On 5 December 1934 Italian and Ethiopian forces clashed at the desert town of WalWal. The location was so obscure that there was doubt as to whether it was located in Ethiopia or Italian Somaliland. The Italian government demanded both an apology and reparations and initially refused an Ethiopian proposal to refer the dispute to arbitration. Ethiopia was, however, a member of the League of Nations and requested an investigation of the responsibility. A long series of complicated diplomatic machinations began and by the winter of 1935 it was apparent the Italians were building up their military strength in East Africa. In May 1935 the Council of the League of Nations established an arbitration commission to examine the question, but in the face of Italian opposition there was no agreement on procedure. The League then called in an additional arbitrator in July with the more restricted charge of establishing responsibility for the clash, but not the ownership of the disputed territory. Italian military preparations continued and from the bellicose statements of the Italian leader Benito Mussolini there was little doubt the Italians were bent on war. A three-power conference in Paris between France, Great Britain and Italy on 16 August submitted compromise proposals, subject to Ethiopian approval, that were scornfully rejected by Mussolini on the 18th. The Commission of Inquiry into the WalWal incident delivered an anodyne verdict on 3 September. Neither side was to blame for the clash since both the Italians and Ethiopians considered WalWal to be in their own territory. The Italian preparations for war continued. Hostilities could therefore lead to a situation where other members of the League might be called upon to enforce sanctions against Italy in fulfilment of their obligations under Article XVI of the Covenant of the League. On 11 September the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, delivered a strong statement at the League that Britain would honour her obligations under the Covenant, this despite the claim made by the French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval that the day before, in a private meeting, Hoare had ruled out military sanctions, a naval blockade, closure of the Suez Canal or anything likely to lead to war. In practice, a major role would be played by the two leading Mediterranean Powers, Great Britain and France.

The Mediterranean Fleet in the period between World War I and World War II produces memories of squadrons of imposing battleships accompanied by numerous cruisers and flotillas of destroyers. The Fleet strived for perfection in the appearance of ships and the precision of their handling. The very number of warships available is striking when compared to the present day. The annual cruises to varied and generally interesting ports provided ample subject matter for numerous letters home or entries in diaries. The social and sporting life at Malta, the main base of the Fleet for much of the time, was also noted. The Fleet regattas, sometimes at secluded bases along the Greek coast, were followed with great interest. Fortunately for the naval historian, there are numerous collections of private letters, diaries, midshipmen's journals and unpublished memoirs available in repositories such as the Imperial War Museum in London. There is understandably a rosy haze of nostalgia about the Mediterranean Fleet of this era, enhanced by the gruelling years of the war that followed. This memory of a golden age, however, can be deceiving. Much of the period between the wars was one of crisis or impending crisis. Financial problems loomed large even in the 1920s with, for example, restrictions on the expenditure of fuel. In the 1930s there was a growing sense of the potential vulnerability of the Fleet's aging ships to the growing threat of air power. Once-friendly states like italy were now potential enemies.

The documents reproduced in this volume cover the decade following World War I. For most of the first half of that decade the activities of the Mediterranean Fleet were concentrated in the Eastern Mediterranean, Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. The war had hardly ended before the Mediterranean Fleet found itself involved in actions against the Bolsheviks and intervention on the side of the White Russians. This was a situation of neither war nor peace, familiar by the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. The political-diplomatic situation was confused, the policy of government at home seemed uncertain, and the on-again, off-again policies towards the White Russians frustrating to all concerned.

The armament of Queen Mary's ships is fully described in a previously unpublished Ordnance Office survey of 1555, now at Longleat [II.78]. This must be the work of Anthony Anthony, and is the only such establishment to survive between his great illuminated inventory of 1546, and a list of 1585. For some of the smaller vessels it is the only source of ordnance data. However, it pre-dates the building of Philip and Mary and the second Mary Rose so does not reveal the full firepower the Marian navy eventually acquired. Two brief lists from Pepys's collections, one of ships [II.79] and the other of designated captains [II.80] are placed here because they cannot be fitted precisely into the chronological sequence of Chapter 6. That also applies to a version of the general orders for the navy [II.81]. This comes from James Humphrey's compendium of 1569, but its occasional use of the plural royal style assigns it to the years of Philip and Mary. There has been some doubt as to whether its more bizarre provisions were ever enforced.

