Heart of Oak Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World

On a blustery November day four centuries ago, the English were preparing

themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen.

Beneath the dome of St Paul's they gathered to celebrate

their tiny nation's victory over the world's greatest superpower, Spain.

On the walls hung the captured ensigns of the Spanish fleet, that was even then being dashed

on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland.

The year was 1588...

..and the battle was the Armada.

Today's celebrations mark the centenary of the Fleet Air Arm, and it still seems

like the most natural thing in the world to devote a great cathedral to the Royal Navy,

a tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago.

1588 marked a turning point in our national story.

Victory over the Armada transformed us

into a seafaring nation and it sparked a myth

that would one day become a reality, that the nation's new destiny,

the source of her future wealth and power, lay out there on the oceans.

This series tells the story of how the Navy expanded from a tiny force

to become the most complex industrial enterprise on Earth.

Of how the need to organise it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy.

Of how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity

and our democracy.

It's a story of heroism and innovation,

but also of disasters and dark chapters in our history.

It's the remarkable story of a 400-year struggle, fought at sea

and on land, of how the Navy drove Britain into the modern age and changed the world.

-Clear the hatch!

-England's extraordinary journey

from a third rate nation to global superpower

began on a clear October day 20 years before the Armada.

OK, bring on the beer.

Not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors

who scurried to and fro in the old harbour in Plymouth,

making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea.

The gangplank groaned as last minute supplies were brought on board.

Large barrels of fresh water and beer and even whinnying goats, and chickens as well.

When anything was brought on board they were lashed down

to the bulkheads in expectation of a bumpy passage.

The two men in command were cousins.

On that fine autumn day, they were thinking not about making war but about making money.

The older of the two was John Hawkins who, at the age of just 35,

was already Plymouth's leading merchant venturer.

The younger was his cousin,

a poor relation who'd grown up with Hawkins, 27-year-old Francis Drake.

They were leaving behind a poor, insignificant town on the edge of a poor, insignificant country

which itself clung to the fringes of Europe.

But this place had one thing going for it - this,

one of the finest natural harbours on Earth, gateway to the Atlantic and, beyond that, the New World.

First discovered only 60 years before,

the New World of the Americas offered wealth beyond imagining -

if they could get there and bring it back, that is.

A round trip of 12,000 miles.

No mean feat in the 1560s.

Stand by. Two, six!

Two, six! Two, six!

Take a break.

-Is that halfway?

-Yeah.

-You're kidding me!

-No!

This wonderful replica of the Tudor ship, The Matthew,

gives me a strong sense of what life might have been like on board.

Sailing one of these you're just so struck by the ingenuity, aren't you?

The sort of combination of wood, rope, bit of metal,

and you can sail round the other side of the world.

Among the profit-hungry investors in the venture was the Queen herself.

She'd lent two ships, the Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion.

Both were old, spent and rotten, as were most of the vessels in her tiny navy.

The crew, too, would get their share of the booty.

All were young. Some were just boys, among them Hawkins' nephew Paul

and the 13-year-old Miles Philips,

whose journal relates the terrors of frequent storms and leaking hulls.

There were no creature comforts for those on board either.

The single-minded Hawkins made his men sleep on deck.

Because every inch of hold space was reserved for the cargo that would make the cash.

On that expedition, the cargo was a human one.

Drake and Hawkins have the terrible distinction of being the first Englishmen

to bind African men, women and children in chains

and transport them in the holds of ships like this.

They were slave traders.

Six weeks out of Plymouth, they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea then headed west.

Few Englishmen had ever made this journey.

England had been slow to spot the opportunities of the New World and the Spanish had got their first.

Now Spain jealously guarded a lucrative American empire stretching from South America

through the Caribbean to Mexico and further north.

Drake and Hawkins just wanted a little slice of the action.

Nip in, sell a few slaves and return home with a hold full of silver.

The problem was that the Spanish had banned foreigners from trading within their lucrative empire.

Hawkins had managed it once or twice before and got away with it.

He hoped to do so again. But this time would be different.

In the Caribbean they traded their human cargo for silver, gold and pearls, then turned for home.

But it was hurricane season.

Storms drove them to San Juan on the coast of Mexico,

where a powerful Spanish fleet first promised them safe passage

then decided to teach them a violent lesson.

