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00:00On a blustery November day four centuries ago, the English were preparing themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen.
00:22Beneath the dome of St Paul's they gathered to celebrate their tiny nation's victory over the world's greatest superpower.
00:30Spain.
00:35On the walls hung the captured ensigns of the Spanish fleet that was even then being dashed on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland.
00:47The year was 1588.
00:51And the battle was the Armada.
00:54Today'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.
01:08A tradition that began on that autumn day 400 years ago.
01:171588 marked a turning point in our national story.
01:21Victory over the Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation.
01:25And it sparked a myth that would one day become a reality.
01:30That the nation's new destiny, the source of her future wealth and power lay out there on the oceans.
01:37This series tells the story of how the Navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth.
01:50Of how the need to organize it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy.
01:55Of how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity and our democracy.
02:03It's a story of heroism and innovation.
02:07But also of disasters, dark chapters in our history.
02:12It's the remarkable story of a 400 years struggle fought at sea and on land.
02:21Of how the Navy drove Britain into the modern age and changed the world.
02:42It's a story of the world.
03:01Clear the hatch!
03:03England's extraordinary journey from a third-rate nation to global superpower began on a clear October day,
03:1020 years before the Armada.
03:16Okay, bring on the beer.
03:18Not that anything so grand was on the minds of the sailors,
03:22who scurried to and fro in the old harbour in Plymouth.
03:25Making a small fleet of six ships ready for sea.
03:31The gangplank groaned as last-minute supplies were brought on board.
03:35Large barrels of fresh water and beer,
03:37even whinnying goats and chickens as well.
03:41When everything was brought on board,
03:42they were lashed down to the bulkheads in expectation of a bumpy passage.
03:48The two men in command were cousins.
03:50On that fine autumn day,
03:52they were thinking not about making war,
03:54but about making money.
03:55The older of the two was John Hawkins,
03:59who, at the age of just 35,
04:01was already Plymouth's leading merchant venturer.
04:06The younger was his cousin, a poor relation who'd grown up with Hawkins,
04:1027-year-old Francis Drake.
04:12They were leaving behind a poor insignificant town on the edge of a poor insignificant country,
04:32which itself clung to the fringes of Europe.
04:34But this place had one thing going for it.
04:37This, one of the finest natural harbours on Earth.
04:41Gateway to the Atlantic, and beyond that, the New World.
04:45First discovered only 60 years before,
04:59the New World of the Americas offered wealth beyond imagining.
05:04If they could get there and bring it back, that is.
05:07A round trip of 12,000 miles.
05:10No mean feat in the 1560s.
05:12Stand by.
05:14Two, six.
05:16Two, six.
05:18Two, six.
05:20Take a break.
05:25Is that halfway?
05:27Yeah.
05:29Are you kidding me?
05:30No.
05:34This wonderful replica of the Tudor ship, the Matthew,
05:38gives me a strong sense of what life might have been like on board.
05:42Sailing one of these is just so struck by the ingenuity, aren't you?
05:46It's the sort of combination of wood, rope, a bit of metal,
05:49and you can sail around the other side of the world.
05:55Among the profit-hungry investors in the venture was the Queen herself.
06:00She'd lent two ships, the Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion.
06:07Both were old, spent and rotten, as were most of the vessels in her tiny navy.
06:14The crew, too, would get their share of the booty.
06:20All were young, some were just boys.
06:26Among them, Hawkins' nephew, Paul, and the 13-year-old Miles Phillips,
06:31whose journal relates the terrors of frequent storms and leaking hulls.
06:34There were no creature comforts for those on board, either.
06:42The single-minded Hawkins made his men sleep on deck
06:47because every inch of hold space was reserved for the cargo that would make the cash.
06:53On that expedition, the cargo was a human one.
07:05Drake and Hawkins have the terrible distinction
07:08of being the first Englishman to bind African men, women and children in chains
07:13and transport them in the holds of ships like this.
07:17They were slave traders.
07:23Six weeks out of Plymouth, they picked up 500 slaves in Guinea, then headed west.
07:40Few Englishmen had ever made this journey.
07:43England had been slow to spot the opportunities of the New World
07:47and the Spanish had got there first.
07:49Now Spain jealously guarded a lucrative American empire stretching from South America
07:55through the Caribbean to Mexico and further north.
08:00Drake and Hawkins just wanted a little slice of the action.
08:04Nip in, sell a few slaves and return home with a hold full of silver.
08:09The problem was that the Spanish had banned foreigners from trading within their lucrative empire.
08:15Hawkins had managed it once or twice before and got away with it.
08:17They hoped to do so again, but this time would be different.
08:26In the Caribbean, they traded their human cargo for silver, gold and pearls, then turned for home.
