home—the _Revenge_, one of the ships in Byng’s battle. It was the damning
evidence of the _Revenge’s_ captain—Frederick Cornwall, now at home on
half-pay—as they all say in the fleet, that settled Byng’s fate. “If I
cannot disprove what you have said, Captain Cornwall,” exclaimed Byng, as
the one-armed captain of the _Revenge_ turned to leave the cabin, after a
futile attempt at cross-examination on the part of the Admiral, “may the
Lord have mercy on me.” There is no need to go further.
If you could look round to Spithead from the Hard, you would see the
old _Royal Sovereign_ on duty as the port flagship. On board her it was
that, on the morning of the execution, Admiral Boscawen put his signature
to Byng’s death warrant, and the order for the firing party. She is the
oldest ship in the King’s Navy, in which connection the _Sovereign_
has other memories of her own. The great Duke of Marlborough named her
at her launch in the year that William the Third died, and it was in
her great-cabin, during the _Sovereign’s_ first cruise, that Rooke’s
council of war planned the swoop on the Vigo treasure galleons, which
Vigo Street, in London, serves to commemorate. Some of the old ship’s
timbers, it is the fact, formed part of the frame of Charles the First’s
world-renowned _Sovereign of the Seas_, and were salved, by special
Admiralty order, out of the _débris_ when the _Sovereign of the Seas_
was burned at Chatham in January, 1696, by the carelessness of a sleepy
bos’un’s mate.
Out yonder at Spithead, too, at this moment, rides at anchor yet another
veteran of our old-time navy, the _Royal Anne_. They have a really
marvellous continuity of service, some of these ancient men-of-war. The
_Anne_ carries us back to the time of the Dutch raid up the Medway. She
was launched as the _Royal Charles_ to fill the place of the _Royal
Charles_ that the Dutchmen carried off. William the Third renamed her
the _Queen_, in honour of his consort, and the ship kept that name until
George the First came over. King George, having at that time his legal
consort under lock and key in Germany, promptly renamed the ship. He
called her after himself, _Royal George_—the first of the series. Three
kings, indeed, have been present at this ship’s various “christenings.”
Charles the Second was present at her first naming as the _Royal
Charles_; William the Third saw her renamed the _Queen_. George the
First paid a special visit to Woolwich when she received the name _Royal
George_, and gave £300 to be divided among the dockyard men employed at
the float-out, in honour of the occasion. The name _Royal Anne_ was given
to the ship only two years ago, when the present _Royal George_, Hawke’s
flagship in the Channel Fleet, was launched. She exchanged the name for
that borne on the stocks by the _Royal George_.
Within sight from the Hard is an 80-gun three-decker, the _Royal
William_, just back from the capture of Louisbourg, Cape Breton. She,
too, was launched as long ago as Charles the Second’s reign, under
the name _Royal Prince_, and she fought her first battle at Solebay,
eighty-six years ago. She carried James Duke of York’s flag during part
of the battle, and Prince Rupert in turn had his flag in her in a later
battle. William the Third gave the ship her present name, and under it
she fought at La Hogue as Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship, not without
distinction.
If one might dip into the future and witness events just one year later,
the visitor to Portsmouth would then see the _Royal William_ there again,
and again just arrived from across the Atlantic. This time she would be
in other guise—a ship “in mourning,” all over funereal black, with yards
set to point in all directions—“a-cockbill,” as the old term went—and
colours at half-mast, firing minute guns, and with a funeral procession
of boats putting off from alongside to bear to the shore the body of
General Wolfe.
