The Commonwealth 1649-1660

Among the many social and political developments which characterised the era of the Commonwealth the most interesting, to the naval student, is the sudden expansion of our maritime power and the extension of its field of action. There was no previous experience to justify our rulers in supposing that the drain in men and money necessary to the support of a great navy—equal to that of the combined powers of Europe—could be borne by a state already exhausted by civil war; and it may well be that, although the sequence of events showed the maintenance of such a force not to be beyond the national capacity, the strain on the national resources between 1649 and 1660 was a large factor in creating the popular discontent which welcomed the return of the Stewarts.

Under Charles I the pecuniary resources of the crown were unequal to the construction of ships during war time, while the launch of one, or at the most two, a year in the time of peace was thought to be sufficient cause for legitimate pride and congratulation: under the Commonwealth they were ordered by tens at the time, and in one year—1654—twenty-two new men-of-war left the slips, besides the hired merchantmen in pay and the numerous prizes fitted out for naval service. Under Charles the preparation of a single fleet for a peaceful summer cruise in the narrow seas necessitated a previous year of preparation, while the coasts were supposed to be sufficiently protected by the occasional presence of a few small vessels: under the Commonwealth, besides a powerful reserve kept in the Downs ready for immediate action, besides the numerous cruisers patrolling the coasts, we find for the first time that Mediterranean station which has played so great a part in English history occupied in force, a moderately strong West Indian squadron, and the small beginning of the North American station. The rulers of the Commonwealth only did, so far as home waters were concerned, what Charles vaguely desired to do with the Navy; but the wildest dreams of Charles never pictured the permanent Mediterranean and West Indian fleets.

It usually happens in statesmanship that administrative or executive development on any particular line is due rather to circumstances than intention, and the history of the republican Navy is an illustration of this rule. At the close of the civil war it was proposed to reduce the naval establishments, and measures were being already taken to that effect when the Rainsborow mutiny occurred. The escape of Rupert from Kinsale with the fleet, of which three of the revolted ships formed the nucleus, together with the encouragement his presence at sea gave to individual privateering, necessitated an immediate and large increase in the Navy, which then had to protect the trade routes as well as chase or blockade him. Rupert’s career made it obvious that the area of the civil war had widened, and that henceforth it would be the duty of the Navy to deal with the enemies of the republic at the circumference of the circle, its internal foes being helpless without aid from abroad. How little those in power anticipated the changes a few years were to effect in our maritime strength, and how doubtfully they regarded the means available to contend even with Rupert, they themselves frankly tell us. In June 1649 they congratulated themselves that they had a fleet at sea such as they scarcely hoped for or their enemies expected, but ‘how the Commonwealth will be able to continue the same in successive years is not easy to evidence.’ But the episode of Rupert was followed by the more expensive Dutch and Spanish wars, both of which required the existence of large fleets at sea and an ample reserve, and their sequel in the prolonged visits of Blake and his successor, Stokes, to the Mediterranean, from which we may date the reappearance of England as a European power.

The crucial difficulty of finance, which had wrecked the designs of Charles I, presented fewer obstacles to Parliament and the Protector. By means of the monthly assessments, delinquents’ compositions, sale of lands, excise, and other methods, the sum of £95,000,000 is declared to have been raised between 1642 and 1660. This gives an average of upwards of five and a quarter millions a year, against far less than a million a year raised by Charles, and, even allowing for the cost of the army and the debts incurred during the civil war, enables us to understand the comparative ease with which the heavy naval expenses were met at first by the government, and why outbreaks of discontent on the part of the men were few, and at once easily appeased by the payment of wages which had been allowed to become too long over-due. The financial system of the Commonwealth was reckless and improvident, inasmuch as it largely consisted in living on capital by the alienation of private or corporate property which, if confiscated, should have been held to the profit of the state; but probably no system of taxation alone could have met the demands of the army and Navy during those years. Not only the naval but every other branch of the administration was overwhelmed with debt in 1660.

By far the most important event of the interregnum was the Dutch War, since our success in that struggle shaped the future course of English commercial development and, in its results, caused English fleets to be henceforward influential factors in continental politics. Although the conditions were, in reality, not at all unequal, an attack made on the richest and greatest maritime power in the world by a nearly bankrupt state which, with the exception of the passable success of 1596, had failed in every important naval enterprise undertaken since 1588, and which in that year had only succeeded—so far as the fruits of victory were concerned—by the chance of wind and wave and the aid of the very nation now assailed, must have seemed to many contemporaries a more than hazardous venture. When success seemed to be definitely inclining towards this country, the Weekly Intelligencer of 7th June 1653 soberly remarked that ‘our generals ... were the first who have made it known that the Dutch are to be overcome by sea.’ The relative position of England and the United Provinces was very similar to that of England and France at present or recently—on the one hand a country with a great commerce and a great navy, but a navy which, in the nature of things, could only bear a percentage relation to the vast pecuniary interests it was required to protect and the extent of sea it was called upon to traverse; on the other a power which, with far less at stake commercially, had for years been expending on its naval establishments a sum which must have equalled or exceeded the total value of its merchant marine, whose fleets had been yearly increased, and whose seamen had been freshly trained by ten years of warfare. How ruinous the war was to Dutch commerce may be measured from the fact that between 27th July 1652 and 8th March 1653 Dutch prize goods were sold, probably much below the normal market values, for £208,655, 3s 11d. For Holland then, as would be the case for England now, it was not sufficient to merely hold her own, for anything short of absolute maritime supremacy is ruin to a nation whose existence depends on an unlimited carrying trade and the unchecked export and import of material. The Dutch did not hold their own, but their flag was by no means driven off the seas, and the Dutch navy certainly not incapable of further action, when the miseries undergone by a teeming population brought the republic to its knees in 1654.

Many circumstances and conditions coincided in weakening the position of the United Provinces. Their share in the thirty years’ war, being almost entirely confined to land operations, had resulted in attention being devoted to the army at the expense of the navy, which had seen little real service since the conclusion of the truce with Spain in 1609. The country was distressed by the economies rendered necessary by the heavy public debts, and was yet suffering from the results of a great commercial crisis experienced in 1646-7. While in England faction was, for the time, crushed, in Holland the attempts of the stadtholder William II in 1650 and 1651 to seize supreme power had given rise to personal and political animosities which had outlived their author, and which are said to have had a disastrous influence on the way some of the higher Dutch officers did their duty. But it was on the side of the personnel and administrative systems of the two countries that a comparison is so favourable to England. The naval organisation of the Dutch republic was directed by five distinct admiralty boards, each exercising separate control, preparing its own ships, appointing its own officers, and depending for co-ordinate action on the limited, and frequently disputed, authority of the states-general. As might have been expected, this system failed even to curb the Dunkirkers, from whom the Dutch suffered nearly as much as did the English.

Never, on the other hand, so far as administration was concerned, had England been better prepared for war. Instead of officials who, as in the preceding half-century, owed their posts to court influence, to purchase, or to seniority, the work was in the hands of men chosen for business aptitude and who, in most instances, had given proof of higher qualifications on the field of battle or in parliamentary committees. Of the latter class was the Admiralty Committee; but the Navy Commissioners, and especially those Commissioners in charge of the dockyards, on whom fell most of the duty of organisation, were officers who had been taught by actual warfare. Prompt, capable, honest, and energetic, sparing themselves neither in purse nor person, and frequently bringing religious fervour as a spur to their daily service, they conveyed to war on another element the same thoroughness and zeal which had made them victorious on land.

Victory in the civil war had only been gained when a weak and hesitating commercialism, scared at its own audacity, and longing for a settlement that would secure its own liberties at whatever sacrifices of the hopes and consciences of others, had been steel-edged by Puritan vigour. The men of that stern mental and moral creed were now in authority throughout the kingdom and wielding its resources. Pitted against a nation of lower ideals, sleekly prosperous, whose national genius had for years tended more and more to take the one groove of trade, unwrought and unpurified by the searchings of soul that all thinking Englishmen must have gone through in those years, all the spiritual elements of success were on the side of England.

Never, before or since, were the combatant branches of the Navy so well supported. As a rule our seamen have had to beat the enemy afloat in spite of the Admiralty ashore, but here they had every assistance that foresight and earnestness could give. As a result of the political troubles of 1650 and 1651 many of the oldest and most experienced of the Dutch captains had been dismissed as adherents of the house of Orange, and their places filled by men of whose cowardice and incapacity bitter complaints were made by their admirals. The English captains were officers practised by years of sea experience, or soldiers who brought their traditions of hard fighting to bear in a fresh field. The United Provinces had perhaps four times as many seamen as a reserve to draw upon; but, ill paid and ill fed, devoted to peaceful pursuits, and frequently discontented with the mercantile oligarchy governing them, the men, although once in action they fought well, did not give that almost enthusiastic service which characterised the Englishmen.

The news sheets of 1652-3 usually take the goodwill of the men for granted, and this silence is itself significant; but occasionally actual references are made, and these references, even if inventions, may be taken as indicative of the spirit with which the men were reputed to be imbued. They had for the Dutch that hatred their fathers felt for Spaniards, and, for the first time for many years, they found themselves well treated—comparatively punctually paid, properly clothed, well fed, cared for when sick or wounded, and promised advantages in the shape of prize money never previously allowed. What wonder they served the Commonwealth, during its earlier years, as the crown had never been served since the days of Elizabeth?

In number of ships England, even at the outbreak of the war, was not so ill-matched as has been supposed. ‘You never had such a fleet as in the Long Parliament,’ said Haselrig on one occasion, and political necessities had as yet prevented any decrease in the strength maintained up to 1648. During 1649-51 the magazines were kept well supplied and forty-one new ships were added to the Navy list, practically doubling its effective; besides these were the hired merchantmen in pay, or recently discharged, and manned by trained crews accustomed to work together. According to some accounts the Dutch navy had been allowed to fall to so low a number as fifty men-of-war, and, although merchantmen were taken into the service, their crews, hurriedly got together and new to their surroundings, were no match, so far as skill went, for their opponents. Throughout the war the Dutch, although they possessed many more ships, never succeeded in sending to sea any materially larger fleets than ours. Fifteen hundred prizes are said to have been taken from them during the war, a number at least double the whole ocean-going merchant marine of England. If they possessed more vessels a far larger proportion of them were unfit for battle, and if ours were slower under sail they were more solidly built and more heavily armed, advantages which told in days when tactics were elementary, and when, for the first time for a century, English seamen tried to fight yardarm to yardarm. Yet another circumstance was most fortunate for England; for a greater part of the year the prevailing winds gave us the weather-gage and the choice of attack. Dutch merchant fleets returning from the westward had to run the gauntlet of the south coast, and some of the most desperate actions of the war were fought on account of—and hampered by—considerations for the safety of these convoys. If they took the long and dangerous route round Scotland, they were still liable to capture when almost within sight of home. It will be seen, if these views are correct, that almost the sole advantage held by the United Provinces was one of finance, and that, although it might have caused political difficulties or revolt under a monarchy, had no immediate influence in a country held down by a victorious army.

Charles I fell, throughout his reign, into the error of supposing that, if ships and guns were provided, devotion to his person would ensure loyalty and spontaneous service on the part of the men. He found, in 1642, that seamen are not sentimental, and that their sense of duty drew them towards the best paymasters. That perception of their own best interests, which had impelled the Long Parliament throughout the civil war to treat the seamen liberally, had still stronger reasons for existence in the years following 1648 when the maintenance, possibly of the republic, certainly of peace at home, depended on the action of the fleet. Throughout the history of the Navy any improvement in the position of the man-of-war’s man is found to bear a direct relation to the momentary needs of the governing classes, and in 1649 the necessity of dealing with Rupert at once woke the tender conscience of the Council to some further improvements that might be made in his condition. Gibson, who was all through the war, says that ‘from the year 1641 the bread and beer was of the best for fineness and goodness;’ but fresh orders were issued by the Council of State to find out and prosecute any agents supplying victuals of bad quality. Hitherto Lent had been strictly kept, being pecuniarily advantageous to the crown as well as spiritually profitable to the men, although physically ‘of much discontent to them;’ in future its observance was to cease, as was also the abatement of food on Fridays, ‘being begotten by the covetous desires of the contractors for victuals, though coloured with specious pretence of abstinence and religion.’

Besides raising their pay the Council also desired that ‘all just satisfaction be given to seamen, and that they reap all the benefit of the act passed for their encouragement in distribution of prize goods,’ and expressed themselves as anxious to appoint persons acceptable to the men as commissioners of prize goods. The act referred to, passed in February 1649, amplified and fixed authoritatively the merely parliamentary resolution of October 1642, which gave the men, beyond their wages, one-third of the value of a prize. Directed especially at Rupert’s squadron and Stewart privateers, the new act gave the officers and men of a state’s or hired ship one-half the value of a man-of-war captured; the other half went to a fund for the relief of sick and wounded and the wives and children of those killed, while if the enemy was destroyed they were to be paid at the rate of from £12 to £20 a gun, according to the size of the pieces it had on board. The net proceeds, after condemnation in the Admiralty Court and sale of goods, of a merchantman taken by a man-of-war were to be divided into three parts, of which one went to the officers and men, one to the fund for sick and wounded, and one to the state. If the merchantman were prize to a hired ship in the state’s service, two-thirds went, as before, to the crew and the sick fund, but the remaining third was divided into two parts, of which one was taken by the owners of the ship, and the other by the state. The tenths which had formerly been a perquisite of the Lord Admiral were now to be devoted to rewards and medals; and owners of English ships recaptured from an enemy had to pay one-eighth of the value of vessel and cargo as salvage.

Doubtless both Parliament and the executive intended to work this enactment loyally, but the needs of the treasury overcame their good intentions, and the delay in the distribution of prize money was a chronic source of discontent. Therefore from 1st January 1653 a new scheme came into operation, which gave ten shillings a ton for every ton the prize, whether merchantman or man-of-war, measured, and £6, 13s 4d for every gun she carried; for every man-of-war destroyed, £10 a gun; and the Lord Admiral’s tenths were to be devoted to the sick and wounded and the relief of widows and orphans. These distributions were to be made by the collectors of prize goods three days after payment of wages, a regulation which must have savoured of irony to those who were waiting, sometimes years, for wages. For the moment, however, the sailor was considered in every possible way, and, in May, Blake and his colleagues were ordered always to exchange prisoners if possible, ‘as it will tend much to the satisfaction of the seamen when they see that care is had of them.’ Matters progressed smoothly enough till the Dutch war strained our finance desperately, and from 1648 till May 1653 there are but two instances of insubordination to be found.

When the Dutch war broke out the want of men was greater than the want of ships, and it was decided to press all seamen between fifteen and fifty years of age, a ticket being given to each man with his three halfpence a mile conduct money, specifying his physical appearance, and which he was called upon to present at the port where he joined his ship. Attempts were made to keep crews in the service by carrying forward thirty shillings of each man’s wages when he was paid off; but this, wrote the Navy Commissioners, caused ‘so much clamour and discontent that we are scarce able to stay in the office.’ Under James and Charles the men had been glad to get any pay at all, and they probably strongly objected to any proceeding which was by way of a return to old customs. Eventually, however, the government did this and more, for a couple of years later it was customary to keep three months’ pay in hand if the men were turned over to another ship.

A long step in advance towards the future discipline of the Navy was made in 1652, when, on 25th December, the House of Commons enacted the first articles of war to which the service had ever been subjected, and which were grounded on some regulations for the government of Warwick’s fleet passed by the House in March 1648-9. These articles have escaped the notice of writers upon naval law, who begin their history of the subject with those passed in 1661; these latter, however, were only based upon those previously existing, which are the groundwork of all subsequent modifications and additions experience has shown to be necessary down to the present day. They were thirty-nine in number, and, so far as paper penalties were concerned, were rigorous enough. No punishment was adjudged for the infraction of the first article relating to the due performance of divine service; and the thirty-ninth is only a vague reference to offences not mentioned in the preceding articles, and which were punishable according to the ‘laws and customs of the sea.’ Of the remaining thirty-seven thirteen carried the infliction of death unconditionally, and twelve that of death or lesser punishment, according to sentence of court-martial, or court of war, as it was then called.

The parliamentary bark seems to have been much more ferocious than its bite since, in all the numerous courts-martial mentioned in the State Papers and elsewhere, there is no instance to be found in which the death sentence was carried out, and very few in which it was pronounced. Moreover precautions were taken against the exercise of tyranny by inferior officers, inasmuch as the promulgation of the code was accompanied by an order that the accused was only to be tried for serious offences in the presence of a flag officer, and that no finding involving life or limb was to be carried out without the approval of the Generals or the senior officer in command; and as trifling charges were to be heard before the captain and seven officers of the ship in which the offence was committed the offender had a fair chance of an impartial trial. Very soon after the Restoration this regulation fell into abeyance and prisoners obtained justice—too often Jeddart—at the hands of the captain alone. Only one case of a really severe sentence on foremast men is to be found. In December 1653, in the middle of the war, six seamen of the Portland were found guilty of inciting to mutiny and were sentenced to death. This was commuted, so far as three were concerned, to thirty lashes apiece, and for the other three to stand one hour with their right hands nailed to the mainmast of the flagship with halters round their necks. There is no record of the infliction of such severe punishment by any other court-martial.

