The formation of a fighting force, 1642�?689

At the beginning of the English Civil War, the navy, then consisting of 35 vessels, sided with Parliament. The execution of Charles I forced the rapid expansion of the navy, by multiplying England's actual and potential enemies, and many vessels were constructed from the 1650s on.

Operations of the time were dominated by the first three Anglo-Dutch Wars, which stretched from 1652 to 1674. Triggered by seemingly trivial incidents, but motivated by economic competition, they were notable as purely naval wars fought in the English Channel and the North Sea. Strategically, England profited little by the wars, but the experience of large-scale battle was instructive to the Navy; the Articles of War regularizing the conduct of officers and seaman, and the Fighting Instructions establishing the line of battle both date from this period.

The administration of the navy was greatly improved by Sir William Coventry and Samuel Pepys, both of whom began their service in 1660 with the Restoration. While it was Pepys' diary that made him the most famous of all naval bureaucrats, his nearly thirty years of administration were crucial in replacing the ad hoc processes of years past with regular programs of supply, construction, pay, and so forth.

Wars with France, 1690�?815

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 rearranged the political map of Europe, and led to a series of wars with France that lasted well over a century. This was the classic age of sail; while the ships themselves evolved in only minor ways, technique and tactics were honed to a high degree, and the battles of the Napoleonic Wars entailed feats that would have been impossible for the fleets of the 17th century.

The landing of the Glorious Revolution itself was a gigantic effort involving 100 warships and 400 transports carrying 11,000 infantry and 4,000 horses. Louis XIV declared war just days later, and the War of the Grand Alliance was on. England's 1690 defeat at the Battle of Beachy Head led to an improved version of the Fighting Instructions, and subsequent operations against French ports proved more successful, leading to decisive victory at La Hougue in 1692.

Naval operations in the War of the Spanish Succession were at first focused on the acquisition of a Mediterranean base, culminating in an alliance with Portugal and the capture of Gibraltar (1704) and Port Mahon (1708). Even so, freedom of action in the Mediterranean did not decide the war, although it gave Britain an advantage when negotiating the Peace of Utrecht, and made her a recognized world power. The subsequent quarter-century of peace saw a few naval actions, at Cape Passaro in 1718, in the Great Northern War, and in the West Indies (1726).

The War of the Austrian Succession brought a new round of naval operations against France, including a blockade of Toulon, an assault on Cartagena in the West Indies, and the capture of Louisbourg in North America. The Navy also defended against invasion by Charles Edward Stuart the "Young Pretender". By the end of the war, the Navy was fully engaged in the worldwide protection of British trade.

The Seven Years War began somewhat inauspiciously for the Navy, with a French siege of Minorca and the failure of Admiral John Byng to relieve it; he was executed on his own quarterdeck. Voltaire famously wrote that he had been shot "to encourage the others (admirals)". Subsequent operations went more successfully (due more to government support and better strategic thinking, rather than admirals "encouraged" by Byng's example), and the British fleet won several victories. The Treaty of Paris that ended the war left Britain with colonial gains, but isolated strategically.

At the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, the Royal Navy dealt with the fledgling Continental Navy handily, destroying or capturing many of its vessels. However, France soon took the American side, and in 1778 A French fleet sailed for America, where it attempted to land at Rhode Island and nearly engaged with the British fleet before a storm intervened, while back home another fought the British in the First Battle of Ushant. Action shifted to the Caribbean, where there were a number of battles with varying results. The most important operation came in 1781, when in the Battle of the Chesapeake the British failed to lift the French blockade of Lord Cornwallis, and resulting in a British surrender in the battle of Yorktown. Although combat was over in North America, it continued in the Caribbean (Battle of the Saintes) and India, where the British experienced both successes and failures.

Initially Britain did not involve itself in the French Revolution, but in 1793 France declared war, leading to the Glorious First of June battle in the following year, followed by the capture of French colonies in the Caribbean. Further action came in 1797 and 1798, with the battles of Cape St Vincent and the Nile, which brought Admiral Horatio Nelson to the public's attention. The Peace of Amiens in 1801 proved to be but a brief interruption in the years of warfare, and the Navy was soon blockading Napoleon's France; in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson's ships destroyed the combined Spanish and French fleets, ensuring that the British enjoyed command of the sea. Although there were no more major actions in the Napoleonic Wars, the Navy continued to be busy enforcing blockades and chasing down privateers. During the War of 1812 with the United States, there was no credible challenge to British naval mastery, the Americans did achieve a number of unexpected victories in single-ship frigate actions, and on the Great Lakes.

