The relationship between Australia and Britain is a complex one. There are links between all areas of government and society in the two countries, of which the military, diplomatic and economic spheres have received the greatest attention. The relationship is perhaps more endlessly fascinating from an Australian perspective, as Britain was, and in many ways remains, the frame of reference from which Australia has developed its own national character. With the use of hindsight and a further evolved national perspective, Australian historians have in part characterised people and institutions by their differences from their British equivalent, as they sought to identify what was specifically Australian. Such interpretations are unsurprising and, in the main, do not diminish either the historians or their work, but they do leave some people and institutions with simplified, sometimes depreciatory characterisations which are not sustainable from the historical record. One institutional example is the Royal Australian Navy, which has often been described mainly in terms of its links to the Royal Navy and Britain. While deep and abiding links most certainly existed, the tensions and complexities of the relationship that existed are often not appreciated, nor is the context in which events took place; perhaps the result of the often discussed separation between military and other mainstream forms of history. A documentary source that does illustrate the tensions and complexities of the relationship (if not often the broader national context) is the correspondence between the professional heads of the Royal Australian and Royal Navies, the First Naval Member and the First Sea Lord.

First Naval Members and Chiefs of Naval Staff

The first Chief of Naval Staff after the Second World War was Admiral Sir Louis Hamilton, RN [1–12]. He was the last British officer loaned to the Australian Navy to be its professional head. Hamilton was well connected in both the RN and the Royal Family, serving twice in the Royal Yacht. He was a ‘salthorse’ (not sub-specialised into gunnery, communications or other warfare disciplines) who, from the end of the First World War to the middle of the Second, commanded four destroyers, three cruisers, the Home Fleet's destroyers and then the First Cruiser Squadron which was his last seagoing command. As Flag Officer, First Cruiser Squadron, Hamilton commanded the close cover for the convoy PQ17. Subsequently he was the Flag Officer Malta and Central Mediterranean Area.

At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign this essential service was under the control of Edward Baeshe, who had been appointed General Surveyor of Victuals for the Seas on 18 June 1550. At first his accounts were rendered irregularly, but in accordance with the Privy Council ruling of 1557 they became annual or ‘as often besides’ as required by the Council. In fact there is then a gap in the extant sequence, which resumes in 1561. As part of the general investigation of military spending after the Le Havre fiasco, Baeshe's accounts from 1 January 1562 were examined by special commissioners appointed under the great seal on 1 May 1564. Meanwhile a new patent had been issued in 1563 to Baeshe in partnership with John Elliot. Then with the 1565 bargain printed here [28], victualling was placed on a contract basis, and the new procedures by which Baeshe alone was accountable to the Exchequer were defined. Thereafter the Declared Accounts survive in full. For just one calendar year we also have a set of his Quarter Books on which, as with those of the Treasurer, the annual accounts are based. A large amount of supporting material is to be found among the State Papers and elsewhere. Reconstructing Baeshe's operation ought therefore to be fairly straightforward, but there are inevitably some residual mysteries.

By about 1560 he had been provided with a headquarters on Tower Hill and a number of storehouses at Ratcliff, St Katherine's and Rochester, all at considerable expense. Before the bargain, he received most of his money from Gonson as it was required. Four samples are given [24–7] of the brief statements he submitted to the Privy Council, requesting ad hoc warrants for the month ahead. After 1565 he was provided with his ordinary in regular tranches directly from the Exchequer, and paid the bills as they came in from the various agents who were working on his behalf (and at his appointment) in the different localities. The earlier hand-to-mouth procedure was scrapped, partly because it was unpredictable, and partly because it was thought to be unnecessarily expensive, and this indenture or contract was agreed in its place. In spite of its precise-seeming language, it is full of holes and ambiguities. The bases are the daily ‘allowance’ for each man, and the rates of 4½d per man/day in harbour and 5d at sea.

John Hawkins was a central figure in the story of the Elizabethan Navy. It was his slaving and piratical expeditions in the 1560s which first engaged the Queen's support and complicity. He enjoyed high favour at court, and it was through him that Francis Drake (with whom he fell out in his later years) became ‘the Queen's pirate’. The letter which he wrote to the Queen on his return to England in September 1565 [33] neatly expresses his self confidence, both as adventurer and courtier. Relations with Spain were at a low ebb in 1570, following Hawkins's debacle at San Juan de Ulúa and the diversion of Alba's payships in 1568, which had provoked the suspension of trade with the Low Countries. Alba had toyed with the idea of assisting the northern rebels in 1569. In the following year Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth, and was looking hopefully towards Philip II to carry out the sentence. However, the countries were not at war, and the coup which Hawkins is suggesting to Leicester in the second of his letters here [34] would have been an act of piracy on a grand scale. The ‘extreme injuries’ referred to were mainly Hawkins's own losses, because, although the Merchant Adventurers had suffered from the interruption of trade, they had managed to shift their mart to Emden, which was not under Alba's control. The reception of his suggestion seems to have been less than enthusiastic. His projection of the value of the fleet, at ‘sixty hundred thousand pounds’ (i.e., £6 million) is sceptically scaled down to £600,000 in a marginal note. Although the former estimate may have been nearer the mark, it would have been a big exaggeration. A second note deflates the estimate of losses sustained to no more than £200,000; in other words nowhere near justifying such a massive seizure. Whoever was responsible for the annotations, ‘Her Highnesses free consent’ was clearly not forthcoming, because nothing came of the suggestion and, given the state of international relations at the time, that is not surprising.

