The Navy, Naval Warfare and the British People
A NATIONAL INDUSTRY
IN THE LATTER PART of the seventeenth century, the navy was not confined to London, the Thames and the dockyard towns, and entirely alien to the rest of the country. Certainly, the navy was manned largely from the Thames, the east coast, the fisheries and the merchant trades; it was based largely in the Medway and the Thames; and simple geography dictated that much of the naval warfare of the age, or at least the main fleet actions against the Dutch, took place in the southern North Sea. But the impact of the navy, especially in wartime, was felt, directly or indirectly, throughout the British Isles. For one thing, the navy was far and away the largest industry in the country. The dockyards, especially Chatham, greatly outdid in scale every other enterprise in Britain, but as with any large industry in any age, the centre of production stood at the heart of elaborate webs of contractors and sub-contractors that extended the navy’s reach far inland. Trees were felled for the navy in Bedfordshire, Sussex, Surrey, Norfolk, Suffolk, Waltham Forest, Sherwood Forest, the New Forest, the Forest of Dean and many other British woodlands.1 Canvas came from Lincolnshire.2 The likes of George Sitwell of Renishaw in Derbyshire manufactured iron shot for the navy, sending it to Hull for trans-shipment.3 Guns were manufactured largely in Sussex and the Weald of Kent.* Gunpowder came from the Lea valley in Essex, where the Waltham Abbey mills were founded in 1664, and from Chilworth in Surrey, where extensive new works were established in the 1650s.4 Contractors could do very well out of the demands of the navy, especially in wartime. The Chilworth contractors made over £3,400 during the second Anglo-Dutch war.5 Henry Whistler, sole supplier of flags to the navy, made some £8,500 during the third war alone,6 but the sums paid to the great timber contractors dwarfed this: in 1670 Sir William Warren was said by Pepys to be holding, or to be owed, bills of imprest from the crown worth over £55,000.7
Ultimately, though, warships are only the vehicles by which men get to sea to fight, and the navy’s manpower, too, was astonishing by the standards of the age. Warships at sea contained about 3,000–4,000 men each year in peacetime, making the navy afloat larger than 90 per cent of British towns. In wartime, the navy often employed well over 20,000 men; on 1 September 1672, 238 ships were in service, and these were manned by 29,154 men.8 This made the navy afloat on that day comfortably larger than any contemporary British town or city except London and Norwich. The provision of food and drink to this floating leviathan was one of the most complex (and expensive) tasks that the early modern state undertook, and this, too, was not simply a metropolitan operation centred entirely on London. In both war and peace, victualling stores had to be maintained at Kinsale, Dublin, Milford Haven and Plymouth for ships operating to the westward, and in wartime other victualling stores were maintained at Ipswich, Dover, Hull, Newcastle, Yarmouth and Bristol. When the fleet moved away from the Thames and Medway during the Dutch wars, victuals had to be shipped after it by sea or acquired locally in the hinterlands of its preferred anchorages, usually Southwold Bay or Bridlington Bay, to the advantage of many a Suffolk or Yorkshire farmer.9
A NATIONAL EMPLOYER
The fact that the navy drew in men from all over the British Isles, including inland areas, Ireland and nominally independent Scotland, can be adduced from the fates of some of those who failed to survive unscathed through the brutal naval wars of the period. Those who claimed bounty for slain or wounded seamen in the third Anglo-Dutch war included widows or mothers from Galway, Melksham in Wiltshire, Gedington in Northamptonshire, Great Ayton in Yorkshire, Llanelli in Carmarthenshire and Westray in Orkney. The deaths of soldiers who had been serving at sea brought grief to households as far apart as Kidderminster, Wigan and Wexford. Three widows from Bo’ness on the Firth of Forth, whose husbands were killed in three separate battles during 1672–3, seem to have gone to London together to claim the entitlement due to them and the eight children that they had between them; at the Admiralty, they may have encountered Widow Howard, from Ballymena, County Antrim, who was on a similar quest on behalf of herself and her five small children.10 A little later, six Devon widows spent over two months in London hoping to obtain relief from the Navy Board, ‘so that they have spent all they can make shift for, and are now ready to pawn the clothes off their backs, while they fear their children are ready to starve in the streets’.11
The remains of‘Osborne’s Redoubt’ on Holy Island.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)
