Chapter IV: James I. and Charles I (2)

King James died on the 27th of March 1625. The navy which he left his son was still at the strength fixed by the Commissioners of 1618. As compared with the navy of Queen Elizabeth, it shows a decrease of either nine or eleven, for there is some doubt as to the exact number of the king's ships, and an increase of about 2350 in tonnage. The work before the navy in the new reign was, to judge by appearances, very serious. The failure of the negotiations for a Spanish marriage, and the wounds inflicted on the vanity, both of Charles and of Buckingham, during their journey to Madrid, had provoked a war. It was not long before the management of the new favourite added a war with France to the existing struggle with Spain. Formidable as the task looks, there is no reason to doubt that the Royal Navy, aided by the levies of merchant ships always made when a great fleet was fitted out for sea at that period, would have been amply sufficient. Spain was already exhausted, and was only too happy to be able to repel attack, while France had, as yet, no navy at all. But in order that the strength of England on the sea could be fully exerted, there was need for good management, a full treasury, and hearty zeal on the part of the nation. All these three conditions were wanted. Therefore the enterprises of one kind or other which went on from 1625 to 1629 were little less languid, and were even more disgraceful, than Mansel's useless demonstration against Algiers. Their political history is of immense interest, but it is unnecessary to be told here. The miserable business of the surrender of the seven English ships to the King of France, to be used against Rochelle in 1625, tells us much about the character of Charles, of Buckingham, and of Pennington, who executed his part of a discreditable transaction stolidly, though not without reluctance; but it is of no interest in the history of the navy proper.

The expedition to Cadiz in 1625, the despatch of the Earl of Denbigh with a fleet to cruise in the Channel in 1626, the attack on the Ile de Rhé in 1627, then the two equally useless cruises of Denbigh in April and May and of Lindsey in September and October of 1629, were indeed all either in whole or in part naval undertakings. But they were so languid, so barren of incident worthy to be remembered, and so wholly without result, that to do more than mention them very briefly would be to rob passages of our naval history, which really deserve to be recorded at length, of their due space. The expedition to Cadiz was a mere parody of the great foray of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The fleet was raised in the same way, consisting partly of ships of the Royal Navy, and partly of vessels levied on the maritime counties. The command, too, was in the hands of men of the same classes, that is to say, nobles and soldiers, with their subordinate council of seamen. But the men and the times and the spirit were very different. The commander, Sir Edward Cecil, Lord Wimbledon, was a commonplace officer of the English regiments of the Low Countries, and he had no associate of marked authority or experience. The young Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth's unhappy favourite, and later on the Lord General of the Parliament in the Civil War, repeated his father's gallantry in the attack on the fort of Puntal. The rest of the history of the voyage to Cadiz is made up of divided councils, vacillation, drunkenness, and failure. The share of the fleet was confined, apart from the attack on the Puntal fort, to carrying the troops there and bringing them back. In 1626, when war had broken out with France, we had some success in capturing French prizes in the Channel, but there was no enemy to fight, which, as the fleet were very badly equipped, was fortunate. The expedition to the Ile de Rhé in 1627 was the Cadiz voyage over again, but worse. Here the fleet had little more to do than to carry the soldiers out at the end of June, and bring back all that remained of them at the end of October. In 1629 two fleets were sent to succour Rochelle, where the Huguenots were making their last stand against Richelieu. They went out, they came back, and they did nothing.

A large part of the discredit of this four years of failure must be thrown on the flighty incapacity of Buckingham, but some share of it is due to the conditions in which the King's Government was working. Charles I. disagreed with his Parliament from the beginning. Therefore he never had enough money, and his armaments, fitted out by makeshifts, were maintained from hand to mouth. Efficiency was hardly to be expected in such circumstances. The unpopularity of the wars reacted on the king's forces. The navy was still in a state of transition, being neither altogether a regular force nor altogether sea militia, but a combination of the two. A regular navy, properly officered, well disciplined and paid, will always fight well. A sea militia will, in favourable circumstances, do very fairly. When there is a great national enthusiasm, a sense of the need for exertion, the hope of booty, and capable leaders, it will render good service, as was shown both in the fighting against the Armada, and at Cadiz in 1597. But in the early years of Charles I. all these conditions were wanting. The merchant ships, when pressed for the service, came unwillingly. Their owners and crews were uncertain of getting their pay from the Crown. The spirits of the men were damped when they saw the destitution of the king's soldiers. Their wish was to get through as soon as they could, to suffer as little damage as might be, and to return at the earliest possible day to their ordinary peaceful and profitable avocations. At Cadiz they behaved with actual cowardice, and at the Ile de Rhé they certainly showed no zeal, whereas the royal ships did the trifling fighting which had to be done very creditably. The deduction that the Crown must make itself independent of their feeble aid was obvious, and, when next England was engaged in a serious naval war, measures were taken to arm a force solely belonging to the State.

