We enter now on the fateful reign of Queen Elizabeth. The condition of England at its opening after the previous years of misgovernment was most unpromising. Wrenched from its moorings by the Reformation, the country had been tossed about by a hurricane of religious fanaticism, which, working round through all points of the compass, had left her helpless and bewildered, uncertain by which course to steer or for what port to make head. Elizabeth was by political exigency rather than religious conviction a Protestant, but her great object in life was to sail, if she could, clear of the circular storm and lie outside it. The design was an impossible one, and her obstinate persistence therein went near to bring England to utter ruin, but in the extremely difficult position wherein she found herself on her accession to the throne she had much excuse for a tortuous policy. The finance was in hopeless disorder, and the realm through long neglect virtually defenceless. There was no discipline in such forces as the country could raise; and the military stores, which her father had taken such pains to collect, appear to have perished. The French were in Scotland in considerable force, and, as the Council pointed out, France was a state military, while England was established for peace. There in reality lay the kernel of the whole matter. England was behind all Europe in military efficiency, and all Europe was keenly alive to the fact.

The situation was so desperate that heroic measures,[128] however distasteful to the Queen from their expense, were inevitable. Arms were purchased hastily in vast quantities in Flanders, the forces of the shire were called out, and Elizabeth exercised in St. James\' Park with fourteen hundred men of the trained-bands, who had been equipped by the city with caliver, pike, and halberd. But up in the north, the loyalty of the troops was doubtful, and their discipline more doubtful still. Fraud again was rife among the officers. The landsknechts during their stay had set the fashion of extravagance in clothing, and some captains, as it was quaintly said, carried twenty to forty soldiers in their hose. Thus, though the muster-rolls of the army in Scotland showed eight thousand men for whom the Queen paid wages, but five thousand were actually with the colours, and the pay of the remaining three thousand went of course into the captains\' pockets. This state of things was put down with a strong hand by special Commissioners, and the little army round Leith became orderly and efficient; but corruption had sunk so deep that it had eaten its way even among the officials of the ordnance at the Tower of London.

The French, however, were in due time compelled to evacuate Scotland, and the danger in the north ceased to be pressing. There was, however, constant trouble in Ireland; and to provide the necessary troops to keep it in order, resort was made to an instrument of which we shall hear much in the years that follow, namely, the press-gang. None the less the revelations discovered by the war in Scotland prompted Cecil to require a report from the magistrates all over England as to the condition of the population and the working of the statutes enacted for national defence. The answer was by no means complimentary to the influence of the Reformation, nor encouraging in respect of military efficiency. The people, reported the magistrates, were no longer trained to the use of arms, because the gentlemen no longer set them the example. In plain words the old system of the fyrd, a people in arms,[129] was obsolete. Not one but many causes had conspired to make it so. The country was passing through a social as well as a religious revolution; old landmarks were vanishing, old customs dying out; and the loss of the old faith had become to many an excuse for disburdening themselves of every irksome duty. Again, Calais was lost, and though there were still vague hopes that it might yet be regained, England was now strictly insular and France was closed as a field of national adventure. The people had awaked to the fact that their heritage was the sea; and the life of the corsair, free, stirring, lucrative, and dangerous, appealed powerfully to a race at once adventurous and grasping, energetic and casual, bold and born gamblers.

Moreover, the national weapon, the long-bow, and the tactics that went with it, were things of the past, while the new arms were at once distasteful and costly, and in the unsettled state of the country not to be trusted in every man\'s hand. The whole business of war, too, was becoming difficult and elaborate, and was passing through transitions too rapid to permit it to be learned once for all. Military training no longer consisted in friendly matches at the archery butts, but in precise movements of drill and man?uvre, unwelcome alike because their advantages were unrecognised, and because they could no longer be learned from the old masters. The acknowledged leaders in hundred and parish and shire gave place to experts trained in foreign schools, men who swaggered about in plumed hats and velvet doublets and extravagant hose, swearing strange oaths of mingled blasphemy taught by Spanish Catholics and Lutheran landsknechts, and prating of besonios and alferez, of camp-masters and rote-masters, of furriers and huren-weibels, of false brays, mines and countermines, in one long insolent crow of military superiority. Such instructors were not likely to soften the painful lesson that war had become a profession, and could no longer be tacked on as a mere appendage to the everyday life of the citizen.

Now, therefore, if ever, was the time for the establishment of a standing army in England. She was menaced by foreign enemies on all sides, and in perpetual peril of intestine insurrection. There was unceasing trouble in Ireland, and eternal anxiety on the Scottish border. The forces of the shires had been proved to be worthless, and the service was not only inefficient but unpopular; the people came unwillingly to the muster, and would gladly have paid to be relieved of the burden. Great results would have followed from the institution of a standing force; order would have been maintained at home; interposition in foreign affairs would have had redoubled weight; untold expense through unreadiness, knavery, and inefficiency would have been spared; and finally, the British Army would have grown up to be honoured as a great national possession, called into existence to stave off a great national peril, instead of to be abused as an instrument of tyranny, and to be condemned to a blighting heritage of jealousy and suspicion.

