Lord Sandwich loses the 13 colonies.

The Royal Navy was unable to relieve the British forces commanded by General Cornwallis at the decisive battle of Yorktown which decided the American War of Independence. Admiral Graves did not have the proper ships, the proper supplies or the ability to recover in time from a recent defeat by the French at Chesapeake Bay. The man who was ultimately responsible for this was the First Lord of the Admiralty in North's administration, Lord Sandwich.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and an intellectual celebrity of the time, commented that Lord Sandwich had spent several weeks trout fishing at Newbury 'with two or three ladies of pleasure..at a time when the fate of the British Empire is in dependance, and in dependance on him.'

One wonders if any of those ladies managed to land a brown trout, or whether Lord Sandwich was content to bait his hook whilst gossiping about a naval administration that was racked with political rivalry, blatant corruption and strategical ineptitude. Indeed, the Royal Navy's officer corps was riddled with aristocrats more concerned with supposed status and honour. Under Lord Sandwich's rather lax command, this particular campaign had shown up British naval commanders as unable to take decisive action during battles and incapable of developing new tactics.

Compounding the flagrant incompetence of the officers was the poor standard of the Royal navy's regular seamen: half of them had been press-ganged into the navy against their will! The other half were paupers with no other work opportunities to choose from. Forced to volunteer for a job with terrible pay, disgusting food and cruel discipline, they would then be exposed to deadly diseases such as scurvy and yellow fever.

"Our fleets, which are defrauded by injustice, are first manned by violence and then maintained by cruelty," admitted Admiral Edward Grog Vernon.

Of course there were other contributing factors to the loss of the thirteen colonies, from the galvanising issue of taxation without representation as well as the military support that George Washington received from the French, to the very nature of this embryonic empire that sought to exploit whilst spreading the self-defeating concept of liberty; however, this case of naval mismanagement is a perfect example of the type of aristocratic blunders that would characterise the British Empire throughout its history.

On the other hand, it is also important to note that the next generation of Royal Navy officers would learn from these costly mistakes and would go on to attain the stunning naval successes of the 1790s and the early 19th Century which would do so much to establish the British Empire properly.

Sources:

1. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781 - 1997.

2. Citizendium on the American Revolution.