08:33But it was hurricane season.
08:38Storms 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.
08:53In the fight that followed, Hawkins lost three of his ships, including the Jesus of Lubeck, and 200 men killed or captured.
09:11He managed to escape on the Minion, and with him was the 13-year-old Miles Phillips, who watched what happened to the prisoners.
09:19They took our men ashore, he wrote, and hung them up by their arms until blood burst out from their fingers' ends.
09:27And in a moment of personal tragedy for Hawkins, he realised that his nephew, Paul, was among them.
09:33Disease and famine followed, and by the time they limped home, fewer than 20 men were left alive aboard the Minion.
09:49But for the survivors, this disaster acted not as a deterrent, but as a spur to action.
10:08The experience marked Drake and Hawkins for the rest of their lives.
10:11Neither would ever forgive the Spanish for their treachery.
10:14And they threw themselves into a bitter personal crusade against Spain.
10:19It was fuelled by the heavy mix of a lust for cash, religious zealotry, and a desire for personal revenge.
10:26In time, this crusade would become a national enterprise, and in doing so, it would forge a new idea of Englishness.
10:38But if England's seafarers were to have any chance of catching up with Spain,
10:42they would need better ships to do it.
10:52Hawkins' answer was the race-built galleon, his radical breakthrough in warship design, preserved in these original drawings.
11:01By 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.
11:17The first was built in 1570, at the Queen's Dockyard in Deptford.
11:26More were to follow.
11:28With greater space for guns, they were perfectly designed for war.
11:33But 20 race-built galleons, the most the Tudor state could afford, would not be enough on their own.
11:49Hawkins landed a job on the Navy Board, the committee that ran the Queen's modest fleet.
11:58And in 1582, the board commissioned a series of extraordinary surveys, preserved here at the National Archives.
12:05Yeah, see, I've read about this, but I've never seen it before.
12:19This is a list of every ship in England compiled under Hawkins' leadership.
12:24And it's actually, as you can see, broken up by county here, Norfolk, Suffolk, absolutely meticulously written down, it's beautiful.
12:34Every single ship, oh, with the tonnage here, so these ones are St Mary, Solomon, 200 tons.
12:40Absolutely incredible.
12:42As 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.
12:54So here we go. In Cornwall, there are 108 masters, 626 mariners and 1,184 seamen.
13:03So precise. Incredible that this information is being gathered centrally in London at the beck and call of the Tudor state.
13:13It's actually very moving seeing the names of people that lived all those centuries ago.
13:18And once you have a list like this, when war comes, when there's a national emergency, you can go and knock on the door of men like John Cooper and Peter Dolomore and say,
13:28Right mate, you're coming in the Navy, you're coming to protect the country.
13:31It does make you wonder whether men like William Bennett, William Mort from Littleham, whether they end up fighting against the Spanish Armada.
13:39And this is just fantastic. You get right to the end, the total number of mariners available to the Tudor state, 16,259.
13:51Men that could be mobilised to protect Little England against the greatest superpower in the world.
13:56Drake, meanwhile, was taking his revenge on Spain in a much more direct fashion.
14:15On an April day in 1587, the residents of Cadiz woke to the sound of gunfire.
14:26By 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.
14:51It was the culmination of a ten-year pillaging spree that had seen Drake circumnavigate the globe, attack Spanish colonies, and steal their loot.
15:03Belligerent, venal, a peerless seafarer, he was Protestant England's new hero.
15:09In Catholic Spain, he was anything but.
15:16Standing here, looking at it from the Spanish point of view, the English appear a little different from Vikings.
15:22Men who came from the north in ships bent on plunder and destruction, to whom nothing was sacred.
15:27Most infamous of all was Drake, still hated, still known as Ildraque, the dragon.
15:36And now the dragon had pushed the king of Spain to take his own terrible revenge on Drake and England.
15:43That revenge came in July 1588.
16:00When the Armada appeared off England's coast, one eyewitness wrote that the ocean groaned under their weight.
16:07It had taken Spain three years and a titanic amount of silver to assemble it.
16:17While the English fleet had been mobilised in just three months.
16:24The battle raged for several days.
16:26But the leadership of men like Drake and Hawkins had given the English a decisive edge.
16:36People have tended to attribute victory over the Spanish Armada to the courage of the English sailors or the intervention of divine wind.
17:01In fact, the Spanish fought equally bravely and at different stages of the campaign, the wind favoured both sides.
17:08The real reason is a lot less glamorous.
17:11It's the inspired organisation of Hawkins.
17:14He ensured that England had a fleet of fast manoeuvrable ships,
17:18each one of which carried something like three times the weight in armament of its Spanish equivalent.
