The Commissioned Officers: ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Tarpaulins’
ORIGINS
THE ‘GENTLEMAN VERSUS TARPAULIN’ controversy, which came to a head in this period, had its roots in earlier decades, and even earlier centuries. A ship was a complex and unpre-dictable structure, and moving it from one place to another required a high degree of technical skill. These simple facts seemed to demand ship’s officers who were imbued with the arts of seamanship and navigation, and had probably been bred to the sea from an early age. Almost by definition in the early modern age, such men were likely to be relatively low-born: ‘tarpaulins’, or professional seamen. There was no issue over this in merchant shipping, which was always almost exclusively a domain of tarpaulins. But warships were a very different matter. By the sixteenth century, they were increasingly perceived as potent symbols of the monarch’s authority; the grandeur of Henry VIII’s great ships, and Elizabeth I’s galleons, seemed to demand men of equally sumptuous status to command them. Moreover, warships were also becoming floating gun batteries, essentially royal castles afloat, and although any royal castle of the sixteenth century had its professional staff of gunners under a master gunner, it also had a captain who was often of considerable social standing. The Tudor monarchs therefore appointed many ‘gentleman’ captains to command their warships, and these often held prominent military commands as well. Sir George Carew, who captained and went down with the Mary Rose in 1545, was the son of a knight, raised in the service of the Marquess of Exeter, subsequently became an MP and sheriff of Devon, was captain of one of the forts defending Calais and had been a lieutenant-general of horse.1 The English captains who fought the Armada included one earl (Cumberland), three lords and seven knights, though the latter came from a mixed bag of social origins and included the likes of Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins.
Under the early Stuarts, naval commands were increasingly monopolised by gentlemen captains, confining the tarpaulins to warrant offices or to merchantmen. But there had been a change in the nature of the ‘gentlemen’; although Charles I’s Ship Money fleets of the 1630s were still commanded by great noblemen, such as the Earls of Northumberland and Lindsey, individual commands were bestowed chiefly on the younger sons of noble and gentry families, men like Henry Stradling, son of a Glamorgan baronet, and Robert Slyngsbie, son of Sir Guylford Slyngsbie, the controller of the navy (an office that Robert himself held, albeit briefly, in 1660–1).2 This aristocratic, Cavalier element was purged abruptly and almost completely from the navy in 1642, when Parliament gained control of the fleet. Its chief imperative in the appointment of captains was to select men who were both competent and held the ‘correct’ political and religious views. Consequently, over 100 merchant ship masters were recruited, and they were often given plum commands; the one and only naval command held by Nicholas Reed, an experienced master in the Levant trade, was the Sovereign, the nation’s greatest warship. During the second half of the 1650s, they were increasingly supplemented by men who had come up within the navy itself, having served as masters, boatswains or gunners (although Captain Nicholas Heaton worked his way up from unlikely beginnings as a trumpeter’s mate).3
Many of the officers appointed during the Interregnum had humble origins. Christopher Myngs, who went on to flag rank and a knighthood, was the son of a shoemaker and a hoyman’s daughter from the Norfolk village of Salthouse.4 But not all were similarly lowborn, and not all were professional seamen. Sir George Ayscue, a leading flag officer during the first Anglo-Dutch war, was the son of one of Charles I’s gentlemen of the bedchamber; he was also a godson of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury.5 Most of the generals-at-sea were from good families, and Blake, who was not, had been to Oxford, where he had nearly obtained a fellowship. Several of them had at least some maritime experience thanks to earlier mercantile service, which was more than could be said of some of the more junior officers brought in from the New Model Army, who were initially just as ignorant of the sea as some of the much-derided ‘gentleman officers’ of earlier and later times. Conversely, some of the tarpaulins were actually quite wealthy and substantial men, especially those like Reed of the Sovereign, who had been ship masters in the richer overseas trades. Others came from prominent families in their home towns, and either were the offspring of mayors or later became mayors themselves; Roger Cuttance, whom Pepys knew well as Montagu’s flag captain in 1659–60, was the son and nephew of mayors of Weymouth, and later served two terms in the same post.6 Even Myngs’s humble origins were not all they seemed, as both of his parents came from landowning families, and, in common with some politicians of more recent times, he may have deliberately exaggerated the lowliness of his background.7
Graffito of a seventeenth century ship (intriguingly, one flying Scottish colours) on a choir stall at Salthouse Church, Norfolk, where Christopher Myngs was baptised and worshipped during his youth.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)
A famous double portrait by Sir Peter Lely of Sir Robert Holmes and Sir Frescheville Holles, two archetypal roguish cavalier officers of the 1660s, who often clashed with Samuel Pepys. Holles is placed on the left to conceal the fact that he had lost his left arm in the Four Days’ battle of 1666.
