"Admiralty Administration, 1783 - 1806" by Patricia Kathleen Crimmin. Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of London. 1965. ProQuest Number: 10107345 All rights reserved INF0RMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10107345 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 2 Abstract. This thesis examines the professional, political and social composition of the Admiralty Board, its secretariat, business and financial methods and office routine between 1783 and 1806. Membership of the Board was confined to younger sons of politi­ cally powerful aristocrats and seamen of political importance or professional reputation. Most civil lords moved to other departments after short terms at the Admiralty. For seamen a seat at the Board was often the culmination of a career. The secretaries and chief clerks, possessing a life time's experience of affairs, were of prime importance in office routine. The Admiralty was an executive branch of government with extensive patronage but limited machinery. It controlled the weapon the Cabinet directed, but the feeding and clothing of that weapon was the responsibility of subordinate offices, chiefly the Navy and Victualling Boards, often virtually autonomous, on whom the Admiralty relied for professional advice. The First Lord was an important Cabinet minister and the Admiralty co-operated with the major government departments. Personal relationships between departmental heads and secretaries, often made easier by a similar social background, were all important to facilitate business in the web of ancient govern­ ment practice. Only occasionally did politics make the Admiralty a storm centre, leading to the downfall of ministries and the political ruin of the First Lord as in 1804-6. n: \ : 3 The Admiralty's attitude to its employees was paternalistic. There was an improvement in conditions of work, pay and pensions by 1806 and a greater emphasis on regular attendance and efficiency by 1806, thanks to the reports of several Parliamentary commissions of inquiry into Admiralty affairs, and to the work of individual First Lords, especially Lords St. Vincent and Barham. 4 Preface. Very little work has been done on Admiralty administration. There is no volume on the Office in the government publication, The Whitehall Series, edited by Sir James Marchant, or in The New Whitehall Series, edited by Sir Robert Fraser. The studies of naval administration by Sir Vesey Hamilton and Sir John Briggs are mainly concerned with the nineteenth century. Sir W. Laird Clowes* massive The Roval Navv. A History (1897-1901) gives useful lists of office holders and tackles the broad outlines of naval administration, but none of these are primarily concerned with the Admiralty. The works of J.R. Tanner, M. Oppenheim, and G.F. James and J.J. Sutherland Shaw, on naval administration. Admiralty personnel etc. deal only with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Professor M. Lewis devoted a section of his The Navv of Britain (1948) to the evolution of the Admiralty, and the prefaces to the papers of the First Lords of the period, published by the Navy Records Society, often give a useful survey of administrative problems and methods. The best account of the growth of the Admiralty is Sir Oswyn Murray's series of articles, intended as a separate volume, and published, uncorrected, in The Mariner's Mirror, vols xxiii-xxv,Jan.1937-Jan.1939. But the account is incomplete and only one section, vol.xxiv.,no.3, deals with the eighteenth century. Special aspects of naval administration have been studied 5 in R.G. Albion's Forests and Sea Power (1926), J. Ehrman's The Navv in the War of William III (1953), Piers Mackes&y's War in the Mediterranean. 1803-1810 (1958), among others, and recently more research work has been done into special periods of naval administration, especially in American universities. A complete list to 1963 can be found in R.G. Albion's Naval and Maritime History: An Annotated Bibliography (3rd.ed., The Marine Historical Association, Mystic, Connecticut, 1963, pp.131-3.) One of the most recent British unpublished theses on this topic is a controversial study of the administration of the Fourth Earl of Sandwich 1771-1782, by M.J. Williams (1962, D.Phil.Oxon.). But naval, and particularly Admiralty administration, after 1783 has been neglected. This thesis attempts a partial remedy of this omission. The years 1783-1806 have not been chosen arbitrarily. They mark the terms of Pitt's ministries; they include ten years of peace and war; they were a time when the nature and duties of public offices were being re-examined as a result of the administrative reforms launched in the 1780's." Though