In the fight that followed, Hawkins lost three of his ships,

including the Jesus of Lubeck and 200 men killed or captured.

He managed to escape on the Minion,

and with him was the 13-year-old Miles Philips,

who watched what happened to the prisoners.

"They took our men ashore," he wrote,

"and hung them up by their arms until blood burst out from their fingers' ends."

And the moment of personal tragedy for Hawkins -

he realised that his nephew Paul was among them.

Disease and famine followed and by the time they limped home

fewer than 20 men were left alive aboard the Minion.

But, for the survivors, this disaster acted

not as a deterrent but as a spur to action.

The experience marked Drake and Hawkins for the rest of their lives.

Neither would ever forgive the Spanish for their treachery,

and they threw themselves into a bitter, personal crusade against Spain.

It was fuelled by the heady mix of a lust for cash, religious zealotry

and a desire for personal revenge.

In time, this crusade would become a national enterprise

and in doing so it would forge a new idea of Englishness.

But if England's seafarers were to have any chance of catching up with Spain,

they would need better ships to do it.

Hawkins' answer was the race-built galleon,

his radical breakthrough in warship design,

preserved in these original drawings.

By using maths and geometry instead of rule of thumb,

by cutting down high decks and by streamlining hulls,

Hawkins produced the fastest ships of their kind anywhere in the world.

The first was built in 1570 at the Queen's dockyard in Deptford.

More were to follow.

With greater space for guns, they were perfectly designed for war.

But 20 race-built galleons, the most the Tudor state could afford,

would not be enough on their own.

Hawkins landed a job on the Navy Board, the committee that ran the Queen's modest fleet.

And, in 1582, the board commissioned a series of extraordinary surveys

preserved here at the National Archives.

I've read about this but never seen it before.

This is a list of every ship in England compiled under Hawkins' leadership.

And as you can see, it's broken up by county.

Here Norfolk, Suffolk, absolutely meticulously written down. It's beautiful.

Every single ship, with the tonnage here, so these ones are St Mary, the Solomon, 200 tonnes.

Absolutely incredible.

As we go further on, here, they didn't just list the ships,

they list the masters and then the number of mariners

and seamen there are as well for each port.

So here we go. In Cornwall, there are 108 masters,

626 mariners and 1,184 seamen.

So precise. Incredible.

This information is being gathered centrally in London at the beck and call of the Tudor state.

It's actually very moving seeing the names of people that lived all those centuries ago.

Once you have a list like this, when war comes, when there's a national emergency,

you can knock on the door of men like John Cooper and Peter Dolomore

and say, "Right, mate, you're coming in the Navy to protect the country."

It does make you wonder whether men like William Bennett, William Mort

from Littleham, whether they end up fighting against the Spanish Armada.

And this is just fantastic. You get right to the end.

The total number of mariners available to the Tudor state,

16,259.

Men that could be mobilised to protect little England

against the greatest superpower in the world.

Drake, meanwhile, was taking his revenge on Spain in a much more direct fashion.

On an April day in 1587, the residents of Cadiz woke to the sound of gunfire.

By the end of the day, over 30 Spanish ships lay at the bottom of the harbour

and Drake's fleet had sailed away with holds full of treasure.

It was the culmination of a ten-year pillaging spree

that had seen Drake circumnavigate the globe,

attack Spanish colonies and steal their loot.

Belligerent, venal, a peerless seafarer,

he was Protestant England's new hero.

In Catholic Spain, he was anything but.

Standing here, looking at it from the Spanish point of view,

the English appear little different from Vikings.

Men who came from the north in ships bent on plunder and destruction, to whom nothing was sacred.

The most infamous of all was Drake,

still hated, still known as El Draque, The Dragon.

And now The Dragon had pushed the King of Spain

to take his own terrible revenge on Drake and England.

That revenge came in July 1588.

When the Armada appeared off England's coast,

one eye witness wrote that the ocean groaned under their weight.

It had taken Spain three years and a titanic amount of silver to assemble it,

while the English fleet had been mobilised in just three months.

The battle raged for several days.

But the leadership of men like Drake and Hawkins had given the English a decisive edge.

