Pepys and the Navy E-Book

C S Knighton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 420

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Pepys's diary has made him a literary celebrity. In his own time he was known as the chief naval official under Charles II and James II and this aspect of the diarist's life has not received the attention it deserves from his modern biographers. Charles Knighton, a Pepys scholar with a particular interest in naval history, reveals the full extent of Pepys's achievements in creating a modern navy which was both permanent and professional.

Leseprobe

First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© C.S. Knighton, 2003, 2013

The right of C.S. Knighton, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9487 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

One

The Calling

Two

Colleagues and Commodities

Three

Contracting and Expanding

Four

The Ships do the Business

Five

Question Time

Six

Rather like an Admiral

Seven

Creating a Standard

Eight

The Uses of Adversity

Nine

Top Gun

Ten

The Oracle of the Navy

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Pepys has been well served by his biographers, though in truth he did a good deal of their work for them. Seventy years ago, when the 300th anniversary of his birth was celebrated, there was still a feeling that his professional achievements were inadequately represented in the mass of writing about him. Now that we mark the 300th year of his death, his serious side is much more widely appreciated. The raffish bon viveur of the Diary will always have more appeal than the industrious naval administrator, but at least there are now several balanced accounts of his life. This, therefore, is an unbalanced one, leaving most of his personal history aside, and concentrating on his work for the Navy. All books about him deal with that, of course, but none has done so exclusively since 1920, when J.R. Tanner published four lectures on aspects of Pepys’s administration. Tanner’s writing was based primarily on the naval papers which Pepys left, along with the rest of his library, to Magdalene College, Cambridge. He edited a great many of these MSS (though but a fraction of those which survive there and elsewhere), and was principally responsible for establishing Pepys’s place in the modern historiography of the Navy. More recent scholars have been sceptical of relying so heavily on Pepys’s own archive for an understanding of the Restoration Navy. Account is taken of these reservations here, though this is again a view from the Pepys Library, and deliberately so. Some of it has been written there at Pepys’s own desk, surrounded by the books which are themselves a part of the story.

In the general narrative of Pepys’s life I make no claim to novelty in fact or interpretation, and sources are not cited for what is well established. My debt to the work of Tanner, Sir Arthur Bryant, Richard Ollard, and now Claire Tomalin, is considerable, and is here acknowledged passim. I follow a broadly chronological sequence, but this is not a biography. For some, no doubt, it will seem to be all the dull bits of Pepys gummed together. The intentionis, rather, to give those whose primary interest is Pepys himself a more concentrated view of his professional inheritance and activities, and to allow naval historians to follow his career undiluted.

Dates are given in Old Style, though reckoning the Year of Grace from 1 January.

I am indebted primarily to the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for having long enjoyed the privilege of working in and for the Pepys Library. More particularly I am grateful for the hospitality which has enabled me to complete this book in the most appropriate surroundings. At Magdalene I have special reasons to thank the President, Professor E. Duffy, the Pepys Librarian, Dr R. Luckett, and the Assistant Librarian, Mrs J.T. Fitzsimons. I am also obliged to the staff at the Public Record Office, the British Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Cambridge University Library, who have assisted my research. Mr Ollard has kindly encouraged my work, and I am grateful to him for sending me a copy of his biography of Sandwich. Mrs Tomalin has helped me from much error, and I particularly thank her for giving me an advance copy of her biography of Pepys. Professor N.A.M. Rodger kindly read my text and usefully corrected some errors; he and Dr S.L. Adams were good enough to send me drafts of forthcoming publications. Professor D.M. Loades and Mr T.H. Wilson have been valued colleagues in previous Pepysian ventures. Above all, my work is sustained by the memory of the late Robert Latham, who introduced me to Pepys’s world.

Needless to say, the imperfections of the book are my own special contribution.

Cambridge, Michaelmas 2002

ONE

The Calling

‘Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.’

Wordsworth, ‘The World is too much with us’

At about noon on 26 May 1659, within sight of the battlements of Elsinore, Pepys enters British naval history. He was arriving aboard the ketch Hind with letters for his cousin Edward Montagu, commander of the Baltic fleet. For Pepys this was no more than an extension of the work he had been doing since he came down from Cambridge four years earlier, as one of Montagu’s household officials. On this occasion he was a messenger only, returning the next day with packets for England. It was undoubtedly the first time he had been afloat in anything larger than a river boat, and we can be sure that the experience interested and excited him. He would have picked up a smattering of naval terminology; it was not until the following year that he had serious occasion to do so. For the present he was probably more interested in the complex political requirements of Montagu’s mission: to prevent a war between Swedes and Danes which would imperil England’s naval supplies, co-operating to that end with the recent and probable future enemy the Dutch, but with the possibility of conflict among any permutation of those four powers. What he did not know was that Montagu was beginning those secret contacts with the exiled royalists from which would develop his key role in the restoration of the monarchy.1 There, rather than in the immediate round of Baltic diplomacy, lay the seeds of Pepys’s naval career.

