Mackesy P. The War for America, 1775-1783
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In Middleton and Sandwich the coming age confronted the ancien régime. One was the head of a great Whig
family; the other the son of a Scots Customs collector, with two generations of Aberdeen professors behind him.
Sandwich was a political jobber, for whom public service was to a considerable extent a matter of pushing one's
friends and interests; Middleton a professional seaman and public servant, and a censorious advocate of
administrative reform and of professionalism and integrity in government. The new Comptroller was a friend of
Lord Shelburne, and a forerunner of the administrators who were soon to convert the archaic racket called
government into the efficient instrument which transformed Victorian England. His principles, so different from
the First Lord's, are concentrated in a single phrase: 'right measures will always make their own way, if supported
with integrity and disinterestedness'.1
Yet there is another side to the picture. Middleton seems to have created his own legend by persistent self-
advertisement. 'My turn to business and application' was the constant theme of his letters to Sandwich and later to
Shelburne. 'The truth is . . . I suffer no object to divert my attention from the public business, and therefore I am
seldom wrong in my information concerning it.' He was exceedingly ambitious and by no means as free from
connections as he liked to imply. Before he became Comptroller he was not above promising the First Lord his
vote and influence in East India Company affairs. He was related to those Scottish political manipulators, the
Dundases; and before discussing his appointment to the Navy Board with Sandwich he told him he wished to talk
the matter over with 'some confidential friends (who by their intimate connection with my family are particularly
interested in any change of my destination)'. He repeatedly solicited Sandwich to find an appointment for his
brother. Nor was his long connection with Shelburne a wholly disinterested, though it was a devious one. 'The only
return I expect', he wrote of his private reports on naval reform when Shelburne was Prime Minister, 'is to be kept
out of sight in all the particulars . . . I may furnish your Lordship with on public subjects.' He had backed a winner
who might soon become a loser.2
Middleton's desire for a new office of Sea Ordnance3 may have been in the best interest of the navy; but it also
bears the stamp of his engrossing ambition. His heavy load of work was caused in part by over-centralisation. He
wished the office of Comptroller to carry a seat on the Board of Admiralty; and he wanted a professional seaman
(and who better qualified
1 CL Shelburne, Vol. 151, No. 54
2 Williams Transcripts, 23 March 1776 and 8 March 1778, Middleton to Sandwich; Williams, Thesis, 277;
Sandwich, IV, 371; CL, Shelburne, Vol. 151, No. 41.
3 Above, p. 18.
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than himself?) in the Cabinet. He got his seaman in the Cabinet in the end: it was Keppel. A short experience of
Keppel as First Lord persuaded him that the head of the Admiralty should be a politician, with a statesman's power
to support his subordinates and a landsman's humility in naval matters.1
The Navy Board had long been extending its authority. Captain Lord Mulgrave, whose junior rank attracted
Middleton's criticism of his seat on the Board of Admiralty, was deeply suspicious of the Navy Board's tricks and
of its greedy over-centralisation of dockyard administration. Rodney attributed the Admiralty's frequent ignorance
of the real state of the fleet to the lack of regular statements from the Navy Board, and advocated tighter
supervision: 'The Navy Board . . . has ever been ambitious of rendering themselves an independent Board. They
have never carried their point, and I hope never will'.2
It is in this context that Middleton's criticisms of Sandwich must be judged. There was certainly some substance in
his views, and they were echoed by Germain. Yet Middleton was at least as critical of Sandwich's successors: he
disliked his masters, whoever they might be. Sandwich was the prisoner of an over-centralised and inflexible
machine; and if he kept short office hours, he must be judged by the standards of the age: in indicting Sandwich,
Middleton was indicting the business methods of a class and a generation. To Middleton himself the frantic
overwork of a modern war-administrator was unknown. In 1779, at the height of the naval danger, he complained
that he could only devote one day a week to private business, and needed five whole days to get through his duties.
