CHAPTER VIII

THE ANGLO-DUTCH WARS

(1) NAVAL ADMINISTRATION UNDER CHARLES II AND JAMES II

THE history of naval administration between 1660 and 1688 falls naturally into four periods: (1) 1660–73, from the appointment of the Duke of York to the office of Lord High Admiral, to his retirement after the passing of the Test Act; (2) 1673-9, the first secretaryship of Samuel Pepys (3) 1679-84, the interval of administrative disorder which followed Pepys' resignation; (4) 1684-8, from the return of the Duke of York until the Revolution - this period being also that of Pepys' second secretaryship.

In the navy, as in other departments, the Restoration involved a reversion to the old order. At the date of the King's return its administrative direction was in the hands of an Admiralty Commission of twenty-eight, appointed by the Rump Parliament in 1659, with a Navy Board of seven experts under it. But so early as May 16, before his landing at Dover, the King had appointed his brother James Lord High Admiral of England; and on July 2 the existing commissions were dissolved, and the ancient form of government by four "principal officers" was restored. With them were associated three "commissioners," and the "principal officers and commissioners of the navy" were usually known as the Navy Board. In determining their remuneration, however, the restored monarchy followed the precedents of the Commonwealth, and offered an increased stipend in place of the traditional fee with allowances. Upon the Navy Board of the Restoration experience was largely represented. Of the seven officials who composed it, four had been used to the sea, one had an extensive military experience, one came of a family of shipbuilders, and but one was altogether without knowledge of naval affairs. This exception, curiously enough, was Samuel Pepys, the Clerk of the Acts, for his brief tenure of office in 1660 as secretary to the Generals of the Fleet could scarcely have equipped him with any special knowledge of the sea.

1660-73]

Causes of administrative failure

169

The older system of naval administration was thus restored; but changes of considerable importance were effected in it, both before and after the Second Dutch War. In 1662 an attempt was made to deal with a serious abuse by prohibiting officials from trading in commodities sold to the navy. In 1667 the increase of business caused by the war, and the administrative confusion which it created, led to a reorganisation of the Comptroller's office, and the appointment of two assistant Comptrollers, one for the accounts of the Treasurer, and the other for the victuallers' and pursers' accounts. Last of all, in 1671, a separate Comptroller was appointed for the stores, and the Treasurer of the Navy was brought much more completely under the control of the Navy Board. Nor did the Government of the Restoration disdain to learn from its predecessors. In 1662 the practice was taken over from the Commonwealth of requiring security from pursers; and in 1664 resident commissioners were appointed, as during the First Dutch War, for the dockyards at Portsmouth and Harwich, in addition to the commissioner assigned at the Restoration to Chatham, the "master-yard of all the rest. In fact, naval administration during the period of the Second Dutch War does not entirely deserve the indiscriminate condemnation which has been poured upon it. The men were at any rate experienced in naval affairs, and some of them were men of ability; they effected material improvements in the system under which they worked; and the system thus improved was sufficiently good to survive without any fundamental changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its disastrous failure during the period under review is to be accounted for by moral and financial causes, rather than by structural defects. The higher naval administration, itself not free from corruption, had to contend with idleness and dishonesty in the lower ranks of the service, due to a relaxation of the standards of public and private duty; and the combination of this with financial disorder ruined the Navy Office under Charles II, as it would have ruined any other public department in any country and at any time. When the management of the navy came to be enquired into in 1668 after the close of the War, it was found that the Principal Officers had been neglecting to carry out the instructions of 1662 under which they were supposed to work. The Treasurer had been remiss in attendance, and his accounts were two years in arrears; the Comptroller had neglected a large part of the details of his office; and the Surveyor had omitted to report to the Navy Board on the state of the dockyards, ships, and stores. Their defence was that the business of the War had absorbed their attention; but we find Pepys writing: "The pest of this Office has all along been an indifference in some of the principal members of it in seeing their work done, provided they found themselves furnished with any tolerable pretence for their personal failures in the doing it."

Still more important as a cause of disaster was the want of money,

170

Administrative changes of 1673

[1665-79 the root of all evil in the navy of Charles II. For this the restored monarchy was not entirely responsible, as it had inherited from the interregnum navy debts of more than a million and a quarter. Associated with this was a want of ready money; and the result was that when the War with the Dutch broke out, in the spring of 1665, the credit of the Government had sunk to the lowest ebb. This involved an enormous waste, for the merchant "resolved to save himself in the uncertainty of his payment by the greatness of his price"; while the hardships to private persons occasioned by delays in payment were almost intolerable. At the end of the War, the accumulated debt of the navy was estimated at over a million, at a time when its ordinary charge in time of peace was to be reduced to £200,000 a year. Measures of retrenchment were adopted in 1669; but so difficult a situation could not be at once remedied, and it was not until the later years of the Restoration period that the burden was lightened. In 1686 the arrears had declined to about £172,000.

When the Test Act in 1673 expelled James, Duke of York, from office, the King delegated part of the functions of the Lord High Admiral to a Commission; but he reserved the Admiralty dues and the patronage of the office to himself. This retention of powers in the King's hands was probably intended to give an opportunity to the Duke, who, in spite of the Test Act, retained until 1679 an important influence in naval affairs. The Secretary to the new Commission was Samuel Pepys, now promoted from the office of Clerk of the Acts; but the changes of 1673 did not interfere with the character of the Navy Board as a body of experts. Although they now took their orders from the Admiralty Commission instead of from the Duke of York, the main features of Admiralty policy were unchanged. It was the work of the new adminis tration to bring the Third Dutch War to a close, and then to repair, by an energetic building programme, that depreciation of the navy which was one of the results of the War. The Admiralty Commissioners were sensible and vigilant, and they were remarkably well served by their Secretary; while the Navy Board was strong on the technical side of its work, and was fortunate in numbering among its members an official so thoroughly capable in his own department as was the great shipbuilder, Anthony Deane. Moreover, although the financial difficulty was not removed, and still continued to hamper and cripple the navy in every possible way, a vigorous building policy was made possible by the better support which Parliament now gave to naval expansion. The political classes were beginning to understand and appreciate the importance of sea-power to England. The Act of 1677 for the construction of thirty new ships was a striking expression of the new parliamentary interest in naval problems.

