Penn as having been issued in 1647, but the original copy of the orders amongst the Penn Tracts (Sloane MSS. 1709, f. 55) is marked as having been delivered on May 2, 1648, to ’Captain William Penn, captain of the Assurance frigate and rear-admiral of the Irish Squadron.’  They are clearly based on the later precedents of Charles I, but it must be noted that Penn is told ‘to expect more particular instructions’ in regard to the fighting article.  We may assume therefore that the admiralty authorities already recognised the inadequacy of the established fighting instructions, and so soon as the pressure of that critical time permitted intended to amplify them.

Amongst those responsible for the orders however there is no name that can be credited with advanced views.  They were signed by five members of the Navy Committee, and at their head is Colonel Edward Mountagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich, but then only twenty-two years old.[1] Whether anything further was done is uncertain.  No supplementary orders have been found bearing date previous to the outbreak of the Dutch war.  But there exists an undated set which it seems impossible not to attribute to this period.  It exists in the Harleian MSS. (1247, ff. 43b), amongst a number of others which appear to have been used by the Duke of York as precedents in drawing up his famous instructions of 1665.  To begin with it is clearly later than the orders of 1648, upon which it is an obvious advance.  Then the use of the word ‘general’ for admiral, and of the word ‘sign’ for ‘signal’ fixes it to the Commonwealth or very early Restoration.  Finally, internal evidence shows it is previous to the orders of 1653, for those orders will be seen to be an expansion of the undated set so far as they go, and further, while these undated orders have no mention of the line, those of 1653 enjoin it.  They must therefore lie between 1648 and 1653, and it seems worth while to give them here conjecturally as being possibly the supplementary, or ’more particular instructions,’ which the government contemplated; particularly as this hypothesis gains colour from the unusual form of the heading ‘Instructions for the better ordering.’  Though this form became fixed from this time forward, there is, so far as is known, no previous example of it except in the orders which Lord Wimbledon propounded to his council of war in 1625, and those were also supplementary articles.[2]

Be this as it may, the orders in question do not affect the position that up to the outbreak of the First Dutch War we have no orders enjoining the line ahead as a battle formation.  Still we cannot entirely ignore the fact that, in spite of the lack of orders on the subject, traces of a line ahead are to be detected in the earliest action of the war.  Gibson, for instance, in his Reminiscences has the following passage relating to Blake’s brush with Tromp over the honour of the flag on May 9, 1652, before the outbreak of the war:[3] ’When the general