First to Third Rates
THE FIRST ANGLO-DUTCH WAR saw the adoption of the‘line of battle’ as the tactic of choice for the British fleet. Ships capable of fighting in this way eventually became known as ‘ships of the line’, though this familiar term did not enter general usage until the eighteenth century. Throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars, and indeed well into the 1700s, British battle-lines consisted of ships of the Fourth Rate and above, originally including Fourth Rate hired merchantmen. Fifth and Sixth Rates were excluded from the line. The size and armament of the smallest ships in the line gradually increased over the years. At the battle of Gabbard in June 1653, ninety of the 101 ships in the British fleet carried fewer than fifty guns, the equivalent of the armament of a Fourth Rate in later years; sixty-two mounted fewer than forty, and many of those had only thirty.1 Some with thirty-four guns were still so employed in the actions of 1666, but the minimum size of Fourth Rates rose to about forty-two guns in the third war (1672–4). After the third Anglo-Dutch war it became rare for ships with fewer than forty-eight guns to feature in the line of battle. Nevertheless, Fourth Rates of forty-eight guns, continued to take their place in the line, even after 1689 when France, with its fleet of ships that were significantly larger than their Dutch counterparts, became the enemy. As late as the battle of Barfleur in 1692, twelve of the fifty-six English ships that took fought in the line of battle were Fourth Rates.
An unidentified two-decker of the Third Rate, before the wind.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
Increasingly, though, the fleet came to be dominated by the largest rates. In 1660 the thirty First to Third rates constituted some 22 per cent of the total number of rated ships, but by 1688 the fifty-nine First to Third rates constituted 45 per cent of the total, and forty-eight of them had been built since 1660. Conversely, only ten Fourth Rates, nine Fifths and eight Sixths were built between the Restoration and 1688.2 Ships also grew larger as kings and shipwrights sought to improve their sailing qualities while simultaneously increasing the number of guns that they carried. A Third Rate of the 1650s had a burden of some 700–800 tons and carried around sixty guns; those of the 1670s had a burden of over 1,000 tons and carried seventy. These statistics reflect both the change in the nature of warfare at sea and the priorities of the royal brothers Charles and James, who wanted big ships that could both give and take punishment in the line of battle, and could act as suitably impressive symbols of their authority. James believed that the Dutch would always be able to set out more ships, particularly ships equivalent in size to Fourth Rates, and that Britain’s advantage had to be ‘that few of [the king’s] ships shall carry greater force than greater numbers of theirs’.3 These attitudes were shared (or copied) by Pepys, who was convinced by the mid-1670s that the navy had more than enough Fourth Rates. It needed a certain number of First Rates, he admitted, as these could give and take punishment better than any other class (and were particularly useful for scaring the French), but on the whole Pepys had become an enthusiast for Second Rates. They were easier to man and cheaper to run than First Rates, but their three decks made them equally ‘terrible to the enemy’, particularly the Dutch, who could not build such large ships.4
The three-deck First and Second rates were intended for summer operations alone, and for relatively short cruises in home waters. For one thing, they were expensive to maintain and to man; First Rates in wartime carried eight hundred men, and the total expense of commissioning just one of them for six months (including wages, victuals and wear and tear) came to well over £12,000.5 More importantly, though, they were not designed or intended to withstand winter weather, so the ‘great ships’ were sent to sea only in March or April and were usually paid off by the end of August. Ignoring this dictum, even by a matter of days, could be dangerous. The Second Rate St Andrew was driven ashore at Rye and wrecked by a gale on 3 September 1666, and twenty-five years later to the day, the new Second Rate Coronation foundered in a storm as she approached Plymouth. Consequently, the more stable, faster and manoeuvrable two-deck Third Rates became the workhorses of the navy. Although they carried two-thirds to three-quarters of the number of guns on a First Rate, they needed just half the number of men, and consequently cost only just over half as much to maintain at sea.6 Twenty-two of the fifty-four British ships at the battle of the Texel in August 1673 were Third Rates, and at Barfleur in 1692 they formed exactly half of a fleet of fifty-six. Third Rates could stay out through the winter and were thus used as the flagships of small squadrons, of larger fleets in the Mediterranean, or often as individual escorts for convoys. Not surprisingly, therefore, twenty of the ‘thirty new ships’ built en bloc from 1677 onwards were of the Third Rate.