People have tended to attribute victory over the Spanish Armada

to the courage of the English sailors

or the intervention of divine wind.

But the Spanish fought equally bravely,

and at different stages of the campaign the wind favoured both sides.

The real reason is a lot less glamorous, it's the inspired organisation of Hawkins.

He ensured that England had a fleet of fast, manoeuvrable ships,

each of which carried something like three times the weight in armament of its Spanish equivalent.

He laid the foundations for modern naval warfare,

bringing ships, men and cannon together

in a decisive combination.

So when the great and the good arrived in their finery at St Paul's on that day in November 1588,

they were celebrating not just a victory,

but the beginning of a new future.

The Queen, as one author wrote, was carried in a golden chariot

through her city of London in robes of triumph...

while the still bloody heads of Catholic traitors,

executed for praying for the Armada's success,

stared down from spikes nearby.

The Tudor PR machine went into overdrive.

A new portrait showed the Queen triumphant, her hand on a globe,

the Spanish ships crushed on the rocks behind her.

The scale of the victory expanded the horizons of a small, impoverished nation.

One commentator wrote,

"The sea had become a means to seek new worlds,

"for gold, for praise, for glory."

# God save our gracious Queen... #

The English had been given a bright vision of a glittering future,

of riches beyond imagination,

of new frontiers that stretched way beyond the shores of tiny England.

Above all, it was a future that would be played out on the seas,

by the ships of the Navy and by a new breed of heroic seafarer.

England's view of its place in the world would never be the same again.

Guard of Honour, slope arms!

Right turn!

The Queen's navy had become a source of national pride as never before

and there was an insatiable demand for stories of seafaring adventure and discovery.

A new national identity - aggressive, ambitious and Protestant - was in the making.

If Hawkins was the architect of that new identity and Drake its firebrand,

then Richard Hakluyt was its biographer.

In 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, he wrote this.

"The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation."

An account of 1,600 years of history

containing over 250 seafaring adventures by Englishmen.

A mix of storytelling and myth making.

Here at the back of this one, for example, we have

Hawkins's ill-fated trip to the Caribbean, with Miles Philips' gruesome account

of the barbarous treatment they received at the hands of the Spaniards.

Here in the next volume we have the accounts of the defeat of the Spanish Armada itself, which ends

with this incredible paragraph that says, "Thus the magnificent, huge and mighty fleet of the Spaniards

"in the year 1588 vanished into smoke."

This was history with a purpose,

a call to arms to a nation on the verge of a new destiny.

That destiny could not have been made more obvious

than it was in a subsequent edition of Hakluyt's work,

which contained this stunning map.

This piece of paper is 400 years old.

It's incredibly beautiful.

Just look at the detail

of the world's coastlines and ports and rivers.

What's so remarkable about this map is that medieval maps show England

as an insignificant island clinging to the edge of Europe,

but now England's not at the edge. It's been picked up

and moved right to the heart of the world.

It's an image of the world we all recognise, but this map showed it for the first time.

It was a potent symbol of a nation that now had global ambitions.

Ships poured out of England,

bound for the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Baltic.

Numerous and aggressive, these English pioneers steadily eroded Spanish power

and founded the colonies that formed the beginnings of Britain's future empire.

Abroad and at home, business was booming.

Ports like East Looe in Cornwall now had scores of fishing boats

trading as far away as North America.

In these new, confident times they called themselves the western adventurers.

But economic success brought a new threat that no-one had foreseen.

Suddenly, whole fleets - 10 or 12 ships - would head out to sea and simply vanish.

There are reports of ships found floating out there in the Atlantic

without their crews, who were never seen again.

On one night in the summer of 1631,

in the village of Baltimore in southern Ireland,

over 100 people were removed from their beds,

leaving the place a ghost town.

A remarkable letter, written in August 1625, reveals the scale and horror of the problem.

It's from the mayor of Plymouth, Thomas Seeley, to the king's council.

"One poor maritime town in Cornwall called Looe hath within ten days

"lost 80 mariners, bound in fishing voyages to the deeps

"and there have been taken by the Turks."

Back then, Turks meant Muslims, and these were in fact pirates from North Africa.

Barbary pirates.

They came to these shores and took people as slaves back to North Africa.

It was a barbarous practice but it was, of course,

what these West Countrymen had been doing to Africans for decades now.

