The Royal Navy and the Examination for Lieutenant
In an article just published in The Mariner’s Mirror, GEM postgrad student Harrison Croft scrutinises the mythologised narrative of the proceedings of Lord Nelson’s 1777 examination for lieutenant.
The hierarchy of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy was very rigid. Anyone hoping to retire with a full admiral’s pension needed not only to survive the obvious perils of naval warfare – with its gunshots, duels, fevers, and mutinies – but also to navigate the subtleties of social connection and favouritism, known at the time as “interest”. The ranks beyond post captain were assigned by seniority, whereby the person who had been promoted to post captain (“made post”) first, would be first in line to receive a promotion to admiral whenever that position was vacated. It was therefore vitally important for young officers to make post quickly. Merely surviving the gruesome Revolutionary Wars was not enough: mentions in dispatches, recognition from more senior officers, and the fostering of relationships with these older figures was paramount.
Long before an officer could hope to make post, they needed to pass the examination for lieutenant. This was an oral examination, usually taking place at the Navy Office, London. The hopeful candidate – with the provisional rank of acting lieutenant – would appear before three captains who posed a series of questions and assessed the candidate’s proficiency. Only if all three captains were satisfied with these responses could the acting lieutenant receive a commission. The examination had been introduced under Charles II following the advice of Samuel Pepys, and it was a process remarkable for its sophistication. None of the Royal Navy’s rivals had established such a system, and reform in the British Army was still almost a century away.
When the young boy Nelson first paced the quarterdeck of his uncle’s command, HMS Raisonable, his future was by no means guaranteed – though it didn’t hurt that his uncle was the Comptroller of the Navy. The young Nelson took full advantage of his uncle’s supportive shadow, making an acquaintance with Captain Mark Robinson, and the future king William IV, no less. In the years before sitting his examination for lieutenant, Nelson had endured storms and sicknesses, dismastings and a battle with a polar bear, and taken command of a range of vessels. He had been to the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Arctic Circle, and the West Indies, and only briefly had to endure the tedium of the Channel blockade that was to be a hallmark of so many of his contemporaries’ careers.
Portrait of Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) by John Francis Rigaud, 1781. Rigaud began painting this portrait in 1777, shortly after Nelson’s examination for lieutenant. Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Caird Fund.
When Nelson presented himself at the Navy Office for his examination on 9 April 1777, there were two legal hurdles to be navigated. First, he had only recently passed his eighteenth birthday: candidates needed to be at least twenty. Second, he needed to have spent at least six years in the Royal Navy. Though he had spent slightly more than six years at sea, one of those had been in the merchant service, not the navy. Not to worry, though – his uncle was on the examining board. The popular story goes that Nelson’s uncle had concealed the relationship from the other two captains until the end of the examination, by which time they had deemed Nelson fully proficient. According to a story circulated by either Nelson’s brother, William, or Nelson himself at some later time, the comptroller revealed the relationship to the other two surprised captains, innocently declaring that he “did not wish the younker to be favoured”.
But this story is a fiction. The other examining captains would have seen the comptroller’s name on the documents Nelson brought with him to the office, the documents that listed the ships on which he had hitherto served. The relationship was plain for all to see. The questions that arise from this are: why did Nelson’s uncle feel compelled to oversee the examination in the first place? And why was this exchange fabricated by Nelson and his biographers?
The gaps in the historical record complicate the answering of these questions. In the first case, a nervousness that Nelson’s true age might be found out seems to have motivated the comptroller to oversee the examination. If he could be there to steer proceedings favourably, the question of Nelson’s age need not be answered or even asked. The second question is harder still to settle, not least because of the overwhelming influence of the innumerable lionising documents produced following Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in 1805. Roger Knight, one of the foremost experts on the history of the Royal Navy, is an important outlier from Nelson’s earlier biographers, having defiantly refused to consult the Clarke and McArthur papers when writing his own Nelson biography in 2005, owing to their considerable subjectivity and unreliability.
Today it might seem self-evident that Nelson was the benefactor of his uncle’s nepotism – especially at this early point in his career. The military advantages of selecting prospective officers from a narrow pool of well-connected men is argued in Voth and Guo’s paper, “Discretion and Destruction: Promotions, Performance, and Patronage in the Royal Navy”. Meanwhile John Sugden provides a counterargument in the second volume of his Nelson biography, in which he lays down the tragic career of Nelson’s stepson, Josiah Nisbet. Under Nelson’s watch, Nisbet was commissioned lieutenant at just sixteen, but was crushed under the weight of his much-adored stepfather, and failed to find success on his own terms.
Without wishing to descend into the depths of teleology, let it be said that Nelson’s early career, fostered by his protective uncle, was vital to the successes he found later in life. Whereas the median wait time for promotion from lieutenant to post captain was over a decade, Nelson made post in just two years and one month.
H. Croft, “‘I Did Not Wish the Younker to be Favoured’: Reconsidering Nelson’s Examination for Lieutenant”, The Mariner’s Mirror 109/1 (2023), 38-49, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2023.2156213.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2023.2156213