The Commissioners, after pointing out in general and in particular that the condition of His Majesty's ships was very bad, give nine "causes" why it was no better. Eight of these are chiefly of the nature of illustrations of the ninth and last, which in itself is a masterly summary of the causes and consequences of bad administration.

The officials could not live on their pay, and were driven to cheat; and as this was nearly as much the case with the seniors as with the juniors, there was no supervision. Some of the cheating took the form of downright lying; thus, of the forty-three ships on the list of the navy, three were not in existence, even in a rotten condition. The Bonaventure was broken up seven years before the Commission was formed, and yet the king had continued to pay £63 a year for her keep. £100, 4s. 5d. was still charged for the Advantage, burnt five years before, and £60, 10s. 10d. for the Charles. Small pilferings were the rule, and the system upon which the men were paid almost invited fraud. Thus the boatswains, whose regular allowance was £10, 17s. 3d., when engaged as caretakers of the king's ships in harbour, were allowed to make a profit by buying what were known as "old mucks" and "brown paper stuff" at a cheap rate. These striking names were applied to cables, moorings, and cordage generally, which were supposed to be too worn out for the king's service. Of this refuse the officials were allowed to make what profit they could. The reader will perceive at once with what delightful facility this system could be worked at the king's expense. Much larger quantities of cable were used than were necessary, and so soon as any part was slightly damaged, the boatswains were allowed to take the whole as "old mucks" and "brown paper stuff." Then they resold it at a very handsome profit. If the little men behaved in this way, it was because their chiefs not only condoned, but shared their malpractices. The king was charged too dear even for the stores he did receive, and he was made to pay for articles never purchased and for work not done for him. As might have been expected, his establishments swarmed with useless servants, the hangers-on of his higher officials. A pathetic interest attaches to the names of some of the useless officials who were detected by the Commissioners. We read, for instance, of John Austin, master, aged and blind, of John Avale, boatswain, aged and blind, of Thomas Butler, gunner, aged and heretofore a man of great service, and may still be an instructor of others, and of John Causton, gunner, maimed in service. These, we may safely believe, were aged men, worn out in the wars of Queen Elizabeth, who were suffered by charity to retain offices for which they were no longer fit. The Commissioners recommend them for reasonable pensions. Though such cases as these were pardonable, yet the system was bad. The fact that one aged seaman or soldier who well deserved a pension had been suffered to retain a post long after he had become unable to perform the duties, was sure to be made an excuse for putting in incompetent persons who had never seen any service at all.

Having drawn this picture of the navy as it was, the Commissioners went on to draft a scheme by which it could again be put on a more creditable footing. They undertook to meet the ordinary and extraordinary expenses for £30,000 a year, to refit the ships which were still capable of being made serviceable, to build new ones, and to do the whole work of re-establishing the navy within five years. Their method was one adopted at all times by administrators who have had to deal with such a state of affairs as is described above. They dismissed superfluous officials and raised the salaries of those that were retained. They set themselves a definite scheme to carry out, and made a careful calculation of the sums of money required to execute it. The establishment of the navy, according to the plan of the Commissioners, was to consist of no more than thirty vessels, but then they were to be, taken together, larger by three thousand and fifty tons than the navy of Queen Elizabeth "when it was greatest and flourished most." The average size of the ships was therefore very much increased. Taking one with another, they measured a little over five hundred and seventy tons. By 1624 this scheme had been fully carried out.

The execution of the reform was accompanied, and indeed we may say was secured, by a change in the administration. It had become impossible that Nottingham should remain any longer Lord High Admiral. His retirement in 1619 was soothed by pensions, and he received the sum of £3000 from his successor as the price of his office. One of the evils of which the Commissioners had to complain was the sale of offices, but the practice continued long, especially in the case of the great men. Nottingham's successor was the showy Duke of Buckingham, one of the best abused personages in English history. It is, however, to his credit that under his administration a great deal was done in the interests of the navy. If he did not do it himself, he at least did not interfere with Sir John Coke and other hard-working subordinates. Nor was the change of Lord High Admiral all. A complete organic change was carried out. The old offices of Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor, and Clerk of the Acts were suppressed, and the members of the committee were entrusted with the whole administration of the navy, under the title of Commissioners.

In spite of this vigorous cleansing of the dockyards and the Navy Office, maladministration was by no means at an end with the navy. During the reign of Charles some at least of these evils reappeared. King Charles took a keen interest in his navy, and did much to increase its strength, but there were permanent conditions during all the existence of the Stuart dynasty which militated against efficiency. These kings were always aiming at more than they had the resources to execute. They were at all times on bad terms with their Parliament, and so could not raise a great revenue. Thus they were for ever short of money, and were compelled to connive at malpractices on the part of servants whom they could not pay. Dishonest men were not satisfied with robbing the king of just so much as would make good their own arrears of salary. They repaid themselves with interest, and very often by defrauding the soldiers and sailors of their food and poor wages. There was also a defect in the character of the Stuarts which Lord Dartmouth defined to Pepys very forcibly as they were talking together before dinner on their way home from Tangier. "He," Pepys writes, "besides observed something Spragg had said that our masters the King and Duke of York were good at giving good orders and encouragement to their servants in office to be strict in keeping good order, but were never found stable enough to support officers in the performance of their orders. By which no man was safe in doing them service." This was not less true of the first James and Charles than of the second, and therefore it was that in spite of cleverness, of a distinct understanding of the conditions which made for efficiency, and of the best intentions, their navy was for ever ill supplied, ill fitted, and manned by discontented men. The sailor who starved in the king's service, and saw those who robbed him in the enjoyment of the royal favour, ended by laying the blame on the king.

