PART VII

WILLIAM III AND ANNE

I. RUSSELL, 1691

II.  ROOKE, 1703

LORD TORRINGTON, TOURVILLE AND HOSTE

INTRODUCTORY

No one document probably possesses so much importance for the history of naval tactics as the instructions issued by Admiral Russell in 1691.  Yet it is a remarkable thing that their tenour was unknown—­indeed their existence was wholly unsuspected—­until a copy of them was happily discovered in Holland by Sir William Laird Clowes.  By him it was presented to the United Service Institution, and the thanks of the Society are due to him and the Institution that these instructions are now at last available for publication.

They form part of a complete printed set of Fleet Instructions, entitled ’Instructions made by the Right Honourable Edward Russell, admiral, in the year 1691, for the better ordering of the fleet in sailing by day and night, and in fighting.’  Besides the Fighting Instructions we have a full set of signals both for day and night properly indexed, instructions for sailing in a fog, instructions to be observed by younger captains to the elder, instructions for masters, pilots, ketches, hoys, and smacks attending the fleet, and the usual instructions for the encouragement of captains and companies of fireships, small frigates and ketches.  Now this is the precise form in which all fleet instructions were issued, with scarcely any alteration, up to the conclusion of the War of American Independence,[1] and the peculiar importance of this set of articles therefore is, that in them we have the first known example of those stereotyped Fighting Instructions to which, as all modern writers seem agreed, was due the alleged decadence of naval tactics in the eighteenth century.

This being so, they clearly demand the most careful consideration.  ‘The English,’ says Captain Mahan in his latest discussion of the subject, ’in the period of reaction which succeeded the Dutch Wars produced their own caricature of systematised tactics,[2] and this may be taken as well representing the current judgment.  But when we come to study minutely these orders of Russell, and to study them in the light of the last of the Duke of York’s and the observations thereon in the Admiralty Manuscript, as well as of the views of the great French admirals of the time, we may well doubt whether the judgment does not require modification.  We may doubt, that is, whether Russell’s orders, so far from being a caricature of what had gone before, were not rather a sagacious attempt to secure that increase of manoeuvring power and squadronal control which had been found essential to any real advance in tactics.