  [Footnote 65: Written in 1900. (_Nineteenth_Century_and_After_, 1901.)] An eminent writer has recently repeated the accusations made within the last forty years, and apparently only within that period, against Queen Elizabeth of having starved the seamen of her fleet by giving them food insufficient in quantity and bad in quality, and of having robbed them by keeping them out of the pay due to them. He also accuses the Queen, though somewhat less plainly, of having deliberately acquiesced in a wholesale slaughter of her seamen by remaining still, though no adequate provision had been made for the care of the sick and wounded. There are further charges of obstinately objecting, out of mere stinginess, to take proper measures for the naval defence of the country, and of withholding a sufficient supply of ammunition from her ships when about to meet the enemy. Lest it should be supposed that this is an exaggerated statement of the case against Elizabeth as formulated by the writer in question, his own words are given. He says: 'Instead of strengthening her armaments to the utmost, and throwing herself upon her Parliament for aid, she clung to her moneybags, actually reduced her fleet, withheld ammunition and the more necessary stores, cut off the sailor's food, did, in short, everything in her power to expose the country defenceless to the enemy. The pursuit of the Armada was stopped by the failure of the ammunition, which, apparently, had the fighting continued longer, would have been fatal to the English fleet.' The writer makes on this the rather mild comment that 'treason itself could scarcely have done worse.' Why 'scarcely'? Surely the very blackest treason could not have done worse. He goes on to ask: 'How were the glorious seamen, whose memory will be for ever honoured by England and the world, rewarded after their victory?' This is his answer: 'Their wages were left unpaid, they were docked of their food, and served with poisonous drink, while for the sick and wounded no hospitals were provided. More of them were killed by the Queen's meanness than by the enemy.' It is safe to challenge the students of history throughout the world to produce any parallel to conduct so infamous as that which has thus been imputed to an English queen. If the charges are true, there is no limit to the horror and loathing with which we ought to regard Elizabeth. Are they true? That is the question. I respectfully invite the attention of those who wish to know the truth and to retain their reverence for a great historical character, to the following examination of the accusations and of the foundations on which they rest. It will not, I hope, be considered presumptuous if I say that—in making this examination—personal experience of life in the navy sufficiently extensive to embrace both the present day and the time before the introduction of the great modern changes in system and naval matÉriel will be of great help. Many things which have appeared so extraordinary to landsmen that they could account for their occurrence only by assuming that this must have been due to extreme culpability or extreme folly will be quite familiar to naval officers whose experience of the service goes back forty years or more, and can be satisfactorily explained by them. There is little reason to doubt that the above-mentioned charges against the great Queen are based exclusively on statements in Froude's History. It is remarkable how closely Froude has been followed by writers treating of Elizabeth and her reign. He was known to have gone to original documents for the sources of his narrative; and it seems to have been taken for granted, not only that his fidelity was above suspicion—an assumption with which I do not deal now—but also that his interpretation of the meaning of those who wrote the papers consulted must be correct. Motley, in his 'History of the United Netherlands,' published in 1860, had dwelt upon the shortness of ammunition and provisions in the Channel Fleet commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham; but he attributed this to bad management on the part of officials, and not to downright baseness on that of Elizabeth. Froude has placed beyond doubt his determination to make the Queen responsible for all shortcomings. 'The Queen,' he says, 'has taken upon herself the detailed arrangement of everything. She and she alone was responsible. She had extended to the dockyards the same hard thrift with which she had pared down her expenses everywhere. She tied the ships to harbour by supplying the stores in driblets. She allowed rations but for a month, and permitted no reserves to be provided in the victualling offices. The ships at Plymouth, furnished from a distance, and with small quantities at a time, were often for many days without food of any kind. Even at Plymouth, short food and poisonous drink had brought dysentery among them. They had to meet the enemy, as it were, with one arm bandaged by their own sovereign. The greatest service ever done by an English fleet had been thus successfully accomplished by men whose wages had not been paid from the time of their engagement, half-starved, with