The Tudor Navy

An Administrative, Political and Military History

David Loades

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780859679220
• eBook ISBN: 9781351880909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The Tudor Navy is a subject which is very unevenly known. The last significant general histories were written at the end of the last century. Since then much detailed research has been undertaken, particularly on the Armada, the end of Henry VIII's reign and the early Elizabethan period. As a result, it has been generally thought that the navy went through a series of booms and slumps during the sixteenth century. Further research on the intervening periods now presents a much more even picture of development, although the pace of advance was uneven. At the same time naval history has tended to be seen in isolation, presented by special naval experts. It is better understood as a part of the general administrative, political and above all financial history of the period. This book is designed to present a whole story, set in its proper contemporary context.

1
introduction

The sovereignty of the seas, wrote Sir John Borough in 1633, was ‘the most precious jewel in his Majesties crown … and the principal means of our wealth and safety.’¹ Borough was arguing in favour of a mare clausum, and like many antiquarian lawyers of his generation, felt compelled to trace his sources back to Julius Caesar. The Saxon King Edgar, he declared, had maintained a navy of 400 ships to assert his authority at all four corners of his realm, and he went on to describe how John, Edward I and Edward III had defended this same ascendancy. In the absence of any agreed definition of territorial water, it is not quite clear how far Borough’s concept of sovereignty extended. He wrote of Edward IV granting licences to foreigners to fish off the Yorkshire coast, and of Queen Mary selling fishing rights in Ireland to her husband’s subjects. But his main concern was with the Narrow Seas where, he claimed, all other ships ‘vaile Bonnet’ in acknowledgement of English superiority ‘to this day’. The main political thrust of Borough’s treatise was against the Dutch, who were getting rich and immensely strong at sea by taking £300 000 worth of fish a year out of English waters without either fee or licence – an argument which echoes that of John Dee over sixty years before.² Queen Elizabeth had not been as remiss as Charles I:

I remember that those of Hamburg and other Easterlings (though in amitie with us) in the late reign of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory were notwithstanding stayed from passing through our seas towards Spain, and good prize made of all other nations that attempted to do the like.

What he did not remember, or did not choose to remember, was that the actions of the English navy at that time had very little to do with the assertion of abstract concepts of sovereignty and everything to do with waging war on Spain. Nevertheless his point was valid. Authority over the sea, like authority over colonial territories, could only be claimed if it could be exercised, and what concerned him was less Hugo Grotius’s doctrine of mare liberum than the power of the Dutch navy. Whatever may have happened in the time of King Edgar or Edward III, the Elizabethan navy had controlled the Channel, and effectively extended the authority of the English Crown beyond the shores of the realm.

Sea power had always been expressed in royal or imperial fleets, but such fleets had been the personal creations of the monarchs who had led or operated them. The Tudor navy, on the other hand, was an aspect of the state, and its history has to be seen in that connection. Its establishment and early development was an act of political will which had very little to do with the maritime history normally associated with it. Only after the middle of the century did the two begin to converge, as naval strategy assumed an oceanic aspect, and mercantile entrepreneurs acted as an auxiliary navy. It is consequently a serious mistake to study the Tudor navy in isolation from other facets of government, with which it had much in common. The king’s ships, like his artillery, were an expression of his power. Dependence upon noble support was second nature to any medieval king, and the fact that the Earl of Warwick had more ships than Edward IV does not seem to have taught that highly conservative monarch any urgent lessons. Most of Edward’s ships, when he needed them, came from the port towns, like the cash which he borrowed from the citizens of London when his land revenues were slow to arrive. Edward, relying upon his personal ascendancy, did not object to this kind of dependence, but Henry VII set out systematically to reduce it. By increasing his revenues he reduced his reliance on short-term loans, and on grants from parliament. By taking more gentlemen directly into his service he made himself less dependent upon the nobility. By building two large warships and constructing an embryonic naval base at Portsmouth he lessened his need to call upon the ships of his subjects. In spite of the contrast in their personalities, Henry VIII followed his father’s policies in many respects. Less suspicious in his relations with his nobility, he nevertheless continued to build up his affinity at a lower level, a strategy urged upon him, and largely executed, by Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, his successive chief ministers. The result was a steady growth in the importance of royal commissions of all kinds, which were largely served by knights and gentlemen. Unwilling to rely upon personal or ad hoc arrangements in the remoter parts of the kingdom, he reformed the royal councils in the north and in the marches of Wales, and brought the remaining franchises under his direct control by a statute of 1536. His privy council was reorganized to make it more efficient and accountable, and new revenue courts were established to handle the income resulting from the Royal Supremacy over the church. It is in this context that the creation of the Council for Marine Causes in 1545 must be viewed.

