sea. No fresh instructions were
forthcoming to clear his perplexity, and he could only protest again. "I
could wish," he wrote, "to be so fortunate as to have only one of these two
duties--to seek out the enemy, or to give convoy, for to do both is
attended with great difficulties."

The indecisive campaign which naturally resulted from this lack of
strategical grip and concentration of effort came to an end with Tromp's
partial defeat of Blake off Dungeness on 30th November 1652. Though charged
in spite of his protests with a vast convoy, the Dutch admiral had sent it
back to Ostend when he found Blake was in the Downs, and then, free from
all preoccupation, he had gone to seek out his enemy.

It was the effect which this unexpected blow had upon the strong military
insight of the Cromwellian Government that led to those famous reforms
which made this winter so memorable a landmark in British naval history.
Monk, the most finished professional soldier in the English service, and
Deane, another general, were joined in the command with Blake, and with
their coming was breathed into the sea service the high military spirit of
the New Model Army. To that winter we owe not only the Articles of War,
which made discipline possible, and the first attempt to formulate Fighting
Instructions, in which a regular tactical system was conceived, but also
two other conceptions that go to make up the modern idea of naval warfare.
One was the conviction that war upon the sea meant operations against the
enemy's armed fleets in order to destroy his power of naval resistance as
distinguished from operations by way of reprisal against his trade; and the
other, that such warfare required for its effective use a fleet of
State-owned ships specialised for war, with as little assistance as
possible from private-owned ships. It was not unnatural that all four ideas
should have taken shape together, so closely are they related. The end
connotes the means. Discipline, fleet tactics, and a navy of warships were
indispensable for making war in the modern sense of the term.

The results were seen in the three great actions of the following spring,
the first under the three Generals, and the other two under Monk alone. In
the last, he carried the new ideas so far as to forbid taking possession of
disabled vessels, that nothing might check the work of destruction. All
were to be sunk with as much tenderness for human life as destruction would
permit