II.78 Extract from Ordnance Office Establishment

[Longleat House, Misc. MS V, ff. 1, 53–73v]

20 August 1555

The Office of the Ordnance. A declaration containing the quantity and number of all such ordnance of brass and iron, with all other sorts and kinds of artillery, munitions and other habiliments of [word repeated] war remaining in sundry places within the realm of England and the dominions of the same, that is to say, as well within the Tower of London, the North parts, the forts standing upon the sea coasts, Calais and the Marches, and Ireland, as also within the King and Queen's Majesties’ ships; together with the yearly wages, stipends, fees and allowances due to the sundry officers and ministers serving within the said office, as well in the 10th year of the reign of our late sovereign lord King Henry the eight of famous memory [1518–19], as also at this present day, being the 20th day of August anno Domini 1555 and the second and third years of Philip and Mary, by the grace of God, King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant,

The Mediterranean Fleet was in the process of returning to normal after the Abyssinian crisis when the Spanish Civil War began on 17 July in Melilla on the north-eastern coast of Spanish Morocco as a military rebellion against the Popular Front Government. The insurgents quickly gained control of Spanish Morocco and a number of points in mainland Spain. However, the revolts were crushed in many of the major Spanish cities such as Madrid and Valencia, ending hopes for a quick insurgent victory. In the Spanish Navy many crews mutinied and killed their officers, but the majority of the fleet remained loyal to the Republic. This posed a dilemma for the insurgents. How could they move forces across the waters to help the rebellion on the mainland before it could be crushed? The solution was provided by the Germans and Italians, who transported troops by air to the mainland. The uprising was not crushed and the Republic had sufficient inherent strength to resist the Nationalist forces on land. The struggle evolved into a long stalemate that would last the better part of three years. The Germans and Italians provided aid and ‘volunteers’ to the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco, while the Republic received substantial aid from the Soviet Union. The most effective foreign assistance was probably active intervention by German and Italian aircraft, wearing Spanish insurgent colours. The insurgents gained control of the port of Cadiz and in February 1937 captured Malaga on the southern coast as well. However, the Government retained control of the eastern or Mediterranean coast of Spain, including the ports of Barcelona, Cartagena, Valencia and Almeria, for the majority of the war. In the North the government also held on to the northern coast on the Bay of Biscay, notably Bilbao, until 1937. The Nationalists succeeded in taking control of Majorca and Ibiza in the Balearic Islands. Minorca remained in Republican hands but an attempt by a largely Catalan force in August 1936 to recapture Majorca for the Government was defeated. The Nationalist position in the Balearics as well as their control of Spanish possessions in North Africa put them in an advantageous position on the flank of the Mediterranean lines of communication to the Republican ports. They were also able to commission two powerful ships, the 10,000 ton 8-inch gun cruisers Canarias and Baleares.

These papers are supplementary to those published in association with the Mary Rose Trust a decade ago. They are not strictly new discoveries, having come from catalogued collections. It was rather that the cataloguing was inadequate or positively misleading, so that the relevance of the materials to Mary Rose had not been recognised.

Sinking [by Professor Loades]

Mary Rose sank in the context of the so-called ‘Battle of the Solent’ between 18 and 21 July 1545. Claude d’Annebault, the Admiral of France, had assembled a great fleet of over 150 ships and 25 galleys with the objective of taking Portsmouth and immobilising the English fleet. The purpose of this exercise was not so much to take an English port as to secure a bargaining counter for the return of Boulogne, which had been in English hands since the previous year. Taking out the English fleet was likewise designed to cut the lines of supply by which the garrison of Boulogne had been maintained, and thus facilitate its recapture. Having failed to check d’Annebault's preparations by a raid on the Seine a few days earlier, Lord Admiral Lisle with the English fleet was at Spithead or within the harbour of Portsmouth, prepared to withstand the French assault. Meanwhile King Henry with a large army was encamped beside the town, with the same object in view. On 18 July the King dined on the flagship Henry Grace à Dieu (Great Harry) as the guest of the Lord Admiral. However he did not remain on board overnight, so his departure cannot have precipitated the dramatic events the following day.

On Sunday 19 July, the wind then being light and fitful, d’Annebault began the assault by sending in his galleys, with their formidable forwardfiring guns, to attack the becalmed English warships. Lisle had only a few galleasses and rowbarges to withstand this attack, and would probably have been overwhelmed if the wind had not freshened sufficiently to enable the full English fleet to move out against the galleys, which thereupon retreated. But it was in the course of this action that Mary Rose was lost. Having discharged a broadside, an attempted manoeuvre resulted in the open gunports being forced below the waterline on the lee side and the sea rapidly entered.