The Prince of 1610, painted by Isaac Sailmaker and shown here as she was in 1663, just three years before her loss in the Four Days’ Battle.
(TRINITY HOUSE)
FIRST RATES
The republic inherited two large First Rates from King Charles I. The Prince, originally known as the Prince Royal, had been built in 1610 as England’s first three-decked warship. She had been rebuilt in 1641, and by the 1650s she carried some eighty-eight guns. Renamed Resolution by the new regime, she served as the fleet flagship during several of the major engagements of the first Anglo-Dutch war. She reverted to her original name at the Restoration and was rebuilt yet again in 1663, but ran aground and was burned by the Dutch during the Four Days’ Battle of 1666. The shock of her loss was as palpable as that felt at the sinking of the Hood in 1941 or hms Sheffield in 1982; Charles II’s Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, claimed that her loss ‘touched every heart in the fleet, for she was the best ship ever built, and like a castle on the sea’.7 The second great ship was the Sovereign of the Seas, Charles I’s mighty prestige symbol, which had been built in 1637. The first English warship to carry over a hundred guns, she was also far and away the most expensive, costing some £65,000 (including her guns). Fantastically decorated, with her carvings coated in real gilt, she cost more in both absolute and relative terms than any ship for another 120 years. She was known as the Sovereign in the 1650s but became the Royal Sovereign at the Restoration. The battle record of the great ship had an unpromising start. In her first fight, at the Kentish Knock in 1652, she ran aground, and the guns with which she had been provided proved to have an embarrassingly short range; she languished in port for almost all of the rest of the war. After being rebuilt in 1659, she was devastatingly effective in the St James’s Day Fight of 1666 and then fought with distinction in all the battles of the third war. Although Prince Rupert commanded the fleet from her decks in 1673, she was unpopular as a flagship because her accommodations for admirals and their ever-growing retinues were uncomfortable by the standards of later First Rates. Rebuilt again in 1685, she fought at Beachy Head and Barfleur (1692) but was accidentally burned at Chatham on 27 January 1696.8 The Royal Sovereign of 1701 was theoretically a rebuild of the charred hull, but this fiction fooled almost no-one.9
The sternpiece of the Royal Charles at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)
The Commonwealth’s first new First Rate, the Naseby, was built at Woolwich in 1655. With her figurehead showed Oliver Cromwell trampling six nations under foot, she was just as much a propaganda statement for the republican regime as the Sovereign had been for the king’s. Her finest moment came in May 1660, when she sailed to the Netherlands to bring back the restored King Charles II and was immediately renamed Royal Charles. She served as the fleet flagship throughout the second Anglo-Dutch war, but was captured by the Dutch on 12 June 1667 as she lay at anchor in the Medway. Towed back to Holland, she was put on display at Rotterdam, but was eventually sold and broken up in 1673. Her sternpiece is still prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.10 The Naseby was followed by the Richard, named after Cromwell’s son and built at Woolwich in 1658. Capable of carrying up to eighty-two guns, she was initially classed as a Second Rate, but she was re-rated as a First at the Restoration, when she was renamed Royal James. She fought in the battles of 1665 and 1666 but was burned during the Dutch attack on the Medway; made a hulk at Woolwich, she was broken up there in 1669.11
Eight more First Rates were built under King Charles II, no fewer than six of them in a remarkable flurry of construction between 1667 and 1673 that must have been intended partly to avenge the humiliation of the Medway raid. The Charles of 1668 (renamed St George in 1687) was comparatively small for a First Rate, as was the St Michael, built at Portsmouth in 1669 and initially classed as a Second Rate. The St Michael was crammed with up to ninety-eight guns, though most of these were short and relatively lightweight. She was made a First Rate in 1672 because she had enough cabin space to serve as a flagship; she reverted to the Second Rate in 1689. The London of 1670 was built out of the remains of the Second Rate Loyal London, one of the ships burned at Chatham three years earlier.12 Her exact contemporary was the St Andrew, built at Woolwich and begun during the second war, though work on her proceeded very slowly for several years.13 All of these ships would have been regarded as horrifyingly overgunned by eighteenth-century standards; but their seventeenth-century owners were careful to employ them only in home waters in summer, and they put their tremendous firepower to good use in many battles. All survived to be rebuilt in the 1700s.