17:23He laid the foundations for modern naval warfare, bringing ships, men and cannon together in a decisive combination.
17:31So when the great and the good arrived in their finery at St Paul's, on that day in November 1588,
17:48they were celebrating not just a victory, but the beginning of a new future.
17:52The Queen, as one author wrote, was carried in a golden chariot through her city of London in robes of triumph.
18:03While the still bloody heads of Catholic traitors executed for praying for the Armada's success stared down from spikes nearby.
18:12The Tudor PR machine went into overdrive.
18:21A new portrait showed the Queen triumphant, her hand on a globe, the Spanish ships crushed on the rocks behind her.
18:28The scale of the victory expanded the horizons of a small, impoverished nation.
18:46One commentator wrote, the sea had become a means to seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory.
18:55The 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.
19:13Above 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.
19:23England's view of its place in the world would never be the same again.
19:27The Queen's Navy had become a source of national pride as never before.
19:41And there was an insatiable demand for stories of seafaring adventure and discovery.
19:48A new national identity, aggressive, ambitious and Protestant, was in the making.
19:54If Hawkins was the architect of that new identity and Drake its firebrand, then Richard Hackliott was its biographer.
20:06In 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, he wrote this.
20:10The principal navigations, voyages, traffics and discoveries of the English nation.
20:16An account of 1600 years of history containing over 250 seafaring adventures by Englishmen.
20:25A mix of storytelling and myth-making.
20:28Here at the back of this one, for example, we have Hawkins's ill-fated trip to the Caribbean
20:34with Miles Phillips' gruesome account of the barbarous treatment they received at the hands of the Spaniards.
20:40Here in the next volume, we have the account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada itself,
20:48which ends with this incredible paragraph that says,
20:51thus the magnificent, huge and mighty fleet of the Spaniards in the year 1588 vanished into smoke.
21:04This was history with a purpose.
21:06A call to arms to a nation on the verge of a new destiny.
21:10That destiny could not have been made more obvious than it was in a subsequent edition of Hackliott's work,
21:17which contained this stunning map.
21:21This piece of paper is 400 years old.
21:24It's incredibly beautiful.
21:26Just look at the detail of the world's coastlines and ports and rivers.
21:33What's so remarkable about this map is that medieval maps show England as an insignificant island clinging to the edge of Europe,
21:39but now England's not at the edge.
21:41It's been picked up and moved right to the heart of the world.
21:48It's an image of the world we all recognise.
21:51But this map showed it for the first time.
21:56It was a potent symbol of a nation that now had global ambitions.
22:00Ships poured out of England, bound for the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Baltic.
22:09Numerous and aggressive, these English pioneers steadily eroded Spanish power
22:15and founded the colonies that formed the beginnings of Britain's future empire.
22:19Abroad and at home, business was booming.
22:32Ports like East Lou and Cornwall now had scores of fishing boats trading as far away as North America.
22:39In these new confident times, they called themselves the Western adventurers.
22:49But economic success brought a new threat that no one had foreseen.
22:54Suddenly, whole fleets, ten or twelve ships, would head out to sea and simply vanish.
23:16There are reports of ships found floating out there in the Atlantic without their crews who were never seen again.
23:21On one night in the summer of 1631 in the village of Baltimore in Southern Ireland,
23:27over 100 people were removed from their beds, leaving the place a ghost town.
23:39A remarkable letter, written in August 1625, reveals the scale and horror of the problem.
23:46It's from the mayor of Plymouth, Thomas Seeley, to the King's Council.
23:53One poor maritime town in Cornwall, called Loo, hath within ten days lost 80 mariners bound in fishing voyages to the deeps.
24:02And there, have been taken by the Turks.
24:12Back then, Turks meant Muslims.
24:14And these were in fact pirates from North Africa.
24:17Barbary pirates.
24:19They came to these shores and took people as slaves back to North Africa.
24:23It was a barbarous practice, but it was, of course, what these West countrymen have been doing to Africans for decades now.
24:29Even so, it turned the sea here from a source of wealth and prestige for England into a place of terror and slavery.
24:37The ports and fishing villages, it's said, were filled with the pitiful lamentations of the victims' families.
24:49In the next few years, Devon and Cornwall would lose a fifth of their shipping and crews.
24:54This extraordinary and little-known episode in English history was to have far-reaching consequences.
25:04Englishmen were bred on the myth of maritime invincibility.
25:09But now they had to face hard truths.
25:12Once the predators, they were now the prey.
25:15And people did what they usually did in a crisis.
25:17They blamed the government.
25:19And they weren't entirely wrong.
25:24Fishing vessel, Trevose. Fishing vessel, Trevose.
25:28This is protection vessel, Tyne, calling you channel one sitter.