The U-boats were defeated effectively before this volume begins, for on 24 May 1943, Dönitz, acknowledging the Allied victory, withdrew his U-boats from their main theatre in the Atlantic to re-configure their armament and electronic equipment and to reconsider their tactics and explore other seas where they might have more effect with sustainable losses. Dönitz himself best expressed the nature of the defeat:

Allied success was due to a number of factors. By the spring of 1943, it is estimated that the Allies deployed over 2200 aircraft and more than 1000 vessels; thus the Atlantic was covered from shore to shore, the convoys assured of more or less continuous air cover (including escort carriers), while on the surface they were well protected by strong close escorts, which were strengthened by support or escort groups, which had the freedom to hunt submarines in the vicinity of the merchantmen [66, 76–8, 82, 83, 89, 93, 111, 114, 122]. Experiments were going on, meanwhile, with new detection systems, weapons and novel platforms such as helicopters. Tactics, organisation and training, shared information and experiences were now highly sophisticated. Captain F. J. Walker, RN, was a leading exponent of escort group anti-submarine warfare, while the American escort carrier groups were also extremely successful and it was noted that ‘The hunter/killer groups’ anti-submarine efficiency was high. Once contact was made it was rare for a U-boat to survive the attacks’ [73, 80, 89, 92, 98, 101, 102]. By this time, too, the escorting forces were well organised, each of the three Atlantic nations having a defined area of responsibility – the Canadians controlling the North-West Atlantic, the British the Eastern Atlantic, and the Americans the Caribbean, the Central Atlantic, their own Eastern Seaboard and the crucial oil traffic [114, 123, 124]. The Americans had instituted a 10th Fleet, under the direct command of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King, and dedicated to anti-submarine warfare.

When Pepys was at the Navy Board in the 1660s, he was indignant that the only accurate fleet list in the Office was the one which by his ‘particular curiosity’ he had compiled for himself. It is by no means certain that his predecessors in the first generation of that department were any better served, because no complete and definitive establishment of ships or men survives. Nor is it really clear what ships constituted the Royal Navy. Vessels owned by the King included small craft used around the dockyards and in support roles such as would nowadays be assigned to the RFA, not flying the White Ensign. On another hand, a number of merchantmen on long-term loan formed part of the fighting force. This might also include ships owned personally by the Lord Admiral and other senior commanders.

Most modern lists of Edward's VI's fleet derive from one first printed in the eighteenth century, showing where each ship was stationed at the end of Edward's first year [I.66]. Although some detail has been corrupted in transmission, the ordnance data corresponds almost exactly to that of the great inventory of Henry VIII's goods compiled at that time. Rather more vessels appear in a list for the same year [I.67]; but this survives as a copy made and amended twenty years later, with manifestly anachronistic elements. The paper nevertheless provides valuable detail previously unnoticed, including some identification of shipbuilders. It comes from a compendium made by an Elizabethan Admiralty official, James Humphrey, which provides most of the items in this section. A listing of dockyard officials and their wages [I.65] appears to be taken from two sections of a Navy Treasurer's Quarter Book, the first extant example of which will be printed in ENA. Humphrey's collection also preserves the detailed rigging inventories and surveys of three great ships taken in July 1552 [I.73–6]. Similar documents exist from the early years of the reign of Henry VIII, but there are no others for the mid-Tudor period.

Another major source for the Tudor Navy is the MS collection of Sir Robert Cotton, now part of the British Library.

This list is meant for quick reference, and includes technical terms and some obsolete words of general application. More extensive comment on certain words and expressions is made at their first occurrence within the text (as noted here), and 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 Capt. John Smith's Sea Grammar in the edition by K. Goell, 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.

Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook has generally been regarded as one of the least effectual First Lords of the Admiralty of the Victorian era. Appointed to the post in 1880 by William Gladstone, he was, according to John Henry Briggs, of the same economical and ideological stripes as Gladstone himself:

Briggs's credentials to pass judgment on the First Lord appear impeccable. Both he and his father were career Admiralty civil servants, their combined tenures spanning much of the nineteenth century. Briggs himself served almost forty-five years at Whitehall, of which more than thirty-five were spent assisting the Board itself. Thus, his boast that he ‘had the honour of serving with fifteen First Lords and upwards of fifty Admirals’ lends apparent credence to his subsequent claim that he ‘was cognisant of all that was taking place throughout the department’.

Having retired in 1870, Briggs was, unless clairvoyant, no longer ‘cognisant of all that was taking place throughout the department’ by the time that Northbrook assumed office, and historians have long been aware that his account of the Admiralty's doings, even when he was present, is often profoundly unreliable: marred by blatant partisanship, factual errors, and near-libels of many distinguished and capable Navy officials. And yet his allegations continue to inform modern judgments of many of those administrators, none more so than Northbrook.

Oscar Parkes, long-time editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, appropriated not only Briggs's verdict but enough of his words to warrant accusations of plagiarism: ‘Northbrook was a politician and a very strong party one at that. Having from early days imbibed the extreme views of economy and retrenchment associated with Liberalism, he was always more solicitous to keep down the Estimates than to incur any expenses which he thought might be embarrassing to the Ministry.’