By 1782 he claimed that he could only keep abreast of his work by keeping office hours six days a week from ten
till five, and longer when Parliament was sitting. Yet having private business in the country a few days later, he
informed the Prime Minister that he would be out of London from Friday evening until Monday morning for the
next month. And this was no great nobleman, but a man of business with his way to make.3
2
The Peacetime Fleet
The work of Sandwich must be judged by two separate standards which are often confused: the upkeep of the navy
through the years of peace, and its mobilisation for war. The first meant the preservation, repair and building
1 Below, pp. 4846.
2 Usher, 713; Lewis, Navy of Britain, 372; Sandwich, IV, 3801; Mundy, Rodney, II, 3567.
3 Sandwich, III, 181; CL, Shelburne, Vol. 151, Nos. 31, 41. The weight of trivial detail which over-
centralisation threw on Sandwich is described by Williams, 1920.
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ofships of the line, most of them to lie 'in ordinary' without crews, rigging or stores; and the provision of a proper
reserve of materials. The second meant preparing the ships to receive men, and then their commissioning, manning,
and final preparation for sea.
This was the only war of the eighteenth century in which England failed to win ascendancy at sea. Lord Sandwich
was chosen as the Opposition's scapegoat for the navy's weakness. For weakness, not indiscipline, was the cause of
failure. From Spain's intervention in 1779 England was fighting against odds which to doubters often seemed
hopeless. The situation was extraordinary. Though England had fought the Bourbon powers together in the last two
wars, and was to fight them again in the next, this was the only occasion on which she faced them simultaneously
with their fleets and finances intact. In 1779 she faced their full combined strength, and eighteen months later they
were joined by Holland. In this war England needed a navy of more than two-power standard. She did not achieve
it.
By the autumn of 1779, within a year and a half of mobilisation, the navy had a battle fleet in commission which
could compare with the highest strength achieved in the Seven Years War: about 100 ships of fifty guns and
upwards, compared with about 118 including ten prizes at the end of 1759. Of the fleet of 1759, fifty were Fourth
Rates; in 1779 there were only twenty; and the more powerful ships of 1779 carried a total complement of nearly
the same number of seamen as the more numerous ships of 1759.1 Judged therefore by the standard of past
achievement, the navy of 1779 was adequate; but judged by present need it was not. It is very difficult to discover
the whole truth, for the parties to the controversy drew up conflicting lists of ships and stores to suit their case. Nor
do the bare figures tell the whole story. Was a ship listed as in commission really a fighting unit, manned and in
good repair? Were new ships built to satisfy the Surveyor's vanity at the expense of repairing old ones? Were
stores accumulated when they should
1 Sandwich, III, 316, checked against list supplied to Shelburne in CL, Shelburne, Vol.142. In the Fourth
Rate the ships of sixty guns were classed as ships of the line, while the fifties were not. Middleton
maintained that the distinction between fifties and the line was ridiculous; and for simplicity the whole
Fourth Rate is included in the line in the figures above. The exclusion of the fifties from the line is rather
more favourable to Sandwich. In approximate figures the more detailed breakdown is:
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have been used for repairs? Comparison is impossible, for there is no serious study of preceding administrations of
a later date than the reign of William III; and for evidence one is confined to the assertions of Sandwich's
parliamentary enemies.
The Opposition alleged that Sandwich had inherited eighty-six serviceable ships of the line from Lord Hawke, and
had allowed this powerful force to waste away. An analysis by Philip Stephens, who had been Secretary to the
Admiralty since 1763, reached a different conclusion. Hawke's ships were the hulks of the fleet which had won the
Seven Years War. The navy of 1763 had been the largest in English history, but in the worst condition. Many ships
had been kept in service at great risk, and another year of war would have seen the fleet begin to dwindle. Of the
new ships, many had been built with green timbers during the emergency and decayed rapidly after the peace.