Off the dockyard, on this October afternoon of 1758, awaiting their turn
for repair, are two jury-rigged ships. One is a small, old-fashioned
sixty-four, firing a broadside of some 540 lb. weight of metal. The other
is a giant 80-gun ship of French build, and brand new. She is bigger than
the finest first-rate in King George’s service, a fair match for the new
_Royal George_, and fires the tremendous broadside of 1136 lb. weight of
metal. Yet the little ship took the big one in a midnight battle last
February. It was as fine a feat of arms as the Navy has seen. The two
are the _Monmouth_ and the _Foudroyant_. They have just come into port,
and both show plenty of marks by way of battle scars. If you were to row
round the _Foudroyant_ you would find her, on her larboard side, where
the _Monmouth_ made her attack, battered almost to splinters. The fight
lasted four and a half hours, from eight till after midnight, and went on
for most of the time within pistol-shot. The _Monmouth_ in that time used
up four tons of powder and about ten tons of cannon-balls. At Gibraltar,
where they repaired the _Foudroyant_ to bring her to England, they had
to plug over seventy shot-holes at the water-line—and two or three
cannon-balls had gone through some of the holes.
One more word of the _Foudroyant_. It would seem as though, in the
Portsmouth of these times, we cannot lay the shade of Admiral Byng. The
_Foudroyant_ was flagship of the fleet that Byng failed to beat, and
Arthur Gardiner, who later commanded the _Monmouth_ when she took the
_Foudroyant_, was Byng’s flag-captain. Captain Gardiner, after Byng’s
battle, it is said, swore that if ever he got another ship, however
small, and met the _Foudroyant_, he would attack her and take her, or
sink alongside. He got the _Monmouth_ and met the _Foudroyant_ and kept
his word; meeting himself a heroic death on his own quarter-deck in the
heat of the battle.
A second French man-of-war, taken on the same occasion and also badly
mauled—the _Orphèe_, a smart 70-gun ship, prize to the _Revenge_—lies
near the _Foudroyant_; also recently brought to England from up the
Straits.[8]
All the day long there keeps on a continuous passing up and down the
harbour of small war-vessels and dockyard craft of every sort. Here a
fireship goes by, a small two-masted vessel, readily distinguishable by
the heavy iron double hooks and grapnels that tip the yard-arms; and that
little boat towing astern. The hooks are meant to grip and hold fast the
fireship’s destined prey as she sheers alongside. The fireship’s crew set
the quick match-train leading to the stacks of pitch-barrels and other
combustibles all over the vessel, ablaze at several points just as they
are closing the enemy, and the little boat is for them to escape in at
the last moment. Now a bomb-ketch passes, a clumsy craft with masts set
well aft and two heavy 13-inch mortars, trained for firing over the bows
right ahead, set side by side in the fore part of the ship, where the
foremast would stand in an ordinary vessel. A rakish-looking Portsmouth
privateer, it may be, now comes by, towing a prize astern of her—some
captured French “sugar ship” from Martinique, snapped up off Ushant. Then
there passes, on the way to one of the guardships or “receiving” ships,
a press-gang tender, coming in from a run along the South Coast. She has
been out for some days to pick up hands for the fleet, and some of those
on board could tell more than one ugly story of high-handed doings among
the villages and farmsteads on the coast, within a night’s march from
the sea. In confinement under hatches on board, it is quite possible, is
also the unfortunate crew of some homeward-bound merchantman, waylaid and
boarded almost within sight of home, off the back of the Isle of Wight.
It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.
All day long duty-boats keep going up and down. Now it is an admiral’s
twelve-oared barge with the flag at the bows; now a captain’s gig, or
a pinnace, pulling between ship and shore; now a midshipman’s boat
scurrying off to answer the flagship’s signal. Ships’ long-boats with
water-casks and pursers’ stores for various men-of-war in harbour, pass
and repass, and beer hoys and yard craft of all kinds. You can always
tell a dockyard boat by the heavy way in which the “maties” row, giving
their elbows a curious lift with each stroke. At intervals, also, ships’
launches and wherries go past, and lighters carrying cables or anchors,
spars and sailcloth, or gangs of shipwrights from the yard on their way
to Spithead to attend to pressing repairs to some Channel Fleet ship or
frigate just come in and impatient to be off again.