Even so, it turned the sea here from a source of wealth and prestige for England

into a place of terror and slavery.

The ports and fishing villages, it's said, were filled with

the pitiful lamentations of the victims' families.

In the next few years, Devon and Cornwall would lose a fifth of their shipping and crews.

This extraordinary and little-known episode in English history was to have far-reaching consequences.

Englishmen were bred on the myth of maritime invincibility.

But now they had to face hard truths.

Once the predators, they were now the prey, and people did what they usually did in a crisis.

They blamed the government. And they weren't entirely wrong.

Fishing vessel Trevose, fishing vessel Trevose.

This is protection vessel Tyne calling you channel one-six, over.

Tyne, Trevose.

I'm on one of the modern Navy's fishery protection vessels about 30 miles from Cornwall.

Just the territory where Barbary pirates

were seizing English shipping.

Trevose, this is Tyne. It's my intention to send a routine boarding team over to you.

My team will be with you in two-zero minutes, over.

In Elizabeth's time, the Queen's ships and the private vessels of freebooters like Drake

had kept these waters safe.

But the Queen was now dead.

The new Stuart regime had made peace with Spain and the Navy had been cut back.

With a predilection for self-aggrandisement,

the regime had spent its cash,

some of it raised illegally by notorious ship money,

on a few grand, vanity ships,

designed to impress the kings of Europe.

The trouble was, fishery protection wasn't the kind of job that these showy vessels were designed to do.

Just as the job that these guys do couldn't be done by an aircraft carrier.

In the absence of this kind of protection, the king's subjects,

particularly down here in the West Country, were completely vulnerable.

They and their cargoes made irresistible targets for North African pirates.

Shocked by the magnitude of the crisis,

West Country MP Sir John Elliot wrote to the king's council begging for action.

But the government did nothing.

Elliot was furious.

And he wasn't the only one.

Anger also oozes from the pages of this,

a best seller written around the time of the disappearances from East Looe.

It's called Sir Francis Drake Revived.

It's written by Drake's nephew,

and he recounts the glories and successes of what now seemed like a vanished age.

It's an indictment on the present with its all-pervasive sense of fear and its insecurity.

But it's also a call to arms, as the author makes very clear on the title page.

He writes, "Calling upon this dull or effeminate age,

"to follow his noble steps for gold and silver."

Sir John Elliot caught the mood,

calling for a return to the aggressive policies of the past.

England's new King, it seemed, was listening.

Charles I had been on the throne for just a few months

and, like a modern leader seeking crowd-pleasing policies in troubled times,

he funded an expedition to attack Spain.

It set sail from Plymouth in October 1625, waved off by a delighted John Elliot.

Their target was none other than Cadiz.

Their mission, a Drake-style smash and grab, returning home

with holds full of treasure to public acclaim.

But it didn't work out that way at all.

The expedition was commanded by Viscount Wimbledon, a man who'd never served at sea before

and was so indecisive his men quickly gave him the nickname "Viscount Sit Still".

Confusion reigned.

Ships collided and masts and rigging tumbled overboard.

When Sit Still ordered his captains to attack, many of them simply ignored him.

The lack of an experienced, charismatic commander, like Drake,

exposed terrible weaknesses in the English fleet.

Even with Drake in charge it would have been hard enough to impose order.

Now, many captains simply did as they wished.

They were a rabble.

The chaos continued when they landed 2,000 troops on the beach

but failed to give them any water.

The weather was scorching.

When they finally got into the town, these thirsty Englishmen stumbled on a warehouse.

It was full of wine.

All hell broke loose.

The men started drinking, and although the officers tried to stop them, it was no use.

"The whole army was drunken,"

wrote one eye witness, "and in one common confusion, some shooting at one another amongst themselves."

This wouldn't, of course, be the last time drunken English behaved disgracefully abroad.

But on this occasion, with the expedition descending into total farce,

the commanders had no choice but to call it off.

On the way home, farce turned to tragedy as disease took hold.

By the time they reached Plymouth, hundreds were dead and hundreds more were dying.

And who was standing up here waiting for them?

None other than Sir John Elliot.

The man who in October had waved them off with such high hopes

now stood on a miserable day just before Christmas 1625, as the fleet limped in.

