The naval expenses, especially during the last fifteen years of her reign, must have seemed appalling to Elizabeth and would have excused her parsimony had she not been so lavish to herself. From the Audit Office Accounts we are enabled to give on the next page the amounts for which the Treasurer of the Navy was answerable, but these by no means included all the expenditure of the crown in various expeditions. The total cost of the Cadiz and Islands voyages, for instance, of 1596 and 1597 is given as £172,260 and this is only partly represented below.[724] If the Queen took a share in an adventure the money she advanced was paid from the Exchequer and is not borne on the Navy accounts.

The £12,000 a year allotted to Gonson, under Mary, for the working of the naval establishments during peace was reduced from 1st January 1564 to £6000 a year, of which he was to pay Baeshe £165, 2s a month for harbour victualling.[725] Of course war, or preparation for war, upset all calculations of economy, but the attempt was steadily made to keep the normal, everyday, expenses of the department separate from the exceptional ones, and to reduce the former to as low a sum as practicable. Gonson must have found the £6000 a year impossible, for in 1567 it was raised to £7695, 6s 2d. The economy could have been only nominal, for on the same date as this new order[726] there is a warrant to Gonson for £10,200 extra for stores and ship repairs which would have formerly been included in the £12,000 a year. By a statement of 1585 the average for these years was £10,946 yearly, when building, repairs, and stores purchased were included.[740] From 1571 commences the division into ordinary and extraordinary, which doubtless had a further saving for its object, although how the process was to work, except as tending towards clearer bookkeeping, is not now manifest.

Total receivedVictualling[727]DockyardsSea Charges[728]Total SpentStores[729]Ordinary[730]Extraordinary
ChathamDeptfordWoolwichPortsmouth
£££££££££££
1559 }106000433005157268001400272623380
1560 }
156119757320021641952886626527485
1562[731]
1563[732]537901920837011970794425291602163290
15641800044922038291214268149721471
1565531821494350445322947844[733]
156651781843361224710776244
15671312919996257484126619000
1568120622718584318542110074315115
1569170157484265334312502820178006354
15701513871623133985122662332175273834
157185802403859857522846[734]
1572123002765855956462913
1573893426861068659404746
15741415729641287761433776
1575680229696893
1576995744491066056315029
157712977387112899
15781427650321495657128727
1579840049181351810038491481
158058291193241101460238336172
15819532335611902
158283883230866340154624
1583669422747486
1584802026153680851539344581
158512934578611602
1586256918636890529391
15874630029563735544000
15888066659221538790813228388530
1589523171594938641265047836475643057
15906116820379225716109603703248
159135626131987046414131000617224868
159229937116577442678928585555423031
1593260009872540022269497417224
1594490001624149300
1595[735]597001466512328563115293590001042548588
1596[736]3742116387[737]21204[738]383791036327935
1597647052863040680[739]765131490660702
15986900022100922953300180001420339000
159967116324261574966665713759504
1600377802135514039352008600817019028
160156500288661416622910704745326
16026245740945262706083220104697653840

In October 1579 ‘bargains’ were made between the Queen and Hawkyns, and with Pett and Baker.[741] Twenty-five vessels of all classes were named in the agreement and Hawkyns undertook to provide their moorings, to keep spare cables and hawsers on board, and to furnish other cordage necessary for ordinary harbour and sea use, for £1200 a year, the contract being terminable at six months’ notice. He was not to be called upon to account for the £1200 and therefore evidently expected, and was at liberty, to make a profit. The agreement with Pett and Baker was to the effect that they should ground and grave the ships at least every first, second, or third year, according to size; that they should repair or replace all faulty masts and yards that became defective in harbour, except the lower masts and yards of the sixteen largest vessels; that they were to pay wages, victualling and lodging of the men they employed and provide all materials and tools; they were to supply carpenters’ stores to vessels in commission, and pay all carriage and hire of storehouses. For this they were to have £1000 a year. It was these two contracts that brought such a storm of obloquy on Hawkyns. On the one hand, the other officers found the greater part of their occupation gone, and their interference in some of the most important transactions an unwarrantable intermeddling with agreements approved by the government. On the other Hawkyns and the shipwrights expected to make a profit, and circumstances seem to suggest that the way in which Hawkyns insisted on the work being done did not leave Pett and Baker that margin they anticipated. These two men subsequently became his bitter enemies, and in 1588 sent in a report on his management, to which events at that time were daily giving the lie. The effect of the new arrangement was to make Hawkyns supreme in all the branches of administration, and therefore every contractor or middleman, with whose arrangements he interfered, swelled the outcry. The result of the commission of inquiry of January 1584 was not to displace him, but apparently it did abrogate these contracts, and in 1585 a new one was entered into with Hawkyns alone. For £4000 a year he defrayed the repair of ships in harbour, found moorings, paid shipkeepers and the garrison of Upnor, repaired wharves and storehouses, finding in all cases materials, victuals, and lodgings for the workmen.[742] The object of this and the preceding agreement was to get the ordinary done for £4000 a year, devoting the money saved to the purchase of cordage, masts, etc., which had formerly been extra. Hawkyns maintained that he had performed it successfully; his opponents denied it. It was the last contract, from which they were excluded, that Pett and Baker reported upon. He gave notice to terminate it at Christmas 1587 in consequence of the great increase in naval operations, and no third bargain was engaged in. From 1st January 1589 the amount allowed for the ordinary was raised to £7268[743] which then only restored it to the standard of 1567; in January 1599 it was increased to £11,000 a year.[744]

