[2] Of the remaining seven articles, five relate to distinguishing squadronal flags and lights as in the earlier instructions, and the last one to the Watchword of the night.  It is to be ‘God save King Henry,’ and the answer, ‘And long to reign over us.’

PART II

ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN

SIR WALTER RALEGH, 1617

THE ELIZABETHAN ORIGIN OF RALEGH’S INSTRUCTIONS

INTRODUCTORY

No fighting instructions known to have been issued in the reign of Elizabeth have been found, nor is there any indication that a regular order of battle was ever laid down by the seamen-admirals of her time.[1] Even Howard’s great fleet of 1588 had twice been in action with the Armada before it was so much as organised into squadrons.  If anything of the kind was introduced later in her reign Captain Nathaniel Boteler, who had served in the Jacobean navy and wrote on the subject early in the reign of Charles I, was ignorant of it.  In his Dialogues about Sea Services, he devotes the sixth to ‘Ordering of Fleets in Sailing, Chases, Boardings and Battles,’ but although he suggests a battle order which we know was never put in practice, he is unable to give one that had been used by an English fleet.[2] It is not surprising.  In the despatches of the Elizabethan admirals, though they have much to say on strategy, there is not a word of fleet-tactics, as we understand the thing.  The domination of the seamen’s idea of naval warfare, the increasing handiness of ships, the improved design of their batteries, the special progress made by Englishmen in guns and gunnery led rapidly to the preference of broadside gunfire over boarding, and to an exaggeration of the value of individual mobility; and the old semi-military formations based on small-arm fighting were abandoned.

At the same time, although the seamen-admirals did not trouble or were not sufficiently advanced to devise a battle order to suit their new weapon, there are many indications that, consciously or unconsciously, they developed a tendency inherent in the broadside idea to fall in action into a rough line ahead; that is to say, the practice was usually to break up into groups as occasion dictated, and for each group to deliver its broadsides in succession on an exposed point of the enemy’s formation.  That the armed merchantmen conformed regularly to this idea is very improbable.  The faint pictures we have of their well-meant efforts present them to us attacking in a loose throng and masking each other’s fire.  But that the queen’s ships did not attempt to observe any order is not so clear.  When the combined fleet of Howard and Drake was first sighted by the Armada, it is said by two Spanish eye-witnesses to have been in ala, and ’in very fine order.’  And the second of Adams’s charts, upon which