THE SAFEGUARD OF THE SEA by NAM RODGER (A Naval History of Britain 660-1649) - excerpts .
"The defence of the kingdom of England consists in having ships always ready and in good order to safeguard against invasion." - King Philip II of Spain (1555)
"Our shipping and sea service is our best and safest defence as being the only fortification and rampart of England." - Sir Walter Ralegh
The common sense of the word (navy) as we use it today refers to a permanent fighting service made up of ships designed for war, manned by professionals and supported by an adminsistrative and technical infrastructure. A navy in this sense is only one possible method of making war at sea, and by some way the most difficult and the most recent. There have in the past been, and to some extent still are, many other ways of generating sea power.
It is not surprising that only one medieval state, Venice, long possessed anything clearly identifiavble as a navy in this sense. We shall see that no state in the British Isles attained attained this level of sophistication before the 16th century, and no history of the Royal Navy, in any exact sense of the words, could legitimately begin much before then. This book, which does, is not an institutional history of the Royal Navy, but a history of naval warfare as an aspect of national history. All and any methods of fighting at sea, or using the sea for warlike purposes, are its concern.
Its subject is the slow and erratic process by which the peoples of the British Isles learnt — and then for long periods forgot — about the 'Safeguard of the Sea', as the 15th century phrase had it, meaning the use of the sea for national defence, and the defence of those who used the sea.
Whether in peaceful trade or warlike attack, the sea unites more than it divides. Even if it were possible to treat England, or the British Isles, as a single, homogenous, united nation, it would still be impossible to write its naval history without reference to the histories of the other nations, near and far, with which the sea has connected it.
'A Naval History of Britain' which begins in the 7th century has to explain what it means by Britain. My meaning is simply the British Isles as a whole, but not any particular nation or state or our own day... 'Britain' is not a perfect word for this purpose, but 'Britain and Ireland' would be both cumbersome and misleading, implying an equality of treatment which is not possible. Ireland and the Irish figure often in this book, but Irish naval history, in the sense of the history of Irish fleets, is largely a history of what might have been rather than what actually happened.
- Introduction
[Ch.1 The Three Seas]
The peoples and politics of the British Isles and the Dark Ages were linked not by the accident of dwelling in the same part of the world, but by the seas and rivers which provided their surest and swiftest means of travel. Kept apart by history, language and religion; sundered by moor and mountain, fen and forest; repeatedly divided by dynastic rivalry; these little nations were joined to one another, and to the world beyond, by the three seas. In the British Isles three worlds met and collided: the Christian, romanized Celtic world in the west; the Christian, romanized Germanic world of the south, and the pagan, unromanized Scandinavian world of the east. To each world belonged a sea, and a common culture, which provided the essential connection when all other connections were wanting.
[Ch.2 The First English Empires]
In every age states of varying size and constitution and at every level of development have found naval warfare to be one of their most formidable and expensive tasks. Ships have always been large, costly and complicated, and warships much more complicated and costly than any others. Scholars are nowadays inclined to emphasize the power, wealth and sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and there is not more striking illustration of this than the advanced and elaborate administrative structures of the early English navy.
[Ch.3 The Partition of Britain]
Norman warhorses were highly-trained and expensive animals which had to be fresh for battle, so they were normally led rather than ridden. A Norman army was not fully mobile unless every knight had a minimum of four horses: a warhorse, a riding horse for himself, another for his squire who led the warhorse, and a packhorse to carry his armour and baggage. It is usually suggested that William had an army of about 7,000, including 2-3,000 knights. Fully equipped, they would have needed 8-12,000 horses, and more if any proportion of the infantry and archers were mounted. A fleet of beteen 700 and 1,000 ships cannot possible have carried so many horses, which meant that the army was effectively immobilzed until it could collect horses in England. In that rich country horses were common but the Norman army could not leave its bridgehead until it had collected a great many of them.
In the 11th century the inlets of Brede and Bulverhythe made Hastings a peninsula which provided secure flanks for the bridgehead, secure, that is to say, against land attack. It is probable that one of Harold's reasons for the much-criticized speed with which he marched south, without waiting to gather the resources of a rich and populous kingdom, was to seal the neck of the peninsulsa before the Norman army acquired the horses, and subsequently the mobility, which they would need to break out.
Nothing is pre-ordained in history, and there was no logical reason why England, the meeting place of the three cultures, should not have been absorbed by any of them, or partitioned between them... it would have been equally plausible at any period between the 7th century and the 12th or even later to imagine a Norse-Celtic maritime empire, ruled from Dublin or Man and holding sway on boths sides of the Irish Sea, perhaps with a land frontier in England with the Danish North Sea empire.
