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PARLIAMENT AND SOME ROOTS OF WHISTLE BLOWING DURING THE NINE YEARS WAR*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2014

MATTHEW NEUFELD
MATTHEW NEUFELD*
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan
*
Department of History, Arts Building, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7K 5A5matthew.neufeld@usask.ca
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Abstract

This article argues that the failed campaign of one former clerk against corruption in the Royal Navy's sick and wounded service during the Nine Years War sheds light on some roots of modern whistle blowing. During the 1690s, England's parliament took important steps towards becoming an organ of inquiry into the workings of all government departments. Parliament's desire for information that could assist it to check Leviathan's actions, coupled with the end of pre-publication censorship in 1695, encouraged the advent of pamphleteering aimed at showing how to improve or correct abuses within the administrative structure and practices of the expanding fiscal-military state. It was from this stream of informative petitioning directed at the Commons and the Lords that informants such as Samuel Baston, as well as George Everett, William Hodges, and Robert Crosfeild, tried to call time on either systematic injustices or particular irregularities within the naval service for what they claimed was the public interest. What they and others called ‘discovering’ governmental malfeasance should be seen as early examples of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

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Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 397 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Great Clamours have been made by some Private Men, who (I suppose) were Male-Contents, they have Promis'd Vast Discoveries of Treachery and Fraud, but when it has come to Examination, I never found that the Accusers could make out their Allegations, but Mountains dwindled into Mole-Hills.Footnote 1

In late October 1696, a former clerk of the commission for sick and wounded seamen named Samuel Baston wrote a satirical pamphlet about corrupt officials working for the English navy. Entitled A dialogue between a modern courtier and an honest English gentleman, the work's publication was deliberately timed to coincide with the opening of a new session of parliament. The whig government did not, however, take kindly to Baston's pamphlet. Within days of the Dialogue's release, Baston and the pamphlet's publisher, one Robert Crosfeild, and at least one hawker, had been arrested and charged with committing seditious libel.Footnote 2 Baston was incarcerated until late January 1697, when he was permitted to post a bond of £500.Footnote 3 Three months after his release, Baston re-issued the Dialogue, only this time it was completely ignored.Footnote 4 He published nothing further, and disappeared from the record. Baston's attempt to expose wrongdoing within King William's officialdom had, it would seem, cost him dearly while achieving little if nothing at all.

Yet, Samuel Baston's failed campaign against corruption in the Royal Navy reveals some important aspects of the institutional beginnings of whistle blowing.Footnote 5 In particular, a re-examination of Baston's efforts within the context of the many printed works concerning the performance and administration of the English navy during the Nine Years War exposes the parliamentary roots of a much debated modern occurrence. These roots of whistle blowing were nurtured by several significant developments that began or were consolidated in England towards the end of the seventeenth century. England's parliament manifestly transformed from an event to an institution in the decade following the Glorious Revolution of 1688.Footnote 6 Moreover, it was during the 1690s that parliament took important steps towards becoming an organ of inquiry into the workings of key government departments, evident most famously with the creation of a commission for public accounts.Footnote 7 These structural and political developments, coupled with the end of pre-publication censorship in 1695, encouraged pamphleteering aimed at showing ways parliament should strive to improve or correct abuses within the expanding administrations of the armed services, especially the navy.Footnote 8 What Baston and others called ‘discovering’ governmental malfeasance should be seen, this article argues, as early examples of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing. Baston and others, including George Everett, a boat builder, William Hodges, a merchant, and Robert Crosfeild, a lace-man turned pamphleteer, informed parliament about what they claimed were systematic injustices and particular irregularities within the naval service. They brought their knowledge of officials' misdeeds to parliament's attention out of a concern for the public interest and the public good.Footnote 9

Whistle blowing may be defined as the act of disclosing information about a wrongdoing. The disclosure is usually made by an employee or former employee of an organization.Footnote 10 Whistle blowing is an indisputably modern descriptor; the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest examples of the term's use come from the 1970s.Footnote 11 Thanks in part to the internet, whistle blowing and whistle blowers are now widely used words within the English-speaking world and beyond.Footnote 12 The term whistle blowing evidently originated in the consumer protection campaigns spearheaded by Ralph Nader in the USA during the 1960s. Nader had evidently received crucial information about the dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair from employees of General Motors.Footnote 13 Nader went on to write the introductory chapter of the first book to outline the theory and practice of whistle blowing, describing it as the deliberate leakage of secret information in the public's interest.Footnote 14 Since 1972, many studies of whistle blowing that examine discrete incidences of it in the past (case-histories), and accounts by or about particular whistle blowers, have been published, but a focused historical treatment of the phenomenon does not exist.Footnote 15 To date, the overwhelming majority of the literature on whistle blowing approaches it from the standpoints of employment law, professional ethics, or public administration.Footnote 16 Additionally, none of the scholarship on whistle blowing looks behind the twentieth century for case-studies. From all of this, it would seem that whistle blowing does not have much of a history.

One suspects, nonetheless, that people have long been informing on their organization's or employer's misdeeds. Significantly, even the compilers of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) agree with this notion, if only just. The single item assigned the subject heading of ‘Whistle blowing’ in the ESTC is a pamphlet dating from 1670, entitled Carr's case.Footnote 17 Interestingly, the author of this work, like Baston a quarter century later, had been a clerk employed in the armed forces who was punished for printing allegations that his superiors were corrupt. William Carr was a gentleman clerk of a troop of the palace Life Guards. In 1667, he accused his former commanding officer, Charles Lord Gerrard of Brandon, of having embezzled £1,000 since the Restoration.Footnote 18 Carr first submitted this information to parliament as a manuscript petition and then subsequently had it printed. It was for publishing the petition containing allegations against Gerrard that resulted in Carr's being called before the Lords and convicted of seditious libel.Footnote 19 Evidently, upon reading the narrative in Carr's case the managers of the ESTC decided that his informing on Gerrard warranted assigning the pamphlet the label of whistle blowing. Their use of the descriptor suggests that there might be analytical value in examining early modern disclosures of wrongdoing in light of more recent revelations of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices or policies. Whistle blowing could also serve as a useful ‘optic’ for rethinking several related historical problems, including the growth of England's fiscal state, the concern over governmental corruption, and political modernization.Footnote 20

