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A Brief History of the Royal Navy And British Empire

Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

The Navy Royal became the Royal Navy in the reign of Charles the Second (1660 -1685), and was to be the principal power of the British Empire. The navy came into being as a permanent standing fleet during the reign of Henry the Eighth (1509 -1547). Before that it consisted of temporary collections of converted merchant ships. By the nineteenth century the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world. The maintenance of the fleet had a profound impact on the country. The fleet called for the establishment of docks, shipyards, foundries, and encouraged the timber and iron trades. The earliest centre for iron forging developed in the Weald of Kent to support the navy during Henry the Eighth's reign. There was a need for constant development of navigation science, and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich was set up for this purpose. The royal dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth, and later Devonport drove industrial development and became the most advanced workshops in the country. The huge expense of the navy also helped Britain develop politically. The cost of the navy was the single most important force driving the crown into permanent partnership with Parliament, who could provide the crown with funds through taxation.

HMS Gannet, Chatham Dockyard

The navy came to allow world-wide domination. The process of accumulating overseas possessions began during the time of Oliver Cromwell. His naval forces took Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. In 1659 the island of St Helena was seized, as an important outpost on the route around the Cape of Good Hope to India. The Seventeenth Century naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys did much to modernise the running of the navy. He regularised accounts, and made sure what money that was available was efficiently spent. His work can still be seen at the Pepys Library in Cambridge, in a document known as the Navy White Book. This conscientious volume has pages devoted to sail-making, tar, ropes, timber, recruitment problems. In1677 Pepys forced through his most revolutionary reform of the navy. He proposed that no one should be appointed lieutenant until he had served three years, received a certificate from his captain and passed an examination in navigation and seamanship at the Navy Office. Having experience and training before taking on a senior role seems an obvious requirement now, but it wasn't in the Seventeenth Century. As Pepys biographer, Claire Tomalin, says: "Pepys had made history at a stroke, bringing about a revolution in the way the navy was run, fired by his belief that education and intelligence were more useful to the nation than family background and money." (Samuel Pepys P303) In this new navy talented people like James Cook, son of a farm labourer, would be able to rise to the highest positions. Horatio Nelson was born in relatively humble circumstaces as the son of a curate. Admittedly his mother was grand neice of Sir Robert Walpole, but Nelson had nothing like the social standing of the man he replaced as admiral of the fleet. After famously ignoring a command to withdraw issued by was 6th Baronet, Hyde Parker at the Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson was promoted to admiral, while Hyde Parker was recalled. This kind of meritocracy was a revolution for the navy, and a social milestone generally. Imperial Britain may have been known for its class system, but it was on a meritocratic basis that the navy grew ever more powerful, and was used to create the largest empire in history. Britain at one time or another has ruled the eastern American states, Canada, fourteen African countries, India, Burma, Nepal, Malaya, New Guinea, Australia, Iraq, Kuwait, Palestine (now Israel), Cyprus, Oman, Aidan, Malta, Minorca, Gibraltar, and many other islands dotted around the world. In defence of this empire the navy was kept at a level where it had as many ships as the next two most powerful naval powers put togther. When Nelson won his famous victory at Trafalgar in 1805 he faced exactly this threat, in the combined fleets of France and Spain.

England Expects" flag message on HMS Victory at Portsmouth Dockyard

The British Empire was generally speaking a maritime empire, held together by the navy. The cost of the navy meant the army had to be small. This largely set the tone of the empire, where characteristically a few British officials would win over local leaders and then work through them, rather than trying to order people about directly. This is not to say that the British Empire was all politeness and fair play. The British could be as ruthless as any other colonial power. This was illustrated right at the beginning of the time of empire in the English reaction to the Scottish Darien expedition of 1698. The Darien adventure was Scotland's big effort to set up a major colony in Central America, and many thousands of Scots invested heavily in it. This was an adventure that the English wanted to see fail. When the expedition ran into difficulties the English refused to help, and this refusal of aid even extended to not taking in starving survivors of the expedition who managed to make it to the English colony in Jamaica. The governor of Jamaica met the captain of the last Scottish ship at his house, offered him a glass of wine and a pipe of tobacco, and told him that unfortunately he could offer no further help. The sick were brought ashore to die, while the rest of the survivors sold themselves into slavery on the plantations, or joined pirates, or the Royal Navy. Such was the financial loss caused by the Darien disaster that it contributed to Scotland having to agree with the Act of Union in 1707. After this date an English empire could become the British Empire.

