This question was asked in the House of Lords in 1779 on a motion to remove Lord Sandwich from the Admiralty. Sandwich was appointed to the Admiralty in early 1771, after the departure of Hawke. He inherited a fleet in good order, a fleet whose maintenance had been carefully co-ordinated and a Navy whose administration and finances had been well managed. When war had threatened with Spain over the Falkland Islands, the Navy was prepared, so well prepared, in fact, that war with the Bourbon powers was averted. In the years that followed the Falklands crisis and as war with Britain’s colonies in America escalated, the impression of the fine fleet inherited by Sandwich apparently evaporated. The Navy’s ships seemed to be in terminal decay. The Navy was administered by, it was alleged, corrupt ministers and officials more interested in lining their own pockets. The focus of this criticism, and contempt, was Lord Sandwich himself. No First Lord of the Admiralty before or since has been subject to so many accusations of dishonesty, corruption and mismanagement. These accusations generated such contempt among Sandwich’s contemporaries in the parliamentary opposition that history has recorded him, until quite recently, as being one of the prime architects of Britain’s loss of her American empire. However, an examination of Sandwich’s administration reveals a man who was without doubt one of the most competent and dedicated naval administrators of the eighteenth century, a view entirely at odds with the unjustified reputation that prevailed for so long.

There is a substantial amount of literature about Sandwich, much of it concerned with his use of patronage, his character and his part as a minister in a government engaged in an unpopular war. The twentieth-century publication of four volumes of the Sandwich papers by the Navy Records Society did much to re-evaluate his reputation. More recently, Knight, Haas and Broomfield, to name a few, have provided a more balanced assessment of Sandwich’s abilities as an administrator and his life has been entirely reassessed in the biography of the earl by Nicholas Rodger. Yet despite a much greater understanding of Sandwich and his management of the Navy, we are left with two unresolved issues.