There was nothing in Pepys’s ancestry or upbringing to suggest that the sea would be his professional concern for the next thirty years, and an abiding interest for the whole of his remaining life. The Pepyses were countrymen, long settled in the Fenland northwest of Cambridge; several had made good livings through administration and the law, and Pepys’s uncle owned a small estate at Brampton in Huntingdonshire. Pepys’s father, a younger son, had moved to London and set up as a tailor in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, where Samuel had been born in 1633. These modest circumstances were easily offset by his natural intelligence, sharpened at the great city school of St Paul’s and then at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He had also spent some time at Huntingdon Grammar School, and it was probably there that he first befriended his cousin Edward, the son of his great-aunt Paulina’s marriage to Sir Sidney Montagu in 1618. The Montagus were local magnates, and the connexion had been a considerable social achievement for the Pepys family. Sidney’s son Edward, like his cousin and namesake the Earl of Manchester, became a commander of the parliamentary forces during the Civil War; he had kept out of public life during the King’s trial and execution, but accepted political office under the republic. Cromwell made him a Councillor of State and, in January 1656, joint General-at-Sea with Blake for an expedition against Spain. Although he had even less experience of naval affairs than did Pepys at the start of his career, he contrived to return home laden with plunder in the high Elizabethan fashion. The mission to the Baltic in 1659 was his first major independent command, undertaken in the name of the Protectorate as continued by Cromwell’s son Richard, to whom Montagu was loyal. Richard’s fall and the return of the Rump regime in May hastened, if it did not initiate, his conversion to royalism. The new government placed the Admiralty in the hands of those who had run it in the early days of the republic, with whom Montagu had little sympathy. He managed to retain control of his force and bring it home in September, adroitly avoiding involvement in a premature royalist rising, and then retired to his seat at Hinchingbrooke.

Pepys meanwhile had been managing Montagu’s London household, from where on 20 October he sent word of the latest turn of events; the Rump having tried to dismiss the principal army commanders, had itself been ousted and replaced by a new Committee of Safety; five civil and five military commissioners had just been nominated. This was simply a military coup, and deeply unpopular; Lucy Hutchinson would recall it as an ‘insolent usurpation’ as a result of which ‘the whole nation began to set their eyes upon the king beyond the sea’. Pepys reported to the same effect on 22 October, though he referred to Charles II more prosaically as ‘King of Scotts’. Opposition to the regime was strong in the Navy; the commander in the Downs, John Lawson, was among those who signed a remonstrance against the military government; the garrison at Portsmouth revolted, and made common cause with a part of Lawson’s fleet. Pepys had all this from the Navy Treasurer, Richard Hutchinson, by 8 December, and could tell Montagu that the greatest worry in Whitehall was what Lawson might do next.2

What he did was stage the only naval coup in modern British history; on 14 December he left station and brought his fleet into the Thames. On the following day Pepys heard that proclamation was made for the return of parliamentary government. Lawson’s ships successfully intimidated the City and the army command, and the Rump returned to its chamber on Boxing Day. Such, then, was the condition of the state on 1 January 1660 when Pepys began the Diary which he would keep for the next nine and a half years, and which would ensure his posthumous celebrity. Lawson was still, as he says, in the River; but General Monck, whom Pepys supposed still to be in Scotland with his army, had on that same New Year’s Day crossed the Tweed. Pepys shared the general hope that Monck’s arrival in the south would result in a more representative parliamentary regime. He had an informed interest in these political developments, because in addition to his work for Montagu, he served an Exchequer official, and was therefore an indirect employee of the successive regimes. He could not know how closely his own advancement hinged on developments he now began to chronicle.3

Lawson, naturally enough, had been high in favour with the restored Rump, but was distrusted by the larger number of members whom Monck brought back into the House in February. Montagu, however, now had friends there, and on 23 February was elected to the Council of State. By the 29th it was known that Lawson was to be outranked in the naval hierarchy by the commissioning of Generals-at-Sea for the summer guard: Monck and Montagu, whose appointments were confirmed on 2 March. Pepys was summoned to meet Montagu in Westminster Hall on the following day, along with some others who had been in the Baltic in 1659. It was three days later, in the garden of his Whitehall lodgings, that Montagu asked Pepys if he ‘could without too much inconvenience go to sea as his Secretary’ and invited him to think it over. At the same time Montagu cautiously began to talk about the return of the King; something to which he was now committed, but which he could not yet openly acknowledge. He said he needed a secretary whom he could trust; so perhaps he was now doubtful of John Creed, who served him in this capacity in 1659 and who was (at this time) a committed Puritan. What Pepys was now offered was not a permanent post, and acceptance might jeopardize his Exchequer place; it would certainly disrupt his domestic life. So think about it he did. The very next day he heard he was to inherit his uncle’s country estate; the world seemed to be opening up for him. He ran into a naval acquaintance, Captain Philip Holland, at a tavern in New Palace Yard; the captain explained that Pepys should take half a dozen servants aboard, pay them a pittance and pocket the difference. This sordid consideration (which in any case remained a fantasy) was not the deciding factor; nevertheless, the following day Pepys accepted Montagu’s invitation. Ever careful, he arranged a locum at the Exchequer and a safe house for his young wife. The only annoyance was learning that Montagu was, after all, taking Creed as deputy treasurer (the post normally combined with secretary).4