This was not, however, to be done by the Government of Charles I. The king never had the revenue needed for the maintenance of a really great navy. His efforts to obtain one were among the causes of the disasters which finally overwhelmed him. Charles was very conscious of the need for a fleet. Indeed, a less intelligent man must have seen the necessity. The naval power of Holland was increasing with great rapidity, while Richelieu was supplying France with an effective navy. The relations of England with her neighbours were always uneasy, and at one time the French and the Dutch were talking of an alliance, which was to end in dividing the Spanish Netherlands and the sea between them. In the presence of this danger Charles I. made serious efforts to raise the strength of the navy. He built no less than 19 vessels. Ten of these were of about 120 tons each, and were known by the odd name of the =Whelps=, numbered consecutively from one to ten. The great =Sovereign of the Seas= was one of the ships built to bring the navy to its proper strength. In 1633 the navy had reached the figure of 50 ships of 23,695 or 23,995 tons, carrying in all 1430 guns. When the Civil War broke out, it numbered 42 ships of 22,411 tons, of which 5 were first rates, measuring on an average 1060 tons each. The difference was due to the shedding of small ships.

The means which the king took to find money for all this building are famous in English history. The constitutional aspects of the writs of ship-money do not concern our subject. It is of course obvious that if the king could tax the whole country for the support of the fleet, if he alone was to be the judge of the amount demanded and of the use to be made of it, he could raise any revenue he pleased. In view of the constant attempts made by Charles I. to escape from the control of his Parliament, it is not wonderful that the Country Party, as the Opposition was called, suspected him of some such scheme. Yet, as a matter of fact, it appears that when the king took to calling in peace on the service of the coast counties, which had as yet only been demanded in war, when he commuted the actual service of men and ships for money payments, when he extended the assessments to the inland counties, he was unaffectedly resolved to spend the fund thus raised on his fleet. The administrative defects of his reign are undeniable, and have been pointed out already. Yet, when the Civil War began, the ships and the guns were there. The service they rendered to his domestic enemies throughout the Civil War may be taken as satisfactory evidence that both were good. We possess an elaborate description of the most famous of the ships built by Phineas Pett for King Charles, written by Thomas Heywood.

"This famous vessel was built at Woolwich in 1637. She was in length by the keel 128 feet or thereabout, within some few inches; her main breadth 48 feet; in length, from the fore-end of the beak-head to the after-end of the stern, _a prora ad puppim_, 232 feet; and in height, from the bottom of her keel to the top of her lanthorn, 76 feet; bore five lanthorns, the biggest of which would hold ten persons upright; had three flush decks, a forecastle, half-deck, quarter-deck, and round-house. Her lower tier had ... 30 ports for Cannon and Demi-Cannon,

Middle tier 30 for Culverines and Demi ditto
Third tier 26 for other Ordnance
Forecastle 12

and two half-decks have 13 or 14 ports more within-board, for murdering pieces, besides 10 pieces of chace-ordnance forward, and 10 right aft, and many loopholes in the cabins for musquet-shot. She had eleven anchors, one of 4400 pounds weight. She was of the burthen of 1637 tons. She was built by Peter Pett, Esq., under the direction of his father, Captain Phineas Pett, one of the principal officers of the navy. She hath two galleries besides, and all of most curious carved work, and all the sides of the ship carved with trophies of artillery and types of honour, as well belonging to sea as land, with symbols appertaining to navigation; also their two sacred majesties badges of honour; arms with several angels holding their letters in compartments, all which works are gilded over, and no other colour but gold and black. One tree, or oak, made four of the principal beams, which was 44 feet of strong serviceable timber in length, 3 feet diameter at the top, and 10 feet at the stub or bottom.

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"Upon the stem-head a cupid, or child bridling a lion; upon the bulk-head, right forward, stand six statues in sundry postures; these figures represent Concilium, Cura, Conamen, Vis, Virtus, Victoria. Upon the hamers of the water are four figures, Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, Eolus; on the stern, Victory, in the midst of a frontispiece; upon the beak-head sitteth King Edgar on horseback, trampling on seven kings."

According to an ancient custom which at last, when it had outlived its time, became a nuisance, the =Sovereign of the Seas= was profusely ornamented. Yet she was a strong ship, and under a variety of names, dictated by the principles of her successive masters, took part in all the naval wars of England until she was accidentally burnt at Chatham in 1696.

