III.

THE TUDOR PERIOD AND BIRTH OF A REGULAR NAVY.

That Henry VII assimilated the lesson of the utility of naval power is abundantly clear. Henry VII it was who first established a regular navy as we now understand it. Previous to his reign, ships were requisitioned as required for war purposes, and, the war being over, reverted to the mercantile service. The liability of the Cinque Ports to provide ships when called upon constituted a species of navy, and certain ships were specially held as “Royal ships” for use as required, but under Henry ships primarily designed for fighting purposes appeared. The first of these ships was a vessel generally spoken of as the “_Great Harry_,” though her real name seems to have been _The Regent_, built in 1485. Incidentally this ship remained afloat till 1553, when she was burned by accident. She has been called “the first ship of the Royal Navy”; and though her right to the honour has been contested, she appears fully entitled to it. The real founder of the Navy as we understand a navy to-day was Henry VII.

Another important event of this reign is that during it the first dry dock was built at Portsmouth. Up till then there had been no facilities for the underwater repair of ships other than the primitive method of running them on to the mud and working on them at low tide. While ships were small this was not a matter of much moment, but directly larger vessels began to be built, it meant that efficient overhauls were extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Yet another step that had far reaching results was the granting of a bounty to all who built ships of over 120 tons. This bounty, which was “per ton” and on a sliding scale, made the building of large private ships more profitable and less risky than it had been before, and so assisted in the creation of an important auxiliary navy as complement to the Royal Navy.

The bounty system did more, however, than encourage the building of large private ships. The loose method of computing tonnage already referred to, became more elastic still when a bounty was at stake; and even looser when questions of the ship being hired per ton for State purposes was at issue. Henry VII, who was nothing if not economical, felt the pinch; the more so, as just about this time Continentals with ships for hire became alarmingly scarce. Something very like a “corner in ships” was created by English merchants.

Henry VII was thus, by circumstances beyond his own control, forced into creating a permanent navy in self defence. He died with a “navy” of eighteen ships, of which, however, only two were genuinely entitled to be called “H.M.S.” He had to hire the others!

This foundation of the “regular navy” is not at all romantic. But it is how a regular navy came to be founded--by force of circumstances. Henry VII, “founder of the Royal Navy,” undoubtedly realized clearer than any of his predecessors for many a hundred years the meaning of naval power. But--his passion for economy and the advantage taken by such of his subjects as had ships available when hired ships were scarce, had probably a deal more to do with the institution of a regular navy than any preconceived ideas. In two words--“Circumstances compelled.” And that is how things stood when Henry VIII came to the throne.

The nominal permanent naval power established by Henry VII consisted of fifty-seven ships, and the crew of each was twenty-one men and a boy, so that the _Great Harry_, which must have required a considerably larger crew, would seem to have been an experimental vessel. The actual force, however, was but two fighting ships proper.

Under Henry VIII, however, the policy of monster ships was vigorously upheld, and one large ship built in the early years of his reign--the _Sovereign_--was reputed to be “the largest ship in Europe.” In 1512 the King reviewed at Portsmouth “twenty-five ships of great burthen,” which had been collected in view of hostilities with France. These ships having been joined by others, and amounting to a fleet of forty-four sail, encountered a French fleet of thirty-nine somewhere off the coast of Brittany.

This particular battle is mainly noteworthy owing to the fact that the two flagships grappled, and while in this position one of them caught fire. The flames being communicated to the other, both blew up. This catastrophe so appalled the two sides that they abandoned the battle by mutual consent; from which it is to be presumed that the nautical mind of the day had, till then, little realised that risks were run by carrying explosives.

The English, however, were less impressed by the catastrophe than the enemy, since next day they rallied and captured or sank most of the still panic-stricken French ships.

Henry replaced the lost flagship by a still larger ship, the _Grace de Dieu_, a two-decker with the lofty poop and forecastle of the period. She was about 1,000 tons. Tonnage, however, was so loosely calculated in those days that measurements are excessively approximate.

When first cannon were introduced, they were (as previously remarked) merely a substitute for the old-fashioned catapults, and discharged stones for some time till more suitable projectiles were evolved. Like the catapults they were placed on the poop or forecastle, as portholes had not then been introduced. These were invented by a Frenchman, one Descharges, of Brest. By means of portholes it was possible to mount guns on the main deck and so increase their numbers.

[Illustration: THE “GRACE DE DIEU” 1515.]