[Illustration: PORTSMOUTH IN THE YEAR THAT THE _VICTORY_ JOINED THE FLEET
_1. North Dock._
_2. Boat-Houses._
_3. Officers’ Houses._
_4. Dock Clock._
_5. Commissioner’s House._
_6. Sail and Mould Loft._
_7. Rope House._
_8. Royal Academy._
_9. Landing Place at the Dock._
_10. Rigging House._
_11. The Common._
_12. Officers’ Lodging in the Gun-Wharf._
_13. Lamport Gate._
_14. Portsmouth Church._
_15. The Point._
_16. Flag on the Platform._
_17. Round Tower._
_18. Spit-Head._
_From a Contemporary Print._]
Now and again, two or three times a month perhaps, a line of ships’
launches from newly arrived vessels from Spithead are to be seen
following one another up the harbour, crammed with men—swarthy
foreigners, poor, ragged, dejected-looking wretches for the most part.
Each boat has its guard of red-coated marines, standing under arms at
the head and stern, all with bayonets fixed. The boatloads comprise
prisoners of war, taken at sea and on their way to undergo confinement
in Porchester Castle,[9] going to join their two thousand compatriots
already there. A favoured few in due course may obtain exchange by
cartel, but the greater number must perforce endure their captivity to
the end of the war.
Such were some of the every-day scenes to be witnessed in Portsmouth
Harbour at the very time that the Admiralty order for the building of the
_Victory_ was being drafted.
Ashore in the streets of Portsea, old salts who had fought with Vernon
when he took Porto Bello, are to be met with any day of the week. You may
come across, indeed, an occasional old fellow who can remember Benbow,
and how the news first came to England of the taking of Gibraltar. And
sitting at his door on a sunny morning you may yet find an old Portsmouth
grandsire here and there who can carry his memory further back still, and
tell you how the bonfires blazed in High Street in honour of the battle
of La Hogue.
Turn away now from the harbour and the Hard and take a short walk through
the streets of Portsmouth town. Soldiers in the uniform that Corporal
John’s men wore at Blenheim and Ramillies, rub shoulders with you every
hour of the day. Some are for Canada, some for the West Indies, some
for Northern Germany. All are passing through Portsmouth on the way to
the great depôt camp in the Isle of Wight where the troops for oversea
service assemble. Most are men of the foot regiments, with long-skirted
red coats, red waistcoats, and red breeches with high white gaiters. Some
wear the big cocked hat that came in with George the First; others the
tall sugar-loaf grenadier cap of the Prussian pattern. Those with buff
facings are “Howard’s” men; those with yellow facings, “Kingsley’s”;
those with willow green, “Rufane’s”; those with blue, “Duroure’s.” For
six or seven years past our regiments have had numbers, but the men
still hold to the old way, and each regiment calls itself for preference
according to the custom of the army for these eighty years past. Now and
then a party of dragoons pass through the streets, red coated and wearing
black leather fur-crested helmets and long jack-boots. These come from
one of the cavalry camps at Chichester or Southampton. Occasionally, too,
cocked-hatted artillerymen are to be met with, in blue coats with red
waistcoats and breeches and white gaiters.
Batches of men of the standing garrison of the Fortress of Portsmouth,
the “Royal Invalids,” as the corps they belong to is called, are to
be seen about the streets at all hours; veterans drafted from off the
Chelsea Hospital out-pension list as being sufficiently able-bodied for
home-service fortress duty, old war-worn warriors bearing scars, many of
them got in action at Dettingen and Fontenoy.
A Portsmouth visitor would certainly, too, have seen in and about the
town a personage of some notoriety in those times: Governor Hawley,
Commandant of the Garrison, the Duke of Cumberland’s hard-riding,
hard-drinking friend. “Bloody Hawley” was what the soldiers called him,
taking the _sobriquet_ from the name that years before the hapless
clansmen of the north gave the man who led “Butcher” Cumberland’s
dragoons in the merciless chase after Culloden. In General Hawley you
would have seen perhaps as badly hated an officer as ever held a King
of England’s commission. “Chief Justice Hawley” the rank and file also
called him: and the reason for it any one would have seen for himself by
walking round Governor’s Green any day of the week, or passing beyond the
postern and strolling out across the Portsmouth ramparts to the glacis on
an execution morning.
* * * * *
The talk of the place—and of all England too at the moment—is of a French
invasion.
