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By Root 985 0

had his only allotment of formal education. Though he became an ornament of the sophisticated world, known for pleasing conversation, he must have learned the manner spontaneously or from association with other sophisticates. The early removal from school of future officers of Britain’s sea power, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study or theory of war or of planned objective, war’s “glorious art” may have been glorious but, with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless. Native intelligence in the Royal Navy was no doubt as good as that of any other nation, but for achieving desired ends in an exacting profession it was not always enough. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, father and pontiff of the theory of naval warfare, was to write that England’s failure to obtain the expected results from her naval superiority taught a lesson of the necessity of having minds of officers “prepared and stocked by a study of the conditions of war in their own time.” But what stock of knowledge has an adolescent officer acquired by the time he stops learning at the age of twelve?

Long before Mahan, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the great voyager Hakluyt spoke of the need for education of sailors. In his classic work The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation, he pointed out in his dedication to the Lord High Admiral of England that the late Emperor Charles V with “great foresight established a Pilot Major for the examination of such as sought to take charge of ships” and also “founded a notable lecture of the Art of Navigation which is read to this day … at Seville.” Hakluyt was thinking of seamanship, not strategy, much less the study of history and politics. His idea of education for seafarers was not thought to apply to the quarterdeck except in France, in its academies for training officers. Whether it would have made a difference to the inept British management of the war of the American Revolution no one can assert. It was America’s good fortune at this moment in her history to produce all at once, as everyone knows, a group of exceptionally capable and politically gifted men, while it has been less remarked that it was Britain’s ill fortune at the same time to have just the opposite. George III, Sandwich, Germain and the successive Commanders-in-Chief in the field, Sir William Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, both men without energy, were not the best Britain has produced in a crisis to conduct and win a war.

Through the influence of his patrons, Rodney entered the navy as a “King’s Letter Boy,” meaning with a letter of introduction from the King, which opened a place initially as no more than a captain’s servant, even lower than a midshipman, but highly desirable because it guaranteed officer’s status on the quarterdeck when the candidate had climbed enough rungs on the ladder of advancement. It was peacetime in England in 1730, the year of Rodney’s entry, when England and France, unable to afford the further expenses of war, were each endeavoring to stay quiet under the careful guidance of their respective ministers, Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury, and this unaggressive condition offered an ambitious young apprentice no chance of action to start him on his climb. Peace, however, was not likely to, and did not, last long. War with Spain over control of the right to trade in Spain’s West Indies broke out in 1739, precipitated by public excitement at the grievance of a merchant captain named Jenkins, who had suffered the severance of his ear in a clash with a Spanish revenue officer. This War of Jenkins’ Ear, engaging France as an ally of Spain in the Bourbon Family Compact, began the period of colonial and continental conflict between France and England that was to last intermittently through Rodney’s lifetime, creating the opportunities for combat that made his career.

The war had