boatmen forsook nets
and lines and took to livelier occupations; Mary was too busy burning
heretics to look to the police of the seas; her father's fine ships
rotted in harbour; her father's coast-forts were deserted or dismantled;
she lost Calais; she lost the hearts of her people in forcing them into
orthodoxy; she left the seas to the privateers; and no trade flourished,
save what the Catholic Powers called piracy.

When Elizabeth came to the throne, the whole merchant navy of England
engaged in lawful commerce amounted to no more than 50,000 tons. You may
see more now passing every day through the Gull Stream. In the service
of the Crown there were but seven revenue cruisers in commission, the
largest 120 tons, with eight merchant brigs altered for fighting. In
harbour there were still a score of large ships, but they were
dismantled and rotting; of artillery fit for sea work there was none.
The men were not to be had, and, as Sir William Cecil said, to fit out
ships without men was to set armour on stakes on the seashore. The
mariners of England were otherwise engaged, and in a way which did not
please Cecil. He was the ablest minister that Elizabeth had. He saw at
once that on the navy the prosperity and even the liberty of England
must eventually depend. If England were to remain Protestant, it was not
by articles of religion or acts of uniformity that she could be saved
without a fleet at the back of them. But he was old-fashioned. He
believed in law and order, and he has left a curious paper of
reflections on the situation. The ships' companies in Henry VIII.'s days
were recruited from the fishing-smacks, but the Reformation itself had
destroyed the fishing trade. In old times, Cecil said, no flesh was
eaten on fish days. The King himself could not have license. Now to eat
beef or mutton on fish days was the test of a true believer. The English
Iceland fishery used to supply Normandy and Brittany as well as England.
Now it had passed to the French. The Chester men used to fish the Irish
seas. Now they had left them to the Scots. The fishermen had taken to
privateering because the fasts of the Church were neglected. He saw it
was so. He recorded his own opinion that piracy, as he called it, was
_detestable_, and could not last. He was to find that it could last,
that it was to form the special discipline of the generation whose
business would be to fight the Spaniards. But he struggled hard against
the unwelcome