Hawke had repaired twenty ships of the line, and left fifteen new ones on the stocks. But he had not kept ahead of
the rising flood of decay, and Stephens declared that most of the ships on the serviceable list in 1771 had been kept
there for political reasons by the very men who now assailed Lord Sandwich. Sandwich's inheritance was a paper-
fleet.1
From the moment when he came into office Sandwich had foreseen that the next war would see France and Spain
in alliance, and that this time England might not be allowed to beat them separately. The state of the fleet was
desperate, and he was convinced that if the Falkland Islands crisis had led to war we should have lost India and
perhaps Gibraltar before enough ships were ready to provide detachments from home. With his Comptroller,
Palliser, he began the uphill task of restoring the fleet. Two years later Palliser could praise 'the noble foundation
your Lordship has laid for building a real serviceable fleet'.2 Economy dictated the removal of the useless ships,
and by 1778 half of Hawke's fleet had vanished from the serviceable list. The fleet which remained was regularly
inspected and repaired. Financial stringency had prevented all from being done that Sandwich had wished; but of
the forty-three of Hawke's ships which remained in service, twenty-six had undergone considerable repairs, though
seventeen were still serving without repair.3
Two bottlenecks had threatened the navy's recovery at the outset: a shortage of timber, and a shortage of slipways
and skilled labour for building. The whole stores situation was disastrous, for a fire in the Portsmouth yard in 1770
had destroyed all the stores and furniture of twenty-five ships of the line, including their masts, yards, sail, cable
and cordage. But the
1 Sandwich, IV 303 ff.
2 Williams Transcripts, 23 June 1773.
3 Ritcheson, 173 ff.; Sandwich, II, 183; IV, 3038; Williams, 447.
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most intractable need was timber for building: the yards were empty and the Navy Board despaired of getting
more. Sandwich bent his energies to the problem. 'I was one of the few that did not despair', he claimed: 'I set my
hand and heart to the work.' One cause of the shortage was excessive building by the East India Company to obtain
the builders' votes in parliamentary elections: against warm opposition a bill was passed to force the Company to
reduce its fleet. But the main reason for the timber shortage was said to be the exhaustion of the English
woodlands. This Sandwich investigated; and he found that the scarcity was artificially created by the timber
merchants to keep the price up. He set to work to break the combination. A subsidy was introduced for the carriage
of distant timber which could not be brought out of the woodlands at the ordinary price; and a large contract was
placed for foreign timber. But the second expedient was to exact an unforeseen penalty. The Stettin oak which was
floated down the Oder to break the English monopoly had only a quarter of the life of English oak; and foreign oak
was just beginning to reveal its defects when the American Revolution surged in.1
By 1777 the three years' reserve of timber which Sandwich had ordered to be maintained had been accumulated.
The opposition alleged that timber was laid down which should have been used for repairing and building; but
Sandwich could point out that a large stock in his new seasoning sheds allowed ships to be built of thoroughly
seasoned timber. Every other store except masts was plentiful. There was more hemp in store in the spring of 1779
than had ever been known at that season, and great quantities were under contract for delivery. There was two
years' supply of pitch, three of tar, four of iron. Middleton could assert in 1779 that the Channel yards were
prepared for accidental and current services, and that the naval arsenals had never been so fully supplied with
stores. By 1781 a vast additional reserve of hemp had been laid down as a precaution against the hostility of the
Baltic powers, and seven times as much was in store as in 1759. The quantities shipped to stations abroad were
unparallelled. Seven thousand tons of stores had already been shipped to seven destinations, and another 1,800 tons
were ready or in course of shipment. If overseas yards were short of stores, this was caused by the accidents of war
and the shortage of shipping rather than by any failure to procure.2
It has been alleged, however, that if the stores in general were satisfactory,
1 Sandwich, II, 259; Ibid. IV, 28, 281 ff., 3038; Lewis, The Navy of Britain, 1056. Mr Williams throws
doubt on the existence of the timber ring, and suggests that the cause of Sandwich's success was a more
enterprising Navy Board headed by Palliser. He amply vindicates Sandwich's claim to have stockpiled
timber.