Although brief in retrospect, the years of the Napoleonic wars came to be remembered as the apotheosis of "fighting sail", and stories of the Royal Navy at this period have been told and retold regularly since then, most famously in the Horatio Hornblower series of C. S. Forester, but also by Patrick O'Brian, Dudley Pope and many other writers as well.

Developments during the Pax Britannica, 1815�?895

The Napoleonic Wars left Great Britain the most powerful naval country in the world, with no meaningful rivals. The country's economic and strategic strength was buttressed by the fleet; localized military action was a staple of the not-entirely-peaceful "Pax Britannica". In addition, the threat of naval force was a significant factor in diplomacy. The navy was not idle however; the 19th century witnessed a series of transformations that turned the old wooden sailing navy into one of steam and steel.

Operations

The first action of the period was the bombardment of Algiers under Lord Exmouth conducted in 1816. During the Greek War of Independence, the Battle of Navarino was fought in 1827. This was the last major action between fleets of sailing ships. Ottoman involvement continued, with the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and additional Mediterranean crises during the rest of the decade, coming to a head with the Crimean War of the 1850s.

The Crimean War became known as a testing ground for the new technologies of steam and shell, as well as for the trial of amphibious landings on a larger scale than ever before. British success at Sevastopol was followed up by the bombardment of Sweaborg, which destroyed the Russian dockyards.

Meanwhile, in 1839 China had opposed the British import of opium from India, but the British insisted, and instituted a blockade of Canton, beginning the First Opium War. Further difficulties accompanied the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s, and in 1857 the British captured Canton and threatened Beijing, thrown back by the Chinese in 1859 and succeeding the following year.

Over the next thirty years, only a bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 brought the fleet into action. Attention instead focused on meeting perceived technological threats.

Technology

Steam power was of interest from the beginning of the 19th century, since it neatly solved the difficult and dangerous sailing problems encountered in estuaries and other inshore areas. It was first adopted in the Comet of 1821, and in 1824 Lightning accompanied the expedition to Algiers. Steam vessels appeared in greater numbers through the 1830s and 1840s, all using side-mounted paddlewheels; screw propellers were introduced in the 1830s, and after some reluctance, were adopted in the mid-1840s (the famous tug-of-war between the screw-propelled Rattlesnake and the paddlewheeled Alecto was entertaining, but records show the Admiralty had already decided on and ordered screw ships). Screw battleships and frigates, both conversions and new constructions, became commonplace in the 1850s. These ships retained a full capacity for sail as steam engines were not yet efficient enough to permit long ocean voyages under power. Steam power was intended only for use during battle and to allow ships to go to sea at will instead of being held in port by adverse winds.

The use of iron in ship construction was more controversial. Although Brunel had adopted iron in the Great Britain, the Admiralty was concerned about the vulnerability of iron in combat, and experiments with iron in the 1840s seemed to indicate that iron would shatter under impact. Even so, France built the first seagoing ironclad, Gloire, in 1858, and Britain responded with Warrior of 1860, the first of an intensive program of construction that quickly eclipsed French efforts. Additional experimentation took the form of shell-firing rifled guns, needed to penetrate the armour.

In turn, these guns were too few and too large to be effective as part of the conventional broadside, and experiments with rotating turrets began in the 1860s, considerably handicapped by the rigging still needed for ships unable to circle the world under steam. Monarch was a first successful design of this sort, but the more radical Captain was unstable and capsized with great loss of life. The problem was eventually solved by the development of more fuel efficient engines and the establishment of coaling stations around the world. This allowed sail power to be abandoned and ships could rely completely on steam power, first realised in Devastation.

The 1870s were characterized by general indifference to the Navy, but in 1884 articles in the Pall Mall Gazette alarmed the public, and pressured the government into two rounds of new construction, the second being the Naval Defence Act of 1889 authorising ten new battleships, 38 cruisers, and additional vessels. Alfred Thayer Mahan's books and his visit to England in the 1890s heightened interest to a fever pitch; when Prime Minister William Gladstone held out against naval construction in 1894, he found himself alone, and resigned.

Age of the battleship, 1895�?919

The strategic situation changed rapidly in the mid-1890s; between a Russian-French alliance, an ambitious program of German naval construction, and both the United States and Japan expanding their spheres, Britain found herself isolated and insecure.

Both naval construction and naval strategizing became intense, prompted by the development of torpedoes and submarines, which challenged traditional ideas about the power of battleships. At the same time the Dreadnought committed to the "big gun" concept and caused a shift in thinking around the world, giving Britain the undisputed lead. Another innovative (though ultimately unsuccessful) concept was the battlecruiser, fast and light but still hard-hitting.

At the same time, there was much dispute within the Admiralty about how to operate the modern navy, with Winston Churchill advocating various changes.