Hawkins's credit was in no way diminished by this failure, although it was recognised both by the Queen and Cecil (and probably by Leicester as well) that he needed a curb rather than a spur.

These papers are principally drafts and other matter used in compiling the 1562–3 Quarter Book. As mentioned above (p. 21 and Appendix 3), they form part of the material which Mary Evelyn inherited from her Gonson ancestors; they remained among the Evelyn family papers after the Quarter Book itself had been given to Pepys. Following acquisition of the complete Evelyn archive by the British Library, a descriptive list was compiled for eventual publication, now available in the Library and via the online catalogue. We are grateful to the British Library Board and to Dr F. Harris for permission to use the Library catalogue entry as the basis for this appendix. The original descriptions were the work of Mr H. Kelliher, to whom we are also indebted. The BL format has been largely reshaped to serve the needs of the present volume. Spelling has been modernised and other adjustments have been made to conform to our conventions. Minor diplomatic details have been omitted, and Gonson's private papers are treated more briefly. At the time of writing the papers remain in loose sections; it is intended that they should be bound with a consecutive foliation for each numbered volume, and that foliation is anticipated here; but in order to preserve a record of the component structure, the individual fragments are here distinguished by item numbers and letters, which will not be marked on the documents. We have added a full transcript of one short item by way of general illustration of the process through which drafts and fragments were absorbed into the finished Quarter Book. The chosen example nevertheless shows that useful scraps of additional information can sometimes be found where these working papers happen to survive.

BL Add. MS 78169. Evelyn Papers, vol. II (formerly Evelyn MS 68)

Benjamin Gonson's draft Quarter Book for Deptford yard for the fourth (Christmas) quarter of 1562 (1 Oct.–31 Dec.) [as finalised in 4, ff. 42–57 (above, pp. 79–106)].

The first specifically naval paper found in the Elizabethan State Papers [1] is a ship list drawn up four months after the Queen's accession, and a month before the more substantial ‘Book of Sea Causes’. Since the latter is printed in British Naval Documents, it is not repeated here. Both documents were part of the general stocktaking at the start of the new reign. The first list also includes incidental information, affirming that operational costs should not be charged against the ordinary, and listing the seven merchant ships at that time in royal service. Cecil's marginalia show an attention to maritime affairs proper in an old shiplord, and are the only evidence for Minion being given away to Lord Admiral Seymour. In the case of Trinity Henry the verdict ‘decayed utterly’ seems a little premature, since the Quarter Book shows this vessel was still maintained afloat, albeit relentlessly leaky, four years later. But although it is instructive, the February 1559 list is no more than a memorandum.

From about a year later come the first ordinances for the Admiralty officers [2], which are mainly a systematic record of the changes which had been introduced after the 1557 review. They are important because they mark a stage in the bureaucratisation of naval administration, and because they emphasise the interdependence of the marine officers, particularly the extent by which they were required to check up on each other. The most notable omission is any reference to the Lord Treasurer, who by terms of the earlier reforms was supposed to be in overall charge. Perhaps the Marquess of Winchester, though retained in office by Elizabeth, had no desire to continue his involvement as established under Mary; or perhaps his role in the formation of policy was simply taken for granted in an administrative directive. However, every officer is described as being responsible to the Lord Admiral, or the Vice-Admiral in his absence, for the discharge of his regular duties, and policy decisions are to be taken by the whole council, reporting to the Lord Admiral. There is no mention of the Lord Treasurer in that context either.

The ordinances, however, do not present a complete picture. The Treasurer (of the Navy), in addition to the detailed procedures described here, was also required to render an annual account to specially appointed commissioners. Similarly the accountability of the Surveyor-General of the Victuals is incomplete.

James Humphrey of Ipswich was a junior clerk in the naval administration, and features most prominently here as a recruiting agent for mariners from East Anglia [4, passim]. The first two letters below show him operating at Aldeburgh and at Holbrook on the Stour estuary. It is likely that he was the man of this name who was a freeman of Ipswich, though he may have come to rest, like many other naval officials, in Deptford church. He also had a private trade in naval supplies, and is sometimes described as a purveyor.

