They are accompanied however in the ‘Sea Book’ by three ’Further Instructions,’ which do not appear in any previous set.  They are of the highest importance and mark a great stride in naval tactics, a stride which owing to Granville Penn’s error is usually supposed to have been taken in the previous war.  For the first time they introduced rules for engaging when the two fleets get contact on opposite tacks, and establish the much-abused system of stretching the length of the enemy’s line and then bearing down together.  But it must be noted that this rule only applies to the case where the fleets are approaching on opposite tacks and the enemy is to leeward.  There is also a peremptory re-enunciation of the duty of keeping the line and the order enforced by the penalty of death for firing ’over any of our own ships.’  Here then we have apparently a return to the Duke of York’s belief in formal tactics, and it is highly significant that, although the twenty-six original articles incorporate and codify all the other scattered additional orders of the last war, they entirely ignore those issued by Monck and Rupert during the Four Days’ Battle.

We have pretty clear evidence of the existence at this period of two schools of tactical opinion, which after all is no more than experience would lead us to suspect, and which Pepys’s remarks have already indicated.  As usual there was the school, represented by the Duke of York and Penn, which inclined to formality, and by pedantic insistence on well-meant principles tended inevitably to confuse the means with the end.  On the other hand we have the school of Monck and Rupert, which was inclined anarchically to submit all rules to the solvent of hard fighting, and to take tactical risks and unfetter individual initiative to almost any extent rather than miss a chance of overpowering the enemy by a sudden well-timed blow.  Knowing as we do the extent to which the principles of the Duke of York’s school hampered the development of fleet tactics till men like Hawke and Nelson broke them down, we cannot but sympathise with their opponents.  Nor can we help noting as curiously significant that whereas it was the soldier-admirals who first introduced formal tactics, it was a seaman’s school that forced them to pedantry in the face of the last of the soldier-school, who tried to preserve their flexibility, and keep the end clear in view above the means they had invented.

Still it would be wrong to claim that either school was right.  In almost every department of life two such schools must always exist, and nowhere is such conflict less inevitable than in the art of war, whether by sea or land.  Yet just as our comparatively high degree of success in politics is the outcome of the perpetual conflict of the two great parties in the state, so it is probably only by the conflict of the two normal schools of naval thought that we can hope to work out the best adjusted compromise between free initiative and concentrated order.