tempor­ arily interrupting those reforms, the war ultimately acted as a vital catalyst in this change. Old methods were slowly being rejected and new ones tentatively applied. The Admiralty provided the battle ground on which the first, inconclusive struggle was contested. These years saw the apotheosis of the Navy in action and the humiliation of its administration, in 1805, 6 I by the revelations of fraud and corruption at the heart of the system, ending in the final use of the seventeenth century weapon of impeachment against a First Lord. Above all these twenty three years are marked by several commissions of inquiry which act as points of alignment from which to take bearings. The period began with a commission inquiring into expenditure in public offices, including the Admiralty and some of its subordinate offices. It ended with a commission producing fourteen reports entirely devoted to naval matters. Perhaps no better indication of the importance of naval administration at this period is needed. The main unpublished manuscript sources for this thesis have been the extensive Admiralty records at the Public Record Office. The records most frequently used were the series Ad.l - Secretary's Department, In Letters, and A d .2 - Secretary's Department, Out Letters, Ad.3 - Board TÆinutes. The Chatham and Dacres Adams papers were also very useful, and much relevant information was found scattered through the series of Indexes. At the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the private papers of Lords Howe and St. Vincent and Sir Evan Nepean were examined and the series ADM/B+B.P. - Admiralty Board In Letters from the Navy Board, ADIvV^D. - the same from the Victualling Board, and ADM/G. - Victualling Board Indexes of Admiralty orders, together with the records of Halifax and Chatham dockyards, were consulted. The papers of individual seamen and politicians most frequently 7 consulted were the Bridport Papers, Martin Papers, Letter Books of Sir Evan Nepean, Melville Papers, the Stowe Mss., all in the Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. At Warwick County Record Office the papers of Lord Hugh Seymour, part of the Seymour of Raaley Mss, collection, proved an unexpected source of information on relations within the Board and deserve closer study, and individual letters at the Gloucester Record Office, among the Ducie, Morton, Reynolds Mss, collection, and at the Bury St. Edmunds and West Suffolk Record Office, among the Mss. of the third Duke of Grafton, also proved of marginal interest. The main published manuscript sources consulted were the publications of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, chiefly the Dropmore, Bathurst and Cornwallis Wykeham-Martin Manuscripts, and the Parliamentary Papers at the British Museum which contain the reports of various commissions of inquiry. The publications of the Navy Records Society, especially the papers of the First Lords, Lord Spencer, Barham and St. Vincent, were especially useful. Other information was found in the Journals of both Houses of Parliament, in the Parliamentary Histories and Debates, in the newspapers of the period and the volumes of the Naval Chronicle and The Annual Register. The many contemporary naval histories and biographies, chiefly I. Schomberg's Nava 1 Chronoloav and W.R. O'Byrne's Naval Biographical Dictionary, and J. Marshall's Royal Naval Biography were also useful. Secondary works which I found most useful, apart from those s already mentioned, were articles on special aspects of admini­ stration in The Mariner's Mirror, Sir H. Richmond's Statesmen and Sea Power (1946), C. Lloyd and J. Coulter's Medicine and the Navv. vol.iii (1961), J.E.D. Binnev's British Public Finance and A dministration, 1774-1792 (1958), and D.M. Young's The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century (1961). 9 I wish to thank the library staffs at the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the National Maritime Museum, the Institute of Historical Research, the Royal Commonwealth Society, the London and Royal Holloway College Libraries, the Warwick, Gloucester and Bury St. Edmunds and West Suffolk Record offices for their help and courtesy. Mr. J. Ehrmann was kind enough to read parts of the manuscript and made several useful suggestions. My grateful thanks are due to the Council of the Royal Holloway College for granting me the Tutorial Research Studentship in History for three years, from 1962 to 1965, which enabled me to undertake this research. Finally, this thesis could not.have been produced without the painstaking supervision and constant encouragement of my academic supervisor, Professor G. S. Graham of King's College.