Further illustrations are provided by the Boer War, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, towards the end of the time of Empire. At this time Cecil Rhodes actually thought that Britain could rule the world, and such arrogance led to one of the darkest episodes in Britain's imperial adventure. A group of Dutch farmers in South Africa struggling against British rule, found themselves facing concentration camps, a terrifying innovation introduced by Kitchener. Over 20 000 Boers died in the camps.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the system of empire had began to unravel as desire for independence grew. Britain liked to think it ruled with the consent of the people, but in India Mahatma Gandhi set out to show that this wasn't so. Gandhi wanted peaceful protest, but many of his followers had no time for quiet resistance. There were riots, and a heavy handed British response. In Amristan in 1919 Brigadier General Reginald Dwyer ordered his men to fire into a demonstration. Three hundred and seventy nine Indians were killed. Dwyer was dismissed, but the damage was done.

HMS Invincible - being decommissioned at Portsmouth

 

After the end of the Second World War preparations began for orderly withdrawal from the empire. Thankfully Britain accepted its changing status and withdrawal was largely peaceful. The French and the Portuguese were demonstrating the hopelessness of trying to hold onto an empire at any cost in their ferocious wars in Indo China, Angola and Mozambique. The British did fight some rear guard actions against the possibility of communist governments in a number of former colonies. Of these "emergencies" Malaya in 1948 and Kenya in 1952 - 1954 are the best known. The Falklands War of 1982 saw a vigorous and successful defence of the Falkland Islands, invaded by neighbouring Argentina. But generally speaking the empire was given up in a peaceful fashion. In 1997 Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, cried as he handed over the Union Jack to the new Chinese administration. He then sailed away on the Royal Yacht Britannia. This was a symbolic end of empire, even though Britain is still responsible for 150 000 people in "dependent territories", most of whom live in Bermuda and Gibraltar.

Now of course the idea of empire is deeply unfashionable, and ideas of freedom are linked with democracy. But democracy is only another imperfect and potentially dangerous way to arrange things. Robert Skidelsky, in his essay The Killing Fields, linked the mass slaughter of the twentieth century to the rise of nationalism and democracy. "Hitler and Stalin were not democrats, but they killed for the sake of the people - to secure them a Thousand Year Reich or the communist millennium. Genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s started with the onset of democracy." (Quoted by A.N. Wilson - After the Victorians P30) Acting in the name of the people is all very well, but first you have to decide who the people are. As democracy rests on the rule of the majority, the "people" by definition does not include everybody. A.N. Willson has written. "In an Imperium, different racial and religious groups have to coexist in order to survive. Not so for the democratic nationalist, who actually asserts his 'freedom' by the right to be a fully independent Hindu or Muslim, Indian or Pakistani. The inevitable concomitant is that the 'alien' in the nationalists midst will, by democratic will of the majority, be expunged." (After The Victorians P30)

As a final note it is interesting to see how this loss of empire has influenced the way the British see themselves. There is supposedly a "traditional" British sense of respect for the underdog. This image isn't totally without foundation. It should be remembered that Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and then waged a single handed war against it, with squadrons of warships deployed to pursue slavers in the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and off west Africa. However, at the height of empire the British could be as arrogant as would be expected of a dominant power. They had Charles Darwin, or it should be said, less able interpreters of Darwin, telling them that life was a struggle of winners and losers, and of course the British were meant to be the winners. It wasn't really until Britain had lost its empire that the underdog came to be valued. Now perhaps we saw that winning and losing were not as clear cut as those nineteenth century interpreters of Darwin believed. Darwin himself never suggested that nature demands domination by one group of winners. In fact he saw the world as one where no single group could or should dominate for long. He also realised that the "struggle" for existence can involve "dependence of one being on another" (P116 of The Origin of Species). These days writers, such as James Lovelock of Gaia fame, express this interdependence of nature more fully, without of course challenging Darwin's basic evolutionary ideas.

The world has to hold a lot of different people, and a lot of different forms of life. In such a situation we have to accept our defeats as well as our victories. Perhaps the words of Rudyard Kipling, the Empire's greatest poet, sum things up best:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same

From If