The volume from which the following extracts are taken is a miscellany of models, forms and calculations, composed in 1568, and which Humphrey doubtless used as a working manual. It passed to James, Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, who in February 1666 lent it to the Navy Board ‘to read and deliver to him back again’. In 1669 Pepys had some selections transcribed and bound. This copy survives as Rawlinson MS C. 846 in the Bodleian Library. At some later point he acquired Humphrey's original volume, which he incorporated into his library (now PL 1266), presumably at the same time relegating the 1669 copy to the secondary collection which passed in due course to the Bodleian. It is impossible to say whether Pepys ever had legitimate title to the original.

Five items from the Humphrey's collection were printed, from the Rawlinson copies, in British Naval Documents. For completeness sake these appear again here, (apart from the first, which dates from Edward VI's reign) though from the earlier and more authoritative texts in the Pepys Library. To these are added such other items from PL 1266 as are relevant to the theme of this volume. The documents are interesting mainly for the way in which they demonstrate different aspects of Admiralty practice.

Items 6–10 relate to the recruitment and discharge of mariners. They present a coherent sequence of paperwork, though the examples are from different times and places. When the fleet was to be manned, commissioners were appointed, usually to cover each of the shires to be mustered. One or more Admiralty officers and their servants would be named to each commission, and Humphrey writes the first letter not only as clerk but also as commissioner, instructing the local officers to muster all the seamen within their jurisdiction at a given day and time.

The main sets of Declared Accounts are in E 351 (Exchequer, Declared Accounts in Rolls); they are handsomely written and on parchment. The versions in AO 1 (Auditors of the Imprest and Commissioners of Audit, ditto) are paper duplicates, sometimes with slight variations in stated terminal dates as shown here. These lists omit some supplementary accounts for parts of years or particular operations which are numbered within the sequences of the main annual series.

Although Elizabeth's Navy has been a subject of enduring interest to scholars and the general public over the years, no general selection from the large body of surviving documents has previously been published. The Navy Records Society devoted its first two and another of its earliest volumes to the Armada and subsequent events of the Spanish war, but the nearest to a comprehensive view of Elizabethan naval administration and finance came in the Society's centenary volume. It is therefore appropriate to return to this field, particularly (but not exclusively) in the earlier years of the reign when there was no formal war. Between 1558 and 1585 the Navy was deployed variously in small-scale campaigns (such as those in Scotland in 1560, at Le Havre in 1563, and Smerwick in 1580), in the pursuit of pirates and in making occasional shows of force. Although the present work relates to such operations, its emphasis is primarily on the financial and administrative processes which supported them, covering such aspects as mustering, victualling and demobilisation as well as the repair and maintenance of the ships themselves. The general content is therefore closer to that of another of the Society's pioneering volumes, which presented similar though less detailed evidence from the reign of Henry VII.

This collection is the second of two dealing with Tudor naval administration, the first of which was concerned with the Navy of Edward VI and Mary I, encompassing the first phase under the management instituted by Henry VIII at the end of his reign. The present volume opens with two foundation documents for the Elizabethan Navy – the first ship list, and the first ordinances for the Admiralty officers. The centrepiece is Benjamin Gonson's massive Quarter Book for 1562–63, which covers (among much else) the preparations for the Le Havre campaign. Although we have deliberately chosen not to make any additions to the Society's substantial dossier on the Armada, the discovery of one hitherto unnoticed item from 1590–91 became the basis for a final section illustrating the organisation behind one of the post-Armada operations. The documents are drawn primarily from the Public Record Office, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and those parts of Pepys's collection which eventually found their way into the Rawlinson MSS at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

This volume has been designed to stand alongside The Navy of Edward VI and Mary I (NRS, Vol. 157, 2011), with which it shares much common apparatus. Two substantial appendices containing details of all RN ships and most senior naval personnel mentioned in both volumes were printed in the first; and certain parts of the technical introduction printed there is repeated here.

Crown copyright material is used by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, and the original State Papers were made available to us by the kind assistance of Mr A. H. Lawes. Papers at Hatfield House are printed by permission of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury. We are grateful to His Lordship's Librarian and Archivist, Mr R. H. Harcourt Williams, for aiding our research. Documents from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, are included by permission of their several custodians, to whom we are indebted for access and guidance in our work. To the British Library, and to the Head of Modern Historical Manuscripts Dr F. Harris, we are in particular grateful for allowing us to print extracts from the Library's online catalogue as an appendix to our own work. Dr R. Luckett helpfully advised us about the provenance of items formerly in his care as Pepys Librarian. We are also appreciative of the research facilities provided by Cambridge University Library and the Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds. This volume has been produced alongside the Society's edition of the Pepys Library MS ‘Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry’, and we have tried to ensure that these two publications are mutually consistent and supportive. To this end we have been much assisted by Mr R. A. Barker, co-editor of ‘Fragments’, and by Dr S. L. Adams and Dr S. P. Rose, who have contributed essays respectively on Hawkins's ‘Bargains’ and nautical terminology for that volume. Dr J. D. Davies has kindly responded to our enquiries. We are obliged to Dr M. Hayward, Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies, University of Southampton, for advice on fabrics. Miss A. Morgan, Archivist of the City of Plymouth, kindly helped us to identify some civic officials.