The method of administering the navy underwent successive modifications during the reign of King Charles. When he ascended the throne, Buckingham held the post of Lord High Admiral, and the work of administering the navy was done in his name by the members of the Commission of 1618. When Buckingham was stabbed in the passage of the little house in the High Street of Portsmouth, which he occupied as his headquarters in 1628, the king had recourse to a method of governing his navy curiously similar to the system now in use. He put the office of Lord High Admiral in Commission. The persons entrusted with the duty seem to have also discharged the work of the Navy Office. The military and the civil functions of the navy were, in fact, joined in the hands of the same body of persons, very much as is the case now. There was, however, one important difference. The Commissioners appointed by Charles also held other great offices. They were Jackson, Bishop of London, who was also Lord High Treasurer; the Earl of Lindsey, the Great Chamberlain; the Earl of Dorset, Chamberlain to the Queen; Lord Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer; the elder Sir Henry Vane, Comptroller of the King's Household; and the two Secretaries of State, Sir John Coke and Sir Francis Windebanke. This Commission, with certain changes in the persons, held office until 1638.

Under this interregnum it was that the two naval demonstrations known as the Ship-money Fleets were fitted out in 1636 and 1637. The object was to make an effective assertion of the King of England's right to the sovereignty of the seas of Britain. They were to put a stop to all warlike operations on the part of Spaniards, Dutch, or French, to compel all fishermen to pay for a licence from the King of England, and in a general way to produce an effect both imposing and terrifying on the minds of all foreign rulers. The fleet of 1636 was perhaps in real power the greatest sent forth by a ruler of England. The command was given to Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, who succeeded the Earl of Lindsey on the Commission of the Navy. Northumberland was a magnificent specimen of a great noble. According to Clarendon, if he had thought the king as much above him as he thought himself above all other considerable men, he would have been a good subject. As it was, he was mainly a great noble who held himself apart, and who lived through a very stormy time without incurring any serious misfortune--a feat, perhaps, partly to be accounted for by the fact that at times of crises he was a little apt to follow the example of the young man who went away sorrowful because he had great possessions. As admiral commanding the Ship-money Fleets, Northumberland had little opportunity to render service. The utmost he could do was to extort the price of a licence from a few unlucky Dutch herring fishermen. The abuses of the navy attracted his attention, and he proposed a scheme for their reform. When it met with no attention, the pride of the noble got the better of the zeal of the reformer. Northumberland declined to put himself again in the way of being snubbed, declaring that he would make no more suggestions till his opinion was asked for. In fact, the abuses of which he complained arose from the very nature of the king's government. Charles, by the help of ship-money and the other devices elaborated by his lawyers, was able to raise money enough to build ships and equip an occasional fleet, but he had not the revenue required to maintain a permanent force. His efforts were necessarily sporadic. His fleets were equipped by fits and starts, and there was no order or coherence in the efforts. In the confusion, the pilferers of the dockyards saw their opportunity, and did not fail to take advantage of it.

In 1638 the king made the second change of his reign in naval administration. In the March of that year he appointed Northumberland Lord High Admiral. It had been intended to keep the office vacant for the little Duke of York, now a boy of five years old. But in 1638 the difficulties of his position induced Charles, who was anxious to please a man so powerful in the North of England, to name Northumberland Lord High Admiral. The commission was, however, only during the good pleasure of the king, and not for life, as in the case of Nottingham and Buckingham. The navy now reverted to the old system of government by an Admiral and the officers of the Navy Board, the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Surveyor, and the Clerk of the Navy, with their subordinate officers.