As might be expected in a mercantile community the thirty-fifth article, relating to convoy duty, was the longest and most explicit. Under Henry VIII, and later, convoy money had been a legal charge; recently it had become difficult to obtain convoy protection at all, and when given owners and captains had been exposed to vexatious and illegal demands. Now, any man-of-war captains not performing such duty thoroughly and efficiently, and defending ‘the ships and goods in their convoy without either diverting to other parts and occasions, or refusing or neglecting to fight in their defence if they be set upon or assailed, or running away cowardly, and submitting those in their convoy to peril and hazard,’ were to make good to the owners any pecuniary loss so caused. As, in the case of a valuable cargo and a penniless naval captain, such a sentence might be equivalent to escaping scot-free, death was also added as a possible punishment. Any captain or officer demanding or receiving a gratuity was to be cashiered. From 19th October 1649 the House had resolved that convoy should henceforth be provided without charge, and in 1650 the east coast fishermen were gratefully acknowledging the benefits resulting. Matters, however, did not progress altogether smoothly. Sometimes merchantmen were independent, and when the government provided men-of-war for the Mediterranean, would not ‘stay half a day’ to obtain their protection. But when the owners belonging to Poole, Weymouth, Dartmouth, and Plymouth united, nine months later, in begging for a stronger guard than usual to Newfoundland the Council recommended them to defer sending a fleet till next year, as a convoy could not be spared. From other papers the truth seems to have been that, although a vessel or two could have been found for the work, the Council desired to obtain for national purposes the men who would have manned the merchantmen.

The option of sailing with or without convoy was not always left to the discretion of owners. In February 1653 the Council sent orders to some of the eastern ports that no vessel was to sail without protection, for which preparations were being made; but in July the owners of three ships destined for the Mediterranean petitioned for leave to send them without the escort, which had been twice promised during sixteen months of delay, and of which there was still no sign. Criticism must take into account the fact that these things were happening during the strain of a great war and that under ordinary circumstances, or when merely at war with Spain, there was no want of promptness in the action of the authorities. On 25th February 1656 Hull petitions for a convoy, and on the 29th it is ordered; Newcastle on 10th February 1657 obtains an order the same day. In January 1660 twenty-five ships were on convoy duty, one being sent down to St Helena to meet the returning East Indiamen (this had been for some years customary), two to the Canaries, and four to the Mediterranean.

The articles of war seem in this generation to have troubled the sailors but little, since, in nearly every instance, we find officers the prisoners before the court. A court-martial would not enable the Treasurer to pay wages and prize money too long over-due, or silence men of whom one, who knew them well, said that they were ‘an unruly and untamed generation,’ and that he found ‘no hope to satisfy them without their full pay.’ But there are signs that, notwithstanding delays in payment, the men gave heartier obedience to the Commonwealth than they had given to the crown under similar circumstances. On one occasion 180 men were sent down to join the Fairfax, but, not finding their raw shipmates already on board to their liking, announced that they would not go to sea ‘to do those men and boys’ work for them.’ But instead of attempting to desert they betook themselves to other ships. Three months afterwards the Navy Commissioners received the welcome news that the men were coming in ‘cheerfully and in great numbers since the publication of the late encouragement to them,’ and from some places they were coming up as volunteers. From Dover and Deal came the information that the new arrangements were ‘much liked,’ and that the greater number of the men were willing to serve. Commissioner Peter Pett reported from Chatham that he found ‘the seamen in general to be very tractable and complying, and begin to attend to their duties handsomely.’

So far as wages were concerned, the encouragement spoken of related to the increased pay which took effect from 1st Jan. 1653. During the civil war the rate had been 19s a month; in the fleets sent against Rupert it had been raised to 25s for that particular service, and it was now to be 24s for able seamen (‘fit for helm and lead, top and yard’), 19s for ordinary, and 14s 3d for gromets, and 9s 6d for boys. Each man’s capacity was to be marked on his wages ticket when paid off, the first sign of the present discharge note. As a further inducement, by an order of 29th Jan. 1653, 20 men in first-, 16 in second-, 12 in third-, 8 in fourth-, 6 in fifth-, and 4 in sixth-rates were to be rated as midshipmen, with pay from £1, 10s to £2, 5s a month, according to the class of ship, and from 14th Dec. 1655 no one was to be so rated unless able to undertake an officer’s duties, if necessary. Of course the increase by the government caused a corresponding rise in merchant seamen’s wages; and at Ipswich, soon afterwards, the latter were so hard to come by as to be obtaining master’s pay.

It was estimated, although the number proved to be insufficient, that 16,000 men would be required in 1653, and many of these were untrained landsmen and boys, almost useless at sea. The remaining thousands needed were drawn from the ranks of the army. It has been suggested that soldiers were sent on board to keep the sailors in subjection, but, beyond the quite adequate explanation of a war demanding a larger number of men than the maritime population had ever before been called upon to supply, there is not the slightest trace of ill-feeling between soldiers and sailors such as would have inevitably occurred had the latter understood it as an attempt at intimidation. The expressed purpose was ‘to perform as far as they are able, all service as seamen, and to be ordered in like capacity as the rest;’ evidently they were expected to help in deck work and where no especial training was requisite. Altogether some 3000 or 4000 soldiers were sent on board the fleet; and it is significant of the different discipline, or the different spirit, animating the army and the Navy, that, although the new comers suffered the same vexations as the seamen in relation to postponed pay and prize money, in addition to the hardships peculiar to the sudden change in situation and duties, they do not appear to have troubled the executive with a single complaint beyond one meek remonstrance about the absence of hammocks.

The seamen appear to have decided that their duties began and ended on salt water. Captain Taylor, at Chatham, informed the Admiralty Commissioners that ships might be sent to sea in half the time and at one-third of the cost if the men could only be persuaded to help in their preparation; but ‘not one will help to get out ballast, or take it in, or do almost anything tending towards dispatch.’ Instead of working they haunted the beershops, which have always been the curse of their class. Bourne, the Commissioner at Harwich, had ‘the beginning of an ugly mutiny,’ attributable to drink; but Bourne eventually succeeded in putting down the alehouses at Harwich. At Plymouth vested interests were too strong for Hatsell, the agent there:—

The men come tippling ashore, and then march away in their mad fits.... The abominable strong drink brewed in this town is of more prejudice to the state and to the poor men than the heads of all the brewers and alehouse keepers here are worth.... The government here protest they cannot remedy it, as the brewers have grown so rich they contend with them at law.... This strong drink is from 26s to 28s a hogshead, and stronger than sack, and when a sailor has drunk one bowl of it it makes him half out of his wits.

Such a letter explains many of the so-called mutinies.

The system of payment, again, exposed the men to every temptation, since a ship might be a year or two at sea and no wages were given or expected until she was ordered in for repairs or laid up, the result being that when money was extraordinarily scarce cruisers were kept unnecessarily in commission to postpone the settling day. Money was sometimes borrowed when a squadron returned to port, and of £32,000 obtained in this manner in 1657, £10,200 was still owing in 1659. There are numerous expostulations from officers about their long over-due pay, but, read by themselves, these lamentations are sometimes apt to leave a wrong impression. Edward Larkin, for instance, gunner of the Mayflower, petitions in 1655 for two and a half years of his ‘dearly earned wages,’ of which he has only received six months; his wife and family are turned out of doors, his goods seized, and he himself arrested for debt. This, taken alone, appears to be a pathetic indictment of the ways of the administration, but here the corrective is supplied by another paper which is an account of stores embezzled by the said Edward Larkin.

There was more difficulty, so far as willingness was concerned, in manning the fleets during the war with Spain than during the Dutch war. The men feared tropical climates, and ‘are so afraid of being sent to the West Indies that they say they would as soon be hanged.’ Moreover as the years went by the Commonwealth did not pay more promptly. There is no sign, so far as their debates go, that Parliament, in improving the position of the men, had ever been moved by other than purely selfish motives, and it may have been felt that less now depended on the attitude of the Navy, or that there was less likelihood, under any provocation, of a serious outbreak. Slight ones frequently occurred and were invariably attributed, by the officers on the spot, to the non-payment of wages or prize-money, and were as invariably appeased when these claims were settled. Sometimes discontent was rather an excuse than a cause; when the crew of the Ruby refused to sail, alleging that they had no clothes and that the ship was defective, they were easily persuaded back to duty when withdrawn from the influence of their landladies, who ‘have been the greatest instruments to hinder their going on board.’ In the matter of prize money officers of high rank fared little better in dealing with the commissioners of prize goods. There are two letters on this subject addressed in August 1654 to the commissioners. The first is mild in tone; the second, signed by sixteen captains in the Downs, curtly points out that their prize money for the three last actions with the Dutch is still due and that unless it is immediately paid they will appeal to the Protector. If captains were compelled to combine and threaten we may imagine how the sailors raged vainly against official penury or inertia.

Poverty occasionally caused the prize money gained by one section of the naval force to be applied to the payment of wages due to another; in October 1655 Blake’s men were partly paid this way, and, vaguely, the deficiency thus made ‘to be supplied some other way.’ There are hints that the Admiralty Court itself was not above suspicion. Captain Kendal, of the Success, wrote, in April 1654, that sixteen months previously he had taken a Dutch ship, still uncondemned; ‘but I suppose the bribes do appear very large in the Admiralty Court,’ and, ‘I fear there hath been much corruption in the Admiralty Court.’

It is but fair, however, to the prize commissioners to notice that the difficulties of the position were not altogether due to themselves. In 1654 they wrote to the Admiralty Court stating that they had sold ships and goods to the value of £70,000, but could not keep the proceeds, because compelled to meet the sums charged upon them by the Council of State, notwithstanding the decrees of the Court ordering them to hold the money. Being uneasy about their position they desired security or indemnity. Another source of abuse was the custom by which crews were allowed to plunder a prize, on or above the gun deck, of all articles except arms, ammunition, and ship’s stores. English merchantmen recaptured from an enemy sometimes experienced more loss from the rescuer than from the original captor. The owners of the Sarah, recaptured by the Falmouth, found that while the enemy had done five pounds of damage the Englishmen had helped themselves to the value of £500, and five or six other ships were similarly treated.

While the majority of the men made protest against their wrongs in the useless and prejudicial form of riots, there seem to have been a thinking minority who were able to apply to their own situation the principles for which they had fought, and which had sent Charles to the block and Cromwell to Whitehall. These men drew up a petition to the Protector, which, before being forwarded, was considered, on 17th October 1654, by a council of two admirals and twenty-three commanding officers, held on board the Swiftsure in the Downs, at which it was decided that it was lawful for them to petition and that the grievances stated were real, except the one relating to foreign service. It was a sign of the times that admirals and captains should have acknowledged such a right in the ‘common sailor,’ and that they did not think themselves warranted in striking out the portion of which they disapproved; they decided that it should be ‘so far owned by us’ as to be presented to the Generals. The petition was as much a remonstrance as a prayer, and, after claiming that they had done the country good service and borne with hardship, sickness, and bad food for its sake, went on to remind the Protector that Parliament had declared its intention of enlarging the liberties of the people, ‘which we were in great hopes of.’ Their hopes have scarcely yet, so far as regards seamen, been realised, but it is expressive of the vast progress the events of a few years had caused in the political education and self-respect of a class hitherto proverbially debased and unreflecting, that constitutional declarations and logical applications of the principles their rulers suited to themselves should have begun to replace the hopeless, unhelpful turbulence of the last generation.

They seem to have objected to foreign service mainly because their families were left without support for a longer period than usual, and bitterly complained that, in accordance with a Council order of 6th Dec. 1652, they were not permitted to go on shore, nor visitors allowed to come on board, when in the Downs, and presumably other places, keeping them ‘under a degree of thraldom and bondage.’ This regulation was then new to them, but it remained in existence long enough to be one of the injustices the mutineers of 1797 desired to have redressed. The conclusion arrived at was a prayer that

they may be relieved in those grievances and may reap some fruits of all their bloodshed and hardships, and that they may not be imprested to serve, they humbly apprehending it to be inconsistent with the principles of Freedom and Liberty to force men to serve in military employments, either by sea or land; and that your petitioners may be as free as the Dutch seamen, against whom they have been such instruments in the Lord’s hands for the good of their country; but that if the Commonwealth have occasion to employ any of your petitioners they may be hired as the Dutch are, and that they, or their lawful attorney, may be paid every six months at the furthest, and that such other encouragement to their relations may be assured in case they are slain in the service as shall be agreeable to justice, etc., as their necessity calls for, and that all other liberties and privileges due to your petitioners as freemen of England may be granted and secured.

The Council of State must have felt that the world was indeed moving when English seamen called themselves freemen, demanded the rights of freemen, and no longer admitted prescription as sufficient reason for the continuance of their wrongs. The fact that there is no reference, printed or manuscript, to this petition does not, of course, prove that it was not considered and replied to, but it is certain that if any promises were made not the slightest practical result followed them. There is a paper assigned to this date which may have had an indirect connection with the affair. It is a report from the Admiralty to the Protector and Council dilating on the state of the naval administration and the difficulties with which they had to deal. Every sentence of their long narrative has reference to the want of money, and may be abstracted into the one particular that while £8000 a week was allowed to the Admiralty the victualling and stores absorbed more than this amount, leaving nothing for wages and other expenses.

Notwithstanding these embarrassments favourite captains and handy ships seem to have had no difficulty in obtaining crews. Referring to the Speaker and the Hind, an official writes: ‘Men have been on board seven or eight days in hopes of being entered, which I have refused to do, having had very much trouble to reduce them to their complement.’ The Sapphire, when commanded by Heaton, was another vessel in which men were eager to serve, and to such purpose that out of 84 prizes brought into Plymouth between August 1652 and December 1655 twenty were taken by her.

The death of Cromwell, and the intrigues which followed that event, intensified the disorder existing in naval affairs, but even before September 1658 the strong hand which had kept some sort of order seems to have been losing its grip. In July the Commissioners of the Admiralty told the Council that ‘the credit of your Navy is so greatly impaired that, having occasion to buy some necessary provisions, as tallow and the like, your ministers can obtain none but for ready money,’ and they complained that out of the customs and excise, nominally set apart for the Navy, half was diverted to the army, £2000 a week to the Protector, and judges’ and other salaries taken from it. The navy debt on 1st July was returned at £573,474, and of this £286,000 was due for wages, so that we can understand why some crews had been for two and three years unpaid. Yet the succession of Richard Cromwell was well received by the fleet in the Downs, and the officers and crews of vessels on outlying stations, such as the Paradox at Milford and Assurance at Scarborough, hastened to announce their satisfaction. When Montagu wrote to Stokes, commanding in the Mediterranean, for signatures to an address promising fidelity to Richard, only one officer of that squadron, Captain Saunders, of the Torrington, manifested any hesitation about signing it.

In their address to the new Protector the officers of the fleet, in expressing their affection for the memory of Oliver, speak of ‘the indulgence he showed to us who served him in his fleet’; but, unless they were alluding to the higher scale of pay and the arrangements, to be presently noticed, made for the care of the sick and wounded, one or both of which may or may not have been owing to his initiative, it is difficult to divine what indulgences they had to be especially grateful to him for. By June 1659 there was owing for wages £371,930, and it may be imagined that if the men, whom it was important to conciliate, remained unpaid, merchants supplying stores, victualling agents, and dockyard workmen fared still worse. In September the crew of the Marmaduke solicited some redress; they said they were abused by their officers, cheated of their victuals and pinch-gut money, and had to go begging about the streets, ‘scoffed and jeered at by other nations.’ On 1st February 1660 the wages debt was £354,000, some ships having been four years unpaid, and these figures, the correlatives of which existed in every other branch of the administration, form the best explanation of the equanimity with which the Restoration was viewed by the seamen and others who may have seen in the return of Charles II their only chance of payment.

Under the Commonwealth occurs the earliest attempt to afford the men some of that attention to which, when ill or wounded, they were entitled. The arrangements made in 1649 and 1652, although sufficient for ordinary needs, were inadequate to the necessities of the Dutch war; and the State was compelled to supplement the existing resources for the relief of disabled men, and to provide additional aid for widows and orphans. After the action of 28th and 29th September 1652 the Council ordered the lord mayor to provide space for the wounded in the London hospitals, and on 18th October £500 was assigned to the mayor of Dover to meet the expense of the injured landed there. On 15th December the Admiralty Committee passed a formal resolution that every care was to be taken of the sick and wounded, both at sea and on shore, and that the London hospitals were to receive some, and the most suitable port towns the others. Every ship was to be allowed medical comforts—rice, oatmeal, and sugar—at the rate of £5 per 100 men, every six months, and, for the first time, men invalided ashore were continued in pay till death or recovery. A special hospital was to be provided at Deal, and from 1st January 1653 half the space in all English hospitals, as they became empty, to be reserved for the seamen.