their clothes in rags, and so ill-found in the necessaries of war that they had eked out their ammunition by what they could take in action from the enemy himself. The men expected that at least after such a service they would be paid their wages in full. The Queen was cavilling over the accounts, and would give no orders for money till she had demanded the meaning of every penny that she was charged…. Their legitimate food had been stolen from them by the Queen's own neglect.' We thus see that Froude has made Elizabeth personally responsible for the short rations, the undue delay in paying wages earned, and the fearful sickness which produced a heavy mortality amongst the crews of her Channel Fleet; and also for insufficiently supplying her ships with ammunition. The quotations from the book previously referred to make it clear that it is possible to outdo Froude in his denunciations, even where it is on his statements that the accusers found their charges. In his 'History of England'—which is widely read, especially by the younger generation of Englishmen—the Rev. J. Franck Bright tells us, with regard to the defensive campaign against the Armada: 'The Queen's avarice went near to ruin the country. The miserable supplies which Elizabeth had alone allowed to be sent them (the ships in the Channel) had produced all sorts of disease, and thousands of the crews came from their great victory only to die. In the midst of privations and wanting in all the necessaries of life, the sailors had fought with unflagging energy, with their wages unpaid, with ammunition supplied to them with so stingy a hand that each shot sent on board was registered and accounted for; with provisions withheld, so that the food of four men had habitually to be divided among six, and that food so bad as to be really poisonous.' J. R. Green, in his 'History of the English People,' states that: 'While England was thrilling with the triumph over the Armada, its Queen was coolly grumbling over the cost and making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that had saved her.' The object of each subsequent historian was to surpass the originator of the calumnies against Elizabeth. In his sketch of her life in the 'Dictionary of National Biography,' Dr. Augustus Jessopp asserts that the Queen's ships 'were notoriously and scandalously ill-furnished with stores and provisions for the sailors, and it is impossible to lay the blame on anyone but the Queen.' He had previously remarked that the merchant vessels which came to the assistance of the men-of-war from London and the smaller ports 'were as a rule far better furnished than the Queen's ships,' which were 'without the barest necessaries.' After these extracts one from Dr. S. R. Gardiner's 'Student's History of England' will appear moderate. Here it is: 'Elizabeth having with her usual economy kept the ships short of powder, they were forced to come back' from the chase of the Armada. The above allegations constitute a heavy indictment of the Queen. No heavier could well be brought against any sovereign or government. Probably the first thing that occurs to anyone who, knowing what Elizabeth's position was, reads the tremendous charges made against her will be, that—if they are true—she must have been without a rival in stupidity as well as in turpitude. There was no person in the world who had as much cause to desire the defeat of the Armada as she had. If the Duke of Medina Sidonia's expedition had been successful she would have lost both her throne and her life. She herself and her father had shown that there could be a short way with Queens—consort or regnant—whom you had in your power, and whose existence might be inconvenient to you. Yet, if we are to believe her accusers, she did her best to ensure her own dethronement and decapitation. 'The country saved itself and its cause in spite of its Queen.' How did this extraordinary view of Elizabeth's conduct arise? What had Froude to go upon when he came forward as her accuser? These questions can be answered with ease. Every Government that comes near going to war, or that has gone to war, is sure to incur one of two charges, made according to circumstances. If the Government prepares for war and yet peace is preserved, it is accused of unpardonable extravagance in making preparations. Whether it makes these on a sufficient scale or not, it is accused, if war does break out—at least in the earlier period of the contest—of not having done enough. Political opponents and the 'man in the street' agree in charging the administration with panic profusion in one case, and with criminal niggardliness in the other. Elizabeth hoped to preserve peace. She had succeeded in keeping out of an 'official' war for a long time, and she had much justification for the belief that she could do so still longer. 