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of pirates, and the repulse of mere raids on the coast, he entered into a contract with the citizens of London. They were to provide a force of ships and men, to be commanded by their own admirals, and were to be paid certain dues, and keep all their prizes. They did not undertake to deal with a great hostile fleet, but only to discharge the police duties. After a good deal of negotiation, the experiment was actually tried from May 1406 to September 1407. The merchants appointed two admirals, Richard Clytherow for the south and west, and Nicholas Blackburn for the north, who were endowed with large powers of impressment. This curious attempt to discharge the duty of the State by contract was not satisfactory, and the arrangement was not renewed. It is chiefly worth mentioning as showing to what shifts the Crown was driven in its times of weakness.

      In an introduction which aims only at giving an outline account of the mediæval navy, further details of warlike operations, which were always of the same general character, are unnecessary. There was a revival of efficiency with Henry V., not, however, marked by any single events of the brilliancy of the battle of Sluys, or "Les Espagnols sur Mer." Then came another period of collapse in the dreary reign of Henry VI. With the close of the fifteenth century the mediæval period in the history came to an end. The establishment of the Tudor dynasty has been described as marking the beginning of the new monarchy. This is perhaps a somewhat arbitrary description, but it is certainly the case that the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses had converted Englishmen, or had brought them back, to a high conception of the need of a strong royal authority as the one effectual security for the safety of the subject against disorder. The administration was centralised in the king's hand. Increase of wealth in the nation supplied him with a larger revenue, and the formation of a Royal Navy in the modern sense became at last possible.

      Before leaving the mediæval navy, the picture may be completed by one example of that brutal violence which has been mentioned as a feature of the sea life of the time. I have spoken of the feuds between the different towns, and of complaints of excesses committed on the coast by armed forces appointed to protect them. One concrete example is better than any amount of general statement. Here is an instance of sheer devilry taken from the unhappy years of the minority of Richard II., when the State was weak, and Englishmen had been brutalised by the savage wars of France.

      In 1379 Sir John Arundel was appointed to the command of a force of archers and men-at-arms, which was to go to the help of the Duke of Brittany. It was to sail from Southampton. As the weather was unfavourable, there was some delay in starting, and Arundel quartered his soldiers in a nunnery. The house, according to a common practice of the time, contained, in addition to the nuns, many married women whose husbands were absent, widows, and unmarried girls, who were sent there for safety and education. Arundel's soldiers violated these women, and pillaged the chapel. Disregarding all complaints, he not only went to sea without punishing the offenders, but allowed them to bring their booty and several of the women with them. There were also, it appears, prostitutes in the ships. The ecclesiastical authorities fell back on the only revenge then within their power. They formally cursed Arundel and his thieves with bell, book, and candle as the ships sailed away.

      To men accustomed to the licence of the French wars, this doubtless appeared a very impotent form of retaliation. But they soon had occasion to change their minds. A violent storm burst upon them, apparently, since it swept them out of the Channel, from the east or north-east. To lighten the ships, these savages threw overboard all the women they had carried to sea. The danger might have been avoided if Arundel had listened to the advice of his sailing-master, John Rust, a sailor of the now very much decayed little town of Blakeney in Norfolk, who warned him that a gale was coming on. But Arundel, though a good soldier, as he showed when defending Southampton in 1377, was neither a seaman himself, nor sufficiently a man of sense to listen to those who were. Having first incurred disaster by his obstinacy, Arundel sealed his own fate by persisting in again overriding the opinion of Rust. He had been driven to within sight of the coast of Ireland, and, in his frantic desire to escape the misery of his position on shipboard, insisted that an attempt should be made to land. It was in vain that the sailors pointed out to him that it was far safer to keep at sea. In an explosion of sheer fury, largely excited, we may presume, by fear, Arundel killed some of them. Then Rust and the others made the hopeless attempt to land the madman whom they had the misfortune to be compelled to obey. Seeing a small island near the coast, the sailing-master attempted to get under its lee, but found the water too broken. Then, as a last resource, he tried to beach the ship, but she struck on the rocks, and went to pieces. Arundel, to whom every opportunity seems to have been given by fate to display his folly, was one of those who contrived to reach the shore. He might have escaped if he had not stood within reach of the waves, shaking the water out of his clothes. Rust, who had also come through alive, seeing his peril, ran forward to drag him back, and both were beaten down and dragged under by the next wave. An uncertain number of other vessels, with many knights and men-at-arms, perished in the same disaster. This may stand as sufficient example of what was possible when the brutality of the Middle Ages coincided with the licence of the sea. We may hope that the details of the story were heightened in the telling, but there is no reasonable ground to doubt its substantial truth, and the mere fact that such a tale could be told shows what was believed to be possible.

CHAPTER I

       THE NAVY OF THE TUDORS TILL THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH

       Table of Contents

      Authorities.—Much information concerning the navy during the earlier Tudor period will be found in Charnock's Naval Architecture, vol. ii. cap. 2 and 3; but the chief authority now is Mr. Oppenheim's recently published Administration of the Navy, 1509–1660. This may be supported by numerous passages in the Calendar of State Papers for the reign of Henry VIII., prepared by Mr. Brewer. The details of the fighting in Conquet Bay are given in Echyngham's letters to Wolsey in the Calendar. The collection called "State Papers," edited by Mr. Haines, 1831–1852, contains Lisle's letters during the operations of 1545. The memoirs of Martin du Bellay and Blaise de Montluc give the French side. The early history of the Trinity House has been investigated by Mr. C. L. Barrett, The Trinity House of Deptford Strond, 1893.

      The Tudor dynasty filled the throne of England for a hundred and eighteen years. A hundred and six years of that period belong to the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, three rulers of consummate ability. No other reigning house has maintained so high a level of governing faculty during so large a proportion of its existence, and it is not the least part of the wonderful good fortune of England that her destinies should have been directed, at a time of change and growth, by sovereigns of eminent capacity. She passed in those years from an old world to a new, and, however high we may rank the faculty of the race, it is impossible to doubt that the transition must have been far less successful than it was if there had been weakness or folly in its rulers. The two Henrys and Elizabeth, it must be remembered, were, in the fullest sense of the word, rulers. They had to submit to necessity, to abstain from much, to accept much which was by no means pleasing to them, but it was because they could do this, and did not persist in endeavouring to drive the world where it would not go, in the fatal fashion of the Stuarts, that they succeeded. The great men who served them, and the qualities of the English people, were not made by the Tudors, but it was they who chose the servants, and used the qualities of their subjects.

      The foundation of the modern navy was a great and vitally important part of their administrative work. It must not be supposed that there was any sharp-drawn line dividing the Middle Ages from the later times. The new monarchy itself cannot be said to have differed formally from the old. Henry VII. claimed to reign by the same right and authority as his predecessors. The difference was in the method and the spirit. From the end of the fifteenth century till the beginning of the seventeenth, Englishmen looked to the sovereign as the representative on earth of that law whose "voice" is "the harmony of the world." To the great mass of Englishmen, to all, in fact, except a few nobles, and the poor and martial northern counties, the king was the divinely appointed ruler who stood between them and anarchy. They expected him to govern by the law, but they also recognised his commission to pronounce and enforce it. In later times the authority of the Crown became an object of hostility, but from the day that Henry VII. put on the circle of gold which had fallen

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