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 ElizabethJonas_, 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 Villede_Paris_ had 560 sick, and lost 61.  The Auguste had 500 sick, and lost 44.  On board the Intrepide 70 died out of 529 sick.  These were the worst cases; but other ships also suffered heavily.