'She could not be thoroughly persuaded,' says Mr. David Hannay,[66] 'that it was hopeless to expect to avert the Spanish invasion by artful diplomacy.' Whilst reasonable precautions were not neglected, she was determined that no one should be able to say with truth that she had needlessly thrown away money in a fright. For the general naval policy of England at the time, Elizabeth, as both the nominal and the real head of the Government, is properly held responsible. The event showed the perfect efficiency of that policy. [Footnote 66: _A_Short_History_of_the_Royal_Navy_, pp. 96, 97.] The war having really come, it was inevitable that the Government, and Elizabeth as its head, should be blamed sooner or later for not having made adequate provision for it. No one is better entitled to speak on the naval policy of the Armada epoch than Mr. Julian Corbett,[67] who is not disposed to assume that the Queen's action was above criticism. He says that 'Elizabeth has usually been regarded as guilty of complete and unpardonable inaction.' He explains that 'the event at least justified the Queen's policy. There is no trace of her having been blamed for it at the time at home; nor is there any reason to doubt it was adopted sagaciously and deliberately on the advice of her most capable officers.' Mr. David Hannay, who, as an historian, rightly takes into consideration the conditions of the age, points out that 'Elizabeth was a very poor sovereign, and the maintenance of a great fleet was a heavy drain upon her resources.' He adds: 'There is no reason to suppose that Elizabeth and her Lord Treasurer were careless of their duty; but the Government of the time had very little experience in the maintenance of great military forces.' [Footnote 67: _Drake_and_the_Tudor_Navy_, 1898, vol. ii. p. 117.] If we take the charges against her in detail, we shall find that each is as ill-founded as that of criminal neglect of naval preparations generally. The most serious accusation is that with regard to the victuals. It will most likely be a surprise to many people to find that the seamen of Elizabeth were victualled on a more abundant and much more costly scale than the seamen of Victoria. Nevertheless, such is the fact. In 1565 the contract allowance for victualling was 4-1/2d. a day for each man in harbour, and 5d. a day at sea. There was also an allowance of 4d. a man per month at sea and 8d. in harbour for 'purser's necessaries.' Mr. Oppenheim, in whose valuable work[68] on naval administration the details as to the Elizabethan victualling system are to be found, tells us that in 1586 the rate was raised to 6d. a day in harbour and 6-1/2d. at sea; and that in 1587 it was again raised, this time to 6-1/2d. in harbour and 7d. at sea. These sums were intended to cover both the cost of the food and storage, custody, conveyance, &c., the present-day 'establishment charges.' The repeated raising of the money allowance is convincing proof that the victualling arrangements had not been neglected, and that there was no refusal to sanction increased expenditure to improve them. It is a great thing to have Mr. Oppenheim's high authority for this, because he is not generally favourable to the Queen, though even he admits that it 'is a moot point' how far she was herself responsible. [Footnote 68: _The_Administration_of_the_Royal_Navy,_ 1509-1660. London, 1896.] If necessary, detailed arguments could be adduced to show that to get the present value of the sums allowed in 1588 we ought to multiply them by six[69] The sum allowed for each man's daily food and the 'establishment charges'—increased as they had been in 1586—did little more than cover the expenditure; and, though it does not appear that the contractor lost money, he nevertheless died a poor man. It will be hardly imputed to Elizabeth for iniquity that she did not consider that the end of government was the enrichment of contractors. The fact that she increased the money payment again in 1587 may be accepted as proof that she did not object to a fair bargain. As has been just said, the Elizabethan scale of victualling was more abundant than the early Victorian, and not less abundant than that given in the earlier years of King Edward VII.[70] As shown by Mr. Hubert Hall and Thorold Rogers, in the price-lists which they publish, the cost of a week's allowance of food for a man-of-war's man in 1588, in the money of the time, amounted to about 1s. 11-1/2d., which, multiplied by six, would be about 11s. 9d. of our present money. The so-called 'savings price' of the early twentieth century allowance was about 9-1/2d. a day, or 5s. 6-1/2d. weekly. The 'savings price' is the amount of money which a man received if he did not take up his victuals, each article having a price attached to it for that purpose. It may be interesting to know that the full allowance was rarely, perhaps never, taken up, and that some part of the savings was till the last, and for many years had been, almost invariably paid. [Footnote 69: See Mr. Hubert Hall's _Society_in_the_Elizabethan_ Age, and Thorold Rogers's _History_of_Agriculture_and_Prices_, vols. v. and vi. Froude himself puts the ratio at six to one.] [Footnote 70: It will be convenient to compare the two scales in a footnote, observing that—as I hope will not be thought impertinent—I draw on my own personal experience for the more recent, which was in force for some years after I went to sea. WEEKLY——————————————————————— There