In 1679 the Popish Plot compelled the withdrawal of the Duke of York and the resignation of Pepys; and the higher administration of the

1679-88]

The Special Commission of 1686

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navy passed to a new Admiralty Commission which was almost entirely without naval experience. They induced the King to surrender into their hands that part of the functions of the Lord High Admiral's office which he had hitherto reserved to himself, and then proceeded, unchecked in their zeal for retrenchment, to destroy the fighting efficiency of the fleet. "No king," wrote Pepys, "ever did so unaccountable a thing to oblige his people by, as to dissolve a Commission of the Admiralty then in his own hand, who best understands the business of the sea of any prince the world ever had, and things never better done, and put it into hands which he knew were wholly ignorant thereof, sporting himself with their ignorance." The result which followed was inevitable. The effective force at sea was reduced; the ships in harbour were allowed to fall out of repair; the yards were hopelessly disorganised; and waste and neglect appeared in every department of the administration. In particular, the thirty new ships built under the Act of 1677 were allowed to fall into a deplorable state through "the plain omission of the necessary and ordinary cautions used for the preserving of new-built ships." In 1684 the King found himself once more in a position to recall his brother and to restore the old order in the navy. The Test Act still prevented the Duke from actually holding office; so the King resumed for himself the whole office of Lord High Admiral, executing it with the advice and assistance of his brother; and the Duke's recovery of his place of influence in the navy carried with it the reappointment of Samuel Pepys to the office of Secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty of England, now formally constituted for the first time by letters-patent under the Great Seal.

The important episode of the period 1684-8 is the establishment of the Special Commission of 1686-an experiment in organisation for which Pepys himself was largely responsible. This Commission, which superseded for the period of its existence the old Navy Board, consisted entirely of experts, and included the notable names of Sir John Narbrough and Sir Anthony Deane, with Sir Phineas Pett as resident Commissioner for Chatham and Sheerness. They acted under special instructions, and were charged with the duty of putting the navy into a state of thorough repair, an annual sum of £400,000 being assigned for three years with that object. The work was finished earlier than was expected; and in 1688, after two and a half years' tenure of office, the Special Commission was dissolved, and the system of government by Principal Officers was restored. Their work was subsequently investigated by a parliamentary Commission, which reported in 1692 "that the ships built, rebuilt, and repaired by these commissioners were fully and well performed, and the buildings and other works by them erected and made during the continuation of the said Commission were done with great exactness, sufficiency, and frugality of expense in the managery and conduct thereof.”

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Deficiency of men

[1660-88

During the period of naval history which extended from the Restoration to the Revolution, successive administrations, whether incompetent or relatively efficient, were alike grievously hampered by the deficiency of men, both in the dockyards and at sea. This is only another aspect of the redoubtable financial problem; for, except during the years affected by the Plague, the deficiency was largely due to the failures of the Government in the matter of pay. The state of things during the Second Dutch War was appalling. We hear of wages fifty-two months in arrear; and Pepys, by this time a hardened official, writes down in his Diary pitiable stories of poor seamen starving in the streets because there is no money to pay them. This reacted upon discipline, and both seamen and workmen in the yards gave a great deal of trouble by their disorderly demeanour. At the close of the War the scarcity of money was such that the dockyard authorities were sometimes compelled to allow their men to go for a time into the employment of private merchants, so that they might earn money to enable them to buy bread. The delays in payment of wages also involved the Government in much needless expense; for, in order to avoid the necessity of paying off surplus men, ships were kept in commission longer than was really required. In spite of the revival in 1664 of the Commonwealth scheme for the distri bution of prize-money, it was difficult to obtain a sufficient number of men, and the deficiency could only be supplied by a somewhat indiscriminate use of the press. One result of this was that the material supplied was often of the poorest kind-"poor patient labouring men and housekeepers," men lame and palsied, and afterwards "little children and never at sea before," who could not be suffered "to pester the ship." So uncertain was the prospect of pay, that English prisoners took service with the Dutch, and Pepys records that when they came up the Medway the English tongue could be heard on board their ships. On the outbreak of the Third Dutch War in 1672 the same difficulties recurred, although in a less aggravated form; and so late as 1692, in the maturer reflexions of his retirement, Pepys still places the "length and badness of the payment of the seamen's wages" first among his "discouragements."

In providing for sick and wounded seamen the Government of the Restoration imitated that of the Commonwealth. The Commission of 1664 was framed on the model of the Commission of 1653, and that of 1672 considerably improved upon it. All the arrangements were admirable upon paper; but in this department, as in others, the want of money prevented their being effectively carried out. It stands, however, to the credit of the higher naval administration that, when at the close of the Third Dutch War the temporary Commission of 1672 was dissolved, its duties were assigned by an Admiralty warrant of 1674 to the "Chirurgeon-general of his Majesty's navy," so that a permanent provision was now made for sick and wounded seamen in time of peace. "Mariners and soldiers maimed in his Majesty's service at sea were