25:35I'm on one of the modern Navy's fishery protection vessels about 30 miles from Cornwall.
25:41Just the territory where the Barbary pirates were seizing English shipping.
25:45It's my intention to send a routine boarding team over to you.
25:55My team will be with you in that 2-0 minutes. Over.
26:01In Elizabeth's time, the Queen's ships and the private vessels of freebooters like Drake
26:06had kept these waters safe.
26:08But the Queen was now dead.
26:10The new Stuart regime had made peace with Spain and the Navy had been cut back.
26:22With a predilection for self-aggrandizement, the regime had spent its cash,
26:27some of it raised illegally by notorious ship money,
26:30on a few grand, vanity ships designed to impress the kings of Europe.
26:41Trouble was, fishery protection wasn't the kind of job that these showy vessels were designed to do.
26:48Just as the job that these guys do couldn't be done by an aircraft carrier.
26:52In the absence of this kind of protection, the King's subjects, particularly down here in the West Country,
27:01were completely vulnerable.
27:03They and their cargoes made irresistible targets for North African pirates.
27:09Shocked by the magnitude of the crisis, West Country MP Sir John Elliot wrote to the King's Council begging for action.
27:22But the government did nothing.
27:24Elliot was furious.
27:26And he wasn't the only one.
27:31Anger also oozes from the pages of this, a bestseller written around the time of the disappearances from East Loo.
27:39It's called Sir Francis Drake Revived.
27:42It's written by Drake's nephew.
27:44And he recounts the glories and successes of what now seemed like a vanished age.
27:49It's an indictment on the present with its all-pervasive sense of fear and its insecurity.
27:55But it's also a call to arms, as the author makes very clear on the title page.
28:00He writes, calling upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver.
28:13Sir John Elliot caught the mood, calling for a return to the aggressive policies of the past.
28:20England's new king, it seemed, was listening.
28:25Charles I had been on the throne for just a few months.
28:28And like a modern leader seeking crowd-pleasing policies in troubled times,
28:33he funded an expedition to attack Spain.
28:41It set sail from Plymouth in October 1625, waved off by a delighted John Elliot.
28:48Their target was none other than Cadiz.
28:57Their mission, a Drake-style smash and grab, returning home with holds full of treasure to public acclaim.
29:04But it didn't work out that way at all.
29:14The expedition was commanded by Viscount Wimbledon, a man who'd never served at sea before.
29:19It was so indecisive, his men quickly gave him the nickname Viscount Sit Still.
29:25Confusion reigned, ships collided, masts and rigging tumbled overboard.
29:30When Sit Still ordered his captains to attack, many of them simply ignored him.
29:35The lack of an experienced, charismatic commander like Drake exposed terrible weaknesses in the English fleet.
29:41Even with Drake in charge, it had been hard enough to impose order.
29:46Now, many captains simply did as they wished.
29:49They were a rabble.
29:57The chaos continued when they landed 2,000 troops on the beach, but failed to give them any water.
30:03The weather was scorching.
30:10When they finally got into the town, these thirsty Englishmen stumbled on a warehouse.
30:18It was full of wine.
30:23All hell broke loose.
30:25The men started drinking, and although the officers tried to stop them, it was no use.
30:28The whole army was drunken, wrote one eyewitness, and in one common confusion,
30:34some shooting at one another amongst themselves.
30:38This wouldn't, of course, be the last time the drunken English have behaved disgracefully while abroad.
30:43But on this occasion, with the expedition descending into total farce,
30:47the commanders had no choice but to call it off.
30:58On the way home, farce turned to tragedy as disease took hold.
31:05By the time they reached Plymouth, hundreds were dead and hundreds more were dying.
31:16And who was standing up here waiting for them?
31:18None other than Sir John Elliot, the man who in October had waved them off with such high hopes,
31:24now stood on a miserable day just before Christmas 1625 as the fleet limped in.
31:30The miseries before us are great, he wrote, as he watched corpses being tossed into the harbour from the ships.
31:39And later he saw sailors drop down dead in the streets of Plymouth.
31:43But soon his compassion for the sailors turned into another emotion.
31:48Rage.
31:56News of the fiasco soon reached London.
31:59And when Parliament convened, John Elliot was on his feet,
32:04his anger echoing around St Stephen's Hall.
32:07Our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men are killed,
32:13not by the sword nor by the hand of an enemy, but by those we trust.
32:19Those words, spoken by Elliot in this chamber where the House of Commons used to meet,
32:24were the sharpest denunciation of Royal Government ever heard in Parliament.
32:29Cadiz, Elliot said, proved that the King was unfit to run the Navy.
32:34In a series of extraordinary speeches in here, Elliot demanded that Parliament take a greater role in overseeing the affairs of state.