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
THE RESTORATION: THE RETURN OF THE ‘GENTLEMAN CAPTAIN’
In 1660 Charles II and the Duke of York immediately faced the dilemma of reconciling the two different, and seemingly contradictory, appointment policies that had prevailed in the preceding decades. On the one hand, their personal inclinations undoubtedly favoured a reversion to ‘gentlemen captains’, and they also had to satisfy the demands of the surviving Cavaliers, both those who had served their father before 1642 and those who had served in the small Royalist fleet that served them in the years after the naval revolt of 1648. The most prominent of the former, such as Sir William Batten, Sir Robert Slyngsbie and his successor as controller, Sir John Mennes, were given posts on the Navy Board, where they became professional colleagues of the young Pepys and unwittingly provided him with much material for his diary (very little of it to their advantage). Younger men gained major seagoing commands: these included Thomas Allin of Lowestoft, the outspoken Richard Beach, the Irishmen Robert Holmes and Edward Spragge, and James Ley, third Earl of Marlborough, something of a ‘throwback’ to the Elizabethan tradition of peers serving at sea. A few men who had served in warrant posts, or had served in the Royalist armies, were also commissioned.8 But Charles and James had relatively few such men to call on, and in any case they did not wish to alienate the majority of Interregnum officers and their patrons, who included men directly responsible for the royal brothers’ return to England – notably George Monck, Duke of Albemarle and Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. Moreover, regardless of any doubts the Stuarts might have harboured over the true loyalties of the Interregnum officers, none could deny the proven fighting record of such men in the wars against the Dutch and Spanish. Consequently, although many of the more radical and irreconcilable elements were purged from the fleet in 1660, many others survived (and at least twenty of those originally removed were recalled in 1664–5); until the end of the second Anglo-Dutch war in 1667, they received the majority of the captains’ commissions that were available.9
In 1661 the Stuart brothers began commissioning young gentlemen with little or no previous seagoing experience into commands, and also instituted the system of sending young gentlemen to sea as ‘volunteers per order. They clearly intended that in the long term these men would become the backbone of a properly trained, unimpeachably Royalist officer corps. The first generations of ‘gentlemen captains’ and volunteers were mainly the younger sons of Cavalier aristocrats and gentlemen; they included sons of the Earls of Bristol and Winchilsea, while the first to gain a captaincy, Hugh Hide, was related to the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor and father-in-law of the Duke of York.10 But the ‘volunteers per order’ soon became a more diverse body. Above all, pages and other servants of great men were sent to sea in this way, regardless of their birth and merits. Critics of the ‘volunteer per order ‘system might have had a field day with the quota of four volunteers appointed to the Henrietta in 1685: the young men were pages to the king, the Duke of Grafton and the Lord Treasurer (the Earl of Rochester), as well as the nephew of one of the MPs for Westminster.11 Pepys’s friend and clerk Richard Gibson was vitriolic on the matter, condemning the ‘butterfly captains’ who were ‘sons of noblemen, brothers or kinsmen to bedchamber men, kinsmen to waiting gentlemen, pages etc sent to sea’.12 This dilution of the blue-blooded credentials of the ‘gentlemen captains’ meant that in practice, there was sometimes little difference in social status between a gentleman and a tarpaulin. Charles Royden, captain of the frigate Sweepstakes in 1677, was a scion of a minor gentry family from Denbighshire, but had followed a tarpaulin route to command. His lieutenant, George Aylmer, was the younger son of an impecunious Irish knight, but he had also been a page to the Earl of Arlington, and this had expedited his path into the navy as a gentleman. The two men fell out, with Aylmer accusing Royden of being a violent drunk; Royden quoted Aylmer as saying that ‘he was a better gent than any of the Roydens, I said admit it be true, yet I never was a footman’.13