"The miseries before us are great,"

he wrote, as he watched corpses being tossed into the harbour from the ships.

And later he saw sailors drop down dead in the streets of Plymouth.

But soon his compassion for the sailors turned into another emotion - rage.

News of the fiasco soon reached London,

and when Parliament convened, John Elliot was on his feet,

his anger echoing around St Stephen's Hall.

"Our honour is ruined. Our ships are sunk.

"Our men are killed, not by the sword, nor by the hand of an enemy,

"but by those we trust."

Those words, spoken by Elliot in this chamber, where the House of Commons used to meet,

were the sharpest denunciation of royal government ever heard in Parliament.

Cadiz, Elliot said, proved that the King was unfit to run the Navy.

In a series of extraordinary speeches in here, Elliot demanded

that Parliament take a greater role in overseeing the affairs of state.

When the Speaker, who sat in his chair on this spot,

tried to shut him up, Elliot hired three thugs to hold him down.

If it seemed like revolution was in the air, it was.

The King's failure to run a modern, efficient navy had sparked a constitutional crisis.

John Elliot was thrown into the Tower.

But a new generation of MPs,

immortalised here in St Stephen's Hall, took up his call for liberty.

Relations between King and Parliament collapsed.

In 1642, Charles fled London and the Civil War began.

By fleeing the capital, Charles lost control both of the Navy

and of the new, burgeoning maritime economy that it supported.

It made his defeat inevitable, and in 1649,

on the orders of England's new republic, he was executed.

Parliament acted quickly to secure control over the Navy, putting men of proven loyalty in charge.

They were known as the "generals at sea".

One of them was Robert Blake, West Country MP, hero of the Civil War,

and a radical protestant to boot.

Blake had never fought at sea.

Not a brilliant start for a man charged with protecting England's coasts against a multitude of foes.

But Blake understood warfare and men,

and he knew that chaos and indiscipline were as dangerous at sea as they were on land.

Command problems that had dogged the English expedition to Cadiz still remained.

In one of his first battles, he was appalled to see his captain disobey his orders and flee.

He knew he had to find a way to assert his control.

His solution was to produce the Navy's first ever

set of rules and regulations,

the Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea, in 1652.

For the first time, it gave English commanders a fighting chance of issuing orders that would be obeyed.

Port 15.

It was a list of 39 offences,

from stealing to spying, from cowardice to sleeping on duty.

Most were punishable by death.

Blake even sacked his own brother for discipline offences.

The Laws of War offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea...

..that would later be applied through all areas of government.

Blake was just what the Navy needed, a tough outsider.

He could see that over the previous 50 years the Navy had vacillated wildly

between great successes like the Armada and total failures like Cadiz, but there was no reliability.

Under charismatic leadership of men like Drake, the English could be great successes.

But otherwise, denied that leadership, failure was often the result.

Blake imposed order and discipline.

He ensured that no matter who was in charge, the Navy would be effective.

Blake left behind a navy that was larger and more disciplined than the country had ever known before.

The powerful fleet had protected the young republic from its foreign enemies.

But it could not fill the vacuum created when Cromwell, the English dictator, died.

A new era was coming.

On May 26th 1660, one of the Navy's grandest ships,

the Royal Charles, came within sight of England.

On board was a man making his triumphant return home after years in exile.

It was Charles, son of the murdered king, soon to be crowned King Charles II.

The journey was the result of weeks of plotting between senior naval officers and exiled royalists

to bring back the monarchy.

The new king was eager to lay claim to England's potent navy.

He gave gold to the sailors and rebranded the fleet.

It was now the Royal Navy.

Disembarking with the royal party was the younger cousin

and newly appointed secretary to the ship's commander.

The young man was honoured to be given the job

of taking the King's spaniel off the ship.

He wrote in his diary, "It shit the boat,

"which made us laugh and methink that the King

"and all that belong to him are but just as others are."

As they came ashore, the young man saw huge crowds

of nobles and citizens alike who'd turned out to welcome their king.

"The shouting and joy expressed by all,"

he wrote, "was past imagination."

The 27-year-old from London had just completed his second sea voyage.

He didn't know it then, but this was just the start of an extraordinary naval career.

His name was Samuel Pepys.