The third First Rate to emerge in 1670 was a new Prince, built as a gift from the nobility of the kingdom to replace the great ship of the same name lost in 1666, but she was narrower than her contemporaries and had to be girdled because of serious stability problems. Nevertheless, she served in the battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war and memorably fought off sustained Dutch attacks at the battle of the Texel (11 August 1673). She was renamed Royal William in 1692, and some have claimed that as such she lasted into the nineteenth century.* A new Royal James was launched in 1671, and early reports suggested she was an outstanding ship, but she was destroyed by a Dutch fireship during the battle of Solebay on 28 May 1672. The Royal Charles of 1673 was the first British warship to have stern galleries, but she, too, proved to be unstable, and until girdled she was unable to use her lower deck guns in action.14 Even so, she survived a great repair, a rebuilding and three changes of name before finally being broken up in 1767. Yet another Royal James was launched in 1675. She was shorter and broader than the Royal Charles and carried lighter guns. Apparently quite successful, she was renamed Victory in 1691 and fought at Barfleur the next year.
In 1649 the navy possessed twelve ships that could be classed as Second Rates, all built between 1617 and 1634 (although in theory at least the Rainbow and Vanguard were even older ships, dating from the 1580s and subsequently rebuilt). These were small by later standards; in 1649 they mounted as few as forty guns, and even after the Restoration they carried only sixty to seventy-four guns. The old Second Rates had three decks, but did not have a complete tier of gunports on the upper deck. Except in the Triumph, they were not fitted with forecastles in order to conserve topweight.15 Most of the old seconds saw much action, although three were lost in the 1650s and another three in 1666–7; the Triumph, Rainbow and Victory fought in almost all the battles of the wars, while the Unicorn was with Blake at Santa Cruz. The Victory was so extensively rebuilt at Chatham in 1665–6 that she effectively occupied much of the yard’s workforce for much of the war, precluding the construction of large new ships there. She subsequently carried eighty guns, and survived until 1691.16 Several others were reclassified as Third Rates in the 1670s, and the last survivor, the St George of 1622, was still afloat as late as 1697.17 (Like the St Andrew, the St George temporarily lost her saintly prefix during the 1650s, when the iconoclastic‘Puritan’ regimes preferred to name them the Andrew and George.) Three new Second Rates, together with the rapidly re-rated Richard, were built under the Commonwealth, but these all had unfortunate careers. In 1665 the London was destroyed by a massive internal explosion that killed about 300 of her crew, including many wives and children who had come aboard to see off their loved ones, as well as a large part of the extended family of her embarked admiral, Sir John Lawson.18 The Swiftsure was captured by the Dutch in the following year, and the Henry, originally built as the Dunbar, was burned at her moorings in 1682.19
The restored monarchy built its first two Second Rates in 1664. Although the Royal Katherine had to be girdled owing to instability, she became a notably popular and successful ship which saw much action against the Dutch and the French. After rebuilding and renaming in 1706 as the navy’s first Ramillies, to commemorate Marlborough’s great victory of that year, she survived until 1741; but her much admired contemporary Royal Oak was one of the vessels burned by the Dutch in the Medway in 1667. The same fate befell the short-lived Loyal London, built in 1666 to replace the ship blown up the year before (her name was changed by the king to reward the City’s generosity in funding a replacement).20 With the St Michael of 1669 soon being reclassified as a First Rate, no new Second Rates proper were built until the ‘thirty ships’ programme began in 1677. However, an unexpected addition to the ranks of the navy’s Second Rates came in the form of the French Ruby. She had been built at Brest in 1664 as the Rubis, but was captured off Cap Gris Nez on 18 September 1666 when she strayed into the middle of the British White squadron, having mistaken its ensigns for the white standard of the Bourbons (her captors were even more bemused when they discovered that her master gunner was an Englishman).21 It was characteristic of the two navies’ different approaches to naval warfare that she mounted only forty guns when captured (though fitted for fifty-four), mounted as far from the waterline as possible; by 1672 her new owners had crammed her with eighty, which made her ride as low in the water as her English-built fellows. She became a hulk at Portsmouth after suffering storm damage in 1682, and was broken up in 1712.
