Could common prudence have allowed me to let loose their valour on the enemy, I hardly know what might not have been accomplished by such men.--Admiral Cornwallis, _June 17, 1795_. (From the official despatch.) Fighting days abound in the story of the _Royal Sovereign_. There is hardly a more famous name in the annals of the Royal Navy, and its record goes back to a hundred years before the Spanish Armada. Our first _Sovereign_ was one of the consorts of the _Great Harry_ in Henry the Eighth's Navy, and fought the French in battle side by side with that 'greate shipp.' The second was Charles the First's _Sovereign of the Seas_, built out of the ship-money tax which began the quarrel with Parliament that in the end brought the King's head to the block. 'Her building,' says Evelyn, 'cost his Ma'tie the affections of his subjects, who quarrell'd with him for a trifle, refusing to contribute either to their own safety or to his glory.'[67] The ship did brilliant service with Blake and Monk against Tromp and Ruyter, and won from the Dutch the _sobriquet_ of the 'Golden Devil,' in allusion to her gorgeous ornamentation and the death-dealing broadsides from her heavy guns. As the _Royal Sovereign_, the name bestowed on her by Charles the Second at the Restoration, in place of the original form, the ship added laurels to her fame. She was in the thick of the fray in the 'Four Days' Fight' of 1666--the 'Four Days' Fight' was what the courtiers of Whitehall called the battle, the ruder 'tarpaulins' who fought the guns called it the 'Four Days' Bloody Blunder';--in the 'St. James's Day Fight' of the same year; at Solebay; and in all the other fleet battles of the Second and Third Dutch Wars. Among the men of note who flew their flags on board the _Royal Sovereign_ in battle were James, Duke of York (afterwards King James the Second), and Prince Rupert. This same man-of-war, too, in William the Third's time, was one of the flagships at La Hogue, where she had 'a very hott dispute' with one of the French flagships. She was also flagship of the admiral in command at the burning of the famous _Soleil Royal_ and two other French first-rates in Cherbourg Bay. A sleepy old bo'sun's mate, one January night, four years after La Hogue, left a lighted candle-end in his cabin in the _Royal Sovereign_, and then went on deck to keep his watch, forgetting all about it. So the quondam _Sovereign of the Seas_ came to her end. In accordance with the sentence of the court-martial[68] on the wretched man, he was rowed up the Medway past the fleet lying there with a halter round his neck, and was then publicly flogged on his bare back, after which he was landed at Chatham dockyard with every mark of degradation, and taken off to be imprisoned in the Marshalsea for life.