The Revolution also dates, if it did not cause, an evolution in the navy. After 1688 the sea service was sharply marked off from the army. During the reign of King James it had not been uncommon to find men who had served alternately as soldiers and sailors, while some held double employments. Isolated cases of the kind may be met with later, but they became very rare, and soon disappeared altogether. The formation of a large standing army, and the participation of England in Continental wars, drew off the gentlemen volunteers who had been found in the fleets of Charles II. The stamp of man described in old plays as “a coxcomb but stout,” had a natural preference for the army. It did not take him off dry land, and the practice of retiring into winter quarters enabled him to combine a great deal of pleasure with his fighting. A ship was at all times but a prison, and in those it was a prison very much overcrowded and abounding in foul smells. The navy was left entirely to the tarpaulin who had been bred to the sea, and could endure its hardships.
The final victory of the tarpaulin element in the corps of naval officers brought with it both good and evil. The good lay in their seamanship. Even a bad seaman is better than an ignorant or careless landsman in command of a ship. The purely technical part of the navy’s work, that which consisted in the mere handling of the vessel, was better done in the years following the Revolution than had been the case before, except during the Interregnum, when also the sailors had been the predominant element. The evil which came was of a kind not to be wholly attributed to the disappearance of the military officer from the higher ranks of the fleet. It was that there was a distinct fall in the purely military spirit, and as a navy is a fighting as well as a navigating force, this was a misfortune. When we speak of a fallen military spirit, it is not meant that there was any sinking in the mere courage of the service, but only that the naval officer as he became at the Revolution and as he remained till far into the eighteenth century, was first and foremost a seaman, and that he had a tendency to discharge the military side of his duty in blind obedience to various rules of thumb. Two reasons may be assigned for this. Times of revolution are very often followed by times of lassitude. The seventeenth century had been very stormy, and it was to be expected that the Englishman of the following generations would be a less daring and original man than his ancestor of the Civil War time. The sailors shared in the general deadening and commonplaceness of their age. It was only natural that men who went to sea as boys, and were never asked to be more than sailors, should not have tried to be more. Then it was the misfortune of the navy that just at a time when it was tending to stupidity in military conduct, it was called upon by authority to obey a set of hard and fast rules.