re signed by five members
of the Navy Committee, and at their head is Colonel Edward Mountagu,
afterwards Earl of Sandwich, but then only twenty-two years old.[1]
Whether anything further was done is uncertain. No supplementary
orders have been found bearing date previous to the outbreak of the
Dutch war. But there exists an undated set which it seems impossible
not to attribute to this period. It exists in the _Harleian
MSS._ (1247, ff. 43b), amongst a number of others which appear to
have been used by the Duke of York as precedents in drawing up his
famous instructions of 1665. To begin with it is clearly later than
the orders of 1648, upon which it is an obvious advance. Then the use
of the word 'general' for admiral, and of the word 'sign' for 'signal'
fixes it to the Commonwealth or very early Restoration. Finally,
internal evidence shows it is previous to the orders of 1653, for
those orders will be seen to be an expansion of the undated set so far
as they go, and further, while these undated orders have no mention of
the line, those of 1653 enjoin it. They must therefore lie between
1648 and 1653, and it seems worth while to give them here
conjecturally as being possibly the supplementary, or 'more particular
instructions,' which the government contemplated; particularly as this
hypothesis gains colour from the unusual form of the heading
'Instructions for the better ordering.' Though this form became fixed
from this time forward, there is, so far as is known, no previous
example of it except in the orders which Lord Wimbledon propounded to
his council of war in 1625, and those were also supplementary
articles.[2]

Be this as it may, the orders in question do not affect the position
that up to the outbreak of the First Dutch War we have no orders
enjoining the line ahead as a battle formation. Still we cannot
entirely ignore the fact that, in spite of the lack of orders on the
subject, traces of a line ahead are to be detected in the earliest
action of the war. Gibson, for instance, in his _Reminiscences_
has the following passage relating to Blake's brush with Tromp over
the honour of the flag on May 9, 1652, before the outbreak of the
war:[3] 'When the general had got half Channel over he could see the
Dutch fleet with their starboard tacks aboard standing towards him,
having the weather-gage. Upon which the general made a sign for the
fleet to tack. After which, having their starboard tacks aboard (the
gener