V - Papers Relating to Wages and Wage Rates

Summary

In this section are gathered a few papers which supplement the formal accounts, and illustrate aspects of the financial administration from different angles. The government needed more immediate information about naval costs, regularly updated, especially when an operation was impending or in progress. For this purpose the Navy Treasurer sent the Privy Council monthly estimates for sea wages, of which two examples from the time of the Le Havre campaign are here printed [16, 17]. The format is deliberately concise – much like the ‘half-sheet of paper’ which was all Churchill wanted to see from his advisers. In order to simplify the projection of wage costs, the complex structure outlined in Humphrey's table [15] was reduced to an average rate of 9s 4d per man per month of 28 days, which is 4d a day, inclusive of ‘dead shares’ and rewards. This did not represent anyone's specific pay, but was what Hawkins calls ‘the medium of all servitors’ [20], based on the numbers of ordinary seamen at 3d per day and officers of various grades at higher rates, each of whom might in reality serve only for some part of the period of account. This shorthand reckoning had long been the practice, and the figure of 9s 4d per man/month had stood since Mary's reign. Such calculation can never have been more than approximate, and like all military budgeting would have assumed maximum complements, with some margin beyond that. Nevertheless our own rudimentary calculation, using the models printed here, suggests that the medium was realistic.

Even these monthly estimates demonstrate the huge discrepancy between the cost of maintaining the Navy and that of actually using it. The annual ordinary budget supposedly provided what would later be called the fleet in being. The highest level of the ordinary during Elizabeth's reign was the £12,000 set in 1559; yet that exact sum could be spent in sending just six ships to sea for four months’ active service. Naval expenses for the Le Havre campaign amounted to about one-seventh of the total identifiable military cost of around £200,000. That outlay could only be met by massive borrowing, including the loans from individuals secured on privy seal warrants and £10,000 from the City of London [4 (p. 243)], from which the Navy received directly £2,008 6s 8d [4 (pp. 242 × 248; 5 (p. 531)].