Carr lost his case because parliament determined that by printing an accusation of wrongdoing, Carr had impugned the authority of the state and its officials.Footnote 21 Within early modern English political and legal culture, it was clearly more important for the authorities to appear above reproach to the people than for their representatives to be made aware of administrative incompetence or the abuse of public office. However, it is also clear that early modern politicians and governmental administrators were at times amenable to receiving information about the nefarious actions of their peers and subordinates, occasionally going so far as to publicize them.Footnote 22 Perhaps the most noteworthy seventeenth-century public revelation of what appeared to be official wrongdoing was the Long Parliament's publication in 1645 of selections of Charles I's secret correspondence, which contained damaging evidence of the king's untrustworthiness.Footnote 23 The decades following the Civil Wars witnessed the increasing publication of so-called secret histories that purported to disclose information about the evil machinations of corrupt court officials.Footnote 24 More prosaically, officials or former officials were occasionally happy to feed politicians with revelations about the secret peccadillos of crown servants, especially if passing along such information could save their own skin. After the Glorious Revolution, Samuel Pepys apparently leaked damaging information about the inner workings of the navy to the newly formed commission for public accounts' two luminaries, Paul Foley and Robert Harley. Pepys disclosed what he knew probably in order to avoid having his own record as ‘secretary of the marine’ under Charles II and James II audited.Footnote 25 Similarly, the country-tory members of parliament who alleged in 1698–9, and again in 1701, that the great whig Admiral Edward Russell (Lord Orford from April 1697) had used his post as treasurer of the navy to enrich himself greatly, probably received crucial information from the clerk of the navy board, Charles Sergison.Footnote 26 Where personal or partisan gain permitted it, English politicians could be very willing to use insider information to impugn publicly the reputation of state servants, and even constrain corruption.Footnote 27

But while it was one thing for parliament to publish evidence of official wrongdoing, or for public servants to inform on the misdeeds of their former or current colleagues anonymously, it was something quite different for people to publish unsolicited information for parliament's use in its struggle against corruption, waste, and malfeasance.Footnote 28 What made the 1690s a crucial turning point in the story of whistle blowing was the fact that England's parliament increasingly came to be seen as an institutional receptacle for information that purported to serve the public interest and facilitate parliamentary oversight of governmental operations.Footnote 29 The desire of at least some of the members of King William's parliaments for information about the administrative workings of the state, especially its fiscal-naval components, coupled with the relatively free expansion of printed public discourse after 1695, provided a legitimate target for informants to ‘discover’ openly governmental wrongdoing. Much of this information was offered in the form of printed petitions or pamphlets either addressed to or dedicated to the parliament. As one would expect, the motives of informants appear to have been mixed, if not wholly self-interested. Additionally, to many of their contemporaries, men such as Baston and Everett appeared to be cheats or simply cranks. These factors complicate any analysis of Baston's case, but they also connect the roots of whistle blowing during the Nine Years War with on-going concerns about what really compels individuals to expose misconduct within their organization.Footnote 30 In our contemporary context, for the purposes of reducing corruption or serving the public interest, a whistle blower's motivations are less relevant than her or his speaking out, or posting material on wikileaks.Footnote 31 Nonetheless, the reasons for blowing the whistle are important historically because these reasons, along with what is held to constitute corruption and the public interest, change over time.Footnote 32

Parliament's concern to monitor government expenditures over the course of a long and expensive war in defence of the Glorious Revolution stirred up men willing for a variety of reasons to expose Leviathan's mis-steps to the national legislature. These disclosures occurred within an expanding sphere of public discourse.Footnote 33 The content of informative petitioning concerning the navy shifted noticeably from general proposals to improve its combat and administrative effectiveness to particular revelations of wrongdoing or abuse. As we shall see below, by the end of the Nine Years War it was possible for at least a few Williamite whistle blowers to insist that an exposé of corruption on behalf of the public interest was its own good.

The remainder of this article will amplify these points by first reviewing Samuel Baston's complaints against the navy's medical agency. This will be followed by an analysis of the transformation of Baston's case from an internal complaint to a series of public revelations to parliament. The final substantive section of the article will contextualize Baston's whistle blowing on the commission for sick and wounded seamen, and gauge its impact, within the context of informative petitioning to parliament during the 1690s. Before examining Baston's struggle, however, it will be useful for us to examine briefly the navy's medical system during the Nine Years War.

I

The commission for sick and wounded seamen appointed in July 1689 was the fourth such agency created since the first Anglo-Dutch war. Like its precursors, the four members of the 1689 commission – Thomas Addison, Edward Leigh, John Starky, and Anthony Sheppard – were appointed because of their political connections and administrative capabilities. Addison, for example, was a business partner of Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven, one of the commissioners of the Admiralty.Footnote 34 Allowed an annual salary of £300 each, the commissioners were primarily charged with ensuring that sick and injured sailors received medical attention and lodging once set ashore. The commission also co-ordinated the lodging and exchange of prisoners of war.Footnote 35 At several points during the conflict, particularly in 1690 and 1693, the commission faced severe difficulties finding quarters.Footnote 36 The acquisition of a hospital at Plymouth was a direct result of the complaints there about the commissioners' mishandling of the demand for quarters in the war's early phase.Footnote 37 Despite being hailed by historians as a step towards a brighter future for maritime medicine, Plymouth naval hospital quickly became a cause for concern.Footnote 38 In the spring of 1692, a local surgeon, Benjamin Berry, reported to the Admiralty that one of the commission's agents, George Dickinson, had mistreated prisoners of war, deprived the patients at Plymouth hospital of their provisions, cheated local landladies of monies owed to them for quartering sailors, and kept fraudulent accounts.Footnote 39 Naturally, Dickinson disputed the charges, and claimed that it was Berry who was guilty of professional misconduct.Footnote 40 The controversy soon died down, but Berry's attack on Dickinson eventually became part of a larger public dispute between the commission and one of its London-based clerks.Footnote 41

Samuel Baston secured the post of chief clerk to the commission for sick and wounded in the summer of 1690.Footnote 42 He was put in to replace Richard Gibson, a veteran of the Republic's navy who had been a clerk under Samuel Pepys intermittently after the Restoration until resigning from a position with the Admiralty in September 1688.Footnote 43 Samuel was probably related to a Thomas Baston, who was employed as a clerk of the Admiralty from 1694 and, like Samuel, the owner of a vessel employed in the king's service.Footnote 44 Baston claimed to have been married, but by 1694 he was living solo as a lodger in Curl Court, Covent Garden, on land owned by Admiral Russell's uncle, the fifth earl of Bedford.Footnote 45 In all likelihood, Baston began his career, as so many servants of King William's navy did, as a dependent of the great whig admiral.

Baston's case began, he would later claim, in September 1693 when he learned that the owners of several ships used to transport prisoners were wrongly profiting from their work. These same ship owners knew about an illegal exchange of letters between English and French officials connected to the exchange of prisoners of war.Footnote 46 Additionally, one of the owners, Major William Churchill, had knowingly, Baston alleged, allowed a suspected French spy on a transport ship across the Channel.Footnote 47 Baston stated that he resigned his post in protest in February 1694, considerably in arrears for salary and travelling expenses, after it became clear that the commissioners were not going to take action against Churchill and Churchill's associates.Footnote 48 Then in March 1694, Baston and John Leakie, a surgeon formerly attached to Plymouth naval hospital, presented seven articles of complaint against the commission for sick and wounded and Plymouth naval hospital both to newly appointed secretary of state Shrewsbury,Footnote 49 and to parliament's commission for public accounts.Footnote 50 The first four complaints related to Churchill's alleged fraudulent dealings, the transportation of a French spy, the mistreatment of prisoners at Plymouth, and the commission's failure to examine the hospital's accounts. The remaining three charges were aimed at the commission's administrative practices, one of them being that in 1690 the commissioners had knowingly cheated quarterers at Plymouth. In particular, Baston asserted that the commission's agents had deducted ‘from the poor people who quartered the Men Six pence p. pound which they told them was for advance of their money on Talleys’.Footnote 51 Since a talley was a short-term credit instrument issued by the exchequer, comparable to a modern investment certificate with a guaranteed rate of interest, what Baston was probably describing with this sentence was an attempt by the commissioners to reduce the cost they would bear on the tallies when they had to cash them with London bankers by lowering what the commission's agents paid to people who quartered sailors.Footnote 52 However, according to Baston, the commissioners' method of reducing the cost of raising the cash needed to pay Plymouth's quarterers was corrupt.