England's sudden and unexpected conquest from the south in 1066, linked the country to the Continent in a Norman, later Angevin empire which lasted for a century and a half. By harnessing England's wealth and power to French politics, this had the effect of ensuring the survival and independence of the Irish, Welsh and Scots states, and of leaving the Northern and Western Isles as Norwegian colonies, when in all probability they would otherwise have fallen, or remained, under indirect English control. It is a striking paradox that the Norman Conquest, made possible by an impressive fleet, caused the rapid collapse of English sea power. Where English kings of the mid-10th century had circumnavigated the British Isles and secured the submission of all the rulers around the Irish Sea, the early Normans exercised only feeble and intermittent power over the nearer parts of the Celtic world... the Norman Conquest led in effect to the partition of the British Isles which had almost been united under English rule in the previous century.
[Ch.8 Decline and Fall]
It is always a mistake to look at medieval naval warfare with the modern distinction between warships and merchantmen too much in mind. Not only were the two hardly distinct in design, but 'peaceful trade' was almost a contradiction in terms. The sea was widely regarded as lying beyond laws, treaties and truces; even in peacetime, here was not much peace at sea. Medieval jurists agreed that there was such a thing as piracy, but in practice outright piracy and peaceable commerce were separated, not by any clear legal distinction, but by a very wide area of debatable ground and questionable practices.
[Ch.9 The Chief Support of the Kingdom]
Medieval England was a great military power with a sophisticated machinery of government, but her naval administration, at best improvised and for long periods missing altogether, pointed to a grave weakness: the lack of any reliable means of putting a force of warships at the disposal of the crown. Only Richard I and Henry V of all the kings of England can be said to have understood the problem and attempted to remedy it. It is no coincidence that they wer by far the most successful in war.
[Ch.12 Change and Decay]
The armament of English ships in Henry V's time remained essentially the same as it had been throughout the Middle Ages. All fighting was hand-to-hand, using standard infantry weapons, with the addition of spears or lances, with 'gads' (iron darts) and heavy stones for throwing down from the topcastle. Soft soap to make the enemy's decks slippery was a real threat to men-at-arms in armour so heavy that they could not easily get up if they fell over. Caltraps might also be tossed on to the enemy's decks, and quicklime thrown from the windward position to blind the defenders at the moment of assault. Crossbows were much used... when the longbow was adopted by the army, it was naturally used at sea. Guns fitted into the same pattern.
For England it may be said that the Middle Ages ended in the mud of October 1523 when Suffolk's army abandoned its march on Paris. This was the last campaign of the Hundred Years War, the last occasion when an English army attempted to uphold the ambitions of Henry V and Edward III, the last expression of vanished greatness. For centuries English power had been defined in military terms and expressed above all by campaigning against France. In the humiliation and failure on the Continent and rejection by the Emperor, it must have been clear to perceptive Englishmen, perhaps even to King Henry himself, that all this was gone for ever. A shruken, post-imperial England faced an uncertain and vulnerable future on the margins of a Europe now dominated by the great powers.
[Ch.17 The Council of the Marine]
With their fine lines, heavy armaments, and constricted hulls, English warships could not generally stow victuals for more than three or four months. For all these reasons victualling remained a major weakness of English fleets throughout the 16th century and for long afterwards. Any voyages to distant seas, any prolonged operations in nearby waters, were almost bound to run against the limitations of contemporary markers and technology. No other single weakness accounts for so many of the English failures to match naval performance to aspirations. If there was one single factor which allowed the fleets of the 18th century to keep the seas for long periods and voyage far from home, it was the steady, unspectacular improvement over 300 years in the quality of victualling.
[Ch.19 The Advantage of Time and Place]
"It is well known that we fight in God's cause... but unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle." - Officer in the Spanish Armada, writing before fleet sailed (1588)
[#22 Sailors for my Money]
The impossibility of keeping Englishmen sober ashore was a constant source of complaint, It was the great weakness of 16th century English infantrymen, whose performance when sober was admired even by the Spaniards. Already it was true, as it was to be for centuries, that many saw and despised the drunken sailor ashore, but few knew and admired him at his work afloat.
[#23 The Undertakings of a Maiden Queen]
The extreme fragility of English finances made it impossible to keep the English fleet mobilized for any length of time. In 16th century conditions, no large force could expect to remain healthy and efficient indefinitely, and the English did not have the money to try, but, thanks to long planning and preparation, they did not have to. The initial mobilization of September to December 1587 took less than three months, while the Armada took three years. Though England's resources were a small fraction of Spain's, they could be concentrated exactly where and when they were needed. This capacity to mobilize quickly remained the key to English defences for the rest of the war.
'Corruption' was then, and has been until recently for many historians, the all-purpose explanation for anything which did not work satisfactorily. It is always simpler to blame individual wickedness rather than explore the obscure weaknesses of complex systems... John Hawkins lived in an age when officials like himself were not salaried civil servants so much as privileged contractors with an ill-regulated business relationship with the crown. They were expect to make a profit for themselves while doing a good job for the queen, preferably at less cost than their predecessors... nobody seriously suggested it was illegal or improper to make a profit from office, so long as the Navy did not suffer. Contemporaries took it for granted that officials would make money from their positions; what they wanted to know was whether the crown was getting value for that money.