As Royden’s career proved, tarpaulins were still able to rise to command during the Restoration period, but the opportunities available to them declined. Fewer came from the merchant service; John Kempthorne, a future flag officer and commissioner of the navy, had been master of ships in the Levant trade, but he was also the son of a Royalist officer who had fought under Prince Rupert, who was responsible for bringing Kempthorne into the navy in 1664.14 Former warrant officers still obtained commands and lieutenancies, especially in smaller ships when the fleet was expanded during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars, but these were often the only commissioned posts they held during their careers. Peter Bonamy had served as a petty officer and midshipman since the Île de Ré expedition in 1627 before he obtained command of a fireship in 1667; he commanded another in 1672–3, then served as a midshipman extraordinary, but never obtained another commission.15 A few went on to greater things, especially if luck or a prominent patron was on their side. The only seagoing commissions held by John Rogers, who had served as a master in the 1660s, were as captain of the Second Rate Unicorn and second captain of the First Rate Royal Charles. John Berry was about twenty-nine years old and serving as boatswain of a ketch in the West Indies in 1665, when he was elevated to her command by the governor of Jamaica, a kinsman of the Duke of Albemarle; Berry’s abilities rapidly became apparent, and by the time he died twenty-five years later, he was a knight, a vice-admiral and a commissioner of the navy, and owned substantial landed estates.16
As the careers of Berry, Cloudesley Shovell and others proved, it was still possible for ‘cabin boys’ to become admirals, but only just. In the 1690s Pepys’s friend Richard Gibson drew up a list of twenty men who had done so during his time in the navy, but only six of these obtained their first commissions after 1660. Commissioned posts were increasingly the preserve of gentlemen officers: during the second Anglo-Dutch war, two-thirds of the commands in First to Third rates, and over four-fifths of the commands in Fourth and Fifth rates, went to Interregnum officers and tarpaulins, but during Pepys’s second term as Admiralty secretary, from 1684 to 1688, well over half the commands in the largest rates, and two-thirds of those in Fourth and Fifth rates, went to ‘gentlemen’.17 The tipping point had come in the years 1665–74, when many of the surviving captains of the Interregnum and their patrons (notably Albemarle, Sandwich and Penn) passed away, partly through natural causes and partly because of the shocking attrition rates among commissioned officers during the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars. With their passing, the issue of political balance that had dominated the appointment of officers since 1660 simply became redundant. Moreover, Sir William Coventry, who had vigorously opposed the pretensions of‘gentlemen captains’, resigned as secretary to the Lord High Admiral in 1667, and was replaced by men who favoured their appointment; by the time Pepys became secretary in 1673, it was too late to reverse the trend.18
George Legge, Lord Dartmouth, a gentleman captain who rose to command despite having very little seagoing experience.
