Letter of Marque

Letter of Marque

Letters of marque – more properly called “letters of marque and reprisal” originated in 1243 when King Henry III of England issued licenses to specific individuals to seize enemy cargoes at sea and split the proceeds from the sale of those cargoes with the Crown. Later, in1354, King Edward III broadened the scope of these licenses to authorize a subject to make reprisals against the citizens and possessions of a hostile nation for alleged injuries perpetrated against the king by that nation. While at the time the reprisal could take place on land or sea, early on the term came to apply only to measures taken at sea.  Those in possession of a highly coveted letter of marque became known as privateers, and the practice was quickly adopted by most European maritime nations and became a mainstay of international law.

Perhaps unwittingly – although probably not – the Plantagenet king had opened wide a treasure trove of opportunity and profit for the private sector and for the Royal Exchequer. Throughout the Middle Ages enterprising English sea captains operated with the tacit understanding of their king if not his outright commission in harassing the maritime trade of offending nation-states. Things reached a fever pitch when privateers such as Sir Francis Drake seized Spanish ships laden with gold and silver on their return voyage from South America and the Spanish Main. Queen Elizabeth I was only too happy to accept this Midas touch and share in the bounty of the captured treasure and subsequent sale of the seized vessel, its value determined by newly developed Admiralty Courts (also known as “prize courts”). The privateer’s captain and crew all received a share based on rank, so everyone was happy – except, of course, the captain and crew of the captured vessel and the Court of King Phillip II of Spain. His displeasure led ultimately to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, one of most colossal and humiliating defeats in military history. 

A letter of marque thus conferred on the private merchant vessel a quasi-naval status, to the point where it was equipped with naval-style guns, often the 6- or 12-pounder variety. (A 6-pomder gun, for example, fired a shot that weighed six pounds.) A commissioned privateer was afforded the full protection of the rules of war, and captured privateers were treated (in theory at least) at prisoners of war. Unlike a naval vessel, however, the primary objective of a privateer was not to engage and destroy the enemy. A privateer’s prime objective was to board an enemy merchantman having caused as little damage as possible to its top-hamper and hull (so to not damage the selling price) and claim it as a prize of war.  If an enemy naval vessel looked on the horizon, a privateer would normally clap on all sail and run, no matter how heavily armed it might be. .

During the American Revolution, letters of marque were issued by state legislatures and by the Continental Congress. Such was the lure of quick and substantial profits, privateering made it increasingly difficult for the Continental navy to recruit sailors. The navy also seized British merchantmen, but not as a prime objective and not with as generous a split of earnings among the ship’s company.

John Paul Jones

To help illustrate the point, below is an exchange between Captain John Paul Jones and protagonist Richard Cutler that takes place in chapter one of A Matter of Honor. Jones is in Hingham, Massachusetts to recruit the 17-year-old Cutler as a midshipman to serve with him in the Continental sloop-of-war Ranger. Cutler has just informed Jones that Richard’s father, a shipping magnate, has donated two of his merchant vessels to the Glorious Cause.

    “I understand your father sent him [Gen. George Washington) two brigs last year.”
    “Yes, sir, he did,” Richard acknowledged. 
    “Refitted as privateers?”
    “Yes, sir. They’re based in Beverly and they’ve had some success. Their biggest prize was three British merchantmen bound for Cape Ann with munitions for Admiral Graves. General Washington was pleased to accept those munitions in his stead. I suspect the British might still be in Boston had these ships not been captured.”
    “I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I’ve invested so much time pounding the tables of Congress in Philadelphia. We need a strong navy for the very same reasons we need a strong army. We cannot rely for our defense on state militias or other local groups anymore than we can rely on privateers or state navies. If we are to prevail in this rebellion, our ships must do more than simply disrupt supplies coming from England to America. “
    “We have more than a hundred privateers at sea, Captain,” Richard pointed out. “Have not the supplies they have seized helped our cause?”
    “Yes, they have. And they have also done much to line the pockets of the owners of those vessels.” Jones took a deep swig of ale. “Privateering is not a calling, Richard. It’s a business, pure and simple. A damn profitable business, I might add. So much so that it’s become nigh impossible to recruit able seamen for our navy. Everyone wants a share of the riches, on the civilian side. But whilst privateers serve one purpose – and I concede, it’s an important one -- the navy serves quite another. And the navy’s mission will ultimately prove more important to victory.”

