The goals of this book, outlined in Chapter 1, were threefold. The first was to test contemporary observations that the French Wars brought social change to the corps of young gentlemen, change which saw opportunities narrow for all but the social and power elites, and resulted in the rise of a more aristocratic midshipmen's berth by 1815. The need to revisit these observations in light of Michael Lewis's opposing theory of a growing social diversity on naval quarterdecks during the war provided the starting point for this study. The second aim was to assess the Admiralty's role in altering the social makeup of the midshipmen's berth through its efforts to centralize recruitment. The third goal sought to test theories that the perceived wartime influx of wellborn, well-connected officer aspirants threatened quarterdeck professionalism and discipline through the confusion of naval and social rank.

These thematic threads sought to characterize the social changes affecting officer recruits before, during, and after the French Wars. The sensitivity of the young gentlemen's condition to both naval and civil pressures was visible in the cyclical pattern of social development that emerged.

The theories of social development

In light of the evidence shown in the data, the simplest answer to the question of whether the French Wars saw the greatest ‘influx of young nobility into the service’, must be ‘no’. Both the samples for quarterdeck boys and junior officers showed significantly higher proportions of young men with aristocratic connections in the navy of 1771 than in 1791, 1801, or 1811.