Spain suffered a good deal by this continuous raiding.  So did the Netherlands.  But such was the power of Charles that, although his navies were much weaker than his armies, he yet was able to fight by sea on two enormous fronts, first, in the Mediterranean against the Turks and other Moslems, secondly, in the Channel and along the coast, all the way from Antwerp to Cadiz.  Nor did the left arm of his power stop there; for his fleets, his transports, and his merchantmen ranged the coasts of both Americas from one side of the present United States right round to the other.

Such, in brief, was the position of maritime Europe when Henry found himself menaced by the three Roman Catholic powers of Scotland, France, and Spain.  In 1533 he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, thereby defying the Pope and giving offence to Spain.  He had again defied the Pope by suppressing the monasteries and severing the Church of England from the Roman discipline.  The Pope had struck back with a bull of excommunication designed to make Henry the common enemy of Catholic Europe.

Henry had been steadily building ships for years.  Now he redoubled his activity.  He blooded the fathers of his daughter’s sea-dogs by smashing up a pirate fleet and sinking a flotilla of Flemish privateers.  The mouth of the Scheldt, in 1539, was full of vessels ready to take a hostile army into England.  But such a fighting fleet prepared to meet them that Henry’s enemies forbore to strike.

In 1539, too, came the discovery of the art of tacking, by Fletcher of Rye, Henry’s shipwright friend, a discovery forever memorable in the annals of seamanship.  Never before had any kind of craft been sailed a single foot against the wind.  The primitive dugout on which the prehistoric savage hoisted the first semblance of a sail, the ships of Tarshish, the Roman transport in which St. Paul was wrecked, and the Spanish caravels with which Columbus sailed to worlds unknown, were, in principle of navigation, all the same.  But now Fletcher ran out his epoch-making vessel, with sails trimmed fore and aft, and dumbfounded all the shipping in the Channel by beating his way to windward against a good stiff breeze.  This achievement marked the dawn of the modern sailing age.

And so it happened that in 1545 Henry, with a new-born modern fleet, was able to turn defiantly on Francis.  The English people rallied magnificently to his call.  What was at that time an enormous army covered the lines of advance on London.  But the fleet, though employing fewer men, was relatively a much more important force than the army; and with the fleet went Henry’s own headquarters.  His lifelong interest in his navy now bore the first-fruits of really scientific sea power on an oceanic scale.  There was no great naval battle to fix general attention on one dramatic moment.  Henry’s strategy and tactics, however, were new and full of promise.  He repeated his strategy of the previous war by sending out a strong