According to another account the first English cast-iron guns were made at Buxted, in Sussex, by one Ralph Hogge in 1543. Peter Bawd, the French founder, was an assistant who had come to this country to teach him the method. But it seems that his connection with Hogge was not of long duration; for, “John Johnson, covenant servant to the said P. Bawd, succeeded and exceeded his master in this his art of casting ordnance, making them cleaner and to better proportion. And his son, Thomas Johnson, a special workman, in and before the year 1595 made 42 cast pieces of great ordnance of iron, for the Earl of Cumberland, weighing 6000 pounds, or three tons a-piece.”[48]
The advance made in the power of King Henry’s sea ordnance is unmistakably shown from trustworthy documents. There is a continuous progress during the reign, and ships which were rebuilt subsequently carried an armament entirely different from that which they originally had. The Sovereign, for instance, built about the year 1488, originally carried one hundred and eighty guns, mostly small serpentines. As rebuilt in A.D. 1509 she carried an armament which included four curtalls, three demi-curtalls, three culverins, two falcons, and eleven heavy iron guns. From an inventory of the armament of the Henry Grace à Dieu, of 1514, it appears[49] that that historic ship was then armed with a miscellaneous collection of pieces, comprising 122 iron serpentines, 12 “grete yron gonnes of oone makyng and bygnes,” 12 ditto “that come owt of fflaunders,” all with separate chambers; 2 “grete Spanish peces of yron of oone sorte,” with chambers; 18 “stone gonnes apon Trotill wheles,” with chambers; “ffawcons of Brasse apon Trotill wheles”; one “grete bumberde of Brasse apon iiij trotill wheles”; two “grete culverynes of Brasse apon unshodd wheles”; as well as a “grete curtalle of Brasse upon iiij wheles,” a sling, vice pieces, and serpentines of brass on wheels shod with iron. Rebuilt at a later date the Henry carried a different armament, which included brass cannons, demi-cannons, culverins, demi-culverins, sakers, and cannon-periers.
The transition of armament is plainly marked for us in the case of the Mary Rose, rebuilt in 1536, which nine years later came to an untimely end off Brading. At the time of her oversetting she carried, in fact, both types of ordnance. In the Rotunda at Woolwich are to be seen some of the guns recovered from her wreck: a built-up wrought-iron breech-loading stone-throwing gun on its baulk-of-timber carriage, identical in character with a serpentine illustrated in Napoleon III’s Études sur l’Artillerie as having been taken by the Swiss from Charles the Bold in A.D. 1476; and a bronze cannon royal (with John Owen’s name on it), demi-cannon, culverin, and culverin-bastard, all of them finished specimens of the founder’s art, and of an offensive, instead of a merely defensive, value. “The system,” says Mr. Oppenheim of this growth of artillery armament, “was extended as the reign progressed, and in 1546 we find comparatively small ships like the Grand Mistress carrying two demi-cannon and five culverins, the Swallow one demi-cannon and two demi-culverins, out of a total of eight heavy guns; the Anne Galant four culverins, one curtall, and two demi-culverins,” etc. etc.
What were the dimensions of the various pieces? It is difficult to give an exact answer. Owing to the continuous development of ordnance throughout the century the pieces increased in size while they retained their class-names, and there is a wide variation between the table of ordnance of Tartaglia, for instance, compiled in 1537, and those drawn up by English authors at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Briefly, we may note that pieces could be grouped in four classes: viz. cannons, culverins, periers, and mortars. The cannons were large in calibre and of medium length; the culverins were of great length, to give them high ranging power; the periers, or stone-throwers, were a sort of howitzer; and the mortars, named probably from the apothecary’s utensil to which they bore a resemblance, were squat pieces used for projecting stones or iron balls at a high elevation. The old stone-throwing serpentine was a gun weighing about 260 pounds, which fired a stone “as big as a swan’s egg.” The curtall, or curtlow was (according to Mr. Oppenheim) a heavy gun of some 3000 pounds, hitherto only used as a siege-piece on land; “courtaulx” are mentioned by Napoleon III as having been, in A.D. 1498, fifty-pounders weighing 5500 livres. The slings were large breech-loaders, probably of the perier class.
With the adoption of a more powerful armament not only did the old pieces disappear, but a simplification of calibres ensued. France led the way in the standardizing of calibres; about the year 1550 the French king Henri II introduced his six “calibres of France.” In the English navy at this period several types were discarded, and a limit was set to the size of the largest ship gun. “The report drawn up in 1559 tells us that there were 264 brass and 48 iron guns, all of calibres down to falconets, on board the ships, and 48 brass and 8 iron in store.... The heaviest piece used on shipboard was the culverin of 4500 lbs.; throwing a 17⅓ lb. ball with an extreme range of 2500 paces; the next the demi-cannon weighing 4000 lbs. with a 30⅓ lb. ball and range of 1700 paces; then the demi-culverin of 3400 lbs., a 9⅓ lb. ball and 2500 paces; and the cannon petroe, or perier, of 3000 lbs., 24¼-lb. ball and 1600 paces. There were also sakers, minions, and falconets, but culverins and demi-culverins were the most useful and became the favourite ship guns. A contemporary wrote, ‘the founders never cast them so exactly but that they differ two or three cwt. in a piece,’ and in a paper of 1564 the average weights of culverins, demi-culverins, and cannon periers are respectively 3300 lbs., 2500 lbs., and 2000 lbs.”[50]
So far, cast iron had not come into general use. The large iron guns were built up like the early Flemish bombards; the demi-cannons and culverins were all of brass. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there seems to have been an attempt to replace the expensive brass by the cheaper cast iron, but later there was a reversion to brass, and it was not until the following century that cast iron was generally recognized as a material for heavy ordnance, and then only for the heaviest types. Some technical considerations may help to indicate the chief factors which determined the material and the dimensions of the Elizabethan ordnance.