Following Baston's case through most of the surviving records and from his retrospective narrations, he appears to be a genuinely scandalized subject seeking to expose wrongdoing, rather than a disgruntled ex-employee striking back at his former bosses. In print, Baston presented himself as an honest citizen, acting only ‘out of a love to Justice, and Zeal for the King's Service (tho directly contrary to my own Private Interest)’.Footnote 53 And, indeed, the records indicate that Baston did not publicly accuse the sick and wounded commission of wrongdoing before having sought redress through proper internal channels, which is today, at least, taken as a sign of good faith from potential whistle blowers. For example, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ concerning the United States' involvement in Vietnam to the New York Times at least one year after passing selected documents to Senator William Fulbright.Footnote 54 Moreover, the trouble taken by the Admiralty and the privy council to investigate Baston's charges suggests that they took them seriously, a severity probably enhanced by their knowledge of the difficulty of securing quarters for naval causalities on shore. For example, in the autumn of 1693 commissioner Christopher Kirkby wrote secretary Trenchard that residents of both Totnes and Dartmouth were uneasy about having to quarter sick seamen. Kirkby had heard people complain that ‘there is no act of parliament that obligates them to receive [the men] into their houses’. Kirkby was also concerned that the seamen ‘are not duely cared for because the poore quarterers are not better paid’.Footnote 55 In such circumstances, it was certainly to the regime's advantage for the administrators of its sick and wounded service to appear to be above reproach.

The Admiralty reacted to Baston's submission by ordering the commission for sick and wounded to respond to it in writing. Subsequently, the Admiralty ordered Baston, the agent Dickinson of Plymouth, and the commissioners to appear before them.Footnote 56 By 14 April 1694, the Admiralty had composed a report on Baston and Leakie's complaints for secretary Shrewsbury.Footnote 57 At this point, according to Baston, the commissioners for sick and wounded presented themselves before the king and pleaded that the charges be examined by the council. Evidently the king agreed, and the council appointed a subcommittee to study Baston's allegations.Footnote 58 The subcommittee interviewed the commissioners in early May and reported back at the end of the month, with the commissioners in attendance. The minutes indicate that at the end of the meeting Queen Mary ordered Lord President Carmarthen (Sir Thomas Osborne) to reprimand the commissioners for their actions. According to Luttrell, however, the queen also ‘discharged the commissioners’ from Baston's accusations, recommending ‘the care of their business to them’.Footnote 59 It is possible that such an acquittal could have followed Carmarthen's admonishment – the matter evidently did not arise in the council again, and none of the commissioners were removed from office.

Both the Admiralty's and the council's reports confirmed some of the facts contained in Baston and Leakie's report. Although the Admiralty's report was more detailed than the one prepared by the council's subcommittee, the latter included an opinion about the commissioners' culpability. The privy council subcommittee found that in the matter of transporting a French spy, the sick and wounded commission was guilty of ‘great mismanagement and breach of trust’. As to Baston and Leakie's other charges, including suborning Dickinson's misbehaviour and bad accounting methods, the commissioners could be faulted most for inadequately supervising their staff.Footnote 60 Significantly, both the Admiralty and the privy council did not find the commission's accounting methods secretive or misleading. Moreover, both bodies accepted the commissioners' explanations for deducting 6d in the pound from money to pay quarterers – this practice was necessary if the commission's agents were to reduce the cost of finding lodging for seamen at short notice.Footnote 61 Thus, in the government's view the commissioners had been delinquent but not corrupt. Baston's co-complainant Leakie subsequently left the country, his cost-saving proposals for the sick and wounded service having been rejected by the navy board.Footnote 62 Nonetheless, Baston remained determined to carry on his struggle, this time before parliament.

Throughout the summer of 1694, Baston tried unsuccessfully to convince the commission for public accounts that the commission for sick and wounded was a corrupt agency. Baston failed to achieve his objective for at least two reasons. First, the public accounts commission appears to have determined that the sick and wounded's financial dealings and accounting were legitimate. Whether they came to such a judgement independently can perhaps be doubted. In 1705, their successors evidently refused to receive a ‘present’ from the fifth sick and wounded commission, which claimed they were informed by their predecessors that such gifts had been made annually to the public accounts commission in the 1690s.Footnote 63 Additionally, it is probably the case that the parliamentary agency came to regard Baston as an unstable crank who was himself likely guilty of wrongdoing. Over time, Baston became more determined to proceed despite being confronted with facts that potentially undermined his case. Indeed, if someone cast doubts about the validity of Baston's allegations, this became for him a sign of corruption. By the conclusion of his first series of meetings with the public accounts commission, Baston was convinced that he had uncovered a conspiracy between the legislature and the executive to suppress the truth about mismanagement in the sick and injured service. He was becoming, it seems, paranoid, although possibly not without reason.

Baston's unwavering conviction can be inferred by comparing his printed account of the proceedings before the commission for public accounts and their meeting minutes, particularly as they concern the depositions of two key witnesses: Dickinson's former clerk, Nicholas Sharrack, and the receiver of the sick and wounded commission, Richard Povey.Footnote 64 In the minutes, there is a brief entry noting that Sharrack had testified on 8 August 1694, and that it took place to Baston's displeasure because his co-plaintiff, the surgeon John Leakie, was unable to be present to cross-examine Sharrack. By contrast, Baston's Case devotes several rambling pages to recounting his protestations against Sharrack's validity as a witness and Sharrack's blatant self-interest.Footnote 65 By contrast, the minutes record in detail Povey's testimony on 16 August about the sick and wounded's method of settling its accounts with quarterers, whereas Baston's printed version of the proceedings does not even mention Povey's name. This is despite Baston's having, at least according to the minutes, cross-examined Povey.Footnote 66

It is not clear why the public accounts' commission minutes did not record Sharrack's deposition in greater detail, since, according to Baston's Case, Dickinson's former clerk essentially refuted Leakie's charges of corruption at Plymouth naval hospital.Footnote 67 Probably, Baston did not refer to Povey's testimony in his publication because Povey's description of procedures at Plymouth largely chimed with what Sharrack had claimed earlier: that it was standard practice to hold back 6d in the pound when paying for quarters in order to maintain a fund of money on which to advance future orders for lodging.Footnote 68 Povey's testimony evidently stopped Baston from continuing to charge the sick and wounded commission with fraud. Thereafter, his attacks took a different angle: he started to claim that the sick and wounded's method of endorsing orders to pay was fraudulent.Footnote 69 For its part, the commission for public accounts appears to have been sufficiently satisfied with the information gathered from the depositions to let the matter rest. Baston was left to nurture his indignation until he found an ally with a publishing background willing to take his information about corruption in the sick and wounded service to a bigger audience.