32:44When the Speaker, who sat in his chair on this spot, tried to shut him up, Elliot hired three thugs to hold him down.
32:52If it seemed like revolution was in the air, it was.
32:56The King's failure to run a modern, efficient Navy had sparked a constitutional crisis.
33:01John Elliot was thrown into the Tower.
33:09But a new generation of MPs, immortalised here in St Stephen's Hall, took up his call for liberty.
33:16Relations between King and Parliament collapsed.
33:21In 1642, Charles fled London and the Civil War began.
33:27By fleeing the capital, Charles lost control both of the Navy and of the new burgeoning maritime economy that it supported.
33:43It made his defeat inevitable.
33:48And in 1649, on the orders of England's New Republic, he was executed.
33:58Parliament acted quickly to secure control over the Navy, putting men of proven loyalty in charge.
34:04They were known as the generals at sea.
34:12One of them was Robert Blake, West Country MP, hero of the Civil War and a radical Protestant to boot.
34:19Check for our vows, check for Blake, carry on, SOC.
34:26Nature message, car. Carry on.
34:33Blake had never fought at sea.
34:38Not a brilliant start for a man charged with protecting England's coast against a multitude of foes.
34:43But Blake understood warfare and men.
34:47And he knew that chaos and indiscipline were as dangerous at sea as they were on land.
34:52Command problems that had dogged the English expedition to Cadiz still remained.
34:57In one of his first battles, he was appalled to see his captain disobey his orders and flee.
35:03He knew he had to find a way to assert his control.
35:06His solution was to produce the Navy's first ever set of rules and regulations.
35:17The laws of war and ordinances of the sea in 1652.
35:24For the first time, it gave English commanders a fighting chance of issuing orders that would be obeyed.
35:29Forfeiting.
35:32It was a list of 39 offences, from stealing to spying, from cowardice to sleeping on duty.
35:40Most were punishable by death.
35:45Blake even sacked his own brother for discipline offences.
35:49The laws of war offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea
35:54that would later be applied through all areas of government.
36:05Blake was just what the Navy needed, a tough outsider.
36:09He could see that over the previous 50 years, the Navy had vacillated wildly between great successes like the Armada and total failures like Cadiz.
36:17But there was no reliability.
36:18Under charismatic leadership, men like Drake, the English could be great successes.
36:25But otherwise, denied that leadership, failure was often the result.
36:29Blake imposed order and discipline.
36:32He ensured that no matter who was in charge, the Navy would be effective.
36:42Blake left behind a Navy that was larger and more disciplined than the country had ever known before.
36:48The powerful fleet had protected the young Republic from its foreign enemies.
36:56But it could not fill the vacuum created when Cromwell, the English dictator, died.
37:03A new era was coming.
37:05On May 26th, 1660, one of the Navy's grandest ships, the Royal Charles, came within sight of England.
37:20On board was a man making his triumphant return home after years in exile.
37:29It was Charles, son of the murdered King, soon to be crowned King Charles II.
37:36The journey was the result of weeks of plotting between senior naval officers and exiled royalists to bring back the monarchy.
37:50The new king was eager to lay claim to England's potent navy.
37:55He gave gold to the sailors and rebranded the fleet.
37:58It was now the Royal Navy.
38:07Disembarking with the Royal Party was the younger cousin and newly appointed secretary to the ship's commander.
38:13The young man was honoured to be given the job of taking the king's spaniel off the ship.
38:27He wrote in his diary,
38:28It shit the boat,
38:30Which made us laugh.
38:31And me think that the king and all that belong to him are but just as others are.
38:39As they came ashore, the young man saw huge crowds of nobles and citizens alike who'd all turned out to welcome their king.
38:47The shouting and joy expressed by all, he wrote, was past imagination.
38:53A 27-year-old from London had just completed his second sea voyage.
38:57He didn't know it then, but this was just the start of an extraordinary naval career.
39:02His name was Samuel Pepys.
39:08Pepys was from humble origins.
39:11The son of a poor tailor and a washerwoman.
39:14But he left behind two extraordinary legacies.
39:17He would transform the administration of the navy like no one before him.
39:21And leave behind one of the most vivid and colourful diaries of all time.
39:30And here it is. Volume one of Samuel Pepys's diary.
39:33Started on January the 1st, 1660.
39:36Possibly in response to a New Year's resolution.
39:38It's in shorthand, so it takes a bit of deciphering, but it's an incredibly honest account of a colourful life.
39:44There are descriptions of his trips to the theatre, drinking, his affairs, music, money and even arguments with his wife.
39:52It's all interspersed with descriptions of a job he loved.
39:56Or at least, he came to love it.
40:01When he first landed the job of clerk of the axe to the navy board, he hadn't the foggiest idea what it entailed.