The First Rate Charles of 1668. She was renamed St George in 1687 and was rebuilt in 1701.
(WILLEM VAN DE VELDE THE YOUNGER; FRANK FOX COLLECTION)
THIRD RATES
In 1649 the Commonwealth launched its first new-build ship. The Speaker, built at Woolwich, proved to be one of the seminal warships of the seventeenth century. At first known as a ‘great frigate’, she became the model for all subsequent two-decked ships of the line. Renamed Mary at the Restoration, she survived no fewer than fourteen fleet actions in the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-French wars – more than any other ship in the history of the navy – only to be wrecked on the Goodwin Sands by the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703. The Speaker/Mary was followed by another fourteen Commonwealth Third Rates, all but one of which survived to the Restoration, while the older Lion was rebuilt. These ships initially carried some fifty guns, but after the Restoration most of them were fitted with between fifty-eight and sixty-two, albeit of lighter calibres.22 Between 1666 and 1668 Charles II’s navy built seven new Thirds. The king himself intervened to increase the beam of two of them, and although all were designed for sixty-four guns, the largest mounted seventy to seventy-four by the 1670s. Four new Thirds were built in 1673–5. Of these, the broad and powerfully armed Royal Oak in particular, and to a lesser extent the Swiftsure and Harwich, seem to have been influenced by French ships that impressed the king and British officers during the campaigns of 1672–3.23 Several foreign prizes were classified as Third Rates, but these had only the briefest of careers under their new flag. Four impressive ships of sixty to seventy guns were taken from the Dutch in 1665 (three of them captured East Indiamen), but three were sunk as blockships in the Thames in 1667 and the other was made a hulk in the same year.
THE ‘THIRTY NEW SHIPS’
In the mid-1670s Pepys and other members of the administration became increasingly alarmed at the navy’s numerical inferiority to the French and Dutch. In 1665, Charles II’s fleet had contained 102 major ships, compared with eighty-one Dutch and thirty-six French; ten years later, the picture had changed alarmingly (see table).
COMPARISON OF THE BRITISH, FRENCH AND DUTCH FLEETS PRESENTED BY PEPYS TO PARLIAMENT, APRIL 1675
The staggering size and speed of the French construction programme fed in to alarm over Louis XIV’s stridently aggressive and acquisitive foreign policies. Worse, it was clear that the existing fleet was in a poor state of repair following the third Anglo-Dutch war; Sir Anthony Deane estimated that twenty-one ships, mostly of the larger rates, required either complete rebuilding or great repairs, and it was not at all clear that the dockyards could cope with such a workload. At least twenty new ships of the First to Third rates were required, and the number soon rose to thirty.24 At first, it proved impossible to convince Parliament of the extent of the problem and of the need to vote huge sums of money for the building programme necessary to remedy it. MPs were deeply suspicious of what they saw as a crypto-Catholic, Francophile court, and Pepys was shouted down in the parliamentary sessions of 1675. One backbencher protested that ‘ships must have been built of gold at these rates’, and like many critics of defence spending in later years, he grumbled that much of the naval budget was actually being spent on the salaries of bureaucrats. Another warned that they should ‘not provide here such a number of ships, as not to come here again’.25 However, the year 1676, when Parliament did not sit, saw a series of stunning French naval successes in the Mediterranean, which proved conclusively that Louis’s fleet was not the paper tiger that some MPs had complacently assumed it to be.26 When Parliament reconvened in February 1677, the mood was decisively different. ‘The king of France’s great fleet is not built to take Vienna’, one MP observed presciently, and on 5 March Parliament voted £600,000 to build one First Rate of 1,400 tons, nine Second Rates of 1,100 and twenty Thirds of 900.27 The king believed that these dimensions were smaller than the French equivalents and ordered an increase in size, to be funded from his own purse.28 In the end, the First Rate Britannia emerged at over 1,600 tons, all of the Thirds bar one at over 1,000.