II

In the spring of 1695, Baston partnered with pamphleteer Robert Crosfeild in order to bring before parliament the sick and wounded commission's misdeeds, and the public accounts commission's failure to address them adequately. Crosfeild had already demonstrated his concern for the state's treatment of injured and sick sailors two years before meeting Baston. In a pamphlet entitled England's glory reviv'd, Crosfeild had proposed the creation of a fund derived from a progressive duty imposed on merchant cargos. This duty would then be used to pay for a pension scheme for disabled seamen and the building of hospitals in major ports to provide care for the sick and injured. These schemes were in the public interest, Crosfeild averred, because a state that showed itself concerned about relieving sick and disabled sailors would have an easier time finding men for its navy. ‘As the Romans were sedulous in taking care to provide for their Souldiery’, Crosfeild argued, ‘so much the more ought we to study the interest of the Saylers upon whom the welfare of these Kingdoms doth very much depend.’Footnote 70 Crosfeild subsequently became convinced that the navy board and the dockyards under its supervision were nests of fraud and embezzlement. He took it upon himself to present these charges to parliament in a pamphlet around the same time that he first encountered Baston.Footnote 71

According to Baston, Crosfeild approached him about adding Baston's allegations against the sick and wounded commission to a petition about corruption in the navy, and the negligence of the public accounts commission, to be presented to the House of Lords.Footnote 72 The petition, which was brought to the Lords on 9 March 1695, began by recapitulating the principal contentions of Baston and Leakie, first presented to the secretary of state almost exactly twelve months earlier.Footnote 73 The Lords evidently heard witnesses who supported the allegations over the next few days, before determining on 20 March to refer the substance of Crosfeild's petition back to the public accounts commission.Footnote 74 Over the next several weeks, Baston and Crosfeild tried again to spur the commissioners, Robert Harley among them, into what they deemed to be satisfactory action, but were evidently again disappointed.Footnote 75 Baston's conception of the extent of government corruption needing public exposure was reinforced by his and Crosfeild's frustration. He concluded from this second round of meetings with them that his difficultly in securing justice was the result of a plot to supress his case and so deter other informants from reporting corruption.Footnote 76 In April 1695, he made one last attempt to move his case forward by writing a letter to the public accounts commissioners requesting that they act on the Lords' order and report back on his charges. The lack of a response convinced him that his suspicions were correct. Baston vented his frustration at his case's lack of progress by printing and submitting a petition to the members of parliament. Its full title was Baston's case vindicated: or a brief account of some evil practices of the present commissioners for sick and wounded. Dedicated to the upper chamber, the pamphlet narrated in just over fifty pages Baston's struggles with his former employers during the previous eighteen months. It also reproduced what Baston claimed was the Admiralty's report to Shrewsbury from April 1694.Footnote 77

Baston's Case was one example of a new mode of individual petition submitted to parliament in the 1690s, what may be called informative petitions. The goal of these works was to give parliament knowledge in order to address adequately problems or else to correct abuses in the navy. Individuals had long submitted petitions to parliament in the hopes of achieving a more speedy and cost-effective remedy to their private grievances.Footnote 78 As is well known, petitioning by groups of people to parliament on matters of public concern became a popular and controversial mode of collective intervention in national politics during the 1640s. It was a mode of ‘popularity’ that was both encouraged and discouraged by politicians, depending on the prevailing political climate and differing partisan agendas.Footnote 79 Although the Cavalier Parliament attempted to discourage collective petitioning to parliament once and for all by making it all but illegal, the practice re-emerged with a vengeance during the early 1680s, only to decline again after the Glorious Revolution.Footnote 80 Although nation-wide petitioning to parliament did not again become an ‘habitual mode of politics’ until the end of the 1690s, from about the middle of the decade an increasing number of individuals, including Robert Crosfeild, Captain George St Loo, and others, submitted printed petitions to parliament that contained schemes and shared information aimed at solving the problems confronting the nation's war effort.Footnote 81 As we shall see below, much of this information concerned corruption within the naval administration, and the injustice of the navy's method of paying, or rather not paying, sick and injured sailors. In Baston's petition, the information he hoped parliament would find useful was the government's and the accounts commission's recent failure to stamp out systematic ‘evil practices’ in the navy's sick and injured service, about which he had personal knowledge.

Both as a request for redress from parliament, and as a public airing of the state's ‘dirty laundry’, Baston's Case was a failure. Parliament did nothing about his charges. While Robert Crosfeild continued to crusade in the halls of Westminster against governmental corruption, Baston's activism disappears from the record over the remainder of 1695. Somewhat surprisingly, by the spring of 1696 Baston was willing to be reconciled to the regime. Baston successfully petitioned the king that he be considered for a place as a purser on a ship of the first, second, or third rates as a reward for having brought to light the misdeeds of the sick and wounded commission.Footnote 82 The fact that the Admiralty chose to ignore Baston's request for a position probably re-ignited Baston's animus against the government. He also rediscovered his willingness to call on parliament to protect the public interest from corrupt officials. Baston composed a second pamphlet denouncing government corruption, posted it anonymously to Crosfeild, and asked that the polemicist release it. Upon reading the work, Crosfeild decided that it deserved publication because it ‘greatly Tended to the Public good’.Footnote 83

Baston's second attempt to get parliament's attention through print was released in the form of a dialogue. A classically rooted genre, dialogues were a particularly effective form of animadversion that belittled and satirized a writer's political opponents, mostly by using their ‘own words’ against them.Footnote 84 Popular during periods of heightened political controversy and used successfully by both opponents of the government and by governments against their critics, dialogues were the most vivid and dramatic of pamphlet genres.Footnote 85 Dialogues facilitated reasoning to lower sorts of people because the dialogue mimicked the everyday speech of common folk. As such, dialogues were the ideal form of print for provoking audible reading and further discussion about the ideas they promulgated.Footnote 86 However, the use of this particular genre was rare among the printed works published for parliament during the 1690s that focused on the deficiencies within the state's administrative apparatus. Baston's decision to release a dialogue between an ‘honest gentleman’ and a ‘modern courtier’ suggests that for the moment he was finished with simply seeking redress from parliament: the time had come to make a bigger impression by mocking the pretensions of the court and the wilful blindness of the government towards corruption within the navy.

