Abstract
Historians have hesitated to connect British officer recruitment, training, and deployment to combat effectiveness, but it is undoubtedly the case that Britain’s emergence as the leading naval power in Europe shaped the course of the eighteenth century. This chapter explores the development, significance, and experience of the lieutenants’ exam, as well as officers’ social backgrounds, promotion prospects, and conceptions of honour. Because of their practical experience at sea, regular opportunities to deploy in wartime, and stiff competition for employment and promotion, British officers developed an aggressive approach naval warfare. The execution of Admiral Byng played a significant role in shaping the ethos of the officer corps.
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Notes
- 1.
John Charnock, Biographia Navalis (London: R. Faulder, 1794). The most famous of the early Nelson biographies is James Stanier Clarke and John M’Arthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B., from His Lordship’s Manuscripts (London: T. Cadell and Davies, 1809). Modern Nelson biographies include but are by no means limited to Andrew Lambert, Nelson: Britannia’s God of War (London: Faber & Faber, 2004); Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson (London: Penguin, 2005); John Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004) and Nelson: The Sword of Albion (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012). John Marshall, Royal Naval Biography (4 vols. In 8 parts plus 4 vols. of supplement, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823–35); William O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (London: J. Murray, 1849); Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1897); and Types of Naval Officers Drawn from the History of the British Navy (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1902).
- 2.
Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960); N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986); N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Commissioned Officers’ Careers in the Royal Navy, 1690–1815’, Journal for Maritime Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 85–129; Tom Wareham, The Star Captains: Frigate Command in the Napoleonic Wars (London: Chatham, 2001); A.B. McLeod, British Naval Captains of the Seven Years’ War: The View from the Quarterdeck (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012); S.A. Cavell, Midshipmen and Quarterdeck Boys in the British Navy, 1771–1831 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012); Evan Wilson, ‘Social Background and Promotion Prospects in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815’, The English Historical Review 131, no. 550 (2016): 570–95; Evan Wilson, A Social History of British Naval Officers, 1775–1815 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017); Catherine Beck, ‘Patronage and the Royal Navy, 1775–1815’ (University College London Ph.D. Thesis, 2017).
- 3.
Those capable of overcoming language barriers and accessing scattered archives have produced comparative histories of navies, generally. The leading example is Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies, and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860 (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1993), but Glete does not discuss officers specifically. Other examples of comparative studies include Peter Van der Merwe, ed., Science and the French and British Navies, 1700–1850 (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 2003); Jonathan Dull, The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British & French Navies, 1650–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Evan Wilson, AnnaSara Hammar, and Jakob Seerup, ‘The Education and Careers of Naval Officers in the Long Eighteenth Century: An International Perspective’, Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 1 (2015): 17–33.
- 4.
N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Penguin, 2004): 607–8.
- 5.
On the economic underpinnings of British power, see P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987): 73–142; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815, on the Long-Run Growth of the British Economy’, Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 12, no. 3 (1989), pp. 335–395; Patrick K. O’Brien, Power with Profit: The State and the Economy, 1688–1815 (London: University of London, 1991); Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); N.A.M. Rodger, ‘War as an Economic Activity in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History 22, no. 2 (2010), pp. 1–18; A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 57–8. For cultural arguments, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 6.
For the naval perspective, see Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 528–44, 575–84; Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 641–44; Roger Knight, Britain against Napoleon: The Organisation of Victory, 1793–1815 (London: Penguin, 2013); J. Ross Dancy, The Myth of the Press Gang: Volunteers, Impressment, and the Naval Manpower Problem in the Late Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015).
- 7.
