Читать книгу Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Julian Stafford Corbett - Страница 30

No fighting instructions known to have been issued in the reign of Elizabeth have been found, nor is there any indication that a regular order of battle was ever laid down by the seamen-admirals of her time.[1] Even Howard's great fleet of 1588 had twice been in action with the Armada before it was so much as organised into squadrons. If anything of the kind was introduced later in her reign Captain Nathaniel Boteler, who had served in the Jacobean navy and wrote on the subject early in the reign of Charles I, was ignorant of it. In his Dialogues about Sea Services, he devotes the sixth to 'Ordering of Fleets in Sailing, Chases, Boardings and Battles,' but although he suggests a battle order which we know was never put in practice, he is unable to give one that had been used by an English fleet.[2] It is not surprising. In the despatches of the Elizabethan admirals, though they have much to say on strategy, there is not a word of fleet-tactics, as we understand the thing. The domination of the seamen's idea of naval warfare, the increasing handiness of ships, the improved design of their batteries, the special progress made by Englishmen in guns and gunnery led rapidly to the preference of broadside gunfire over boarding, and to an exaggeration of the value of individual mobility; and the old semi-military formations based on small-arm fighting were abandoned.

At the same time, although the seamen-admirals did not trouble or were not sufficiently advanced to devise a battle order to suit their new weapon, there are many indications that, consciously or unconsciously, they developed a tendency inherent in the broadside idea to fall in action into a rough line ahead; that is to say, the practice was usually to break up into groups as occasion dictated, and for each group to deliver its broadsides in succession on an exposed point of the enemy's formation. That the armed merchantmen conformed regularly to this idea is very improbable. The faint pictures we have of their well-meant efforts present them to us attacking in a loose throng and masking each other's fire. But that the queen's ships did not attempt to observe any order is not so clear. When the combined fleet of Howard and Drake was first sighted by the Armada, it is said by two Spanish eye-witnesses to have been in ala, and 'in very fine order.' And the second of Adams's charts, upon which the famous House of Lords' tapestries were designed, actually represents the queen's ships standing out of Plymouth in line ahead, and coming to the attack in a similar but already disordered formation. Still there can be no doubt that, however far a rudimentary form of line ahead was carried by the Elizabethans, it was a matter of minor tactics and not of a battle order, and was rather instinctive than the perfected result of a serious attempt to work out a tactical system. The only actual account of a fleet formation which we have is still on the old lines, and it was for review purposes only. Ubaldino, in his second narrative, which he says was inspired by Drake,[3] relates that when Drake put out of Plymouth to receive Howard 'he sallied from port to meet him with his thirty ships in equal ranks, three ships deep, making honourable display of his masterly and diligent handling, with the pinnaces and small craft thrown forward as though to reconnoitre the ships that were approaching, which is their office.' Nothing, however, is more certain in the unhappily vague accounts of the 1588 campaign than that no such battle order as this was used in action against the Armada.

It is not till the close of the West Indian Expedition of 1596, when, after Hawkins and Drake were both dead, Colonel-General Sir Thomas Baskerville, the commander of the landing force, was left in charge of the retreating fleet, that we get any trace of a definite battle formation. In his action off the Isla de Pinos he seems, so far as we can read the obscure description, to have formed his fleet into two divisions abreast, each in line ahead. The queen's ships are described at least as engaging in succession according to previous directions till all had had 'their course.' Henry Savile, whose intemperate and enthusiastic defence of his commander was printed by Hakluyt, further says: 'Our general was the foremost and so held his place until, by order of fight, other ships were to have their turns according to his former direction, who wisely and politicly had so ordered his vanguard and rearward; and as the manner of it was altogether strange to the Spaniard, so might they have been without hope of victory, if their general had been a man of judgment in sea-fights.'

