Elizabethan Sea Dogs | Page 7

only in
Spain, concentrated the machinery of government in Madrid, and
became so unpopular elsewhere. Charles had been brought up in
Flanders; he was genial in the Flemish way; and he understood his
various states in the Netherlands, which furnished him with one of his
main sources of revenue. Another and much larger source of revenue
poured in its wealth to him later on, in rapidly increasing volume, from
North and South America.
Charles had inherited a long and bitter feud with France about the
Burgundian dominions on the French side of the Rhine and about
domains in Italy; besides which there were many points of violent
rivalry between things French and Spanish. England also had hereditary
feuds with France, which had come down from the Hundred Years'
War, and which had ended in her almost final expulsion from France
less than a century before. Scotland, nursing old feuds against England
and always afraid of absorption, naturally sided with France. Portugal,
small and open to Spanish invasion by land, was more or less bound to
please Spain.
During the many campaigns between Francis and Charles the English
Channel swarmed with men-of-war, privateers, and downright pirates.
Sometimes England took a hand officially against France. But, even
when England was not officially at war, many Englishmen were
privateers and not a few were pirates. Never was there a better training
school of fighting seamanship than in and around the Narrow Seas. It
was a continual struggle for an existence in which only the fittest
survived. Quickness was essential. Consequently vessels that could not
increase their speed were soon cleared off the sea.
Spain suffered a good deal by this continuous raiding. So did the
Netherlands. But such was the power of Charles that, although his
navies were much weaker than his armies, he yet was able to fight by
sea on two enormous fronts, first, in the Mediterranean against the

Turks and other Moslems, secondly, in the Channel and along the coast,
all the way from Antwerp to Cadiz. Nor did the left arm of his power
stop there; for his fleets, his transports, and his merchantmen ranged
the coasts of both Americas from one side of the present United States
right round to the other.
Such, in brief, was the position of maritime Europe when Henry found
himself menaced by the three Roman Catholic powers of Scotland,
France, and Spain. In 1533 he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of
Aragon, thereby defying the Pope and giving offence to Spain. He had
again defied the Pope by suppressing the monasteries and severing the
Church of England from the Roman discipline. The Pope had struck
back with a bull of excommunication designed to make Henry the
common enemy of Catholic Europe.
Henry had been steadily building ships for years. Now he redoubled his
activity. He blooded the fathers of his daughter's sea-dogs by smashing
up a pirate fleet and sinking a flotilla of Flemish privateers. The mouth
of the Scheldt, in 1539, was full of vessels ready to take a hostile army
into England. But such a fighting fleet prepared to meet them that
Henry's enemies forbore to strike.
In 1539, too, came the discovery of the art of tacking, by Fletcher of
Rye, Henry's shipwright friend, a discovery forever memorable in the
annals of seamanship. Never before had any kind of craft been sailed a
single foot against the wind. The primitive dugout on which the
prehistoric savage hoisted the first semblance of a sail, the ships of
Tarshish, the Roman transport in which St. Paul was wrecked, and the
Spanish caravels with which Columbus sailed to worlds unknown, were,
in principle of navigation, all the same. But now Fletcher ran out his
epoch-making vessel, with sails trimmed fore and aft, and
dumbfounded all the shipping in the Channel by beating his way to
windward against a good stiff breeze. This achievement marked the
dawn of the modern sailing age.
And so it happened that in 1545 Henry, with a new-born modern fleet,
was able to turn defiantly on Francis. The English people rallied
magnificently to his call. What was at that time an enormous army

covered the lines of advance on London. But the fleet, though
employing fewer men, was relatively a much more important force than
the army; and with the fleet went Henry's own headquarters. His
lifelong interest in his navy now bore the first-fruits of really scientific
sea power on an oceanic scale. There was no great naval battle to fix
general attention on one dramatic moment. Henry's strategy and tactics,
however, were new and full of promise. He repeated his strategy of the
previous war by sending out a strong squadron to attack the base at
which the enemy's ships were then assembling; and he definitely
committed the