As a footnote to this discussion, the French term for a letter of marque is lettre de course, a term which gave rise to the word “corsair” as a synonym to “privateer.”

Photo credits: Lettre de marque [public domain]; Sir Francis Drake viewing treasure taken from a Spanish ship [public domain]; John Paul Jones, oil on canvas by Charles Wilson Peale [public domain].

The Fall of the Bastille

Storming of the Bastille

The Bastille has long served as a symbol of a ruthless King Louis XVI oppressing his hapless and demoralized subjects. The wretchedness of this royal prison before the French Revolution is perhaps best depicted by Charles Dickens in his epic novel A Tale of Two Cities, in which the upstanding Doctor Manette is incarcerated in the Bastille in 1757 and left to rot in solitude as “Prisoner 105, North Tower,” maintaining a lifeline to sanity only by cobbling shoes. 


The roster of prison inmates on July 14, 1789 was of a quite different pedigree. On that date the Bastille hosted but six inmates. (Some historical sources claim seven.) Two of them had been judged insane and another was the son of a wealthy chevalier who had him tossed in there as punishment for disobedience.

No, it was not revenge to save the oppressed and the wrongfully accused that inflamed a Parisian mob to take to the streets that fateful July day. Citizens of France had finally reached a tipping point after too many months of (a) economic bankruptcy brought on by excessive government spending on the American Revolution and revenge against England, (b) crop failures brought on by miserable winter-like weather that kept its icy grip on French wheat fields deep into the months of spring, and (c) moral bankruptcy brought on by a corpulent and incompetent king, his despised Austrian-born and free-spending queen known contemptuously as “Madame Deficit,” and a well-heeled and privileged aristocracy that remained utterly oblivious to the abject misery of 98 percent of the French population.

King Louis XVI

So what happened on that momentous day of July 14, 1789? Perhaps the question can best be answered by John Paul Jones in a conversation with Richard Cutler as profiled in chapter 13 of For Love of Country, Volume II of the Cutler Family Chronicles. Richard was in Paris on his return voyage to Boston to confer with his former naval commander after he, Richard, had sailed from Algiers where he had tried to ransom his brother Caleb and his shipmates being held there as prisoners in conditions far worse than anything suffered in the Bastille. President Washington had recently appointed Jones as special envoy to the Barbary States to negotiate the release of all American sailors being detained by the Barbary regencies. Richard had information about North Africa that he and Thomas Jefferson, American ambassador to France, thought Jones would find useful in his upcoming mission.  

            “What exactly do you know about what happened at the Bastille?”

            Richard shrugged. “Not a lot, really. A thousand people marched to the prison and demanded that the garrison surrender. They were armed with muskets and cannon, taken from an army arsenal. The Invalids Hospital, as I recall. Their goal, they claimed, was to free the prisoners inside. But according to General Lafayette; what they really wanted was to destroy this symbol of royal authority and seize the powder inside. The prisoners were actually of minor importance.”

            “Lafayette is correct. Go on.”

            “At first, the governor of the prison refused to surrender. He ordered his troops to fire on the crowd. Some people were killed. He sent word to the mob that he would blow up the Bastille himself if they didn’t disperse. Since something close to twenty thousand pounds of powder was stored inside (editor’s note: the most powder stored anywhere in France), that was no small threat.”

            “That’s not exactly how it happened. Yes, the governor did order his men to fire, but into the air, over the heads of the crowd. He wanted to scare them, to bring them to their senses. And yes, the governor did threaten to blow up the Bastille, but only if the mob refused to accept his terms of surrender -- which basically were to allow his garrison to leave the prison unharmed. He was simply trying to defuse the situation, avoid further bloodshed on both sides, and guarantee the safety of his soldiers. He realized he couldn’t defend the Bastille with a hundred aging veterans and a few Swiss guards dispatched from Versailles. He lost all hope when three hundred Gardes Françaises defected from the regular army and marched into Paris to join the ranks of the mob. But the governor had his honor to consider.”

            “What happened next?” Richard asked, caught up in the telling and seeing no point in recounting events that Jones obviously knew far better than he.

