narchically to submit all rules to the
solvent of hard fighting, and to take tactical risks and unfetter
individual initiative to almost any extent rather than miss a chance
of overpowering the enemy by a sudden well-timed blow. Knowing as we
do the extent to which the principles of the Duke of York's school
hampered the development of fleet tactics till men like Hawke and
Nelson broke them down, we cannot but sympathise with their
opponents. Nor can we help noting as curiously significant that
whereas it was the soldier-admirals who first introduced formal
tactics, it was a seaman's school that forced them to pedantry in the
face of the last of the soldier-school, who tried to preserve their
flexibility, and keep the end clear in view above the means they had
invented.

Still it would be wrong to claim that either school was right. In
almost every department of life two such schools must always exist,
and nowhere is such conflict less inevitable than in the art of war,
whether by sea or land. Yet just as our comparatively high degree of
success in politics is the outcome of the perpetual conflict of the
two great parties in the state, so it is probably only by the conflict
of the two normal schools of naval thought that we can hope to work
out the best adjusted compromise between free initiative and
concentrated order.

It was the school of Penn and the Duke of York that triumphed at the
close of these great naval wars. The attempt of Monck and Rupert to
preserve individual initiative and freedom to seize opportunities was
discarded, and for nearly a century formality had the upper hand. Yet
the Duke of York must not be regarded as wholly hostile to initiative
or unwilling to learn from his rivals. The second and most remarkable
of the new instructions acquits him. This is the famous article in
which was first laid down the principle of cutting off a part of the
enemy's fleet and 'containing' the rest.

Though always attributed to the Duke of York it seems almost certainly
to have been suggested by the tactics of Monck and Rupert on the last
day of the Four Days' Battle, June 4, 1666. According to the official
account, they sighted the Dutch early in the morning about five
leagues on their weather-bow, with the wind at SSW. 'At eight
o'clock,' it continues, 'we came up with them, and they having the
weather-gage put themselves in a line to windward of us. Our ships
then which were ahead of Sir Christopher Myngs [wh