Writing in 1628, Robert Norton, in his book The Gunner, refers as follows to the early Tudor ordnance. “Gun-founders about 100 or 150 years past,” he says, “did use to cast ordnance more poor, weak, and much slenderer fortified than now, both here and in foreign parts: also the rather because saltpetre being either ill or not refined, their sulphur unclarified, their coals not of good wood, or else ill burnt, making therewith also their powder evilly receipted, slenderly wrought, and altogether uncorned, made it prove to be but weak (in respect of the corned powder used now-a-days), wherefore they also made their ordnance then accordingly (that is much weaker than now). For the powder now being double or treble more than it was in force of rarification and quickness, requireth likewise to encrease the metal twice or thrice more than before for each piece.” And, in fact, the weight of cannon increased in the period mentioned from eighty to two hundred times, the weight of culverins from a hundred to three hundred times, the weight of their shot. The slender large-bore built-up guns of the Henry Grace à Dieu could only be used with a weak slow-burning powder. At the same time this slow-burning powder required, for its complete combustion, a great length of gun. These guns, such of them as were breech-loaders, must have suffered from the leakage of gas at the joints of their primitive chambers; in the case of the smaller pieces a serious inefficiency was the excessive windage allowed between shot and gun. Until the end of the sixteenth century the windage bore no direct relation to the diameter of the shot or bore of the gun: it was a fixed amount, one quarter of an inch. The effect, therefore, of the leakage of powder gases past the shot, the loss in efficiency of discharge, was greatest in the smallest guns.
The lines along which improvement lay were those which were taken. First, an elimination of the smallest guns. Second, a return to muzzle loading. Third, a strengthening of the powder by corning. Fourth, a further fortifying and a general augmenting of the weight of the cast pieces, which had the double effect of giving the necessary strength to meet the stronger powders coming into use,[51] and of giving the extra mass required to minimize the violence of their recoil. Cast iron could not yet compete with well-found brass for the guns required. Demi-cannon proved too unwieldy, and as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, gave place more and more to the long-ranging culverins, demi-culverins, and sakers, “which strained a ship less, were served more quickly and by fewer men, and permitted a heavier broadside in the same deck space.”[52] As powder grew stronger the conditions improved; smaller charges were necessary, windage had less effect, and, owing to the quicker combustion, it was possible to shorten the pieces without detracting seriously from their ranging power; and this was done in the Queen’s Navy, the guns being thereby made lighter and more easily manipulated, while at the same time their projecting muzzles were less liable to entangle and interfere with the tackles of the sails.[53]
The substitution of the powerful, safe, and easily manipulated demi-cannon and the long-ranging culverin and demi-culverin in place of the old chambered ordnance of the first half of the century made possible a new form of naval warfare. The cannon at last became, in the hands of the Elizabethan seaman, the chief instrument of battle. Off-fighting was now feasible: a mode of action which largely neutralized the effects of an enemy’s superiority in size of ship or number of men, and which gave full scope and advantage to superior seamanship. Though no high standard of gunnery efficiency was then possible, yet it was the great superiority of the English gunfire, principally from the demi-culverins, the sakers, and the minions, over that of Spain, which conduced more than any other factor to the dispersal and subsequent flight of the Invincible Armada. The gun was the weapon on which the English seaman had learnt to rely. It was the gun, plied with rapidity just out of pistol-shot of his lofty ships, which in the year 1588 harassed and put to confusion the Spaniard, the haughty fighter who still maintained a quixotic contempt for the use of cannon and esteemed artillery “an ignoble arm.”[54] What a volume of fire was poured against him may be seen from a letter written by the admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham: “All the world,” he writes, “never saw such a force as theirs was; and some Spaniards that we have taken, that were in the fight at Lepanto, do say that the worst of our four fights that we have had with them did exceed far the fight they had there; and they say that at some of our fights we had twenty times as much great shot plied as they had there.”
By this time the founding of guns in cast iron had made progress. Cast iron was cheap, and of a greater hardness and endurance than bronze, but more like to crack and fly and endanger the crew, and requiring an enormous expenditure of wood-charcoal for its production. The use of mineral coal for iron smelting was not discovered until the following century, and even then, because of the opposition of the vested interests, it was long before it displaced the use of timber. In the Tudor times the iron and brass foundries were nearly all in the wooded south of England. The rivers of Sussex and Kent had for centuries been dammed to form hammer-ponds, and the sound of the tilt-hammers was heard throughout these counties. To such an extent were the forests depleted of wood to form fuel for the Wealden foundries, that serious inroads were made on the available supplies of shipbuilding timber; legislation was required in Elizabeth’s reign to prevent the charcoal-burner from robbing the shipwright of his raw material.