[#24 No More Drakes]
The arrival of the Barbary pirates radically changed English attitudes. Instead of patriotic pirates plundering foreign cargoes and bringing them homes to enrich their countrymen, the 'Turks' were in the usual Mediterranean business of slave-raiding — and now the English were the victims. The West Country men suffered the heaviest, and did not appreciate the irony. The Newfoundland fishery, dominated by Devon ports, lost at least 20 ships in 1611 alone.
[Conclusion]
So ended a thousand years of naval history in the British Isles, with the future relationship and future independence of the three kingdoms as doubtful as they had ever been. This is a history of the British Isles rather than of England not simply in the sense that it tries to avoid being crudely anglocentric. Part of its argument is certainly that Scotland, Wales and Ireland have naval histories worth knowing about; but beyond that, the very existence and shape of the three kingdoms and one principality which historically make up the nations of the British Isles is itself the product of the successes and failures of sea power.
In the 10th century, and again for a while in the 11th, the sea power of a newly-united England was well advanced in establising an informal empire over most or all of the British Isles. This empire vanished with the English navy after 1066, the date which marks the dissolution of the English empire and the partition of the British Isles. Henceforward the relations of the English with their Celtic neighbours were military rather than naval: they turned on intermittent warfare, raid, settlement and conquest, The pattern involved the domination, subjugation and eventual destruction of political and social systems which were perceived as being hostile and racially inferior.
Though everyone had heard of the Viking invasions, a facile idea is current among modern historians that after 1066 England was in some sense 'invasion-proof- because it was surrounded by the sea. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sea certainly offered an obstacle of sorts, and it is easy to find examples of would-be invasions which were dispersed by gales, or (more often) which failed to surmount the considerable logistical difficulties of a seaborne attack. But the sea is a highway as much as a barrier, and in the Middle Ages it was a much better highway than most of those on land. Compared to a respectable mountain range like the Alps, the Pyrenees or even the Cheviots, the English Channel and the North Sea were trivial obstacles, The result was the England and Scotland were repeatedly invaded by sea. English governments have been overthrown (or seriously undermined) by seaborne invasions at last nine times since the Norman Conquest: in 1139, 1153, 1326, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471. 1485 and 1688. The sea is no safeguard at all to those who are not capable of using it for their own defence.
The reader of this book will be in no doubt that a 16th century 'naval revolution' did take place, and that a modern navy of the kind created in England made unique demands on state and society. If it was the demands of the 'military revolution' which created the absolutist monarchies (Spain, France, Sweden, later Prussia, Austria and Russia), it should logically follow that the much greater demands of the 16th century 'naval revolution' would have propelled the leading naval powers (England and the Dutch Republic) into the forefront of the autocratic monarchies. Instead they were the two large states which conspicuously retained their medieval constitutions, complete with what seemed to be archaic and ineffectual representative institutions.
Considering the 'military revolution' and the 'naval revolution' together suggests that absolutist monarchy was essentially a system of government for mobilizing manpower rather than money. More efficient in its way than the medieval constitutions it replacedm it was poorly adapted to meet the much greater strains imposed on state and society by a modern navy. For that, it may be suggested, what was needed was a system of government which involved the maximum participation by those interest groups whose money and skills were indispensable to sea power — not just the nobility and peasantry whom absolutism set to work, but the shipowners and seafarers, the urban merchants and financiers, the industrial investors and managers, the skilled craftsmen; all the classes, in short, which absolutist governments least represented and least favoured. A military regime could sustain itself by force, but a navy had to earn public support. Autocracy was adequate for an army, but navies needed consensus. This, we may suggest, is why Spain failed the naval test in the 16th century, just as France failed it in the 18th, Germany and Russia in the 20th.
In Queen Elizabeth's time it was Spain which had the great merchant fleet; Engish sea power was a hybrid made up of the defensive royal fleet and the offensive, predatory privateer fleet. The Stuarts tried to build a Navy for the same purposes of national defence and deterrence for which Elizabeth had planned, but the threats they faced were nearer and greater, and they also had to respond to demands for protection from a large and politically powerful merchant shipping interest. Considered as an organization in isolation, the Royal Navy of the 1630s was as successful as Elizabeth's rather different Royal Navy had been. Its administration, its discipline and professional skills, its ships and weapons were probably still a match for anything in Europe. But its political and constitutional foundations were unsound; it was not rooted in the broad national support needed to sustain so complex and costly a force. Charles I's attempt to build a navy without consensus helped to fracture the country and lead to civil war and the collapse of his regime. What was needed for successful sea power was a broadly based coalition of 'interest groups' of one mind not only on the need for a navy, but on the size and type of navy which was needed. Early Stuart England probably already had a consensus of the need for a navy, but it had no agreement on the nature of the fleet and how it might be financed... his attempt to go ahead without national consensus led to a civil war in which the king and his Navy both perished.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
--------
and many, many more
http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Quotes.html#History----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
--------