As a result of modern trends in the fields of power, authority, frontiers and intercultural contact, a growing need has arisen to re-assess the history of the Latin East. The unique – and, at times, not so unique – challenges faced by the Frankish inhabitants of Outremer, due to their physical and social surroundings, provide significant insights into how Latin Christians interacted with their frontiers and neighbours. It has been argued here that this is especially so for the principality of Antioch, as the military, political and cultural pressures placed upon its rulers and settlers were of an intensity, and variety, unknown elsewhere in the medieval world. In response to this, the Frankish elites adopted the sort of fluidity of action also characteristic of western borderlands, with internal power structures and foreign policies shaped to meet the localised needs of security and stability. Although testament to the diversity of socio-political relationships which could emerge on medieval frontiers, that this has gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians demonstrates the need to re-examine Antioch's history.

An undoubted impetus for Frankish reactivity was the principality's fluctuating territorial extent. During the twelfth century, various strategic hotspots emerged which helped to shape the balance of power and the strategies pursued by Antioch's ruling elites. This was influenced, first and foremost, by the increased external scrutiny exerted on the principality after Bohemond II's death in 1130, as well the declining vigour with which princes were able to recover lost territory. As Zengid power on the eastern frontier developed, therefore, earlier attempts at isolating and subduing Antioch's nearest threat, the city of Aleppo, began to falter, and Frankish power east of the Orontes diminished. This was compounded by large-scale reverses, such as Inab in 1149 and Artah in 1164, as well as the rise of the Ayyubids under Saladin, whose devastating invasion in 1188 reduced the principality to its capital and immediate environs. This final loss did not entirely preclude Frankish military or political activity, but it was now severely inhibited. Coupled to this were evolving relations with the Christian powers of Byzantium and Armenian Cilicia, with both serving as allies and enemies at various points – a complication unique to Antioch in Outremer.

The first serious attempt to research commissioned officers’ lives and careers in a systematic way was Michael Lewis’ 1960 book, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815. Much about Lewis’ work is valuable: he studied both the quarterdeck and the lower deck; he used data to describe officers’ backgrounds and careers; and his prose is lively. His methodology, however, left something to be desired. He was writing from within the Royal Navy, and he was apparently allergic to archives. Lewis relied entirely on the work of two biographers to collect his data. John Marshall compiled a multivolume and multipart biographical dictionary of all living officers at the rank of commander and above during the 1820s. William O'Byrne included lieutenants in his thousand-page tome, but he was working in 1849. Both men solicited the biographies from the officers themselves, which explains why they were only interested in living officers. Any officer who died before 1823 (for Marshall) or 1849 (for O'Byrne) was omitted. To give a sense of how much time had passed from the Wars to O'Byrne's work, Nelson would have been ninety-one in 1849. Additionally, lieutenants made up the majority of all officers; they are a significant omission in Marshall's work. The biographical dictionaries also gave officers a perfect opportunity to burnish their careers by filtering the information they provided. Despite these problems, Lewis used Marshall and O'Byrne as the foundation of his work. Combining all of Marshall and O'Byrne means that Lewis’ sample of officers is huge – more than 1,800 – but not random and significantly skewed.

The next attempt to create a database of officers’ lives was the small random sample that N.A.M. Rodger compiled for an article he published in 2001. In many ways, his work lays the foundation for this book, but it does not pre-empt it. His sample covered the whole of the eighteenth century, and he was interested only in career patterns, not social backgrounds. In other parts of his extensive catalogue, he discusses officers’ backgrounds and careers using a combination of archival and printed sources, but does not attempt a statistical survey.

The twelfth century was a period of profound territorial change for the principality of Antioch. From its very inception, the principality had emerged within a complicated patchwork of Islamic mini-states – classified by Michael Köhler as a system of ‘Syrian autonomous lordships’ – subject to external interests and influences. According to Köhler, this engendered a ‘no place doctrine’, in which northern Syria's Muslim elites opposed the hegemony of outside forces in favour of preserving their own independence. The opening decades of Frankish control saw the principality largely able to slot into this framework, and through martial dominance and crafty politicking, particularly under the energetic leadership of Tancred of Hauteville, the Antiochenes were able to assert control over much of Cilicia and northern Syria. Most importantly, this was done not only by opposing Byzantine interference, but also by isolating Antioch's nearest military threat and greatest rival for power in the region, the city state of Aleppo, to such a degree that it was forced to pay financial tribute to the Franks. The principality's fortunes still waxed and waned in response to military and political changes, and defeats against Muslim forces at Harran in 1104 and Ager Sanguinis in 1119 were followed by significant land losses. Nevertheless, by 1130 Antioch had reached its greatest territorial extent. In the decades which followed, however, successive disasters reduced the principality to little more than the capital city and its immediate environs, but the Franks endured. To survive such fluctuations as the Antiochenes did was almost entirely unknown elsewhere in the medieval world, especially in the Latin East, as although Jerusalem and Tripoli experienced territorial changes, before 1187 these were far less profound than in the principality. Meanwhile, Edessa's fall in 1144 quickly heralded the county's total demise. As will become evident throughout this study, such territorial changes prompted the creation of a fluid and responsive state, one whose existence sparked the attention of various nearby powers and was predicated on an ability to manage these interventions.

