First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [89]
The navy was ruled at the top by the Lords Commissioners, who were professional seamen exercising political power from seats in Parliament and among whom the First Lord held a seat in the small national governing Cabinet of eight or nine ministers. It was a vast institution administering several hundred warships, with enough cannon to equip an army and enough personnel to man its ranks, dockyards, victualing yards and storehouses around the world. The harm done by the rampant politicizing following the default of Ushant is recorded by Rodney’s friend Wraxall, drawing on Rodney’s private letters. “So violent was the spirit of party and faction in his own fleet, as almost to supersede and extinguish the affection to their Sovereign and their country …” and of such “inveterate an animosity to the Administration … particularly to the First Lord, as almost to wish for a defeat if it would produce the dismission of Ministers.” Naval officers themselves confirmed these sentiments. As Commissioner of the Portsmouth dockyard, Admiral Hood declared in a letter to his brother that “such a want of discipline and order throughout a fleet was never known before, and such a want of regard and attention to the good of the King’s service. The negligence of officers in general is really astonishing, and God knows to what extent the mischief will go.” Admiral Samuel Barrington, who had entered the navy at the age of eleven, commanded a ship at eighteen and whose brother was one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, when declining the Channel command, spoke of the “total relaxation of discipline” and said that the “strain and anxiety” would kill him. “Had I been in command, what I have seen since I have been here would have made me run mad.” He had no confidence in Sandwich or in the Admiralty, who were the “wickedest herd that ever good men served under.” The lesson was not yet clear in the 18th century, as America was to learn to her cost in our own century, that the presence of disunity in the military about method and strategy, and among the nation’s people about the rightness of the war aim, makes it impossible for a war of any duration to be fought effectively and won.
A modern historian, Geoffrey Callender, has offered the provocative thought that the stalemate at Ushant had historic result, for if the French had been beaten and shut up thereafter in their ports, they could not have come to the aid of the Americans, with the probability that the British might then have defeated the Revolution, leaving America to remain part of the British Empire. However interesting may be this prospectus for the history of the world, it is not realistic, for it would have depended on British will and capacity to undertake and maintain a blockade of French Atlantic ports. To tie down the fleet in a static role when protection of trade and defense of far-flung positions from Gibraltar to Ceylon was considered the warships’ primary duty would not have been at all likely, even had there been a victory at Ushant.
The accepted view that inadequate naval force was the primary reason for Britain’s defeat in the War for American Independence leaves an open question. Disunited and ill-disciplined the Royal Navy certainly was. Its numbers were too few for its tasks, and as a result of profiteering at the dockyards