Looking back over the writing that has shaped our attitude to the Spithead and Nore mutinies, the most striking feature of the books by Gill, Manwaring and Dobrée and Dugan is the extent to which they themselves were heirs to the belief that Britain in 1797 was on the brink of revolution. According to their thinking, the whole of Europe was subject to tumult precipitated by revolutionary France. England stood in danger of invasion, Ireland was on the brink of revolt, at which point the Channel Fleet, Britain's shield against invasion, mutinied against appalling conditions of service, brutal discipline, and tyrannical officers. It is a view that has fuelled an empathic and impassioned rationalisation of the mutinies as an element in the politicisation of the whole working community of Great Britain. It was foolish, E. P. Thompson claimed in 1963, ‘to argue that, because the majority of the sailors had few clear political notions, this was a parochial affair of ships' biscuits and arrears of pay, and not a revolutionary movement’. It is a view that has been refined more recently by Roger Wells who has revealed that the seamen were both influenced by external democrats and revolutionaries, predominately Irish, and managed by a politically radical but divided minority.

It is not the purpose of this paper to take issue with these beliefs. However it does take notice of two more recent contributions to the naval and political historiography of Britain that have done much to change the ideological context within which the Spithead and Nore Mutinies are considered.