2 CL, Shelburne, Vol. 142, No. 10; Sandwich, II, 263; IV, 281 ff.
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there was one vital exception: the 'great masts' of over 27inches diameter for the lower masts of ships of the line.1
Since the days of Cromwell England had relied for her great masts on the pine forests of New Hampshire, a safer
source than the Baltic. When this supply was cut off in 1775, Sandwich had a three years' reserve in hand; but
nothing was done either to find a new source of supply or to revive the art of making composite masts from smaller
trees. The charge is that at the moment when France entered the war the stock of great masts was exhausted; and
that the shortage imposed crippling difficulties on fleet operations. But a close and recent investigation has shown
that there was no alarm about the stock of great masts till 1780, when the apparent scarcity of great masts in Europe
threatened the fleet's consumption. The scarcity of 1778 was not of mast-poles but of 'made-masts', the composite
masts which were stronger than pole-masts and which, in spite of assertions to the contrary, supplied all lower
masts of capital ships. Experience had never shown a reserve of made-masts to be necessary; but at the battle of
Ushant in July, 1778, Keppel's fleet suffered unprecedented damage aloft from the new French technique of firing
into the masts and rigging. Though some masts were borrowed from ships lying in ordinary, the fleet could only be
refitted quickly by wholesale 'fishing' of old masts; and many of these fished masts were sprung in the gales of the
autumn. The deficiency was cured in due course by building up a reserve of made-masts; and its cause was not
neglected to stockpile, but a tactical surprise.
It had become clear during the Seven Years War that the royal dockyards were unable to build and maintain the
expanding navy. Storehouses, docks and slipways were all inadequate. A long-term plan to expand the western
yards had been drawn up in 1764; but when the Sandwich administration investigated the situation in 1771, the
work everywhere was behind its schedule. It was now pushed on as fast as funds allowed. But even in the years of
peace the docks in the royal yards had been too few; with the result, if an embittered Navy Board clerk is to be
believed, that repairs were often disastrously delayed for the sake of new building. The only solution was to
contract with merchant builders. Till 1778 about a third of all new building was done outside the royal yards:
thereafter the proportion in the private yards gradually drew ahead. Every available slipway was brought into use.
Ships of the line were built at three places where none had been in the previous war; and at the end of 1781 thirty-
seven ships of the line were building. 'Every slip in England', wrote Middleton about this time, 'where a line of
battle ship can be built with safety and advantage is at this moment
1 The theme is in Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 27690; the critique in Williams, esp. pp. 3179, 3267, 451,
4567.
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occupied by the Navy Board and new ships contracted for as fast as they become vacant.'1
In the royal yards shipwrights were as short as slipways. Three companies of shipwrights, each of fifteen men and
six boys, could build a seventy-four in a year. These craftsmen, often illiterate, built by eye and tradition, and
imposed their variations on Admiralty designs. Such traditional skills could not be learnt in haste; nor could
artificers be recruited from other yards. The law allowed no compulsion except for seamen; and to raise wages
merely sent up wages in the merchant yards in competition. Unable to increase the shipwrights' numbers, the
Admiralty tried to raise their productivity. Task work, which cut costs and time, was introduced to the royal yards.
The system shortened working hours and raised wages; but there were immediate strikes in all the yards except
Deptford. The Channel yards could not be coerced, for the loss of a month's work in Portsmouth and Plymouth
might have been fatal; nor was the system easy to apply to their main wartime work of refitting. In the eastern
yards, where most of the building was done, task work was gradually established, and without powers of
compulsion the government could do no more. 'There is a line', said Sandwich, 'beyond which the exertions of
every country cannot go'; and in England before the French Revolution the line was sharply drawn by concern for
individual liberty and low taxation.2
3
The State of Readiness
Low taxation and balanced budgets meant stable Ministries; and from the beginning of Sandwich's administration,
he had been in conflict with the Treasury. His revenue threatened by the near-bankruptcy of the East India
Company, Lord North looked to cuts in naval expenditure to balance his budgets and reduce the National Debt.