40:08But he was delighted with the pay.
40:10ÂŁ350 a year.
40:12More than he'd ever earned in his life.
40:13Eager to learn, Pepys threw himself into the complex new world of the navy's dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Deptford.
40:27All are now long gone.
40:30But this yard on the Dutch coast is building a replica ship of the same era.
40:38The project manager is Arjen Klein.
40:41It's great to see the ship at this stage, isn't it?
40:44Because you see what gives it its strength, because usually you just sort of see it when it's floating around.
40:48Yeah, a mess of timbers. Yeah, it's all heavy timber construction.
40:51So how many oak trees go into the building of this then?
40:53Well, several hundred.
40:55Really? The estimates vary from 400 to 600 fully grown trees.
40:59And some of these trees will be maybe 100 years old, maybe older.
41:03And how long would it take them to build this back in the 17th century?
41:06It took about nine months.
41:08Wow, that's quick.
41:09Very hard labour. Hundreds of men working day and night almost.
41:13And as soon as these ships were watertight, they would be put into the water.
41:17So to make room for the next ship on the slipway.
41:19God, it just shows the value of the goods that these ships are bringing back, I suppose.
41:23That they were being built to just bring back the riches of the world.
41:26Well, yeah, the big East Indian men were built for trade.
41:29But this particular ship we're standing in now was a man of war.
41:32Who was it built to fight against then?
41:35The English, I'm afraid.
41:37The Dutch had a really large stake in the world trade at that time.
41:42And England, of course, thought, well, we'll have some of that trade.
41:46And it erupted into trade wars between Holland and England.
41:50And this ship is basically a result of an arms race between the two countries.
41:58The Dutch had overtaken Spain to become England's new maritime rivals.
42:02They were aggressive, Protestant and organised.
42:07Just like the English.
42:13To combat the Dutch threat, England was now spending a mighty 25% of the national budget on her navy.
42:20Making it by far the country's largest industrial enterprise.
42:24The dockyards consumed materials in vast quantities.
42:31150 tonnes of iron a year.
42:34100 miles of rope.
42:36And had a vast workforce to match.
42:40And as Pepys soon discovered, corruption was rife.
42:44Pepys reported corrupt officials to the Navy Board.
42:48But he soon realised that the worst corruption was actually on the Navy Board itself.
42:51He refers to his colleagues as old fools and rogues.
42:56And realised that one of them was even stealing from the sailors' pension fund, known as the Chatham Chest.
43:02The problem was that the Navy had become a vast receptacle of public funds.
43:07There were no systems in place to spend that money.
43:10And if a few thousand went missing, who would care?
43:12Peepys cared.
43:16Peepys cared.
43:18And realised that every aspect of the Navy had ballooned except for the central administration.
43:23The fleet had grown far beyond the ability of the medieval Navy Board to manage it.
43:29Back in the office, Peepys hired a team of clerks.
43:35He gave them desks and regular hours.
43:38And together they set out imposing some order.
43:41They spent a lot of time making lists.
43:44This one here is an alphabetical list of all naval officers that served in the Navy during Peepys' time in office.
43:51Starting up here with A, coming all the way down to Z, down here.
43:57The amazing thing is it contains a fair amount of information about their service records, the dates on which they're in different ships.
44:03In fact, in some cases it even has their fate.
44:06So for example, this man died, George Colt drowned, and Humphrey Conisby was discharged by His Royal Highness.
44:15Lists like these imposed a manageable symmetry on the anarchic world that Peepys found himself in.
44:23And he became an expert in the complex gathering and storage of information.
44:28He was determined to professionalise every aspect of the Navy's operations.
44:34He designed a call book to keep records of dockyard hours worked.
44:39Compiled an alphabetical list of all contracts.
44:42And kept detailed notes of everything he did.
44:47Peepys wasn't the first naval administrator to make lists, but he was the most systematic, the most brilliant, the most obsessive.
44:55He was a man who adored the Navy, not because he loved storming aboard enemy ships with the smell of gun smoke in his nostrils,
45:01but because he loved the bureaucracy.
45:03He delighted, he wrote, in the neatness of everything.
45:06But the Samuel Peeps of the diary emerges as a man who was far from being a dull paper pusher and list maker.
45:28Here's a not-untypical entry.
45:35He has an orgy with the wife of one of his colleagues on the Navy board.
45:39And her daughter.
45:41He wrote,
45:42There were a great many women in the chamber, my lady Penn and her daughter among them.
45:46Whereupon my lady Penn flung me down upon the bed, and herself and others, one after another, upon me.
45:53And very merry we were.
45:56Well, I'm not surprised.
45:57Every man has his vice, they say, and for Peeps, it was definitely the ladies.
