tactics and strategy, at least so far as it had then been tried.  Penn, the vice-admiral of the fleet, was a professional naval officer of considerable experience, and it was he who by a bold and skilful movement had saved the action off Portland from being a severe defeat for Blake and Deane.  Monck’s therefore was the only new mind that was brought to bear on the subject.  Yet it is impossible to credit him with introducing a revolution in naval tactics.  All that can be said is that possibly his genius for war and his scientific and well-drilled spirit revealed to him in the traditional minor tactics of the seamen the germ of a true tactical system, and caused him to urge its reduction into a definite set of fighting instructions which would be binding on all, and would co-ordinate the fleet into the same kind of homogeneous and handy fighting machine that he and the rest of the Low Country officers had made of the New Model Army.  In any case he could not have carried the thing through unless it had commended itself to the experience of such men as Penn and the majority of the naval officers of the council of war.  And they would hardly have been induced to agree had they not felt that the new instructions were calculated to bring out the best of the methods which they had empirically practised.

How far the new orders were carried out during the rest of the war is difficult to say.  In both official and unofficial reports of the actions of this time an almost superstitious reverence is shown in avoiding tactical details.  Nevertheless that a substantial improvement was the result seems clear, and further the new tactics appear to have made a marked impression upon the Dutch.  Of the very next action, that off the Gabbard on June 2, when Monck was left in sole command, we have a report from the Hague that the English ’having the wind, they stayed on a tack for half an hour until they put themselves into the order in which they meant to fight, which was in file at half cannon-shot,’ and the suggestion is that this was something new to the Dutch.  ‘Our fleet,’ says an English report by an eye-witness, ’did work together in better order than before and seconded one another.’  Then there is the important testimony of a Royalist intelligencer who got his information at the Hague on June 9, from the man who had brought ashore the despatches from the defeated Dutch fleet.  After relating the consternation which the English caused in the Dutch ranks as well by their gunnery as their refusal to board, he goes on to say, ’It is certain that the Dutch in this fight (by the relation and acknowledgment of Tromp’s own express sent hither, with whom I spoke) showed very great fear and were in very great confusion, and the English he says fought in excellent order.’[6]