The Culture of Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic culture in the late eighteenth century was a legacy of that regime under which administrative departments had been founded, organised and run in the late seventeenth century. The central feature of the 1660 orders was the delegation of the Crown&s;s authority for managing the navy to a Lord High Admiral. Improved naval efficiency rested in part on the long tenures of professional administrators like Samuel Pepys and William Blaythwayt who brought a rational, systematic approach to government grounded in political arithmetic. Lack of money was the common factor in both the Crown&s;s instability and Parliament&s;s growing power. The subordination of the Crown to Parliament by the Bill of Rights in 1689 increased the stability and security of government bureaucracy. Perquisites were suspected of contributing to loss by fraud, undermining public finance. Until the 1780s there was little prospect of change.