Naval warfare inevitably generated a pathetic legacy of sick and maimed men. Coastal communities like Ipswich bore the brunt initially, but men soon moved on from there to return, if they could, to their home towns and villages. Many of those who survived would have been familiar sights in their communities for decades afterwards, often reliant for support on the funds provided by charities, the counties or the navy’s own source of relief, the Chatham Chest. John Bostock lost his right leg three inches above the knee in 1666, but had to wait fifteen years for an almsman’s place at Rochester Cathedral.12 Nicholas Kitching of Bovey Tracey in Devon came back from the third Anglo-Dutch war with wounds in his back and right knee; he never worked again, and thus became dependent on the charity of his parish and his county. His fellow Devonian John Spry lost the use of both his legs in the same war, and had to spend all his pay to get home to Buckland-in-the-Moor.13 By the 1670s about half of the men receiving relief from the Chatham Chest lived in the London area, but others lived as far afield as York, Worcester, Liverpool, Scotland, Ireland and Virginia.14
Like the ships at sea, the dockyards, too, sucked in workers from all over the country, and at the end of a war they invariably spat them out again to fend for themselves. Preference was given to retaining local men, and in 1674 some of those who came from further afield, and found themselves summarily dismissed, petitioned in protest, stating that they ‘were pressed men [who] do live at Bristol, Newcastle and other remote parts and have wives and great charges on families, whose wants cry loud in their ears’.15 The navy also provided work for many shipwrights and tradesmen who lived far from the dockyards and naval warfare. The unprecedentedly rapid expansion of the navy after 1649, and the scale of the subsequent Anglo-Dutch wars, created intolerable pressures on the dockyards and the private building yards along the Thames. Consequently, ships were built for the navy in Southampton and Shoreham on the south coast, Bristol and Lydney in the west and Yarmouth, Woodbridge, Walberswick and Maldon in the east.16 In 1673 a contract was agreed for the building of four frigates in Ireland (at Waterford), but the end of the Anglo-Dutch war shortly afterwards led to the cancellation of the project.17
A NATIONAL BULWARK
The Anglo-Dutch wars were fought almost exclusively at sea, but even so, movements of troops, and their billeting in comparatively peaceful areas, would have brought some sense of conflict to unlikely quarters of the British Isles. In the autumn of 1673 Lord Northampton’s regiment was quartered on the coast of Norfolk to defend against any putative Dutch invasion, and subsequently marched to Gravesend via overnight stops at Walsingham, Swaffham, Thetford and several towns in Suffolk and Essex; similar scenes were played out throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars on inland roads and in towns far from the sea.18 Of course, the Dutch never invaded, but the constant threat that they might terrified communities around the British Isles, a panic in which the government often shared. The Dutch victory at Dungeness in December 1652 prompted immediate reinforcement of the coasts of Hampshire, Sussex, Kent and the Isle of Wight, but this was not enough to prevent a brief Dutch landing during which the English state lost the sum total of several dozen sheep.19 In July 1666 the government ordered three general rendezvous of militia at Maidenhead, St Albans and Northampton in case the Dutch and their French allies attempted a full-scale invasion, but the muster was stood down at the end of the month to allow the men to return home for the harvest.20 On a more prosaic level, fear of invasion prompted Weymouth and Melcombe Regis to petition in 1665 for the replacement of the sixteen old guns that Queen Elizabeth I had sent them in the days of the Armada, and other coastal communities, from the Scilly Isles to Whitehaven and the Isle of Mull, also demanded better protection.21 New beacons were erected along the Norfolk coast in 1666, but there was more than a suspicion that the local authorities were exaggerating the danger to their coast as a means of getting out of their fair share of war taxation.22
Concerns that the Dutch might attempt to disrupt the collier fleets of the north-east as they assembled in the Tyne and Tees estuaries led to the construction in 1672–3 of Clifford’s Fort at North Shields and Osborne’s Redoubt on Holy Island. Meanwhile, the defence of Ireland was an issue in both war and peace. The Spanish invasion of 1601 was still just within living memory in 1649, when Cromwell’s army poured into Ireland to deal with the Catholic and Royalist threat that lingered there, and Ireland’s vulnerability to invasion was also admitted by the Restoration regime, even if it was not prepared to pay very much to put matters right. When Charles II found himself at war with both France and the Netherlands in 1666–7, his Irish authorities obsessed endlessly about the invasion they believed to be imminent, and made various half-hearted defensive measures to counter it; these included the stationing of a garrison on the remote Aran Islands in Galway Bay.23 This has some claim to be the most remote British locality affected directly by the warfare of the age, though it is run close by the construction of a fort at Lerwick in Shetland, which was built to deny the excellent harbour-of-refuge there to Dutch fishing fleets and merchantmen attempting to return home ‘northabout’ around the British Isles. Built in 1665 on the site of a fort erected during the first Anglo-Dutch war, it was taken and burned by the Dutch in 1673.