Pepys and Creed were of an age, and shared many accomplishments and intellectual or aesthetic interests; naturally they disliked each other a great deal. Creed was more polished socially and academically, but Pepys would surpass him as an administrator and in their master’s favour. Their paths intertwined professionally for many years, and they sustained an uneasy friendship. Pepys had wanted the deputy treasurership for himself in 1660 (not merely that Creed should not have it), but his frustration was soon forgotten in the preparations for his voyage, and with the exciting discovery that money would be pressed into his hands by those seeking appointments in the fleet. The first he received was ‘half a piece’ on behalf of an aspirant chaplain; this kind of thing Pepys would come to deprecate as bribery (for future favour), and quite different from gold and silver he received for issuing Captain Robert Williamson with his commission, which was a gratuity (for services performed). With some of this ready cash Pepys was able to smarten his wardrobe, and to buy a sword; charmingly he also bought a telescope as a present for Montagu. Then on 23 March he took a barge from Tower wharf, and went aboard the Swiftsure anchored at Long Reach. This was temporary accommodation until Montagu’s former and favoured flagship, Naseby, was made ready. After seeing Montagu come aboard to a salute from the assembled ships, Pepys went down to his cabin, and began writing. At first there were orders for immediate business to be drafted, but after a couple of days he was making out a list of all the ships in the fleet, their numbers of men and guns. He had found his billet.5

Both Generals now wanted the return of the monarchy; Montagu had been so disposed since the beginning of the year, but Monck had only committed himself in the previous week. They were, however, far from certain of support in the rest of the fleet. Lawson, now their Vice-Admiral, again played a key part. He had also been turned by royalist agents, but he had a following whose opinions remained hostile to the restoration. Pepys, who was getting to know the sea officers, heard of ‘a great whispering of some of the Vice-admiralls captains’ on the evening of March 29. Lawson defused the potential mutiny, and Montagu then proceeded to replace a number of Lawson’s more extreme adherents with men of his own persuasion. His care, Pepys noted (1 April), was ‘to put by as much of the Anabaptists as he can’. Most prominent of these was George Dakins (Pepys calls him ‘Dekings’) of the Worcester, whom Montagu first thought to send on a minor posting to the Mediterranean; when that mission was upgraded, Montagu manoeuvred Dakins out of his command altogether. By the time the Council had approved this (17 April), Montagu had already told Pepys to make out a commission for Robert Blake to captain the Worcester. Another key appointment was of Roger Cuttance to be flag captain of the Naseby, to which Montagu had transferred on 30 March. Pepys and Cuttance quickly struck up a friendship, lubricated by wine and oysters, and more usefully spent in a little nautical education. Cuttance would remain a favourite of Montagu’s, and therefore of Pepys’s, until the scandal over prize goods which touched them all in 1665. On this voyage Pepys first met many of those with whom he would shortly have considerable dealings. Others were at least glimpsed; while the fleet was still in the River two of the new Admiralty Commissioners came aboard, William Penn and George Thomson – the one to be Pepys’s close colleague and neighbour for a decade, the other a formidable opponent in the enquiry which Pepys and Penn would face after the Second Dutch War.6

Political developments were now awaited. While Pepys had still been in Westminster the Long Parliament had finally agreed to scuttle itself, and in its place a Convention was to assemble on 25 April. Montagu would be elected, though in the event he needed no seat in Commons. On 9 April the fleet sailed round the North Foreland and came to anchor in the Downs, giving Pepys his first sight of the French coast. Montagu immediately contacted the King, now at Breda; over the next weeks the comings and goings proliferated, but discretion and subterfuge remained necessary. When one royalist agent, Henry Norwood, was given passage back to Holland on 21 April, Montagu told Pepys to keep the matter out of the log. A week later ‘all the world knew’ who Montagu’s visitors were. On the 29th Pepys heard that the King had sent the newly assembled Convention the conciliatory terms (the Declaration of Breda), on the basis of which the Convention voted for the return of the King on 2 May. Charles had sent a copy of the Declaration to the Generals, asking for it to be published throughout the fleet, which he called ‘the Wall of the Kingdom’.