England, in 1758, had not yet recovered from her last bad fit of nerves,
brought on by truculent vapourings from Versailles at the outset of the
Seven Years’ War. Government was urgently pushing on arrangements for
forming an efficient militia force to fill the place of the regular
battalions fighting abroad in Germany and in America, in view of the
invasion scare that was threatening in the near future. Already reports
had come to hand from France of the building of flat-bottomed beach-boats
and preparations for large encampments next summer in the vicinity of
the French Channel ports—at Dunkirk and Calais, Havre and St. Malo, and
in Lower Brittany on the shores of Quiberon Bay. In every county of
England and Wales the local authorities were getting ready for the early
muster of the new militia levies—now, for the first time in our history,
to be formed into regiments. Along the coasts of Sussex and Kent,
from Selsea to beyond Dungeness and Hythe, where the open coast-line
might seem to invite attack—at Littlehampton, Brighton, Blatchington,
Seaford, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone—the sites for four- and six-gun
batteries were being pegged out by military engineers, to be thrown up
by local labourers under expert supervision. At every point along the
seashore from Spurn Head to the Lizard the beacons were being watched
night and day, while the local authorities of every seaboard district had
standing orders to be ready, on the first alarm of a hostile landing, to
transport the women and children in farm carts to the nearest towns, and
drive inland the horses and sheep and cattle.
We have to turn over many pages of the world’s history to get to the year
that saw the _Victory_ brought into the British Navy. The Seven Years’
War itself, the exigencies of which called the _Victory_ into existence,
is nowadays but a schoolbook term. Frederick the Great, in the year that
the _Victory_ first figures in the Navy Estimates, was the man of the
hour. Peter the Great’s daughter ruled in Russia. The “Old Pretender”—the
“warming-pan baby” of Whitehall, of the year 1688—was still alive,
dragging out his last years in Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. Captain
Cook was as yet an unknown master’s mate, serving on board a man-of-war
away across the Atlantic with Boscawen. Nelson, as has been said, was
a long-clothes baby; Napoleon and Wellington were not yet born. The
Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Viscount Ligonier, was a French
Huguenot refugee, born a subject of the Grand Monarque, who first saw war
under Marlborough at Blenheim. Wolfe was an unheard of Major-General,
nearly at the bottom of the list. News of Clive’s victory at Plassey had
not long reached England. The elder Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” had only
been in power for little over a twelvemonth. William Pitt was not yet
born. Smeaton was building the Eddystone Lighthouse. James Watt was a
Glasgow mathematical instrument maker, his ideas about steam hardly yet
in embryo. Burke was a young Irishman in London, making a poor living out
of essays for Grub Street magazines. Lord Chesterfield was still writing
his letters. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was a new book, being advertised
in publishers’ announcements, in two bulky quarto volumes at £4. 10s.
Garrick was playing nightly at Drury Lane.
It was still the custom at Bath to announce the arrival of lords and
ladies and “nabobs” with peals on the Abbey bells and serenadings by
the Assembly band. Brighton was hardly on the map as yet; it was merely
Brighthelmstone, a Sussex fishing village, just beginning to be visited
for sea bathing by the handful of people who had heard of it through Dr.
Russell’s pamphlets. Old London Bridge still had houses on it. Traffic
in imported merchandise throughout the country was still carried on
by pack-horse. One coach—or “machine”—a month, ran between London and
Edinburgh, and took a fortnight on the road. A similar conveyance between
London and Portsmouth took, under the most favourable conditions, two
whole days. The mails went by postboy, and hardly a week passed without
people failing to get their letters, because the local postboy had been
stopped by a highwayman. Gibbets, indeed, with the bleached bones of
these gentry in chains, stood on every main road out of London. Pirates
were still from time to time publicly borne from the Old Bailey down the
Thames in boats, heavily chained, to be hanged at Execution Dock and
gibbeted at Galleons Point—on the average half a dozen a year. Just as
the Admiralty draughtsmen were outlining the plans of the _Victory_, the
news of the hour for nine people out of ten in England was the committal
of Eugene Aram to York Castle for the murder of Daniel Clark.