is now a small allowance of oatmeal, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, against which we may set the 'purser's necessaries' of Elizabeth's day. In that day but little sugar was used, and tea and cocoa were unknown even in palaces. It is just a question if seven gallons of beer did not make up for the weekly allowance of these and for the seven-eighths of a pint of spirits. Tea was only allowed in 1850, and was not an additional article. It replaced part of the spirits. The biscuit allowance is now 8-3/4 lbs. Weekly. The Victorian dietary is more varied and wholesome than the Elizabethan; but, as we have seen, it is less abundant and can be obtained for much less money, even if we grant that the 'savings price'—purposely kept low to avoid all suggestion that the men are being bribed into stinting themselves—is less than the real cost. The excess of this latter, however, is not likely to be more than 30 per cent., so that Elizabeth's expenditure in this department was more liberal than the present. Such defects as were to be found in the Elizabethan naval dietary were common to it with that of the English people generally. If there was plenty, there was but little variety in the food of our ancestors of all ranks three centuries ago. As far as was possible in the conditions of the time, Elizabeth's Government did make provision for victualling the fleet on a sufficient and even liberal scale; and, notwithstanding slender pecuniary resources, repeatedly increased the money assigned to it, on cause being shown. In his eagerness to make Queen Elizabeth a monster of treacherous rapacity, Froude has completely overreached himself, He says that 'she permitted some miserable scoundrel to lay a plan before her for saving expense, by cutting down the seamen's diet.' The 'miserable scoundrel' had submitted a proposal for diminishing the expenses which the administration was certainly ill able to bear, The candid reader will draw his own conclusions when he finds that the Queen did not approve the plan submitted; and yet that not one of her assailants has let this appear.[71] [Footnote 71: It may be stated here that the word 'rations' is unknown in the navy. The official term is 'victuals.' The term in common use is 'provisions.'] It is, of course, possible to concede that adequate arrangements had been made for the general victualling of the fleet; and still to maintain that, after all, the sailors afloat actually did run short of food. In his striking 'Introduction to the Armada Despatches' published by the Navy Records Society, Professor Sir John Laughton declares that: 'To anyone examining the evidence, there can be no question as to victualling being conducted on a fairly liberal scale, as far as the money was concerned. It was in providing the victuals that the difficulty lay…. When a fleet of unprecedented magnitude was collected, when a sudden and unwonted demand was made on the victualling officers, it would have been strange indeed if things had gone quite smoothly.' There are plenty of naval officers who have had experience, and within the last ten years of the nineteenth century, of the difficulty, and sometimes of the impossibility, of getting sufficient supplies for a large number of ships in rather out-of-the-way places. In 1588 the comparative thinness of population and insufficiency of communications and means of transport must have constituted obstacles, far greater than any encountered in our own day, to the collection of supplies locally and to their timely importation from a distance. 'You would not believe,' says Lord Howard of Effingham himself, 'what a wonderful thing it is to victual such an army as this is in such a narrow corner of the earth, where a man would think that neither victuals were to be had nor a cask to put it in.' No more effective defence of Elizabeth and her Ministers could well be advanced than that which Mr. Oppenheim puts forward as a corroboration of the accusation against them. He says that the victualling officials 'found no difficulty in arranging for 13,000 men in 1596 and 9200 in 1597 after timely notice.' This is really a high compliment, as it proves that the authorities were quite ready to, and in fact did, learn from experience. Mr. Oppenheim, however, is not an undiscriminating assailant of the Queen; for he remarks, as has been already said, that, 'how far Elizabeth was herself answerable is a moot point.' He tells us that there 'is no direct evidence against her'; and the charge levelled at her rests not on proof, but on 'strong probability.' One would like to have another instance out of all history, of probability, however strong, being deemed sufficient to convict a person of unsurpassed treachery and stupidity combined, when the direct evidence, which is not scanty, fails to support the charge and indeed points the other way. The Lord Admiral himself and other officers have been quoted to show how badly off the fleet was for food. Yet at the close of the active operations against the Armada, Sir J. Hawkins wrote: 'Here is victual sufficient, and I know not why any should be provided after September, but for