If all the promises made to them had been kept, neither men nor officers would have had reason to complain. The sailors' wages had risen steadily from the 5s. a month at which they stood at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. They rose to 6s. 8d. under King Edward, and in 1585 they were increased to 10s. Fourteen shillings were given to the crews of the ships sent against Algiers in 1620, and Charles I. fixed 15s. as the regular wage of a sailor. At a time when the purchasing power of money was greater than it is now, this was fair pay. The old system of compensating the officers by "dead pays" disappeared in the reign of Elizabeth. In the reign of Charles I. the captain received from £4, 6s. 8d. to £14 a month, according to the size of his ship; the lieutenant, who was only carried in vessels above the third rate, from £2, 16s. to £3, 10s., and the master from £2, 6s. 8d. to £4, 13s. 9d. Warrant officers were paid from £1, 3s. 4d. to £2, 4s. The allowance of provisions was ample in quantity. Seven lbs. of biscuits, four lbs. of beef, two lbs. of pork, one quart of peas, three pints of oatmeal, six oz. of butter, and twelve oz. of cheese, besides all the fresh fish which was caught, without any deduction for it, were supposed to be served out to the men every week. They were also entitled to an ample allowance of beer. But when a large force was collected for service during any length of time, it was the common rule to divide four men's food among six. At all times, too, the quality of the provisions was liable to be bad. Complaints were particularly common in regard to the beer. The badness of the stores was often largely due to the difficulty of keeping them sweet during prolonged cruises in small wooden vessels, ballasted with sand, into which all the leakage of the beer-barrels drained, and which was soaked in bilge water; but the stores were often bad to begin with.

During this reign we first hear of the division of the king's ships into classes, called rates. At a later period they were classified by armament, but in the reign of Charles I. the division was made by the number of the crews. First rates carried 500 and 400 men, second rates 300 and 250, third rates 200 and 160, fourth rates 120 and 100, fifth rates 70 and 60, and sixth rates 50 and 40.

The long peace which began with the accession of James I. had the effect of throwing back the development of the navy for some time. During the later years of Queen Elizabeth, a separate class of sea officers was beginning to be formed. Sir William Monson, for instance, was as much a naval officer as Lord Hawke. He went to sea young, he passed through all grades of the service, he was a trained seaman, and yet a gentleman who had received the education of his class. Constant war had begun to teach Englishmen that the business of commanding a fighting ship at sea required something more than a knowledge of military discipline and the habit of carrying arms. If King James had pursued the policy of constant hostility with Spain advocated by the small party whose best-known representative was Sir Walter Raleigh, it is probable that a corps of naval officers would soon have been formed by the mere necessities of the case. But when peace was signed with Spain, the necessity for maintaining a great naval force came to an end. The ships were laid up, the crews were disbanded, the officers either retired into private life, or were employed by the king in other ways. The seamen among them betook themselves to the service of the East India Company, to trade, or to colonising ventures in America. Thus, when the time came again to fit out great fleets, no progress had been made in the formation of a body of sea officers. In the reign of James I. and his son, it was not much less the rule than it had been with Henry VIII., that the captain of a king's ship was a gentleman with little or no knowledge of sea affairs, and that the seaman was confined to the inferior position of master. There were exceptions to this rule. Sir John Pennington, who was much employed by Charles as admiral in the Narrow Seas, was a seaman bred, but even he was commonly superseded by some noble whenever the king made a serious effort to fit out a great fleet.

