British Naval Policy - 1860-1890
The Victorian Era in England began in 1819 when Victoria was born, and ended with her death in 1901. Queen Victoria's was an age of invention, industrial expansion, and the indomitable imperialism that gave rise to the quotation, "The sun never sets on the British Empire." It was also a time of cultural flowering: along with Rudyard Kipling, the era welcomed such literary luminaries as Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
British colonial expansion reached its height largely during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Queen Victoria's reign witnessed the spread of British technology, commerce, language, and government throughout the British Empire, which, at its greatest extent, encompassed roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of the world's area and population. British colonies contributed to the United Kingdom's extraordinary economic growth and strengthened its voice in world affairs. In 1876 Queen Victoria became the first British queen who was also the formal Empress of India. Even as the United Kingdom extended its imperial reach overseas, it continued to develop and broaden its democratic institutions at home. Victoria was a royal icon, a symbol of an important age, for in her time Britain became a pervasive and influential global presence, the largest empire the world had ever seen, ruling one quarter of the world's population and land.
From the gigantic Napoleonic struggle at the dawn of the nineteenth century, England issued the undoubted victor on the seas. The French fleet had disappeared from the ocean, and so had all the other fleets of the continental powers, with the single exception of Russia, whose ships, though, remained confined to the Baltic in their sphere of activity. With no rivals to dispute its absolute sway, the island empire was enabled to gather leisurely and uninterruptedly the fruits of its blood-bought achievements.
During a century England was forming her world empire, and girding the earth with an unbroken chain of prosperous and profitable colonies, and her commerce made the entire globe tributary to her merchant princes in the city. Her industry rose to fabulous heights, and London became the emporium of the world. Nobody stood in her way. The continental powers were still bleeding from the awful wounds which twenty years of incessant warfare had struck, and when these at last had closed and healed, internal troubles arose, striving for a measure of that constitutional liberty which England had enjoyed so long, and then aspirations for national unification - all these engrossing the attention and monopolizing the energies of these less favoured peoples to the exclusion of all transmarine adventures, and of a naval policy.
It was only during the reign of Napoleon III that England's old rival, France, appeared once more on the field with a very respectable navy. Oddly enough, its first achievements were not directed against England, but on the contrary it acted during the Crimean War as her faithful ally, accomplished considerable, and was in point of strength but very little behind that of the insular power. It was France which at that time, on the occasion of the bombardment of Kinburn, first employed iron-clad batteries, and which soon after built the first iron-clad vessel, the Gloire.
The military adventures of Napoleon III raised fears that he was embarking on a policy deliberately intended to reverse the territorial arrangements made in 1815 at Vienna, and even to humiliate in succession the Great Powers by whom these arrangements had been imposed on France. The knowledge that Napoleon was strengthening his own fleet, suggested the suspicion that the next blow might be aimed at England, and created the apprehension that the defences of the country, neglected during a long period of peace, might be unequal to withstand the invasion on which some people thought that the Emperor had already determined.
The result was what the Liberal statesman Richard Cobden called the "Panic of 1859." Many members of the Cabinet wished to take steps to guard the country from attack. Haunted by the apprehension that steam, in Lord Palmerston's phrase, "had bridged the Channel," they desired to fortify the most important and most exposed positions on the coast. The more extravagant of these alarmists actually suggested the construction of a ring of forts round the whole island.
A silent conflict went on during 1860 between the policy that found expression in the Commercial Treaty with France, and that which was typified by the Fortification Scheme of Lord Palmerston. The vast fiscal changes involved by the Treaty were based on the supposition that France would be at peace with Britain, yet the Fortification Scheme clearly rested on the assumption that France would soon be involved in war.
The Royal Commission on National Defences, appointed in 1859 to consider the matter, recommended the fortification of the chief dockyards. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary for War, who had persuaded himself that war with France was imminent, staked his position as a Cabinet Minister on the acceptance of the Royal Commissioners' scheme. Lord Palmerston, whose distrust of Napoleon III was continually increasing, vigorously supported him ; and the Cabinet, as a whole, was naturally disposed to accept their recommendations.
