Now this is the precise form in which all fleet instructions were issued, with scarcely any alteration, up to the conclusion of the War of American Independence,[1] and the peculiar importance of this set of articles therefore is, that in them we have the first known example of those stereotyped Fighting Instructions to which, as all modern writers seem agreed, was due the alleged decadence of naval tactics in the eighteenth century.
This being so, they clearly demand the most careful consideration.

'The English,' says Captain Mahan in his latest discussion of the subject, 'in the period of reaction which succeeded the Dutch Wars produced their own caricature of systematised tactics,[2] and this may be taken as well representing the current judgment.

But when we come to study minutely these orders of Russell, and to study them in the light of the last of the Duke of York's and the observations thereon in the _Admiralty Manuscript_, as well as of the views of the great French admirals of the time, we may well doubt whether the judgment does not require modification.

We may doubt, that is, whether Russell's orders, so far from being a caricature of what had gone before, were not rather a sagacious attempt to secure that increase of manoeuvring power and squadronal control which had been found essential to any real advance in tactics.
In the first place, after noting that these instructions begin logically with two articles for the formation of line ahead and abreast, we are struck by this disappearance of the Duke of York's article relating to 'dividing the enemy's fleet.' It is certainly to this disappearance that is mainly due the belief that the new instructions were retrograde.

The somewhat hasty conclusion is generally drawn that the manoeuvre of 'breaking the line' had been introduced during the Dutch Wars, and forgotten immediately afterwards.