l interest with which he had been officially concerned, by way of
forming a collection of precedents.[1] Amongst these is a copy of
the orders set out below, dated from the Royal Charles, the Duke of
York's flagship, 'the 10th of April, 1665,' by command of his royal
highness, and signed 'Wm. Coventry.' This was the well-known
politician Sir William Coventry, the model, if not the author, of the
_Character of a Trimmer_, who had been made private secretary to the
duke on the eve of the Restoration, and was now a commissioner of the
navy and acting as secretary on the duke's staff. So closely it will
be seen do they follow the Commonwealth orders of 1653, as modified in
the following year, that it would be scarcely worth while setting them
out in full, but for the importance of finally establishing their true
origin. The scarcely concealed doubts which many writers have felt as
to whether the new system of tactics can have been due to the Duke of
York may now be laid at rest, and henceforth the great reform must be
credited not to him, but to Cromwell's 'generals-at-sea.'

Nevertheless the credit of certain developments which were introduced
at this time must still remain with the duke and his advisers: Rupert,
Sandwich, Lawson, and probably above all Penn, his flag captain. For
instance, differences will be found in Articles 2 and 3, where,
instead of merely enjoining the line, the duke refers to a regular
'order of battle,' which has not come down to us, but which no doubt
gave every ship her station in the line, like those which Sandwich had
prepared for his squadron a few months earlier, and which Monck and
Rupert certainly drew up in the following year.[2] Then again the
truculent Article 10 of 1653 and 1654 ordering the immediate
destruction of disabled ships of the enemy after saving the crews if
possible, which contemporary authorities put down to Monck, is
reversed. At the end, moreover, two articles are added; one, numbered
15, embodying numbers 2 and 3 of Sandwich's orders of the previous
year, with such modifications as were necessary to adapt them to a
large fleet, and another numbered 16 enjoining 'close action.' Nor is
this all. Spragge's 'Sea Book' contains also a set of ten 'additional
instructions' all of which are new. They are undated, but from another
copy in Capt. Robert Moulton's 'Sea Book' we can fix them to April
18th, 1665.[3] Their whole tenour suggests that they were the
outcome of prolonged d