What particularly exercises Baston's ‘gentleman’ is the hypocrisy of the court in refusing to address systematic wrongdoing in the navy's administration. Corruption for the honest gentleman is defined as action damaging to the public interest, and the unwillingness on the part of officials to bring it to a stop. Among the particular instances of malfeasance the gentleman produces are fraud in the administration of the dockyards, which the navy board and Admiralty conceal, the navy's inability to protect merchant shipping from French privateers, the commission for sick and wounded's overlooking illegal correspondence with the enemy and its cheating the sick and injured – all actions that the public accounts commission had yet to report on as directed by the House of Lords. To these (older) charges, Baston's gentleman adds the case of the poor sailors which ‘should fire up zeal for the public good’. Here, the gentleman was referring particularly to the perception among mariners and their dependants that the navy's policy of withholding sailors' pay by marking them in pay-books as ‘Q’ (for ‘Query’) when they were put ashore sick or injured was unjust.Footnote 87 In normal circumstances, the gentleman argues, the sorts of dishonesty and conflicts of interests he describes would be subject to strict sanctions. Yet, in this ‘Age full of Wonders’, the court did nothing; what it lacked in integrity, justice and morality, it made up for with an abundance of ‘Praying and Preaching and Fasting’.Footnote 88

The Dialogue's accusation that the regime was hypocritical, and that there was a need for better oversight of the naval service, echoed earlier so-called whig Jacobite denunciations of William III's betrayal of the principles of 1688.Footnote 89 Indeed, for the Dialogue's gentleman, the hypocrisy of William III's court made its transgressions worse than those of the deposed James II's. At least the former Catholic king had had the decency to be open about his plans, even if they were wrong. By contrast, the current Protestant court thrived on keeping its crimes hidden from both the king and the people. The latter, identified as the ‘popularity’ or middle sort of people, could not expect redress of grievances, let alone justice, from a court that quashed revelations of corruption.Footnote 90 If King William's regime was serious about snuffing out Jacobite sentiment, it would act swiftly to remove those officials ‘most obnoxious to the People’, and not persecute those brave subjects who blew the whistle on them.Footnote 91

Unlike Baston's petition, his Dialogue provoked a marked reaction from the authorities. The pamphlet went on sale at Westminster the day the new parliamentary session began (20 October). The hawkers were hauled before secretary Sir William Trumbull, questioned, and had their remaining copies seized. Two days later, a female hawker named Ann Herring was dragged before a JP while selling copies at the Royal Exchange; she and Crosfeild were subsequently detained at London's Poultry Compter.Footnote 92 Baston surrendered himself to the secretary of state shortly thereafter. The former clerk managed to secure his release at the end of January 1697 after posting a £500 bond.Footnote 93

Why did the government react so negatively to Baston's Dialogue when it was first released in the autumn of 1696? The country was in the middle of a deep monetary contraction as a result of the Coin Act, which might have made the ministry more sensitive than otherwise about having its ‘dirty laundry’ aired in public.Footnote 94 At the same time, the difficulty the commission for sick and wounded was having in finding people willing to lodge naval casualties perhaps made the government feel more protective towards that branch of the state. Indeed, on 27 October, the day after Baston's arrest, the sick and wounded told the treasury lords that they were so far behind paying the quarterers that some had threatened to let sick and injured sailors starve and to set prisoners of war free.Footnote 95 Yet, it is almost certainly because the Dialogue could be read as an attack on Admiral Russell, a very modern courtier and junto whig, who was just then preparing both to reveal the Jacobite conspirator Sir John Fenwick's allegations against him and other leading members of the whig ministry, and to lead the campaign for Fenwick's attainder in the Commons, that made the pamphlet seem so threatening.Footnote 96 It is not all that surprising that Baston was allowed to post bond within weeks of Fenwick's execution in January 1697. The ministry, and Russell, were then secure enough to tolerate a little satire about corruption in the navy, written by a disgruntled former client and ex-employee.

Two months later, Baston decided to risk publishing the Dialogue again. He dedicated it, like his previously published petition, to parliament. In the paratext, Baston wilfully conflated his personal struggles with the national interest, claiming that he was being treated like a criminal despite having ‘discover'd and detected’ enemies of the king and ‘laying open the Nations Grievances to Parliament’.Footnote 97 Significantly, Baston used the dedication to articulate something similar to the principle of the public's right to know when and how government officials broke public faith, and of the duty of crown servants to bring such transgressions to light. ‘Every subject of England’, Baston proclaimed, ‘has an undoubted Privilege to Complain of, and discover, Injuries done to the King and also lay open the Grievances of his People.’Footnote 98 His reason for printing the Dialogue a second time was, Baston declared, ‘that God may be honour'd by the Punishment and Suppression of Wickedness, the King and the Kingdom's Enemies remov'd, and the Laws put in Execution for the publick safety’.Footnote 99 In other words, he had to publish because parliament's failure to act against corruption in the navy was both wrong and contrary to the public interest. Anticipating future whistle blowers, Baston argued that it was the exact opposite of sedition for a subject to reveal openly the nature of corruption in a state run by ‘a Cabal of Men’ who were ‘ready to turn the King's Authority against himself, and to subvert Gospel, Law, Loyalty and Justice’.Footnote 100 As the following section will demonstrate, Baston was not alone in propounding a doctrine that it was legitimate to release to parliament information about wrongdoing committed by public officials to parliament.

III

Baston's publications emerged within a rising stream of informative petitioning in which a handful of informants sought to expose corruption in the navy. Much of the early petitioning attempted to alert the executive and the legislature about ways to remove inefficiencies within the naval administration or to ameliorate the lot of its employees. For example, the first part of Captain George St Loo's pamphlet presented a scheme that he claimed would make it easier to man ships, while the second part proposed a better way to support disabled sailors.Footnote 101 Similarly, Crosfeild's first pamphlet contained detailed proposals for improving the care of sick, injured, and disabled seamen, which if implemented would encourage, he claimed, more men to enlist in the navy.Footnote 102 George Everett, a shipwright from Chatham, wrote a pamphlet that attempted to show that the normal procedures for procuring labour and managing materials at the navy's dockyards were inefficient and far too costly. Additionally, if not surprisingly, Everett claimed that the practice of paying shipwrights after their work was completed was actually a drag on their productivity.Footnote 103 Such works as these suggested that the navy's administration was not so much tainted with wrongdoing as needing improvement.

However, from 1694 more pamphlets aimed at parliament contained information about systematic injustices created by naval administrative policy. Crosfeild's Justice perverted offered to the Lords in 1695, argued that the navy's policy of withholding the pay of sick and injured men until they reported back in person to their ships unfairly deprived seamen of their wages, while giving ships' captains, pursers, and clerks the power to record men falsely as ‘Q’ or ‘R’ (for Run) and pocket their wages for themselves.Footnote 104 Indeed, the injustice of the ‘Qs’ and ‘Rs’ was the main grievance presented in William Hodges's numerous petitions to parliament over the period 1693 to 1699.Footnote 105 Hodges's complaint on behalf of underpaid sailors was echoed by Crosfeild, repeated in Baston's Dialogue and other petitions to parliament about the injustice of the ‘Qs’. All these works agreed that the official policy, rather than particular officials, was wrong because it unjustly deprived sailors of their pay.Footnote 106