those which my Lord doth mean to leave in the narrow seas.' On the same day Howard himself wrote from Dover: 'I have caused all the remains of victuals to be laid here and at Sandwich, for the maintaining of them that shall remain in the Narrow Seas.' Any naval officer with experience of command who reads Howard's representations on the subject of the victuals will at once perceive that what the Admiral was anxious about was not the quantity on board the ships, but the stock in reserve. Howard thought that the latter ought to be a supply for six weeks. The Council thought a month's stock would be enough; and—as shown by the extracts from Howard's and Hawkins's letters just given—the Council was right in its estimate. Anyone who has had to write or to read official letters about stocks of stores and provisions will find something especially modern in Howard's representations. Though the crews of the fleet did certainly come near the end of their victuals afloat, there is no case of their having actually run out of them. The complement of an ordinary man-of-war in the latter part of the sixteenth century, judged by our modern standard, was very large in proportion to her size. It was impossible for her to carry provisions enough to last her men for a long time. Any unexpected prolongation of a cruise threatened a reduction to short commons. A great deal has been made of the fact that Howard had to oblige six men to put up with the allowance of four. 'When a large force,' says Mr. D. Hannay, 'was collected for service during any length of time, it was the common rule to divide four men's allowance among six.' There must be still many officers and men to whom the plan would seem quite familiar. It is indicated by a recognised form of words, 'six upon four.' I have myself been 'six upon four' several times, mostly in the Pacific, but also, on at least one occasion, in the East Indies. As far as I could see, no one appeared to regard it as an intolerable hardship. The Government, it should be known, made no profit out of the process, because money was substituted for the food not issued. Howard's recourse to it was not due to immediate insufficiency. Speaking of the merchant vessels which came to reinforce him, he says: 'We are fain to help them with victuals to bring them thither. There is not any of them that hath one day's victuals.' These merchant vessels were supplied by private owners; and it is worth noting that, in the teeth of this statement by Howard, Dr. Jessopp, in his eagerness to blacken Elizabeth, says that they 'were, as a rule, far better furnished than the Queen's ships.' The Lord Admiral on another occasion, before the fight off Gravelines, said of the ships he hoped would join him from Portsmouth: 'Though they have not two days' victuals, let that not be the cause of their stay, for they shall have victuals out of our fleet,' a conclusive proof that his ships were not very short. As to the accusation of deliberately issuing food of bad quality, that is effectually disposed of by the explanation already given of the method employed in victualling the navy. A sum was paid for each man's daily allowance to a contractor, who was expressly bound to furnish 'good and seasonable victuals.'[72] Professor Laughton, whose competence in the matter is universally allowed, informs us that complaints of bad provisions are by no means confined to the Armada epoch, and were due, not to intentional dishonesty and neglect, but to insufficient knowledge of the way to preserve provisions for use on rather long cruises. Mr. Hannay says that the fleet sent to the coast of Spain, in the year after the defeat of the Armada, suffered much from want of food and sickness. 'Yet it was organised, not by the Queen, but by a committee of adventurers who had every motive to fit it out well.' It is the fashion with English historians to paint the condition of the navy in the time of the Commonwealth in glowing colours, yet Mr. Oppenheim cites many occasions of well-founded complaints of the victuals. He says: 'The quality of the food supplied to the men and the honesty of the victualling agents both steadily deteriorated during the Commonwealth.' Lord Howard's principal difficulty was with the beer, which would go sour. The beer was the most frequent subject of protest in the Commonwealth times. Also, in 1759, Lord (then Sir Edward) Hawke reported: 'Our daily employment is condemning the beer from Plymouth.' The difficulty of brewing beer that would stand a sea voyage seemed to be insuperable. The authorities, however, did not soon abandon attempts to get the right article. Complaints continued to pour in; but they went on with their brewing till 1835, and then gave it up as hopeless. [Footnote 72: See 'The Mariners of England before the Armada,' by One must have had personal experience of the change to enable one to recognise the advance that has been made in the art of preserving articles of food within the last half-century. In the first Drury Lane pantomime that I can remember—about a year before I went to sea—a practical illustration of the quality of some of the food supplied to the navy was