Introduction

In Part IV, the two principal limitations of the navy's financing mechanism were established: the long-standing reliance on a single trésorier's access to credit, and how the trésoriers were insufficiently compensated for financing naval activity. Part V develops these themes and investigates how the trésoriers’ funding of the navy in the War of the Spanish Succession became an unsustainable and loss-making financial operation in the face of substantial funding shortfalls in payments and increased financial pressures. Chapter Eleven presents evidence of a damaging pattern of overspending and underfunding, and it examines the organisational factors behind both the navy's tendency to exceed its budget and the chronically inadequate supply of funds from the finance ministry. The chapter then shows how the trésoriers’ personal finances came under pressure as they were forced to borrow unsustainable amounts of money to bridge widening funding gaps. This in turn increasingly incited the trésoriers to manage the navy's finances in response to their own financial priorities and the demands of their creditors. The fundamental cause of the naval treasury's deteriorating performance in the 1700s was a failure to allocate sufficient financial reimbursement to the trésoriers and, more importantly, to improve the navy's access to relatively limited credit facilities. Combined, these factors ensured that the trésoriers would be unable to fund the continuous, large-scale mobilisations that Louis XIV's naval ambitions required, and, as Chapter Twelve shows, resulted in the spectacular collapse of the navy in 1707–09.