However, petitioners increasingly informed parliament about particular misdeeds committed by agents of the navy. In 1695, Crosfeild accused the Admiralty, navy board, and sick and wounded commission of enriching themselves ‘to the great waste of the Publick Treasure, and hazard of the Common Safety of the Nation’. Significantly, Crosfeild's pamphlet recounted what he claimed was the deposition to the Admiralty by a Gosport merchant, identified only as H. B., that ‘sufficiently discover[ed] to what sad Pass the Nation is brought, in having the Publick Stores embezzled’.Footnote 107 Several years later, George Everett denounced the commissioners for prizes for embezzling prizes and prize goods. He also claimed that the commissioners responded to reports of fraud by ‘Brow-beat[ing] the discoverers’, and branding them ‘with the Name of an Informer’, while making them pay to produce the evidence of wrongdoing.Footnote 108 The boldest petitioner was former whig agitator Hugh Speke, whose plea for a parliamentary investigation into irregularities in the Admiralty and navy board explicitly named officials, including known clients of Admiral Russell, whom Speke alleged had defrauded the government.Footnote 109 The grievances presented in these works were not concerned with government policies that were unjust, but rather with individual officials revealed to be corrupt yet left unpunished. It was parliament's responsibility, the petitions implied, to act on the information that had been discovered for its members.

For Baston's contemporaries, the word ‘discovering’ referred to the act of exposing wrongdoing to people with power. For example, Crosfeild denounced the navy board for crushing ‘all those persons that had made any discoveries of the embezzled Stores’.Footnote 110 Everett claimed that he had exposed the prize commission's systematic embezzlement out of a concern for the public's interest, yet bewailed the fact that ‘the detecting and discovering Publick grievances’ was treated as a crime.Footnote 111 It was probably from a desire to prevent the navy from punishing informants that Hodges suggested that parliament should create a committee ‘to hear and receive all Informations, wherin the King and Nation have been cheated, and liberty to grant a safe Conduct to any one to come and appear before them, to make a full and free discovery’.Footnote 112 Thus, by the end of the 1690s, Baston and some of his contemporaries had an idea of informing on or discovering an organization's wrongdoing to those with power, in their case, to parliament, that is congruent with modern notions of whistle blowing.

Discovering governmental wrongdoing to parliament during the Nine Years War was justified in either the language of moral reformation or the public interest. Hodges evidently believed that the nation's success in the war, and its standing before God, depended on parliament's willingness to redress the horrendous consequences of the ‘Qs’ and ‘Rs’ for seamen. Indeed, he claimed that the Almighty ‘led me to Write what I have written, and God will bring what I write to Judgment, and all the Seamens Ruins and Destructions to Judgment’.Footnote 113 Baston, as noted above, cited both religion and public safety as reasons for lifting the veil on the corruption at the sick and wounded.Footnote 114 By contrast, Crosfeild and Everett offered their information to parliament solely as a way of promoting the public interest. Everett, for example, declared it to be manifest that ‘for [his] Integrity in Promoting the publick Interest, I have offended many of the Publick Enemies’.Footnote 115 Crosfeild retrospectively justified having published his ‘Knowledge of a great many Notorious Crimes that had been committed in the Government’, and the assistance he had given to Baston's campaign against the sick and wounded's ‘evil practices’, as the ‘Duty (which every man owes to his Native Soil) to bring [such] Aggressors to open Shame’.Footnote 116 Not only did a few late seventeenth-century men have a notion of actions that fall today within the scope of whistle blowing, they also had firm notions about why it was a good thing to do them.

IV

Blowing the whistle on the sick and wounded commission did little good for Samuel Baston. His petitions were ultimately ignored by parliament, and his request for a place as a purser remained unfulfilled.Footnote 117 Similarly, Everett's and Crosfeild's charges of systematic fraud at the dockyards were either refuted or simply ignored.Footnote 118 In early 1699, Hodges stated in his Ruin to ruin that Baston was, regretfully, silent in the grave.Footnote 119 A few years later, Baston's erstwhile colleague, Robert Crosfeild, acknowledged that parliament had simply brushed aside Baston's campaign to clean up the sick and hurt service.Footnote 120 Yet, before we feel sorry for him as a failed and largely forgotten whistle blower, it is apt to note that Baston is probably no more deserving of sympathy than his former employers, not one of whom was reappointed to the fifth commission for sick and wounded seamen at the beginning of the Spanish Succession war.Footnote 121 Although both Baston and the commissioners claimed to have behaved scrupulously while employed by the Royal Navy,Footnote 122 there is evidence to suggest that these statements can be doubted. In relation to Baston, a reconstituted parliamentary commission for public accounts determined in the autumn of 1703 that there was a discrepancy of nearly £440 between the sick and wounded's record of monies paid on account to its former chief clerk, and the sum the office charges paid to Baston actually revealed.Footnote 123 One reason Baston might have got away with over-charging for his services is suggested in another report from the public accounts commission to the Lords a few months later. In their report, they claimed that the 1690s sick and wounded's accounting methods were idiosyncratic and very confused, ‘many vouchers wanting, and some of those produced very suspicious’.Footnote 124 Neither Baston nor his former employers were, it would seem, entirely free of wrongdoing during their stints as crown servants.

As John Ehrman noted well over a half century ago in his seminal work on the navy under William III, episodes such as Baston versus the sick and wounded remind us of just how common it was for late seventeenth-century naval officials to enrich themselves in the course of public employment. Additionally, Ehrman argued that petitioners such as Baston, Crosfeild, and Everett were important because they drew public attention to corruption within the ranks of the Royal Navy's administration.Footnote 125 However, as this article has attempted to demonstrate, the efforts of these individuals are also significant because they struggled to bring information about governmental misdeeds to parliament's attention. They aimed their paper bullets at Westminster because it appeared to them that parliament had the power to censure and even stop the wrongdoing about which they had information. While it is true that parliament's public accounts commission was crucial for educating members about how naval finances worked, the activities and publications of men such as Crosfeild and Baston were also vital in helping that institution take on the task of overseeing the workings of government.Footnote 126 Without informants such as Baston or Everett who went public, as well as those like Sergison or his navy board colleague Gilbert Wardlaw who kept their complaints out of the printed domain, it is doubtful that country-minded members could have launched the sort of attacks on Orford's conduct as treasurer of the Royal Navy that led to his resignation in May of 1699, and later to his impeachment.Footnote 127

Finally, Baston's failed campaign to clean up the sick and wounded commission suggests that people living before the modern era were cognizant of actions that today are called whistle blowing. In the case of the Nine Years War, whistle blowing emerged into the open as an institution, namely parliament, capable of the conceit of checking Leviathan and which sought information to do so effectively. This is not to suggest that this particular case is necessarily normative for similar instances that followed, or that a receptive legislature is required in order for whistle blowing to be a realistic option for an insider with information about wrongdoing. Rather, acknowledging the parliamentary roots of whistle blowing during the Nine Years War should encourage historians to seek out similar contexts and scenarios in early modern Europe and elsewhere. This pursuit could be considered a good thing if for no other reason than it fulfils one of the discipline's chief reasons for being, which is to remind our colleagues in the social sciences and the legal profession that at least some of the great questions of today, including whether or not the public has a right to know what the state's servants are doing in the course of protecting them and their interests, have in fact been struggled over in different ways for a long time.

