Introduction

Part III outlined the weaknesses of the measures that were intended to ensure paymaster accountability and the challenges that the crown faced in gathering the information that would have better enabled it to control the activities of the trésoriers. Part IV argues that a mismatch between the navy's funding needs and the structure of its financing mechanism developed over the course of the seventeenth century. It investigates the organisational expedients that were deployed by the crown in managing the office of trésorier as both purchasable property and as a means of mobilising private access to credit. Chapter Nine begins by considering the long-term consequences of efforts to improve the effectiveness of the naval treasury in the first half of the seventeenth century, particularly during the ministry of Cardinal Richelieu when he built his power base in maritime affairs. In doing so, the chapter principally draws upon the archival research of Henri Legohérel and Alan James, but it examines the ramifications of their findings in the light of the naval treasury's eventual failure in the War of the Spanish Succession. Chapter Ten then outlines the pattern of office ownership that was encouraged during Louis XIV's reign and examines how the naval treasury developed in a way that was incompatible with the demands of funding the navy when it mobilised for war in the 1690s. The consequence of treating the office of trésorier as a marketable investment was that the French navy came to rely on the financial strength of only one trésorier until 1692, and that the financial rewards of acting as trésorier were structured in a way that secured office values but failed to indemnify officeholders against the rising costs of naval warfare.