In February and March 1653, Portsmouth, Deal and Dover were full of wounded men; surgeons were sent down to these towns, and seven shillings a week granted for the support of each man. Judging from the returns, the death-rate among the injured was not so high as might have been expected, if the conditions existing at Portsmouth also obtained elsewhere. There the sick were mostly in private or beer houses, which were said to be small and stifling, besides exposing their occupants to the temptation of drink; of the town itself the governor, Nath. Whetham, had nothing good to say, dwelling on ‘the filthy nastiness of this place,’ unpaved, undrained, and enduring an epidemic of small-pox. The town must have been continually full of suffering men, since for two months alone of 1654 the cost of the sick and hurt there was £2300, of which £580 went to the surgeons and £325 to the nurses.

Knowing that they would be repaid any outlay, the civic authorities of the coast towns were attentive to the wants of the invalids, and, for a time, the government spent liberally in this direction. In August 1653 there were 1600 men at Aldborough, Ipswich, and adjacent villages, whose charges amounted to some thousands of pounds, cleared in due course, while smaller sums of £958, £400, and £1366 were sent, on account, to Dover, Weymouth, and Harwich; at Yarmouth between 3rd August 1653 and 6th February 1655 £2851 was expended in the town for the same purpose. In some respects the sick men were better off than their able-bodied fellows. Monk and Deane reproached the Admiralty Commissioners for paying the former their wages, but not the latter, and ‘we think it neither in reason nor conscience to employ men who must perish for want of clothes lost in the service, and whose families are starving, and yet their pay is due, their tickets signed, and their captains satisfied they will not run away.’

Hitherto all the duty of superintendence had been thrown on the Navy Commissioners, but, in view of their protests that they were overwhelmed by their own more special work, a new department was created from 29th September 1653, consisting of four commissioners at £150 a year each and fifteen subordinate officers, who divided £1090 a year between them. They took the title of ‘Commissioners of sick and wounded at Little Britain,’ where their office was situated, were to supervise the distribution of invalided men, provide surgeons and medicines, and control the authorities of the towns. They had also to take charge of prisoners, see that the convalescent returned to their ships, and were authorised to grant gratuities up to £10 and pensions up to £6, 13s 4d.

A pension or gratuity might be augmented by appeal to the Admiralty Committee, although we may be certain that such a petition was rarely successful, but the corresponding gifts to officers’ widows were on a much more liberal scale. To seven captains’ widows sums ranging from £400 to £1000 were granted in April 1653, and it seems a somewhat uneven ascent from the seaman’s widow at £10 to the captain’s at £1000. So far as applicants of inferior rank were concerned, the Commissioners must have had their time fully occupied if they investigated every case as closely as that of Susan Cane. They held that £5 was enough for her, as she had not lived with her husband, led a loose life, and possessed more than ordinary skill in making stockings. The institution of a new benefaction caused new rogueries, and soon some of the office clerks were levying commissions on the donations given to these women and were in partnership with people who made real or false claims on their behalf. In the two years ending with May 1656 some £12,000 had been disbursed on behalf of men sent on shore ill or injured; but it is apparent that, although the Commonwealth procedure compared very favourably with the indifference which preceded it, the tender anxiety the government displayed for the sailor’s welfare, when it had urgent need of him, languished after the Dutch war and died away with the Spanish one. Later, in the year 1656, the bailiffs of Yarmouth wrote to the Admiralty Commissioners that the Commissioners at Little Britain were now careless about paying for the men sent on shore, leaving it to the bailiffs to spend the town money and get it back how or when they could. The squadron before Mardike was considered very unhealthy, there being usually about ten per cent. sick, and when these were sent home they were simply laid on the ballast and shot about by the pitching and rolling of the ship; and another paper mentions the ‘noisome smells’ produced by the condition of these men. Fleets must, however, have been much healthier than in earlier times, since on 24th March 1659 the number of sick in nearly 3000 men under Montagu was only nineteen, and but seventy-two in 2803 under Goodson.

In 1656 independent charities relating to the sick and maimed existed in the shape of the Chatham Chest, Ely Place, the Savoy Hospital, and the Commissioners, and it was then suggested that they should be amalgamated, both on account of economy and the prevention of fraud, but this was never done. For several years the Treasurer of the Navy paid £735 a week for the support of pensioners, but in what proportion this was divided among the foregoing charities is uncertain.

Of these institutions the only one of which we have any details is the Chatham Chest. For the three years 1653-5 the accounts stand:—

Revenue Revenue from
Lands Expenditure

£ £ s d £ s d

1653 5653 433 6 8 10,065 0 0

1654 4000 433 6 8 4531 18 10

1655 4000 433 6 8 4500 0 0

There was thus an excess of outlay over receipts, for these three years, of more than £4000, and Edward Hayward, then in charge, asks for assistance from the central authority. He probably obtained it, as on another occasion, Hutchinson was ordered to lend the Chest £3000. In March 1656 a report was drawn up which made the income from land £382, 10s a year, and recommended the removal of the Chest to London to save expense and the inconveniences experienced by the men. From this report we learn that officers’ widows were entitled to pensions from it, but not those of the men. In June 1657 there were 800 or 900 pensioners, but half the arrears were unpaid; a year later the situation was worse and the delay had reduced the men ‘to such extreme misery that I fear many of them have perished of late,’ the writer, Pett, having been forced to leave Chatham to escape these outcries. Pett adds, ‘If Rochester Cathedral were given to the governors to be improved ... it might go towards paying the arrears.’

There are two references in the Commonwealth papers which suggest that Hayward did not escape suspicion then of having appropriated Chest money to his own use, but in the inquiry into its management, begun in 1662, the weight of scrutiny fell upon Pett. Hayward said that he had lost all the books relating to the years 1648-55, although he afterwards produced some of them. From the interrogatories addressed to Pett we may infer that he and captain John Taylor, who was jointly responsible with him, amicably passed each other’s accounts; that the accuracy of these accounts was attested by only some of the officers who should have signed them; that the same travelling expenses were entered three or four times over; that he and Taylor had taken large sums from the Chest as salary, no commissioner having ever before charged for his management; and that such items occurred as £52, 13s 4d for the governor’s dinners, etc., at one meeting, £10 a year salary to a ‘mathematician,’ and £9 to Taylor ‘for relief for a fall.’

The quality of the food supplied to the men and the honesty of the victualling agents both steadily deteriorated during the Commonwealth. Complaints began to be frequent about 1650, and a fresh contract was then entered into with Colonel Pride and others to undertake the duty at eightpence per head at sea, and sevenpence in harbour, the government bearing the cost of transport to fleets on service. The lax system in force was not, however, calculated to act as a deterrent; in May 1650 a victualling office clerk, who had embezzled £137, gave security for it, and was suspended, but, inferentially, only until the money was refunded. It may be said that, generally, the object of the Navy authorities, in cases of fraud and embezzlement by clerks or officers, was not so much to punish as to obtain restitution. Possibly they found it to be the most effective form of punishment. During 1652 the pressure caused by the necessity of supplying an unprecedentedly large number of men produced more disorders in this branch of the service, and in June the contractors were called before the Council, told that their explanations were unsatisfactory, and heard the Admiralty Commissioners directed to continually watch and inspect the victuals furnished.

The story of the victualling arrangements during these eleven years brings out the most striking point of difference between the Commonwealth administration and those which were antecedent to it, in the fact that matters affecting the health and comfort of seamen were not ignored as in previous periods. This, we know, was greatly due to political necessity, but the letters remaining, written by officials of all ranks, show that a conscientious recognition of justice due to the sailors, and of responsibility for their welfare, widely existed. This sentiment is much more clearly marked among captains, admirals, and commissioners than among the ruling politicians, although members of the government were doubtless not unaffected by the prevailing spirit; the financial straits of the country, however, first cramped, and then destroyed, reforms which otherwise might have become permanent.

In 1652 new buildings for the Victualling department were built in several ports; and from February 1650 the slaughterhouse at Deptford, standing on ‘the poore’s ground’ and originally devoted to the service of Greenwich Palace, was taken for that of the state. In 1653 the rate rose to ninepence a head, and it may be roughly calculated that the Victuallers were called upon to provide at least some 7,500,000 lbs. of bread, 7,500,000 lbs. of beef and pork, and 10,000 butts of beer, besides cheese, butter, fish, and other necessaries. The mechanism at their command was little superior to that used by their predecessors under Charles I, and English agriculture could hardly yet have recovered from the effects of the civil war. The victualling contracts between September 1651 and December 1652 came to £332,000, a sum representing a drain on the food resources of the country difficult to meet, not so much, perhaps, in quantity as in suddenness, although since 1648 there had been an unbroken series of years of dearth. Remembering commissariat experiences of our own, happening under much more favourable conditions within living memory, the wonder is, not that there should have been complaints, but that there should have been comparatively so few under circumstances, which might almost have excused absolute failure. Pride and his associates were condemned because they were judged by a higher standard than had previously existed, but under Charles I their management would have been praised as highly successful.

When complaints came in they were not officially pigeon-holed but at once inquired into, and, so far as lay with the Admiralty Committee, the wants relieved. On 17th May 1653, a captain reported that he had no medical extras; on the 19th the Navy Commissioners were ordered to examine into this and remedy it; on 16th June the Generals of the fleet wrote about the badness of the provisions, and on the 20th the Navy Commissioners were directed to take the Victuallers to task. The beer was the most frequent subject of protest, and the difficulty was met by sending water in its place, to the extent of 500 tuns at a time, the men being allowed twopence a day to reconcile them to the change. At least one brewer laid the blame on the prices paid him, and frankly said he could give nothing better for the money. Beer and other provisions, ‘decayed and unfit for use,’ were licensed for export free of customs, perhaps in the hope that such stores would go to Holland. In October 1654 Pride and his colleagues gave notice of their intention to resign their contract, and, after some debate, it was decided to constitute the Victualling a department under the immediate care of the Navy Commissioners, captain Thos. Alderne being made its head, with a salary of £500 a year. Alderne died 10th April 1657, and was succeeded by three of the Navy Commissioners, majors Robt. Thompson, Neh. Bourne, and Fr. Willoughby, who were thenceforward styled ‘Commissioners of Navy and Victualling,’ and who received an additional £250 a year each for their services.

Alderne and his successors may or may not have been competent, but they had little chance of doing well under the financial embarrassments amid which they worked; they considered themselves fortunate in being able to continue supplies, of whatever quality, from hand to mouth. In June 1655 bakers and brewers were petitioning the Admiralty Committee, that although in January they had been promised monthly cash payments, not one penny had yet been paid them. The whole of one long despatch of Blake’s is made up of complaints about the provisions sent out, and censure of the officials at home. We, who have wider knowledge than Blake could then have, now know that the defaults were due to the situation rather than to the men. Orders might be given in London, but the local contractors were either not properly controlled, or, more probably, were defiant, knowing that the Admiralty could hardly go on provisioning the fleets without the credit they gave it. If the seamen protested to those individuals they obtained scant consideration. Some of the Tiger’s crew went ashore at Harwich to show the victualling agent their bread and beer which, their captain agreed, was not fit for food. The agent sent for the baker and brewer, and the former told the men that they were ‘mutinous rogues,’ that it was good enough for their betters, and next time should be worse. In another port the local agent told the purser of the Maidstone, whose men had shown provisions absolutely putrid, and to whom he had promised improvement when they were before him, that the more they complained the worse they should have. This coming to the ears of the men, some of the Maidstone’s crew went ashore and wrecked his house.

As the end of the Commonwealth approached matters became as bad as they could well be. At Plymouth, in January 1660, the victualler reported that he had been obtaining stores hitherto on his own credit, but would do so no longer; that there were six ships in port with starving crews, and another six expected, and that the only way open to him was to turn the men ashore to shift for themselves. In February the Navy Commissioners warned their chiefs that, unless money was provided within a week, there would be a failure of provisions everywhere, and that having done their utmost by persuasion they must be acquitted of blame. Judging from the number of their letters still existing, the Navy Commissioners must, about this time, have been pressing the Admiralty Committee for money nearly every day, either for wages or stores; it was not their fault if any one remained unpaid. Warrants authorising revictualling were posted freely, but, as captain Heaton wrote from Plymouth, nothing was said about the money, without which they were of no use. Heaton describes graphically the cruel poverty to which some of the townspeople there, who had trusted the government, were reduced:—

One cries, ‘For God’s sake spare me £20 to keep me out of prison;’ another begs for money to buy his family meat to eat, and to-day I saw a poor women beg of Mr Addis ten shillings of her due, to buy her four poor children bread, as for alms. Not long since a baker with sad complaints prevailed with Mr Addis for £23, and was as glad of it as though the money had been a free gift.’

While this letter was travelling up to London two others, of the same date, were coming from Hull. One, from the captain of the Bryer to the Admiralty Committee, says that he has already written nine times to them, and that his officers are compelled to buy their own food, and his men to forage for themselves on shore; the other, from the victualling agent at Hull, acknowledges the receipt of their warrant to furnish the Bryer and Forester, but, before acting on it, desires to know how he is to be paid. Truly the pious hope of captain Harman, of the Kentish, that Lawson would ‘be an instrument of bringing the victualling to its former splendour,’ was one not likely to lack fulfilment for want of occasion.

It had long been customary to give medals and chains to distinguished officers, but Parliament, for the first time, extended this form of distinction to the men. The first reference is a somewhat doubtful one, being an order of the House of 15th Nov. 1649, for medals for ‘several mariners’ who had done good service the previous year, but who may possibly have been officers. About the second, however, there is no question. In 1650 captain Wyard, of the Adventure, a hired merchantman, fought a gallant action off Harwich against greatly superior force, and he, his officers, and crew were awarded medals of different values, ranging from the one of £50 intended for himself down to others worth 5s for the men, each ‘with the service against five ships engraved on one side and the arms of the Commonwealth on the other.’ There were at least 20,000 men employed during 1652-4, but the whole number of medals for the war was only 169; of these 79 were small ones, and may have been intended for the seamen, although, as they were all of gold, it is unlikely. Nine of the larger ones were with chains, the smaller weighed 18dwt. 11gr. each, and the total cost was £2060. One alone had ‘the service done in the Triumph expressed on it.’ Blake and Monk had chains worth £300 a piece given them, and Penn one of the value of £100. The government was never unduly liberal in dealing with naval men. Major Fr. White, for bringing the news of Dunbar to London, was given £300; capt. Young, for following the Spanish fleet for a week in 1657, and then seeking Blake with the information which enabled him to destroy it at Santa Cruz, was granted £100.

The sale of clothes to the men was not confined to any one vendor, and scandals in this department, if they existed, do not appear to have attracted the attention of the authorities till 1655. Then an order was issued from the Navy Office that, ‘upon the consideration of the several abuses done by those that serve the state’s ships with clothes, by exorbitant prices and bad goods, to the prejudice of the poor seamen,’ the clothiers were not to send any on board ship without the permission of the Navy Commissioners. Two months later prices were fixed as follows:—

s d

Canvas jackets 1 10 each

” drawers 1 8 ”

Cotton waistcoats 2 2 each

” drawers 2 0 ”

Shirts 2 9 each

Shoes 2 4 a pair

Linen stockings 0 10 ”

Cotton ” 0 10 ”

This outfit, if a complete one, does not seem all that could be desired for winter service in the Channel, although it is a nearer approach to a uniform than existed much later. The Commissioners were careful to repudiate any responsibility for the clothes, though, as we see, they interfered when they considered it necessary, and allowed a sum, usually £2, to each man if his kit had been lost in action or by shipwreck.