This list is meant for quick reference, and includes technical terms and some obsolete words of general application. Terms appearing once only are mostly dealt with at that point. This is not a general dictionary, but has application only to the present volume. Since its purpose is to help the reader rather than highlight the editors’ ignorance, uncertain terms are not included. This applies both to words which could not be interpreted (and therefore printed within inverted commas in the text), and to items described in commonplace words but the precise application of which cannot be stated. The definitions derive chiefly from OED and Captain John Smith's Sea Grammar in the edition by K. Goell (1970), assisted by previous NRS volumes and the glossary in Professor Rodger's Safeguard of the Sea. D. King, J. B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes, A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian's Seafaring Tales (New York, 1995) is also useful, though its definitions reflect eighteenth-century usages which were sometimes different from those of the sixteenth.

Admiral. Sometimes used for a ship commanded by an Admiral.

advertisement. News, notice.

arrearages. Arrears.

Augmentations (court of). Government department which between 1536 and 1554 administered the properties of the dissolved monasteries and confiscations from the church; its residual functions were absorbed by the Exchequer.

band (of pitch, tar). A form of ‘bond’, meaning thickness, hence binding quality.

bay salt. Sea salt.

billet. Cut of firewood.

block. Pulley.

bonaventure (in full, bonaventure mizzen). Aftermost mast of a fourmasted ship.

bowsprit. Spar extending from stem.

brigantine. Small oared warship.

brod. Round-headed nail.

cablet. Small cable.

caliver. Hand gun.

can hook. Rope or chain forming sling for cask.

chaldron. Cauldron, used as measure, viz. 32 bushels (4 quarters).

clap. Leather flange.

clench (nail). A form of ‘clinch’, having the point driven back into the material through which it has passed, forming a double-headed clamp, or hammered into a rove. In shipbuilding, used to fasten the overlapping planks or strakes in the construction of the hull (hence ‘clinker-built’).

cloveboard. A form of ‘clapboard’, i.e. a small size of split oak.

cock of brass. Socket of block or shiver.

conduct (of troops). Marshalling from place of recruitment to point of assembly, and home again. Conduct money was paid to the men per mile travelled.

crayer. Small merchantman.

crow. Crowbar.

customer. Customs collector.

The main item here [4] is the first of the five Quarter Books surviving from the reign of Elizabeth, and is reproduced in full because of the unique insight which it provides into the detailed working of the Admiralty and its various agencies at that time. The regular income of £12,000 a year provided by the warrant of 1559 is recorded in its successive tranches under ‘Ordinary: Receipts’. Most of this revenue is absorbed by the wages and other charges itemised in the quarterly sections for the several royal dockyards, as ‘Ordinary: Deptford’ or ‘Ordinary: Portsmouth’. Further charges against the same income are listed under ‘Ordinary: Conduct’ (recruitment of shipwrights, caulkers and other craftsmen), ‘Ordinary: Prests’ (money advanced to Edward Baeshe for the victualling of shipkeepers and workmen in the harbours), and ‘Ordinary: Charges’, which relate to the collection of the money from the Exchequer. Extraordinary income is listed separately. This was obtained under a number of ad hoc warrants from different sources, and was so called not because it was exceptional, but simply because it was not issued under the ordinary warrant. Extraordinary expenditure relates to the actual ‘setting forth’ of the ships to the seas, and apart from that incurred at Portsmouth, is mostly under one or other of the general categories. ‘Extraordinary: Conduct’ relates to the recruitment of seamen, gunners and soldiers to serve in the ships; ‘Extraordinary: Prests’ to money advanced to Baeshe for victualling the ships for active service, and ‘Extraordinary: Charges’ to a variety of miscellaneous costs, most of them relating to communications. The ‘Extraordinary: Sea Charges’ cover the diets and wages of captains, masters and mariners on active service. It should be noted that at this stage Gonson is still passing substantial sums of money to Baeshe, who accounted separately in accordance with the Privy Council order of 1557. This was to change with the introduction of the victualling contract in 1565.

The overall composition is uniform, as the following table shows. The most significant variations are in the entries for Portsmouth, much fuller as the yard became the centre of operations during the Le Havre campaign, and in the sections on conduct money and sea charges, which increase for the same reason.