Royal Scots Navy - The Last Years of Independence, 1689-1707

The Last Years of Independence, 1689-1707

By the time of England's Glorious Revolution, the Royal Navy had more than a hundred warships, most of them large ships of the line designed to fight fleet battles against rival navies. In Scotland, the Revolution of 1689 and the Nine Years' War saw the government reliant as ever on privateers and hired merchant ships, but in the mid-1690s, two separate schemes for larger naval forces were put in motion. As usual, the larger part was played by the merchant community rather than the government.

Private business interests equipped a capable force of four ships of the line for overseas campaigns, probably Scotland's largest warships since the Great Michael. Two big ships were built at Hamburg, the St Andrew and Caledonia, cited as carrying 56, 60 or 70 guns in varying sources. The St Francis of 46 guns was purchased and renamed Unicorn. The Amsterdam-built Rising Sun mounted 60 guns but was capable of bearing an even heavier armament. Although initially envisaged as privateers, they eventually sailed in peacetime, and there is some evidence that they were commissioned as Royal Scots Navy ships.

These ships were used to support the Darien Scheme, a colonial project to establish a Scottish economic and military presence in the Americas. The project was a disaster, and almost all the ships were lost during the retreat from the colony. Only the Caledonia returned to Scotland, and her subsequent career is obscure.

Simultaneously, it had been decided to establish a professional navy for commerce protection in home waters, with three purpose-built warships bought from English shipbuilders in 1696. The Royal William of 32 guns was the smallest type of fifth rate in the English ranking, but she carried a half-battery of five nine-pounder guns per side on the lower deck, giving a heavier broadside than comparable Royal Navy vessels, and at first the Scots called her a "ship" rather than a "frigate". The other two vessels were sixth-rates, the Royal Mary and Dumbarton Castle, each of 24 guns, generally described as frigates.

Even before the financial crisis caused by the failure in Darien, the Privy Council struggled to pay their running costs, and the War of the Spanish Succession saw just the two smaller frigates mobilized, "to beat off the small privateers". This they did, but much of the actual responsibility for manning and equipping the ships was passed on to the burghs in the traditional manner, and initially, the government even decided to lease out the Royal William as a merchantman for trade with the West Indies, rather than commissioning her as a warship. Her intended captain was Thomas Gordon, a veteran Aberdeen merchant captain with privateering connections; instead of crossing the Atlantic, he became the last commander of the Royal Scots Navy, taking charge of HMS Royal Mary on the North Sea patrol, moving to Royal William when she entered service in 1705, and being promoted to commodore in 1706.

As a consequence of the Act of Union in 1707, the Royal Scottish Navy was merged with the English Royal Navy, but there were already much larger English ships called Royal William and Mary, so the Scottish frigates were renamed HMS Edinburgh and HMS Glasgow, while only Dumbarton Castle retained its name. Within two years, only the ex-Royal Mary remained in service, and when she was paid off in 1719, the last meaningful connection of the Royal Navy to the old Scottish fleet had disappeared.

Most of the Scottish officers had already left, resigning their Royal Navy commissions when the Elector of Hanover became king in 1714. Commodore Gordon led the bulk of Scotland's naval officers away to the Russian Empire, where Peter the Great was in the process of launching a new navy, and needed experienced officers to command his ships. Within two years, Gordon was a Russian admiral, eventually becoming the Baltic Fleet's commander-in-chief in 1727, leading a mighty fleet of ships-of-the-line from the 100 gun flagship Peter and Paul, and governing the great naval fortress of Kronstadt.