This book is about British naval officers and their place in society at the end of the eighteenth century. It was a tumultuous period, both at home and abroad. Between 1688 and 1815 – what historians refer to as the ‘long eighteenth century’ – Britain and France fought seven major wars lasting almost sixty years in total and culminating in more than two decades of sustained conflict. During the French Revolutionary Wars of 1793–1802 and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815, Britain's survival was in doubt. French forces overran the Low Countries, Italy, and the German states, subdued Austria, Russia, and Prussia, annexed Spain, and invaded Egypt. A major French invasion of Britain was a constant threat. Domestically, population growth and a vibrant popular press combined with changing social mores to unsettle the established hierarchy. Fears of popular uprisings and the influence of revolutionary ideologies from France and America meant that the social elite could no longer count on their future dominance.

It is tempting to tell a story in which heroic naval officers save Britain, her ruling classes, and parliamentary government from Napoleonic tyranny. After all, they commanded the wooden walls that prevented a French invasion and won every major fleet action of the Great Wars. The most frequently told version of this story is depicted in the cover illustration: Vice-Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson's death at the moment of his victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. With the beams of Victory forming a cross above him, his body is wrapped in a white sheet and bathed in a heavenly glow. His overwhelming triumph, we are to understand, prevented Napoleon and his army from invading and ended the war at sea; his sacrifice, we know, earned him the everlasting thanks of the nation and installed him in the pantheon of national saviours.

In the last seven chapters, we have flirted with questions of naval officers’ social status and whether they were gentlemen. This chapter addresses these questions directly. Answering them is important for understanding the world of eighteenth-century Britain and her navy, perhaps more so than modern readers might expect. First, recall Collingwood's proclamation from Chapter 5 that he sought enterprising and diligent officers who were also gentlemen. On the quarterdeck, gentility was prized alongside merit. Keith wrote of an officer who carried his dispatches in 1796, ‘I beg leave to mention him to their Lordships as a respectable gentleman and an active officer.’ Nelson's advice to a young officer was quoted at the beginning of the book: ‘Recollect that you must be a Seaman to be an Officer, and also, that you cannot be a good Officer without being a Gentleman.’ Second, on land, social status shaped interpersonal interactions in ways that are difficult to understand today. The middling sort sought the affirmation and prestige of genteel status; the landed classes worried about the marriage market and the acceptability of working for a living; and the elite sought to reinforce their dominance in the face of threats both domestic and foreign.

Despite its importance, social status is notoriously difficult to define. It is often easier to say what it was not than what it was. Social status is not equivalent to class, in the Marxist sense. For the men of this book, sometimes it was a rank, defined by birth, title, and income; sometimes it was a description of behaviour, defined by education, occupation, and manners. None of these definitions were precise. To deal with the confusion, one historian proposed ‘The Four Variables of Status’, a general formula for understanding social status in a time and place. The variables are: how different social status is from other kinds of power; what characteristics are valued; whether status is hereditary; and whether status is institutionalised and regulated. In eighteenth- century Britain, we can say that social status was tied closely to other kinds of power, though economic power was not a guarantee of social status.