Compared with the accessions of previous reigns the following list of new vessels is startling in its magnitude, and the cost of building and maintenance is another item which helps to account for the chronic difficulties besetting the Treasurer of the Navy:—

Prize Built At By Net tonnage Gross tonnage

1 Fairfax 1649 Deptford 789

2 Guinea(B) 1649 375 500

3 Jermyn* 1649

4 President 1649 Deptford P. Pett, sr. 445 593

5 Speaker 1649 Blackwall H. Johnson 778 928

6 Old Success 1649 380 506

7 Tiger’s Whelp* 1649

8 Advice 1650 Woodbridge P. Pett, jr. 516 690

9 Amity(B) 1650 354 472

10 Assistance 1650 Deptford H. Johnson 521 694

11 Concord(B) 1650

12 Centurion 1650 Ratcliff P. Pett, sr. 531 690

13 Dover 1650 Rotherhithe Castle 571 681

14 Eagle 1650

15 Elizabeth Prize* 1650

16 Foresight 1650 Deptford Shish 524 698

17 Great Charity 1650 400 553

18 Pelican 1650 Taylor

19 Marigold 1650

20 Portsmouth 1650 Portsmouth Eastwood 422 600

21 Mary Prize* 1650

22 Reserve 1650 Woodbridge P. Pett, jr. 513 688

23 Antelope 1651

24 Bryer* 1651 180

25 Convertine 1651 500 666

26 Discovery(B) 1651

27 Fortune 1651

28 Gilliflower(B) 1651

29 Laurel 1651 Portsmouth

30 Martin Prize* 1651

31 Mayflower(B) 1651

32 Mermaid 1651 Limehouse Graves 289 385

33 Nightingale 1651 Horseleydown Shish 289 385

34 Peacock 1651

35 Pearl 1651 Ratcliff P. Pett, sr. 285 380

36 Old President 1651

37 Little President 1651

38 Primrose 1651 Taylor

39 Sapphire 1651 Ratcliff P. Pett, sr. 442 589

40 Tresco* 1651

41 Worcester 1651 Woolwich Russell 629 838

42 Adam and Eve 1652 200

43 Advantage 1652

44 Arms of Holland 1652

45 Convert 1652

46 Crow 1652

47 Deptford 1652

48 Diamond 1652 Deptford P. Pett sr. 547 740

49 Dolphin 1652

50 Drake 1652 Deptford P. Pett 113 153

51 Duchess 1652

52 Endeavour 1652

53 Falmouth 1652

54 Gift Major 1652 480 653

55 Golden Falcon 1652

56 Golden Lion 1652

57 Heartsease 1652

58 Hound 1652

59 Hope 1652

60 Hopewell(B) 1652

61 Horseleydown 1652

62 Hunter 1652

63 Kentish 1652 Deptford Johnson 601 801

64 Marmaduke(B) 1652 400 533

65 Martin 1652 Portsmouth Tippetts 92 124

66 Merlin 1652 Chatham Taylor 105 141

67 Middleburgh 1652

68 Oak 1652

69 Paul 1652 290 384

70 Peter 1652

71 Plover 1652

72 Princess Maria 1652

73 Raven 1652

74 Recovery 1652

75 Ruby 1652 Deptford P. Pett, sr. 556 745

76 Sampson 1652

77 Sophia 1652 300 400

78 Stork 1652

79 Sun 1652

80 Sussex 1652

81 Swan 1652

82 Violet 1652

83 Waterhound 1652

84 Welcome 1652 400 533

85 Weymouth* 1652 120 160

86 Wildman 1652

87 Augustine 1653 359 478

88 Bear 1653 395 526

89 Black Raven 1653 300

90 Bristol 1653 Portsmouth Tippetts 532 680

91 Cardiff 1653

92 Church 1653 300

93 Elias 1653 400 533

94 Essex 1653 Deptford Ph. Pett 742 989

95 Fairfax 1653 Chatham Taylor 745 993

96 Falcon Flyboat 1653

97 Fortune 1653

98 Golden Cock 1653

99 Hare 1653

100 Half moon 1653 300

101 Hampshire 1653 Deptford Ph. Pett 481 594

102 Hector 1653 150 200

103 John Baptist 1653

104 Katherine 1653

105 King David 1653

106 Little Charity 1653

107 Lizard* 1653 100 133

108 Mathias 1653 500 666

109 Marigold Hoy 1653 Portsmouth Tippetts 42

110 Newcastle 1653 Ratcliff Ph. Pett 631 841

111 Orange Tree 1653 300

112 Ostrich 1653

113 Paradox* 1653 120 160

114 Pelican Prize 1653

115 Plover 1653

116 Plymouth 1653 Woolwich Ch. Pett 741 988

117 Portland 1653 Wapping Taylor 605 806

118 Redhart* 1653

119 Renown 1653

120 Rosebush 1653 300 400

121 Satisfaction 1653 220 293

122 Sparrow 1653 60 80

123 Swiftsure 1653 Woolwich Ch. Pett 740 986

124 Tulip 1653

125 Westergate 1653 270 365

126 Wren 1653

127 Yarmouth 1653 Yarmouth Edgar 608 810

128 Adviser 1654

129 Basing 1654 Walderswick Shish 255 340

130 Cat* 1654

131 Colchester 1654 Yarmouth Edgar 287 382

132 Fagons 1654 Wivenhoe Page 262 349

133 Gainsborough 1654 Wapping Taylor 543 724

134 Gloucester 1654 Limehouse Graves 755 1006

135 Grantham 1654 Lidney Furzer 265 323

136 Indian 1654

137 Islip 1654

138 Jersey 1654 Maldon Starling 560 746

139 Langport 1654 Horseleydown Bright 781 1041

140 Lyme 1654 Portsmouth Tippetts 769 1025

141 Maidstone 1654 Woodbridge Munday 566 754

142 Marston Moor 1654 Blackwall Johnson 734 978

143 Nantwich 1654 Bristol Bailey 319 425

144 Newbury 1654 Limehouse Graves 765 1020

145 Nonsuch Ketch(B) 1654 60 80

146 Preston 1654 Woodbridge Cary 550 642

147 Seahorse 1654

148 Selby 1654 Wapping Taylor 299 398

149 Sorlings* 1654 250 333

150 Taunton 1654 Ratcliff Castle 536 714

151 Torrington 1654 ” Ph. Pett 738 984

152 Tredagh 1654 ” ” 771 1008

153 Winsby 1654 Yarmouth Edgar 607 809

154 Bridgewater 1655 Deptford Chamberlain 742 989

155 Cornelian* 1655 100

156 Dartmouth 1655 Portsmouth Tippetts 230 306

157 Eaglet 1655 Horseleydown Huggins 60 80

158 Fame* 1655 90 120

159 Hawk 1655 Woolwich Cooper 60 80

160 Hind 1655 Waveney Page 60 80

161 Naseby 1655 Woolwich Ch. Pett 1229 1638

162 Norwich 1655 Chatham Ph. Pett 246 328

163 Pembroke 1655 Woolwich Raven 269 368

164 Portsmouth shallop 1655

165 Redhorse Pink 1655

166 Roe 1655 Waveney Page 60 80

167 Wexford* 1655 130 173

168 Accada(B) 1656

169 Beaver* 1656

170 Blackmoor 1656 Chatham Taylor 90 110

171 Bramble 1656 112 160

172 Cheriton 1656 Deptford Challis 194 261

173 Chestnut 1656 Portsmouth Tippetts 90 110

174 Dunbar 1656 Deptford Challis 1047 1396

175 Elias 1656

176 Griffin* 1656 90 120

177 Harp 1656 Dublin

178 Hunter* 1656 50 66

179 Jesu Maria 1656

180 Kinsale* 1656 90 120

181 Lark* 1656 80 100

182 London 1656 Chatham Taylor 1050

183 Oxford 1656 Deptford Challis 240 320

184 Raven* 1656

185 Vulture* 1656 100 133

186 Wakefield 1656 Portsmouth Tippetts 235 313

187 Wolf* 1656 120 160

188 Cygnet 1657 Chatham Taylor 60 80

189 Forester 1657 Lidney Furzer 230 306

190 Greyhound* 1657 150 200

191 Hart 1657 Woolwich Ch. Pett 55 75

192 Lily 1657 Deptford Challis 60 80

193 Parrot 1657 Chatham Taylor 60 80

194 Rose 1657 Woolwich Ch. Pett 55 75

195 Swallow 1657 Deptford Challis 60 80

196 Bradford 1658 Chatham Taylor 230 306

197 Cagway* 1658 60 80

198 Coventry* 1658 200 266

199 Fox* 1658 120 160

200 Francis* 1658 90 110

201 Gift Minor* 1658 120 160

202 Lichfield* 1658 200 266

203 Maria* 1658 120 180

204 Richard 1658 Woolwich Ch. Pett 1108 1477

205 Leopard 1659 Deptford Shish 636 847

206 Monk 1659 Portsmouth Tippetts 703

207 Towing Galley 1659 Chatham Taylor

Length of keel Beam Depth of hold Draught Guns Remarks

Ft. Ft. Ft. Ft.

1 116 35.8 14.6 17.6 64 Burnt at Chatham, March 1653.

2 90 28 14 30

3 Disappears before 1653.

4 102.9 29.6 12.6 15.6 42

5 116 34.9 14.6 17 64

6 34

7 Sold before Nov. 1658.

8 100 31.2 12.3 15.7 40

9 85 28 14 30

10 102 31 13 15 40

11 26 Sold, Aug. 1659.

12 104 31 13 16 40

13 100 31.8 13 16 40

14 12 Hulk at Chatham in 1660.

15 Disappears before 1653.

16 102 31 13 14.6 40

17 106 28.6 11.10 14 38

18 100 20.8 15.4 38 Burnt at Portsmouth, Feb. 1656.

19 30 Sold, 1658.

20 99 28.4 14.2 15 38

21 36 Sold, June 1657.

22 100 31.1 12.4 15.6 40

23 120 36 16 56 Wrecked on coast of Jutland, 30th Sept. 1652.

24 18

25 40

26 20 Burnt at Jamaica, 1655.

27 Captured by Dutch, Aug. 1652.

28 32 Sold, June 1657.

29 103 30.1 15 38 Lost on Newarp Sands, 1657.

30 Sold before Sept. 1653.

31 20 Sold, 1658.

32 86 25.2 10 12 22

33 86 25.2 10 12 22

34 Sold before Nov. 1658.

35 86 25 10 12 22

36 Sold, Aug. 1655.

37 12 Sold, 1657.

38 86 25.2 10 12 22 Wrecked on the Seven Stones, 1656.

39 100 28.10 11.9 13.6 38

40 Wrecked, 1651.

41 112 32.6 14 16 48

42 20 Sold, June 1657.

43 26 Sold, August 1655.

44 32 Blew up in West Indies, July 1656.

45 26 Sold, 1659.

46 36 Sold, 1656.

47 4 Sold, 1659.

48 105.6 31.3 3 16 40

49 30 Disappears before 1658.

50 85 18 7 9 14

51 24 Sold, 1654.

52 36 Sold, 1656.

53 20 Sold, 1659.

54 90.8 30.8 11.6 13.6 26

55 28 Sold, 1658.

56 Sold, 1653.

57 36 Sold, 1656.

58 36

59 26 Sold, 1657.

60 20 Sold, 1656.

61 4 Sold, 1655.

62 Lost in action of July 1653.

63 107 32.6 13 15 40

64 32

65 64 19.4 7 14

66 75 18 7.8 9 14

67 32 Sold before Nov. 1658.

68 Lost in action of July 1653.

69 84 26 9.6 10.6 22

70 32 Sold, 1653.

71 26 Sunk in action of Feb. 1653.

72 36 Wrecked on the Goodwins, 1658.

73 36 Recaptured by Dutch, April 1654.

74 26 Sold, 1655.

75 105.6 31.6 13 16 40

76 32 Sold, 1658.

77 26

78 Hulk at Deptford in 1660.

79 12 Sold, 1654.

80 46 Blew up at Portsmouth, 9th Dec. 1653.

81 22 Sold, 1654.

82 98 28 11 12.6 44 Hulk at Woolwich in 1660.

83 32 Sold, 1656.

84 36

85 14

86 16 Sold, 1657.

87 100 26 14 14 26

88 106 26.6 14.6 14.6 36

89 38 Sold, 1654.

90 104 31.1 13 15.8 44

91 18 Sold before Nov. 1658.

92 30 Hulk at Harwich in 1660.

93 101 27.6 11 14.6 36

94 115 33 13.8 17 48

95 120 35.2 14.6 16.6 52

96 24 Sold, 1658.

97 26 Sold, 1654.

98 24 Sold, 1656.

99 12 Wrecked, 1655.

100 30 Sold, 1659.

101 101.9 29.9 13 14.10 38

102 30

103 12 Sold, 1656.

104 36 Sold before Nov. 1658.

105 12 Sold, 1654.

106 30 Sold, 1656.

107 16

108 38

109 32 14 7 7

110 108.6 33.1 13.3 16 44

111 26 Sold, 1655.

112 Hulk at Portsmouth in 1660.

113 12

114 34 Sold, 1655.

115 26 Sold, 1657.

116 116 34.8 14.6 17 54

117 105 32.11 12.10 16 44

118 6 Sold, 1654.

119 20 Sold, 1654.

120 34

121 26

122 12 Sold, 1659.

123 116 37.4 14.10 18 60

124 32 Sold, 1657.

125 86 24.6 11.6 13 34

126 12 Sold, 1657.

127 105 33 13.3 17 44

128 8 Taken by a privateer in 1655.

129 80 24.6 10 12 22

130 8 Retaken by a privateer in 1656.

131 83 25.6 10 12 24

132 82 24.8 10 12 22

133 100.10 31.10 13 15 40

134 117 34.10 14.6 18 50

135 80 25 10 11.6 28

136 44 Sold, 1659.

137 22 Wrecked near Inverlochy, 24th July 1655.

138 102.10 32.2 13.2 15.6 40

139 116 35.7 14.4 17 50

140 117 35.2 14.4 18 52

141 102 31.8 13 16 40

142 116 34.6 14.2 17 52

143 86.8 26.4 10.4 12.6 28

144 117 35 14.5 17.6 52

145 27 15.6 6 8 Taken by a privateer, March 1659; recaptured by a cruiser in the following April.

146 101 30 13 16 40

147 26 Sold, 1655.

148 85.6 25.8 10 12 22

149 28

150 100.6 31.8 13 16 40

151 116.8 34.6 14.2 17 52

152 117.3 35.2 14.5 17 50

153 104 33.2 13 17 44

154 116.9 34.7 14.2 17 52

155 12

156 80 25 10 12 22

157 8

158 10

159 42 16 8 8

160 42 16 8 8

161 131 42 18 11 80

162 81 25 10.6 12 22

163 81 25 11.6 12 22

164 4 Retaken by a privateer, July 1655.

165 10 Sold, 1658.

166 8

167 14

168 10 Wrecked, 1659.

169 6 Sold before Nov. 1658.

170 47 19 10 12

171 14

172 76 24 10 11 20

173 47 19 10 12

174 123 46 17.2 21 64

175 Used as hulk at Plymouth in 1660.

176 12

177 8

178 6

179 Used as hulk at Portsmouth in 1660.

180 10

181 10

182 123.6 41 16.6 18 64

183 72 24 10 11 22

184 6 Sold before Nov. 1658.

185 12

186 74 23.6 9.9 11.6 26

187 16

188 6

189 22

190 60 26.6 11.6 20

191 50 14.6 5.6 5 6

192 5 6

193 5 6

194 50 14 5.6 5 6

195 5 6

196 85 25.6 10 12 28

197 8

198 20

199 72 23 8.6 10 14

200 10

201 12

202 20

203 12

204 124 41 18 20 70

205 109 33.9 15.8 17 44

206 108 35 13.11 16 52

207 1

Thus 207 new vessels were added to the Navy during these eleven years, of which 121 were on the active list in 1660; besides 22 others still remaining of the old Royal Navy and 17 more, originally of the same era, which had been used but had been sold, wrecked, or lost in action between 1649 and 1660. We are told that ‘the principal thing the Long Parliament aimed at was to outsail the Dunkirkers,’ and the large number of light vessels of twenty-two guns, or under, shows how earnestly they set themselves to this task. In a few cases the names of old ships were altered—the Charles to Liberty, the Henrietta Maria to Paragon, the Prince to Resolution, and the St Andrew and St George lost their saintship. The Sovereign is, once or twice, called the Commonwealth, but here the proposed change of name never became an actual one.

In October 1651 the Council of State were considering ‘some encouragement to be given to Messrs Pett for their success in contriving and building of frigates.’ The improvements consisted, we may be certain, in moulding the under-water section on finer lines, and probably in reducing the height of the hull above water and lengthening the keel by lessening the rake, fore and aft, and so diminishing the undue proportion the length ‘over all’ bore to the keel. Such alterations would have tended to abate the pitching, from which these old ships must have suffered terribly, to have given them a steadier gun platform, and to make them more weatherly, although from the journal of the Gainsborough it appears that she, at any rate, was nearly unable to beat to windward. At first the new frigates, of whatever class, were built without forecastles, but experience led to the conclusion that they were advisable in the larger ships, it being found necessary sometimes to run them up at sea, and eventually only fifth- and sixth-rates were still built without them. But this was an advance on the old system, which had constructed the smallest vessels on exactly the same plan as the largest. Beyond Pett’s improvements, which really belong to the period of Charles I rather than to that of the Commonwealth, there was little progress in matters relating to sails and the better adjustment of weights. Fore and aft sails are still rarely mentioned, and then only in connection with small vessels, and there is no record of the introduction of any mechanical appliances calculated to lighten or quicken the physical work necessary in handling a ship. The sail area was still small for the tonnage, nor, in view of the crankness of the ships, did it appear possible to increase it. The Sovereign, cut down in 1652, and then of 100 guns and 2072 gross tonnage, carried 5513 yards of canvas in a complete suit of sails; in 1844 the regulation equipment for a second-rate of 84 guns and 2279 tons (the Thunderer), was 12,947 yards. Of course the line-of-battle ship of 1844 would be in reality a much bigger vessel than the Sovereign, but the excess in length and breadth would not alone explain the ability to bear more than double the extent of canvas.

