“There can be no doubt,” the historian remarks, “that the organization and discipline of English troops were in anything but a satisfactory state at that period.”—­“The soldiers required shoes and stockings, bread and meat, and for those articles there were not the necessary funds.”—­“There came no penny of treasure over.”—­“There is much still due.  They cannot get a penny, their credit is spent, they perish for want of victuals and clothing in great numbers.  The whole are ready to mutiny.”—­“There was no soldier yet able to buy himself a pair of hose, and it is too, too great shame to see how they go, and it kills their hearts to show themselves among men.”—­These “poor subjects were no better than abjects,” said the Lieutenant-General.  “There is but a small number of the first bands left,” said another,—­“and those so pitiful and unable to serve again as I leave to speak further of them, to avoid grief to your heart.  A monstrous fault there hath been somewhere.”  Of what nature the “monstrous fault” was we may conjecture from the language of the Commander-in-Chief.  “There can be no doubt of our driving the enemy out of the country through famine and excessive charges, if every one of us will put our minds to forward, without making a miserable gain by the wars.” (We give the Italics as we find them in the text.) He believed that much of the work might be speedily done; for he “would undertake to furnish from hence, upon two months’ warning, a navy for strong and tall ships, with their furniture and mariners.”

In the mean time “there was a whisper of peace-overtures,” “rumors which, whether true or false, were most pernicious in their effects”; for “it was war, not peace,” that the despot “intended,” and the “most trusty counsellors [of England] knew to be inevitable.”  Worse than this, there was treachery of the most dangerous kind.  “Take heed whom you trust,” said the brother of the Commander-in-Chief to him; “for that you have some false boys about you.”  In fact, “many of those nearest his person and of highest credit out of England were his deadly foes, sworn to compass his dishonor, his confusion, and eventually his death, and in correspondence with his most powerful adversaries at home and abroad.”

It was a sad state of things.  The General “was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops.”  “Swaggering ruffians from the disreputable haunts of London” “were not the men to be intrusted with the honor of England at a momentous crisis.”  “Our simplest men in show have been our best men, and your gallant blood and ruffian men the worst of all others.” (The Italics again are the author’s.) Yet, said the muster-master, “there is good hope that his Excellency will shortly establish such good order for the government and training of our nation, that these weak, badly furnished, ill-armed, and worse trained bands, thus rawly left unto him, shall within a few months prove as well armed, complete, gallant companies as shall be found elsewhere in Europe.”