Pepys was from humble origins,

the son of a poor tailor and a washerwoman,

but he left behind two extraordinary legacies.

He would transform the administration of the Navy like no-one before him,

and leave behind one of the most vivid

and colourful diaries of all time.

And here it is, volume one of Samuel Pepys' diary,

started on January 1st 1660,

possibly in response to a New Year's resolution.

It's in shorthand, so takes a bit of deciphering,

but it's an incredibly honest account of a colourful life.

There are descriptions of his trips to the theatre,

drinking, his affairs, music, money and even arguments with his wife.

That's all interspersed with descriptions of a job he loved.

Or at least, he came to love it.

When he first landed the job of Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board,

he hadn't the foggiest idea what it entailed.

But he was delighted with the pay - £350 a year,

more than he'd ever earned in his life.

Eager to learn, Pepys threw himself into the complex new world

of the Navy's dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford.

All are now long gone.

But this yard on the Dutch coast

is building a replica ship of the same era.

The project manager is Aryan Klein.

It's great to see the ship at this stage,

cos you see what gives it its strength.

Usually you just see it floating around.

Yeah, it's all heavy timber construction.

-So how many oak trees go into the building of this then?

-Several hundred.

-Really?

-The estimates vary from 400-600 fully grown trees.

And some of these trees will be maybe 100 years old, maybe older.

How long would it have taken to build this back in the 17th century?

-About nine months.

-Wow, that's quick.

Very hard labour. Hundreds of men working day and night almost.

And as soon as the ships were watertight,

they would be put into the water

to make room for the next ship on the slipway.

It just shows the value of the goods these ships were bringing back.

They were being built to bring back the riches of the world.

Well, yeah, the big East Indiamen were built for trade,

but this particular ship we're standing in now was a Man of War.

Who was it built to fight against, then?

The English, I'm afraid!

THEY CHUCKLE

The Dutch had a really large stake in world trade at that time

and England, of course, thought, "Well, we'll have some of that trade."

And it erupted into trade wars between Holland and England.

This ship is basically the result of an arms race between the two countries.

The Dutch had overtaken Spain

to become England's new maritime rivals.

They were aggressive, protestant and organised, just like the English.

To combat the Dutch threat, England was now spending a mighty 25%

of the national budget on her navy,

making it by far the country's largest industrial enterprise.

The dockyards consumed materials in vast quantities.

150 tonnes of iron a year,

100 miles of rope,

and had a vast workforce to match.

And, as Pepys soon discovered, corruption was rife.

Pepys reported corrupt officials to the Navy Board, but he soon realised

that the worst corruption was actually on the Navy Board itself.

He refers to his colleagues as "old fools and rogues"

and realised that one of them was even stealing

from the sailors' pension fund, known as the Chatham Chest.

The problem was that the Navy had become a vast receptacle of public funds.

There were no systems in place to spend that money,

and if a few thousand went missing, who would care?

Pepys cared, and realised that every aspect of the Navy had ballooned,

except for the central administration.

The fleet had grown far beyond the ability of the medieval Navy Board to manage it.

Back in the office, Pepys hired a team of clerks.

He gave them desks, with regular hours,

and together they set out imposing some order.

They spent a lot of time making lists.

This one here is an alphabetical list

of all naval officers that served in the Navy

during Pepys' time in office,

starting up here with A,

coming all the way down to Z down here.

The amazing thing is it contains information

about their service records, dates on which they were in different ships -

in some cases, it even has their fate.

So, for example,

this man died,

George Colt drowned,

and Humphrey Connisby was discharged by his Royal Highness.

Lists like these imposed a manageable symmetry

on the anarchic world that Pepys found himself in,

and he became an expert in the complex gathering

and storage of information.

He was determined to professionalise every aspect of the Navy's operations.

He designed a call book to keep records of dockyard hours worked,

compiled an alphabetical list of all contracts,

and kept detailed notes of everything he did.

Pepys wasn't the first naval administrator to make lists,

but he was the most systematic, the most brilliant, the most obsessive.

He adored the Navy, not because he loved storming aboard enemy ships

with the smell of gunsmoke in his nostrils,

but because he loved the bureaucracy.

He delighted, he wrote, "in the neatness of everything".

