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DISCONTENT AT THE PEACE.

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walls, and see where they might be easiest assaulted. Some of the French sallied and surrounded him; Risely escaped by flight; but Savage, "of his high courage, disdained to be taken of such villains," and, defending himself to the last, perished through his own wilfulness. Before the peace was concluded, Henry thought it prudent that some of his best captains should advise him to it, "under their hands, in an earnest manner, in the nature of a supplication." The feint of the siege had been carried farther than he had expected, owing to the length of time employed upon the treaty; so that the town was distressed, and might have been assaulted: but, in the chronicler's words, "when every man was prest and ready to give the assault, a sudden rumour rose that peace was concluded; which fruit, as it was pleasant and mellifluous to the Frenchmen, so it was to the English bitter, sour, and dolorous; because they were ready at all times to set on their enemies, and refused never to attempt any enterprise which might seem to be either for their laud or profit. They were in great fumes, angry and evil content, railing and murmuring among themselves, that the occasion of so glorious a victory to them manifestly offered, was, by certain conditions, to no man, nor yet to the king, commodious or profitable, refused, put by, and shamefully slacked. But above all, other divers lords and captains, encouraged with desire of fame and honour, trusting in this journey to have won their spurs, who, to set themselves and their band the more gorgeously forward, had borrowed money, and for the repayment of the same had mortgaged their lands and possessions, sore grudged and lamented the sudden peace, and return of them unthought of, and spake largely against the king's doings, saying that he, as a man fearing the puissance of his enemies, had concluded an inconvenient peace, without cause or reason.'" But he, like a wise prince, represented what bloodshed and loss both of captains and soldiers must of necessity have ensued at the assault of such a place, so well furnished with men and munitions.

And he made it appear that the peace was no less to the honour of the English nation, than to its profit; for the French were to pay 745,000 ducats for the costs of the expedition, and 25,000 crowns yearly for the charges sustained in aid of the Bretons; and it was left somewhat indefinite when the payment was to determine, and this made the English esteem it, as a tribute carried under fair terms.

*

Rich presents were made by the French king to all Henry's principal counsellors, and large pensions assigned them, which, "whether the king did permit to save his own purse from rewards, or to communicate the envy of a business that was displeasing to his people, was diversely interpreted." His costs in the expedition were repaid, but that repayment went into his coffers; and they who had contributed to the general outfit by the forced benevolence, or who had embarrassed themselves by the expense incurred on their own, stuck not to say that the king was willing enough to pluck his nobility and his people for the sake of feathering himself. Some made themselves merry with what he had declared in parliament, "that after the war was once begun, he doubted not but to make it pay itself:" he had kept promise, they said. From Calais Henry wrote letters to the lord mayor and aldermen "(which was a courtesy that he sometimes used), half bragging what great sums he had obtained for the peace, as knowing well that it was ever good news in London that the king's coffers were full: better news it would have been," says the great historian of this reign, "if their benevolence had been but a loan."* The peace was for the two kings' lives.

No attempt had been made to oppose the passage of the English army in ths invasion, nor to interrupt its communications with England: but the fleet had been annoyed by a set of homebred marauders, and the robberies and murders which these wretches committed were so frequent, and the scandal so great, that strict orders

* Hall, 458, 459. Holinshed, 502, 503. Bacon, 273. + Bacon, 274.

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were given to proceed against and punish them; and Robert Willoughby de Broke was appointed marshal of the fleet, with full powers for this purpose.* Where there are facilities for entering upon such a course of life, piracy will always be a tempting and a frequent crime †, because it may be committed with so little danger of detection: it was punished, therefore, severely at this time, when the maritime states were sensible how much they were dependent upon commerce for their strength. A large ship's crew of Easterling pirates was A. D. circumvented and taken in the Meuse; they were all 1471. beheaded, and their bodies exposed upon wheels, upon the highest ridges of the sand-hills along the coast. Two freebooters, Pining and Pothorst by name, who had been banished from some of the Baltic states, collected a body of outlaws, and took possession of a high and rocky island, which is called Huitsark, and described as half-way between Iceland and Greenland; from thence, like the Vitalians, they infested the northern seas, till their depredations became so serious that all the states which suffered by them united for their 1494. destruction, and effected it.§ In the next generation, 1525. the Hamburghers captured a galleon of great strength, commanded by a pirate named Knipoff; and he and seventy of his men were put to death, and exposed upon the wheel.

The Scottish historians affirm, that the superiority of

* Rymer, xii. 485, 486. "Quidam miseri et vagabundi," they are called, "maligno spiriti seducti ;" and the crimes which they were daily committing were said not only to be in contempt of the king, but "in armatæ nostræ scandalum et infamiam."

