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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FOUNDATIONS

BY THE END OF the seventeenth century, contemporaries had convinced themselves that they had a glorious naval past to live up to. The vision was heroic: Elizabethan ships facing down the Spanish Armada and swashbuckling adventurers sailing off to plunder far-flung imperial possessions (hopefully someone else’s). However, the Elizabethan navy was largely composed of private ships temporarily united in national service, rather than a corps of royal ships intended for permanent standing service.1 Elizabethan adventurers likewise embarked on private endeavors, at times given official sanction by the state, at times an unofficial wink, and other times crossing the line into piracy. There was not yet a tradition of having a permanent English naval force that could be considered comparable to a standing army. During the seventeenth century, the naval forces mustered by England were substantial—battle fleets could outnumber their eighteenth-century counterparts several times over—but the sea corps was still less than permanent and less than professional, although toward the end of the century there were changes in the recruitment and promotion of officers as well as in shipbuilding. During this period, English sea officers were often unreliable in carrying out their orders, and many naval expeditions failed to come to fruition. Politicians and the naval administration at times rewarded passivity in sea officers rather than risky aggression.
Nevertheless, the Royal Navy played a significant role both practically and symbolically in discussions over foreign policy and the domestic social and political order. Contemporaries debated the structure of the navy (who its officers should be, how many ships of what types it should comprise), the purpose of sea power (whether it was the primary theater of warfare or an auxiliary one, whether it was meant to plunder or protect), and the tactics of naval battles (should they be offensive or defensive). As was the case later in the eighteenth century, changes in the composition of the sea officer corps and in naval governance were taken to be a bellwether of wider sociopolitical changes: one commentator observed, “Our Navy is the soul of our government.”2 Opponents of government policy expressed concern that an expanded or more professional naval force would mean a concomitant expansion of executive power, threatening to unbalance the constitution. Throughout the Restoration and Glorious Revolution eras, the sea service was linked in the public mind to the most important divisions in English society.