But the Samuel Pepys of the diary emerges as a man

who was far from being a dull paper-pusher and list-maker.

Here's a not untypical entry.

He has an orgy with the wife of one of his colleagues on the Navy Board

and her daughter.

He wrote, "There are a great many women in the chamber,

"My Lady Penn and her daughter among them, whereupon My Lady Penn

"flung me down upon the bed and herself and others,

"one after another upon me and very merry we were."

Well, I'm not surprised!

Every man has his vice they say, and for Pepys it was definitely the ladies...

Well, and bouts of heavy drinking, and fine dining, and nice clothes,

and music, and he loved the theatre, of course, and, well, you get the idea.

The point is Pepys was a man who lived life to the full.

But what really shines out in these diaries is his love of his work.

"My business," he wrote "is all my delight."

The Navy's officer training college, here at Dartmouth,

was built long after Pepys' time, but the idea

of professionally trained and qualified officers was his.

Anyone with the right connections, Pepys realised,

could become an officer,

leaving the Navy's valuable ships in often unreliable hands.

There was no quality control.

-Midshipman Briers!

-Sir.

Pepys' solution - exams.

The verbal test that he introduced for all would-be lieutenants still exists.

Midshipman Briers, take a seat, please.

These days, they call it Fleet Board.

The first question is,

what are the responsibilities of the CBM at State One?

He's on upper deck roaming, sir,

-looking mostly for fire fighting events.

-OK.

The whole idea of assessment and interview seems deeply familiar to us.

What items of seamanship rigging must always be fully rigged?

The safety net underneath, sir.

But that's because of Pepys.

When he introduced his exam for lieutenants, it was the first time

any employee of the English state had ever been tested in this way.

And where is it located?

Quick release marker buoy, sir.

-It's usually found on the quarter deck.

-OK.

Thank you very much, Midshipman Briers. Please carry on.

Using pen, paper and a tidy mind,

Pepys had done for the Navy as an institution

what Hawkins had done for its ships,

and Blake for the discipline of its crews.

But could it survive the ultimate test -

war?

In 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch.

A series of English victories early on seemed to augur well.

But Pepys was worried.

He'd said from the start that Parliament hadn't voted enough money

to fund the war and, just as he predicted, the money was soon gone.

The Navy lunged from triumph

to crisis.

Things soon reached boiling point.

The Navy was terribly in debt and sailors went unpaid.

In the dockyards, Pepys saw workers walking around like ghosts

and he heard the lamentable moans

of sailors that lay destitute in the street,

a sight which he said "troubled him to his heart".

To add to the sense of crisis, plague broke out in London

and Pepys and his clerks came here to Greenwich,

where they took up residence in this, one of Charles II's unfinished palaces.

But that put them in the heart of the fleet

with all the disgruntled sailors around them.

One day, their windows were broken

and Pepys and his staff were threatened with physical violence.

Pepys spent 24 hours composing a desperate letter to the King.

It's unambiguous and it would have made very disturbing reading for his royal master.

Pepys begins by apologising for being troublesome, he says

"troubling His Majesty on the subject which we often have done,

"the want of money, the effects of that want,

"under which His Majesty's service under our care

"hath long been sinking."

So Pepys is in no doubt that his Navy

is facing utter ruin and he comes up with a typically Pepysian solution.

He gives a list, carefully costed,

of everything that he thinks is necessary to prevent that.

He starts up here by saying 55 anchors of various weights,

800 bales of sailcloth, 4,000 loads of plank,

400 dozen oars, 12 tons of brimstone,

10,000 spars of all sorts,

and comes up with the incredibly precise figure,

as only Pepys could do, of the money required

to stave off disaster for the Navy and for England.

And that sum is 179,793 pounds

and ten shillings.

But the King had nothing to give and would not humiliate himself

by going cap in hand to Parliament to ask for more.

Just a few months later came the naval disaster Pepys had predicted.

It was the summer of 1667.

The fleet had been laid up because there was no money to pay crews to man it.

Upnor Castle, 30 miles up the Thames from London,

had been built in Elizabeth's time to protect the fleet

across the River Medway at Chatham.

The exhausted and unpaid garrison were not at their best.

On that June day, the horrified defenders of this fort watched

as 62 Dutch ships made their way up the river on the rising tide.