            “When a leader of the mob – a man named Aubriot -- refused the governor’s terms, the mob stormed into the outer courtyard, which was undefended, and cut the chains on the drawbridge leading into the inner yard.  When they did that, the garrison opened fire. Many people were killed, which only served to inflame the mob further. They stormed inside in ever greater numbers until the governor finally was forced to surrender. When he did, he and his officers were seized and dragged off to la place de Grève, a spot where traitors and criminals have traditionally been executed. He was defiant to the end. He was even able to free himself long enough to kick one of his captors in the balls and spit in Aubriot’s face. The mob pounced on him like a pack of dogs, after that.  They tore at his body and cut into his neck with a dull knife. As his lifeblood flowed out of him, he managed to gurgle out: Vive le roi!  They cut off his head, impaled it on a pike, and paraded it through the city streets followed by rioters shouting,  ‘Death to all aristocrats!’”

The French Revolution was under way, and many more years of suffering and bloodshed would elapse before the citizens of France – high-brow and low-brow alike -- would find any sort of reprieve.

(As a footnote to history, John Paul Jones never did serve as special envoy to the Barbary States. He died in Paris not long after the fall of the Bastille.)

Photo credits: Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789, public domain; Louis XVI in Coronation Robes, public domain.

Terror in Whitehaven, 1778

Attack on Whitehaven
painting by Col. Charles Waterhouse

In the 1770's the town of Whitehaven was one of England's busiest seaports. Located near the shores of the Irish Sea, it looked out upon the Solway Firth that comprised the westernmost boundary between England and Scotland. Because Whitehaven was near where John Paul Jones was born and raised in the Scottish Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, it was where Jones decided to launch his one-ship invasion of England. Although this raid was strongly opposed by most of his officer corps, especially by First Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, it was sanctioned by a host of American dignitaries, including America's emissary in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.

John Paul Jones monument
in Whitehaven

Just after midnight on April 23, 1778, Jones ordered two ship's boats lowered away from the weather deck of the Continental sloop of war Ranger. Thirty sailors and Marines clambered down into the boats. Jones objectives: to first spike the guns of the English fort protecting the entrance to the harbor and the firth, and then to set fire to the three hundred or so vessels nested together at anchor in the harbor -- most of them either coastal merchantmen or coal transports. If the fires spread to the town, so much the better. Jones had no military objectives. Whitehaven held no strategic importance to him or to anyone else. It was simply a town that Jones had sailed in and out of many times in his boyhood, and it was here that he proposed to strike fear and panic among the citizens of Whitehaven – and by extension, among the entire British nation.

Despite a prolonged row ashore caused by shifting winds and a strong ebb tide, Jones realized his first objective. During the first inklings of dawn, he and his captain of Marines, Lt. Wallingford, entered the lightly garrisoned fort and spiked its cannon, temporarily disabling them. Jones, however, failed to realize his second objective, in part because the lanterns in both boats ran out of fuel sufficient to light a conflagration, and in part because a member of his raiding party, an Irishman, slipped away as dawn approached and ran along a harbor street of Whitehaven shouting out a Paul Revere-style warning. Only a single vessel, the collier Thompson, was set aflame, and the domino effect of one burning mast collapsing onto another mast did not materialize. Meanwhile, a fire alarm was sounded, Whitehaven's fire-fighting equipment was mobilized, and large numbers of townsfolk came running to the quays dressed in nightclothes and brandishing family weapons. Jones was forced to retreat to his two boats and back to Ranger, which he did without incident under the silence of the fort's spiked cannon.

We Americans do not like to think of ourselves as perpetrating any overt act of terrorism at any time in our history. But the raid on Whitehaven was one such act. As stated above, it had no military objective, other than perhaps to draw ships of the Royal Navy away from the Channel in pursuit of Ranger. Its primary purpose was to spread panic among British citizenry and it succeeded in doing just that. Britons were not accustomed to having their country invaded, even by a single ship, and few people living long the coast could rest easily at night knowing that ship was prowling offshore, ready, willing and able to strike again. As Midshipman Richard Cutler responds to Captain Jones in Ranger's after cabin when asked for his opinion of the proposed raid in A Matter of Honor, "It's a bold plan, Captain, because it does not rely on success. American Marines landing on British soil will have its effect, no matter the outcome." As it turned out, he was right.

What Became of John Paul Jones?

John Paul Jones*

Many people are aware that John Paul Jones was the one great naval commander to serve in the Continentail Navy during the American Revolutionary War.  His exploits in British waters as captain of Ranger and then of Bonhomme Richard are the stuff of legend.