The Seventeenth-Century Navy in Focus

During the seventeenth century, naval warfare changed fundamentally in character. While previously it had been standard for merchant ships to be involved in naval battles, they became increasingly obsolete for purposes of warfare as naval ships increased their firepower. In 1650 naval battles tended to include massive numbers of ships of a variety of origins and sizes, but by 1710 the trend was to deploy fewer, larger ships with more guns. In the seventeenth century, the English navy was substantial in numbers but existed in rough parity with its primary rivals, the French and the Dutch. By 1710, however, the British navy had increased in size to outstrip both, though it was still far from being able to exert unquestioned dominance over its competitors. During this period, most naval actions took place within the waters around the British Isles, expanding to include the Mediterranean during the War of the Spanish Succession.
John Guilmartin Jr. identifies a series of “revolutions” at sea during the early modern era, beginning with the first transoceanic sailing vessels in the fifteenth century, adapting to the use of gunpowder, and culminating in the ship of the line of the seventeenth century.3 This ship of the line—capable of carrying heavy cannons and sustaining their fire—for the first time permitted potentially global warfare.4 It also spurred two further important and related developments. The first was the invention of the “line of battle” as a combat tactic. In earlier naval warfare, battles were melees, with individual ships swarming and engaging other individual ships, frequently in an attempt to board the enemy ship and carry out hand-to-hand combat. They were land battles fought on floating platforms. In contrast, “line of battle” formation, which the English adopted in 1653, involved ships sailing one after another in a line, allowing them to discharge full broadsides of cannon fire at the enemy’s parallel line. Previously, merchants had been encouraged to build ships that were suitable for war, which were then frequently hired or coopted into royal fleets.5 The line of battle and the fact that ships would now have to be able to withstand direct cannon fire meant that there was less of a place for merchant ships in war fleets.
Although nowhere near as large in terms of manpower as the eighteenth-century navy, the navy was of considerable size even in the seventeenth century, at least during wartime. In September 1672, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), the 238 ships in active service held just under 30,000 men—a population larger than all English towns with the exception of London and Norwich. The English fleets at both the 1653 Battle of the Gabbard and the 1665 Battle of Lowestoft were each composed of one hundred ships. As a point of comparison, Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 was composed of twenty-seven ships.6 While the number of ships involved in individual battles did dramatically decrease, this reflected a tightening of control and an increasingly focused form of warfare. In terms of thinking about professionalization, merchant ships hired into royal fleets were naval mercenaries: private bearers of legitimate violence temporarily co-opted into a larger force. While they certainly contributed to the overall force a country could bring to bear on its enemies, they cannot be taken as evidence of a state’s ability to control naval warfare, when it was forced to contract that warfare out. The commissioning of merchant ships faded after the 1660s.7
The English navy was not the unchallenged ruler of the seas during these years. As Table 1.1 illustrates, control of the largest fleet shifted back and forth between the English, French, and Dutch, all of whom displayed acute awareness of the policies other countries were pursuing. Louis XIV and his ministers repeatedly dismissed the idea that the English navy posed a real threat. In 1666 Louis XIV claimed “the English by themselves were not to be feared.” Under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Colbert—Louis XIV’s minister of finance and the secretary of the navy—France embarked on a massive building program in the 1670s, which meant that by 1675, the French navy outnumbered that of the English by a 3 to 2 ratio. At that time, Colbert was confident that French ships were “better equipped, better armed, and better commanded.”8 The Dutch fleet also outnumbered that of the English. In response to this—at Charles II’s urging, for reasons explained below—Parliament voted the funds for an English building campaign to match, known as “thirty new ships.” While the Dutch’s relative naval strength dropped over the following twenty-five years, those of the English and the French stayed in relative parity. In 1690, the French fleet was generally larger and better armed than that of the English. Although the English destroyed a number of French ships at the Battle of la Hogue in 1692, the French added 100,000 tons of warships between 1691 and 1693, offsetting those losses. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the English also added substantially to their fleet, building 159 ships of the line and 113 cruisers, for a net increase of 31 ships of the line and 58 cruisers. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, England had taken the lead, though France and the Netherlands continued to maintain substantial fleets of their own.9
Table 1.1. Relative strength of major naval fleets, 1660–1710.
England
France
Dutch Republic
Year
Ships of the line
Cruisers
Ships of the line
Cruisers
Ships of the line
Cruisers
1660
76
55
21
5
64
33
1675
73
37
102
32
80
30
1690
83
26
89
32
52
21
1695
112
46
119
30
72
42
1710
123
57
94
24
86
33
Technically a cruiser was any ship sent to patrol on its own; however, here I am following Rodger’s usage of the term to refer to ships of less than five hundred tons displacement (before 1680) and fifth- and sixth-rate ships (from 1680 to 1790)—in other words, smaller warships like frigates that could be used in combat but were not considered sturdy enough to survive line of battle warfare. There are no reliable numbers for Spain before 1715. The only other major European naval power at this time was Denmark, which increased its numbers from twenty to forty ships of the line and maintained around ten cruisers during this period. During the 1710s, Russia began its own naval building program and would soon have numbers comparable to Denmark’s. These figures are drawn from Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, 607–608; see also the comparative chapters in Davies, Pepys’s Navy.
What complements this picture of England as simply one among several top-rate naval powers is the fact that the English navy experienced only mixed success during these years. English failures like the Dutch raid on the Medway (1667), the Battle of Beachy Head (1690), and the Caribbean and North American campaign of 1702–1703 were counterbalanced by successes in the Battles of Barfleur and la Hogue (1692), the Battle of Vigo (1702), and the capture of Gibraltar (1704) and Minorca (1708). The navy’s track record was haphazard.
A further major difference between the seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century navies consisted of their spheres of action. In the latter half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the English navy was relatively limited in range. The majority of English naval warfare in the seventeenth century was concentrated in the waters around England.10 With the Dutch as the primary adversary, many seventeenth-century battles were fought in the North Sea and could be heard more than a hundred miles inland. In 1666, for example, Charles II, his brother James, and Samuel Pepys went to St. James’s Park in London to listen to the St. James’s Day Battle taking place off the coast of Kent. The English fleet did for the first time begin to conduct more sustained campaigns in the Mediterranean, though most of the burden of defense still fell on individual merchants.11 In June 1666 only two of England’s warships were out of the waters around the British Isles, both on convoy to Barbados. In July 1696 during the Nine Years’ War with France, more than 70 percent of England’s warships were in the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, or other waters immediately around the British Isles; an additional 10 percent were stationed or on convoy to the Mediterranean. Only 7 percent of the ships were stationed in the Americas, with an additional 8 percent convoying trade there. The remaining 4 percent were in the East Indies. In June 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, roughly 50 percent of warships were in home waters or in the Bay of Biscay, while another 30 percent were in the Mediterranean, one of the war’s major naval theaters. Roughly 17 percent were in the Americas. As a point of comparison, in July 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, the percentage of warships in home waters had fallen to roughly 20 percent with an additional 12 percent in the Mediterranean; 30 percent of warships were in the Americas, 7 percent in the East Indies, and 30 percent on convoy duty to a variety of locations. In 1778 during the American Revolutionary War, the number of ships kept at home increased to 45 percent to protect against invasion from France, but the proportion of ships stationed in the Americas also increased to 50 percent, with 2 percent in the East Indies and 3 percent in the Mediterranean.12 While it is not surprising that the navy would be deployed to North America in a war against North American colonists, this brief snapshot suggests the extent to which the navy’s sphere of action expanded away from European waters to become much more global by the end of the eighteenth century. Britain established permanent peacetime naval presences in both North America and the Caribbean, with a large proportion of ships on active duty there during wartime.
This is reflected in the spread of naval dockyards around the globe. In 1711 the navy had eight dockyards within the British Isles and essentially no docking facilities elsewhere. Naval ships used Port Royal in Jamaica from the mid-seventeenth century for limited refits and Britain acquired Port Mahon in the Balearic Islands in the first decade of the eighteenth century, but neither site really had the ability to accommodate ships of war. By 1815 there were seven domestic royal dockyards, as well as docky...