Compassion and Politics. Age, Disability and the Greenwich Hospital Project 1694-1763

In 1692, it is said, Queen Mary was deeply affected by the sight of maimed sailors being carried ashore after the hard-fought battle of La Hogue.  After her death, William III gave over the site of a half-built royal palace, on which a hospital for old and crippled seamen was to be built.  Thus was the Royal Hospital for Seamen founded, and thus were the magnificent buildings erected which are now known as the Old Royal Naval College.

This version of events is at best incomplete.  The Hospital was constructed on a vast scale, in buildings that took fifty years to erect, at vast cost.  The paintings on the walls of the famous Painted Hall are replete with political symbolism.  The Hospital was funded not out of general taxation, but from subscriptions and one-off grants, among other devices used to raise money.  As a result, the nascent Hospital had to weather several periods of severe financial difficulty.  Why was all of this so?  What were the intentions of those who founded the Hospital, those who helped to fund it, and those who continued its development through two major wars (1702-13 and 1739-48), several changes of government, a major financial crisis in 1720 and a long period of peace?  Little research has been done into the early history of the Hospital, and all of these questions remain to be answered.

And what of the seamen who inhabited the vast buildings?  What were their circumstances?  How were they selected for admission, and how did the Hospital compare with other options that might have been open to them?  What, indeed, might those options have been, aside from private charity and the Poor Law?  Old age and infirmity are two aspects of eighteenth-century society about which we still know comparatively little.

Utilising the records of the Royal Hospital, now held in The National Archives, personal papers and the State Papers, Compassion and Politics research by the GMI seeks to answer all of these questions, and provide new insights into eighteenth-century society.