A council of war was duly held aboard Naseby next day, at which Pepys read out the Declaration and the King’s covering letter. He repeated this performance on the quarter deck and then on the other ships, to resounding cheers. None of the officers had spoken against the Declaration, but Pepys rightly suspected that many remained disaffected. The seamen he thought loyal to a man; in fact their enthusiasm had much to do with the promise that their unpaid wages would be met by the incoming regime. Diplomatically, the wraps were off, and Montagu could show Pepys letters he had received from the King and the Duke of York. Only now did Pepys fully understand the extent of the negotiations since the fleet had been in the Downs, in the logistics of which he had been involved. The King’s letter to the Generals and the resolution of the council of war were published over Pepys’s counter-signature, and the government newsletters also borrowed from one of Pepys’s despatches.7

The fleet in the Downs had become the Royal Navy, and royal banners and other trappings were required to mark the fact. Pepys drafted the Generals’ reply to the King on 9 May, the day after Charles had been proclaimed in London. It was obvious that the fleet would now sail to Holland to fetch the King home, but there was continuing debate about protocol. Monck wanted Charles to be brought in before the political mood changed, and Montagu (perhaps keen to take centre stage) decided to sail for Holland without waiting for instructions from London. Lawson and the Rear Admiral, Richard Stayner, had disagreed, but rank prevailed, and on the morning of 12 May the fleet, thirty ships in all, weighed anchor and set course for Scheveningen. Pepys went ashore at The Hague on the 14th, wanting to pay his respects to the nine-year-old Prince of Orange. This he did late that evening, and found Prince William ‘a very pretty boy’. William would lose his looks, but he would gain three kingdoms and, among other consequences, destroy Pepys’s career.8

There was disappointment when the King failed to visit the fleet as expected on 16 May (Montagu was reduced to spending the afternoon playing ninepins on deck with Pepys). But the next evening Pepys wheedled his way into the Mauritzhuis, where the Court was staying, and kissed the hands of the King and the Duke of York, their sister the Princess Dowager of Orange, and their aunt Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. The Duke had just been confirmed as Lord High Admiral of England, a post he had notionally held since childhood. This rather deflated Montagu, and Pepys found himself with little to do. However, a visit from the Duke and his brother Henry (Duke of Gloucester) aboard the flagship on 22 May made work for everyone; Pepys was allowed to fire one of the guns, and nearly lost an eye in the process. The next day the King and the Royal Family came aboard Naseby, promptly made the Royal Charles. The other ships which embarrassingly recalled the Civil War and republic were renamed at the same time; this might more tactfully have been done when the royal insignia was furnished, but possibly the tradition of the sea had discouraged the move. As they sailed for home, Pepys heard the King speak of his wartime adventures, much of which could only now be revealed. Twenty years later, when the stories had grown a little, Charles gave Pepys the authorised version with a view to publication. On the present voyage Pepys’s only business with the King was to draft and present a document for his signature. He had some talk with the Duke, who addressed him by name and made what can only have been a conventional promise of future favour. In fact it was the start of a remarkable working relationship between prince and commoner, tarnished only in its final moment.9

Dover was reached on 26 May. A brigantine had been prepared to bring the King ashore, but he and his brothers chose to go with Montagu in his barge. Pepys also landed in royal company, having shared a boat with one of Charles’s famous dogs (whose incontinence prompted a tortuous reflection on the humanity of kings). Pepys’s account of the Restoration voyage vividly demonstrates that the King had already developed that easy manner and accessibility which would become legendary. He had to a large measure the special royal talent for focusing his full attention on a slight encounter. It is sometimes thought that the royal ‘walkabout’ was a modern invention, but no monarch walked about more than Charles II. Unfortunately, aboard the Royal Charles he walked into a beam, and Pepys arranged for the place to be marked in gold with the royal cipher. This apart, there were no accidents, and Montagu was ‘almost transported with joy’ that it was so. A more tangible joy was the Garter, which he received after the King had left for London. Another royal bounty was the promise of a month’s pay to the thirty ships which had brought the King back; Pepys reckoned this at £6,538 (‘I wish we had the money’). £8,000 was in fact at once provided, and though this was only a fraction of the arrears then due, it bought the seamen’s loyalty. Pepys’s personal finances were also gratifyingly buoyant; he had been given an advance of £30, and he now found himself worth £100. Even better, Montagu had promised to carry him along: ‘We must have a little patience and we will rise together.’ For neither was their patience strained.10

Once back in Westminster, the business of paying off the fleet brought Pepys frequently to Whitehall Palace, where the Admiralty Office was newly established. Montagu, who had been appointed Great Master of the Wardrobe, also now lodged in the palace. It was there on 18 June that Montagu first told Pepys that he was looking to get him the Clerkship of the Acts, that being the secretaryship to the Navy Board. As yet neither the Board nor the Clerkship existed, having been displaced by other administrative arrangements during the Commonwealth, but the King intended to restore the previous system. A few days later Montagu said he could promise Pepys the job, but it was not yet settled. Among other contenders was Thomas Turner, who as Clerk-General of the Navy Office for the past fourteen years was to some extent the in-post official. He had the backing of Monck, but Montagu politely observed that he would not meddle in army appointments, so Monck should allow him to make those he wanted in the Navy. On his own Turner lacked the drive and means to advance his candidacy; he would offer Pepys £150 for a share in the office, but someone else had already promised Pepys £500 to stand down altogether. Another bidder tempted Pepys with £1,000, though this was still short of his asking price of four years’ purchase (£1,400). In the end he bought Turner off with £50 and a minor place in the new administration, and would help him in other ways in the future. It was from Turner that Pepys acquired one of the most notable naval MSS which now adorn his library.11

A technically more awkward rival was the surviving previous holder of the office, Thomas Barlow, who Pepys learned to his dismay was still alive and, worse, ‘coming up to town to look after his place’ (29 June). Barlow’s job had been swept aside when Parliament abolished the Navy Board in September 1642; but now that institution was to be revived, might not his 1639 patent hold good? Here, with the contending claims of the incumbent Turner and the dispossessed Barlow, the State’s servant and the King’s, was the problem of the Restoration settlement in microcosm. Those who had sided with Charles I in war and Charles II in exile now expected their recompense, but the King could not hope to repay all their services. He had in any case not been restored by the Cavaliers, but by his erstwhile enemies. A balance had to be exercised in the distribution of offices and honours, though it was weighted heavily in favour of the Restoration’s chief architects and their clients. Neither Pepys’s brief service with the fleet nor his duties in the Exchequer gave him any large claim to promotion. It was simply his good fortune to be associated at this moment with Montagu, who was himself created Earl of Sandwich. On 4 July an Order in Council revoked the authority of the existing Admiralty Commissioners, and nominated the members of the new Navy Board. Pepys was there designated Clerk of the Acts, and instructed to take possession of all books, papers and other effects of the former Commissioners. When Pepys joined his colleagues on the following day, he was still worried about Barlow. He was reassured that even if the old man established a financial interest, he would not exercise the office in person. Pepys eventually agreed to pay Barlow a pension of £100 a year out of the £350 salary which was assigned to him by a further order of 4 July. All the Navy Board salaries were increased handsomely from the former rates (the Clerk’s had been £180), so Pepys could well afford to be generous. He did not actually learn what his salary was to be until 7 July; character-istically he went off at once and bought a couple of fine engravings (after Rubens), then returned to the Office to begin listing the documents which were now his responsibility.12

The post to which Pepys was formally appointed by letters patent of 13 July was still officially known as Clerk of the King’s Ships, and as such Pepys could claim succession to the oldest administrative job in the Navy. At first he seems to have had no interest in the position except as a source of income and advancement. Even later, when he planned to write a history of the Navy, he knew little of his distant predecessors. He would surely have been delighted by the suggestion that he might trace his office to William de Wrotham, Archdeacon of Taunton, who was styled custos galliarum in the reign of King John. However, it is now thought that naval administration properly derives from the Lord Admiral’s secretaries, and that the first Clerks of the King’s Ships can be identified in the mid-fourteenth century. The medieval Clerk was a rather lowly figure, whose responsibilities and status fluctuated according to the requirements of individual kings. He remained a financial officer, receiving funds from the Exchequer for the material requirements of the ships in dock. In times of high naval activity he might find himself fitting out an invasion force, but he was always a civilian. There was little for Henry IV’s Clerk John Elmerton to do, since the Royal Navy was down to two ships. Even when the fleet expanded to thirty-six under Henry V, and the Clerk, William Soper, was a man of substance, only one additional official was needed. In Henry VI’s reign the Navy and its administration were wound down completely, and the Clerkship became a sinecure. A new era opened with the appointment of Thomas Rogers by Edward IV in 1480. Rogers had been at sea as purser and master, and would have far wider remit than previous Clerks, hiring ships and appointing officers in addition to custody of matériel. He managed to retain office through the reigns of Edward V and Richard III, and into that of Henry VII. He also seems to have been the first Clerk of the Ships whom Pepys could have named, though not until many years later when one of his own clerks transcribed a document of 1482 into Pepys’s collection of naval history.13

Pepys was confident that the ‘first establishment of the Royal Navy’ was owed to Henry VIII, but was hazy about the details. These are a good deal clearer to us, although the interpretation is sharply divided. David Loades has argued that with the Clerkship of Robert Brigandyne (1495–1523) ‘the story of Tudor naval administration really begins’. According to N.A.M. Rodger, Henry failed to establish ‘any sort of administrative structure for the fleet he rapidly built up’ and matters ‘remained rudimentary for the great part of his reign’. Brigandyne’s duties were largely confined to Portsmouth, and marine affairs were handled on an ad hoc basis by officers of the royal household and others. Professor Rodger finds more significance in the building of storehouses at Erith and Deptford in 1512–13, which for the first time gave the Navy a roof over its head. A new post of Comptroller was created in 1512, but it was the keeper of the storehouses, William Gonson, who had become the leading naval official at the time of his death in 1544. By then four further offices had come into being: Master of Naval Ordnance, Lieutenant (or Vice-Admiral), Treasurer, Surveyor and Rigger. The French war of Henry VIII’s last years occasioned the more formal tenure of these offices. On 24 April 1546 individual patents were delivered to the Master of Ordnance, Lieutenant, Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor, and Clerk, and to another unspecified official for ‘marine causes’. Although no corporate body was specifically erected, these instruments are held to mark the emergence of what was already spoken of as ‘the Admiralty’ or ‘the Council for Marine Causes’. Various other names came into use before the institution was finally dissolved in 1832: in full dress ‘the Principal Officers and Commissioners of His (or Her) Majesty’s Navy’; more simply though confusingly ‘the Navy Office’ or ‘the Officers of the Navy’, but usually ‘the Navy Board’. The several patents of April 1546 are therefore the ‘establishment’ which Pepys wished to identify.14