It is not necessary to list more Nelson biographies, but there are plenty of other works that credit individual officers with British success: Peter Le Fevre and Richard Harding, eds., Precursors of Nelson: British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century (London: Chatham, 2000); idem., British Admirals of the Napoleonic Wars: The Contemporaries of Nelson (London: Chatham, 2005). See also the biographies of Nelson-adjacent admirals such as Max Adams, Admiral Collingwood: Nelson’s Own Hero (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); Kevin D. McCranie, Admiral Lord Keith and the Naval War against Napoleon (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2006); Denis Orde, In the Shadow of Nelson: The Life of Admiral Lord Collingwood (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2008); Tim Voelcker, Admiral Saumarez versus Napoleon: The Baltic, 1807–12 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008).
- 8.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976), 128.
- 9.
Quoted in Adam Nicolson, Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 183–4.
- 10.
There are many accounts of the experience of sitting the lieutenants’ exam, but this one relies primarily on Francis Venables Vernon, Voyages and Travels of a Sea Officer (London: Printed for the Author, 1792), 291–6.
- 11.
As you will read in other chapters in this volume, it did not distinguish British officers for the entire century: some navies later copied variations of the British exam.
- 12.
Wilson, Social History, 174–82. It should be said that there were signs that the French were adopting aspects of the British approach on the eve of the Revolution, as will be explored in the next chapter.
- 13.
Training and education are of course two sides of the same coin. See N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Training or Education: A Naval Dilemma over Three Centuries’, Hudson Papers 1, ed. Peter Hore (London: Oxford University Hudson Trust, 2001).
- 14.
Roger Knight, William IV: A King at Sea (London: Penguin, 2015), 8. The king’s instructions were not wholly obeyed, nor could they be: a prince was unlike any other officer.
- 15.
Wilson, Social History, 26–7.
- 16.
Wilson, et al., ‘Education and Careers’: 17–33.
- 17.
Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 388; Knight, William IV, 19–20.
- 18.
Quoted in J.D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 40.
- 19.
Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 34–66; Wilson, Social History, 14–32, 185–222.
- 20.
Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 232–3; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 121–2.
- 21.
Tom Wareham, Frigate Commander (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2004), 110–12.
- 22.
One of the unharmed ships was commanded by Sir James Saumarez, whose uncle, Philip, had completed the circumnavigation with Anson. Knight, Pursuit of Victory, 272–3.
- 23.
Vernon, Voyages and Travels, 218. Note also that Vernon was writing in 1792 before the great fleet victories of 1793–1806.
- 24.
Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins; Wilson, Social History, 83–104.
- 25.
The sample was drawn from David Syrett and R.L. DiNardo, eds., The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy, 1660–1815 (Aldershot: Navy Records Society, 1994), 3, 22, 25, 30, 34, 42, 58, 67, 68, 83, 85, 105, 107, 127, 146, 153, 155, 167, 170, 175, 179, 184, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 213, 215, 226, 236, 254, 258, 272, 286, 288, 290, 297, 319, 328, 340, 374, 376, 381, 382, 394, 403, 419, 433, 434, 452, and 482. The book consists simply of officers’ names and dates of promotion. All officers on the listed pages who were commissioned between 1700 and 1800, inclusive, were added to the database, at which point their passing certificates were found in Bruno Pappalardo, Royal Navy Lieutenants’ Passing Certificates, 1691–1902 (2 vols., Kew: The National Archives, 2001) and consulted in the archives: Lieutenants’ Passing Certificates, 1691–1800, ADM 107/1–24 and ADM 6/86–97, The National Archives, Kew (TNA). From there, a variety of archival, electronic, and secondary sources were consulted to compile the database. For a description of similar techniques and sources, see Wilson, Social History, 227–32; note that the officers sampled for that project were different from the officers sampled for this one.
- 26.
Numerate readers will note that one-fifth from the landed classes plus four-fifths from the professional classes cover all possible social backgrounds. That is slightly misleading: a small group—less than ten per cent—of officers came from working-class backgrounds or were sons of freehold farmers in the last quarter of the century. See Wilson, Social History, 85.
- 27.
Wilson, Social History, 83–104. £200 per year is equivalent to the income of an engineer; a tailor might expect up to £150 per year; the rector of a country parish might earn £120 per year. See Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s Social Tables 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History 19 (1982): 385–408.
