navy

navy. ‘For the regulating and better government of H. M.'s, ships of war and forces by sea, wherein, under the good Providence of God, the wealth, safety, and strength of the Kingdom is so much concerned’ (Preamble to Naval Discipline Act, 1661); ‘Fishermen, yachtsmen … river boatmen … manned their craft with volunteer crews and rushed them to the assembly point, although they did not then know for what purpose they were required’ (Admiralty communiqué, The Times, 4 June 1940). Separated by three centuries, these records of mid-17th-cent. aspiration in the wake of Cromwellian successes against Dutch and Spaniards, and mid-20th-cent. summons of all seafarers from Sussex to East Anglia to rescue at Dunkirk the only army the nation possessed, proclaim the importance of naval power for an island. The first is a perception of state interest which dates back well beyond the Armada to the reign of Elizabeth I's grandfather Henry VII, and has never ceased to apply, while the second invokes the duty owed the realm by the subject best equipped to discharge it. That obligation can be traced back to Æthelred II's plight under Danish attacks at Sandwich in 1006, and probably to Alfred's native-found ships at Poole, again resisting the Danes, in 897. Yet few aspects of the crown's prerogative power were more strenuously questioned through the 17th, 18th, and 19th cents. than that to impress the subject for sea service. Not until 1853, when fixed terms of service in the navy and pension rights were made statutory, did age-old constraints cease to be obnoxious. There seems poetic justice that the first Victoria Cross was won by a non-commissioned seaman in the Crimean War.

Britain's place in the ‘Viking World’ was rendered most definitive through the person of Cnut (1016–35). King, or overlord, also in Denmark (1019) and Norway (1028), no English monarch had such distant dominions again until Charles II in the later 17th cent. Cnut's navy seems not to have been a personal apanage but an auxiliary, its periods of service specifically fixed by financial provision. In 1051 it was dispensed with by Edward the Confessor out of economy, though this Norman-raised king may also have intended to ease the succession to his crown of the rich and ecclesiastically regenerated Normandy. William I had continuous trans-channel ferry needs during his reign, after the first crucial shipment of an army to Pevensey in September 1066; and he, William II, and Henry I may have made some 40 Channel crossings in all. Portsmouth, a nascent naval base by the reign of John (1199–1216), or Southampton were their usual destinations. But did they pretend to naval power beyond such dictates, or occasionally commandeering the resources of English merchants trading with Scandinavian, Flemish, or, later, Gascon ports? By the end of the 12th cent. the Cinque Ports had long enjoyed privileges from the crown in return for an annual provision of ships and men. Through the 13th cent. these ports, joined by Winchelsea and Rye, provided the ‘drive’ for assembling royal fleets, though under Henry III (c.1255) they so resisted his weak authority that Henry had to look to the east coast shipbuilding ports. By this time the oared single sail ‘long ship’ or galley, still predominant in northern waters and the Mediterranean, was ceding place to wider-beamed and higher-sided vessels, furnished with fore and stern castles. These were more difficult to manœuvre, but they could carry bowmen and projectiles in their castles and were more suitable for boarding an enemy, even if oar-power remained the handiest means finally to position a warship. Edward III's victory over the French at Sluys in 1340 must have featured such ships; and before the 14th cent. was out there was vital sail evolution through the development of the three-masted ship. The age-old side rudder also gave place to the stern-post rudder aligned on the keel, facilitating steering a few points off the wind.

The evolution of the navy in the 15th cent. has to be seen in the context of an ever-increasing volume of trading voyages, to Iceland, the Baltic ports, to the Basque coast and Portugal, and then the Newfoundland Banks. The east coast coal trade needed many ships, and Hanseatic competition in the shipment of English cloth to the processors in the Low Countries had to be countered. More distant trades made big ships economic: in 1400–25, 68 per cent of crown-hired ships were of less than 100 tons burthen, but by 1451 that percentage had dropped to 52. The three great ships of Henry V were each over 550 tons; the Grace Dieu of 1420, whose timbers yet lie in the Hamble river, was of over 1,000, though she may never have put to sea. These ships were unique, and possibly uniquely unserviceable. Around 170 years later, when England faced the Armada in 1588, only 14 of the 177 private ships enlisted for service were over 200 tons, and only 5 of the 34 ‘Queen's Ships’ exceeded 500 tons. The late medieval small ship had a durable progeny in the navy of the Tudors, the dynasty which truly founded the navy with its yards at Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich, and which fostered native gun-founding. In 1546, Henry VIII's last year, the Navy Board was formed from the navy's principal officers: it was destined to serve as the executant of the fleet's construction, maintenance, and supply, the country's largest industrial undertaking until the 19th cent. The names of Hawkins, Pepys, and Barham are inseparable from its record, strained though the board's relations with the policy-making Board of Admiralty often were. The critical change in warship design came during the 40 years before 1588, the removal of the medieval ‘castles’ in favour of a lower superstructure, with ships' sides pierced for guns on wheeled carriages, which made for some ease of movement between decks and allowed for recoil. Through to the coming of the steam-powered ‘ironclad’ this was the basic character of the warship; the teamwork, ensuring high rates of fire, inculcated in motley crews described in the 18th cent. as of ‘naturally generous dispositions though turbulent, fearless, or, rather, thoughtless of consequences’, made a singular contribution to Britain's awesome repute at sea in the century of Vernon, Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson.

