To men accustomed to the licence of the French wars, this doubtless appeared a very impotent form of retaliation. But they soon had occasion to change their minds. A violent storm burst upon them, apparently, since it swept them out of the Channel, from the east or north-east. To lighten the ships, these savages threw overboard all the women they had carried to sea. The danger might have been avoided if Arundel had listened to the advice of his sailing-master, John Rust, a sailor of the now very much decayed little town of Blakeney in Norfolk, who warned him that a gale was coming on. But Arundel, though a good soldier, as he showed when defending Southampton in 1377, was neither a seaman himself, nor sufficiently a man of sense to listen to those who were. Having first incurred disaster by his obstinacy, Arundel sealed his own fate by persisting in again overriding the opinion of Rust. He had been driven to within sight of the coast of Ireland, and, in his frantic desire to escape the misery of his position on shipboard, insisted that an attempt should be made to land. It was in vain that the sailors pointed out to him that it was far safer to keep at sea. In an explosion of sheer fury, largely excited, we may presume, by fear, Arundel killed some of them. Then Rust and the others made the hopeless attempt to land the madman whom they had the misfortune to be compelled to obey. Seeing a small island near the coast, the sailing-master attempted to get under its lee, but found the water too broken. Then, as a last resource, he tried to beach the ship, but she struck on the rocks, and went to pieces. Arundel, to whom every opportunity seems to have been given by fate to display his folly, was one of those who contrived to reach the shore. He might have escaped if he had not stood within reach of the waves, shaking the water out of his clothes. Rust, who had also come through alive, seeing his peril, ran forward to drag him back, and both were beaten down and dragged under by the next wave. An uncertain number of other vessels, with many knights and men-at-arms, perished in the same disaster. This may stand as sufficient example of what was possible when the brutality of the Middle Ages coincided with the licence of the sea. We may hope that the details of the story were heightened in the telling, but there is no reasonable ground to doubt its substantial truth, and the mere fact that such a tale could be told shows what was believed to be possible. CHAPTER I THE NAVY OF THE TUDORS TILL THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH