Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas. William Wood
flags gay with coloured crests fluttered in the breeze. The English, too, made a brave show of flags and armoured men. They had a few more vessels than the Spaniards, but of a rather smaller kind, so the two fleets were nearly even. The King steered for the Spaniards; though not so as to meet them end-for-end but at an angle. The two flagships met with a terrific crash; and the crowded main-top of the Spaniard, snapping from off the mast, went splash into the sea, carrying its little garrison down with all their warlike gear. The charging ships rebounded for a moment, and then ground against each others' sides, wrecked each others' rigging, and began the fight with showers of arrows, battering stones from aloft, and wildfire flying to and fro. The Spanish flagship was the bigger of the two, more stoutly built, and with more way on when they met; so she forged ahead a good deal damaged, while the King's ship wallowed after, leaking like a sieve. The tremendous shock of the collision had opened every seam in her hull and she began to sink. The King still wanted to follow the Spanish flagship; but his sailors, knowing this was now impossible, said: "No, Sire, your Majesty can not catch her; but we can catch another." With that they laid aboard the next one, which the king took just in time, for his own ship sank a moment after.
The Black Prince had the same good luck, just clearing the enemy's deck before his own ship sank. Strange to say, the same thing happened to Robert of Namur, a Flemish friend of Edward's, whose vessel, grappled by a bigger enemy, was sinking under him as the two were drifting side by side, when Hanekin, an officer of Robert's, climbed into the Spanish vessel by some entangled rigging and cut the ropes which held the Spanish sails. Down came the sails with a run, flopping about the Spaniards' heads; and before the confusion could be put right Robert was over the side with his men-at-arms, cutting down every Spaniard who struggled out of the mess. The Basques and Spaniards fought most bravely. But the chief reason why they were beaten hand-to-hand was because the English archers, trained to shooting from their boyhood up, had killed and wounded so many of them before the vessels closed.
The English won a great victory. But it was by no means complete, partly because the Spanish fleet was too strong to be finished off, and partly because the English and their Flemish friends wanted to get home with their booty. Time out of mind, and for at least three centuries to come, fleets were mostly made up of vessels only brought together for each battle or campaign; and even the King's vessels were expected to make what they could out of loot.
With the sea roads open to the English and mostly closed to the French and Scots the English armies did as well on land as the navy did at sea. Four years before this first great battle with the Spaniards the English armies had won from the French at Cressy and from the Scots at Neville's Cross. Six years after the Spanish fight they won from the French again at Poitiers. But in 1374 Edward III, worn out by trying to hold his lands in France, had been forced to neglect his navy; while Jean de Vienne, founder of the regular French Navy, was building first-class men-of-war at Rouen, where, five hundred years later, a British base was formed to supply the British army during the Great War.
With Shakespeare's kingly hero, Henry V, the fortunes of the English armies in France revived. In 1415 he won a great battle at Agincourt, a place, like Cressy, within a day's march of his ships in the Channel. Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, had been Henry's base for the Agincourt campaign. So the French were very keen to get it back, while the English were equally keen to keep it. Henry sent over a great fleet under the Duke of Bedford. The French, though their fleet was the smaller of the two, attacked with the utmost gallantry, but were beaten back with great loss. Their Genoese hirelings fought well at the beginning, but made off towards the end. In 1417 Henry himself was back in France with his army. But he knew what sea-power meant, and how foolish it was to land without making sure that the seaways were quite safe behind him. So he first sent a fleet to make sure, and then he crossed his army, which now had a safe "line of communication," through its base in France, with its great home base in England.
Henry V was not, of course, the only man in England who then understood sea-power. For in 1416, exactly five hundred years before Jellicoe's victory of Jutland, Henry's Parliament passed a resolution in which you still can read these words: "that the Navy is the chief support of the wealth, the business, and the whole prosperity of England." Some years later Hungerford, one of Henry's admirals, wrote a Book of English Policy, "exhorting all England to keep the sea" and explaining what Edward III had meant by stamping a ship on the gold coins called nobles: "Four things our noble showeth unto me: King, ship, and sword, and power of the sea." These are themselves but repetitions of Offa's good advice, given more than six centuries earlier: "He who would be safe on land must be supreme at sea." And all show the same kind of first-rate sea-sense that is shown by the "Articles of War" which are still read out to every crew in the Navy. The Preamble or preface to these Articles really comes to this: "It is upon the Navy that, under the providence of God, the wealth, prosperity, and peace of the British Empire chiefly depend."
Between the death of Henry V in 1422 and the accession of Henry VII in 1485 there was a dreary time on land and sea. The King of England lost the last of his possessions in the land of France. Only the Channel Islands remained British, as they do still. At home the Normans had settled down with the descendants of the other Norsemen to form one people, the Anglo-Norman people of today, the leading race within the British Empire and, to a less extent, within the United States. But England was torn in two by the Wars of the Roses, in which the great lords and their followers fought about the succession to the throne, each party wanting to have a king of its own choice. For the most part, however, the towns and seaports kept out of these selfish party wars and attended to their growing business instead. And when Henry VII united both the warring parties, and these with the rest of England, he helped to lay the sure foundations of the future British Empire.
CHAPTER VII
KING OF THE ENGLISH SEA
(1545)
England needed good pilots to take the ship of state safely through the troubled waters of the wonderful sixteenth century, and she found them in the three great Royal Tudors: Henry VII (1485–1509), Henry VIII (1509–1547), and Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603). All three fostered English sea-power, both for trade and war, and helped to start the modern Royal Navy on a career of world-wide victory such as no other fighting service has ever equalled, not even the Roman Army in the palmy days of Rome. It was a happy thought that gave the name of Queen Elizabeth to the flagship on board of which the British Commander-in-chief received the surrender of the German Fleet. Ten generations had passed away between this surrender in 1918 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. But the British Royal Navy was still the same: in sea-sense, spirit, training, and surpassing skill.
Henry VII was himself an oversea trader, and a very good one too. He built ships and let them out to traders at a handsome profit for himself besides trading with them on his own account. But he was never so foolish as to think that peaceful trade could go on without a fighting navy to protect it. So he built men-of-war; though he used these for trade as well. Men-of-war built specially for fighting were of course much better in a battle than any mere merchantman could be. But in those days, and for some time after, merchantmen went about well armed and often joined the king's ships of the Royal Navy during war, as many of them did against the Germans in our own day.
English oversea trade was carried on with the whole of Europe, with Asia Minor, and with the North of Africa. Canyng, a merchant prince of Bristol, employed a hundred shipwrights and eight hundred seamen. He sent his ships to Iceland, the Baltic, and all through the Mediterranean. But the London merchants were more important still; and the king was the most important man of all. He had his watchful eye on the fishing fleet of Iceland, which was then as important as the fleet of Newfoundland became later on. He watched the Baltic trade in timber and the Flanders trade in wool. He watched the Hansa Towns of northern Germany, then second only to Venice itself as the greatest trading