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The Westminster Model Navy: Defining the Royal Navy, 1660-1749

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The Westminster Model Navy: Defining the Royal Navy, 1660-1749 The Westminster Model Navy: Defining the Royal Navy, 1660-1749 Samuel A. McLean PhD Thesis, Department of War Studies May 4, 2017 ABSTRACT At the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Charles II inherited the existing interregnum navy. This was a persistent, but loosely defined organization that included a professional community of officers, a large number of warships, and substantial debts. From the beginning Charles II used royal prerogative to define the Royal Navy. In 1661, Parliament created legislation that simultaneously defined the English state and the Royal Navy. These actions closely linked the Royal Navy’s development to that of the English state, and the use of both statutes and conventions to define the Navy provided the foundation for its development in the ‘Westminster Model’. This thesis considers the Royal Navy’s development from the Restoration to the replacement of the Articles of War in 1749 in five distinct periods. The analysis shows emphasizes both the consistency of process that resulted from the creation and adoption of definitions in 1660, as well as the substantial complexity and differences that resulted from very different institutional, political and geopolitical circumstances in each period. The Royal Navy’s development consisted of the ongoing integration of structural and professional definitions created both in response to crises and pressures, as well as deliberate efforts to improve the institution. The Royal Navy was integrated with the English state, and became an institution associated with specific maritime military expertise, and the foundations laid at the Restoration shaped how the Navy’s development reflected both English state development and professionalization. In particular, the aspects of the Royal Navy that Charles II and Parliament respectively defined in 1660 provide important context for when first Parliament, then the Board of Admiralty later stepped outside those bounds. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER 1: The Restoration and the Royal Navy 41 CHAPTER 2: Charles II and James II 85 CHAPTER 3: The Glorious Revolution and Later Stuarts 137 CHAPTER 4: The Hanoverian Succession to 1740 182 CHAPTER 5: Replacing the Articles of War 223 CONCLUSION 270 BIBLIOGRAPHY 283 3 INTRODUCTION Andrew Lambert argues that '[n]avies developed alongside the nation states that they served. Only strong, centrally controlled states had the tax-raising powers to fund standing navies.'1 Whilst this is undoubtedly true, the nature of the relationship between a navy's development and that of its parent state is more complex than this observation allows. Given the global commercial, military, and imperial power of eighteenth- century Britain, the exploration of this relationship has been of particular historical interest, giving rise more recently to an emphasis, not on strong, centralised monarchies, as such, but to Britain's exceptional, parliamentary constitutional nature and on the long-term fiscal benefits of investment in a strong navy.2 Many histories of the Royal Navy, therefore, explore the links between its development and the growth of the state, building a narrative around key events or developments, such as the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, and privileging the particular constitutional nature and financial resilience of the state. A premise of this thesis is that, although they were closely related, the processes of state development and of naval development were not one and the same thing, nor was the navy just the incidental product of countless political contests and economic and military imperatives. To borrow a phrase from Kathleen Wilson's definition of empire, the navy 'was always in the making, changing, and in process', and it is this process that is of interest here.3 Like the Restoration state itself, which adopted and modified certain aspects of the Commonwealth before it, but which was really an attempted reconstitution of the state as it had existed prior to the civil wars, the navy 1 Andrew Lambert, War at Sea in the Age of Sail, London: Cassell, 2000. 24 2 N.A.M.Rodger, 'From the 'military revolution' to the 'fiscal-naval' state', Journal for Maritime Research 13, 2 (2011), 119-128. 3 Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 12. 4 experienced more than a mere re-branding of the Parliamentarian navy. In its own process of change, the Royal Navy naturally built upon the existing fleet and the officers, along with the accumulated debt and experiences of its recent, turbulent history, but it, too, was the product of re-invention, or re-definition. This involved the revival of customs and precedents, such as the appointment of individuals to offices that had been abolished under the Commonwealth. It also resulted in new legal definitions. This thesis, therefore, is primarily a study of the development of the Royal Navy as a contested legislative space, the result of many political contests that left significant, observable traces in the legislative record. It emerged out of the particular circumstances of the Restoration itself in 1660 and, notably, the subsequent insertion of the navy's Articles of War into statute law the following year. The period of study ends in 1749, when these statutes, which defined the Navy, were repealed and amended following the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). It is well-known that the Restoration navy needed to come firmly under direct, royal control from 1660 and that the creation of a close association between the navy and the monarchy and of a shared identity was an important moment in the Royal Navy's celebrated history. Yet this study does not take the Royal Navy's future institutional form as a particularly treasured feature of the state or its later operational successes as natural or inevitable, nor as the basis on which to assess its early history. It is not such longer-term results that matter here but the process itself, and a new way of viewing this process can be gleaned from the constantly changing definitions of the navy that are found within statute law and other formal documents. The choice of these 'definitions' as the object of study was partly inspired by what has been referred to as the 'cultural turn' in political and imperial history. Wilson's study of the eighteenth century, for example, defines political culture as 'the realm encompassing political values and 5 ideologies, the forms of their expression – verbal and non-verbal, embodied in both actions and artifacts – and the mechanisms of their dissemination and transformation'.4 The definitions studied here are one such cultural 'artifact' from the past which, together, can shed some light on the process of change in the navy over time. In this sense, something of an 'archaeological approach' to the historical record is being taken here. That is to say that, rather than another study of the many political contests and pressures that affected the navy themselves, it is their outcome in the form of legal definitions which is being uncovered and studied here for the light that they shed on the process of change. An important concept is that of royal prerogative. It has been described as: [t]he personal discretionary powers which remain in the Sovereign's hands. They include the rights to advise, encourage and warn Ministers in private; to appoint the Prime Minister and other Ministers; to assent to legislation; to prorogue or to dissolve Parliament; and (in grave constitutional crisis) to act contrary to or without Ministerial advice.5 Following the Restoration, many powers remained in the King’s hands, including the power to define the state. In particular, it is clear from taking this approach that early definitions of the Royal Navy were not simply imposed by Charles II. In 1661, Parliament passed the Act for the Establishing Articles, which contained the Royal Navy's Articles of War. It also created limits on the authority and jurisdiction of the restored office of Lord High Admiral.6 This provided the Royal Navy with statutory definitions which, together with the customs inherited from the Commonwealth Navy, recreated or modified at the Restoration, in effect formed what will be argued in this 4 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12. 5 Parliament, Select Committee on Public Administration Fourth Report, https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmpubadm/422/42202.htm accessed May 3, 2017. 6 'Charles II, 1661: An Act for the Establishing Articles and Orders for the regulateing and better Government of His Majesties Navies Ships of Warr & Forces by Sea.,' in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628-80, ed. John Raithby (s.l: Great Britain Record Commission, 1819), 311-314. British History Online, accessed August 16, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes- realm/vol5/pp311-314. 6 thesis was a ‘Westminster Model’ constitution. This is a twentieth-century concept that is used primarily to describe flexible constitutional arrangements within the Commonwealth, but which also best describes the nature of the subsequent evolution of the navy. This redefinition of the navy was an extraordinary departure that would set the foundations for the navy's subsequent legal development up to the 1740s. Indeed, the replacement of the Articles of War in 1749 appears to have defined another, distinct departure, as it was the first time that the definitions in the Act for the Establishing Articles were entirely replaced, as opposed to just supplemented as circumstances required. By 1749, therefore, the Royal Navy was no longer quite the same contested legislative space that it had been after 1660. The amendments were initiated by members of the Board of Admiralty who sought to implement an institutional philosophy that emphasized discipline and hierarchy in a reaction to the Royal Navy's experiences in the War of the Austrian Succession.
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