Believe it or not, service in the Royal Navy was one of the few respected and well-established methods of social advancement throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. While you will always have snobs in any society, most peers and gentlemen would have considered naval officers social equals. Gentlemen who, if not born to that rank, nevertheless earned that rank through military service.

Though the English Navy of Elizabethan and early Stuart times stipulated that the men who led the fleets and commanded the ships be gentlemen first and foremost,^1 by the end of the seventeenth century this attitude had begun to fall by the wayside. Class distinctions could still be observed in society at large, as well as in the English (later British) army until the late nineteenth century and the decline of the purchase system.^2 However the navy, by contrast, became less clearly demarcated. The highly skilled nature of naval warfare, with its necessary emphasis on sailing ability, caused the state to realize the necessity for naval officers who could fill the roles of both seaman and fighter. By examining the system of officer training in the Royal Navy of the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries; more specifically, by looking at the ways in which officers were recruited – or as Harris says, the ways in which officers entered the navy^3 – what was required of them in their training period, and how they were commissioned one may see that the navy was itself a means to social advancement rather than an end for wealthy young men seeking honorable employment.

Modern naval officers enter the service through institutions of officer training – academies or reserve training programs, but this was not the case in the early modern period. The earliest and indeed, continually most popular, method used by officers to enter the Royal Navy has been termed the 'captain’s servant' method. Under Admiralty regulations, a captain was allowed to take four servants to sea with him for every one hundred seamen aboard his vessel. While some of these positions were undeniably filled by domestics, it was common practice for these captains to take to sea with them their sons, sons of relatives or friends, or the son of someone to whom they owed an obligation (such as a tradesman with a large bill).^4 These boys or young men, if they could command enough patronage could very well find themselves promoted to '[l]ieutenant at the first possible opportunity, and by the simple selection of the Captain himself…It all depended on the Captain. For…the latter appears to have had complete freedom in the choice, and the making, of his own lieutenant, as well as of his own servants, up to the beginning of the 1630s'. And once a man had made lieutenant, he stepped onto the lowest rung on the ladder of commissioned ranks.^5

Yet, by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a new system for entering the navy with the eventual aim of reaching officer status had come into being. Known as the King’s Letter Boys, this newest breed of officer-hopeful was the embryonic precursor of the modern naval cadet. Because officers born of the 'captain’s servant' method could very well have sprung from any level of society (and very often did), chosen as he was by the captain’s discretion, the King’s Letter Boys were picked specifically from the ranks of the nobility and gentry and given preference over any other 'who have not served Us yet in that capacity'.^6 The aim of such a move in the eyes of the Admiralty was to regain some control over the type of men who would be serving as officers, and to ensure that their selection pool consisted of the 'right sort 'of man. Eventually the King’s Letter Boys would be replaced by volunteers from the Naval Academy, and despite the Admiralty’s efforts, the old system of 'captain’s servant' officers never really died out in the period under review.

Prior to the establishment of the Naval Academy, which later became the Royal Naval Academy and still later, Royal Naval College, future officers were trained in what may be thought of as a sea apprenticeship. Both the 'captain’s servants' and the King’s Letter Boys learned the ins-and-outs of seamanship, navigation, and command by observation on board a commissioned vessel. In the late seventeenth century when the Royal Navy came under the control of Samuel Pepys, it was stipulated that all men presenting themselves for a lieutenant’s commission had to present proper documentation that they had indeed undergone three years of sea service with one year spent as either a midshipman or master’s mate – a position that would have exposed them to a greater amount of navigational and mathematical training.^7 In fact, by 1794 the term 'captain’s servant' had disappeared when referring to officer candidates brought aboard by the captain himself; from then on they were to be rated midshipmen as soon as they entered the ship's books.

With the advent of the Naval Academy in the 1730s, boys were to be trained in theory at the school, and the bulk of their education focused on mathematics. Indeed, academy volunteers could not be posted to a ship until they had satisfied the institution’s mathematical standards, a course of study that usually took three years but could be completed in as little as one by the gifted.^8 As it was understood that these young gentlemen were to be rated midshipmen upon entering their first ship, all that remained was for them to acquire their three years (by the mid-eighteenth century this had increased to six years) of sea service before they could present themselves for a chance at a officer’s commission. The academy never became popular, however: sons of the nobility and gentry preferred the much surer route of buying a commission in the army and the Admiralty eventually had to compromise in order to exert some control over the training that officer candidates underwent. While the captain and his officers were still charged with overseeing a young candidate’s practical training at sea, the Admiralty began to send schoolmasters aboard their commissioned vessels to undertake the candidate’s theoretical education.^9 All this training was important to the hopeful officer candidate because unlike the English (and later British) army of the time, commissions were granted only to those men who could pass a competency examination in seamanship.