D’Annebaut, after landing his sick and provisioning his fleet, was soon at sea once more. But by this time the West of England ships had come in,[[379]] and Lisle was at the head of a fleet strong enough to go in search of the French. On August 11 he received orders to put to sea, the French being reported to be off Rye to the number of 200 sail. The two fleets sighted each other on the 15th off Shoreham. As before, the galleys formed the advanced guard of the French, and were engaged by the lighter English sailing craft. The English fleet was drawn up—if a set of fighting instructions dated a few days earlier was followed—in the manner of a land army of the period: the first-class ships in the centre, preceded by a line of armed merchantmen, and guarded on either flank by the auxiliaries. The merchantmen thus answered to the cannon in a land battle, breaking the enemy’s ranks in preparation for the advance of the main body—the infantry on land—behind. The light craft on the wings played the part of cavalry, guarding the flanks of their own fleet and taking advantage of confusion among the enemy. The plan was very pretty on paper, but it is doubtful if it would have stood the test of practice by a fleet untrained to manœuvre in concert, and a much simpler procedure was actually adopted in the Armada fights in 1588.[[380]] In the present instance, the battle was never fairly joined. The galleys maintained a brisk cannonade against the row-barges and privateers, getting, on the whole, the worst of the encounter. The French ‘great ships’ held off, hoping that the galleys would do all the work. Towards evening the weather became worse and the galleys were much knocked about. Both fleets anchored for the night within a league of one another; and next morning at dawn Lisle saw his enemies’ topsails disappearing beneath the horizon. Finding the galleys useless in anything but a calm, they had decided to give up the enterprise and retire to Havre.[[381]]
The English made sail to the Narrow Seas, and a few days later Lisle, apprehending no further danger for the moment, quitted the fleet. He was present in person at a meeting of the Council at Woking on August 24. In September he raided the Normandy coast, burning the town of Tréport and thirty ships, and retiring without molestation. Thus the French, for all their superiority of force, had again surrendered the command of the Channel. But the victory had not been attained without great sacrifice. The fishermen of all the southern shires had been impressed into the service, and were now dying by hundreds from the same epidemics which had scourged the French. Their wives and daughters were obliged to take the boats out in search of a living; and it was a common occurrence for a boat ‘manned’ by a dozen women and a boy to be chased into port by a French privateer. The mortality in the fleet was so great that, as soon as it was ascertained that the French acknowledged defeat, haste was made to discharge the majority of the crews. The privateers compensated by their energy for the timid tactics of the great ships. They scoured the Channel and the neighbouring seas and were seldom scrupulous as to the ownership of the property they took. Privateering as a lifelong profession dates from this war. It was never thoroughly put down until the following century.
In 1546 naval operations were renewed, centring principally round the siege and relief of Boulogne; but the French were relatively much weaker than in the previous year, and the captured fortress remained in English hands. The war terminated in June with a French acknowledgement of powerlessness to do anything further.
On a general view it is evident that Henry VIII’s naval policy was justified by success. If it was his object to create a fleet sufficiently powerful to render England immune from invasion and to secure respect for her sea-borne commerce, it must be admitted that that object was gained. Although the Continental powers were very much more formidable than they had been at the opening of his reign, he was generally able to take the offensive and to fight on the enemy’s ground. Scotland, too, was rendered easier to deal with by the vulnerability of Edinburgh to a stroke from the sea; and the oft-dreaded Franco-Scottish combination was seldom effective owing to the interposition of an English fleet between the allies. Henry died in January 1547, and a list[[382]] made a year later shows that there were then in the navy 6 ships of 500 tons and over, 19 between 200 and 500 tons, 4 between 100 and 200, and 24 of less than 100. The total tonnage of the 53 vessels was 11,268, and they carried between them 7,780 men and 2,087 guns. If the total of guns seems disproportionately large, it must be remembered that many of them were small weapons such as swivels and hailshot pieces, which might almost be reckoned as small arms.