The one important naval expedition of King James's reign was directed against the pirates of Algiers in 1620. The despatch of this force was of the nature of an innovation on the usual policy of James's Government. It had not hitherto been the custom even to try to afford English traders effective protection beyond the Narrow Seas. There was no such permanent naval force as could have done the work, even if the Government had been disposed to make the attempt. According to the establishment drafted by the Commission of 1618, the guard to be maintained at home was to consist of only four vessels, of which the largest was 120 tons. This trifling squadron was not to be expected to do more than cope with such pirates "of base condition" as the ex-boatswain's mate Clarke, whom Sir William Monson hunted in the Shetlands and the Hebrides. It was utterly unable to afford protection to English traders beyond the Narrow Seas, nor indeed did they expect to be protected. Trade to the East and the Levant was conducted by great privileged companies, who sent their ships out well armed, and maintained agents at foreign courts. As regards the East Indies, it was long before a king's ship made its appearance in the waters frequented by the Company's squadrons. But the Turkish Company, which traded to the Levant, was less strong, and was also subject to attack by more formidable enemies. The Algerine pirates were then, in even a greater degree than was the case later, a standing menace to all ships trading in the Mediterranean, and even in the more accessible parts of the Atlantic. On one occasion they carried off a great part of the population of the Canary Islands, on another they sacked Baltimore in the south of Ireland. The vessels of the Turkey Company were to a certain extent able to protect themselves, and on several occasions they beat off the attacks of the pirates. But the smaller traders fell easy victims. To the disgrace of Europe, a large proportion of the pirates were renegades; one of them was an Englishman of the name of Ward, formerly a boatswain in the navy. The seaports of the time were full of stories of Englishmen who had been carried off by these rovers, and had in the majority of cases remained in slavery, unless they were ransomed by their relations. Now and then some English sailors who had been taken would escape by turning the tables on their captors. Thus, for instance, the Jacob of Bristol, a ship of 120 tons, was recaptured by four of her men who had been left on board with the prize-crew. They took the opportunity of a storm, when they were called upon to help the Moslem pirates, who were clumsy sailors. As the prize-master was lending a hand to strike the sails, the four Englishmen deftly gave him "a toss overboard." As he tried to clamber up again by the help of a rope which was trailing alongside, he was knocked down "by the handle of a pump." The prize-crew were then overpowered in detail, and the vessel carried into San Lucar in Spain, where the captive Mohammedans were themselves promptly sold for slaves. A somewhat similar story is told of one John Rawlings, skipper of a small vessel of forty tons, named the Nicholas of Plymouth. He was taken prisoner outside the Straits of Gibraltar and carried to Algiers, where he was sold as a slave to an English renegade of the name of John Goodall. Goodall employed him in the crew of one of the various pirate craft he owned, and Rawlings had the good fortune and dexterity to organise and carry through a conspiracy among the Christian slaves, who overpowered the Mohammedan masters and carried the ship into Plymouth. These, however, were exceptional cases, and of those who fell into the hands of these pirates there were few who ever saw an end to their captivity, unless they had friends to ransom them or were prepared to become renegades.

In 1620 a fleet was at last fitted out against these enemies of the human race. King James acted at least as much under the influence of the Spaniards, to whom Algiers was a perpetual menace, as in the interest of his own subjects. Neither the Spaniard nor the English trader profited by this solitary example of King James's naval enterprise. The expedition was too futile to deserve detailed notice in the history of the English Navy, when so many and such very different events lie close ahead of us. Yet the constitution of the squadron is interesting, as showing within a moderate space how the fleets of that time were composed.

The command of the squadron was given to Sir Robert Mansel, an old officer of the Elizabethan time, who had fought against the Armada, and had seen much service. He was a cousin of Lord Howard of Effingham, had been a greedy if not corrupt official, and had taken an active share in supporting the Lord Admiral in his opposition to the Commission of 1613. The second in command, Sir Richard Hawkins, was the son of the more famous Sir John. He had in the former reign been taken prisoner by the Spaniards in the South Seas after a gallant fight. During his captivity he had been converted to Roman Catholicism. His account of his voyage to the South Seas is, next to the Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, the best contemporary account of the sea life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Captain John Pennington who appears among the commanders of the merchant ships, is the Sir John Pennington of later years. Although not a man of great ability or considerable achievements, he is interesting as a type. He belonged to a family of Puritan tradesmen, who came originally from Henham in Essex, but were settled in London. The seaman did not share the politics of his family, but was, in the fullest sense of the word, a king's servant, making it his boast that it was his one rule to obey his master's orders. He began life as a merchant's skipper, and sailed in the employment of Raleigh in the last voyage to Guiana. He had endeavoured to enter the service of the East India Company, without success, although (if it ought not to be because) he had the patronage of Buckingham. The same patron probably obtained for him the command of the Zouch Phenix on this voyage. From this time forward he was regularly in the employment of the Crown, and generally in command of the Narrow Seas. The qualities which made his fortune lie on the surface. He was, as has already been said, the king's servant and nothing more, ready to fight or to run away, to tell the truth or to lie, even to tell manifestly incompatible lies, upon the order of anybody whom the king told him to obey. Such a man was invaluable. The combination of perfect loyalty with a total absence of scruple is never very common. Charles appreciated Pennington's qualities to the full, and, when the Civil War was about to break out, even inclined to give him the great office of Lord High Admiral.

The expedition against the Algerine pirates left England on the 12th October 1620. In June of the following year it turned homeward, having done nothing in the interval except make one futile attempt to defraud the Dey of Algiers, by sending a sham consul, who was, in fact, a common sailor dressed up for the occasion, and another no less feeble effort to burn the pirate ships in the harbour. It spent a great part of its time at Alicante, or in the Balearic Islands. It went aimlessly to and fro between these places and Algiers. It was in harbour when it ought to have been cruising against the pirates, and was at sea when the pirates were safe back in Algiers. It finally returned, having done much more harm than good by encouraging the Algerines in their belief of their own strength.

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.

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.

CHAPTER V
THE NAVY IN THE CIVIL WAR