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 conclusion.  He tried to revive lawful trade by a Navigation Act.  He tried to restore the fisheries by Act of Parliament.  He introduced a Bill recommending godly abstinence as a means to virtue, making the eating of meat on Fridays and Saturdays a misdemeanour, and adding Wednesday as a half fish-day.  The House of Commons laughed at him as bringing back Popish mummeries.  To please the Protestants he inserted a clause, that the statute was politicly meant for the increase of fishermen and mariners, not for any superstition in the choice of meats; but it was no use.  The Act was called in mockery ‘Cecil’s Fast,’ and the recovery of the fisheries had to wait till the natural inclination of human stomachs for fresh whiting and salt cod should revive of itself.