As had been customary for at least 150 years, each ship possessed three boats—long boat, pinnace, and skiff—which were respectively 35 feet, 29 feet, and 20 feet long in those belonging to second-rates, and 33 feet, 28 feet, and 20 feet in third-rates. In no list of equipments or stores are davits mentioned. The long boat was apparently still towed astern; it invariably was in 1625, since the Cadiz fleet of that year lost every long boat in crossing the Bay of Biscay. How the other boats were now hoisted to the ship is uncertain.

Early in the Commonwealth administration John Holland, one of the Navy Commissioners, recommended that the service shipwrights should not be allowed to keep private yards, seeing that if they were dishonest there was no way of tracing government timber, or other materials, used for their own purposes, a reason which does not say much for government methods of supervision. But the state yards were obviously inadequate to the demands suddenly made upon their capacity, and recourse was necessary to the yards belonging to government shipwrights and to private builders. In 1650 and 1651 the Pelican, Primrose, Pearl, Nightingale, and Mermaid were bought in this way, the first at £6, 10s, the others at £5, 8s a ton. Vessels built in private yards were subjected to continual inspection at the hands of the government surveyors, and, in many cases, the materials were supplied by the Navy Commissioners, who only desired such prices for them ‘as shall be moderate and fit between man and man.’

During 1651-53 Parliament was continually ordering new frigates to be commenced, and the master shipwrights who possessed building slips seem to have tried to get the work placed in their own yards rather than in the government ones. In April 1652, when two new vessels were to be commenced, Peter Pett and Taylor recommended that they should be given out to contract, as there was not enough timber in the government stores. Whatever may have been the knowledge or sense of duty possessed by some of their subordinates, the Commonwealth Navy Commissioners were the wrong men upon whom to try finesse, more appropriate to the preceding or following administrations. All that Pett and Taylor obtained by their move was an intimation that they, at all events, would not be allowed to compete, and this was followed by an urgent recommendation to the Admiralty Committee that, as there was in reality plenty of timber available, the two men should be ordered to proceed with the work at once in the state’s yards. On other occasions the London shipwrights combined to put pressure on the Admiralty by refusing to tender below certain rates, and Edmond Edgar, of Great Yarmouth, based a claim to consideration on the fact that he had cut in and broken down the combination. There are several petitions, like this one of Edgar’s, from shipbuilders, for compensation on account of vessels turned out from their yards larger than had been specified in the original contracts, and thereby exposing them to loss. As the Admiralty tried to be just rather than generous in dealing with contractors, we may suppose that the miscalculations, like those which occurred under Charles I, were due really to ignorance rather than to a not very hopeful attempt to obtain larger profits by deliberately ignoring instructions. Country builders, moreover, sometimes worked under difficulties they could scarcely have anticipated when tendering. Bailey, who built two ships at Bristol, desired the government to authorise him to pay his men more than two shillings a day, and thus free him from the liability to ten days’ imprisonment and a £10 fine incurred, according to the city ordinances, by those who paid more.

In accordance with the tendency of the time the decoration of ships was reduced to a minimum. Until 1655 the use of gilding appears to have ceased, special orders being in some cases given that vessels under repair were not to have any gold used upon them, and the cost of carved work in fifth-rates was fixed at £45, an amount which was not passed without serious questioning. In 1655 this severe simplicity was, to a certain extent, relaxed, since, in August, Richard Isaacson undertook the gilding and painting of two second-rates at £120 each. So far as the outside was concerned, the figurehead, arms on stern, and two figures on the stern gallery were to be gilt; the hull, elsewhere, was to be painted black, picked out in gold where carved. The Navy Commissioners held that the decoration ought not to cost more than £80, being unnecessary and ‘like feathers in fantastic caps.’ Figure heads were sometimes exuberant in style. The Naseby’s consisted of Oliver on horseback, ‘trampling upon six nations.’

The following table gives the equipment in offensive weapons and stores for typical vessels of each rate; the scale was not implicitly adhered to, but it is the first sign of an attempt to establish a permanent relation between guns and tonnage such as became afterwards almost invariable. The paper belongs to 1655, but it is not likely that any material alteration occurred before 1660. The first establishment of third-rates was 140, of fourth-rates 130, and of fifth-rates 100 men; these were subsequently raised to 160, 150, and 110 men respectively:—

Vessels Cannon Drakes Demi-cannon Culverins Demi-culverins Sakers Round Shot Double headed Shot Barrels of Powder Muskets Blunderbusses Pikes Hatchets

1st-rates Sovereign 19 9 8 30 5 2580 720 330 300 20 200 100

Resolution

Naseby

2nd-rates Triumph 6 0 24 4 1900 740 203 120 12 80 40

Victory

Dunbar

3rd-rates Speaker 4 2 26 8 2080 670 180 120 10 60 40

Marston Moor

Fairfax

4th-rates Bristol 24 6 8 908 462 100 60 7 60 40

Portland

Dover

5th-rates Pearl 18 4 660 260 40 0 4 40 20

Mermaid

Fagons

6th-rates Cat 8 240 40 14 0 3 20 12

Hare

Martin

Of the large number of prizes passed into the service many had not been built as men-of-war, and, as soon as the immediate need had ceased, were sold, if only for the momentary relief the money thus obtained gave the harassed treasury. In one year, ending with October 1654, nine were sold for £6181. Notwithstanding the enormous increase in the strength of the Navy the Commissioners found it hardly equal to the provision of the over-sea fleets, now required, and the fifty or sixty cruisers in the four seas which replaced the half-dozen small vessels formerly considered sufficient, and which number, relatively large as it was, did not succeed in entirely crushing the enterprise of the Dunkirk and Stewart privateers. The recollection of what commerce had suffered from piracy must have remained very lively, and, at the close of the civil war, strong summer and winter ‘guards’ were still maintained; in October 1651 there were thirty-six vessels cruising in home waters. During the Dutch war every available ship was needed with the fleets, and the Channel was sometimes so devoid of protection that two prizes, taken off the Land’s End in December 1653, were brought up Channel to Flushing without, during the six days occupied in the voyage, and of which one was spent in lying to off Dungeness, meeting a single English man-of-war.

When peace was made with Holland the protective cordon round the coasts was renewed, and increased rather than decreased in strength during the last years of the Commonwealth. To illustrate the way in which the ships were employed one station list for May 1659 may be quoted. In the Downs, 12, of 232 guns; watching Ostend, 3, of 70 guns; off the mouth of the Thames, 2, of 12 guns; between the Naze and Yarmouth, 2, of 34 guns; off Lynn Deeps, 2, of 20 guns; between Yarmouth Roads and Tynemouth Bar, 3, of 66 guns; on Scotch coast, 2, of 52 guns; with the mackerel boats, 2, of 24 guns; with the North Sea boats, 1, of — guns; in mouth of Channel, 4, of 76 guns; between Portland and Alderney, 2, of 26 guns; on Irish coast, 3, of 50 guns; on convoy service, 8, of — guns; and 6 others have not their duties specified. The large increase in the effective of the Navy diminished the necessity for hired merchantmen, and the need became less as the Dutch prizes were refitted for service. The caste feeling which divides the professional from the amateur fighter was beginning to be strongly marked among officers who had gone through the experiences of the civil war, and who by a succession of events had been retained in the service of the state instead of being returned to mercantile pursuits, as had been the case formerly on the cessation of warfare. Both these causes helped to do away with the use of hired merchantmen, although at one time thirty or forty were in pay. Blake desired that not more than two-fifths of the fleets should consist of hired ships, that they should carry at least twenty-six guns, and be commanded and officered by approved men. The proportion does not appear to have risen to this figure even before prizes became plentiful, and so eager was the government to adapt suitable prizes that it did not always wait for legal condemnation, and sometimes found itself compelled to make terms with the injured owners when the ship had been used and sold out of the service. After long efforts the owners of the Golden Falcon, captured in 1652, obtained, in March 1659, a decree of the Admiralty Court in their favour; but the vessel had been sold a year before, and the Navy Commissioners were ordered to pay her appraised value when taken. Nor is this a solitary instance.

In 1652 there was a survey of merchant shipping throughout the kingdom, but the resulting reports have not survived. In December 1653 there appear to have been only sixty-three merchantmen, of 200 tons and upwards, in the Thames suitable for service; but the size of these does not show much advance on the tonnage of the previous generation; one was of 600, four of 500, two of 450, five of 400, twenty-five of from 300 to 400, and the remainder under 300 tons. According to one (royalist) writer both the merchant navy and trade decreased under the Commonwealth; but the customs receipts directly contradict the latter and inferentially negative the former portion of his statement. Store ships and transports were paid for at the rate of £3, 15s 6d a month per man, the owners sending them completely ready for sea. If a ship was meant to go into action the state took the risk of loss, paid and provisioned the men, and supplied powder, shot, and any guns necessary beyond the normal number. When stores were sent out as part of an ordinary trader’s cargo, the cost of freight was, to the Straits of Gibraltar, from 40s to 44s a ton; to Alicante, 50s to 54s; to Leghorn, 60s to 64s; and to Jamaica, £4.

Private enterprise turned naturally towards letters of marque as a lucrative, if hazardous, speculation. In July 1652 letters were restricted to owners able to send out vessels of not less than 200 tons and 20 guns, but it was soon found out that this limitation was almost prohibitive. Such privateers were further placed under the direct control of the admirals, and compelled to keep them and the Council informed of their proceedings. Afterwards letters of marque were more charily issued, since it was found that they were competing for men against the regular service, much to the disadvantage of the latter, the looser discipline and larger chance of prize money of the privateer being much more to the sailor’s liking. Frequently ordinary trading ships sailed with letters of marque among their papers on the chance of some profitable opportunity occurring; but from 1st August 1655 all such commissions were, without exception, revoked, in consequence of the difficulty their possessors seemed often to find in distinguishing between the ships of enemies and those belonging to friendly states. Thenceforward, although still at war with Spain, Englishmen acting under them were to find themselves in the position, and liable to the punishment, of pirates.

Besides the losses of the Commonwealth Navy in the ships, from 1649 onwards, noted in connection with their names in the preceding list, the following vessels of the old Navy were lost or sold; as well as various prizes dating from the civil war, and merchantmen bought during the same period, not here entered:—

• Bonaventure, lost in action.
• Charles, wrecked.
• Crescent, broken up.
• Defiance, sold.
• Garland, lost in action.
• Greyhound, lost in action.
• Happy Entrance, burnt at Chatham.
• Henrietta, sold.
• Henrietta Maria, burnt in West Indies.
• Leopard, lost in action.
• Mary Rose, wrecked.
• Merhonour, sold.
• Nicodemus, ”
• Roebuck, ”
• 1st Whelp, ”
• 2nd Whelp, ”
• 10th Whelp, ”

The Bonaventure, Garland, and Leopard were lost to the Dutch, but the two former were burnt and sunk when fighting under the Dutch flag in July 1653. The Merhonour, Defiance, and 2nd Whelp, all three long laid up as useless, were handed over to Taylor in 1650, at a valuation of £700, in part payment of his shipbuilding bill; the 1st Whelp was used for some time as a hulk at Deptford, and the 10th Whelp remained in commission till 1654. The Greyhound was blown up in action with two privateers, in 1656, by her captain, Geo. Wager, when she was boarded and practically taken by 100 of the enemy, who went up with her. The Henrietta Maria and Happy Entrance were burnt by accident in 1655 and 1658; the Mary Rose was wrecked off the coast of Flanders in 1650, and the Charles off Harwich in the same year.

Whenever ships were lost on the British coasts the authorities did their best to recover the stores, and, in the case of the Charles, men were still engaged in 1660 patiently fishing for her guns. At first Bulmer, a man whose name has been mentioned under Charles I as an inventor in connection with maritime matters, was employed, but it was not until May 1657, after seven years of search, that he triumphantly announced that he had discovered her exact position. He was succeeded by Robert Willis, described as a diver, who was more fortunate in that he did at last recover at least two brass guns, for which he was allowed 20s a cwt. As the Admiralty had been for eight years at the expense of a hired hoy and the wages of the men occupied in work, it might have been cheaper to have allowed the guns to remain under water. The methods used are not alluded to, but, as the diving-bell was described by Bacon in the beginning of the century, it must have been a well-known appliance; and Bourne had described a diving dress on the modern principle in 1578.

One other man-of-war, the Phœnix, belonging to Badiley’s squadron, was captured on 7th September 1652 by the Dutch off Leghorn, and gallantly retaken in November by eighty-two volunteers, under captain Owen Cox, who boarded her at daybreak while at anchor amidst the enemy’s fleet. Cox did not disdain to eke out the lion’s with the fox’s skin, since, in the afternoon, he hired ‘a bumboat or two with good wine to go aboard and sell it cheap;’ the Dutch were consequently keeping a careless watch, but fighting continued below for two hours after the ship was under way. Cox further promised £10 to each man with him, but this was still unpaid in June 1653, and he then tells the Council of State that the men ‘persecute him to fulfil his engagement’; and Badiley wrote that ‘since their exploit they are very turbulent and disorderly.’ Cox was granted £500 for his good service; he was killed in the action of July 1653, while still in command of the Phœnix.

Complaints of piracy, in the strict sense, are very few during this period, and there is not a single reference to the presence of a Turk in the narrow seas. In face of the Commonwealth Navy there were no more of such incidents as the sack of Baltimore. The French, Dutch, and Spanish privateers, who kept our men-of-war continually on the alert, and occasionally overpowered a smaller one, sailed under some sort of commission, either from their own states or the Stewarts, and did not, therefore, possess that freedom from responsibility which in warfare soon degenerates into savagery. The owners of the Constant Cavalier, for instance, cruising under a commission from the nominal Charles II, had to give a bond for £1000 not to injure his allies or his loyal subjects. That the Dunkirkers and others found privateering by no means so easy a road to fortune as it had been in the days of Charles I is sufficiently shown by the number of their captured ships taken into the national service, besides the loss of many more not considered suitable for that purpose. Their best opportunity was during the Dutch war, when the cruisers were mostly withdrawn to strengthen the fleets: but even then the government usually managed to provide convoys for the coasting trade. English, Scotch, or Irish seamen taken in a privateer were summarily transported to the plantations.

In 1656 for some reason, probably the effort to keep the fleets on foreign service at their full strength, the guard round the coasts seems to have been temporarily relaxed, and the result was that ‘the Ostenders and Dunkirkers begin to grow numerous.’ On the east coast they were so successful for the moment that, dreaming hopefully that the old times were about to return, they desired some of their released prisoners to ‘tell the Protector that while he is fetching gold from the West Indies they will fetch his coals from Newcastle.’ Oliver was not a safe subject for threats, and their spoon was certainly not long enough to enable them to enjoy in comfort the meal they proposed sharing with him; at any rate very shortly afterwards the war was carried into the enemy’s country by the blockade of Ostend and Dunkirk, and there are no more lamentations about the number of them at sea, or the mischief they were doing, until the very eve of the Restoration.

The administrative direction of the Navy was, at the beginning of the Commonwealth, placed in the hands of (i.) the Admiralty Committee of the Council of State, (ii.) the Committee of Merchants of Navy and Customs, and (iii.) the Commissioners of the Navy. The second Committee took no practical part in the administration, was early requested to leave the management to the Navy Commissioners, ‘as formerly,’ and was dissolved in 1654. Warwick’s second appointment as Lord Admiral was cancelled by a parliamentary ordinance of 23rd Feb. 1649, and the first Admiralty Committee of the Council of State took over his duties from that date for the one year for which the Council of State was only itself existent. This Committee was renewed yearly until the Protectorate, when ‘Commissioners of the Admiralty and Navy’ were nominated by act of Parliament, and the control of the Ordnance department was also given them. Their number varied but was seldom less than twelve or fifteen; they met at first at Whitehall once a week, during the Dutch war once a day, and, from January 1655, occupied Derby House at a rental of £100 a year. Following the fall of Richard Cromwell an act was passed, 21st May 1659, nominally vesting authority in ‘Commissioners for carrying on the affairs of the Admiralty and Navy,’ but power really remained in the hands of Parliament to which the Commissioners had to submit the names of even the captains they appointed.

The brunt of administrative work and responsibility fell, however, on the Navy Commissioners, who, so far as may be judged from the letters and papers relating to them and their work, laboured with an attention to the minutest details of their daily duties, a personal eagerness to ensure perfection, and a broad sense of their ethical relation towards the seamen and workmen, of whom they were at once the employers and protectors, with a success the Admiralty never attained before and has never equalled since. The earliest Commissioners were John Holland, Thos. Smith, Peter Pett, Robt. Thompson, and Col. Wm. Willoughby; the last-named died in 1651, and was replaced by Robt. Moulton, who himself died the next year. In 1653, Col. Fr. Willoughby, Ed. Hopkins, and major Neh. Bourne, who, besides being a soldier had also commanded the Speaker, were added to the first four. In 1654 Geo. Payler replaced Holland, and from then there was no change till 1657, when Nathan Wright succeeded Hopkins. All the Navy Commissioners, except Holland, had £250 a year, a sum for which they gave better value than did the members of the Admiralty Committee for their £400 a year; but for 1653 each was granted an extra £150 in consideration of the excessive and continuous toil of that year.

