Pepys's Navy by J. D. Davies

Author:J. D. Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Naval
ISBN: 9781783830220
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2008-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

The court martial of Admiral John Byng, 1757. Seventeenth century courts would have been organised in a similar way, although far fewer people would have been present than in this particularly high profile case – and, of course, the officers would not have been in uniform, which was not introduced into the navy until 1747.

(FROM THE LONDON MAGAZINE, 1757)

CHAPTER 32

Mutiny and Desertion

THE OFFENCE OF MUTINY

MUTINY WAS MUCH LESS COMMON in the seventeenth century than it later became.1 In part, this was because seamen had more ways in which they could make their voices heard, and often got a sympathetic hearing from their superiors, especially during the 1650s.* A significantly larger proportion of naval seamen were volunteers, many of whom would have had a vested interest in conforming to the system. The political circumstances were also more complex: the greatest ‘mutiny’ of the period, the revolt of much of the fleet in 1648, was partly a conventional mutiny over bread-and-butter issues, but on another level it was a Royalist uprising, and one of many consequences of the general discontent against parliamentary rule that triggered the ‘second civil war’. But it would be dangerous to assume that seamen were more quiescent in the late seventeenth century than in later years. The evidence is much thinner, and the extant records of mutiny are really just chance survivals. There is much more extensive evidence of desertion, and this suggests that many seamen of the time were sufficiently discontented with their lot to seek extreme solutions.

The set of Articles of War issued in 1652 mentioned mutiny twice, but both of these betray the contemporary conflation of mutiny and Royalist conspiracy. The twenty-first article prohibited ‘any words of sedition and [significantly, not ‘or’] uproar’ as well as making or attempting to make ‘any mutinous assemblies’. The twenty-second was directed against those who concealed ‘mutinous words, or any words spoken by any to the prejudice of the present state or government’.2 The twenty-first article became the nineteenth article of the 1661 Articles of War and survived unchanged, but the twenty-second article, which became the twentieth, now reflected a concern with suppressing republican discontent, prohibiting the concealment of any ‘trayterous or mutinous practices, designs or words, or any words spoken by any to the prejudice of his Majesty or Government, or any words, practices, or designs tending to the hinderance of the service …’.3 There was no single catch-all article prohibiting mutiny itself; this was introduced as the thirty-fourth article of the 1749 Articles of War, suggesting a growing concern during the eighteenth century with mutiny per se, rather than with expressions of political opposition to the regime in power.4 The definition of‘mutiny’ in the seventeenth century was therefore much looser than it later became, and was often applied simply to drunken or violent acts by individ-uals.5 The word was not used at all in cases like that of the crew of the Fox in 1665, who refused to go past Land’s End in her on the grounds

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