(© TRUSTEES OF THEBRITISH MUSEUM)
‘GENTLEMEN VERSUS TARPAULINS’
The quarrel between Captain Royden and Lieutenant Aylmer suggests that the ‘gentleman-tarpaulin’ issue was not necessarily grounded in social status, and by the 1670s it was no longer primarily political. The Royden-Aylmer dispute was largely about manners and competition for places. Tarpaulins like Royden were accused of being ill-mannered, too familiar with their crews, and lacking in the honour to be suitable representatives of the king and country; writing at much the same time, the tarpaulin Captain Thomas Harman expressed the opinion that his kind were losing opportunities for commands because they tended to be drunken and poorly behaved. ‘We now live in an age that a tarpaulin bred is thought fitter by some as companion for a porter than a gent,’ he wrote, ‘and more fit for a master or boatswain than a commander’.19 On the other hand, gentlemen like Aylmer were accused of using their powerful contacts to monopolise commissions, of acting in an arrogant, overbearing manner, and – most important of all – of not knowing the seaman’s trade well enough.20 There was also a strong element of competition between generations. Tarpaulins were invariably much older than gentlemen; Royden was at least in his late forties, Aylmer probably no more than thirty. Many of the former merchant ship masters drawn into the navy during the 1640s had been relatively advanced in years. William Goodson was forty-four when he gained his first naval command, while Richard Haddock became a vice-admiral in 1652 at the age of seventy. The picture changed in the 1650s, when the fleet was expanded and it became possible for much younger men to gain commands,21 but throughout, it remained the case that officers who worked their way up from warrant posts naturally took much longer to reach commissioned rank. After the Restoration, tarpaulins attained their first commands on average at the age of about thirty-nine; gentlemen captains were twenty-five.22
The charge that gentlemen were unfit to command at sea was an obvious one to make, and in many cases it was perfectly true. In the 1660s many officers were promoted beyond their competence far too quickly, with predictable consequences. The loss of the Pembroke in Torbay in 1667, following a collision with the Fairfax, was attributed to the ignorance of her young gentleman captain, George Legge, who was making what was probably only his third voyage to sea and had been in command of her for five weeks.23 Legge later regretted his lack of initial training, and became an enthusiastic advocate of Pepys’s attempts to reform the profession.24 However, some of his contemporaries became competent ship-handlers quite rapidly. In 1668 only the quick thinking of the twenty-three-year-old Captain Francis Digby, an earl’s son, effectively saved an entire squadron from being wrecked in fog on the North African coast.25 The introduction of the qualifying examination for lieutenants in 1677 was intended to create a consistent standard, and although many commentators from the 1660s through to the 1700s attempted to cast the ‘gentleman-tarpaulin’ issue in terms of the political disputes of their own times, it was increasingly difficult to do so on grounds of professional competence.26
THE ‘GENTLEMAN–TARPAULIN’ CONTROVERSY AND SAMUEL PEPYS
The ‘gentleman-tarpaulin’ issue became something of an obsession with Pepys himself, both throughout his professional service in the navy and in retirement. However, Pepys tended always to view the matter in the light of the prejudices he acquired during the ‘diary period’, primarily from his early mentor Sir William Coventry, who was markedly hostile to gentlemen captains. On 29 June 1667 Coventry complained to Pepys of
the having of gentleman captains, who discourage all tarpaulins and have given out that they would in a little time bring it to that pass that a tarpaulin should not dare to aspire to more than to be a bosun or gunner … it is notorious, even to his bearing of great ill will at court, that he hath been the opposer of gentlemen-captains … he hath always told the gentlemen-captains his opinion of them; and that himself, who had now served to the business of the sea six or seven years, should know a little, and as much as them that had never almost been at sea; and that yet he found himself fitter to be a Bishop or Pope than to be a sea-commander, and so indeed he is.27
Other influences on the impressionable Pepys were rather less obvious: they included ‘Dirty Bessy’, the notoriously coarse Duchess of Albemarle, who ‘cried out mightily against the having of gentlemen captains with feathers and ribbands, and wished the king would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea-captains that he served with formerly, that would make their ships swim with blood, though they could not make legs as captains nowadays can’.28 Pepys took a rather more balanced view, and understood the reasons why Charles and James wished to employ gentleman captains, but in later years he never really grasped that many of the issues underpinning the ‘gentleman-tarpaulin’ controversy had changed significantly since the 1660s.