Footnotes

*

For their helpful comments and criticisms on drafts of this article, I thank Christopher Baxfield, Richard Kleer, Joe Ponic, the members of the University of Saskatchewan Department of History research seminar – especially Lisa Smith and Chris Kent, the anonymous referees of this Journal, and Phil Withington. Financial support was provided by the SSHRC of Canada and the University of Saskatchewan's Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity. I also thank Madeleine Peckham, Blaine Wickham, and Phil Baker for their assistance.

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37 TNA, ADM 3/3/6, Jan. 1690. Less than a year later, William III ordered a review of the commission's work on account of more complaints coming from the ports; TNA, PC 2/74/74, Dec. 1690.

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46 Baston, Case, pp. 1–5.

47 Although Baston does not use the man's first name, he was almost certainly referring to Major William Churchill; BL, Add. MSS 42140, fo. 1v; TNA, SP 32/5/106, 6 Apr. 1694.

48 Baston, Case, p. 7. The record compiled for the commission for public accounts in the autumn of 1703 suggests that Baston was not paid after Dec. 1693; TNA, T38/615, ‘Mr Povey's payments’.

49 SRL, MS 129/2, ‘The representation of John Leakie and Sam[ue]l Baston of ye illegal and clandestine management of the present commission[ers] for sick and wounded seamen’; TNA, ADM 1/4080/1127, Shrewsbury to Admiralty; ADM 3/9, 8 Mar. 1694.

50 BL, Harleian Manuscripts 1492, fos. 36r–v, 38, 7 and 19 Mar. 1694. Baston might have also informed the navy board, since by late March 1694 it apparently suspected sick and wounded agents were falsifying forms and forcing seamen to bribe them prior to issuing discharge papers; Merriman, R. D., ed., The Sergison papers (Navy Records Society, vol. 89, London, 1950), pp. 213–14Google Scholar.

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52 I thank Richard Kleer for clarifying this point. Quarterers were allowed 1s per day for lodging a sailor, and 6s 8d for cure; Royal Navy Museum, Portsmouth (RNM), Corbett papers, MSS 121/13, p. 9.

53 Baston, Case, p. 53.

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57 SRL, MS 129/3, ‘Report of the commission of the Admiralty on the complaint against the commissioners of the sick and wounded’, 14 Apr. 1694; Baston, Case, pp. 8–18.

58 TNA, PC 2/75/397, 18 Apr. 1694.

59 TNA, PC 2/75/424, 31 May 1694; Luttrell, Brief relation, iii, pp. 307–8, 8 and 10 May 1694, p. 322, 2 June 1694.

60 TNA, PC 2/75/424.

61 The tallies carried interest as high as 8 per cent, which was 2 per cent above the legal maximum for private loans; Richard Kleer, ‘“Fictitious cash”: English public finance and paper money, 1689–1697’, in McGrath and Fauske, eds., Money, power and print, pp. 70–103, at p. 74.

62 SRL, MS 129/4, ‘Proposals of John Leakie, surgeon, to Sir Robert Rich’, member of the Admiralty commission, 4 May 1694; Cumbria Record Office, Kendal, Admiralty papers of Sir John Lowther, DLONS L/13/7/2/44, pp. 26–37, 15 May 1694; Baston, Case, p. 23.

63 TNA, ADM 99/5, 5 Feb. 1705.

64 Baston, Case, pp. 22–38; BL Harl. MSS 1492, fos. 36r–v, 38v; BL Harl. MSS 1493, fos. 47r, 54r–55v, 61v–63v.

65 BL, Harl. 1493, fos. 54r, 55v; Baston, Case, pp. 24–36.

66 BL, Harl. 1493, fos. 61v–62r.

67 Baston, Case, pp. 25–9, 32–4, 35–6.

68 BL, Harl. 1493, fos. 61v–62r.

69 BL, Harl. 1493, fos. 77, 78v.

70 Robert Crosfeild, England's glory reviv'd demonstrated in several propositions (1693), Wing C7243, pp. 6–11, 13–17; Knights, ‘Parliament, print and corruption’, pp. 53–8.

71 Robert Crosfeild, Great Britain's tears humbly offered to the consideration of the Lords and Commons (1695), Wing C7244, pp. 9–13.

72 Baston, Case, p. 4.

73 Robert Crosfeild, Justice perverted, and innocence loyalty oppressed (1695), Wing C7245, p. 26; LJ, xv, 9 Mar. 1695, pp. 515–16; HOL, ns, i, p. 526.

74 LJ, xv, pp. 532; HOL, ns, i, pp. 527–8.

75 Baston, Case, pp. 45–52; BL Harl. MSS 1492, Jan. to Apr. 1695, contain no mention of Crosfeild or Baston.

76 Baston, Case, pp. 50, 53.

77 Ibid., sigs. A2r–v, pp. 8–18.

78 Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and pamphleteering in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 301–10Google Scholar.

79 Zaret, David, ‘Petitions and the “invention” of public opinion in the English Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 101 (1996), pp. 1497–555CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braddick, Michael, God's fury, England's fire: a new history of the English Civil Wars (New York, NY, 2008), pp. 128–30, 152–3Google Scholar; Hirst, Derek, ‘Making contact: petitions and the English Republic’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), pp. 26–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 13 Car. II. ch. 5, ‘An act for preventing tumults and disorders in petitioning the king or parliament’, Statutes of the realm (11 vols., London, 1819), v, p. 308; Knights, Mark, ‘Petitioning and political theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London's “monster” petition of 1680’, Past and Present, 138 (1993), pp. 94–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Politics and opinion in crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 239, 258–65, 300; Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and his kingdoms, 1660–1685 (New York, NY, 2005), pp. 184–5Google Scholar; Knights, Representation and misrepresentation, pp. 109–14, 123.

81 Knights, Representation and misrepresentation, p. 124; William Hodges, To the two most honourable Houses … an humble representation of the sad and distressed case of many thousands of their most gratious Majesties loyal seamen (1693), Wing H3642; George St Loo, England's safety, or a bridle to the French king: proposing a sure method for encouraging navigation and raising qualified seamen (1693), Wing S342, pp. 35–8; George Everett, The pathway to peace and profit (1694), Wing E3548A; William Hodges, An humble representation of the seamen's misery (1694), Wing H2331; John Perry, A regulation for seamen (1695), Wing P1649; William Hodges, Great Britain's groans: or, an account of the oppression, ruin, and destruction of the loyal seamen of England (1695), Wing H2327.

82 Robert Crosfeild, An account of Robert Crosfeild's proceedings in the House of Lords (1696), Wing C7240; LJ, xv, p. 654, 29 Jan. 1696; p. 678, 22 Feb. 1696, p. 688, 29 Feb. 1696; CSPD William, viii, p. 140, 12 Apr. 1696.