From the first they adopted a tone towards the Admiralty Committee which would hardly have been endurable but that it was excused by an obvious honesty, and justified by superior knowledge. Early in 1649 they recommended that the rope-makers at Woolwich should have their wages increased by twopence a day, but their letter was returned by the Admiralty Committee, probably with a reprimand. This was not to be borne in silence, so ‘we have cause to resent that we are so misunderstood as to be inhibited by you to do our duty.’ If the Committee has not itself power to make the order it can move Parliament, ‘who will not see men want, especially as in the sweat of these men’s brows consists not only their particular living but also that of the republic.... What interpretation soever may be made of our actions by those that have the supervision of them we shall not fail to represent the grievances of those under our charge when they represent them to us.’ On 22nd May 1649 the admirals and captains at sea were ordered to address the Commissioners direct on all administrative details, thus leaving only matters of the highest importance to be dealt with by the Admiralty Committee. In some ways the relative position of superiors and inferiors seems to have been reversed, for, on one occasion, we find the Committee writing to the Commissioners about a course of action the former had decided on, that, ‘as you disapprove’ of such procedure, it was not to be adopted; and it frequently happened that the Council of State communicated directly with the Navy Commissioners, ignoring the intermediate Admiralty Committee.

During the Dutch war a Commissioner was stationed in charge of each of the principal yards—Pett at Chatham, Willoughby at Portsmouth, and Bourne at Harwich, which last place, in consequence of the operations on the North Sea and off the Dutch coast, had suddenly sprung into importance. Monk wrote concerning Bourne: ‘It is strange that twenty ships should be so long fitting out from Chatham, Woolwich, and Deptford, where there are so many docks ... when there have been twenty-two or more fitted out from Harwich in half the time by Major Bourne.’ There is a consensus of evidence as to the way in which Bourne threw his heart into his work, and the success he obtained under difficulties due to the want of docks and materials at Harwich and an insufficient number of men. Notwithstanding Monk’s depreciatory reference to Chatham, Pett was very well satisfied with his operations there. A few months before he had reported to the Admiralty Committee that he had graved nine ships in one spring tide, without injury to ship or man; ‘truly it makes me stand amazed at the goodness of God in such unparalleled successes.’

Besides their superintendence of the building, repairing, and fitting out of ships, the purchase and distribution of stores, the control of the dockyards, and all the diverse minutiæ of administration in war time, the Commissioners were called upon to maintain the not very rigid discipline of the service. Hitherto all ranks had been allowed to do much as they pleased when ships were in port, but henceforth no captain was to leave his command for more than six hours without the express permission of either the Admiralty or Navy Commissioners, and during any such absence the lieutenant, or the master, was to remain on board; for the first disobedience the penalty was a fine of one month’s pay, for the second three months’, and for the third to be cashiered. Similar rules applied to all the officers; and men absent without leave forfeited a month’s pay. The clerks of the check were to ‘take an exact account’ how officers and others performed their duties, and once a week report to the Navy Commissioners, a regulation which, if loyally obeyed, must have made the clerks popular. The clerks of the check attached to the dockyards were to similarly watch the clerks on shipboard, and, in turn, report on them once a week to the Commissioners. This system was akin to that of the sixteenth-century Spanish navy, in which the duties were so arranged that each officer was a spy on another; admirable in theory, it did not suit English idiosyncrasies, and these reports never took any practical shape.

From 2nd June 1649, the Navy Commissioners had occupied rooms in the victualling office at Tower Hill, but in 1653 they found the annoyance caused by the proximity of the victuallers’ slaughterhouses there to be unbearable. It was not, however, till the next year that Sir John Wolstenholme’s house in Seething Lane was purchased for them for £2400, and became the Navy Office for a long period; the Treasurer’s, now a quite distinct office, was in Leadenhall Street, and its lease was renewed in February 1657 for eight years at a rental of £49, 6s 8d a year and a £700 fine. The next request of the Commissioners was that their number might be increased, as half the members of the Board were constantly away in charge of dockyards, and for this they ‘desire timely remedy or dismissal from our employment.’ It has been noticed that three new men, of whom certainly two—Bourne and Willoughby—were, in their sphere, amongst the ablest administrators who have ever served the state, were in consequence added in 1653. Besides the Commissioners, Thomas White at Dover, captain Hen. Hatsell at Plymouth, major Richard Elton at Hull, and major William Burton at Yarmouth, acting as Admiralty agents, had nearly as much work and responsibility, and executed it as ably, as their more highly placed colleagues.

In 1655 the salaries of subordinates at the Admiralty amounted to £1740, the secretary, Robert Blackborne, receiving £250. The first secretary of the Admiralty Committee, Robert Coytmore, had £150 a year, of which £50 was regarded as an extra given on condition that neither he nor his clerk received fees—a stipulation probably due to a lively recollection of the habits of Nicholas and his successor, Thomas Smith. The Navy Commissioners had no secretary, and until September 1653 each Commissioner was allowed only one clerk, at £30 a year—scanty assistance, considering the amount of work thrown into their hands. From September the number was doubled, and two purveyors were appointed to assist them in purchasing stores. The total annual cost of the Admiralty, the Navy Office, and the chief officers of the four dockyards was £11,179, 9s 10d.

If we may trust a later writer, the sums spent on the Navy Office, which bore only a trifling proportion to the naval expenses, sometimes reaching a million and a quarter, were not misapplied. Henry Maydman, who was a purser under the Commonwealth, and Mayor of Portsmouth in 1710, wrote long afterwards:—

In all the wars we had in the time of King Charles’s exile the Navy Office was so ordered that a man might have despatched any affair almost at one board ... and with the greatest ease imaginable, and cheapness too. For their public business was carried on with all imaginable application, and it was a crime for any one to absent himself from his post.

So far as the intentions and efforts of the Navy Commissioners were concerned this was doubtless true, but it is to be feared that the State Papers do not support the implication that money matters were settled with the same ease as those relating to the routine of daily management, although that, of course, was an imperfection for which they were not accountable, and over which they had no control. To the full extent of their power they watched not only over the public interests, but also over those of the men who, for the first time, seem to have looked up to officials of their position as friends and helpers. Some of the appeals they listened to are embodied in a letter to the Admiralty Committee.

We have complaints daily made unto us by poor seamen pressed out of merchant ships into the state’s service that they are grossly abused by their masters and owners in pretending leakage, damage, or not delivery of their goods, whereby they keep their pay from them, meanly taking advantage of the poor men’s forcing away by the state’s press masters and not having time to get their rights, are by this means defrauded of their wages. We look upon it as a very great oppression and have therefore thought good to acquaint your honours therewith.

Shortly afterwards they had to write on behalf of merchants who had trusted them:—

It is not pleasing to us to fill your ears with complaints, yet we judge it our duty, while entrusted with so great a share of the naval affairs, to again remind you of the emptiness of all the stores.... We have not been wanting in obtaining supplies by means of fair promises, and now we are hardly thought and spoken of by those who cannot obtain their money.

In one instance the ‘fair promises’ resolved themselves into a bill for £400 on account, which, said the recipient, ‘has hitherto done me no more good than an old almanac.’ It has been remarked that the position of all who were in the service of the state became more difficult as time passed, and money became scarcer and scarcer towards 1660. When, in 1658, the Navy Commissioners were obliged to pay—or promise—prices from 30 to 50 per cent. above the market standard, it may be supposed that their situation had its own discomforts. Besides guarding the material interests, they had to review the moral conduct, of their subordinates, and they were evidently shocked to be compelled to report to the Admiralty Commissioners that captain Phineas Pett, clerk of the check at Chatham, was the father of an illegitimate child. On another occasion Willoughby was inquiring whether a boatswain possessed two wives.

After the resignation of Richard Cromwell Parliament interposed more directly in naval affairs, and the Commissioners exercised less authority; on one occasion the agent at Chester, who went on board a man-of-war to muster the men, was refused an opportunity to perform his duty, and told, in answer to his threats, that ‘the power of the Navy Commissioners was not as formerly.’ A fact so plainly put must have been generally recognised, and accounts for the comparative disappearance of the Commissioners from the papers of the last year of the Commonwealth.

From 1st January 1651, Richard Hutchinson replaced Vane as Treasurer of the Navy under circumstances noticed on a previous page. He began with a salary of £1000 a year, in lieu of all former fees and perquisites, and the appearance of his name in the State Papers is almost invariably associated with requests for higher pay, or melancholy wails about the amount of work thrown upon him by the wars in which we were engaged. For 1653 he was allowed an extra £1000; not satisfied with this he petitioned again in December, and so successfully that, by an order of the Council, he was to be given, in 1654, £2500, and a further £1000 for every £100,000 disbursed in excess of £1,300,000. That this man, who was merely a glorified clerk, who was never required to act on his own initiative, and whose work demanded neither energy, foresight, nor talent, should have received over £2500 a year, while the Navy Commissioners, to whose organising genius was mainly due the rapid and complete equipment which enabled the English fleets to be of sufficient strength at the point of contact, were rewarded with £250 a year, and a gratuity of £150 for one twelvemonth, is one of those incidents which interest the impartial student of forms of government. From January 1655 his pay was fixed at £1500 a year, with £100 commission on every £100,000 issued above £700,000; a year later he tried to get this commission doubled, and to have it allowed on his first three years of office, ‘I having much larger promises at the time.’ A remark like this, the ease with which he obtained his almost annual increments, and the fact that he was appointed in spite of Vane’s opposition, taken together, lead one to suspect that he must have had some potent influence behind him.

Among officers, captains were the class who gave most trouble throughout these years, the number tried for, or accused of, various delinquencies yielding a much higher percentage of the total employed than that afforded by the men, or by officers of any other rank. This was, perhaps, largely due to the rapid promotion necessitated by the sudden increase of the Navy, commanders being chosen mainly for professional capacity, and, if considered politically safe, few questions were asked about their religious or moral qualifications. Many, again, had risen from the forecastle, and possibly brought with them reminiscences of the habits existing in the Caroline Navy: others had been privateer captains, an occupation which did not tend to make their moral sense more delicate. Professional honour was not yet a living force, and, in some orders issued by Monk to the captains of a detached squadron, the threat of loss of wages as a punishment for disobedience came after, and was obviously intended as a more impressive deterrent than, the disgrace of being cashiered.

With one offence, however—cowardice—very few were charged; after 1642 few men wanting physical courage were likely to force their way to the front. George Wager, who chose to blow up the Greyhound rather than strike the English flag, had been a boatswain; Amos Bear, a boatswain’s boy; Robert Clay, a carpenter; Heaton, a trumpeter’s mate; Badiley, Sansum, and Goodson, cabin boys; and doubtless close inquiry would reveal many more examples. Four days before the execution of Charles the Navy Commissioners wrote to Portsmouth, and presumably to other naval stations, ‘to entreat’ those in charge to take care that all officers appointed were well affected to the Parliament, and authorising them to suspend any suspected ones on their own responsibility. But the government was not unforgiving; two of Rupert’s captains, Goulden and Marshall, commanded state’s ships, and officers who had deserted in the mutiny of 1648 were received back into the service of the Commonwealth. The following list, in all probability by no means complete, will show the large number of captains whose conduct came under observation, and the character of their misdemeanours:—

Name Accused of Result

John Taylor Neglect of duty in action of Nov. 1652 Ordered to enter into recognisances to come up for judgment if called upon.

Anth. Young

Edm. Chapman

B. Blake

Thos. Marriott Embezzlement, 1652 Not known

John Mead ” 1653 ”

John Best Drunkenness and cowardice, 1653 ”

Wm. Gregory Embezzlement, 1653 ”

Jon. Taylor Signing false tickets, 1653 ”

Thos. Harris Neglect of duty, 1653 Cashiered

Jas. Cadman Killing one of his crew, 1653 Suspended for 12 months

—— Neglect of convoy duty, 1653 Not known

Jas. Peacock Embezzlement, 1653 ”

Sam. Dickinson ” 1654 ”

Val. Tatnell ” 1654 ”

J. Clarke ” 1655 Cashiered

—— ” 1655 Wages suspended

Robt. Nixon Cruelty, 1655 Not known

J. Seaman Drunkenness, 1655 ”

Fr. Parke Theft from prizes, 1655 ”

Alex. Farley Drunkenness and embezzlement 1656 ”

J. Jefferies Embezzlement, 1656 Fined £60

Thos. Sparling ” 1656 ” £160

J. Lightfoot Fraud and violence, 1656 Not known

J. Smith Embezzlement and drunkenness, 1656 ”

Rich. Penhallow Making out false tickets, 1656 Amount to be deducted from his wages

Jas. Cadman Embezzlement, 1656 Fined

W. Hannam Cowardice, cruelty, and incapacity, 1656 Not known

John Best Drunkenness, 1656 ”

Robt. Nixon Cruelty and embezzlement, 1657 ”

Hen. Powell Embezzlement, 1657 Severely admonished

—— Drunkenness and blasphemy, 1657 Not known

J. Vasey Drunkenness, 1658 Charge withdrawn

— Davis Selling prize goods, 1658 To refund

Robt. Saunders Came home without leave, 1658 Cashiered

Thos. Whetstone Drunkenness and theft, 1658 Not known

Rowland Bevan Embezzlement and carrying cargo, 1658 ”

—— Carrying cargo, 1659 ”

Pet. Foote. ” 1659 ”

Robt. Kirby Drunkenness and theft, 1659 ”

—— Carrying cargo, false tickets, 1660 ”

It is curious to find that, in 1657, two ex-captains, Mellage and Baker, were in prison as Quakers. In cases of embezzlement the sentence of a court-martial, where ascertainable, appears to have been usually confined to fining the accused the value of the stores stolen, or stopping the amount from his wages. The custom was commencing of trying commanders, who lost their ships by misadventure, before a court-martial, instead of accepting their explanations, or holding an informal investigation at Whitehall, as had previously been done; and once a captain was sent before a court because his ship went ashore, although she came off without damage. This must be almost the first occurrence of that form of inquiry. Log books were now compulsory, and were sent up to the Navy Commissioners on the return of the ship; by an order of 2nd Feb. 1653 an advocate, who conducted prosecutions in courts-martial, was attached to the fleets. It will be noticed how often drunkenness is an article in the foregoing charges, and this weakness seems to have been common in all ranks, from captains down to ships’ boys. Among these naval papers there are very few indications of the existence of Puritan fervour or even of ordinary religious feeling; the great mass of men and officers aimed at pay and prize money, gave strenuous service when the former was punctual and the latter plentiful, and became heedless and indifferent when they failed. Sailors have been always much more interested in their material prosperity in this world than the prospects of their future welfare in the next. Nor does the rule of the saints appear to have spiritualised the proverbial hard swearing of the service.

It is, however, from this period that dates that sense of solidarity among officers and men which is at once the sign and consequence of an organised and continuous service. Hitherto the permanent executive force in peace time had consisted of a few subordinate officers and some 200 or 300 shipkeepers, many of whom were not even seamen. When a fleet was prepared, the ships were commanded by captains for whom sea service was only an episode, and officered and manned by men who came from, and were immediately sent back to, the merchant service on the completion of their cruise. But between 1642 and 1660 every available English sailor must have passed a large portion of those years on the state’s ships; and the captains and officers were kept in nearly continuous employment, with the result of the formation of a class feeling, and the growth of especial manners and habits, characteristic of men working under conditions which removed them from frequent contact with their fellows. The numerous notices in Restoration literature of the particular appearance, modes of expression, and bearing, stamping the man-of-war officer—references never before made—show how rapidly the new circumstances had produced their effect.

When captains showed themselves so ready to steal it might have been expected that officers of lower rank would follow, and even improve upon, the pattern set them, but this did not prove to be the case. Although, of course, there are many flagrant cases recorded, the number of officers charged with fraud or theft is not only relatively less, considering the much larger aggregate employed, than under Charles I, but also absolutely smaller for any equal series of years. Experience, gained during the civil war, had led to closer inspection and the introduction of safeguards which made theft neither so easy nor so free from risk, and further precautions were taken under the Commonwealth. Embezzlement by a captain could not be prevented, it could only be punished: but the regulations which made it easy for him might make it difficult for his gunner or boatswain. The first step, taken in 1649, was to raise the wages of those officers who were in charge of stores, a measure recommended long before by Holland and every other reformer. In 1651 the Navy Commissioners were directed to consider how the frauds, still numerous among officers, might be best dealt with, and this was probably the cause of an order the next year that sureties should be required from pursers, boatswains, and others for the honest performance of their duties. These sureties were usually entered into by two persons, and were sometimes as high as £600.