As Admiralty secretary from 1673 to 1679 and from 1684 to 1688, Pepys was responsible for enforcing compliance with the General Instructions to Captains, but his attempts to do so brought much opprobrium upon him. Above all, many gentleman captains believed that their attendance at court or in London society took precedence over fitting out their ships, and resented the secretary’s attempts to crack down on these unofficial spells of leave.29 In this respect, as in many others, Pepys’s attempts to hold gentlemen captains to their duty generated a considerable amount of resentment against him and his fellow administrators. Always jealous of their exaggerated sense of personal honour, gentlemen frequently clashed with the resident commissioners in the dockyards and their subordinates, with the Navy Board and with Pepys, who was, after all, merely the son of a tailor, a fact that his critics often raked up.30 Moreover, the officers knew that they could often appeal successfully over Pepys’s head. Charles and James Stuart wanted to attract officers of good breeding into the navy, but the royal brothers knew full well that the rates of pay and other conditions of service alone were unlikely to do so. They often intervened to reduce or revoke the punishments of officers who had failed to comply with the regulations, and they often colluded with the officers’ wishes to exploit the ‘perquisites’ available to them.31 Above all, they freely granted ‘good voyages’ to favoured captains on Mediterranean duty, which permitted the fortunate officers to enrich themselves from carrying bullion aboard their ships.*
Tangier, the ‘playground’ of a tight-knit group of naval and army officers during the 1670s and early 1680s; a contemporary study of the town by Wenceslaus Hollar.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
THE CREATION OF A NAVAL PROFESSION?
Particularly after the Restoration, the navy was riven by bitter faction-fighting. In addition to the ongoing issue of gentlemen and tarpaulins, the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars witnessed feuding between clients of prominent admirals, notably the Dukes of York and Albemarle, Prince Rupert and the Earl of Sandwich, accompanied by accusations of cowardice and incompetence, by duels and resignations. Although not quite on the same scale, a similar power struggle for the prizes of patronage and promotion took place in the Mediterranean fleet during the late 1670s and early 1680s.32 Yet for all that, a recognisably professional officer corps emerged during the same period. This was partly a result of reforms introduced by the administration, for several of which Pepys was directly responsible; these included the lieutenants’ examination, building on the earlier introduction of‘volunteers per order’, the introduction of half pay and the evolution of the concept of promotion by seniority. The navy was larger than it had been before, but demand for places still far outran supply. It was no longer enough for aspiring officers to rely on the word of their patrons, as they might be contending against men with equally good connections, so proving oneself more competent than the competition became a vital asset. Many ships stayed at sea for longer periods than before, particularly in the Mediterranean (where most of the navy’s operational ships were deployed between 1674 and 1688), and prolonged service with each other undoubtedly created strong bonds of friendship and professional solidarity between many captains; the close-knit group known as the ‘Tangerines’, the captains who served at Tangier and in the Mediterranean from 1679 to 1682, became the basis of the conspiracy of the fleet on behalf of William of Orange in 1688.* The shared experience of battle during wars against the Dutch, the Spanish and the corsairs over the course of forty years must also have helped to create a sense of solidarity.
The single most powerful force that gave naval officers a sense of belonging to a unified profession was the all-pervading notion of honour. Many gentlemen captains came from well-born families, with highly developed notions of their own and the king’s honour,33 and these attitudes could be readily accommodated within a navy that Charles and James saw both as their principal weapon of war and as the most impressive symbol of their royal authority. Many officers took a particular interest in the appearance of their ships and sought to enhance their decoration, and almost all were determined to uphold the proper ‘salutes to the flag’ that were demanded officially by the General Instructions and unofficially by their own sense of themselves as the chief defenders of the nation’s dignity at sea. To the sea-officers, ‘honour’ provided a personal connection between themselves, the monarch and, from 1660 to 1673, the monarch’s brother, the Lord High Admiral, who commanded and fought alongside them. This was reflected in the easy access to Charles and James that even relatively junior officers enjoyed. A solicitant for a boatswain’s place was able to attend the king in person and secure his warrant, while in 1682 an important change in the composition of the Admiralty Board was decided in a private conversation between Charles II and one of the most junior captains in the navy. Despite the fact that both Charles and James clearly liked and valued Samuel Pepys, it was very difficult for the secretary to compete with the special bond that existed between the Stuart brothers and the men who would ultimately uphold their honour on the seas and fight their battles for them.34
Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, who commanded at sea during the third Anglo-Dutch war before distinguishing himself in land service in Flanders.