Although the earliest portholes were merely small circular holes which did not allow of any training, and though the idea of them was probably directly derived from the loopholes in castle walls, the influence of the porthole on naval architecture was soon very great indeed. By means of this device a new relation between size and power was established, hence the “big displacements” which began to appear at this time. The hole for a gun muzzle to protrude through, quickly became an aperture allowing of training the gun on any ordinary bearing in English built ships. The English (for a very long time it was English only) realisation of the possibilities of the porthole in Henry VIII’s reign contributed very materially to the defeat of the Spanish Armada some decades later. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the porthole was to that era what the torpedo has been in the present one. Introduced about 1875 as a trivial alternative to the gun, in less than forty years the torpedo came to challenge the gun in range to an extent that as early as 1905 or thereabouts began profoundly to affect all previous ideas of naval tactics, and that by 1915 has changed them altogether!

Another great change of these Henry VIII days was in the form of the ships.[6] At this era they began to be built with “tumble-home” sides, instead of sides slanting outwards upwards, and inwards downwards as heretofore. With the coming of the porthole came the decline of the cross-bow as a naval arm. In the pre-porthole days every record speaks of “showers of arrows,” and the gun appears to have been a species of accessory. In the early years of the Sixteenth Century it became the main armament, and so remained unchallenged till the present century and the coming of the long-range torpedo.

Henry VIII’s reign is also remarkable for the first institution of those “cutting out” expeditions which were afterwards to become such a particular feature of British methods of warfare. This first attempt happened in the year 1513, when Sir Edward Howard, finding the French fleet lying in Brest Harbour refusing to come out, “collected boats and barges” and attacked them with those craft. The attempt was not successful, but it profoundly affected subsequent naval history.

Therefrom the French were impressed with the idea that if a fleet lay in a harbour awaiting attack it acquired an advantage thereby. The idea became rooted in the French mind that to make the enemy attack under the most disadvantageous circumstances was the most wise of policies. That “the defensive is compelled to await attack, compelled to allow the enemy choice of the moment” was overlooked!

From this time onward England was gradually trained by France into the role of the attacker, and the French more and more sank into the defensive attitude. Many an English life was sacrificed between the “discovery of the attack” in the days of Henry VIII, and its triumphant apotheosis when centuries later Nelson won the Battle of the Nile; but the instincts born in Henry’s reign, on the one hand to fight with any advantage that the defensive might offer, on the other hand to attack regardless of these advantages, are probably the real key to the secret of later victories.

The Royal ships at this period were manned by voluntary enlistment, supplemented by the press-gang as vacancies might dictate. The pay of the mariner was five shillings a month; but petty officers, gunners and the like received additional pickings out of what was known as “dead pay.” By this system the names of dead men, or occasionally purely fancy names, were on the ship’s books, and the money drawn for these was distributed in a fixed ratio. The most interesting feature of Henry VII and Henry VIII’s navies is the presence in them of a number of Spaniards, who presumably acted as instructors. These received normal pay of seven shillings a month plus “dead pay.”

The messing of the crews was by no means indifferent. It was as follows per man:--

Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday: ¾ lb. beef and ½ lb. bacon.

Monday, Wednesday, Saturday: Four herrings and two pounds of cheese.

Friday: To every mess of four men, half a cod, ten herrings, one pound of butter and one pound of cheese.

There was also a daily allowance of one pound of bread or biscuit. The liquid allowance was either beer, or a species of grog consisting of one part of sack to two of water. Taking into account the value of money in those days and the scale of living on shore at the time, the conditions of naval life were by no means bad, though complaints of the low pay were plentiful enough. Probably, few received the full measure of what on paper they were entitled to.

Henry VIII died early in 1547. In the subsequent reigns of Edward VI and Mary, the Navy declined, and little use was made of it except for some raiding expeditions.

When Elizabeth came to the throne the regular fleet had dwindled to very small proportions, and, war being in progress, general permission was given for privateering as the only means of injuring the enemy. It presently degenerated into piracy and finally had to be put down by the Royal ships.

No sooner, however, was the war over than the Queen ordered a special survey to be made of the Navy. New ships were laid down and arsenals established for the supply of guns and gunpowder, which up to that time had been imported from Germany. Full advantage was taken of the privateering spirit, the erstwhile pirates being encouraged to undertake distant voyages. In many of these enterprises the Queen herself had a personal financial interest. She thus freed the country from various turbulent spirits who were inconvenient at home, and at one and the same time increased her own resources by doing so.