At the same time Henry VIII was a warlike King, much given to military bravado of a kind which his resources could not really support. His contemporary and arch-rival Francis I of France established a small standing army of mercenary soldiers, and Henry needed an effective riposte. Armed ships were his chosen status symbol, a symbol appropriate to the nature of his realm, and also to his personal tastes. There was nothing very original about that, but by creating an infrastructure of dockyards and storehouses, and drawing the whole establishment into the institutional framework of government, he detached it from his own preferences and priorities. A standing navy changed the nature of the King’s relationship with his seafaring subjects, just as the Royal Supremacy changed the nature of his relations with the clergy. To what extent either Wolsey or Cromwell appreciated the significance of this development is unclear, but both were dedicated to the augmentation of the King’s power, and Cromwell certainly had the necessary strategic grasp. He was deeply involved in questions of naval administration during the formative years 1535–40, and the Council for Marine Causes seems to bear traces of his influence. The testing time for the navy as an institution of state came with Henry VIII’s death, when his creative drive was removed. He had, however, reigned long enough for it to have been no shallow growth by 1547. Also, its advantages had become sufficiently obvious for his successors to need no further education in the merits of preserving it. In that respect also it was very much like the Royal Supremacy, which had begun as a personal ascendancy and during this period was recognized as an aspect of the Crown’s authority. Both Edward Seymour and John Dudley, the two regents for Edward VI, were knowledgeable in maritime affairs, and maintained both the structure and function of the navy; in the latter case far better than he is normally given credit for doing. By 1553 there was really no question of the navy being an optional or expendable item, and during Mary’s short reign its integration into the machinery of state was carried a stage further. The Queen’s suspicion of the officers whom she had inherited brought about a thorough stock taking, and the elimination of the last traces of ad hoc improvisation, with the introduction of the Ordinary, or regular budget. Placed under the supervision of the Lord Treasurer, the Admiralty survived when both the Royal Supremacy and the Court of Augmentations ¹ went down. By the time that Elizabeth’s council carried out another survey in 1559, and sketched out a policy for the future, the issue was about ways and means, not about the nature or the scale of the enterprise.

However, just as the early Tudor navy had reflected the growing power and self-confidence of the state, so the Elizabethan navy reflected its problems and ambiguities. Thanks to the independent commercial developments which had taken place, particularly since 1553, and the growth of a new breed of maritime adventurer, Elizabeth was quickly faced with a challenge and an opportunity. If the navy was to ‘cover’ the worldwide operations of the new companies in the way it had covered the Merchant Adventurers, who traded cloth to northern Europe, then it needed either a major injection of capital or some fresh strategic thinking. What happened was in many respects a retreat from the position which had been reached by 1557. The ‘ordinary’ was steadily reduced in significance as more and more work was contracted out, often to the officers themselves; and the navy began to cover long distance operations by taking part on a joint stock basis. Elizabeth, having inherited a situation where political dependence upon the nobility was largely a thing of the past, found the cure in some respects as bad as the disease. The gentry, who had been increasingly introduced into government earlier in the century, and who had provided her father with much of the solid support which he had needed for his controversial policies and expensive wars, were now indispensable and in some respects intractable allies. Willing to serve but unwilling to pay, they imposed limitations upon the Queen’s freedom of action which could not be transcended. The Queen was forced to purchase their co-operation because she could not afford to bypass them. Much of Elizabeth’s celebrated parsimony was not her fault. and on the whole in naval matters the arrangement worked well enough for most of the reign. Gentry, and even nobles, invested heavily alongside the merchants, and enabled the small royal navy to appear much more omnipresent than it really was. But the price was high. Private warships, and even private fleets, reappeared in a manner which had not been seen since the reign of Edward IV. The Queen’s monopoly of force at sea was not challenged, but it was undermined. Whereas her father and grandfather had hired private ships on their own terms, Elizabeth was often constrained to co-operate as a more or less equal partner. This erosion of control was partly concealed by the Queen’s success in maintaining a consensus support for the war with Spain, but it began to have a deleterious effect upon the Admiralty, where private interest began to undermine professional integrity, as it did in so many other aspects of the late Elizabethan administration.