Here, then, if we may trust Savile, a definite battle order must have been laid down beforehand on the new lines, and it is possible that in the years which had elapsed since the Armada campaign the seamen had been giving serious attention to a tactical system, which the absence of naval actions prevented reaching any degree of development. Had the idea been Baskerville's own it is very unlikely that the veteran sea-captains on his council of war would have assented to its adoption. At any rate we may assert that the idea of ships attacking in succession so as to support one another without masking each other's broadside fire (which is the essential germ of the true line ahead) was in the air, and it is clearly on the principle that underlay Baskerville's tactics that Ralegh's fighting instructions were based twenty years later.[4]

These which are the first instructions known to have been issued to an English fleet since Henry VIII's time were signed by Sir Walter Ralegh on May 3, 1617, at Plymouth, on the eve of his sailing for his ill-fated expedition to Guiana. Most of the articles are in the nature of 'Articles of War' and 'Sailing Instructions' rather than 'Fighting Instructions,' but the whole are printed below for their general interest. A contemporary writer, quoted by Edwards in his Life of Ralegh, says of them: 'There is no precedent of so godly, severe, and martial government, fit to be written and engraven in every man's soul that covets to do honour to his king and country in this or like attempts.' But this cannot be taken quite literally. So far at least as they relate to discipline, some of Ralegh's articles may be traced back in the Black Book of the Admiralty to the fourteenth century, while the illogical arrangement of the whole points, as in the case of the Additional Fighting Instructions of the eighteenth century, to a gradual growth from precedent to precedent by the accretion of expeditional orders added from time to time by individual admirals. The process of formation may be well studied in Lord Wimbledon's first orders, where Ralegh's special expeditional additions will be found absorbed and adapted to the conditions of a larger fleet. Moreover, there is evidence that, with the exception of those articles which were designed in view of the special destination of Ralegh's voyage, the whole of them were based on an early Elizabethan precedent. For the history of English tactics the point is of considerable importance, especially in view of his twenty-ninth article, which lays down the method of attack when the weather-gage has been secured. This has hitherto been believed to be new and presumably Ralegh's own, in spite of the difficulty of believing that a man entirely without experience of fleet actions at sea could have hit upon so original and effective a tactical design. The evidence, however, that Ralegh borrowed it from an earlier set of orders is fairly clear.

Amongst the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum there is a small quarto treatise (No. 426) entitled 'Observations and overtures for a sea fight upon our own coasts, and what kind of order and discipline is fitted to be used in martialling and directing our navies against the preparations of such Spanish Armadas or others as shall at any time come to assail us.' From internal evidence and directly from another copy of it in the Lansdown MSS. (No. 213), we know it to be the work of 'William Gorges, gentleman.' He is to be identified as a son of Sir William Gorges, for he tells us he was afloat with his father in the Dreadnought as early as 1578, when Sir William was admiral on the Irish station with a squadron ordered to intercept the filibustering expedition which Sir Thomas Stucley was about to attempt under the auspices of Pope Gregory XIII. Sir William was a cousin of Ralegh's and brother to Sir Arthur Gorges, who was Ralegh's captain in the Azores expedition of 1597, and who in Ralegh's interest wrote the account of the campaign which Purchas printed. Though William, the son, freely quotes the experiences of the Armada campaign of 1588, he is not known to have ever held a naval command, and he calls himself 'unexperienced.' We may take it therefore that his treatise was mainly inspired by Ralegh, to whom indeed a large part of it is sometimes attributed. This question, however, is of small importance. The gist of the matter is a set of fleet orders which he has appended as a precedent at the end of his treatise, and it is on these orders that Ralegh's are clearly based. They commence with fourteen articles, consisting mainly of sailing instructions, similar to those which occur later in Ralegh's set. The fifteenth deals with fighting and bloodshed among the crews, and the sixteenth enjoins morning and evening prayer, with a psalm at setting the watch, and further provides that any man absenting himself from divine service without good cause shall suffer the 'bilboes,' with bread and water for twelve hours. The whole of this drastic provision for improving the seamen's morals has been struck out by a hurried and less clerkly hand, and in the margin is substituted another article practically word for word the same as that which Ralegh adopted as his first article. The same hand has also erased the whole numbering of the articles up to No. 16, and has noted that the new article on prayers is to come first.[5] The articles which follow correspond closely both in order and expression to Ralegh's, ending with No. 36, where Ralegh's special articles relating to landing in Guiana begin. Ralegh's important twenty-ninth article dealing with the method of attack is practically identical with that of Gorges. Ralegh, however, has several articles which are not in Gorges's set, and wherever the two sets are not word for word the same, Ralegh's is the fuller, having been to all appearances expanded from Gorges's precedent. This, coupled with the fact that other corrections beside those of the prayer article are embodied in Ralegh's articles, leaves practically no doubt that Gorges's set was the earlier and the precedent upon which Ralegh's was based.