This meant not only curbing expenditure on the maintenance of the fleet in reserve, but cutting to the bone the
force in immediate readiness. North knew very well that England had been caught unprepared at the beginning of
the past two wars; but 'great peace establishments will . . . prove our ruin', and [in 1772], 'I do not recollect to have
seen a more pacific appearance of affairs than there is at this moment.' He wanted to reduce the squadrons abroad
and put four guardships out of commission. The squadrons abroad were reduced as he wished, but to
1 Williams, 34192; Usher, 3878, 395400; Sandwich, IV, 281 ff.; CL, Shelburne, Vol. 151, No. 37; Add.
MSS. 38344, ff. 310, 312. Between 1778 and 1781 there were 151 dockyard refits of ships of the line, and
36 dockyard repairs (Add. MSS. 38344. ff. 3203).
2 G 3510; Sandwich, IV, 308 ff.; Add. MSS. 38344, f. 306.
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Sandwich the twenty guardships at home, ready for sea and manned by skeleton crews, were the foundation of
British security. He called Lord Rochford to his support, and his resolute stand maintained the guardships at
twenty.1
These twenty guardships were enough until the middle of 1776, when it became clear that France and Spain were
arming. By then the real strength of the home fleet had been undermined by the war in America. Every frigate in
good repair was abroad, and all the fifty-gun ships; so were 15,000 seamen, leaving only 8,000 at home to protect
the trade and man a battle fleet. These facts Sandwich put repeatedly to the Cabinet. If no countermeasures were
taken, France and Spain would soon have as many ships ready in Europe as Britain had, and before much longer
would have double the British force.
But the King and Prime Minister were reluctant to accept his reasoning. George III counted on a rapid victory in
America to dispel the crisis, and was unwilling to embark on further naval expenditure which might never be
needed. He and Lord North were all too ready to be soothed by Vergennes' assurances. Sandwich was not.
Whatever the intentions of the present French Ministry, France was preparing for a war. Rearmament would indeed
be costly and might be dangerous; but he remembered the Falkland Islands crisis, and knew that the greatest
danger was to be weak. He wanted more guardships commissioned, and more ships brought forward from ordinary
and prepared to receive men. In June 1776 he persuaded the Cabinet to commission three more guardships,
augment the Marines, and make secret arrangements for a press. But it took another month and further alarming
intelligence to get Cabinet sanction for a dozen more ships to prepare to receive men, though this committed the
country neither to heavy expenditure nor to increasing the fleet actually in commission.2
That autumn the Spanish dispute with Portugal reached a crisis; and the news of French preparations were so
alarming that Sandwich was able to obtain much more extensive measures. The twenty-three guardships were
manned to full crews by a general press; other ships were commissioned to replace them in immediate reserve; and
more were prepared to receive men. Admiral Keppel was nominated as Commander of the Channel fleet in the
event of war. These precautions brought thirty-six ships of the line into commission at home by the end of 1776,
and would have been satisfactory if the gain could have been held. But almost at once it began to be dissipated by
a call from America.
At the end of the summer Lord Howe had asked for a large reinforcement of two-deckers for the next campaign,