During the eleven years covered by the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, the history of the navy shows a steady decline, not so much in strength of ships and guns as in leadership, administration, and the moral qualities making for success. On paper, especially under Edward VI, this decline is not evident; indeed, a list of 1552 shows that only five of Henry VIII’s ships had dropped out, while others had been acquired in their places. But a formidable roll of battleships was of little value if the ships themselves were allowed to rot untended in docks and harbours, or were chartered by merchants for twelve-months’ voyages to the Levant or the African coast. This charge of improvidence against the administration is fully borne out by its inability, increasing as time went on, to send large fleets of first-class ships to sea as Henry VIII had done. Details of deterioration are wanting, and it can only be deduced from its results; but it is certain that in the last eighteen months of Edward’s reign, three large fighting ships were sent on distant commercial ventures, and it is probable that other transactions of the same kind took place, of which the evidence has perished. The three ships referred to were the Jesus of Lubeck (700–800 tons) and the Mary Gonson (600), chartered for a Levant voyage in February 1552[[383]]; and the Primrose, which, together with the Moon (pinnace), was lent to Thomas Wyndham and his co-adventurers for their Guinea expedition in 1553.[[384]]
To the credit of Edward’s guardians, on the other hand, must be placed the establishment of the rudiments of a naval base in the Medway, afterwards Chatham dockyard, and the inauguration of a special department for victualling the ships of the fleet.[[385]]
At the outset of Edward’s reign, the Protector Somerset[[386]] determined on a fresh invasion of Scotland for the purpose of securing the consent of the Scots to a marriage between their infant queen and the young king of England. The expedition was on a more ambitious scale than that of 1544, consisting of a fleet under Lord Clinton keeping pace with a marching army under the Protector. The latter routed the Scots at Pinkie (September 10, 1547) and again took Leith and Edinburgh; while the fleet ravaged the coast and destroyed all the Scottish shipping it could find. But the political result of the invasion was failure, for the young queen was sent off to France by way of the Irish Sea in the following summer, and her escort succeeded in eluding the English who were keeping strict watch in the North Sea and the Channel.
During these events France, in a state of scarcely veiled hostility, had maintained a fleet of galleys under Strozzi in her northern waters. The war became regularized when the French began to raid the Sussex coast and to concentrate troops in the neighbourhood of Boulogne in 1549. In consequence of the former operations instructions were given to Thomas Cotton, in May 1549, to patrol the Channel. With the commission of Vice-Admiral he was to take six small craft of the row-barge type and one shallop, and with them to drive the enemy from the Sussex coast, to ‘traverse the seas’ between the Isle of Wight, Portland, and the Channel Islands, to supply the latter with munitions of war, and to keep watch on Brest, where great preparations were said to be in progress. He was particularly enjoined not to molest neutral shipping.[[387]] Early in August a sharp action was fought in the neighbourhood of the Channel Islands, but whether by Cotton’s squadron or not is not clear. It is vouched for by Fox the Martyrologist and by the writers of chronicles of the time, but has left no trace in official documents, either English or French. The substance of the accounts is that a fleet of French galleys was sent to reduce the Islands and that it was beaten back by an English squadron with the loss of 1,000 men.[[388]] Boulogne was able to hold out until the spring of 1550. By that time the English Government, hampered by lack of money and by anarchy at home, had come to the conclusion that its retention was not worth the efforts involved. In March they agreed to surrender the fortress for a large money payment, and peace was restored between England and France for the next seven years.
A feature of the naval history of this period was the series of changes in the chief command of the fleet. During Edward’s reign the office of Lord Admiral was successively held by Warwick (formerly Lord Lisle); Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset (executed March 1549); Warwick again, and Clinton. Mary on her accession appointed Lord William Howard, who held office until 1558, when he was superseded by Clinton. One of the charges against Seymour was his connivance at piracy. In this connexion a letter addressed to him in September 1548, by John Graynfyld, a privateer captain, is of some interest. At the date mentioned war had not been declared with France, and the man was legally a pirate. He describes how his bark and three others had sailed from the Cornish coast to that of Brittany, and had there separated ‘each to seek their adventure, as the manner is of venturers’. Graynfyld himself, being alone within half a league of Pointe de Penmarch, sighted twenty-seven sail of Normans and Bretons. Nothing dismayed by the odds, he gained the wind of them, waited until twelve of them had passed, and then set on the thirteenth, which was armed with six pieces of ordnance. She only escaped him by going ashore in Audierne Bay. He served two others in the same way. While thus engaged, another of the enemy, of 95 tons and with a crew of twenty-six men, got to windward of him. But Graynfyld rose to the occasion, boarded the French ship and took her, after slaying her captain in the fight.[[389]] A more convincing testimony to the reckless audacity of the sixteenth-century privateers would be hard to find.
Under Mary the navy sensibly decreased in strength and efficiency, and it may safely be said that it had never since the beginning of the Tudor period passed through such a period of discouragement as that of the years 1557–8. Even the paper strength of the fleet was not maintained. The Henry Grace à Dieu was accidentally burned at Woolwich on August 25, 1553. The Primrose was sold in 1555, together with nine smaller craft, some of them fetching such ridiculous prices as £8 and £10 apiece,[[390]] showing the utter state of decay into which they had been allowed to fall. Other ships disappeared also in the reign with the net result that, although six new craft were acquired, there were at Mary’s death only twenty-six royal ships with a total tonnage of 7,110, a decrease of 36 per cent. from Henry VIII’s total. Mr. Oppenheim does not agree with censures on Mary’s naval administration. He points out that thirteen of the ships left by Henry VIII were row-barges of 20 tons, and that it was mainly this class of vessel which was disposed of. But the fact remains that England lost command of the sea in the winter of 1557–8, at a time when the French had no overwhelming force afloat, and that the failure to relieve Calais was due to the fact that not one of the ‘great ships’ officially borne on the strength of the fleet was in condition to put to sea at the time of need.