There is every reason to believe that this action of Elizabeth’s was part of a well-designed and carefully thought out policy. The type of ship suitable for distant voyages and enterprises was naturally bound to become superior to that which was merely evolved from home service. The type of seamen thus bred was also necessarily bound to be better than the home-made article. Elizabeth can hardly have failed to realise these points also.

To the _personnel_ of the regular Navy considerable attention was also given. Pay was raised to 6/8 per month for the seamen, and 5/- a month with 4/- a month for clothing for soldiers afloat. Messing was also increased to a daily ration of one pound of biscuit, a gallon of beer, with two pounds of beef per man four days out of the seven, and a proportionate amount of fish on the other three days. Subsequently, and just previous to the Armada, the pay of seamen rose to 10/- a month, with a view to inducing the better men not to desert.

The regular navy was thus by no means badly provided for as things went in those days; while service with “gentlemen adventurers” offered attractions to a very considerable potential reserve, and so England contained a large population which, from one cause and another, was available for sea service. To these circumstances was it due that the Spanish Armada, when it came, never had the remotest possibility of success. It was doomed to destruction the day that Elizabeth first gave favour to the “gentlemen adventurers.”

Of these adventurers the greatest of all was Francis Drake, who in 1577 made his first long voyage with five ships to the Pacific Ocean. Drake, alone, in the _Pelican_, succeeded in reaching the Pacific and carrying out his scheme of operations, which--not to put too fine a point on it--consisted of acts of piracy pure and simple against the Spaniards. He returned to England after an absence of nearly three years, during which he circumnavigated the globe.

There is little doubt that Drake in this voyage, and others like him in similar expeditions, learned a great deal about the disadvantages of small size in ships. Drake, however, learned another thing also. Up to this day the crew of a ship had consisted of the captain and a certain military element; also the master, who was responsible for a certain number of “mariners.” The former were concerned entirely with fighting the ship--the latter entirely with manœuvring it.

This system of specialisation, awkward as it appears thus baldly stated, may have worked well enough in ordinary practice. It did not differ materially from the differentiation between deck hands and the engineering departments, which to a greater or less extent is very marked in every navy of the present day.

Drake, however, started out with none too many men, and it was not long before he lost some of those he had and found himself short-handed. His solution of the difficulty is in his famous phrase, “I would have the gentlemen haul with the mariners.” How far this was a matter of expediency, how far the revelation of a new policy, is a matter of opinion. It must certainly have been outside the purview of Elizabeth. But out of it gradually came that every English sailor knew how to fight his ship and how to sail her too, and this amounted to doubling the efficiency of the crew of any ship at one stroke.

Of Drake himself, the following contemporary pen-picture, from a letter written by one of his Spanish victims, Don Franciso de Zarate,[7] explains almost everything:--

“He received me favourably, and took me to his room, where he made me seated and said to me: ‘I am a friend to those who speak the truth, that is what will have the most weight with me. What silver or gold does this ship bring?’

“... We spoke together a great while, until the dinner-hour. He told me to sit beside him and treated me from his dishes, bidding me have no fear, for my life and goods were safe; for which I kissed his hands.

“This English General is a cousin of John Hawkins; he is the same who, about five years ago, took the port of Nombre de Dios; he is called Francis Drake; a man of some five and thirty years, small of stature and red-bearded, one of the greatest sailors on the sea, both from skill and power of commanding. His ship carried about 400 tons, is swift of sail, and of a hundred men, all skilled and in their prime, and all as much experienced in warfare as if they were old soldiers of Italy. Each one, in particular, _takes great pains to keep his arms clean_;[8] he treats them with affection, and they treat him with respect. I endeavoured to find out whether the General was liked, and everyone told me he was adored.”

Less favourable pictures of Drake have been penned, and there is no doubt that some of his virtues have been greatly exaggerated. At the present day there is perhaps too great a tendency to reverse the process. Stripped of romance, many of his actions were petty, while those of some of his fellow adventurers merit a harsher name. Hawkins, for instance, was hand-in-glove with Spanish smugglers and a slave trader. Many of the victories of the Elizabethan “Sea-Kings” were really trifling little affairs, magnified into an importance which they never possessed.