By the time the sun set on 15 June 1780, Edward Pellew, in what should have been a moment of triumph, was distraught. His commanding officer, Captain Philemon Pownoll, had just been killed by a shot fired from a French privateer. Pellew – future admiral and viscount, recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, commander-in-chief of the East Indies station, hero of the shipwreck of the East Indiaman Dutton, and commander of the Bombardment of Algiers – was convinced that his career was over. Pownoll had been Pellew's patron, and, since Pellew had no relatives or other connections of any note in government or in the navy, he feared that he would never progress past being first lieutenant of Apollo, a thirty-two-gun frigate. He later wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl Sandwich:

Two factors prevented Pellew's career from stagnating. First, he took command of Apollo during the height of the action in which Pownoll was killed and brought it to a successful conclusion, driving the French privateer ashore. She was later recovered and bought by the navy; more importantly for Pellew, he was promoted to commander and immediately given the sloop Hazard. Sandwich made the reasons for Pellew's promotion explicit: ‘as a reward for his gallant and officer-like conduct’. Second, Pellew was clearly a talented and driven commander, likely to capture valuable prizes and reflect well on any powerful patron. Lord Falmouth, an eminent Tory politician closely connected to Pownoll and Pellew's community in Cornwall, quickly stepped into the patronage void, and Pellew was made post by the end of the American War. His career was no longer in jeopardy.

Naval officers led hard lives. The sea and the wind were a daily threat, not to mention the enemy. Disease killed the most, as George Pringle recounts in the passage above. Not only did he lose his brother and his patron in an outbreak of yellow fever in 1804, but also his leaky ship was left dangerously short-handed. Pringle's mission, to carry French prisoners from the West Indies back to Britain, did him no favours; to keep ahead of the water seeping into the hold, Pringle fed the prisoners full rations and put them to the pumps for the duration of the transatlantic voyage. They were lucky to survive. Success in a naval career required toughness; Pringle suggests it also required a belief that the privations were worth enduring for the sake of a higher calling.

Commissioned officers left their families as boys in the hopes of finding adventure, only to endure experiences like Pringle's: an adventure, to be sure, but not the stuff of Nelsonic legend. To survive, they needed to learn the rhythms of shipboard life and the skills of their profession. To protect the nation's enormous investment in men and materiel, the navy tested officers to ensure they had learned the required skills. Newly-commissioned lieutenants strapped swords around their waists and draped blue coats over their shoulders. They were now qualified to stand a watch on a ship at sea; they were also now gentlemen.

The study of intercultural relations in the Latin East remains one of the most controversial and contested fields in modern crusader studies. Subjected to frequent reinterpretation – from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians who viewed the Frankish polities as idylls of convivencia (or living together), to mid- to late twentieth-century scholars who proposed an entirely negative form of exploitative colonialism characterized by social exclusion and fear of the other – the crusader states have often come to reflect contemporary attitudes towards war and inter-faith contact. More recently, attempts have been made to bridge the gap between these polarised models. Benjamin Kedar has sought to show that socio-religious interaction occurred at many levels of Frankish society, and Ronnie Ellenblum has demonstrated that, rather than hiding in their walled cities, the Franks settled in rural areas of the kingdom of Jerusalem, albeit only in regions populated by Eastern Christians. Andrew Jotischky, meanwhile, has argued that Latin interaction with indigenous communities was not defined only by religion, but also by language and social custom. Furthermore, that due to the great divergences – over space and time – within the different polities, it is difficult to find distinct rules of intercultural contact over the entire ‘crusader’ period. Christopher MacEvitt has nevertheless proposed such an overarching model for interaction: ‘rough tolerance’. In this, Frankish overlords granted freedoms to non-Latins, yet also used targeted bouts of violence to keep them in line. Likewise, Alan Murray has offered a hierarchical model for social interaction across the Latin East, in which a group's military capabilities, as well as their suitability for intermarriage, are viewed as the most valuable impetus for their interaction with the Franks. As such, the Armenian Christians, with whom such unions were prominent, sit at the top, followed by the Greeks and other Christians (predominantly the Jacobites and Melkites), while Jews, Samaritans and Muslims are at the bottom.

In many ways, the rough outline of the previous chapter is well known: a typical officer joined the navy in adolescence, often through naval connections, and he spent six years at sea learning the manual and technical skills of his profession. He passed for lieutenant around his twentieth birthday and looked forward to receiving a commission. But beneath this outline lurks new information about the forces that shaped young naval officers’ careers. Seamanship was best learned at sea at a young age, and parents familiar with naval service sought to get their sons sea time as early as possible. Officers risked sitting the lieutenants’ exam before their twentieth birthday because they knew that passing for lieutenant was no guarantee of future employment; the earlier they passed, the sooner they could petition their patrons for a commission.