offered during the harlequinade by the clown, who satisfied his curiosity as to the contents of a large tin of 'preserved meat' by pulling out a dead cat. On joining the service I soon learned that, owing to the badness of the 'preserved' food that had been supplied, the idea of issuing tinned meat had been abandoned. It was not resumed till some years later. It is often made a joke against naval officers of a certain age that, before eating a biscuit, they have a trick of rapping the table with it. We contracted the habit as midshipmen when it was necessary to get rid of the weevils in the biscuit before it could be eaten, and a fairly long experience taught us that rapping the table with it was an effectual plan for expelling them. There is no more justification for accusing Queen Elizabeth of failure to provide well-preserved food to her sailors than there is for accusing her of not having sent supplies to Plymouth by railway. Steam transport and efficient food preservation were equally unknown in her reign and for long after. It has been intimated above that, even had she wished to, she could not possibly have made any money out of bad provisions. The victualling system did not permit of her doing so. The austere republican virtue of the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of Elizabeth's power. In 1653, 'beer and other provisions "decayed and unfit for use" were licensed for export free of Customs.' Mr. Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment that this was done 'perhaps in the hope that such stores would go to Holland,' with whose people we were at war. As the heavy mortality in the navy had always been ascribed to the use of bad provisions, we cannot refuse to give to the sturdy Republicans who governed England in the seventeenth century the credit of contemplating a more insidious and more effective method of damaging their enemy than poisoning his wells. One would like to have it from some jurist if the sale of poisonously bad food to your enemy is disallowed by international law. That there was much sickness in the fleet and that many seamen died is, unfortunately, true. If Howard's evidence is to be accepted—as it always is when it seems to tell against the Queen—it is impossible to attribute this to the bad quality of the food then supplied. The Lord Admiral's official report is 'that the ships of themselves be so infectious and corrupted as it is thought to be a very plague; and we find that the fresh men that we draw into our ships are infected one day and die the next.' The least restrained assertor of the 'poisonous' food theory does not contend that it killed men within twenty-four hours. The Armada reached the Channel on the 20th of July (30th, New Style). A month earlier Howard had reported that 'several men have fallen sick and by thousands fain to be discharged'; and, after the fighting was over, he said of the _Elizabeth_Jonas_, she 'hath had a great infection in her from the beginning.' Lord Henry Seymour, who commanded the division of the fleet stationed in the Straits of Dover, noted that the sickness was a repetition of that of the year before, and attributed it not to bad food, but to the weather. 'Our men,' he wrote, 'fall sick by reason of the cold nights and cold mornings we find; and I fear me they will drop away faster than they did last year with Sir Henry Palmer, which was thick enough.' 'The sickness,' says Professor Laughton, 'was primarily and chiefly due to infection from the shore and ignorance or neglect of what we now know as sanitary laws…. Similar infections continued occasionally to scourge our ships' companies, and still more frequently French and Spanish ships' companies, till near the close of the eighteenth century.' It is not likely that any evidence would suffice to divert from their object writers eager to hurl calumny at a great sovereign; but a little knowledge of naval and of military history also would have saved their readers from a belief in their accusations. In 1727 the fleet in the West Indies commanded by Admiral Hosier, commemorated in Glover's ballad, lost ten flag officers and captains, fifty lieutenants, and 4000 seamen. In the Seven Years' war the total number belonging to the fleet killed in action was 1512; whilst the number that died of disease and were missing was 133,708. From 1778 to 1783, out of 515,000 men voted by Parliament for the navy, 132,623 were 'sent sick.' In the summer, 1779, the French fleet cruising at the mouth of the English Channel, after landing 500, had still about 2000 men sick. At the beginning of autumn the number of sick had become so great that many ships had not enough men to work them. The _Ville_de_Paris_ had 560 sick, and lost 61. The Auguste had 500 sick, and lost 44. On board the IntrÉpide 70 died out of 529 sick. These were the worst cases; but other ships also suffered heavily. It is, perhaps, not generally remembered till what a very late date armies and navies were more than decimated by disease. In 1810 the House of Commons affirmed by a resolution, concerning the Walcheren Expedition: 'That on the 19th of August a malignant disorder showed itself