But, when all is said and done, it is in these men that we find the birth of a sea spirit which still lingers on, despite that other insular spirit previously referred to--the natural tendency of islanders to regard the water itself as a bulwark, instead of the medium on which to meet and defeat the enemy.

The Spanish, already considerably incensed by the piratical acts of the English “gentlemen adventurers,” presently found a further cause of grievance in the assistance rendered by Elizabeth to their revolting provinces in the Netherlands. Drake had not returned many years from his famous voyage when it became abundantly clear that the Spaniards no longer intended quietly to suffer from English interference.

Spain at that time was regarded as the premier naval power of Europe. Her superiority was more mythical than actual, for reasons which will later on be referred to: however, her commercial oversea activities were very great. The wealth which she wrung from the Indies--though probably infinitely less than its supposed value--was sufficient to enable her to equip considerable naval forces, certainly larger ones numerically than any which England alone was able to bring against them.

Knowledge of the fact that Spain was preparing the Armada for an attack on England, led to the sailing of Drake in April, 1587, with a fleet consisting of four large and twenty-six smaller ships, for the hire of which the citizens of London were nominally or actually responsible. His real instructions are not known, but there is little question that, as in all similar expeditions, he started out knowing that his success would be approved of, although in the event of any ill-success or awkward questions, he would be publicly disavowed.

Reaching Cadiz, he destroyed 100 store ships which he found there; and then proceeding to the Tagus, offered battle to the Spanish war fleet. The Spanish admiral, however, declined to come out--a fact which of itself altogether discredits the popular idea about the vast all-powerful ships of Spain, and the little English ships, which, in the Armada days, could have done nothing against them but for a convenient tempest. On account of this expedition of Drake’s, the sailing of the Armada was put off for a year. So far as stopping the enterprise was concerned, Drake’s expedition was a failure. Armada preparations still went on.

It is by no means to be supposed that the Armada in its conception was the foolhardy enterprise that on the face of things it looks to have been. The idea of it was first mooted by the Duke of Alva so long ago as 1569. In 1583 it became a settled project in the able hands of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who alone among the Spaniards was not more or less afraid of the English. In the battle of Tercera in 1583, certain ships, which if not English were at any rate supposed to be, had shown the white feather. Santa Cruz assumed therefrom that the English were easily to be overwhelmed by a sufficiently superior force, and he designed a scheme whereby he would use 556 ships and an army of 94,222 men.

Philip of Spain had other ideas. Having a large army under the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands, he proposed that this force should be transported thence to England in flat-bottomed boats, while Santa Cruz should take with him merely enough ships to hold the Channel, and prevent any interference by the English ships with the invasion.

Before the delayed Armada could sail Santa Cruz died; and despite his own protestations Medina Sidonia was appointed in Santa Cruz’s place to carry out an expedition in which he had little faith or confidence. His total force at the outset consisted of 130 ships and 30,493 men. Of these ships not more than sixty-two at the outside were warships, and some of these did not carry more than half-a-dozen guns.

The main English fighting force consisted of forty-nine warships, some of which were little inferior to the Spanish in tonnage, though all were much smaller to the eye, as they were built with a lower freeboard and without the vast superstructures with which the Spaniards were encumbered. As auxiliaries, the English had a very considerable force of small ships; also the Dutch fleet in alliance with them.

The guns of the English ships were, generally speaking, heavier, all their gunners were well trained, and their portholes especially designed to give a considerable arc of fire, whereas the Spanish had very indifferent gunners and narrow portholes. The Spaniards themselves thoroughly recognised their inferiority in the matter of gunnery, and the specific instructions of their admiral were that he was to negative this inferiority by engaging at close quarters, and trust to destroying the enemy by small-arm fire from his lofty superstructures.

The small portholes of the Spanish ships, which permitted neither of training, nor elevation, nor depression, are not altogether to be put down to stupidity or neglect of progress, for all that they were mainly the result of ultra-conservatism. The gun--as Professor Laughton has made clear--was regarded in Spain as a somewhat dishonourable weapon. Ideals of “cold steel” held the field. Portholes were kept very small, so that enemies relying on musketry should not be able to get the advantage that large portholes might supply. To close with the enemy and carry by boarding was the be-all and end-all of Spanish ideas of naval warfare. When able to employ their own tactics they were formidable opponents, though to the English tactics merely so many helpless haystacks.