- 28.
George James Perceval to his parents, Lord and Lady Arden, 25 December 1806, PER/1/21, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (NMM).
- 29.
Masters were warrant officers expected to be experts in navigation and seamanship. Their exams were more intensive than lieutenants’, and they had to pass a new exam each time they sought a warrant in a larger ship. See Wilson, Social History, chapter three.
- 30.
Passing Certificate of John Aire, 31 May 1794, ADM 107/18/84, TNA.
- 31.
Passing Certificate of William Robertson, 29 December 1792, ADM 107/16/5, TNA. Technically, the Admiralty forbade boys under eleven from joining ships in commission. No captain seems to have noticed. Cavell, Midshipmen and Quarterdeck Boys, 7–36.
- 32.
Wilson, Social History, 9–32.
- 33.
Cavell, Midshipmen and Quarterdeck Boys, 7–8.
- 34.
Passing Certificates of John Bilton (1 January 1703, ADM 107/1/302), Richard King (1 February 1746, ADM 6/86/215), and George Grant (15 November 1781, ADM 107/8/177), TNA.
- 35.
Passing Certificate of Kennedy Silvester, 12 April 1708, ADM 107/2/175, TNA.
- 36.
Wilson, et al., ‘Education and Careers’: 27–33; Wilson, Social History, 14–32; Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 16; Cavell, Midshipmen and Quarterdeck Boys, 88–92. Another attempt to control the social backgrounds of future officers came in 1794, when the Admiralty attempted to cause captains to distinguish among three classes of volunteer boys. Theoretically, only the first class were to be destined for commissions. Captains could easily manipulate the ratings, though, and the scheme failed to take hold during the Napoleonic Wars. Since the database stops with officers commissioned in 1800 and the scheme was introduced in 1794, only a handful were eligible to be initially rated as a first class volunteer.
- 37.
Daniel Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750 (Publications of the Navy Records Society, 1977), 35–43; N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 20–39.
- 38.
Roughly one officer in five received his commission within a month of passing, and a further two in five within a year. But the average wait time was just under two years. That does not seem to have changed over the century—if anything, there is a slight decrease in the average waiting time. This is unexpected, but can perhaps be explained by the unequal distribution of peacetime years (the most significant factor in determining waiting times).
- 39.
Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 35–43.
- 40.
Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 36.
- 41.
D. Steel, Steel’s Original and Correct List of the Royal Navy (London: Printed for the Author, 1798), 18–28. Extrapolating from the pages sampled in Syrett and DiNardo, eds., Commissioned Sea Officers, gives an estimate of 7942 officers who served across the entire century.
- 42.
The database sampled randomly from a list of all commissioned officers, and as a result, the number commissioned each year can be used to estimate the growth in the size of the overall population. Data on manpower growth comes from Dancy, Myth of the Press Gang, 30. I am grateful to Dr Dancy for providing access to the database underpinning his book. The size of the fleet comes from Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 607–8.
- 43.
The estimate of positions available comes from combining the manpower and fleet numbers described in the previous note. By determining the average number of officers per ship of the line (0.99 officers per 100 men) and per cruiser (1.68 per 100), and the average size of the crew for a ship of the line and a cruiser (3.3 times as many men in a ship of the line as a cruiser), it is possible to estimate the number of available officer positions as a function of the number of men in the navy. New commissions in the database operate on a five-year average. While the sample for individual years is small, overall, the 805 officers in the database are distributed across the century as the total population of officers was. For more information on how the database was built, see n. 25.
- 44.
Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 388.
- 45.
Quoted in Rodger, Wooden World, 255.
- 46.
Wilson, Social History, 91.
- 47.
Passing Certificates of Thomas Hankerson (4 September 1734, ADM 107/3/261) and Sir Richard Hussey Bickerton (15 December 1777, ADM 107/7/19), TNA; Syrett and DiNardo, eds., Commissioned Sea Officers, 34, 199.
