Note 1287 — THE COMMONWEALTH 1649-1660

It is advisable to dwell on this point because the late Mrs Everett Green (Preface to Calendar of State Papers, 1649-50, p. 24), said, speaking of the Commonwealth seamen generally, that ‘disaffection and mutiny were frequent among them,’ and writers of less weight have echoed this opinion. The instances of mutiny were in reality very few—seven between 1649 and 1660—were not serious, and were, in every case but one attributable to drunkenness or to wages and prize money remaining unpaid, the single exception being due to the refusal of a crew to proceed to sea in what they held to be an unseaworthy ship. This is a very trifling number compared with the series of such events occurring during nearly every year of the reign of Charles I. Of disaffection in the sense of a leaning towards the Stewarts there is not a trace among the men, and but two or three examples among officers. The exiles in France and Holland, with that optimism peculiar to the unfortunate, were continually anticipating that ships and men were coming over to the royal cause, an anticipation never once verified in the event. The analogue of the seventeenth century seaman, if he exists to-day at all, is to be found, not in the man-of-war’s man, who now has literary preferences and an account in the ship’s savings bank, but in the rough milieu of a trader’s forecastle, and among men of this type violence, or even an outbreak of savage ruffianism, by no means necessarily implies serious ground of discontent, but may be owing to one of many apparently inadequate causes. There were no such outbreaks among the Commonwealth seamen, and the punishments for drunkenness and insubordination were not disproportionate to the number of men employed, but if that is made an argument it should also be applied to the army; nearly every page of Whitelocke furnishes us with instances of officers and men being broken, sentenced, or dismissed for theft, insubordination, and sometimes disaffection, but no one has yet suggested that the army yearned to restore the Stewarts. The two most striking examples of these mutinies usually quoted are those of the Hart in 1650 and the riotous assemblies in London in 1653. In the case of the Hart what actually happened was that, the captain and officers being on shore, 28 out of the 68 men on board seized the ship when the others were below, with the intention, according to one contemporary writer, of taking her over to Charles, according to another, of turning pirates, and according to a third, because they were drunk. Perhaps all three causes were at work, seeing that the mutineers soon quarrelled among themselves, and the loyal majority of the crew regained possession of the ship and brought her back to Harwich. Yet I have seen a serious writer quote the Hart as an example of desertion to the royalists, an error probably due to the fact that she was afterwards captured by the Dutch, and eventually sailed under a Stewart commission until she blew up at the Canaries. In October 1653 there were tumults in London, due entirely to the non-payment of prize money, and these, it is true, required to be suppressed by military force. But this riot, extending over two days, was the only instance in which the government found difficulty in dealing with the men, and does not warrant a general charge of disloyalty during eleven years. If a detailed examination of the remaining instances were worth the space, they could be shown to be equally due to causes remote from politics. Historically, a mutiny among English seamen has never necessarily signified disloyalty to the de facto sovereign or government; the mutineers at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 were especially careful to declare their loyalty to the crown, and their failure at the Nore was probably due to the extent to which they carried this feeling. If the character of the service rendered to the republic is compared with that given to Charles I, it is difficult to understand how the charge of disaffection can be maintained.