This history, in consequence, is a history of the navy as an aspect of the Tudor state. It is not a technical history of ships and guns. These objects are constantly present, and discussed as appropriate, but the conflicting nature of much of the detailed evidence, and the confusions of contemporary terminology, make them intractable subjects except at a very general level. ¹ Nor is it a history of English seafaring. Before 1550 the English were, with occasional exceptions, mere apprentices in the navigational sciences, and it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that they caught up, and began to teach their neighbours. Maritime enterprise has never lacked for scholarly exposition, and in recent years the works of E. G. R. Taylor, D. W. Waters, D. B. Quinn, K. R. Andrews and G. V. Scammell have provided learned and comprehensive coverage. ² The English have, since the days of Hakluyt and Purchas, been profoundly interested in their seafaring past, and that interest has shown no sign of slackening in the second half of the twentieth century. But the navy, or at least the Tudor navy, has fared less well. After the great works of Laird Clowes, Michael Oppenheim, J. S. Corbett, Alfred Spont and others between 1890 and 1920, the subject seems to have lost its appeal. ¹ There has been no general work, and more specialized studies have been patchy. In 1965 C. S. L. Davies published an excellent article on the origins of the Council for Marine Causes, in the English Historical Review,² and since then the American scholar Tom Glasgow jnr has written a number of highly informative articles on the Marian and early Elizabethan period, which have appeared in the Mariners Mirror.³ The Mirror has also published, and continues to publish, many specialized and technical articles of relevance. More recently there has been a spate of publication, mostly of no academic significance, in celebration of the fourth centenary of the Armada. Exceptions to the general rule are the works of Geoffrey Parker, Colin Martin, I. A. A. Thompson, Felipe Fernandez Armesto and Mia Rodriguez Salgado, the last in the catalogue of the superb exhibition which was mounted at the National Maritime Museum.⁴ Finally, this is not a history of the Admiralty jurisdiction. The Admiralty courts provide a constant background to the history of naval activity, particularly in respect of piracy and privateering, but they belong to the civilian and not to the military administration. There was no institutional link between the courts and the Council for Marine Causes, except through the person of the Lord Admiral. The subject of this study is the growth of the navy as a fighting force – its administration, personnel, funding, policy, strategy and tactics. It threads its way between foreign policy, commerce and war, with constant sideways glances at other aspects of government. Naval history is not an isolated subject in its own right, but is an integrated aspect of the general history of the period.

The main feature which emerges from this treatment is continuity. In place of the picture of boom and slump, which tends to come from concentrating on periods of war when evidence is plentiful, we find a profile of remarkably steady growth. If a conscious decision was ever taken to establish a standing navy, then it must date from the very early days of Henry VIII’s reign, or even from those of his father. There was more activity during war time, and several identifiable administrative developments took place during those years, but by no means all. The establishment of the Council for Marine Causes was not a sudden revolutionary move; it grew naturally out of the slow multiplication of earlier offices, and the example of the Ordnance Office. The Ordinary decreed in 1557 was a commonsense conclusion from the changes which had been taking place in funding arrangements over the previous thirty years. Similarly, although the use of gun ports to mount heavy cannon below the main deck was a change of revolutionary potential, it was to be another thirty years before such firepower began to be translated into tactics. The broadside as a tactic was not so much invented as evolved, and it took another whole generation of experiment before the logical conclusion of a line ahead formation was arrived at. Sir John Hawkins may have grasped the possibilities of lower and slimmer hull design more effectively than his predecessors, but he did not invent the galleon. On the other hand there was no time when, to use Tom Glasgow’s dramatic phrase, the fleet was “rotting at its moorings’; certainly not the years 1551–4, to which he applied it.¹ Glasgow long ago disposed of the idea that Elizabeth had rescued a navy in terminal decline, but his own view that it was Philip who performed that rescue act is no more substantial. The evidence for Philip’s role in initiating a fresh phase of naval development boils down to a report of one irritated letter to the English council some two months after he had left England. In fact the level of activity in the dockyards and anchorages seems to have fluctuated more in the first twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign than it had at any time since the outbreak of Henry VIII’s last war in 1543. Most of the men involved, both at sea and ashore, were deeply conservative, and accepted change only slowly and reluctantly. Sir William Monson was still arguing the virtues of high charged carracks in the 1620s, just as Roger Ascham was still defending the longbow against the arquebus in the 1570s. The real innovators were not the policy makers, but the practical seamen and gunners, who suddenly found themselves with unexpected problems to solve. It was almost certainly some overmatched privateer, who, in order to avoid a grapple, first fired its guns at its enemy below the waterline. When Sir John Hawkins invented his double skin to keep out wood-boring beetles, it was as a captain with experience of tropical seas, not as Treasurer of the Admiralty.

Until 1547 a steady growth in the number and variety of ships to be provided for kept up the pressure for new facilities, and the development of proper schedules for repair and maintenance. After that date, with the main services and administrative structure in place, the size of the fleet remained remarkably constant, and the emphasis shifted to the more efficient use of plant and resources. Commercial enterprise drew the royal ships out of home waters, and gradually introduced a totally new strategic concept, that of the blockade. A fleet ‘circling the realm’ for defensi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Maps showing the principal naval actions
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The medieval background
• 3  Early Tudor developments, 1485–1520
• 4  Administration, equipment and services, 1520–1547
• 5  The navy in action, 1520–1547
• 6  The navy and seafaring policy, 1547–1558
• 7  Policy, administration and finance, 1558–1588
• 8  Ships at sea, 1558–1588
• 9  The Armada and after
• Note on ships’ names and identification
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index