In 1911 the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy came into being.

The accumulated tensions in international relations finally broke out into the hostilities of World War I. From the naval point of view, it was time for the massed fleets to prove themselves, but caution and maneuvering resulted in only a few minor engagements at sea. In the Dardanelles, an effort was made to use naval power to attack shore installations, though with limited success. Finally, in 1916 the British and German fleets in the North Sea connected with each other in the gigantic Battle of Jutland, in which dozens of ships were lost, but whose net results were inconclusive. In the closing phases of the war, U-boats became a factor in what was called the First Battle of the Atlantic, but the RN barely managed to develop effective countermeasures before the war was over.

Interwar and World War II, 1919�?946

The British economy was exhausted by the war, and the Navy was drastically reduced over the next few years by the effects of the Ten-Years Rule, which directed the services to plan on the assumption that another war would not occur for at least ten years; this rule remained in effect until 1933. New activities such as naval aviation received little development during the 1920s. The neglect was partly justified by the arms limitation treaties of the time, notably the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Naval operations occurred in the 1919 War of Intervention against Bolshevik Russia, where a bold attack sank the cruiser Oleg.

By the mid-1930s, the international situation had again become worrying, and the naval construction program expanded anew. The Navy made a show of force against Mussolini's war in Abyssinia, and operated in China to evacuate British citizens from cities under Japanese attack.

Germany was far outnumbered in surface ship strength in 1939, and relied on U-boats in what came to be known as the Second Battle of the Atlantic, but even so scored some initial victories against British warships. The first large-scale operation was in Norway in 1940, and was followed by several battles in the Mediterranean. Japan's 1941 entry resulted in losses in the Far East, but subsequently British ships fought the Pacific War with the Americans all the way to the shores of Japan.

In 1941 the New Zealand Division became the Royal New Zealand Navy.

The Navy from 1946

Postwar, Navy planners expected to maintain unrealistically-high force levels, and were eventually constrained to be a "medium power", relying on the Americans to be the primary defence against Soviet threats.

Although the late 1940s were generally quiet, the mining of the Saumarez and Volage off Albania in 1946, attempts to control illegal immigration to Palestine in 1947, and the Yangtse Incident of 1949 were reminders that the world was not entirely at peace.

A half-dozen warships, including an aircraft carrier, were routinely on station throughout the Korean War. The Navy also landed troops during the Suez crisis of 1956.

The nuclear submarine Dreadnought

The role of the Navy continued to be debated, and in 1957 the Defence White Paper of Duncan Sandys emphasised reliance on nuclear weapons while leaving the Navy's future uncertain. Lord Mountbatten nevertheless continued with development, and by 1962 a new Dreadnought became Britain's first nuclear-powered submarine and in 1968 the first ballistic missile submarine Resolution was commissioned, armed with the Polaris missile. Even so, the Labour government announced in 1966 that Britain would not mount major operations without the help of allies, and that the existing carrier force would be maintained into the 1970s; Christopher Mayhew and Sir David Luce resigned in protest, but to no avail. In 1968, further cuts eliminated Britain's "East of Suez" policy.

In the meantime, the fleet was regularly involved in crises; to deter an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1962, in Tanganyika in 1964, and in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966. The Beira Patrol blocking oil supplies to Rhodesia began in 1965. In the Atlantic, the "Cod War" with Iceland, and manoeuvres with Spain over Gibraltar were civilised affairs.

1970s planning envisioned still further cuts to the Navy, with the focus being on "contributing to NATO" rather than operating independently. In 1981, another Minister, Keith Speed, resigned in protest over plans to retain just two carriers and overall manpower at its lowest in over a century. The Falklands War erupted in April 1982, and resulted in a British victory.

HMS Invincible accompanied by three Leander-class frigates and three RFA's. The Leanders were the mainstay of the RN during the 1980s

The Falklands were a reminder of the hazards of reducing the Navy further, and resulted in a stabilisation of force levels, as well as technical improvements due to lessons learned from the war.

As the Cold War ended, the Royal Navy fought in the Gulf War against Iraq, with Sea Skua missiles sinking a large proportion of the country's navy. However, the end of the Soviet threat brought about a very large reduction in the strength of the Navy. All its diesel submarines were decommissioned and more surface combatants left the fleet.

The 1990s saw blockade operations against Bosnia and involvement in the Kosovo War. The Strategic Defence Review of 1998 promised a somewhat brighter future for the Navy, although the optimism was mitigated by the further loss of surface combatants. However, the promise of the SDR was not fulfilled, and despite being at war since September 2001 the United Kingdom's forces suffered further savage cuts in 2004.