There was, however, a considerable party both in the country and in the House of Commons who did not agree with this opinion. The safety of Great Britain - they were already urging - was to be found not in fixed fortifications but in a mobile fleet ; and money would be better spent in increasing the navy.
On 23 July 1860, Prime Minister Palmerston brought this important national question before the House of Commons. In proposing the Resolution, the object of which was to carry into effect the recommendations of the Royal Commission, Lord Palmerston observed that, after the conclusiomi of the great war, in which British supremacy at sea had been established, a long continuance of peace was calculated upon, and the Government had thought it unnecessary to call upon the country to secure British dockyards against the distant contingency of a war. And as long as the fleet depended upon the wind and the weather alone, Palmerston said Britain did right to rest upon the strength she possessed. Gradually, however, steam became the moving power, which altered the character of naval war fare, and impaired the advantages of Britian's insular position by bridging over the Channel.
One of the last events of the Session was a spirited debate on 26 June 1861 on the demand of the Government for £200,000 for new ironclads. Palmerston, by dwelling on the growth of the French navy, frightened Parliament into granting the money, and the Manchester Radicals were fain to hold their peace. Mr. Disraeli, however, rather leant to the Peace Party in this debate. He suggested that diplomacy might effect a friendly understanding with France which would fix the relative proportions between the two- navies, but his followers, who were bellicose, listened to him with amazement and anger. It did not occur to them that he was already speculating on the prospect of being in office next year, and was preparing the way for a friendly reception at the Tuileries.
In England, where they had allowed the fleet to gradually diminish to half its former size, the new danger of this marine rivalship was clearly apprehended. From that time on it became the naval policy of England, a policy scarce influenced by changes in party administration, to maintain at whatever cost that naval supremacy which had brought the country to the pinnacle of political and material power.
This for many years was no hard task for England, for after her crushing defeat in 1870-71 France was in no condition to resume her former colonial and naval ambitions, but was compelled to rally all her energies in recovering from the awful blow she had sustained. And outside of France there was no power which owned a navy at all commensurate with England's. There came a time, however, when these favourable conditions ceased to exist.
There was a keen competition among both political parties in the United Kingdom to reduce the expenditure upon the fleet to the lowest possible limit, though that limit the fleet to the lowest possible limit, though that limit was incompatible with national security. In this rivalry the Conservative party vied with the Liberal party, with the result that in the early 1880s the strength of the British fleet had been so greatly reduced and Britain's position had become so insecure that public opinion, although then singularly badly informed on naval matters, was aroused and the professional politicians who had been too absorbed in party warfare to take account of the movement of events, particularly in France, were at last forced to turn their attention to the fleet.
When the Russo-Turkish war broke out in 1877, a panic scare arose and the House of Commons had suddenly thrown at it a peremptory demand for a special vote for the navy of six millions for a typical "scare programme." With this money a number of inferior ships were obtained at high prices, the fleet gained in strength hardly appreciably and public anxiety subsided. Even this incident left the professional politician blind to the course of events.
By the middle of the eighties, France's navy once more took her stand on the oceans, grown again to man's size, and Russia suddenly began to deploy considerable naval forces both in the Baltic and in the Black Sea. It was, too, precisely at that time that the attitude of both these powers toward England became nothing less than threatening. As another rather formidable naval power Italy had come to the front. It is certain that at this particular turn in the wheel, England's sea supremacy was most seriously endangered, especially as Gladstone's weak and vacillating foreign policy then extended to the naval policy as well, and the steady enlargement of the British fleet came for a period to a halt.
If France at that time had not continued to anxiously stare at the "gap in the Vosges," left there after 1871, England's practical seizure of Egypt would not have been possible, and the Suez Canal would still remain what it since ceased to be - neutral in the full sense. But this state of temporary weakness came soon to a close.
