but he never pushed his own interests.  His masculine independence in professional conduct, towards superiors and inferiors, found its root and its reflection in personal unconcern—­as well antecedent as subsequent—­about the results from his actions to his fortunes.  To do his own part to the utmost, within the lines of the profession he knew, was his conception of duty.  As he would not meddle with the land officers’ decision as to what they should or should not do, so he left to the politicians, in whose hands the gifts lay, to decide what they would, or should, accord to a successful admiral.  Pitt, the Great Commoner, left Hawke a commoner.  Possibly he recognized that only by stretch of imagination could Hawke be reckoned one of the creations of a great Minister’s genius.

Little remains to tell.  On September 3, 1762, the admiral’s flag was hauled down for the last time.  He never went to sea again.  In 1766, when Pitt came back to power as Lord Chatham, Hawke became First Lord of the Admiralty, and so remained till 1771.  It was a time of unbroken peace, succeeding a period of continuous wars extending over a quarter of a century; consequently there was in naval and military matters the lassitude usual to such a period.  Hawke is credited with formulating the principle that “the British fleet could only be termed considerable in the proportion it bore to that of the House of Bourbon;” that is, to the combined navies of France and Spain, over which that House then reigned.  The maxim proves that he had some claim to statesmanship in his view of affairs outside his service; and his manifested freedom from self-seeking is the warrant that no secondary political motives would divert his efforts from this aim.  That he succeeded in the main, that he was not responsible for the fallen condition of the fleet when war again arose in 1778, is evidenced by a statement, uncontradicted, in the House of Lords in 1779, that when he left office the navy had 139 ships-of-the-line, of which 81 were ready for sea.

In 1765 Hawke, who was then already a full admiral, wearing his flag at the mainmast head, was made Vice-Admiral of Great Britain; an honorary position, but the highest in point of naval distinction that the nation had to give.  As one who held it three-quarters of a century later wrote, “It has ever been regarded as the most distinguished compliment belonging to our profession.”  The coincidence is significant that upon Hawke’s death Rodney succeeded him in it; affirming, as it were, the consecutiveness of paramount influence exercised by the two on the development of the Navy.  In 1776 the peerage was at last conferred; seventeen years after his great victory, and when, having passed three score and ten, a man who had ever disdained to ask must have felt the honor barren to himself, though acceptable for his son.