A doubt occurs to me, while here writing from my notes, whether armata may not in this place be used, as it sometimes was by the French, to signify an army. Fleet is its more usual signification, and in that sense I understood it when the book was before me. At present I have no means of reconsulting it, and endeavouring to ascertain whether or not I was mistaken.

†The state of Greece, and still more of Spanish America, has rendered piracy more frequent at this time than it has ever been since the days of the Buccaneers: such are the consequences of exchanging even a bad government for anarchy. In a volume of sermons recently printed at Boston (in New England), the preacher warns his hearers against being enticed to commit robbery, either on the land or sea.

Oude Chronijcke van Holland, 494.

Olaus Magnus, p. 55.

|| Id. 56

their seamen over the English was signally manifested in Henry VII.'s reign. They say that five chosen ships of the royal navy infested the Firth of Forth, soon after the accession of James IV., and occasioned loud complaints by the frequent captures which they made at sea, and the ravages which they committed in their descents on the coast. At length, sir Andrew Wood, of Largo, whose loyalty to the late murdered king made him at this time a malecontent, was persuaded for the honour of his country to forego his just indignation, and act against these enemies. He was urged to attack them with a greater, or, at least, with an equal force; but he said that his own two ships were sufficient; and, indeed, when the Scottish nobles, after they had murdered their king, called upon the Leith captains and sailors to reduce this officer, they were told, in reply, "that no ten ships of Scotland would dare to assault Wood's two vessels; such was his strength in men and artillery, and such his maritime and military skill.”* The Flower and the Yellow Carvel were the names of his vessels with these he attacked the five English ships, which were lying off Dunbar, captured them all, brought them to Leith, and presented their commander to the king and council. † It is further added by Scottish historians, that Henry VII., mortified by this shameful defeat, and hoping to retrieve the honour of the English navy, assembled a council of his naval officers, and offered to put any means at the disposal of him who would undertake this service, promising great rewards if Wood were brought to him either alive or dead. All hesitated, because they feared to engage with such an antagonist; till at length sir Stephen Bull, a man of distinguished prowess, offered himself. Three ships, chosen from the royal navy, were placed under his command: with these he sailed to the Forth, and anchored behind the Isle of May, waiting Wood's return from

Pinkerton's Hist. of Scotland, ii. p. 3.

Ib. 14. Buchanan, xiii. s 2, 3.

This name occurs among the captains of the fleet under sir Edward Howard in 1512.

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Flanders, whither he had escorted some merchant vessels. Some fishermen were captured and detained, that by their look-out sir Andrew might be known: few days had passed before his vessels were seen coming by St. Ebb's Head, and the fishermen were set at liberty as soon as they had recognised them for sir Andrew's ships. It was early in the morning when the action began; the Scots, by their skilful manoeuvring, obtained the weather-gage, and the battle continued, in sight of innumerable spectators, who thronged the coast, till darkness suspended it. It was renewed at daybreak: the ships grappled; and both parties were so intent upon the struggle, that the tide carried them into the mouth of the Tay, into such shoal water, that the English seeing no means of extricating themselves surrendered. Sir Andrew brought his prizes to Dundee: the wounded were carefully tended there; and James, with royal magnanimity, is said to have sent both prisoners and ships to Henry, praising the courage which they had displayed, and saying that the contest was for honour, not for booty.*

The French paid little attention to their navy at this time, but they did not wholly neglect it, as the English had done during the civil wars and the dissolute reign A.D. of Edward IV. Louis XI. had a ship which was said 1475. to be the largest man-of-war that had ever been seen: it was of such force that it put a whole fleet of Hollanders

* Pinkerton, 15, 16. Buchanan, s. 6. There is no mention of either of these actions in any of the English historians; and Pinkerton who says that this silence will excite little doubt "in those who know the tame and meagre information presented by the original historians of England at this period," admits that Lindsay, whose narration he follows," appears to have amplified these incidents" by his partiality., There can be no doubt of this. The "royal navy," was in no state at that time to have employed five chosen ships upon such a service; and the chroniclers were neither likely to have overlooked actions in themselves so remarkable, nor to have dissembled them, because the event had not been honourable to the English arms. They were too honest for this, and the nation was too brave to require any such concealment; and, undoubtedly, these circumstances would have been referred to, as enhancing the triumph when sir Andrew Barton was defeated. The story of the naval council I take to be mere fiction; and suppose that the five vessels captured in the first action belonged to private adventurers, and their loss of so little import to any but the parties concerned, that Hall, if he ever heard of it, did not think it worth recording.

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