In 1884 [and 1888 and 1893] there followed the series of naval agitations, undignified in their expression, costly in their operation and baneful in their influence upon relations with foreign Powers. Fortunately at this time France was the only power in Europe which devoted a considerable proportion of its revenue to naval defense, and in the early 1880s public opinion rested satisfied with the standard of British expenditure which aimed to maintain the fleet at a slight margin of superiority to that of France alone, so that the professional politician was not greatly disturbed by the pressure which was put upon him to keep ahead of France in naval preparations. From year to year, however, the outlay upon the navy fluctuated violently.
In July, 1884, Lord Northbrook, the First Lord of the Admiralty in Mr. Gladstone's administration, publicly declared that if he had £3,000,000 to spend upon the Navy, that force was so sufficient and so efficient that he would not know on what to spend the money. Before the end of the year he was compelled to find out how to spend £5,500,000, and to spend them.
From a Liberal Government the Salisbury Government of 1886 inherited the completing of the Northbrook shipbuilding programme ; whose provisions were based, not upon any intelligible scheme of preparation for war but, upon the Russian war-scare. Those who were acquainted with the real posture of affairs were not deluded by the mere haphazard expenditure of a few millions, voted in order to soothe public opinion. Nor did ministers themselves deny the total inadequacy of their measures.
In March, 1886, when the Liberal administration was still in power, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford brought forward in the House of Commons an amendment empowering the Government to expend an additional sum of over £5,000,000 upon the construction of 35 cruisers, three armoured cruisers, and 21 torpedo craft; pointing out at the same time that the expenditure would provide employment for a large number of unemployed workmen, both skilled and unskilled. The amendment was defeated.
In spite of the naval agitation of 1885, in the opinion of Admiral Sir W. H. Colomb, the British strength in 1888 was less than that of France alone. Then came the naval movement of 1888. When this movement of public opinion first became clamant, Lord George Hamilton, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty, refused to admit that there was any necessity for increased appropriations for the fleet.
In 1889 Lord Salisbury emphasized the enormous importance of the British Navy by insisting that it should be equal to that of the two strongest foreign Powers, but it was not until 1895-98 that it became in any real sense worthy of the term 'modern.'
The four decades l860-l900 were essentially periods of experiment: that new types of ships were continually being evolved, to serve a comparatively short time, to be discarded and superseded by something newer, this latter also immediately finding a successor, until our fleets, when collected together for grand manoeuvres, presented tlie most amazing variety of types, so far as large armoured ships were concerned. During this time a large amount of money was always expended on smaller ships- frigates, corvettes, and gunboats in the earlier period, cruisers, torpedo boats, and destroyers in more recent years. In the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties (to a smaller extent) the British fleet abroad was much larger.
Before the year 1890, although the larger units of the fleet were built in batches of two, three, and four ships of the same tonnage and armament, there was no coordinated effort to attain homogeneity and standardization in our battle fleet. The year 1892 marks what may be termed the modern period, as in that year the Royal Sovereign class of eight ships was begun and these ships formed the precursors of a whole line of similar vessels, also built in batches, which in their main features closely resembled one amther. Without entering into tedious details it is sufficient to say that the Royal Sovereigns were ships of 14,150 tons, and that their main armament was four 13.5 in. guns, disposed in pairs, one at each end of the ship in barbettes, with a secondary armament of ten 6in. quick-firing guns on the broadside. They carried in addition sixteen 6 pounders, twelve 3 pounders, and eight machine guns. They were a great advance not only in power but in speed on all the big ships by which they had been preceded, and possessed the advantage, so important in a battle squadron, of complete homogeneity. Ships which have the same speed and the same turning circle can act together in battle in a manner impossible to the same number of vessels of diverse types.
This system evolved in 1892 was continued, due regard being paid to the progress of ordnance, armour, and torpedoes. What is noticeable in the period under review, however, is that in spite of retrogression here and there in the tonnage of our battleships the trend had generally been upwards. Thus the Inflexible 1881, the monster ship of her day, was 11,880 tons. Incidentally it may be remarked that she was rigged as a brig, that is to say with two masts and square yards of immense size, which when sail was made upon them in a strong breeze rendered her completely unmanageable. In 1890 came the Nile and Trafalgar of 11,940 tons, and then the Royal Sovereigns.
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