- 48.
Lindert and Williamson, ‘Revising England’s Social Tables’: 385–408; Wilson, Social History, 142–4.
- 49.
Wilson, Social History, 171–3.
- 50.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Milne, Sir David (1763–1845) and Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson (1758–1805); Vernon, Voyages and Travels.
- 51.
Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 159–67; Syrett and DiNardo, eds., Commissioned Sea Officers, 434; Wilson, Social History, 34–5, 182.
- 52.
Quoted in Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 513.
- 53.
A glaring exception is Pellew, who made his son a post-captain at eighteen in a blatant example of nepotism.
- 54.
Wilson, ‘Social Background and Promotion Prospects’: 570–95; Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 35–43.
- 55.
Dull, Age of the Ship of the Line, 129; Étienne Taillemite, ‘Le Haut-Commandement de la Marine Française de Colbert à la Révolution’ in Martin Acerra, José Merino, and Jean Meyer, eds., Les Marines de Guerre Européennes, XVII–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1985), 267. For the Swedes, see Chap. 6.
- 56.
Wilson, Social History, 125–6; Beck, ‘Patronage in the Royal Navy’, passim.
- 57.
Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 74–5.
- 58.
Captain Bennett to Admiral John Markham, 26 August 1803, MRK 102/1/25, NMM.
- 59.
Sir Clements R. Markham, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of Admiral John Markham during the Years 1801–4 and 1806–7 (Publications of the Navy Records Society, 1904), 374.
- 60.
John Knox Laughton, ed., The Naval Miscellany, Vol. II (Publications of the Navy Records Society, 1912), 343; Syrett and DiNardo, eds., Commissioned Sea Officers, s.v. ‘Milner, Edmund’.
- 61.
Knight, William IV, 15–16.
- 62.
Wilson, Social History, 105–29.
- 63.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Byng, John’.
- 64.
The narrative of Byng’s life and death presented here relies heavily on Dan Baugh’s entry for Byng in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See also his Global Seven Years War, 229–35.
- 65.
For older accounts, see Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (London: P. Allen & Co., 1928); Dudley Pope, At Twelve Mr. Byng was Shot (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962); H.W. Richmond, ed., Papers Relating to the Loss of Minorca in 1756 (Publications of the Navy Records Society, 1913).
- 66.
Sarah Kinkel, Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance, and the Rise of the British Navy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 121–38; Sarah Kinkel, ‘Saving Admiral Byng: Imperial Debates, Military Governance and Popular Politics at the Outbreak of the Seven Years’ War’, Journal for Maritime Research 12, no. 1 (2011): 3–19.
- 67.
Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 282–3, 437–8, 471.
- 68.
H. Thompson to Sir John Orde, 9 May 1805, OSB MSS 133/9/165, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. For an in-depth discussion of Orde, see the forthcoming article: J. Ross Dancy and Evan Wilson, ‘Sir John Orde and the Trafalgar Campaign: A Failure of Information Sharing’, The Naval War College Review (Spring 2020).
- 69.
Nicholas Harris Nicolas, ed., The Dispatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, 7 vols. (London: 1846), VII, 89–92, 9 October 1805.
- 70.
N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Honour and Duty at Sea, 1660–1815’, Historical Research 75, no. 190 (2002): 425–47; Wilson, Social History, 191–202; Mark Barton, ‘Duelling in the Royal Navy,’ The Mariner’s Mirror 100, no. 3 (2014): 282–306.
- 71.
Wilson, Social History, 191–202.
- 72.
Mark Adkin, The Trafalgar Companion: A Guide to History’s Most Famous Sea Battle and the Life of Admiral Lord Nelson (London: Aurum Press, 2005), 45.
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Wilson, E. (2019). Britain: Practising Aggression. In: Wilson, E., Hammar, A., Seerup, J. (eds) Eighteenth-Century Naval Officers. War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25700-2_2
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