Admiralty, and the function of that board is the maintenance
and expansion of the fleet in accordance with the policy of
the government, and the supplying of it with trained officers
and men; its distribution throughout the world; and its
preservation in readiness and efficiency in all material and
personal respects. The character of the Admiralty Board is
peculiar to the British constitution, and it possesses certain
features which distinguish it from other departments of the
state. The business it conducts is very great and complex,
and the machinery by which its work is done has grown with
the expansion of that business. The whole system of naval
administration has been developed historically, and is
not the product of the organizing skill of one or a few
individuals, but an organic growth possessing marked and special
characteristics. The Admiralty Board derives its character
from the fact that it represents the lord high admiral, and
that its powers and operation depend much more upon usage
than upon those instruments which actually give it authority,
and which, it may be remarked, are not in harmony among
themselves. The executive operations are conducted by a
series of civil departments which have undergone many changes
before reaching their present constitution and relation
to the Board. The salient characteristic of the admiralty
is a certain flexibility and elasticity with which it
works. Its members are not, in a rigid sense, heads of
departments. Subject to the necessary and constitutional
supremacy of tho cabinet minister at their head, they are
jointly and co-equally ``commissioners for executing the
office of high admiral of the United Kingdom, and of the
territories thereunto belonging, and of high admiral of the
colonies and other dominions.'' The members of the Board are
in direct and constant communication with the first lord and
with one another, as also with the civil departments which
work under their control. It was enjoined by James I. that
the principal officers and commissioners of the navy should
be in constant communication among themselves, consulting and
advising ``by common council and argument of most voices,''
and should live as near together as could conveniently
be, and should meet at the navy office at least twice a
week. This system of intercommunication still exists in a
manner which no system of minutes could give; and it may be
remarked, as illustrative of the flexibility of the system,
that a Board may be formed on any emergency by two lords and a
secretary, and a decision arrived at then and there. Such
an emergency board was actually constituted some years ago
on board the admiralty yacht in order to deal on the instant
with an event which had just occurred in the fleet. At the
same time it must be remarked that, in practice, the first
lord being personally responsible under the orders in council,
the operations of the Board are dependent upon his direction.
History.
The present system of administering the navy dates from the
time of Henry VIII. The naval business of the country had
so greatly expanded in his reign that we find the Admiralty
and Navy Board reorganized or established; and it is worthy
of remark that there existed at the time an ordnance branch,
the navy not yet being dependent in that matter upon the
War Department.1 The Navy Board administered the civil
departments under the admiralty, the directive and executive
duties of the lord high admiral remaining with the admiralty
office. A little later the civil administration was vested
in a board of principal officers subordinate to the lord
high admiral, and we can henceforth trace the work of civil
administration being conducted under the navy and victualling
boards apart from, but yet subject to, the admiralty itself.
This was a system which continued during the time of all the
great wars, and was not abolished until 1832, when Sir James
Graham, by his reforms, put an end to what appeared a divided
control. Whatever may have been the demerits of that system,
it sufficed to maintain the navy in the time of its greatest
achievements, and through all the wars which were waged with the
Spaniards, the Dutch and the French. The original authority
for the present constitution of the Admiralty Board is found
in a declaratory act (Admiralty Act 1690), in which it is
enacted that ``all and singular authorities, jurisdictions
and powers which, by act of parliament or otherwise, had been
lawfully vested'' in the lord high admiral of England had always
appertained, and did and should appertain, to the commissioners
for executing the office for the time being ``to all intents
and purposes as if the said commissioners were lord high
admiral of England.'' The admiralty commission was dissolved
in 1701, and reconstituted on the death of Prince George of
Denmark, lord high admiral in 1709. From that time forward,
save for a short period in 1827-1828, when the duke of Clarence
was lord high admiral, the office has remained in commission.
A number of changes have been made since the amalgamation of
the admiralty and the Navy Board by Sir James Graham in 1832
(see NAVY, History), but the general principle remains the
same, and the constitution of the Admiralty Board and civil
departments is described below. The Board consists of the
first lord and four naval lords with a civil lord, who in
theory are jointly responsible, and are accustomed to meet
sometimes daily, but at all times frequently; and the system
developed provides for the subdivision of labour, and yet for
the co-ordinated exertion of effort. The system has worked
well in practice, and has certainly won the approval and the
admiration of many statesmen. Lord George Hamilton said,
before the Royal Commission on Civil Establishments, 1887,
that ``It has this advantage, that you have all departments
represented round a table, and that if it is necessary to take
quick action, you can do in a few minutes that which it would
take hours under another system to do''; and the report of the
Royal Commission of 1889 remarked that ``The constitution of
the Board of Admiralty appears to us well designed, and to be
placed under present regulations on a satisfactory footing.''