A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE
Privateering, the setting out of state-licensed private warships, provided another means by which individuals in many parts of Britain could contribute to the maritime war effort. During the first Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–4, privateers were set out by syndicates of merchants from London, Dover and Bristol, as well as by several officers of the New Model Army – the most well-known being Colonel George Joyce, who as a young cornet a few years earlier had notoriously seized King Charles I at gunpoint from Holdenby House.24 After the Restoration, privateering presented an even broader social spectrum across Britain with respectable opportunities for displaying patriotic fervour, ideally by enriching oneself in the process. Owners during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars included men from Northumberland, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire, Carmarthenshire and Cornwall, as well as a consortium of Thames shipwrights. Individual backers of privateering ventures included a haberdasher, a clockmaker, two distillers, a blacksmith and Samuel Pepys, esquire, Clerk of the Acts, who invested in the not wholly successful cruises of the Flying Greyhound.25 Elspeth Browne was one of the owners of the Scottish privateer Margaret, while Anne and Mary Powlet received letters of marque and reprisal (authorising them to fit out a privateer) to avenge their dead husbands and reclaim some of the £21,000 of losses that the Dutch had allegedly cost them.26 Several other women had equally proactive roles in naval warfare. In 1653 Joan Chudleigh was running her late husband’s shipwright’s business at Kinsale and giving the navy estimates for the repair of its warships; Mary Harrison was a ship painter at Portsmouth for over twenty years from 1676. Margaret Browne was the chief supplier of lead to the yard at Deptford in 1659, while in later years ‘widow Braman’ was the lockmaker at Deptford, and Martha Bradford and ‘Widow Evans’ were borne on the books of Chatham yard as, respectively, the keeper and water-carrier of the payhouse.27
A NATIONAL BURDEN
Days of humiliation and prayer for the success of the navy preceded each campaign of the Anglo-Dutch wars, and were enforced in every parish church in the land; victories, real, pyrrhic or imaginary, were celebrated with bonfires, sermons and drunkenness throughout the country. In 1665 the victory in the battle of Lowestoft was marked in this way throughout Charles II’s three kingdoms: a sixty-one-gun salute was fired from the wharf at the Tower of London, while at Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin a ‘thronged congregation’ celebrated with three hours of‘Halellujahs for His Majesty’s unparalleled success by sea’.28 Such displays were not simply celebrations of naval success. They were also carefully stage-managed political propaganda, intended to hearten the loyal and dishearten the disloyal. Britain fought all three Dutch wars with a substantial dissident minority within its borders, the Royalists in the first war, disgruntled republicans and nonconformists in the second and third. Unsurprisingly, a connection between success or failure at sea and rebellion on land was immediately apparent to contemporaries. The Dutch victory at the battle of Dungeness in December 1652 gave fresh impetus to the Cavaliers. The dour old Cavalier general Sir Marmaduke Langdale schemed to seize Newcastle and Tynemouth and hand them over to the Dutch as the price for their support of a restoration of the monarchy: in effect, a Geordie Gibraltar.29 The Pentland Rising in Scotland in 1667 was widely expected to be the prelude to a Dutch invasion; ships were sent to ply between Scotland and Ireland to prevent dissidents in both countries contacting each other.30
The perceived link between naval setbacks and political discontent was exacerbated by the unprecedented cost of the navy, in particular the great fleets set out in the Anglo-Dutch wars, which had an impact that was felt throughout Britain.31 Thanks partly to the ignorance of successive parliaments, which voted far too little money to meet the true costs of the navy, and (in the 1650s) partly to the need to satisfy the army’s demands first, the navy’s debts spiralled to over £2 million at the Restoration, and naval finance continued to stagger from one crisis to another in later years. Pepys’s diary and many other sources reveal a sorry tale of chaotic finances, unpaid creditors and fractious unpaid seamen.32 Raising even insufficient funds to meet these commitments meant falling back on a taxation system that was slow, cumbersome and virtually medieval in key respects, but in turn, that risked forfeiting the goodwill of taxpayers throughout the country. In 1665 the JPs of landlocked Derbyshire were ‘apprehensive of the vast charge of the navy’ and patriotically advanced three months’ money, despite their private cynicism that the king’s ministers would divert it ‘into their own purses’.33 In the following year, wartime taxation prompted riots in Hereford, Marlborough, St Neots, Hexham and the North Riding of Yorkshire.34 The city fathers of Chester, and even the Bishop of