The year to which the reader will turn with most interest is 1588, and the figures here given, representing the payments of Hawkyns only, deal with the expenditure through him and probably do not represent the whole, even of the naval expenses. A document printed by Murdin[745] makes the naval disbursements, between the beginning of November 1587 and the end of September 1588, exclusive of victualling and the charges borne by London and other ports, reach the much larger sum of £112,000. Powder and shot were used to the value of £10,000, while £20,000 was required to replace stores and put the fleet in seaworthy condition again. Another estimate puts the expenses of the year at £92,370.[746] It gives the cost by fleets: the Lord Admiral’s £31,980; Seymour’s £12,180; coasters and volunteers £15,970; Frobisher’s £840; Drake’s £21,890, etc. Finally we have the items stated in a different way[747]: wages £52,557; conduct and discharge money £2272; tonnage (hire of) £6225; other expenses £15,003; extraordinary allowances and rewards £854. The compensation paid for the eight vessels converted into fireships and sent among the Spaniards during the anxious night of 28-29th July was £5111, 10s, perhaps the cheapest national investment that this country has ever made.[748] Two of them were of 200 tons apiece, in all they measured 1230 tons.

Preparation and Cost of Fleets.

There were in pay during the struggle in the Channel 34 Queen’s ships and 163 merchantmen, but all through the year merchantmen had been taken up or discharged, and men-of-war put in and out of commission as the need seemed more or less urgent. There were 8 admirals, 3 vice-admirals, 126 captains, 136 masters, 26 lieutenants, 24 corporals, 2 ensign bearers, 2 secretaries, 13 preachers, and 11,618 soldiers, sailors, and gunners.[749] Other authorities give a larger number of men, in one instance 15,925; and only 95 merchantmen appear in the Audit Office Accounts as paid by the Treasurer. In this case the in and out working must have puzzled the authorities considerably, but ordinarily experience had enabled them to calculate with fair accuracy the probable cost of sending a fleet to sea. In October 1580—Drake had returned in September and Mendoza was vapouring—such an estimate was prepared for twenty men-of-war, to be manned by 4030 seamen and gunners, and 1690 soldiers. The press and conduct money of the seamen amounts to £1410, 10s, that of the soldiers and their coat money to £676; sea stores of ships £800, and wages of officers and crews for one month £2669, 6s 8d. The discharge money for both soldiers and sailors is £1462, and one month’s provisions £4004. In all the charges make a total of £11,449 for the first month. As there would be no cost of preparation, nor press, conduct, coat, or discharge money to be reckoned in the following months, the cost for the second and succeeding months would be £6773 each. For another £12,000 twenty-two armed merchantmen, of 5200 tons and 2790 men, could be joined with the men-of-war for three months. The last years in which foreign ships appear to have been ‘stayed’ by the authority of the crown for service with its fleets were 1560, 1561, and 1569. There is a payment of £300 in 1560 for ‘putting the Venetian’s hulk and ship that be staied for our service in warre in like order and sorte.’[750] In 1569 another £300 was paid by Gonson to two Ragusan masters whose ships were stayed but do not appear to have been used.[751] Some other foreign vessels are also referred to but their names do not occur in any naval paper.

The expenses of the semi-private, semi-royal, expeditions of various years are not borne on the navy accounts and the references to them in the State Papers are frequently incomplete and contradictory. That of Frobisher, in 1589, cost upwards of £11,000, of Frobisher and Hawkyns in 1590, £17,000,[752] and of Lord Thomas Howard in 1591, £24,000.[753] The outlay attendant on Essex’s fleet in 1596 was £78,000,[754] and that of the Drake-Hawkyns venture in 1595, £42,000.[755] Here the Queen provided six men-of-war and, according to one statement,[756] was to have had one-third of the booty, but it is difficult to disentangle the actual facts from the several discrepant versions. The voyage was a disastrous failure financially, treasure to £4907 only being brought home; worse still it cost the lives of Drake and Hawkyns. The lower ranks, however, did not fare so badly; it was said that £1000 was embezzled from the sale of powder alone, and some of the men, being drunk, ‘showed a great store of gold’ on their return.