evidently to increase his manpower
1 Sandwich, I, 1930.
2 G 18946, 1905; Sandwich, I, 213, 21516; Ritcheson, 209.
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for assisting the army. Sandwich hoped that fifty-gun ships and frigates with their shallower draught would be at
least as useful on the American coast as ships of the line. He explained the danger of dissipating the battle fleet in
Europe; but Howe felt that the possibility of French intervention merely strengthened his case for more ships of
force on the station, and asked for six more ships of the line to bring his squadron to eight. Sandwich was anxious
not to deny him; and in February 1777 the Cabinet resolved to send him five ships of the line from home, and
make up the number he required by putting a fifty-gun ship in the St Lawrence at his disposal. But the same
meeting decided not to replace them at home by commissioning others. Sandwich would not be put off. By letter
and conversation he continued to press for their replacement, using Robinson as his channel to urge on North the
necessity of keeping pace with the Bourbons. In March he confronted Robinson with fresh intelligence of
preparations in France, and begged for a decision.1
North had been laid low by a cough and could not be seen; but his attitude as revealed by Robinson was a very
curious one. At that moment he regarded the international situation as so threatening that he was enquiring about
plans to resist an invasion. Yet though he insisted that Howe must have all that he asked to mollify him for his
brother's lack of military reinforcements, he still hedged about the fleet at home. If French armament continued, his
objection to keeping pace would cease; but the French preparations must first be proved, and since there was a
Cabinet minute on the subject, the Cabinet ought to decide. All this emerged when the King grew curious. For
though King George was anxious not to alarm the French by military precautions, he regarded naval readiness as a
different matter. If the Prime Minister agreed on replacing the ships going out from home, the King intended to
encourage the other Ministers to support him in the Cabinet. The royal intervention may have been decisive; for the
decision to commission replacements was duly taken.2
Thus Sandwich won the battle to keep the home fleet at thirty-six. But as the summer of 1777 drew on, a different
anxiety developed. American privateers had multiplied at an alarming rate, and with French connivance were
swarming in the British seas. From every quarter came cries for convoy and protection. The few cruisers left in
home ports were hopelessly overstretched, and the battle fleet had to do their work. The ships of the line were
scattered on cruising stations and with Mediterranean and South Atlantic convoys. On the American coast the
privateers and rebel cruisers were
1 Sandwich, I, 160, 163, 170, 285; Sackville, II, 50, 52; Add. MSS. 37883, f. 163.
2 Add. MSS. 37883, ff. 16170; G 1974; Thynne Papers, American Affairs 17778, No. 6 (Cabinet Minute of 15
March 1777).
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becoming very bold. The frigate Fox fell a temporary prize to the 32-gun Hancock; and the Admiralty feared that if
the rebels cruised in small squadrons they could overmatch our single cruising frigates. Palliser argued that Howe
should be ordered to pursue American squadrons with his own two-deckers. 'For if we are to disperse our home
guard after every squadron of privateers in distant parts, whilst the fleets of Spain and France are armed, we
certainly shall not be safe at home.' Nevertheless a ship of the line was detached from the home fleet in August to
sustain the frigates on the Newfoundland station against the Boston cruisers. 'The sea is now overspread with
privateers on every part', Sandwich told Lord Howe, 'and the demands for convoys and cruisers so great that we
know not how to supply them.'1
Meanwhile French actions continued to belie their soothing professions. In June Captain Jervis fell in with a small
squadron whose Admiral said frankly that he was cruising to protect American shipping. In French ports privateers
were being armed for American captains, and merchantmen laden with clothing and munitions for the rebel armies.
From Dunkirk to Bordeaux the French were sheltering and equipping the King's enemies. So outrageous were their
breaches of neutrality that in the summer of 1777 Germain thought that immediate war was inevitable. Yet North,
in spite of his earlier enquiry about plans to resist invasion, had 'no idea of taking any public steps that would cause
any alarm whatever'. To tread so warily, yet knowing that French supplies alone might be sustaining the rebellion,
seems at first sight a strange policy. Yet as Suffolk reminded Sandwich, it was of immense importance to preserve
the peace for that year, while the campaign which might still be decisive unrolled in America. For England had
staked on the army: that effort must not be jeopardised by fighting France for the sake of a sea blockade.2
At the beginning of August Sandwich tackled the Prime Minister again. The presence of Spanish and probably of
French ships of the line in the Antilles had prompted the Prime Minister to suggest yet another detachment from
the home fleet. Admirable, said Sandwich; but they must be replaced by commissioning more. 'I lay it down as a
maxim that England ought for her own security to have a superior force in readiness at home to anything that
France and Spain united have in readiness on their side.' Later in the month it was learnt that the French were
preparing troops and frigates for the West Indies. North caught the alarm. Postponing a visit to Somerset, he
hastened to London to summon a Cabinet. Such bewildering fluctuations and inconsistencies in the conduct of
France momentarily convinced him that England should no longer depend on her professions, and must be ready
1 Sandwich, I, 181, 223, 224, 229, 2334, 294.
2 Sackville, II, 73; Sandwich, I, 2213, 226; Abergavenny, 18; G 1975.
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