When in June 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Wellington) spoke in Parliament of the navy as ‘the characteristic and constitutional force of Britain’, he was expressing a national sense of obligation to a service which, resolutely administered by Middleton (Barham) since 1778, and liberally provided for by Pitt in the 1780s, had earlier withstood the unprecedented challenges of the American War and had next reaped the laurels of victory under exceptional commanders. In the years to come the navy played a crucial role in supporting Wellington in the Peninsula. Wellington's logistical back-up had been prefigured, however modestly, by the first wintering of a British fleet in the Mediterranean in 1694–5; but few developments in Britain's Atlantic economy were more spectacular than the doubling of her exports to the Caribbean after 1808, following the Anglo-Spanish entente. At long last, and following Trafalgar, the book was closed on one of the most abiding and distracting of Britain's strategic preoccupations: the security of the West Indies possessions had exercised the minds of all thinking naval officers, as well as commercial lobbies, since the age of William III. This concern lay close to the beginnings of Britain's commercial empire in the 16th and 17th cents.—the Levant Company 1592, the Virginia Adventurers 1609, the Royal Africa Company 1660, above all the East India Company 1600—all undertakings calling for ships which must dwarf the warships of Elizabeth I. Some traces of her fleet's tonnage possibly survived even in the great battle fleets sent out under Cromwell; but by the time of Pepys's ‘30 ship’ building programme of 1677, ‘your ships’ as he reminded Parliament, there may have been an average burthen tonnage of 1,200 for ships of over 70 guns as against 940 in 1660. The navy finally became ‘royal’ in name under Charles II, and it was of incalculable importance for its future self-identity that there was, deliberately, no discrimination against that religious dissent among seamen which had afforded the Cromwellian navy its special pugnacity.

The first steam-powered vessels in the navy were the paddle-driven frigates/sloops of the 1820s, but the navy's ships in the Crimean War did not look much different from those of 75 years before. Even Warrior, Britain's first screw-driven ironclad (1860), retained sail-power after modifications in 1887. Within the period 1867–90 there was a breath-taking acceleration in the power of warships, but seamen of all ranks lacked the training to exploit these advances. During the incipient naval race with Germany in the 1890s there emerged, in the fascinating and powerfully prophetic educator John Arbuthnot Fisher, the man who drove the navy into the 20th cent. What has to be understood about his 18,000-tons displacement Dreadnought, with her 21-knot speed (launched February 1906), is that such a ship was waiting to be built: turbine and not reciprocated engine driven, and with a provision of uniformly heavy guns ensuring straddling salvoes of the highest possible accuracy. Yet Dreadnought was rapidly overtaken by more powerful and faster sisters, and she herself played little part in the First World War. Though included in the 1922 scrapping programme, Dreadnought had served her turn through her very launching and her specifications became common currency across the world. But at the end of his life (1920) Fisher was convinced that air power was inseparable from sea power in any future conflict, and that the capital ship had had her day—a glimpse of what was to happen in the Second World War to the Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Hood. The mine, the torpedo, and the submarine had already set the pace of change; and at the Coronation Review of 1953 only one British battleship remained, the 42,000-ton Vanguard, which had never seen action. Accompanied though she was at Spithead by five major aircraft carriers, these great ships lay among myriad smaller vessels of a versatility of purpose which would have won the approbation of a Fisher—and a Nelson.

David Denis Aldridge

Bibliography

Grove, E. , Vanguard to Trident (1987);
Hattendorf, J. B., and Knight, J. B. (eds.), British Naval Documents 1204–1960 (Aldershot, 1993);
Lewis, M. , The Navy of Britain (1949).