46:02Well, and bouts of heavy drinking, and fine dining, and nice clothes, and music.
46:09And he loved the theatre, of course, and, well, you get the idea.
46:13The point is, Peeps was a man who lived life to the full.
46:16But what really shines out in these diaries is his love of his work.
46:21My business, he wrote, is all my delight.
46:27The Navy's Officer Training College here at Dartmouth was built long after Peeps's time.
46:38But the idea of professionally trained and qualified officers was his.
46:47Anyone with the right connections, Peeps realised, could become an officer.
46:52Leaving the Navy's valuable ships in often unreliable hands.
46:55There was no quality control.
46:59Mitchum and Briars.
47:01Sir.
47:02Peeps's solution, exams.
47:05The verbal test that he introduced for all would-be lieutenants still exists.
47:11Mitchum and Briars take a seat, please.
47:14These days, they call it Fleet Board.
47:17First question is, what are the responsibilities of the CBM at State 1?
47:23He's on upper deck roaming, sir, looking mostly for firefighting events.
47:29The whole idea of assessment and interview seems deeply familiar to us.
47:35What items of seamanship rigging must always be fully rigged?
47:39That would be the safety net underneath, sir.
47:41That's because of Peeps.
47:42When he introduced his exam for lieutenants, it was the first time any employee of the English state had ever been tested in this way.
47:51And where is it located?
47:53Quick release marker, boy, sir.
47:55It's usually found on the quarter deck.
47:57Thank you very much.
47:59Mitchum and Briars, please carry on.
48:00Using pen, paper and a tidy mind, Peeps had done for the Navy as an institution what Hawkins had done for its ships and Blake for the discipline of its crews.
48:14But could it survive the ultimate test?
48:17War.
48:18War.
48:23In 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch.
48:30A series of English victories early on seemed to auger well.
48:34But Peeps was worried.
48:38He'd said from the start that Parliament hadn't voted enough money to fund the war.
48:43And, just as he predicted, the money was soon gone.
48:47The Navy lunged from triumph to crisis.
48:54Things soon reached boiling point.
48:57The Navy was terribly in debt and sailors went unpaid.
48:59In the dockyards, Peeps saw workers walking around like ghosts.
49:04And he heard the lamentable moans of sailors that lay destitute in the street.
49:10A sight which, he said, troubled him to his heart.
49:13To add to the sense of crisis, plague broke out in London.
49:16And Peeps and his clerks came down here to Greenwich where they took up residence in this, one of Charles II's unfinished palaces.
49:23But that put them in the heart of the fleet with all disgruntled sailors around them.
49:27One day, their windows were broken and Peeps and his staff were threatened with physical violence.
49:39Peeps spent 24 hours composing a desperate letter to the King.
49:43It's unambiguous, and it would have made very disturbing reading for his royal master.
49:49Peeps begins by apologising for being troublesome, he says.
49:52Troubling, his majesty, on the subject for which we often have done, the want of money, the effects of that want,
49:59under which his majesty's service under our care hath long been sinking.
50:04So Peeps is in no doubt that his navy is facing utter ruin.
50:09And he comes up with a typically Peepsian solution.
50:12He gives a list, carefully costed, of everything that he thinks is necessary to prevent that.
50:17He 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.
50:30And he comes up with the incredibly precise figure, as only Peeps could do, of the money required to stave off disaster for the navy and for England.
50:40And that sum is ÂŁ179,793 and 10 shillings.
50:49But the King had nothing to give, and would not humiliate himself by going cap in hand to Parliament to ask for more.
50:56Just a few months later came the naval disaster Peeps had predicted.
51:06It was the summer of 1667.
51:09The fleet had been laid up because there was no money to pay crews to man it.
51:13Upna 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.
51:25The exhausted and unpaid garrison were not at their best.
51:29On that June day, the horrified defenders of this fort watched as 62 Dutch ships made their way up the river on the rising tide.
51:40Anchored here was much of Charles' fleet, including four of his finest battleships.
51:45In a desperate measure, the English sank some of their own ships here to try and block the river.
51:51But that didn't work, and their cannon on shore opened up to try and turn the Dutch back.
51:56But unbelievably, someone had delivered the wrong ammunition and many of the cannonballs didn't even fit down the barrels.
52:02The Dutch ships ploughed in amongst the English ships with impunity, capturing them, burning others, including three of the finest battleships in the land.
52:12The river was covered in wreckage, and in the sky there was a pall of smoke.
52:19One of Pepys' clerks, who lived and worked down here, wrote and said,
52:23The destruction of those three glorious ships was one of the most dismal sights my eyes have ever beheld.
52:29It was enough, he said, to make the heart of every true Englishman bleed.