amongst H.M. troops; and that on the 8th of September the number of sick amounted to upwards of 10,948 men. That of the army which embarked for service in the Scheldt sixty officers and 3900 men, exclusive of those killed by the enemy, had died before the 1st of February last.' In a volume of 'Military, Medical, and Surgical Essays'[73] prepared for the United States' Sanitary Commission, and edited by Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, Surgeon-General of the U.S. Army, it is stated that, in our Peninsular army, averaging a strength of 64,227 officers and men, the annual rate of mortality from the 25th of December 1810 to the 25th of May 1813 was 10 per cent. of the officers and 16 per cent. of the men. We may calculate from this that some 25,000 officers and men died. There were 22-1/2 per cent., or over 14,000, 'constantly sick.' Out of 309,268 French soldiers sent to the Crimea in 1855-6, the number of killed and those who died of wounds was 7500, the number who died of disease was 61,700. At the same date navies also suffered. Dr. Stilon Mends, in his life of his father,[74] Admiral Sir William Mends, prints a letter in which the Admiral, speaking of the cholera in the fleets at Varna, says: 'The mortality on board the Montebello, _Ville_de_Paris_, Valmy (French ships), and Britannia (British) has been terrible; the first lost 152 in three days, the second 120 in three days, the third 80 in ten days, but the last lost 50 in one night and 10 the subsequent day.' Kinglake tells us that in the end the Britannia's loss went up to 105. With the above facts before us, we are compelled to adopt one of two alternatives. We must either maintain that sanitary science made no advance between 1588 and 1855, or admit that the mortality in Elizabeth's fleet became what it was owing to ignorance of sanitary laws and not to intentional bad management. As regards care of the sick, it is to be remembered that the establishment of naval and military hospitals for the reception of sick soldiers and sailors is of recent date. For instance, the two great English military hospitals, Netley and the Herbert, are only about sixty years old. [Footnote 73: Philadelphia, 1864.] [Footnote 74: London, 1899.] So far from our fleet in 1588 having been ill-supplied with ammunition, it was in reality astonishingly well equipped, considering the age. We learn from Mr. Julian Corbett,[75] that 'during the few years immediately preceding the outbreak of the war, the Queen's navy had been entirely re-armed with brass guns, and in the process of re-armament a great advance in simplicity had been secured.' Froude, without seeing where the admission would land him, admits that our fleet was more plentifully supplied than the Armada, in which, he says, 'the supply of cartridges was singularly small. The King [Philip the Second] probably considered that a single action would decide the struggle; and it amounted to but fifty rounds for each gun.' Our own supply therefore exceeded fifty rounds. In his life of Vice-Admiral Lord Lyons,[76] Sir S. Eardley Wilmot tells us that the British ships which attacked the Sebastopol forts in October 1854 'could only afford to expend seventy rounds per gun.' At the close of the nineteenth century, the regulated allowance for guns mounted on the broadside was eighty-five rounds each. Consequently, the Elizabethan allowance was nearly, if not quite, as much as that which our authorities, after an experience of naval warfare during three centuries, thought sufficient. 'The full explanation,' says Professor Laughton, 'of the want [of ammunition] seems to lie in the rapidity of fire which has already been mentioned. The ships had the usual quantity on board; but the expenditure was more, very many times more, than anyone could have conceived.' Mr. Julian Corbett considers it doubtful if the ammunition, in at least one division of the fleet, was nearly exhausted. [Footnote 75: _The_Spanish_War_, 1585-87 (Navy Records Society), 1898, p. 323.] [Footnote 76: London, 1898, p. 236.] Exhaustion of the supply of ammunition in a single action is a common naval occurrence. The not very decisive character of the battle of Malaga between Sir George Rooke and the Count of Toulouse in 1704 was attributed to insufficiency of ammunition, the supply in our ships having been depleted by what 'Mediterranean' Byng, afterwards Lord Torrington, calls the 'furious fire' opened on Gibraltar. The Rev. Thomas Pocock, Chaplain of the Ranelagh, Byng's flag-ship at Malaga, says:[77] 'Many of our ships went out of the line for want of ammunition.' Byng's own opinion, as stated by the compiler of his memoirs, was, that 'it may without great vanity be said that the English had gained a greater victory if they had been supplied with ammunition as they ought to have been.' I myself heard the late Lord Alcester speak of the anxiety that had been caused him by the state of his ships' magazines after the attack on the Alexandria forts in 1882. At a still later date, Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay interrupted his attack on the Spanish squadron to ascertain how much ammunition his ships