Laerquerac, was captain of the Breton craft. On being arrested he stoutly denied that he had ever "spoiled" English ships. That was most certainly a bare-faced lie, and presently Peter Dromyowe, one of his own mariners, confessed that he himself had robbed one Englishman; whereupon Laerquerac made a confession that, as a matter of fact, he had taken ships' ropes, sailors' wearing apparel, five pieces of wine, a quantity of fish, a gold crown in money and eleven silver halfpence or pence, as well as four daggers and a "couverture"!
It was because the English merchants complained that they lost so much of their imports and exports by depredations from the ships of war belonging to Biscay, Spain, the Low Countries, Normandy, Brittany and elsewhere, that Henry VIII. had been prevailed upon to send Sir John Dudley, his Vice-Admiral, to sea with a small fleet of good ships. Dudley's orders were to cruise between the Downs on the east and St. Michael's Mount on the west—in other words, the whole length of the English Channel—according as the wind should serve. In addition, he was to stand off and on between Ushant and Scilly and so guard the entrance to the Channel. Furthermore, he was to look in at the Isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel—for both Lundy and the Scillies were famous pirate haunts—and after having so done he was to return and keep the narrow seas. Dudley was especially admonished to be on the look out to succour any English merchant ships, and should he meet with any foreign merchant craft which, under the pretence of trading, were actually robbing the King's subjects, he was to have these foreigners treated as absolute pirates and punished accordingly.
For the state of piracy had become so bad that the King "can no longer suffer it." So also Sir Thomas Dudley, as