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)
John Leake was one of comparatively few tarpaulins who rose to the very highest ranks. After going to sea as a child under his father, a master gunner, he followed the same path and served as gunner of several ships, as well as making several merchant voyages. He gained his first command, a bomb vessel, in 1688, and his gallantry at the battle of Bantry Bay (May 1689) led to his promotion to a frigate command. He eventually became a Rear Admiral in 1702, an Admiral in 1708, and ultimately commander-in-chief, a knight, senior commissioner of the Admiralty, MP for Rochester and Rear Admiral of Great Britain. Despite the distinction of his career, his grave at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, is virtually unknown and in a very poor condition (thanks in part to a disastrous ‘repair’ with concrete).
There were several negative manifestations of the officers’ obsession with honour; they include vanity, duelling, a pedantic insistence on correct etiquette and an exalted opinion of their own status, which led to frequent clashes with other authorities ranging from masters-attendant of dockyards to colonial governors and foreign admirals. But some were already prepared to argue that even tarpaulins became men of honour, and perhaps even‘officers and gentlemen’, once they accepted the king’s commission.35 Charles and James knighted many naval officers as a way of encouraging good service, and the recipients included old Cavaliers (such as Allin, Holmes and Spragge), old republicans (Lawson, Myngs, Smith),‘gentlemen’ of good family (Berkeley, Holles, Strickland) and tarpaulins who were hardly of obvious knightly stock: the latter included John Berry (son of an impoverished Exmoor vicar) and Richard Munden, the son of a Chelsea ferryman, who was knighted for recapturing St Helena. As well as sharing high honours of state, many gentlemen and tarpaulins clearly got on very well together, and there are several examples of strong bonds of mutual respect building up between officers from very different social and professional backgrounds, notably that between the Earl of Ossory, heir to a dukedom, and John Narbrough, son of an obscure Norfolk labourer and a man who had been at sea for most of his life.36 The navy was a melting pot, with unique conditions and dangers, and it threw men from different strata of society together in ways that would have been simply inconceivable on land. Paradoxically, a sense of a unified profession also developed as a reaction against the administrative demands imposed by Pepys and his colleagues; gentlemen and tarpaulins were affected equally by, and often reacted with equal bemusement or hostility to, the burdens placed on them. Therefore, the gradual evolution of a nascent naval profession during this period can be attributed to a complex interaction of political, social, factional and professional factors, rather than to the actions of any individual or monarch.37
Perhaps the best evidence of all this is the fact that a naval captains’ club was formed in 1674. This initially consisted of roughly equal numbers of gentlemen and tarpaulin officers, under the stewardship of the former flag officer (and veteran tarpaulin) Sir John Kempthorne, who was also master of Trinity House at that time. It met every Tuesday at one at the Vulture, Cornhill; members paid a joining fee of three shillings and a weekly fee of six pence, a ‘pot’ which funded their activities until five, after which every man had to pay his own share. It probably did not survive for very long (Kempthorne moved to Portsmouth as commissioner in 1675, and died there in 1679), but the very fact that it existed at all is the best proof that many naval officers already regarded themselves as part of a single, united profession, in which distinctions between gentlemen and tarpaulins were increasingly irrelevant.38
* See Part Four, Chapter 16, p105.
* See Part Thirteen, Chapter 53, pp271-2.