That some such method was necessary, at least with the pursers, is evident from the following catalogue of their ‘chief’ abuses, drawn up by the Navy Commissioners in 1651: (1) They forge their captains’ signatures; (2) make false entries of men; (3) falsify the time men have served; (4) sign receipts for a full delivery of stores and compound with the victualling agents for the portion not received; (5) do not send in their accounts for one voyage till they are again sailing; (6) charge the men with clothes not sold to them; and (7) execute their places by deputy while they stop on shore. The principal reforms suggested by the Commissioners were that bonds should be required, that stewards should be employed for the victualling, that pursers should in future sail as clerks of the check, with limited powers, and that all their papers should be countersigned by the captain. These measures were all adopted, but a further recommendation that a pillory should be erected near the Navy Office for their especial use was not, apparently, acted upon. When one purser openly declared that he cared not how the seamen starved if he could ‘make £500 or £600 a year out of their bellies,’ it was full time to apply to his kind the treatment exercised by governments on such dangerous idealists as constitutional reformers.

The Commissioners had set themselves a hard task in the inculcation of honesty, for that sentiment which still regards lightly cheats on a government was strongly against them. When Dover was searched, in 1653, large quantities of stolen cordage, sold from the ships, were discovered, and Bourne found that ‘these embezzlements are so common that the people declare that they think it no wrong to the state.’ Still in the long run they were more successful than their predecessors had been, and the trials for embezzlement became fewer after 1653. Their treatment of the pursers had the best results, judging from the small number of those officers who came up for judgment; these gentlemen did not at all like the new rules and at first mostly refused to sail as clerks of the check. For reasons unknown, unless it was that they had become more trustworthy and that the new system was in some respects cumbrous, the clerks were abolished in 1655 and the pursers reinstated in their old powers, pecuniary guarantees in the shape of the bonds still being required from them. It must have been a very new and unpleasant experience to some of these men, who many of them remembered the free hand they were allowed before 1640, to find themselves before a court-martial for acts they had come to look upon as natural to their places. One steward attempted to evade an accusation of embezzlement by declaring that the rats had eaten his books; he might have improved his defence by producing some of the victuallers’ ‘salt horse,’ and showing that his books, being tenderer and more nutritious, were more likely to tempt the rats. In the trial of another we have some account of the mode of proceeding. The prisoner, Joshua Hunt, was tried under the twenty-eighth article of war before Lawson and twelve commanding officers, and was himself sworn and examined. By the twenty-eighth article the character of the penalty is left to the decision of the court, and Hunt was given the option of making restitution or of undergoing punishment. In making his report, Monk remarked that the prisoner had only been found out in that which most stewards did, and that he would be sent up to London to give his friends or sureties the opportunity of making amends; if they failed to do this he was to be returned to the fleet for corporal punishment at the decision of a further court-martial. This form of sentence was very frequent, and gunners, boatswains, and stewards were ordinarily fined the value of the stores stolen, and committed to prison until it was paid.

The wide discretion left to the courts-martial led to great inequality in the sentences, especially when an example could be made without losing the stores or their money value. A carpenter was tried for theft; he confessed to the intention, and partly to the act, but returned the articles before arrest. He was, however, ordered to be taken from ship to ship in the Downs, with a paper describing his offence affixed to his breast, the paper being read at each ship’s side, to be thrice ducked from the yardarm, and to be cashiered. Obviously it was more profitable and less dangerous not to stop halfway in theft. In 1653 is found a rather remarkable sentence: Wm. Haycock, carpenter’s mate of the Hound, was, for ‘drunkenness, swearing, and uncleanness,’ ordered, among other things, ten lashes at the side of each flagship. Haycock has the distinction of being the first recorded victim of the form of punishment which afterwards developed into the devilish torture known as ‘flogging round the fleet.’ It became comparatively common during the reign of Charles II.

At Chatham, in 1655 the authorities appear to have discovered and broken up a gang of receivers, of whom one had an estate of £5000 obtained from thefts from the ships and yards. A hoyman, Dunning, confessed to having conveyed 500 barrels of powder from the men-of-war at Chatham and Deptford within four years. When pressed for particulars, he exclaimed, ‘Alas! shall I undo a thousand families? Shall I undo so many? I did not think you would put me upon it to do so!’ Finding that this appeal, instead of silencing, only whetted his examiners’ curiosity, he had at last to name eighteen ships whose gunners had given him powder to remove. The Admiralty employed detectives of their own to find out thefts, but on more than one occasion these men turned thieves themselves. The aforesaid Dunning bought a cable from one of them; another was found ‘to have unduly abused his trust,’ but a third was granted £15 for proving the larcenies of captain Cadman. Sometimes, when the amount was small, the Admiralty, instead of bringing offenders to trial, deducted the estimated value of their embezzlements from wages; evidently punishment was very uncertain in extent, but the practical impunity of former times could no longer be reckoned on.

In some few instances the Admiralty had to deal with difficulties of another nature among the officers. Richard Knowlman, a gunner, and described as a Quaker, wrote to the Commissioners that he had served by sea and land from 1641, and was still willing to continue in any other capacity, since ‘I would be free to act against all deceit ... for I see most men, especially those in the navy and of most rank and quality, are corrupted.’ Knowlman could not have expressed less respect for the average official had he enjoyed access to the State Papers, but on the whole his was one of the very rare eras when such doubts were unjust. Another master gunner had, for two months, refused to fire a gun, ‘lest blood might be spilt,’ and a third insisted on preaching to the crew of the Fame, who by no means appreciated his amateur ministrations. In three instances chaplains are found accused of drunkenness, but their presence on board ship was not invariable, and their influence appears to have been very slight. One was tried for forging Monk’s signature.

The habits of half a century were not to be at once overthrown, but after 1655 references to thefts became far fewer; and the Navy Commissioners could congratulate themselves on having done much to extinguish customs which had gone far to destroy the vitality of the former Royal Navy. The want of trust, that long experience had shown to be justifiable in gunners, carpenters, and boatswains, who had been, and were still to a certain extent, treated as officers, may have been one reason why lieutenants were now always attached to ships, except fifth- and sixth-rates. Another may probably be found in the growing demand for scientific seamanship, an accomplishment the former class had little opportunity of acquiring. Whatever the cause, the effect was to thrust the gunners and their compeers lower down in the social scale, to lose them that respect on shipboard they had hitherto possessed, to lessen their authority, and so quicken the downward movement. We are told that, a generation later, it was as usual to strike them as to strike the men, and that they had to ‘fawn like spaniels’ on the lieutenants to retain favour or position. The lieutenants must have been found much more satisfactory; in the whole series of papers relating to this period there is no instance of one being tried by court-martial, and only one in which such an officer got into any trouble. His captain put him in irons, but the reason is not given. Lieutenants were occasionally appointed to the naval service in the reign of Elizabeth, but the Dutch war may be taken as the period where their position became permanent. In June 1652, Sir Wm. Penn, then vice-admiral, writing to Cromwell, gave expression to the unanimous desire of his colleagues that such a rank should be allowed in all ships carrying 150 men.

Another difficulty the Commissioners had to contend with was the forging of seamen’s tickets, an old form of crime which grew in extent with the employment of so many more men. The Navy Commissioners, in advance of their time, recognised that the only legal penalty, death, was too severe, and practically prevented any punishment. The Navy department was not the only one which suffered from these forgers, who were all more or less connected with each other; in the same year forgeries of public faith bills to the amount of £115,000 were discovered. Some of these men were in league with clerks in the Navy and prize offices, and obtained the necessary papers and information from them. At a later date one of the gang confessed, when in prison, that the total of the public faith bill and other forgeries was nearly £500,000. In 1656 a new plan was tried: ‘to prevent the many frauds and deceits formerly practised,’ the Commissioners were ordered to send the Treasurer, daily or weekly, an abstract of all the bills or tickets they signed authorising payment of money. Subsequently the Admiralty Commissioners obtained power to themselves commit offenders to prison. Nicholas Harnaman, for instance, was sent to Bridewell with hard labour ’till further order,’ for counterfeiting tickets.

Officers’ pay was raised in March 1649, and again in 1653, after which latter date there was no alteration. It then stood per month at:—

1st Rate 2nd Rate 3rd Rate 4th Rate 5th Rate 6th Rate

£ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d £ s d

Captain 21 0 0 16 16 0 14 0 0 10 0 0 8 8 0 7 0 0

Lieutenant 4 4 0 4 4 0 3 10 0 3 10 0

Master 7 0 0 6 6 0 4 13 8 4 6 2 3 7 6

Master’s mate or pilot 3 6 0 3 0 0 2 16 2 2 7 10 2 2 0 2 2 0

Midshipman 2 5 0 2 0 0 1 17 6 1 13 9 1 10 0 1 10 0

Boatswain 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0

Boatswain’s mate 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0

Quartermaster 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0

Quartermaster’s mate 1 10 0 0 10 0 1 8 0 1 8 0 1 6 0 1 5 0

Carpenter 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0

Carpenter’s mate 2 0 0 2 0 0 1 16 0 1 14 0 1 12 0 1 10 0

Gunner 4 0 0 3 1 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0

Gunner’s mate 1 15 0 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 6 0

Surgeon 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0 2 10 0

Corporal 1 15 0 1 12 0 1 10 0 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 5 0

Purser 4 0 0 3 10 0 3 0 0 2 10 0 2 5 0 2 0 0

Master Trumpeter 1 10 0 1 8 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 4 0

Cook 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 5 0 1 4 0

When Parliament began the rapid construction of new ships some of its members may have had misgivings about getting the crews to man them, but few probably anticipated the future difficulties in procuring the guns wherewith to arm them. Geo. Browne, for so many years the royal gunfounder, was still almost the only maker, and his works were unequal to the increased demands. In March and April 1652, when war appeared certain, 335 guns were immediately required to equip only part of the Navy, but the authorities were already reduced to such straits as to be compelled to send searchers about London to try to find ordnance. A month later some of the inland strongholds were disarmed, and 84 brass and 544 iron guns thus obtained; the sale of ordnance taken in prizes was strictly prohibited, and, in the course of the year, guns were hired at ten and twelve shillings each a month. In December the ordnance officials announced that 1500 iron pieces, weighing 2230 tons, at £26 a ton, were required, the same number of carriages at from 21s to 31s 3d each, 117,000 round and double-headed shot, 5000 hand grenades at 2s 6d each, 12,000 barrels of corn powder at £4 10s a barrel, and 150 tons of breechings and tackle at £50 a ton. To meet these wants they had in store only 121 guns and 34,000 rounds. In February 1653 the contracts were made for these guns, but, very soon after they were entered into, the officials saw that the deliveries would be at ‘a vast distance from our pressing occasions,’ for not only was the Tower empty but the ports were also destitute of munition, and, at Portsmouth, they were in April ‘at a stand’ for powder and shot.

All that Browne and Foley could promise was to deliver 140 guns in October, 190 in February 1654, 254 in June, 230 in October, and 86 in June 1655; but, as 500 were still to be sent in on old contracts, their engagements could hardly be relied on. Fifty tons of shot and 5000 hand grenades they promised for June, 50 tons in September, and 100 more by March 1654. In the meantime ships intended to serve as armed merchantmen were actually waiting uselessly for 117 guns, which the Ordnance department could not procure anywhere. The immediate outlook for powder was no better, since there was instant demand for 2780 barrels and only 500 in store, while the contractors were only bound to supply 660 barrels a month. Here, however, the further prospect was more favourable, as there were many powder-makers at work and the government could purchase quantities at Hamburg.

The staff of the Ordnance office was very much larger, proportionately, than that of the Admiralty. It employed, at yearly salaries, a surveyor, £194; clerk, £215; storekeeper, £216; clerk of the delivery, £166; master gunner of England, £121; keeper of the small gun office, £66; messenger, £60; two furbishers, £12 each; and twenty labourers at £21 each. Its management had mended considerably since 1640, but the improvement did not avail to save its independence in 1653 when it became a department of the Admiralty. In February 1654 matters were so far better that there were 2359 barrels of powder and 38,000 round and other shot in hand, but still no guns in reserve. There are no complaints about the quality of the powder supplied during the Dutch war, but, in 1655 and 1656, accusations against the makers, who were said to ‘use some sleight to make it Tower-proof on delivery, but it does not long continue good nor abide change of weather,’ became numerous. All that the authorities could do was to call upon the manufacturers to make it good, or, if they preferred, take it back with a licence to export it abroad; 6827 out of 15,098 barrels recently furnished were defective, and, by an order of 2nd April 1656, the Council gave the contractors the choice between these courses and being committed to prison. The makers, however, had something to say on their side. Like most other naval purveyors they had not been paid, and even to get any money on account were sometimes compelled, under threats of still longer postponement, to repair Hamburg powder at 17s a barrel when the real price should have been £2, naturally with unsatisfactory results. Some attributed all the mischief to the Hamburg importations, but most of them seem to have gone into the business without any expert knowledge, simply with a view of profiting by the sudden demand for war material.

The form of reparation exacted was manifestly unfair: instead of each maker being required to substitute good for whatever bad powder he had sent in they were called upon to replace it in proportion to their contracts. Thus Josias Devey was made liable for 461 barrels instead of the 141 which were faulty in the number he had supplied, and apparently he would have fared just as badly if his powder had been excellent down to the last pound. As some of the manufacturers had delivered 50 per cent., or more, of inferior quality, the probable explanation of this not very honourable proceeding is to be found in the fear of the Council that the worst culprits would be pecuniarily unable to make amends if assessed at their full liability. Wapping seems to have been a manufacturing district, since, in July 1657, there was an explosion of powder mills, or stores, there which injured many people and damaged 846 houses to the extent of £10,000.

The enlargements and improvements of the dockyards were not as considerable as might have been expected in view of the increased number of ships, and the space required for their accommodation. These requirements were partly met by the greater use made of Plymouth, and making Dover and Harwich stations where ships might obtain provisions and minor repairs. Harwich, largely used for a few years in the middle of the sixteenth century, had been found of some service during the civil war, but the movements of the fleets in the North Sea, and off the coast of Holland, brought both it and Dover into prominence. The latter port was not utilised till 1653, and was never very freely used, although the quarterly accounts sometimes reached £700 or £800; both it and Portsmouth were supplied with stores from Deptford. Bourne, from the date of his appointment as Navy Commissioner, took up his residence at Harwich, and remained there till March 1658. Monk’s testimony to his ability and success has already been quoted, although he had none of the appliances available in the older yards. But in 1657 ground was rented from the corporation, for a permanent government yard and wharf, on a ninety-nine year lease at £5 a year. Plymouth was employed mainly for victualling the ships on the western Channel station, as Dover was for those eastwards, and, to a certain extent, for repairs, although its exposed roadstead was no favourite with captains whose vessels were fit to put to sea. Blake evidently did not like it; ‘the unsafeness and hazard of this road, which to us is worse than a prison, is enough to scare us hence.’

One way of gauging the relative importance of the dockyards is to compare the stores in hand at a given date. We are enabled to do this for February and June 1659, as follows:—

Chatham Woolwich Deptford Portsmouth Plymouth Harwich

Anchors 108 129 62 17 13

Masts 356 724 269 498 95 67

Cables 106 29 272 70 42 63

Loads of timber 1500 322 416 508 79

Tree-nails 80,000 122,000 93,000 2000

Compasses 180 144

Hemp 100 tons 75 tons 63½ tons

Noyals canvas 23,000 yds. 10,600 yds. 2000 yds. 4850 yds.

Vittery ” 1800 ells 25,000 ells 380 ells

Ipswich ” 272 bolts 5½ bolts

English ” 240 bolts 7650 yds. 370 yds.

Tar and pitch 30 lasts 99 barrels 95 barrels

Hammocks 900 1200 700 2020

Owing to want of money the magazines were very low at this date, but the relation shown here would doubtless always exist. Harwich and Plymouth can refit ships which have suffered in spars, fittings, or canvas; Chatham, Woolwich, and Deptford build or repair, while Portsmouth is equipped for all purposes. Hitherto all masts had been obtained from the Baltic, but in 1652 the government tried the experiment of sending two vessels to New England for them, and the results were so satisfactory that henceforth a proportion of masts from the colonies is found in all the lists of dockyard stores. The English canvas is elsewhere described as west country canvas, and was principally made in Somersetshire; its manufacture was due to Geo. Pley, afterwards government agent at Weymouth and governor of Portland, who successfully urged its use upon the Admiralty. It cost 1s 7d or 1s 8d a yard, and was dearer than French canvas, but considered better.

