e that, even had she wished to, she could not possibly
have made any money out of bad provisions. The victualling system
did not permit of her doing so. The austere republican virtue of
the Commonwealth authorities enabled them to do what was out of
Elizabeth's power. In 1653, 'beer and other provisions "decayed
and unfit for use" were licensed for export free of Customs.' Mr.
Oppenheim, who reports this fact, makes the remarkable comment
that this was done 'perhaps in the hope that such stores would
go to Holland,' with whose people we were at war. As the heavy
mortality in the navy had always been ascribed to the use of bad
provisions, we cannot refuse to give to the sturdy Republicans
who governed England in the seventeenth century the credit of
contemplating a more insidious and more effective method of damaging
their enemy than poisoning his wells. One would like to have it
from some jurist if the sale of poisonously bad food to your
enemy is disallowed by international law.

That there was much sickness in the fleet and that many seamen died
is, unfortunately, true. If Howard's evidence is to be accepted--as
it always is when it seems to tell against the Queen--it is
impossible to attribute this to the bad quality of the food then
supplied. The Lord Admiral's official report is 'that the ships
of themselves be so infectious and corrupted as it is thought to
be a very plague; and we find that the fresh men that we draw
into our ships are infected one day and die the next.' The least
restrained assertor of the 'poisonous' food theory does not contend
that it killed men within twenty-four hours. The Armada reached
the Channel on the 20th of July (30th, New Style). A month earlier
Howard had reported that 'several men have fallen sick and by
thousands fain to be discharged'; and, after the fighting was
over, he said of the _Elizabeth_Jonas_, she 'hath had a great
infection in her from the beginning.' Lord Henry Seymour, who
commanded the division of the fleet stationed in the Straits
of Dover, noted that the sickness was a repetition of that of
the year before, and attributed it not to bad food, but to the
weather. 'Our men,' he wrote, 'fall sick by reason of the cold
nights and cold mornings we find; and I fear me they will drop
away faster than they did last year with Sir Henry Palmer, which
was thick enough.'

'The sickness,' says Professor Laughton, 'was primarily and chiefly
due to infection from the shore an