Anchored here was much of Charles' fleet,

including four of his finest battleships.

In a desperate measure, the English sank some of their own ships here

to try and block the river, but that didn't work

and their cannon on shore opened up to try and turn the Dutch back.

But someone had delivered the wrong ammunition

and many of the cannonballs didn't even fit the barrels.

The Dutch ships ploughed in amongst the English ships with impunity, capturing them,

burning others, including three of the finest battleships in the land.

The river was covered in wreckage

and in the sky, there was a pall of smoke.

One of Pepys' clerks who lived and worked down here wrote,

"The destruction of those three glorious ships

"was one of the most dismal sights my eyes have ever beheld."

"It was enough," he said, "to make the heart of every true Englishman bleed."

In a final humiliation,

the Dutch towed back to Holland the Royal Charles itself,

a moment immortalised on canvas,

showing the pride of England's fleet flying the Dutch flag.

The Dutch raid on the Medway was at the time, and remains to this day,

the most embarrassing defeat in the history of the Royal Navy.

Not even the brilliant Pepys could avert this catastrophe.

The simple fact was that King Charles

just couldn't afford a modern navy.

The Medway disaster set the King and Parliament

on another collision course

over how the Navy was to be funded and controlled.

When Charles died in 1685,

relations between King and Parliament

were at their lowest ebb since the Civil War.

He was succeeded by his brother, James.

Now he had had a rather successful career as an admiral in the Royal Navy.

Could he be the man to work together with politicians and financiers

and businessmen to build a new kind of constitutional monarchy?

Well...

no.

And this extraordinary portrait tells us why.

James has had himself painted in the garb of a roman emperor,

with a haughty stare,

his golden tunic, magnificent purple robe flowing off his shoulders

and decked out in jewels at his throat, sword hilt and sandals.

And out at sea his navy, his plaything,

the royal banner flying from the main topmast.

This was not how the English wanted their kings to see themselves.

To make matters worse, James was openly, proudly Catholic.

He appointed Catholics to key positions in the armed forces.

He even put one of them in charge of the Royal Navy.

This was clearly a man who wouldn't send his Royal Navy out to attack

the great Catholic powers of Europe.

This was not a man to protect the legacy of Drake and Hawkins.

He would have to go.

In July 1688, a figure dressed as a common sailor arrived in Holland.

Beneath the disguise

was England's premier naval officer, Admiral Arthur Herbert.

Or, rather, ex-admiral.

He'd resigned weeks before, refusing to serve under King James.

Herbert was carrying an extraordinary letter.

It was signed by seven Englishmen, all grandees in the armed forces,

church and state, and it was addressed to the Dutch Prince,

William of Orange, who was not only protestant

but he was married to James II's daughter, Mary.

It was an appeal for William's help against their tyrannical king.

This was high treason, but Herbert and his fellow conspirators

were the desperate men from an exasperated nation.

And in William, they'd found their man.

On November 1st 1688, a vast Dutch invasion fleet -

463 vessels, 40,000 men -

left Holland, bound for England.

It was almost exactly 100 years since the Spanish Armada,

but this time not a single shot was fired.

On the top mast of William's flagship, he flew a banner

with his family motto on - "I will maintain".

But he added, in letters three-feet-high,

"the liberties of the English and the protestant religion".

The message was clear and when William landed here

on the south coast of England, he was greeted with cheers.

Over the next few weeks,

it became obvious the English weren't going to fight for James II

and he fled the country and was replaced as king by William.

James, like his brother and his father before him,

had proved himself incompatible with the new idea of Englishness

that had crystallised since the days of the Armada.

That idea was opposed to absolutism and Catholicism

and proud of Parliament, liberty

and of sending the English Navy out against England's traditional enemies.

William's invasion of 1688 represented the final victory of those values.

It was the myth of the Armada made real.

In little over 100 years,

a rabble of West Country seafarers and a few royal ships

had become a recognisably modern institution,

with staff and systems to manage a vast, efficient navy.

This was England's heart of oak,

a navy that now lay at the centre of the national project and its future.

Next week - how the Navy triggered a series of revolutions

in finance, industry and agriculture,

generating unimaginable wealth

and propelling Britain into the modern world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media

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