In 1653 there was a double dry dock at Chatham, Woolwich, and Deptford respectively, and one at Blackwall, probably in the East India Company’s yard; these were the only docks directly belonging to, or available by, the state. No addition appears to have been made to Chatham yard except the purchase of a wharf and storehouse adjoining the old dock in 1656. In October 1653 a contractor from Chatham was either repairing an old, or constructing a new, dock at Deptford; and in 1657 some wharves were built there along the waterside. A new dry dock was ordered for Woolwich in 1653 and completed the next year; storehouses were built in 1656; and two years later a lease was taken from John Rymill, butcher, of London, of one acre of land, known as Chimney Marsh, on the east side of Ham Creek, ‘next to the state’s yard,’ for ten years, at £4 a year. The sizes of the yards may, perhaps, be inferred from the number of watchmen attached to each—Chatham, 32; Deptford, 18; Woolwich, 16; and Portsmouth, 13.

Portsmouth, if the smallest of the chief yards, became under the Commonwealth one of the busiest and most important. In June 1649 one of five new frigates was ordered to be laid down there; this vessel, the Portsmouth, was duly launched in 1650, and, with the doubtful exception of the Jennett, in ‘new making’ at Portsmouth in 1559, was the first man-of-war of the modern Royal Navy built at that place since the Mary Rose and Peter Pomegranate of 1509 were first floated in the harbour. The dry dock so often recommended and ordered under Charles I was, however, not yet existent. It was urged that one-third of the Navy ought to be permanently stationed at the port, but in 1652 the Commissioner in charge complained that there was not room for the stores required for the few ships usually there. From a survey of 1653 we obtain, so far as names go, a statement of the number of buildings in the dockyard; they are upper and lower storehouses, upper and lower hemp houses, block loft, old rope-maker’s house, office and nail loft, canvas room, hammock room, kettle room, iron loft, tar house, oil house, sail loft, and top-makers’ and boat-makers’ house.

Less than twenty years earlier Russell had found that work done at Portsmouth was 100 per cent. dearer than at the other yards, but Willoughby had altered that, and now boasted that he could build 20 per cent. cheaper than elsewhere, although all the skilled artisans required in naval work had to be sent down, there seeming to be as yet no population attached to or living on the dockyard. He desired that five and a half acres of adjoining ground should be purchased, a rope yard erected, and the whole yard surrounded by a brick wall 73 perches in length. Therefore in 1653 and 1654 the Navy Commissioners were directed to take a lease of an acre and a half of the ground recommended, to set up a rope-yard, and to build the wall. In December 1655 Willoughby put before the Commissioners the difficulty in carrying on the ordinary work, ‘we wanting the benefit of a dock,’ and at this time the staff, recently reduced in strength, numbered 180 men. In the following April Bourne and captain John Taylor, a shipwright of Chatham, were sent down to consult with Willoughby as to the best position for a dry dock which was to be ‘forthwith made.’ On their report an order issued in August that one of sufficient capacity to take third-rates was to occupy the situation of the existing graving dock, and that it was not to cost more than £3200, of which the town, presumably in the hope of attracting trade and inhabitants, was willing to contribute £500. In November Taylor was instructed to go to Portsmouth and superintend its construction, but he energetically protested that he knew nothing about dock-building and would, under such circumstances, only make himself ridiculous. It was therefore put in the hands of Nicholas Poirson, who signed the contract on 24th November, by which he undertook to complete it by the following 20th July, for £2100, the government providing the materials and the corporation £500 of this sum.

There were still a sufficient number of abuses in connection with the dockyards, but the flagrant thefts customary under Charles I had been largely diminished. Members of the Pett family occupied responsible positions in the three home yards, and either they used their power to ill purpose, or their favour with the authorities was no passport to the love of their subordinates. In 1651 there was what would now be advertised as a great scandal at Chatham; all the chief officers, and many of the workmen, were accusing each other of misdeeds in a way which necessitated a governmental commission of inquiry, empowered to take evidence on oath. The light in which the Petts were regarded is shown by a remark made by one man to another that he dared not speak, ‘for fear of being undone by the kindred ... they were all so knit together that the devil himself could not discover them except one impeached the other.’ The result of the inquiry was a resolution that all the accused, on both sides, should retain their places, a decision more likely to be due to the impossibility of displacing experienced officers when war was imminent than to any inability to form an opinion.

The yearly salary of the master shipwright at Chatham was £103, 8s 4d, Deptford the same, and Woolwich £70. The building programme of the government naturally tempted these men to add to their salaries the profits to be made by having private yards for the construction of men-of-war. Holland pointed out that this led to the shipwright’s absence from the state’s yard, to the exchange of good government workmen for bad of his own, and that usually a frigate turned out from a shipwright’s yard cost the country twice as much as one from a dockyard. Holland commented on another evil, the existence of beerhouses in the dockyards, ‘necessary at first, now one of the greatest abuses in the Navy.’ At least one ‘searcher’ was employed to prevent theft from the dockyards; but, judging from the small number of such cases reported, the precautions taken or the higher standard induced in the men, had greatly altered former conditions for the better. In one instance, however, the want of honesty shown by two men was attributed—it is painful to have to confess here—to their habit of reading ‘histrye books.’ The wages of shipwrights and caulkers were raised in April 1650 from 1s 10d to 2s 1d a day, and again in 1652 to 2s 2d; they appear to have been punctually paid to a later date than the seamen, but in 1656, when they also were beginning to suffer from the emptiness of the treasury and their wages to fall into arrear, the Council, with the dry humour of officialism, ordered ‘an exact and punctual inspection and examination’ quarterly of their accounts. By 1658 they had, mostly, twelve months’ wages owing, but their murmurs were not nearly so loud as those of the seamen. Frequently during 1659 they were working half-time or less, for want of materials. In March 1660 there were not 100 yards of canvas remaining at either Woolwich or Deptford, the contractors would not supply more without ready money; and we may assume that other necessaries were equally lacking. During part of 1659 there was only one forge going at Portsmouth, John Timbrell, the anchor-smith, having received no money for two years, and having been compelled to dismiss his men, being unable to procure iron on credit. Timbrell was mayor of the town in 1662, so that the Restoration apparently relieved him of his troubles.

In September 1658 the Happy Entrance was destroyed by fire at Chatham, a mishap attributed to carelessness on the part of the men at work on her, and the absence of supervision of the superior officials. This caused the promulgation of an order the following month that no member of the superior dockyard staff should absent himself without leave from the Commissioner, and he only by permission of the Admiralty or Navy Commissioners, with a general penalty of dismissal for disobedience. This order was to be framed and hung up in each yard. White’s invention of 1634 of iron mooring chains, noticed previously, was now taken up by the government, and some were laid down at Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich for ships to ride at, two to a chain. Mooring places for the use of merchantmen were granted to White, Bourne and others at a rental of £5 a year. The dockyard chains weighed 2 cwt. 2 qrs. 14 lbs. to a fathom, cost fivepence a pound, and were guaranteed for two years. In 1658 a boom was ordered to be placed across the Medway at Upnor, but there is reason to believe that the order was not carried out.

Among the Commonwealth experiments was that of using the wood and iron ore of Dean Forest for the manufacture of iron for the supply of the dockyards and private purchasers. As a ton of iron could be made there for £3, 10s, and a ton of shot for £4, and sold respectively at £7 and £9, the enterprise was more profitable than most government undertakings. In 1656 the stock in hand was valued at £9446, which stood as net gain, all expenses being cleared; but, as Major Wade, who was in charge, thought that one or two hundred tons of iron thrown upon the market ‘would surfeit the whole country,’ it was rather a book profit than an actual one. However, from September 1654 to March 1659 Dean Forest supplied the Navy with 701 tons of shot and 88 tons of iron fittings; and from Sept. 1656 to April 1660 with 2300 tons of timber and 123,000 tree-nails, the saving thus effected being alone a sufficient justification of the new department. The plentiful yield of timber suggested the advisability of building frigates on the spot, and the Grantham was launched at Lidney in 1654; she was followed by the Forester, and then the Princess remained long in hand, since Furzer, the master shipwright, was receiving only £2 a week of the £15 necessary to meet expenses. In October 1659 he wrote to the Navy Commissioners that instead of attending to his duties he was forced to be away two or three days in the week trying to borrow money.

The following table, drawn up from the Audit Office Declared Accounts, shows the general expenditure for this period in round figures:—

Amounts received and paid by Treasurer Already owing Victualling Deptford Woolwich Chatham Portsmouth Wages

1649 } 432,000 233,500 149,000 8700 8786 23,768 5292

1650

1651 446,000 129,000 51,000 10,163 7776 19,089 3783

1652 629,000 238,000 88,000 10,900 8381 22,744 6860 304,000

1653 1,445,000 335,000 269,000 12,600 12,500 29,000 13,700 227,000

1654 1,117,000 450,000 230,000 11,700 13,500 22,500 15,700 225,000

1655 587,000 466,000 70,000 8700 7600 21,800 7700

1656 791,000 473,000 209,000 8000 7000 20,000 7000

1657 746,000 506,000 9000 10,300 19,400 6200 311,000

1658 } 1,442,000 714,000 11,800 18,000 25,000 9000 447,000

1660

1660 1,056,000

The Commonwealth began its naval administration hampered by a debt of £233,000, and it will be seen that, with the exception of 1650, during which year the arrears were partly paid off, it steadily grew in amount. But comparing the national revenue, which had also to support a standing army, with the sums devoted to the Navy, the wonder seems to be that the debt was not larger. For the financial year ending 29th September 1657 the total public income was £1,050,000, and of this £809,000 was assigned to naval purposes; for 1658 £951,000, of which the Navy took £624,000. The receipts for 1659 were put at £1,517,000, and the Navy estimates at £848,000.

The strain began to be most seriously felt from 1653, when, in September, the Navy Commissioners warned their chiefs that £1,115,000 was required before 31st December, without including the cost of the vessels on the stocks or that of the winter fleet; no provision, they said, had been made for this and ‘we find it necessary to lay before you the daily clamours we undergo for want thereof.’ In October 1654 the Admiralty Commissioners apprised the Protector that the credit of the Government was so greatly impaired that stores could not be obtained except for ready money; yet £1,117,000 in cash passed through the Treasurer’s hands in this year. This sum was procured from many sources—excise, £262,000; treasurer-at-wars, £424,000; customs, £162,000; ‘profits arising by probate of wills,’ £1163; commissioners for Dutch prizes, £2029; commissioners for prize goods, £44,000; treasurer at Drury House, £16,000; Col. Barkstead, £44,000; from the exchequer, £131,000; and defalcations and sale of stores, £31,000. Notwithstanding these receipts the Admiralty Commissioners wrote in April 1655 to the Council that they had only been able to pay seamen’s wages, that all other debts remained unpaid, and that the yards were exhausted of stores. Straitened as they were, the Council, two months later, were not deterred from ordering 2000 Bibles for the soldiers in the West Indies, although the fact that the commissioners of the treasury had to ‘consider’ how they could be paid for seems to imply that Bibles were no more to be obtained on credit than cordage. On at least one occasion Oliver appears to have himself advanced £10,000 to the Navy Office.

The debt increased, but the revenue did not show the same elasticity; all that the Admiralty Commissioners could do, themselves almost daily invoked by the Navy Commissioners, was to carry on the appeal to the Council, ‘finding every day a sad increase of the just complaints of several persons for money long since due.’ This was in 1658, but in March of the following year they wrote bitterly to the Council that, while such large debts were contracted and they were struggling with difficulties, it made them ‘exceeding unhappy’ to see that even their assignments on the customs were not handed over to them in full. In May 1659, among other items, £330,000 was owing for seamen’s and £43,000 for dockyard wages, and the £735 a week paid by the Navy Treasurer to the Savoy and Ely House hospitals was six months over-due. In September the army commissioners were directed to hand over £60,000 for naval purposes, although the soldiers’ pay was months in arrear. When the Commonwealth accounts close on 7th July 1660 the debt was £1,056,000. For this large sum every year from 1640 furnished its quota, thus detailed:—1640-9, £10,200; 1650, £71,000; 1651, £25,000; 1652, £16,000; 1653, £11,000; 1654, £5000; 1655, £50,000; 1656, £229,000; 1657, £218,000; 1660, £421,000. That the earlier amounts were not merely book debts carried forward for want of claimants is shown by the existence of a petition, of April 1658, begging for the settlement of a bill for freight incurred between 1643 and 1651. These liabilities, belonging to only one branch of the public service, help to explain why many classes of society, not actively royalist, may have welcomed a restoration which promised a settlement of debts and a more stable financial system.

When the St George’s cross was made the national flag in February 1648-9, it was also ordered that an escutcheon should be carried on the stern of each man-of-war, containing a red cross in one compartment and a harp in another. In 1653 the three Generals at sea used, besides their standards, a pendant of red, white, or blue, at the main, and their vice- and rear-admirals their respective colours at the fore and mizen. From 18th May 1658 the standard of the General of the fleet was to bear the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ‘with his Highnes’ escutcheon of pretence according to the great seal of England.’ The jack flag for admirals was to consist of the arms of England and Scotland united, ‘according to the ancient form,’ with the harp added, ‘according to a model now shown.’ All saluting, whether from ships or forts, was strictly forbidden in 1652, except in honour of ambassadors; but the salute to the flag from foreigners was firmly upheld under all circumstances. By the treaty of 5th April 1654, the Dutch formally acknowledged the English right to the salute in the ‘British seas.’ In 1657 Opdam, with thirty Dutch sail, passing Dover struck his flag and saluted the castle; shortly afterwards he met the Dragon and the Colchester, whose captains ordered him again to strike. He refused, saying that he was not expected to pay this mark of respect to every ship he met, whereupon they replied that if he did not they would engage him till they sank alongside. Then ‘he struck in a great rage,’ and kept his flag down till out of sight of the Englishmen. Man-of-war captains sometimes displayed the same feeling of pride in their position at the expense of English ships. In 1654 a Virginiaman was run down and sunk in the Channel by the Ruby. In the subsequent inquiry the master of the merchantman held that the Ruby should have gone astern of his vessel, to which her captain retorted by asking, ‘How many men-of-war have you known go under a merchantman’s stern?’

The prices of naval stores varied greatly, according to the confidence felt in the treasury and conditions of peace or war; the following are the rates for some of the principal articles:—

Iron Ordnance

1650, £20 a ton

1653, £26 ”

Canvas

Noyals, 1652, £15 to £17 a bale

Noyals, 1654, £19, 7s a bale

Vitery, 1654, 1s a yard

Vitery, 1655, 1s 4d an ell

Ipswich, 1654, £1, 12s a bolt

Ipswich, 1655, £1, 7s 9d a bolt

Hemp

1653, £32 a ton (English)

1655, £38, 10s a ton (Riga)

1657, £44 a ton (Riga)

1658, £46 a ton (Riga)

1658, £33 a ton (English)

1658, £38 a ton (Russia)

Anchors

1656, £34 a ton

” £37 ”

Powder

1650, £3, 16s a barrel

1652, £4 ”

1653, £4, 10s ”

Plank

1653, £2, 18s a load

1655, £3, 7s ”

1657, £3, 5s ” (oak)

1659, £3, 15s ” ”

Small Arms

Snaphaunces, 1658, 11s 6d each

Matchlocks, 1658, 10s 6d each

Carbines, 1658, 11s each

Pistols, 1658, 14s a pair

Black Rosin

1655, £10, 10s a ton

1657, £10 a ton (Mar.)

1657, £9, 5s ” (Aug.)

Compass Timber

1656, £2, 5s a load

1658, £3 ”

Cordage

1649, £30 a ton

1656, £44 ”

1657, £48 ”

1658, £44 ”

Shot

1652, £11, 10s a ton

1653, £14 a ton

Tar

1654, £1, 15s a barrel

1655, £10, 12s a last

1656, £12 a last

1657, £12, 10s a last

1658, £13 a last

Pitch

1654, £1, 16s a barrel

1655, £15, 5s a last

Beer

1654, £1, 15s a tun

1659, £2, 5s ”

Sprutia Deals

1656, 12s 6d each

1659, 14s ”

Ordinary Deals

1657, £4, 3s per 100 of six score

Whale Oil

1659, £26, 15s a ton

English Tallow

1658, £2, 3s per cwt.

Lignum Vitæ for blocks

1656, £6, 15s a ton

Examples of that incongruity of expression usually associated with Puritan fervour are not frequent among the Navy papers, but they do occasionally occur. On one occasion Lawson writes, ‘All that look towards Zion should hold Christian communion—we have all the guns aboard.’ Major Robert Sedgwick, starting for the West Indies, asks the Navy Commissioners, after official details, for ‘your prayers that we may be sent out with a blessing and be a blessing where we go.’ Major Sedgwick’s duties were to kill Spaniards, plunder their property, and annex their territory. These men were too grimly earnest in the work they set their hands to do to trouble themselves about fine phrases. They lacked humour, and the court of Charles II was, we are taught, very witty; but when, in 1667, the roar of foreign guns was, for the only time in English history, heard in London, even that majority which always loves a royal jest must have begun to appreciate the distinction underlying Stewart wit and Puritan dulness.