Naval history is central to our understanding of the eighteenth century |
A HISTORY OF 18TH-CENTURY BRITAIN without reference to the Royal Navy is like a history of Switzerland without reference to mountains. This is the view of University of Exeter historian N.A.M. Rodger, whose second epic installment of British naval history won the British Academy Book Prize 2005.
In the extract below from The Command of the Ocean, Rodger outlines how politicians hijacked an issue of social prejudice during the reign of Charles II, and explains why Samuel Pepys’s famous contribution to the record books is not all it might seem.
One issue has tended to dominate the social history of the Restoration Navy: the choice of captains and admirals. It is always encapsulated in the phrase ‘gentlemen or tarpaulins’: the question of whether the Navy’s officers should be chosen from the nobility and gentry – the natural leaders of society, possessors of the hereditary military virtues of honour and courage, and principal supporters of the crown, but with a few exceptions ignorant of seafaring – or from amongst professional seamen, the so-called ‘tarpaulins’ (from the oiled canvas of which seamen made their foul-weather coats), bred up to the sea and skilled in its ways. They had provided the Navy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate with almost all its captains, and therefore constituted the great part of the pool of available officers in 1660, but they had been chosen for their religious and political qualities as much as their professional abilities.
They were, or had very recently been, ‘fanatics’, in the language of the Restoration, and Republicans. The choice was of high political sensitivity as well as practical significance. In fact there were two choices: one immediate, and one for the future. In the short term Charles II had to choose officers for the relatively small fleet retained in commission in 1660, and the much larger fleet prepared for war in 1664, largely from those who were then available. Beyond that, however, he had to set up a system (which the Protectorate had never done) to select and train the officers of future generations. For this he had to consider what qualities were needful, and how they could be nurtured. The two problems were distinct, and demanded different solutions, but both of them turned on the balance between political loyalty, social suitability and professional competence.
These were difficult issues at the time, and for two reasons they have been seriously misunderstood by subsequent generations and their historians. Being of obvious political sensitivity, the question of ‘gentlemen or tarpaulins’ was debated in the political world, amongst many people who had no specialized knowledge of the Navy. Precisely because the Navy was a national institution which commanded almost universal support, but very general ignorance, it provided a convenient rhetorical language for different political groups.
To praise the good qualities of tarpaulin officers in Restoration England was indirectly to say what could not be said explicitly; to praise the English Republic which had chosen them, or at least to express discontent with the morality and efficiency of Charles II and his court. This rhetorical language of ‘gentlemen versus tarpaulins’ quickly took on a life of its own which long outlived the real problem in the Navy. The real issue was almost completely solved in Charles II’s lifetime, but the rhetorical debate was at its height around the end of the century, and had by no means died even in the 1740s. Historians from Macaulay almost to the present day have been unduly credulous in taking the political rhetoric at face value, as a comment on the real Navy; rather than what it actually was, a coded language used by politicians who knew very little about the Sea Service, but found it a perfect vehicle for conveying their views on national issues.
The second reason for misunderstanding the ‘gentlemen or tarpaulins’ question is Samuel Pepys. Since his papers and his work as a naval administrator were rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, they have exercised a dominant influence over the views of historians – and this was one of the issues on which his prejudices were strongest and most enduring. His patron Lord Sandwich, by origin a gentleman and a soldier, strongly disapproved of sea officers drawn from his own background. So did Pepys’s mentor William Coventry. Himself a middle-class Londoner who had grown up with the victories of the Commonwealth Navy ringing in his ears, remote from the social values of the court and the Cavalier Parliament, Pepys readily accepted and never lost a deep-seated aversion to gentlemen officers.
Though he was in time intellectually persuaded of the necessity of recruiting them, though he was a loyal servant of the king and his brother, he never to the end of his life ceased to collect disparaging anecdotes about gentlemen officers, and always saw the Navy’s administrative and disciplinary problems as springing from their social origins. He believed as profoundly as any of his contemporaries in hereditary virtues and vices; but in his case it was the virtues of middle-class professionals like himself; the vices of gentlemen, courtiers and those who aped their manners. Captain John Tyrell, he declared in a characteristic judgement, was ‘the only sober, diligent, modest and true bred seamen of any gentleman that I know in the fleet’.
Until recently historians were apt to accept Pepys’s views as expressing all that needed to be said about the Restoration Navy. Now they are more aware that Pepys was a partisan and that in this, and other matters, he formed views in the 1660s which did not evolve as circumstances changed.
The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649 – 1815 by N.A.M. Rodger is published by Allen Lane. |
