First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [69]
As Captain of the Eagle in the battle off Brest, Rodney’s share was £8,165, which enabled him to buy a country home and laid the basis of his fortune, which he was to gamble away.
From the capture of Havana in 1761, the distribution of prizes amounted to £750,000, of which Admiral Keppel, who was second in command, received £25,000 and his chief, Admiral Pocock, £122,000. Admiral Anson, the leading naval officer of the day, was believed to have made £500,000 in the course of his operations. The lure of such rewards drew young men into the navy despite its dangers and discomforts.
In the War of the Spanish Succession, ending in 1713, England had gained dominance in the Mediterranean by annexation of Gibraltar and Minorca. Colonial rivalry in America added to, even superseded, ancient conflicts in Europe. France, eager for colonial territory, had advanced overland through the American north woods down from Canada and Nova Scotia and down the Ohio to establish settlements that pushed against the English-settled colonies in the effort to block their westward movements. French colonies in India were also conflicting with the English. But France, sucked dry by the land wars of Louis XIV, had let her navy sink into shabby neglect that could not sustain a serious bid for the sea power on which trade and empire depended.
For the next fifty years, 1739–89, from the War of Jenkins’ Ear to the French Revolution, war in the 18th century continued in these terms through various phases and under various names, until the issues were shaken up and rearranged by the Revolution and fighting recommenced under Napoleon. As between France and England, it was basically a maritime war for overseas commerce and colonies in America and India. This was not fundamentally changed by the intrusion of the American Revolution, though it altered war aims politically.
A strange development of the three major maritime powers, Holland, England and France, was that each should have allowed its vehicle of sea power to decay through inadequate funding and indifference and the corruption that drained available funds into the pockets of bureaucrats and dockyard managers. Moreover, the Royal Navy of Britain was halved in effective power by having two functions: offense and defense. Honored by its countrymen as the “wooden walls of England,” it was also the only conveyance by which Britain’s military forces could be deployed against an opponent, whether it be colonial rebels or France. As an island, Britain could use land forces against a foreign enemy only to the degree that sea power allowed. Instead of being polished and fed and kept at the peak of perfection, for instant use upon call, the navy, which had enjoyed appropriations of more than £7 million in 1762, was cut in 1766, after the close of the Seven Years’ War, to £2.8 million, less than half, and cut by half again to a stingy £1.5 million in 1769. Sandwich, though he was not yet First Lord, was held to blame because he was a well-known figure detested by the public for his betrayal of the popular hero John Wilkes.
Sandwich at this time held office as Secretary of State for the so-called Northern Department, actually the department for foreign affairs. Although associated with the Admiralty because of his previous service and supposedly deeply devoted to the navy, he did not exert himself, as Choiseul was doing in France, to rebuild it as a proud and eminent fighting fleet.
Besides being splintered by politics and faction, the navy was administered not by a professional in the service, as was the army, but by a figure of political power chosen from the group known at this time as the King’s Friends. For eleven years, from 1771 to 1782, the First Lord of the Admiralty was the fourth Earl of Sandwich, called by some the most unpopular man in England, known for the venality of his administration and for personal sins, ranging from laziness to debauchery.