Powers.
The special characteristics of the Admiralty Board which have
been described are accompanied by a very peculiar and noteworthy
feature, which is not without relation to the untrammelled and
undefined operations of the admiralty. This feature arises from
the discrepancy between the admiralty patent and the orders in
council, for the admiralty is not administered according to
the terms of the patent which invests it with authority, and
its operations raise a singular point in constitutional law.
The legal origin of the powers exercised by the first lord
and the Board itself is indeed curiously obscure. Under
the patent the full power and authority are conferred upon
``any two or more'' of the commissioners, though, in the
patent of Queen Anne, the grant was to ``any three or more
of you.'' It was under the Admiralty Act 1832 that two lords
received the necessary authority to legalize any action of
the Board; but already, under an act of 1822, two lords had
been empowered to sign so long as the Board consisted of six
members. We therefore find that the legal authority of
the Board under the patent is vested in the Board; but in
the order in council of the 14th of January 1869 the sole
responsibility of the first lord was officially laid down, and
in the order in council of the 19th of March 1872 the first
lord was made ``responsible to your Majesty and to parliament
for all the business of the admiralty.'' As a matter of
fact, the authority of the first lord, independent of his
colleagues, had existed in an undefined manner from ancient
times. Before a select committee of the House of Commons
in 1861 the duke of Somerset stated that he considered the
first lord responsible, that he had always ``acted under that
impression,'' and that he believed ``all former first lords
were of this opinion''; while Sir James Graham said that ``the
Board of Admiralty could never work, whatever the patent might
be, unless the first lord were supreme, and did exercise
constantly supreme and controlling authority.'' It is not,
therefore, surprising to find that there has been undoubtedly
direct government without a Board. Thus, in the operations
conducted against the French channel ports in 1803-1804, Lord
Melville, then first lord, took steps of great importance
without the knowledge of his colleagues, though he afterwards
bowed to their views, which did not coincide with his own.
Again, when Lord Gambier was sent to Copenhagen in 1807, he
was instructed to obey all orders from the king, through the
principal secretary of state for war, and in this way received
orders to attack Copenhagen, which were unknown to all but the
first lord. In a similar way the secretary of the admiralty
was despatched to Paris in 1815 with instructions to issue
orders as if from the Board of Admiralty when directed to do
so by the foreign secretary who accompanied him, and these
orders resulted in Napoleon's capture. These instances were
cited, except the first of them, by Sir James Graham before
the select committee of the House of Commons in 1861, in
order to illustrate the elastic powers under the patent which
enabled the first lord to take immediate action in matters
that concerned the public safety. It is not surprising that
this peculiar feature of admiralty administration should
have attracted adverse criticism, and have led some minds
to regard the Board as ``a fiction not worth keeping up.''
Between 1860 and 1870 the sittings of the Board ceased
to have the effective character they had once possessed.
During the administration of Mr Childers,2 first lord
from 1868 to 1871 in Mr Gladstone's cabinet, a new system
was introduced by which the free intercommunication of the
members of the Board was hampered, and its sittings were quite
discontinued. The case of the ``Captain'' led, however, to
a return to the older practice. The ``Captain'' was a low
freeboard masted turret ship, designed by Captain Cowper Phipps
Coles, R.N. Competent critics believed that she would be
unsafe, and said so before she was built; but the admiralty
of Lord Derby's cabinet of 1866 gave their consent to her
construction. She was commissioned early in 1870, and
capsized in the Bay of Biscay on the 7th of September of that
year. Mr Childers, who was nominally responsible for
allowing her to be commissioned, distributed blame right and
left, largely upon men who had not approved of the ship at
all, and had been exonerated from all share of responsibility
for allowing her to be built. The disaster was justly held
to show that a civilian first lord cannot dispense with the
advantage of constant communication with his professional
advisers. When Mr Childers retired from the admiralty in
March 1871, his successor, Mr Goschen (Viscount Goschen),
reverted to the original system. It cannot be said,
however, that the question of ultimate responsibility is well
defined. The duke of Somerset, Sir James Graham and Sir
Charles Wood, afterwards Lord Halifax, held the view that
the first lord was singly and personally responsible for the
sufficiency of the fleet. Sir Arthur Hood expressed before
the House of Commons committee in 1888 the view that the Board
collectively were responsible; whilst Sir Anthony Hoskins
assigned the responsibility to the first lord alone with