had left. The carrying capacity of ships being limited, rapid gun-fire in battle invariably brings with it the risk of running short of ammunition. It did this in the nineteenth century just as much as, probably even more than, it did in the sixteenth. [Footnote 77: In his journal (p. 197), printed as an Appendix to _Memoirs_relating_to_the_Lord_Torrington_, edited by J. K. Laughton for the Camden Society, 1889.] To charge Elizabeth with criminal parsimony because she insisted on every shot being 'registered and accounted for' will be received with ridicule by naval officers. Of course every shot, and for the matter of that every other article expended, has to be accounted for. One of the most important duties of the gunner of a man-of-war is to keep a strict account of the expenditure of all gunnery stores. This was more exactly done under Queen Victoria than it was under Queen Elizabeth. Naval officers are more hostile to 'red tape' than most men, and they may lament the vast amount of bookkeeping that modern auditors and committees of public accounts insist upon, but they are convinced that a reasonable check on expenditure of stores is indispensable to efficient organisation. So far from blaming Elizabeth for demanding this, they believe that both she and Burleigh, her Lord Treasurer, were very much in advance of their age. Another charge against her is that she defrauded her seamen of their wages. The following is Froude's statement:— 'Want of the relief, which, if they had been paid their wages, they might have provided for themselves had aggravated the tendencies to disease, and a frightful mortality now set in through the entire fleet.' The word 'now' is interesting, Froude having had before him Howard's and Seymour's letters, already quoted, showing that the appearance of the sickness was by no means recent. Elizabeth's illiberality towards her seamen may be judged from the fact that in her reign their pay was certainly increased once and perhaps twice.[78] In 1585 the sailor's pay was raised from 6s. 8d. to 10s. a month. A rise of pay of 50 per cent. all at once is, I venture to say, entirely without parallel in the navy since, and cannot well be called illiberal. The Elizabethan 10s. would be equal to £3 in our present accounts; and, as the naval month at the earlier date was the lunar, a sailor's yearly wages would be equal to £39 now. The year's pay of an A.B., 'non-continuous service,' as Elizabeth's sailors were, is at the present time £24 6s. 8d. It is true that the sailor now can receive additional pay for good-conduct badges, gunnery-training, &c., and also can look forward to that immense boon—a pension—nearly, but thanks to Sir J. Hawkins and Drake's establishment of the 'Chatham Chest,' not quite unknown in the sixteenth century. Compared with the rate of wages ruling on shore, Elizabeth's seamen were paid highly. Mr. Hubert Hall states that for labourers 'the usual rate was 2d. or 3d. a day.' Ploughmen received a shilling a week. In these cases 'board' was also given. The sailor's pay was 5s. a week with board. Even compared with skilled labour on shore the sailor of the Armada epoch was well paid. Thorold Rogers gives, for 1588, the wages, without board, of carpenters and masons at 10d. and 1s. a day. A plumber's wages varied from 10-1/2d. to 1s.; but there is one case of a plumber receiving as much as 1s. 4d., which was probably for a single day. [Footnote 78: Mr. Halliday Sparling, in the article already referred to (p. 651), says twice; but Mr. Oppenheim seems to think that the first increase was before Elizabeth's accession.] Delay in the payment of wages was not peculiar to the Elizabethan system. It lasted very much longer, down to our own times in fact. In 1588 the seamen of the fleet were kept without their pay for several months. In the great majority of cases, and most likely in all, the number of these months was less than six. Even within the nineteenth century men-of-war's men had to wait for their pay for years. Commander C. N. Robinson, in his 'British Fleet,'[79] a book that ought to be in every Englishman's library, remarks: 'All through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the rule not to pay anybody until the end of the commission, and to a certain degree the practice obtained until some fifty years ago.' As to the nineteenth century, Lord Dundonald, speaking in Parliament, may be quoted. He said that of the ships on the East Indies station, the Centurion's men had been unpaid for eleven years; the Rattlesnake's for fourteen; the Fox's for fifteen. The Elizabethan practice compared with this will look almost precipitate instead of dilatory. To draw again on my personal experience, I may say that I have been kept without pay for a longer time than most of the people in Lord Howard's fleet, as, for the first two years that I was at sea, young officers were paid only once in six months; and then never in cash, but always in bills. The reader may be left to imagine what happened when a naval cadet tried to get a bill for some £7 or £8 cashed at a small Spanish-American port. |
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