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.’