not to be tempted to put himself at a disadvantage. Indeed, the plan was rather a futile one, which it hardly needed any great display of skill on the part of the English admiral to defeat. The galleys were not able to face the king's ships when any wind was blowing. They were very lightly built, and carried only one gun in the bow. If the English ships were able to manœuvre, they could either overpower their enemy by the fire of their broadsides, or, better still, run into them and sink them. Such a vessel as the Great Harry running before a good breeze would probably have gone over a galley without suffering any material damage herself. Therefore the vessels sent by D'Annebault could not, without extreme rashness, come within striking distance of the English fleet, except in a dead calm. When, however, the weather was of this kind, the English ships were unable to move, and could not sail into the French fleet even if they had been disposed to do so. The fight, then, between the two resolved itself into something like this. During the calm hours of the morning, the Baron de la Garde and his colleague Strozzi, the Prior of Capua (the same who afterwards took the castle of St. Andrews from the Scotch Reformers, and had John Knox for his prisoner), came near enough to Lisle's ships to open an exasperating fire. So long as the wind did not get up, the English vessels lay helpless, and could only reply to the fire of their enemy with the few guns they could bring to bear. In such a case, the galleys at all times took care, as far as possible, to station themselves right ahead or else astern of their opponent, in order to avoid the fire of the broadside, though this, considering the rude gunnery of the early sixteenth century, was almost an excessive precaution, since the narrow, low-lying galley, when end on, must have presented a mark much more likely to be missed than to be hit. When the breeze got up, the English ships stood toward the enemy, who thereupon incontinently fled, and was not followed for any considerable distance. This moment was dangerous for him, for if he did not turn quick enough and get away before the English were quite close, he was likely to suffer very severely, for the galleys carried no guns astern. La Garde and the Prior of Capua were expert officers, and when, after some hours of long bowls, the wind got up and the English ships began to bear down, they extricated themselves very smartly from danger.
The first day having thus passed in a species of fighting which might have been prolonged for weeks with little material damage to either side, the French went on for a second, but not apparently for a third day. Yet, on this occasion, they were encouraged by the conviction that they had really inflicted a severe loss on the English fleet. There had been a loss, but it was due, unless all contemporary Englishmen were in a conspiracy to conceal the truth, to something more discreditable to us than the enemy's cannon. The king's ship, the Mary Rose, had been thrown away by pure mismanagement. This was the vessel so ardently praised by Sir Edward Howard in the words quoted already. She capsized as she was coming out of Portsmouth harbour, owing, as it would seem, partly to defects in her construction, partly to neglect of precautions on the part of her crew. The lower-deck ports are said to have been only sixteen inches above the water-line, which is certainly dangerously low. As her crew were tacking her, or altering her course in some other way, she heeled over. If the ports had been shut and the guns made fast, no great harm might have followed, but the ports were open and the guns cast loose. When the water rushed in, the additional weight caused the vessel, overburdened as she was with the weight of her fore and after castles, to heel still further, and then the unfastened guns fell in a rush on the lee-side, probably breaking through wherever they fell against the planking. The Mary Rose filled and sank with such amazing rapidity, that of the 400 soldiers and 200 sailors, more or less, who formed her crew, not more than 40 were saved.
The pardonable conviction that they were entitled to credit themselves with the destruction of the Mary Rose had no very inspiriting influence on the French. M. d'Annebault even gave up making any further attacks to draw the English ships out by the use of his galleys, and adopted the alternative course of landing small parties of men in St. Helens Bay, at Shanklin, and the Blackgang Chine, for the purpose of plundering the country. None of these landing-parties seem to have been of any strength, and several of them were roughly handled by the militia of the island. D'Annebault has been severely criticised by his countrymen for want of energy, and on the whole with justice. He excused himself, partly by pleading that if he had landed a great number of men, he would have so weakened his fleet that the English at Portsmouth could have fallen upon him with every prospect of success, and partly by the opinion of a council of war. The first of these excuses is very lame, for at a later period D'Annebault could afford to put four thousand men on shore in France, and yet be strong enough to give battle to Lisle at Shoreham. He could certainly have landed three thousand in the Isle of Wight, and if he had done so he might have retaliated very severely for the damage done by the English in France, while the ships at Portsmouth must have incurred deep discredit if they had lain idle while the houses of their countrymen were being burned before their eyes. The council of war is only technically a better excuse. He did indeed call a council of all the pilots in his fleet, to ask them whether it was possible to attack the English at Portsmouth with success. The pilots, as might have been expected, magnified the dangers and the difficulties—the shoals, the narrowness of the entry, the currents, the tides, the risk that the first vessels entering would be overpowered, and block the way for those following, the chance that a ship anchoring in a tideway would swing stern-on to the English fire, and, in short, all the topics of dissuasion which are usually advanced by subordinates on such occasions. If the expert knowledge of pilots had been listened to by Nelson, he would never have fought the battle of the Baltic. Fortunately for King Henry VIII., D'Annebault does not seem to have reflected that you can hardly hope to inflict serious injury upon an enemy who possesses some effective strength, except at the very serious risk of being hurt yourself. He wanted, to judge by his actions, to win without running any serious risk; and as the enemy with whom he had to deal was not one likely to give him a victory upon these easy terms, he had finally to retire without delivering an effective stroke. His timidity and want of resource are strikingly illustrated by the fact that he made no use of his galleys for the purpose of towing his great ships into Spithead, which they could easily have done. On the other hand, it must be confessed that no very great enterprise was shown by the English in the use of their own row-boats. We neither hear of them as being employed to tow the big ships into action, nor of any really serious attack made by them upon the galleys. Perhaps the fate of Sir Edward Howard was too fresh in the recollections of our officers to allow of any repetition of his attempt in Conquet Bay.
Whether any considerable number of men were either killed or wounded in these very languid operations is doubtful, but both fleets certainly lost heavily from a cause which, throughout the whole of this and the following two centuries, was far more destructive than the sword. Hardly had King Henry VIII. left Portsmouth when his generals began to report to him the prevalence of sickness in his fleet; while the plague broke out amongst the French at St. Helens, even if it had not begun before they left Havre. Overcrowding, dirt, and salt food were universal in old fleets, and they produced their natural effects. We are probably well within the mark in supposing that for every man killed in action, or mortally wounded, fifty died of fever or the plague, and this continued to be the rule until well past the middle of the eighteenth century. What between disappointment at the obstinacy of the English in not fighting him on his own terms, the timidity of his pilots, and want of enterprise, D'Annebault, after spending several days in this futile manner, sailed away from St. Helens, coasting along Sussex, and making, as before, small plundering attacks, which even seem to have been very badly conducted, and could in any case serve no purpose except to embitter the already sufficiently savage hostility of the two countries. After a few days of this, he stood over to the coast of France, and near Boulogne landed not only four thousand soldiers, but three thousand pioneers, who had been supplied to him for the purpose of erecting the fortifications in the Isle of Wight. Even after this he still thought himself sufficiently strong to return to the English coast, and he reappeared accordingly in a few days.
On their return to the coast of England, the French made no attempt to renew the attack on the Isle of Wight. They prowled along the shores of Sussex and of Kent in what reads like a very aimless manner. If they had any definite object, it was to prevent the English from sending reinforcements to Boulogne. On the whole, it does appear likely that they had some such purpose, for the general direction of their cruise was towards the narrow seas. So soon as they were relieved from their fears at Portsmouth,
