It was as a general officer, as an admiral commanding great fleets and bearing responsibilities unusually grave through a most critical period of his country’s history, that Jervis made his high and deserved reputation.  For this reason, the intervening years, though pregnant with the finished character and distinguished capacity which fitted him for his onerous work, and though by no means devoid of incident, must be hastily sketched.  The Treaty of Paris, which in 1763 closed the Seven Years War, was followed by twelve years of peace.  Then came the American Revolution, bringing in its train hostilities with France and Spain.  During the peace, Jervis for nearly four years commanded a frigate in the Mediterranean.  It is told that while his ship was at Genoa two Turkish slaves escaped from a Genoese galley, and took refuge in a British boat lying at the mole, wrapping its flag round their persons.  Genoese officers took them forcibly from the boat and restored them to their chains.  Jervis resented this, as being not only an insult to the British flag, but also an enforcement of slavery against men under its protection; and so peremptory was his tone that an apology was made, the two captives were given up on the frigate’s quarter-deck, and the offending officers punished.  The captain’s action, however, was not sustained by his own government.  It is curious to note that, notwithstanding his course in this case, and although he was not merely nominally, but strenuously, a Whig, or Liberal, in political faith, connected by party ties with Fox and his coterie of friends, Jervis was always opposed to the abolition of the slave trade and to the education of the lower orders.  Liberty was to him an inherited worship, associated with certain stock beliefs and phrases, but subordination was the true idol of his soul.

In 1775 Captain Jervis commissioned the Foudroyant, of eighty-four guns, a ship captured in 1758 from the French, and thereafter thought to be the finest vessel in the British fleet.  To this, her natural superiority, Jervis added a degree of order, discipline, and drill which made her the pride and admiration of the navy.  He was forty when his pennant first flew from her masthead, and he held the command for eight years, a period covering the full prime of his own maturity, as well as the entire course of the American Revolution.  It was also a period marked for him, professionally, less by distinguished service than by that perfection of military organization, that combination of dignified yet not empty pomp with thorough and constant readiness, which was so eminently characteristic of all the phases of Jervis’s career, and which, when the rare moments came, was promptly transformed into unhesitating, decisive, and efficient action.  The Foudroyant, in her state and discipline, was the type in miniature of Jervis’s Mediterranean fleet, declared by Nelson to be the finest body of ships he had ever known; nay, she was the precursor of that regenerate British navy in which Nelson found the instruments of his triumphs.  Sixty years later, old officers recalled the feelings of mingled curiosity and awe with which, when sent to her on duty from their own ships, they climbed on board the Foudroyant, and from the larboard side of her quarter-deck gazed upon the stern captain, whose qualities were embodied in his vessel and constituted her chief excellences.