[Illustration: AT PORTSMOUTH POINT
_Thomas Rowlandson._]
[Illustration: IN PORTSMOUTH HARBOUR
_Thomas Rowlandson._]
On the day that the _Victory’s_ keel was laid two men were pilloried in
Cheapside for blackmailing a City merchant, and a bad egg accidentally
hitting the Sheriff’s officer in charge of the proceedings led to a riot
and fighting with drawn swords. On the day before the _Victory_ was
launched, one Mary Norwood, an unfaithful wife, condemned at Taunton
Assizes for poisoning her husband, was publicly strangled in the
market-place of Ilverston, her home, and her body tied to the stake and
burned before several hundred spectators.
So far back does the life-story of our “old” _Victory_ take us, touching
at either end the middle of the eighteenth century and the opening years
of the twentieth, directly linking King George the Second with King
Edward the Seventh.
HOW THEY BUILT THE _VICTORY_ AT CHATHAM
This is the story of the building of the _Victory_ at Chatham Dockyard,
and how, why, and when the order to set to work on this particular
first-rate man-of-war was given.
On the 20th of September, 1758, Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty,
after commanding at sea on Special Service off the coast of France all
the summer, arrived in London to resume his duties on the Board. Nine
days later, in the old parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was
born into this world the infant boy to whom six days later was given the
name Horatio Nelson. The two dates are a coincidence of interest in our
story of the _Victory_.
Anson came back to town to hold conference with Mr. Secretary Pitt,
the War Minister. Pitt had laid his plans for the future, and was
ready. There were first of all to be no more half-military, half-naval
expeditions up and down the coast of France. They had done little real
harm to the enemy, and in two cases had ended in downright failure. The
wits of St. James’s were not to get a second chance for a sneer that
“the French were not to be conquered by every Duke of Marlborough” (an
allusion to the general commanding the troops employed—the second Duke).
The Channel Fleet was not to be received a second time on returning to
Spithead with a dumb peal on the bells of Portsmouth Church. That plan
of campaign had been to some extent a legacy to Pitt from the previous
Ministry; he was prepared now to set on foot his own scheme. Great
Britain would henceforward take the offensive vigorously and deal with
the enemy at all points. Pitt’s plan was to make it first and foremost
a naval war, to attack the oversea possessions of France all the world
over, utilizing every ship at the disposal of the nation. The striking
success achieved by Boscawen at Louisbourg had shown the way, and what
could be done.
The War Minister’s projects made known to him, Anson acted. On the 14th
of October the First Lord called on the Navy Board—the Department
charged with the general administration and dockyard business of the
Navy—for a detailed return of every seaworthy ship in the fleet, and
of every ship capable of being made seaworthy. On the 24th of October
he called for a Supplementary Return of the older ships, which, if for
the present available, would necessarily, through wear and tear, go
off the effective within three years and need replacing. Both returns,
from details specially supplied by each dockyard, were presented to the
Admiralty on the last day of November. They were considered forthwith,
and a decision in regard to them was come to on the 13th of December.
Five days later, as the result, a shipbuilding programme to add twelve
ships of the line to the fleet was laid, with the Navy Estimates for
the coming year, on the table of the House of Commons. Nine of the
twelve men-of-war proposed were to be put in hand at once—five in the
dockyards and four in merchants’ yards. At the head of the list was a
new first-rate of a hundred guns, as to the preparations for which the
Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard had already received instructions. That
ship was the future _Victory_.
* * * * *
They were ready at Chatham. They had been expecting an order of the
kind for some years. Ever since, indeed, the autumn of 1746, when the
Admiralty had made inquiries at Chatham in regard to a new first-rate
that it was then proposed to build at Chatham, “in the room,” as the
official term went, of the three-decker _Victory_, old Admiral Balchen’s
ship, lost with nine hundred men and officers on board, on the Casquets
in the terrible shipwreck of October, 1744. The project for various
reasons had been shelved, but the dockyard authorities at Chatham had
not lost sight of it. To that fact, probably, we owe it that the next
_Victory_, when she at length did come into existence, lasted to fight at
Trafalgar, and also, in some degree, that the _Victory_ remains afloat at
the present hour.