Fewer people are aware of his earlier life.  Born on the southeast coast of Scotland in 1747, John Paul went to sea at an early age as a merchant sailor.  As master of his own vessel in the 1770s, he killed a member of his crew, a mutineer.  He claimed it was self-defense, but feared that a court in Tobago would find him guilty nonetheless.  So he fled to America, added "Jones" to his name, and for several years managed the Virginia estate of his deeased brother. Frustrated by the life of a gentleman farmer, he decided to join the navy.

Few people are aware, however, of what became of Jones after the Revolutionary War.  He remained in Paris, a city much to his liking and where he was revered, until he grew restless for action.  To quote from my novel For Love of Country:

"He [Richard Cutler] was referring to the rank of Rear Admiral bestowed upon Jones by her most Catholic majesty, the Tsarina of Russia, Catherine the Second. Three years ago, fed up with Congressional reluctance to invest in a navy, Jones had accepted the invitation of the Empress Catherine to join her Black Sea fleet in an attack against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. That fleet was under the titular command of a Romanov prince, Admiral Potemkin, vested with wresting Constantinople away from the Muslim Turks who had occupied the city for three centuries. Having liberated the Christians there, the Empress expected to receive, as just compensation for doing God’s work, a warm water port for her navy and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Once aboard the Russian flagship, Jones quickly concluded that Potemkin had no future as a naval commander. It took considerable effort and tact to convince Potemkin that Russia would be better served were he to hand over the reins of commander-in-chief to Jones, advice the reluctant prince finally accepted. At the Battle of Liman, having secretly reconnoitered the enemy fleet the night before from a rowboat, Jones destroyed fifteen enemy warships while killing three thousand Turks and taking sixteen hundred prisoners – all at the cost of one Russian frigate and eighteen Russian sailors. When reports of the stunning victory reached the capital, all Russia rejoiced except for one man, Prince Potemkin, who, stung by what he deemed a usurpation of his rightful glory, publicly accused Jones of molesting a ten-year-old girl selling butter in a St. Petersburg. square. Disgusted and disillusioned, Jones left Russia when the charges were dropped and returned to Paris, where details of his adventures were widely published."

Jones died in Paris in 1792.  In 1906 his remains were brought aboard the USS Brooklyn.  With three other cruisers acting as escorts, the "father of the U.S. Navy" sailed home on his final vovage.  Today, his coffin rests, appropriately, in Bancroft Hall at the United States Naval Academy.

*Painting by Charles Wilson Peale, c1781, published in the US before 

1923 and public domain in the US.

Cutler Family Chronicles

This is the first blog profiling the naval, commercial, social and political history of the United States during the Age of Sail, as depicted in the Cutler Family Chronicles. Novels in the series are published by the Naval Institute Press located in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Cutler Family Chronicles is a projected seven-book series profiling the best of American duty, honor and courage during the Age of Fighting Sail. Years covered in the series are 1774 to 1815, from the American Revolution to the Second Barbary War. All seven novels have as a backdrop the creation of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of the United States as a commercial power on the world stage. All novels feature the seafaring Cutler family of Hingham, Massachusetts, as well as a supporting and ever expanding cast of characters.

While these novels feature plenty of swashbuckling sea action, they also reveal close interpersonal relationships among family members and friends. At their core they chronicle a life-long love story between Richard Cutler, the main protagonist, and the love of his life, English-born Katherine Hardcastle Cutler. Together, Richard and Katherine interact in intriguing ways with other men of honor and women of passion, some fictional, many of them real historical characters such as John Paul Jones, Thomas Jefferson, Horatio Nelson, John Adams, Stephen Decatur, Edward Preble, Isaac Hull, Oliver Hazard Perry, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Each historical character has been studiously researched and each novel has been vetted for historical accuracy.

Come sail in the breeze with Ranger, Bonhomme Richard, Falcon, USS Constellation and USS Constitution as the fledgling United States confronts, in the Revolution, the world’s greatest sea power, and then, in the Quasi-War with France, the world’s greatest land power. Along the way, and in the years following, America’s first naval heroes take on the Barbary States, twice, and England a second time, along with vipers’ nests in pirate-infested waters from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and to the Indian Ocean and beyond.