On shore, in England, the coming of the Armada provoked a good deal of panic; though the army which Elizabeth raised and reviewed at Tilbury was probably got together more with a view to allaying this panic than from any expectations that it would be actually required. The views of the British seamen on the matter were entirely summed up in Drake’s famous jest on Plymouth Hoe, that there was plenty of time to finish the game of bowls and settle the Spaniards afterwards!

[Illustration: THE SPANISH ARMADA--1588.]

Yet this very confidence might have led to the undoing of the English. The researches of Professor Laughton have made it abundantly clear that had Medina Sidonia followed the majority opinion of a council of war held off the Lizard, he could and would have attacked the English fleet in Plymouth Sound with every prospect of destroying it, because there, and there only, did opportunity offer them that prospect of a close action upon which their sole chance of success depended. Admiral Colomb has elaborated the point still further, with a quotation from Monson to the effect that had the Armada had a pilot able to recognise the Lizard, which the Spaniards mistook for Ramehead, they might have surprised the English fleet at Plymouth. This incident covers the whole of what Providence or luck really did for England against the Spanish.

To a certain extent a parallel of our own day exists. When Rodjestvensky with the Baltic fleet reached Far Eastern waters, there came a day when his cruisers discovered the entire Japanese fleet lying in Formosan waters. The Russian admiral ignored them and went on towards Vladivostok. The parallel ends here because the “Japanese fleet” was merely a collection of dummies intended to mislead him.[9]

The first engagement with the Spanish Armada took place on Sunday, June 21st. It was more in the nature of a skirmish than anything else. The Spaniards made several vain and entirely ineffectual attempts to close with the swifter and handier English vessels. They took care, however, to preserve their formation, and so to that extent defeated the English tactics, which were to destroy in detail what could not be destroyed without heavy loss in the mass. So the Spaniards reached Calais on the 27th with a loss of only three large ships.

They there discovered that Parma’s flat-bottomed boats were all blockaded by the Dutch, and that any invasion of England was therefore entirely out of the question. It must have been perfectly obvious to the most sanguine of them by this that they could not force action with the swifter English ships, while they could not relieve the blockaded boats without being attacked at the outset. In a word, the Armada was an obvious failure.

On the night of the 28th, fire ships were sent into the Spanish fleet by the English. This, though the damage done was small, brought the Spanish to sea, and the next morning they were attacked off Gravelines by the English. The battle was hardly of the nature of a fleet action, so much as well-designed tactical operations intended to keep the enemy on the move. It resulted in the Spaniards losing only seven ships in a whole day’s fighting. The only really serious loss that the Spaniards sustained was that they were driven into the North Sea, with no prospect of returning home except by way of the North of Scotland.

Followed for awhile and harried by a portion of the English fleet, which fell upon and destroyed stragglers, the Spaniards were driven into what to most of them were unknown waters and uncharted seas. To the last the retreating fleet maintained a show of order. Fifty-three ships succeeded in returning to Spain.

[Illustration: THE END OF A “GENTLEMAN-ADVENTURER.”--THE “REVENGE.”--CAPTURED BY SPANIARDS, 1591.]

Stripped of romance this is the real prosaic history of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The wonder is not that so few Spanish ships returned, but that so many did! The loss in Spanish warships proper appears to have been little over a dozen all told, and of these not more than three at the outside can be attributed to “the winds.”

Havoc was undoubtedly wrought, but the “galleons” which “perished by scores” on the Scotch and Irish coasts were mainly the auxiliaries, transports, and small fry; the battle fleet proper kept together all the time, and with a couple of exceptions the ships reached home together as a fleet.[10]

At no time in the advance of the Spanish--probably at no time in the retreat either--could the English have engaged close action with any certainty of success. Victory was attributable solely and entirely to the evolution of a type of ship, fast, speedy and handy, able to hit hard, and which had been more or less specially designed with an eye to offering a very small target to the clumsily designed Spanish style of gun mounting.

It was “history repeating itself” in another way. As Alfred overcame the Danes by evolving something superior to the Danish galleys; so, in Elizabethan days, there was evolved a type of warship meet for the occasion.

From the defeat of the Armada and onwards, English naval operations were mainly confined to raiding expeditions against the Spanish coast, with a view to checking the collection of any further Armadas. These operations were chiefly carried out by the “gentlemen adventurers”; but the real Navy itself was maintained and added to, and at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, it consisted of forty-two ships, of which the 68-gun _Triumph_ of 1,000 tons was the largest. This Navy was relied upon as the premier arm in case of any serious trouble.