52:42In a final humiliation, the Dutch towed back to Holland the Royal Charles itself.
52:52A moment immortalised on canvas, showing the pride of England's fleet, flying the Dutch flag.
52:59The Dutch raid here on the Medway was at the time, and remains to this day, the most embarrassing defeat in the history of the Royal Navy.
53:12Not even the brilliant Pepys could avert this catastrophe.
53:15The simple fact was that King Charles just couldn't afford a modern navy.
53:19The Medway disaster set the King and Parliament on another collision course over how the navy was to be funded and controlled.
53:36When Charles died in 1685, relations between King and Parliament were at their lowest ebb since the Civil War.
53:50He was succeeded by his brother James.
53:59Now, he had had a rather successful career as an admiral in the Royal Navy.
54:04Could he be the man to work together with politicians and financiers and businessmen to build a new kind of constitutional monarchy?
54:12Well, no.
54:15No.
54:16And this extraordinary portrait tells us why.
54:21James has had himself painted in the garb of a Roman Emperor.
54:26With a haughty stare, his golden tunic, magnificent purple robe flowing off his shoulders,
54:32and decked out in jewels at his throat, sword hilt and sandals.
54:37And out at sea, his navy, his plaything, the Royal Banner flying from the main top mast.
54:43This was not how the English wanted their kings to see themselves.
54:49To make matters worse, James was openly, proudly Catholic.
54:54He appointed Catholics to key positions in the armed forces.
54:58He even put one of them in charge of the Royal Navy.
55:01This was clearly a man who wouldn't send his Royal Navy out to attack the great Catholic powers of Europe.
55:08This was not a man to protect the legacy of Drake and Hawkins.
55:14He would have to go.
55:15In July 1688, a figure dressed as a common sailor arrived in Holland.
55:34Beneath the disguise was England's premier naval officer, Admiral Arthur Herbert.
55:39Or rather, ex-admiral.
55:43He'd resigned weeks before, refusing to serve under King James.
55:50Herbert was carrying an extraordinary letter.
55:53It was signed by seven Englishmen, all grandees in the armed forces, church and state.
55:57And it was addressed to the Dutch Prince William of Orange, who was not only Protestant,
56:03but he was married to James II's daughter, Mary.
56:07It was an appeal for William's help against their tyrannical king.
56:11This was high treason.
56:13But Herbert and his fellow conspirators were the desperate men from an exasperated nation.
56:18And in William, they'd found their man.
56:28On November 1, 1688, a vast Dutch invasion fleet, 463 vessels, 40,000 men, left Holland bound for England.
56:41It was almost exactly a hundred years since the Spanish Armada.
56:52But this time, not a single shot was fired.
56:55From the top mast of William's flagship, he flew a banner with his family motto on, I will maintain.
57:13But he added, in letters three feet high, the liberties of the English and the Protestant religion.
57:18The message was clear, and when William landed here on the south coast of England, he was greeted with cheers.
57:25Over the next few weeks, it became obvious that the English weren't going to fight for James II,
57:30and he fled the country and was replaced as king by William.
57:33James, like his brother and his father before him, had proved himself incompatible with the new idea of Englishness
57:49that had crystallised since the days of the Armada.
57:52That idea was opposed to absolutism and Catholicism, and proud of Parliament, liberty,
57:57and of sending the English Navy out against England's traditional enemies.
58:04William's invasion of 1688 represented the final victory of those values.
58:11It was the myth of the Armada made real.
58:13In little over a hundred years, a rabble of West Country seafarers and a few royal ships
58:24had become a recognisably modern institution, with staff and systems to manage a vast, efficient navy.
58:32This was England's Heart of Oak, a navy that now lay at the centre of the national project and its future.
58:41Next week, how the navy triggered a series of revolutions in finance, industry and agriculture,
58:52generating unimaginable wealth and propelling Britain into the modern world.
58:57And Empire of the Seas continues next Saturday at the slightly earlier time of six o'clock.
59:08A fresh perspective on modern warfare in the legacy of Lawrence of Arabia over on BBC Two now.
59:14And here on BBC HD, stay with us for Drama with Gracie.
59:18A graphic of the WCA's
59:27A big girl's original life in England at the same time of 1932 and a great commission.
59:29And these are the major issues that are available on culture and of the national project.
59:31And let us consider theć of the European Union and Northern Iraq at the core of the European Union and Northern Ireland.
59:33And welcome to the European Union with the European Union for Quebec.
59:35Here in the European Union, the European Union and Northern Pakistan,
59:37which is the European Union and Northern America,
59:38it is the European Union and Southern Africa.
59:39And one of the European Union in Europe and the European Union was greater than the European Union.
59:41And the European Union was anuncanzable in France.
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