Chichester, dragged their feet and openly protested against the sums demanded of them.35 This resistance to taxation, the spiralling debts and the hordes of discontented creditors were a few of the many proofs that the state’s financial systems were inadequate to the demands of seventeenth-century warfare. It proved impossible to sustain any of the three Anglo-Dutch wars for more than two consecutive campaigns; even if the sums voted for a war were sufficient on paper, they rarely reached the Exchequer in time to pay for expenditure, so short-term loans had to fill the gap.36 The most substantial of these came from the City of London, which provided large loans secured upon the Hearth Tax, but this dependence on the capital came unstuck, partly because of the successive depredations of the Plague and the Great Fire, both of which seriously dislocated financial life in the capital, and partly because the Hearth Tax receipts proved inadequate to repay the loans.37 New methods of financing the naval wars had to be found, and there was a marked switch to indirect sources of taxation, especially customs and excise; the increasing dependence on excise duties, introduced initially to finance Parliament’s cause in the civil war, placed an unprecedented new burden of taxation on the lower orders of society.38
Meanwhile, the impact of war on seaborne trade brought depression to some towns, prosperity to others. In Sidmouth and Exmouth, so many of the local menfolk were pressed that their wives and children were thrown onto parish relief.39 Nearby Exeter, which depended heavily on Dutch and French markets, was hit badly in all three Anglo-Dutch wars.40 Conversely, Newcastle benefited. The vital coal trade down the east coast of England was desperately vulnerable to Dutch attack. If the trade was cut off or severely disrupted in winter, London would freeze, and the strategic and economic importance of the coals from Newcastle was widely recognised – not only by the scheming Sir Marmaduke Langdale, but above all by the coal merchants themselves, who seem to have exaggerated the dangers that they faced in order to indulge in some rampant profiteering.41 By April 1653 coal was costing £5–6 a chaldron in London (seven or eight times the usual price), the poor were said to be suffering, and worst of all, several brewers had stopped work because they could not light their fires.42 In 1667, when prices were at much the same level, one of Charles II’s ministers believed that lack of coal was contributing just as much as naval failure and lack of money to the humiliating peace that the king was forced to sign.43
A NATIONAL INSTITUTION
In 1672 differing accounts of the outcome of the battle of Solebay led to a violent argument in a grocer’s shop in Ludlow, Shropshire. Reports of naval events, and speculation on the progress and outcomes of naval wars, crop up regularly in the correspondence of aristocrats, gentlemen, merchants and less exalted folk throughout the British Isles.44 What the navy was, and what it did, was evidently not beyond the comprehension of very many British people. For one thing, even if they could not see the ships that sailed and fought on their behalf, they could sometimes hear them. The naval battles of the age were vast affairs, involving anything up to 200 ships, carrying thousands of large guns, spread out over many miles of sea. Most of the battles were fought in the confined, shallow waters of the southern North Sea. A relatively little-known consequence of this strategic and geographical reality is that in the late seventeenth century many people in south-east England actually heard the sounds of the wars in which they were engaged with a regularity and immediacy that would not be experienced again until 1914–18, when the great bombardments that preceded battles like the Somme could be heard clearly in London. In 1666 Charles II, the Duke of York and Pepys appropriately went out into St James’s Park to hear the gunfire from the St James’s Day fight. The Four Days’ Battle was heard clearly in Totternhoe, Bedfordshire, and in 1673 the sounds of naval battle were even reported at Lamport in Northamptonshire, over a hundred miles from the sea.45
Ultimately, a good case can be made for claiming that the navy was the first truly British institution, pre-dating the Act of Union of England and Scotland by many decades. Although Scotland and Ireland technically retained separate jurisdictions in naval matters, in practice they were subordinate to, and increasingly modelled on, the English pattern. Although only English and Welsh taxes actually paid to build and set out warships, the navy drew in men from all parts of the British Isles, and Scots, Irishmen and Welshmen all commanded ships for the Stuarts. The names that King Charles II, in particular, chose for his ships reflected this sense of a British national identity: they included the likes of Stirling Castle, Berwick, Saint Andrew, Saint Patrick and Saint David. The greatest ship launched in his reign, bearing the penultimate ship’s name that the king would choose, was the Britannia, a clear proof of the king’s attitude towards, and agenda for, the British navy that served him.
* See Part Three, Chapter 12, p82.