83 TNA, SP 32/13, Nov. 1696, Crosfeild, ‘Case of Robert Crosfeild’, p. 2.

84 Raymond, Pamphlets, pp. 213, 218–19.

85 Discourse betweene a resolved, and a doubtfull Englishman (1642), Wing D1572; Roger L'Estrange, Citt and Bumpkin in a dialogue over a pot of ale, concerning matters of religion and government (1681), Wing L1220; Withington, Phil, ‘‘“For this is true or els I do ly”: Thomas Smith, William Bullein, and mid-Tudor dialogue’, in Pincombe, Mike and Shrank, Cathy, eds., The Oxford handbook of Tudor literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 455–71Google Scholar, at p. 458.

86 Freist, Dagmar, Governed by opinion: politics, religion and the dynamics of communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar, pp. 248, 252; Harris, Restoration, pp. 218–19.

87 Baston, Dialogue, pp. 7, 9, 10–11, 13, 12; TNA, ADM 2/171 fos. 200–2, Mar. 1691; Admiralty Commission, Rules and directions appointed to be observed, in order to the returning to their Majesties service, such men as shall be put on shore, sick or hurt (1691), Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, BrSides By6 1691; RNM, Corbett papers, MSS 121/13, p. 7; Ehrman, Navy in the war of William III, pp. 128–33.

88 Baston, Dialogue, p. 12; a very unsubtle reference to the court's homiletical self-presentation, analysed in Claydon, Anthony, William III and the godly reformation (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

89 [Charles Lawton], An honest commoners speech (1694), Wing H2580, p. 6; Goldie, Mark and Jackson, Clare, ‘Williamite tyranny and the whig Jacobites’, in Mijers, Esther and Onnekink, David, eds., Redefining William III: the impact of the king-stadholder in international context (Burlington, VT, 2007), pp. 177–200Google Scholar.

90 Baston, Dialogue, pp. 26–8.

91 Ibid., p. 16.

92 TNA, SP 32/13/219–220, Nov. 1696, Crosfeild, ‘Case of Robert Crosfeild’, p. 2.

93 Crosfeild, Government unhing'd, pp. 4–5; Baston, Dialogue, sig. A3v.

94 Jones, D. W., War and economy in the age of William III and Marlborough (New York, NY, 1988), pp. 21–2Google Scholar.

95 CTP, i, p. 522, 24 June 1696, i, p. 550, 27 Oct. 1696.

96 Coxe, William, ed., The private and original correspondence of Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury (London, 1821), pp. 411, 414–15Google Scholar; Horwitz, Parliament, pp. 184–7; Aldridge, ‘Russell’, p. 161; Hayton, ‘Russell’, pp. 330–1; Hopkins, Paul Anthony, ‘Sham plots and real plots in the 1690s’, in Cruickshanks, Eveline, eds., Ideology and conspiracy: aspects of Jacobitism 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 89–110Google Scholar, at p. 98.

97 Baston, Dialogue, sigs. A3v, B1r; cf. John Lilburne, The oppressed mans importunate and mournfull cryes to be brought to the barre of justice (1648), Wing L2148.

98 Baston, Dialogue, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, sig. B1r.

99 Ibid., sig. A4v.

100 Ibid., sig. B1r.

101 St Loo, England's safety, pp. 35–8.

102 Crosfeild, England's glory, pp. 6–9, 11, 13–15; cf. Lincoln, Andrew, ‘The culture of war and civil society in the reigns of William III and Anne’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 44 (2011), pp. 455–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 457.

103 Everett, Pathway to peace, pp. 5–6, 11, 13–14, 17–18; Robert Ledgingham, The humble recital of Robert Ledgingham … (1698), BL 816m793, is a petition to instal pumps on ships.

104 Crosfeild, Justice perverted, p. 16.

105 Hodges, To the two most honourable Houses, pp. 1–2; idem, Seamen's misery, pp. 5–8; idem, Ruin to ruin after misery to misery (1699), Wing H2332, pp. 16–17.

106 Crosfield, Justice perverted, pp. 16–17; Baston, Dialogue, p. 12; William Eccles, Reasons for the taking off the Q---s and R---s (1700?), Wing E131; John Dennis, The seamens case with respect to their service in the navy (1698–9), Wing D1043; idem, Some reasons … to hear the petitioner John Dennis, when the report of the Q's and R's is read (1699), Wing D1044; The case of divers seamen … and the wives of seamen … together with several widows and others their friends … (1700), BL, 816m791; The humble case of the sailors … some further reasons … offered by the sailors … for taking off the Q's and R's (1700), Wing S4507B.

107 Crosfeild, Justice perverted, pp. 5–8, at p. 8.

108 George Everett, A word in season … Being a prospect of publick grievances, with some particulars relating to the imbezling of prizes and prize goods (1699), Wing E3549.

109 Hugh Speke, Some considerations … concerning the Lords of the Admiralty and the commissioners of the navy (1698?), Wing S4914B.

110 Crosfeild, Justice perverted, p. 11.

111 George Everett, Loyalty and fidelity rejected and oppressed (1699), Wing E3547, p. 16. Earlier in the same work, Everett stated that the Admiralty had encouraged another employee to take ‘his discoveries’ to the navy board, p. 11.

112 Hodges, Ruin to ruin, p. 28. For a similar suggestion see Crosfeild, Justice perverted, p. 21.

113 Hodges, Ruin to ruin, pp. 18–19, 25; idem, Humble representation, pp. 1, 9.

114 Baston, Dialogue, sig. A4v.

115 Everett, Loyalty, p. 13.

116 Crosfeild, Government unhing'd, p. 4.

117 Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae notitia, or, the present state of England (1700), Wing C1836, pp. 548–50.

118 Johnston, ‘Parliament and the navy’, p. 98.

119 Hodges, Ruin to ruin, p. 25.

120 Crosfeild, Government unhing'd, p. 5.

121 P. K. Watson, ‘The commission for victualing the navy, the commission for sick and wounded seamen and prisoners of war, and the commission for transport, 1702–1714’ (Ph.D. thesis, London, 1965), pp. 190–3.

122 Baston, Case, p. 7; for the commissioners' claim to have managed their financial affairs in a ‘husbandly manner’, see TNA, T1/72, fos. 123–6, Jan. 1701.

123 TNA, T38/615, ‘Monies charge on the late commission for sick and wounded seamen and its servants by the hon. commission of accounts compared with the office charge’, Oct. 1703.

124 HOL, ns, v, pp. 368–9, 372–3, Jan. 1704. Indeed, the report claimed that £124,416 of the total £260,000 the sick and wounded received from the navy's treasurer went to salaries and ‘travel costs’.

125 Ehrman, Navy in the war of William III, p. 596.

126 Johnston, ‘Parliament and the navy’, p. 113.

127 Merriman, R. D., ‘Gilbert Wardlaw's allegations’, Mariner's Mirror, 38 (1952), pp. 106–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnston, ‘Parliament and the navy’, pp. 91–6; Brooks, ‘Country persuasion’, pp. 140–4; Aldridge, ‘Russell’, p. 163; The chief heads of the articles of impeachment against the earl of Orford (1701), Cambridge University Library, Broadsides.B.70.41.