Two important developments quickly followed. On 18 June 1550 further letters patent, now in the name of Edward VI, appointed Edward Baeshe as ‘Surveyor General of Victuals for the King’s Ships and Marine Affairs’, to work under the direction of the Lord Admiral or the Navy Officers. It was a post which Pepys would reinvent for himself in 1665. Baeshe’s thirty-seven years tenure has left ample records, some of which would be copied into Pepys’s own collection. The Navy Board’s overall functions were defined by an order of Queen Mary’s Privy Council on 8 January 1557, which decreed an annual £14,000 to support the building and repairing of ships, material provisions of all kind, and the wages and food of the seamen. Mary is not usually regarded as one of the Navy’s founders, but in the long term the establishment of this regular funding (the ‘ordinary’) was more important than anything her father had done.15

Despite all this burgeoning bureaucracy, the Navy Officers of the latter sixteenth century were often active sea commanders, and it was generally in this capacity that Pepys would know of them. While he recalled approvingly the appointment of Hawkins and Drake (‘two plain tarpaulins’) to flag commands in 1588, he probably never knew that Hawkins might have been one of his own predecessors. Hawkins had obtained a reversionary grant of the Clerkship in 1567; he never took it up, but sat on the Navy Board as Treasurer from 1578 to his death. His colleague there as Clerk of the Acts from 1580–8, William Borough, was the author of a popular textbook on navigation. Though Pepys acquired this and read it, he may not have realised that ‘Burrows’ the author was the same man as ‘William Burrough’ or ‘Borrows’ associated with Hawkins in the administration, and also the ‘Mr Burroughs’ whom Drake condemned to death in 1587. Borough was Vice-Admiral in the fleet which famously sabotaged the preparing Armada at Cadiz. Borough, aboard the Golden Lion, became detached from the fleet in circumstances which Drake interpreted as mutiny. Borough survived, albeit losing (as a modern commentator nicely expresses it) ‘the dignity expected of a member of the Navy Board and Clerk of the Ships’.16

With the Gonson dynasty, prominent in naval administration through three generations, Pepys would have a surer link. William Gonson’s son Benjamin had been named Clerk of the Ships in 1545, but did not actually join the Board until appointed Treasurer in 1549, as which he served until 1577. His great-granddaughter married Pepys’s friend and colleague John Evelyn, who inherited many of Gonson’s office records. Pepys was shown one such ‘Lieger’ in 1665, and (in the predatory manner perfected by the late Queen Mary) admired it so much that Evelyn had to give it to him. Pepys later acquired, seemingly by the same means, many other volumes of Elizabethan naval accounts. Although Pepys’s primary interest in these papers was antiquarian, they could serve a contemporary purpose. When the Navy Treasurer’s accounts were under parliamentary scrutiny in 1670, Pepys was able to score a point by citing one of the Elizabethan ledgers he had acquired.17

It was not until Pepys had been Clerk of the Acts for half a year that he heard something of his predecessors from the then Comptroller, Robert Slingsby. It pleased him to learn of Sir Peter Buck, who had succeeded Benjamin Gonson’s son (also Benjamin) as Clerk of the Acts in 1600. Pepys was ‘not a little proud’ to hold a post which had been occupied by a knight, and he persuaded himself that the same honour might soon be his. It was indeed true that most of his colleagues at the Board had titles, but the Clerk was always the junior member; Buck had benefited from James I’s lavish way with honours, and he would be the only Clerk of the Acts ever knighted. In other respects he was not a good role-model. A better one was Sir John Coke, whose prominence in Jacobean naval administration has won him praise as ‘the Samuel Pepys of his day’. On seeing some of Coke’s papers, Pepys was impressed that ‘the order that was observed in the Navy then, above what it is now, is very observable’. Coke was the leading figure in the Commission appointed in 1618, which not only made immediate reforms, but superseded the normal Navy Board for a decade. This second Jacobean Commision would be Pepys’s precedent and pattern for the Special Commission which he introduced in 1686–8 at the high point of his career.18

The specific functions of the Navy Officers were defined in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and again in a state paper of 1617. A more substantial set of instructions was issued by Lord Admiral Buckingham, of which the Pepys Library holds one of the two MS texts. From Buckingham’s death until the appointment of the Earl of Northumberland in 1638, the Admiralty was in commission. Northumberland issued his own instructions in 1640, which would be the model for those which the Duke of York published in 1662, by which the Navy Board would be governed until its dissolution by William IV. The pre-Civil War routine was also set out by Sir William Monson, who described the Navy Officers as ‘the conduit pipes’ through whom the Lord High Admiral’s commands descend ‘to all other inferior officers and ministers’. To Pepys, Northumberland’s regulations had already acquired the solemn authority of age; they were the ‘ancient Instructions’, to which the Navy had happily returned after two decades of alternative management.19