The administration of Northumberland, which lasted till June 1642, when he was dismissed by the king in bitter wrath, is of great importance in the history of England. It contains nearly, if not quite, the most discreditable incident in naval history. In the September of 1639 the Spaniards sent out a great fleet with reinforcements for their garrisons in Flanders. It arrived at the mouth of the Channel on the 7th of the month, and was at once attacked by the Dutch. A running fight took place along the Channel, in which the Dutch, who were constantly reinforced, soon gained the advantage. The Spanish admiral, Don Antonio de Oquendo, the son of the Don Miguel de Oquendo who had served in the Armada, took refuge in the Downs. His Government was acting by arrangement with the king's, and he had reason to believe that he would be helped, or would at least be protected from attack, in English waters. As a matter of fact, King Charles made an effort, which no Englishman can think of without shame, to turn the necessities of the Spaniards into ready money, by alternately offering to let the Dutch destroy them, or to afford them protection, according to which of the courses he happened to think would prove most profitable. Northumberland, in London, could not make out what the king would be at, and said so to Pennington, who was at Dover with a squadron far too weak to inspire any respect in the Dutch. They, again, were encouraged by the great French Minister Richelieu, who was now triumphantly carrying out his anti-Spanish policy, and were commanded by a man for whose courage no risk was too great, the indomitable Martin Harpertz (Herbertson) Tromp. The peddling vacillations of the unlucky English king were all cut short, and his hopes of profit blown to the four winds of heaven, when Tromp on the 11th of October fell upon the Spaniards, and destroyed at least three-fourths of them, with the most absolute and insolent disregard of Pennington's squadron. The great Ship-money Fleet, for the sake of which the poor king had strained his prerogative and had forfeited so much of the confidence of his subjects, had proved totally incapable of defending the honour of England when it was seriously attacked, though no doubt it had been able to extort a few fees from the skippers of Dutch herring busses.

Whether the anger which Northumberland undoubtedly felt at being made to play the poor figure he had cut in this shameful transaction had anything to do with the course he followed four years later, must necessarily be a mere matter of guess-work. Certainly, if he meant to be revenged on his master, he could not well have taken a course more effectual than that which he actually adopted. It was this representative of the great feudal house of Percy who did more than any other single man to seal the king's fate by putting the fleet into the hands of his domestic enemy. In the Long Parliament, Northumberland sided with the Opposition. He had been loaded with favours by the king, and was always profuse in declarations of loyalty. Yet he put the fleet into the hands of the king's enemies, by an act which no sophistry can show to have been one of other than deliberate hostility to his master. When Parliament made its demand on the king for the control of the "militia," that is to say, of the whole armed force of the nation, it naturally included the fleet. The command of the sea was vital to it. If the king could have obtained help from abroad, his position would have been far stronger than it was. For this very reason, the king was eager to retain possession of his ships. While they were at the orders of Northumberland, the king could hope to make little use of them. The obvious course would have been to dismiss the earl and put the fleet into trustworthy hands. But in the summer of 1642, on the very eve of the Civil War, and when the last despairing efforts were being made to arrange a compromise, this would have been an act of open hostility against the Parliament. The king shrank from it, and adopted an alternative which seemed to offer him some reasonable prospect of obtaining the same practical result without provoking an immediate conflict. The Lord High Admiral was not necessarily what we should call the executive officer in command of the fleet. The direct command of a squadron might be given, and pretty commonly was given, to a vice-admiral, acting on the commission of the Lord High Admiral. A devoted vice-admiral would have served the purposes of Charles very well. There was some talk of selecting the veteran Sir Robert Mansel for the post, but the king rejected him as too old. The officer whom he finally decided to direct Northumberland to appoint, was Sir John Pennington. Parliament in the meantime had called upon the earl to appoint Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Northumberland referred to Parliament to ask whether he should obey the king's orders, and was immediately instructed to appoint the Earl of Warwick. He obeyed, and the nominee of Parliament was duly accepted by the fleet as its admiral. The care the king had taken to provide England with a naval force turned against himself. The loss of the fleet was one of the main causes of the final defeat of the Crown in the approaching struggle with Parliament.

There can, of course, be no doubt that this revolutionary measure--for it was no less--could never have been carried out if the sympathies of the seafaring classes had not been largely with the Parliament. There is no question that they were. The bulk of the seamen belonged to the southern and eastern counties, where the Puritans were strong. They shared the opinions of their neighbours. The sailors had been conspicuous in the excited mobs which collected to protect the privileges of Parliament after the king's futile attempt to arrest the five members. London was very Puritan, while the baseness of Goring, who spent his life in disgracing or betraying both sides, had thrown Portsmouth into the hands of the Parliament. It therefore held actual possession of the dockyards both in the Thames and Channel. Yet, in spite of the advantages of its position and the sympathy of the population, it is very doubtful whether Parliament could have obtained such complete command of the naval resources of the kingdom if it had not had the assistance of Northumberland. The evil fortune of King Charles spared him nothing. He had formed a strong fleet to maintain his power, and it was made a principal instrument of his ruin. He had, in his own bitter words, courted Northumberland like a mistress, and that haughtiest of nobles repaid him by striking him a cruel blow. When it was too late, the king dismissed Northumberland from his post. It would have been better for the king if he had thought less of what Northumberland might do if he chose, and more of what Sir John Pennington would certainly do when he was ordered, and had named him Lord High Admiral in 1638.