 1670s saw a tetchy dispute over precedence, with the master of the Ordnance claiming that the Admiralty should use the word ‘desire’ rather than ‘direct’ in its warrants to him (an argument that he won).⁴⁶ Nevertheless, in practice there was considerable overlap of personnel and sympathy of purpose between the Navy Board and the Ordnance. Sir Thomas Chicheley, master of the Ordnance from 1670 to 1679, was the father of a prominent naval officer who became a vice-admiral; George Legge, later Lord Dartmouth, succeeded his father as Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance in 1672 and also had a long naval career, culminating in his command of the fleet during William of Orange’s invasion (1688).

Dunkirk, briefly an English possession from 1658 and 1662, but a notorious den of privateers both before that time and after 1689.
(FROM AN ENGRAVING MADE IN 1712-13)

Another entirely independent institution that impacted directly on naval administration was Trinity House or, more accurately, the Trinity Houses of Dover, Hull, Newcastle and Deptford. Responsible for lights, buoys and pilotage around England’s coast, it also certified the competence of naval masters, assisted in recruitment, and sometimes provided a source of expert advice on such matters as the ‘sovereignty of the sea’, coastal defence and the hiring or construction of warships.⁴⁷ Although the ruling bodies of the Deptford house, the Elder and Younger Brethren, continued to include a large number of captains who served exclusively in the merchant service, they also included many prominent naval officers and, increasingly, administrators and courtiers. Pepys was a Younger Brother from 1662 and eventually served as Master twice, in 1676–7 and 1685–6.⁴⁸Lord Dartmouth served as Master in 1683–5, and even a son of Charles II, the Duke of Grafton, held the office in 1682–3 after serving at sea for just two years and being elected Master at the age of nineteen.

OTHER INSTITUTIONS: THE COMMISSION FOR THE SICK AND WOUNDED AND THE CHATHAM CHEST

When the first Anglo-Dutch war broke out in 1652, England had not fought one of its continental neighbours for a quarter of a century, and had not sustained large-scale naval campaigns over a period of several years since the 1590s. Moreover, wars against the Dutch, conducted primarily in the southern North Sea, shifted both the focus and the burdens of naval warfare much closer to London. This shift worked to the advantage of such institutions as the victualling board, but it also created new problems for the naval administration. Above all, it rapidly became clear that the casualties of warfare could not be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. In 1653 up to 1,000 wounded men were sent ashore at Ipswich, but many were rapidly moved out to neighbouring villages to reduce the burden on the town; as soon as possible, wagon trains moved the pathetic cargo along the roads through Colchester to the London hospitals. Consequently, the same year saw the establishment of a Commission for the Sick and Wounded, ‘the first organized attempt by England to ensure adequate medical aid for her sailors’.⁴⁹ Set up on 29 September, the new body consisted of four commissioners and fifteen subordinates. The commission arranged the distribution of wounded men, provided surgeons, co-ordinated the activities of local authorities, and disbursed money in the form of both gratuities and pensions.⁵⁰ The commission also had responsibility for prisoners of war.* The Spanish war on which Cromwell embarked in 1654 petered out before the Restoration, and with it the need for the commission, although it was never formally dissolved. It was re-established in October 1664, additionally took over responsibility for prisoners of war in Ireland, and moved into the Star Chamber of Westminster Palace after the Great Fire of London. The new commissioners, appointed on salaries of £300 a year, included Colonel Bullen Reymes, the rising politician Sir Thomas Clifford and the diarist John Evelyn, whose work for the commission brought him into contact with Samuel Pepys for the first time, thereby beginning their long friendship.⁵¹ Hamstrung by a lack of money and suitable accommodation for its charges, the commission nevertheless built up a reputation for caring and diligence; Reymes even paid some nurses out of his own pocket.⁵² The board was dissolved in 1674 but was revived at the beginning of subsequent wars. The Sick and Hurt Board, as it became known, survived until 1806.⁵³

Naval veterans and their families could call on a number of different sources of relief, but the most established and most exclusively naval was the Chatham Chest. Set up in 1590 in the aftermath of the Armada campaign and funded by compulsory deductions from seamen’s pay, the fund was kept quite literally in a chest at Chatham, and was administered by a governing body drawn from the warrant officers of the First and Second-Rate ships laid up in ordinary. The outgoings of the Chest fell away after the end of the Spanish war in 1604, but then rose again as a consequence of the Anglo-Dutch wars: in 1617 the Chest provided for forty-one pensioners at a cost of £182 per annum, but by 1656 there were 442 pensioners costing £2,124, and by 1676 885 pensioners costing £5,725.⁵⁴ The Chest was poorly administered, and rumours of corruption were always rife. In the 1650s a merger with the Commission for the Sick and Wounded was mooted, and from 1662 to 1664 Pepys sat on a commission of enquiry into the maladministration of the Chest, but the system survived both these attacks and the pressures generated by the long wars of the eighteenth century. It lasted until 1803, when it was merged with Greenwich Hospital, the great institution founded in 1694 as a more comprehensive response to the attrition of naval warfare than any of the piecemeal procedures that were in place in the period 1649–89.

* A detailed description of naval victualling, and the role of the victualling office, is given in Part Nine, Chapter 40.

* See Part Six, Chapter 24, pp132-3.