navy

navy 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. In 1051 it was dispensed with by Edward the Confessor out of economy. 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. 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. By this time the oared single sail ‘long ship’ or galley was ceding place to wider‐beamed and higher‐sided vessels, furnished with fore and stern castles. These were more difficult to manœuvre than galleys, but they could carry bowmen and projectiles in their castles and were more suitable for boarding an enemy. 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 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. More distant trades made big ships economic. 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. But 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. 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 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. Through to the coming of the steam‐powered‘ironclad’ this was the basic character of the warship; the teamwork, ensuring high rates of fire, made a singular contribution to Britain's awesome repute at sea in the century of Vernon, Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson.

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 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. By the time of Pepys's ‘30 ship’ building programme of 1677 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.

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. 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. 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.