Swashbuckling 1: The Life and Times of Mr. Mansell
This is the opening post of the Mansell series, in which I intend to discuss Mansell’s life and career, and explore the contexts of both.
Sir Robert Mansell seems to have been a very influential man, and somewhat of an adept political survivor – he managed to retain office through three sovereigns, despite a series of investigations into his activities and allegations against him. It is perhaps these allegations that have defined his reputation to posterity: Christopher Penn, the early 20th-century historian of the Stuart navy, accused him of being an ineffectual and entirely corrupt administrator, along with the other Principal Officers of the Navy.[1] Though these allegations may well have been true, he does seem to have given good service on some occasions, so perhaps he deserves a more balanced appraisal.
Robert Mansell was born in 1570 or ‘71, son of Sir Edward Mansell, a gentleman of Glamorgan.[2] His was a well-connected family: his maternal grandfather was the Earl of Worcester, his nephew Sir Lewis Mansell was related by marriage to Thomas Lord Howard, and he himself married the daughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the late Lord Keeper. It was through the link with Lord Howard that he began his naval career, in 1591 captaining a privateer in Howard’s expedition to the West Indies. His marriage to Elizabeth Bacon brought him land in Norfolk, but he was soon back at sea. In 1596, he served in the Earl of Essex’s famous attack on Cadiz, taking command of a royal warship after her captain was killed, a service for which Essex knighted him. The year after, he was Essex’s flag captain on his Islands’ voyage, and then given the post of vice-admiral in the Narrow Seas.[3] In 1599 he was given command of a small squadron in the Irish Sea, and fought an action against rebels at Waterford.
Sir Robert never managed to gain much popularity in his adopted home in Norfolk. His standing was ruined by a duel he fought with Sir John Heydon in 1600, which lost him both his place on the Norfolk bench and the use of his right arm.[4] However, he found his way back into favour by abandoning his former patron Essex, after Essex’s unsuccessful rebellion in 1601, and assisting in the rounding-up of the Earl’s accomplices. Despite subsequent naval victories, on one occasion capturing six vessels carrying Portuguese goods, he was defeated as MP for Norfolk, but succeeded as a representative of King’s Lynn four days later.
After only moderate activity in the 1601 parliament, Mansell was once again admiral of the narrow seas. It was during this period that the engagement on which I’m focusing took place – the fight with six Spanish galleys in September, 1602. This was the last of his naval escapades for some while. With the accession of James I he desired a courtier’s position, rather than an active commission, and presumably through the agency of the Lord Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham, he was granted the Treasurership of the Navy in 1604. This was at the same time as Phineas Pett was given a reversion to the post of Royal Shipwright, the post that would make him famous: and there may have been some factional politics involved. According to Pett, the previous Treasurer, Fulke Greville (later Lord Brooke) had often quarrelled with both Pett and Sir John Trevor, the Surveyor of the Navy. Shortly after being made Treasurer, Mansell bought a third of Pett’s new ship, the Resistance, and Trevor bought the other third; Pett described Mansell and Trevor as ‘my good friends’ and both of them attended the funeral of his brother, Joseph, also a Royal Shipwight.[5]
As Treasurer of the Navy, Mansell was undoubtedly corrupt; but it seems he was not alone. For example, in 1605 the Resistance was hired to the Navy as a victualler of 300 tons, though she was actually 140. Furthermore, rather than victuals she then carried a cargo of lead on behalf of a private merchant; and though the Navy paid £379 for her rigging, the Navy’s stores never saw that rigging again. By such measures Mansell (and presumably Pett and Trevor too) made himself rich, and in 1618 he sold the Treasurership to a fellow merchant of the Muscovy company and was given instead the – largely ceremonial – post of Vice-Admiral of England.
Their corruption however did not escape attention: there were a number of investigations into the dealings of the navy, but by a show of solidarity and the protection of Nottingham, Pett, Trevor and Mansell largely escaped punishment, though Mansell spent a short spell in Marshalsea prison. Mansell was not without other friends in high places – he was part of the circle surrounding Prince Henry, and was attached to the royal favourite Robert Carr Earl of Somerset, and then his successor as favourite George Villiers Duke of Buckingham.
This survival, from one patron to another, suggests that Mansell was either skilled at political manoeuvring, indispensable to the Navy, or a mixture of both. Though one might be inclined to assume the former, the latter should not be ruled out: indeed, Mansell seems to have had genuine ability. He served on the Council of War that James I called in response to the Palatinate Crisis, and Mansell’s letters to Nottingham and Robert Cecil suggest a perceptive understanding of naval warfare.[6] Cecil clearly considered him reliable, writing ‘[I] take your general professions of love towards me in the best kind, knowing them to proceed from a gentleman of your quality.’[7]
Yet Mansell never matched his early successes. The expedition he led against the Algiers pirates in 1620-1 fell far short of its aims, although the similarly lacklustre performance of Rainborowe’s expedition to Sallee in 1627 suggests that the navy was ill-equipped to deal with this sort of action.[8] Outside of naval matters, he was both lucky and unlucky, obtaining a monopoly on glass production but incurring great losses thereby. He was openly critical of Buckingham’s shortcomings, but was later reconciled, and continued to be consulted on naval matters throughout the reign of Charles I. By the coming of the Civil War, though, he was too old to serve and was passed over as a royalist admiral. There is some controversy over his death, as licenses to export horses were issued his name in 1655, though he was buried in 1652.
Mansell is, then, somewhat of a difficult figure to characterise. Although he was certainly corrupt and enriched himself at the Navy’s expense, he was also a successful naval commander, and possessed of a huge amount of nerve: when one investigating commission was preparing charges against him, he responded by presenting a bill of expenses as Treasurer of £10,000 – the commission could do nothing but drop their attacks. These contradictions are quite typical of military and government men in the early modern period, and though the endemic corruption of the time does not excuse Mansell’s activities, it does set him in his context.
In any case, in the next post I will be looking more closely at the engagement of September 1602, and what it can tell us about naval combat at the beginning of the 17th century.
[1] C.D. Penn, The Navy Under the Early Stuarts and its Influence on English History, (London, 1913), p. 10. Penn’s work is by now somewhat outdated, but remains authoritative because there has been no comprehensive reconsideration of this topic. K.R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I, (Cambridge, 1991), is an excellent book which goes a long way to rectifying this; however, he does not discuss Mansell, so will largely escape mention for the rest of these posts.
[2] Unless otherwise noted, most of the information for this is taken from the Oxford DNB, sub ‘Mansell, Sir Robert (1570/71-1652).
[3] The ‘Narrow Seas’ was the rather poetic title for the sea between Britain and Europe, including but not restricted to the Channel.
[4] This was clearly a matter of concern to those in high places, as Sir Robert Cecil, secretary of state, received at least one letter on the subject: Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter H.M.C.), Salisbury MSS, vol. 10, (London 1904), p. 433. For duelling in this period see R.B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms, (Oxford, 2003).
[5] W.G. Perrin (ed.), The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, (London, 1918), pp. 24-5, 27.
[6] For these, particularly in reference to the 1602 engagement, see H.M.C. Salisbury MSS, vol. 12, (London, 1910), pp.189, 236-8, 241-2, 389.
[7] Ibid, vol. 12, p. 275.
[8] For the Algiers expedition, Penn, Navy, ch. 4; for Sallee, Andrews, Ships, ch. 7. Andrew Thrush’s award-winning article, ‘In Pursuit of the Frigate, 1603-40′, Historical Research, 64, 1991, discusses the developments in naval technology and tactics which may have rendered much of the English Navy obsolete.
