vessels used for war in those days had been built for merchantmen, served as merchantmen in peace-time, belonged to merchants, and were manned by persons nominally in the pay of merchants. The connection between the navy and the general mercantile prosperity of the country was consequently very intimate. If the merchants were discontented, the navy was apt to be inclined to disaffection; and, under Henry V. and Henry VI., the merchants of England were nearly ruined. Indeed, it was said that the frequent and often unreasonably protracted arrests of shipping, the undue favour accorded to foreigners, and the heavy exactions of various kinds, brought about such a decline of commerce that the people became poorer than they had ever been within the memory of persons then living. The natural course of trade was interfered with; as, for example, by Henry VI., who, not satisfied with mortgaging the customs of London and Southampton to the Cardinal of Winchester, engaged by indenture to turn sea-borne commerce chiefly to those ports. And the security of personal property was outraged by the same king, when, in his thirty-first year, he seized all the tin at Southampton, and sold it for his own purposes. The business that drifted away from the merchants of England fell into the hands first of those of the Hanse Towns,[1] and then of those of Italy;[2] and as the commercial classes, probably with good reason, imagined that the transfer was aided by the corrupt intrigues of the Court and particularly by those of Queen Margaret of Anjou, they were not slow to welcome the Yorkists, among whose professed principles were the encouragement of trade, the revival of the navy, and distrust of foreigners.
And, indeed, the navy sadly needed revival, for the fleet had practically ceased to exist. Under Henry VI., one of the first orders of the Council[3] had directed the sale of most of it, apparently to pay the late king's debts. How little of national feeling there was in the land, and how entirely the navy was regarded as the personal possession of the sovereign, will appear from the fact that the Council parted from the fleet without a qualm, and that the people quietly suffered the iniquity. For the two years ending August 31st, 1439, the whole outlay on the Royal Navy was only £8 9s. 7d.
After the sale of the navy, the police of the Narrow Seas, so far