An apparent difficulty in the date of Gorges's treatise need not detain us. It was dedicated on March 16, 1618–9, to Buckingham, the new lord high admiral, but it bears indication of having been written earlier, and in any case the date of the dedication is no guide to the date of the orders in the Appendix.

The important question is, how much earlier than Ralegh's are these orders of Gorges's treatise? Can we approximately fix their date? Certainly not with any degree of precision, but nevertheless we are not quite without light. To begin with there is the harsh punishment for not attending prayers, which is thoroughly characteristic of Tudor times. Then there is an article, which Ralegh omits, relating to the use of 'musket-arrows.' Gorges's article runs: 'If musket-arrows be used, to have great regard that they use not but half the ordinary charge of powder, otherwise more powder will make the arrow fly double.' Now these arrows we know to have been in high favour for their power of penetrating musket-proof defences about the time of the Armada. They were a purely English device, and were taken by Richard Hawkins upon his voyage to the South Sea in 1593. He highly commends them, but nevertheless they appear to have fallen out of fashion, and no trace of their use in Jacobean times has been found.[6]

A still more suggestive indication exists in the heading which is prefixed to Gorges's Appendix. It runs as follows:—'A form of orders and directions to be given by an admiral in conducting a fleet through the Narrow Seas for the better keeping together or relieving one another upon any occasion of distress or separation by weather or by giving chase. For the understanding whereof suppose that a fleet of his majesty's consisting of twenty or thirty sail were bound for serving on the west part of Ireland, as Kinsale haven for example.' The words 'his majesty' show the Appendix was penned under James I; but why did Gorges select this curious example for explaining his orders? We can only remember that it was exactly upon such an occasion that he had served with his father in 1578. There is therefore at least a possibility that the orders in question may be a copy or an adaptation of some which Sir William Gorges had issued ten years before the Armada. Certainly no situation had arisen since Elizabeth's death to put such an idea into the writer's head, and the points of rendezvous mentioned in Gorges's first article are exactly those which Sir William would naturally have given.

On evidence so inconclusive no certainty can be attained. All we can say is that Gorges's Appendix points to a possibility that Ralegh's remarkable twenty-ninth article may have been as old as the middle of Elizabeth's reign, and that the reason why it has not survived in the writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen's 'mystery' or were too trite or commonplace to need enunciation. At any rate in the face of the Gorges precedent it cannot be said, without reservation, that this rudimentary form of line ahead or attack in succession was invented by Ralegh, or that it was not known to the men who fought the Armada.

Amongst other articles of special interest, as showing how firmly the English naval tradition was already fixed, should be noticed the twenty-fifth, relating to seamen gunners, the twenty-sixth, forbidding action at more than point-blank range, and above all the fifth and sixth, aimed at obliterating all distinction between soldiers and sailors aboard ship, and at securing that unity of service between the land and sea forces which has been the peculiar distinction of the national instinct for war.

As to the tactical principle upon which the Elizabethan form of attack was based, it must be noted that was to demoralise the enemy—to drive him into 'utter confusion.' The point is important, for this conception of tactics held its place till it was ultimately supplanted by the idea of concentrating on part of his fleet.