When they passed mattered as well. Vernon passed for lieutenant in peacetime along with, by his calculations, thirteen hundred other officer hopefuls. He expected only one hundred of them to receive commissions. ‘The rest’, he writes, ‘[were] dismissed with the scripture verse, many are called, but few are chosen.’ But, he adds sarcastically, those who did not receive commissions ‘were to be amply provided for, by midshipman's half-pay, viz. nothing per day, and to find themselves’. We now know that Vernon, writing in 1792, need not have been so pessimistic about his chances. The best hope for officers seeking employment and professional opportunities was a long war. When it arrived in 1793, many passed master's mates were able to count themselves among the chosen, including Vernon, but even two decades of war did not alleviate the threat of unemployment.

Commissions and employment prospects

Aspiring officers, including Vernon, who passed during peacetime can be seen in Figure 2.1, which shows two different random samples of commissions and successful exams over time.

In the passage above, Edward Ferrars explains to his future mother-in-law how he became a clergyman. His rationale is a window into the statusobsessed world of late Georgian Britain. Edward's mother insists that he marry an heiress; in the meantime, it was important that he find a profession that was appropriate for a gentleman and that also provided a sufficient income. He rejects the army because it requires a significant outlay of funds to join and does not provide much in the way of earning potential. ‘Too smart’, in this sense, means beyond his means. The law provides enough of an income at the top of the profession, and is genteel enough, but he does not want to be a lawyer. He was too old for the navy, so the church is the last resort, only marginally acceptable to his haughty mother.

The first six chapters of this book have described the characteristics, careers, and prospects of naval officers. It is now time to look beyond the navy to other professions and to other countries to provide some context.

When the leaders of the First Crusade reneged on an agreement to return Antioch and other former imperial possessions to Emperor Alexios I Komnenos in 1098, they set the soon-to-be-formed principality of Antioch on a collision course with Byzantium – a power which had held much of this region until the second half of the eleventh century. The relationship which developed from this is one of the most important for an understanding of the complicated diplomatic challenges faced by Antioch's ruling elites. Before 1130, it was characterised by frequent bouts of armed conflict which even threatened to fragment the crusader states. Imperial hopes of recovering Antioch were continually thwarted, however, despite Alexios forcing Bohemond I, in 1108, to agree to the Treaty of Devol – which reportedly recognised Greek authority and relegated the prince to satellite status. Indeed, Tancred, now de facto prince, refused to recognise the terms whenever Alexios pushed for his rights, including after Bohemond's death in 1111. A brief period of silence followed the emperor's demise in 1118, but imperial interest was renewed with Bohemond II's death. Over the next five decades, Byzantine rulers thrice visited Antioch, frequently offered direct or indirect military support and even forged a number of marriage alliances with the Latins. More significantly, the notion of imperial overlordship – so fervently opposed by the early princes – was now openly discussed, and, during a visit to Antioch by Manuel Komnenos in 1158, finally implemented.

The connection between Antioch and Byzantium has attracted considerable scholarly interest. For the most part, this has focused on the imperial perspective – most prominently the notion that the emperors preferred recognition over possession – or propagated a narrative of conflict emphasising instances of tension. On those occasions when the Antiochene perspective is assessed, two distinct themes emerge: first, that the actions of Frankish rulers and nobles were permanently influenced by an inherent dislike of the Greeks; and, second, that the political changes which occurred in northern Syria during this period left the principality a mere passenger to the desires of both Byzantium and the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Situated at the easternmost edge of Latin Christendom, the principality of Antioch offered profound challenges to its inhabitants. Founded in 1098 by the Norman adventurer and First Crusade leader, Bohemond of Taranto, its territorial extent – based largely on a former duchy of the Byzantine Empire – acted as a meeting point between Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia. This brought the newly arrived Latin Christians – described more generally as Franks – into contact with a nearly incomparable wealth of religious and political groups, both internally and externally. Incorporated within this were numerous Eastern Christian communities and powers, such as Byzantium and the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenians, including the independent warlords of Cilicia, the Syriac Jacobites and the Melkites, the latter of whom were liturgically Greek but spoke Arabic. Likewise, there were Sunni Muslim peoples and potentates theoretically linked to the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, such as those of Aleppo, Mosul and the Seljuk and Danishmend Turks of Asia Minor, as well as Shi'a Muslims, including the enigmatic Isma'ili sect, famously known as the Assassins. Finally, there were other Latin powers to contend with, including Western kings and states, the papacy, the military orders and even the other Crusader States. In addition to this were numerous topographical challenges, such as the various mountain ranges and limestone massifs which dotted the region and hampered easy settlement and movement, as well as the Orontes River that bisected the principality. The maintenance of Antioch's authority thus demanded a delicate balance of diplomacy, warfare and political reactivity in order to counter the political and geographical demands placed upon its ruling elites.