A model dating from the Commonwealth period – possibly the earliest known – and consistent in gunport arrangement and dimensions with the ‘great frigates’ Speaker and Fairfax of 1650; they were originally designed for 50 guns, with the quarterdeck unarmed. This very old photograph shows the model as it appeared in the early 1900s (with eighteenth-century rigging), before it suffered a regrettable restoration which considerably changed its appearance. The model is now displayed at the US Naval Academy Museum.
(FRANK FOX COLLECTION)
The unprecedented scale of the building programme, conducted at the same time as an extensive refurbishment of the existing fleet, placed massive strains on the infrastructure of the entire country. New supplies of wood were sought in previously untouched estates and forests throughout the British Isles,* and large amounts were brought in from the Baltic. Despite Charles II’s determination to build all the ships ‘in house’, it soon became apparent that the main royal dockyards could not build all of the ships within the time-frame specified by Parliament (two years), so seven Thirds were contracted out to private yards, six on the Thames and one at Bristol. The small and moribund dockyard at Harwich was reactivated to build two of the Seconds and to utilise large untapped supplies of timber in Suffolk. Weekly progress reports were sent in to the Admiralty, while the king took a keen personal interest in the whole project.
However, progress slowed significantly after 1679. In that year, the Franco-Dutch war finally came to an end, removing the immediate strategic imperative for the ships. At much the same time, political crisis led to the downfall of Pepys and the appointment of a new Admiralty Commission, committed to retrenchment and very much subordinate to the Treasury, which was determined to rein in naval spending. Once the new ships were structurally complete, they were immediately laid up in ordinary, and their condition rapidly began to deteriorate. By the mid-1680s, both professionals and disinterested foreign visitors alike were commenting on their rotten state. The condition of the new ships was undoubtedly very bad, and Pepys subsequently used carefully selected evidence to denounce his political opponents, the Admiralty Commission of 1679–84, for incompetence in allowing this to happen. In particular, he charged them with not ensuring the proper care and maintenance of the hulls.* The commission, in turn, accused several of the shipwrights of building the ships too quickly, and of using too much foreign timber of poor quality.29 Its argument centred on the fact that once oak timber arrived in the yards, it was normal practice for it to be left in the open air for at least two or three years to dry the sap. This process was known as seasoning, and building ships too quickly, from wood that had not been allowed to season, was a guaranteed recipe for rapid decay. The political pressure to build the thirty ships as quickly as possible, frequently using new and previously untried sources of wood rather than supplies that had been stockpiled and seasoned in the yards for some time, suggests that the Admiralty Commission of 1679–84 had a point.30 Pepys vigorously denied that rapid building and the use of foreign timber were to blame, but he had been closely involved in laying down the original construction schedule and sourcing the timber for the ships, so it was clearly in his interests to divert the blame onto his successors in office.
THE SHIPS OF THE PROGRAMME
The largest of the ‘thirty new ships’ was also the last First Rate to be built in Charles II’s reign. The Britannia, launched at Chatham in 1682, was exceptionally beamy, but had too little draught, so that the massive weight of her armament turned her into a ‘top heavy slug’.31 This was discovered only at her first commissioning in 1691, whereupon she was promptly girdled. Although she fought with distinction as the fleet flagship at Barfleur in 1692, she continued to give trouble and lasted only until 1715. The programme included nine Second Rates, though the last of these, the Coronation, was not launched until 1685. These were much larger than earlier Second Rates; the gundeck was some ten feet longer than that on Seconds built in the 1660s, and the new ships were designed for ninety guns. The Second Rates of the programme finally saw service when the war against France commenced in 1689; eight of the nine were at the battle of Barfleur in 1692. Those that survived the war were all rebuilt, and in some cases renamed, during the reign of Queen Anne. Twenty of the ‘thirty new ships’ were Third Rates. These have been described as ‘among the best looking warships ever built’,32 although there were slight differences between them, particularly in the arrangement of the gunports. Smartly decorated and graceful, they became the mainstays of the fleet in the early years of the French war that commenced in 1689; sixteen of them were at Barfleur. Five were lost during the war, three by enemy action and two in accidents, and most of the survivors were rebuilt between 1695 and 1705.33
* See Part Thirteen, Chapter 55, p280.
* See Part Three, Chapter 9, pp69-70.
* See Part Three, Chapter 10, p72.