But Elizabeth would have none of such things. She refused, to her credit, to employ foreign mercenaries, and by breaking off that evil tradition did lasting good. But she was incapable of living except from hand to mouth. She hated straight dealing for its simplicity; she hated conviction for its certainty; above all she hated war for its expense. She loved her money as herself, and to these twain she would sacrifice alike the most faithful servant and the most friendly State. She was so mean and dishonest in defrauding even such troops as she employed of their due, that no one seems to have dared even to hint to her the expediency of keeping a standing army. It may be urged that this was well for the liberties of England, but, on the other hand, it went near to destroy them altogether; and, after all, a standing army did not save either James the Second of England or Louis the Sixteenth of France. The people of England, however, saw more clearly[131] than their tricky inconstant Queen, and made good her delinquencies in their own way.

The French had not long evacuated Scotland when the desperate condition of the Protestants in France forced the Prince of Condé to offer Elizabeth Havre and Dieppe as pledges for the restoration of the lost Calais, if she would send him money and men. Elizabeth consented; and seven or eight thousand men were despatched to garrison these two ports. Five hundred of them, English and Scots, at once volunteered to cut their way into Rouen, which was closely besieged by Guise, and fell at the capture of the town, fighting desperately till they were cut down almost to a man. These volunteers should be remembered, for they cleared the ground for the foundation-stone of the British Army, English and Scots fighting side by side for the Protestant cause in a foreign land. The remaining troops were, as was inevitable under the parsimonious rule of Elizabeth, ill-equipped and ill-provided, a miserable contrast to the armies of the Plantagenets, and a shameful example which has been followed only too faithfully since. War between France and England at once broke out in earnest, and the garrison of Havre required reinforcement. No troops of course were ready, and it was necessary to raise recruits in a hurry. The prison doors were opened; the gaols were swept clean; robbers, highwaymen, and cut-purses, the sweepings of the nation, were driven into the ranks; and a second evil precedent, companion to the press-gang, was set for the misleading of England the Unready. None the less these poor men fought gallantly enough against the besieging French, until the plague suddenly broke out among them; and then they went down like flies. Between the 7th and 30th of June the effective strength of the garrison of Havre sank from seven thousand to three thousand men. More men were hurried across the channel to perish with them, but the waste was greater than the repair, and in another fortnight but fifteen hundred of the[132] whole force were left. Further requests for men and arms were met by the despatch of raw boys and of all the worn-out ordnance in the Tower—"The worst of everything is thought good enough for this place," wrote the General, Lord Warwick, in the bitterness of his soul—and finally after a grand defence Havre was surrendered.

Nevertheless, little or nothing was done to make good defects in the years that followed. The dishonesty of the officers and the indiscipline of the men in Ireland was past all belief; but it was only with extreme difficulty that Elizabeth was induced to remedy the evil, which brought untold misery and oppression upon the forlorn Irish, by the simple process of paying her soldiers their wages. It was not until 1567, when the movements of Philip the Second gave the alarm of invasion, that a corps of arquebusiers, four thousand strong, was formed for the defence of the coast towns from Newcastle to Plymouth, and prizes were given for the encouragement of marksmanship with the new weapon. Even so, practice with the bow was still enjoined upon the villagers, as though no better arm could be discovered for them.[116]

Then came the rebellion, which but narrowly missed a most serious character, of the Catholic nobility in the North. Disloyalty was widespread in Yorkshire, and it was proverbial that the Yorkshire levies would not move without pay; but Elizabeth was too economical to send the train-bands from London to nip the insurrection in the bud, and only at the last moment consented to provide money for the payment of the troops on the spot. The difficulties of the commanders were frightful. The numbers that came to muster were far short of the true complement; horsemen were hardly to be obtained by any shift, and the footmen that presented themselves came with bows and bills only, there being but sixty firearms, and not a single pike, among two thousand five hundred infantry. The[133] rebels, on the other hand, were very well equipped, and had a force of cavalry armed after the newest pattern of the Reiters. "If we had but a thousand horse with pistols and lances, five hundred pikes and as many arquebuses," wrote Elizabeth\'s commanders, "we should soon despatch the matter"; but even so trifling a contingent as this could not be produced except after infinite difficulty and delay.[117]

For all this Elizabeth was responsible; but the peril was so great that it stirred even her avaricious soul. From this year bows and bills began slowly to make way for pikes and firearms; and a manuscript treatise in the State Papers shows that the reform was brought under the immediate notice of the Royal Council.[118]

An alarm of invasion by the French in the following year led also to a general stirring of the sluggish forces of the shire. The French ambassador reported that one hundred and twenty thousand men could take the field in different parts of the country; and the muster-rolls showed the incredible total of close on six hundred thousand men. Yet when we look into these muster-rolls we find simply a list of able-bodied men and of serviceable arms in each shire without attempt at organisation. In truth, throughout the long reign of Elizabeth we feel that in military matters one effort and one only is at work, namely, in Carlyle\'s words, to stretch the old formula to cover the new fact, to botch and patch and strain the antiquated web woven by the Statute of Winchester and newly dyed by the Statute of ............