During the Civil War and Commonwealth naval administration operated through a number of agencies appointed by Parliament and the successive republican regimes. The process began with the creation of a parliamentary naval finance committee in August 1641. In the summer of 1642 the King lost physical control of his entire fleet, and Parliament appointed its own Navy and Admiralty Commissions. The former comprised six professional and six civilian members, and did not sustain the old Board’s separation of duties. William Batten, who had been Surveyor in the old Board, was continued in that part (though in fact he was too busy at sea); and, since someone had to keep the records, one of the Commissioners acted as Clerk. No Comptroller was appointed, and after 1652 the Surveyorship lapsed. Although formal distinction between Admiralty and Navy continued, several individuals belonged to both Commissions; some also sat on various related committees. Secretarial resources, too, were shared, and the archives became inter-mingled. Understandably the separate functions of these several bodies were and have been confused.20

Pepys was not overmuch concerned with these distinctions; he commonly referred to the naval management of ‘the late times’, embracing all the administrative devices of Commonwealth and Protectorate. ‘Late times’ was itself no whimsical understatement, but a careful euphemism for the whole unsettling period from the breakdown of royal government in 1641 to its recovery in 1660. The war itself did not yet have a name: when in 1669 Pepys submitted a background paper which referred cautiously to ‘the rupture between the King and the Parliament’, the Duke of York asked him to change it to ‘the beginning of the late Rebellion’. This, as James accurately observed, was when the Navy ‘was put out of its old good course into that of a Commission’. Pepys would be irritated by those who viewed the naval administration of those days with nostalgic reverence (‘as historians do of the primitive times in reference to the church’). In general terms he conceded that his predecessors left ‘many things worthy imitation’, and acknowledged the obligations personal and professional which he owed to them. Robert Blackborne, who had been Secretary to the Admiralty and Navy Commissions, and who but for his Puritan leanings might well have been made Clerk of the Acts, was generous with advice when the post went to Pepys. In retirement Pepys judged that under Richard Hutchinson, the Navy Treasury was ‘never . . . better managed, or with more credit or satisfaction to the service’. But in particulars he would always defend the record of the restored Navy Board against that of the preceding commissions. The need to do so became acute after the Second Dutch War (1664–7), when the incumbent naval administration was compared unfavourably with its predecessor in the militarily more successful war of 1652–4.21

Pepys made detailed investigation of the records. Figures he compiled for the overall costs of the First Dutch War retain their value in modern analysis, and show much the same proportion of national expenditure as in the Second War. To Pepys’s more immediate purpose he was able to demonstrate his generation’s better economy – to the tune of £171,185 in the first year of the respective wars. He showed that several practices for which he and his colleagues were criticised – the issuing of credit notes to suppliers and of promissory tickets to seamen – were resorted to in the First War. Even so there had then been more money about; in consequence the republic had been able to raise seamen’s pay in 1653, and impressment had been less necessary (or at least less complained of) than in the 1660s. The reliability of their payments gave the Commonwealth Commissioners a credit rating which their Restoration successors lacked, obliging them to ‘hunt . . . abroad’ in making contracts. Conversely, where some duties (such as auditing storekeepers’ accounts) were indeed overlooked in the heat of the Second War, it was shown that similar corners had been cut in the First War without impeding the satisfactory operation of the fleet. Pepys does not trouble to make the elementary point that the republican government had the more money because it took more. The princes he served from 1660 to 1689 were paupers by comparison, and Pepys’s whole career in the Navy was conditioned by the fact.22

TWO

Colleagues and Commodities

‘Some really startling decision by the Board to reorganise the shore side of the Navy . . . would have an electrical effect on everyone.’

Admiral Sir Guy Grantham, 11 October 1955

[Br. Naval Documents, p. 1014]

The Navy Board as reconstituted on 4 July 1660 comprised the four main officials (Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor and Clerk of the Acts), together with three Extra Commissioners (Lord Berkeley, Sir William Penn, and Peter Pett). Pett was resident at Chatham dockyard, and other Out-Commissioners would later be appointed for Harwich and Portsmouth. The number of Commissioners without portfolio, as Penn and Berkeley were at the outset, would vary from time to time. In order to appreciate the junior status Pepys initially held, and his achievement in rising very rapidly from it, it is helpful to look in some detail at the careers of his original colleagues.

John, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, from the Somerset branch of the prominent West Country family, had commanded royalist forces in the Civil War. From 1648 he was in the service of the Duke of York, whose own military service in the armies of France then Spain he encouraged and shared. He annoyed the rest of the émigré court, but retained the Duke’s friendship, and his appointment to the Navy Board is adequately explained by that. He was among those whom Pepys sourly classified as ‘Brought into the Navy for want of other ways of gratification’, and it is fair to say that of the newly appointed Commissioners he had the least acquaintance with naval affairs, Pepys not excepted. In fact Berkeley received much additional gratification, as Steward of the Duke’s household and an associate in his master’s commercial interests. His public career would take him to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant (1670–2). He had played little part in the Navy Board, and by January 1665 had sold his place there to Sir Thomas Harvey for £3,000. He had not endeared himself much to Pepys, because of hostility to Sandwich and to Thomas Hayter, Pepys’s Quaker clerk. Once Berkeley had left the Navy Board he was among those who drew unfavourable comparisons with the Commonwealth administration (of which he can have had no personal experience); more predictably he supported the appointment of gentlemen as commanders. Pepys concurred in Sandwich’s view that Berkeley was ‘very ordinary . . . as to parts and experience’, and voiced a common suspicion that not all of his martial anecdotes were authentic. He later acquired a copy of Berkeley’s posthumously published Memoirs, and several papers documenting his early career.1

Sir George Carteret was another Cavalier of impeccable credentials, from a family which had long been the foremost on the island of Jersey. His was, however, a junior branch, and he had to find his own living in the Navy. He was Vice-Admiral in the expedition which briefly triumphed over the corsairs of Salé in 1637. This was described by John Dunton in a book which Pepys admired enough to buy twice, though it has since been found ‘artless and misleading’. Carteret returned to the North African coast in the following year, and has left a journal of his proceedings. His years afloat scarcely justify Clarendon’s friendly lay opinion that Carteret was ‘as good, if not the best seaman of England’, but they usefully prepared him the administrative posts he subsequently held. In 1639 he was given reversion to the Comptrollership, to which he succeeded in 1641. During the tussle over naval commands in the summer of 1642, Carteret was invited to serve as deputy to the designated de facto admiral, the Earl of Warwick. The King, in forbidding Carteret to accept, further weakened his own control of the fleet, and so contributed to his altogether losing it. At the start of the Civil War Carteret served the King on land, returning to Jersey in 1643. He liberated the island from English occupation, and held it until 1651. He received the Prince of Wales there in 1646, and sheltered him again, as King, in 1649–50. These events and Carteret’s part in them are featured in MSS which Pepys acquired. Carteret had been given a knighthood and a baronetcy for his services, and also an island in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, which he called it after his existing territory. He failed to establish his title there, and it would be to another, larger, access of North American real estate that in 1664 he gave the enduring name of New Jersey. From 1651 to 1660 he shared the royalist exile in a variety of diplomatic and military functions. Charles I had designated him Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, a post which Charles II made substantive on the day after he returned to his capital in 1660. His appointment to the Treasurership of the Navy (4 July 1660) was quickly followed by admission to the Privy Council (11 July), and reflects the high personal esteem with which he was held by the King. Carteret’s accent amused smarter people, and his imperfect education upset Pepys. He had no special capability for the complexities of public finance, from which he would eventually be obliged to withdraw. Pepys was not alone in thinking that Carteret’s accounting revealed ‘perverse ignorance’. Even so, he believed him capable of colluding in a complicated scam run by the Navy paymaster and the London bankers to defraud suppliers. Pepys also condemned Carteret for embezzling the naval chaplains’ pay. This apart, Pepys’s comments on Carteret are free from the abuse which he dispensed elsewhere. He retained his original impression that Carteret was ‘very good-natured’, and found Carteret and his wife ‘most extraordinary people . . . to continue friendship with’.2

Sir William Batten (Surveyor 1660–7) had a similarly substantial curriculum vitae, intersecting with that of Carteret, but of a very different nature. He had been bred to the sea, and sailed with a whaler out of Great Yarmouth. He went on to command, as Carteret had done, one of Charles I’s ‘whelps’ (fast patrol vessels); he then bought himself into the Navy Board, paying £1,500 for the Surveyorship in 1638. He had meanwhile aligned himself with the London shipping interest, whose religious leanings he also shared; and when in 1642 Parliament assumed control of the fleet, Batten was made Vice-Admiral and a Navy Commissioner. He featured prominently and controversially in the chief naval events of the war. His firing on the Queen at Bridlington in February 1643 was considered ungentlemanly by the neutral Dutch, and damned him for ever in the eyes of the Cavaliers. By 1648 he had become disenchanted with his political masters, and helped foment the mutiny in which a detachment of Parliament’s ships ‘revolted’ to the King’s cause. He was made Rear Admiral of the fleet which put itself at the Prince of Wales’s disposal, but there were doubts about his sincerity. These were intensified when Batten advised against engaging Parliament’s ships when this at last became a possibility. Pepys records Charles II’s memory of Batten pacing the deck, mopping his sweat with a handkerchief; and of Prince Rupert itching to shoot him for seeming to signal to the enemy. After the stand-off the royal ships had returned to Holland, where Rupert took control. Batten was then allowed to return to England, but had now lost credibility with both sides. When the Restoration was imminent he offered the King his services, which were accepted. The return to the Surveyorship was his principal accomplishment; he was elected to Parliament in 1661, and in 1664 was licensed to build lighthouses at Harwich, the dues from which usefully increased his income.3