Between the death of Henry V in 1422 and the accession of Henry VII in 1485 there was a dreary time on land and sea. The King of England lost the last of his possessions in the land of France. Only the Channel Islands remained British, as they do still. At home the Normans had settled down with the descendants of the other Norsemen to form one people, the Anglo-Norman people of today, the leading race within the British Empire and, to a less extent, within the United States. But England was torn in two by the Wars of the Roses, in which the great lords and their followers fought about the succession to the throne, each party wanting to have a king of its own choice. For the most part, however, the towns and seaports kept out of these selfish party wars and attended to their growing business instead. And when Henry VII united both the warring parties, and these with the rest of England, he helped to lay the sure foundations of the future British Empire. CHAPTER VII KING OF THE ENGLISH SEA (1545) England needed good pilots to take the ship of state safely through the troubled waters of the wonderful sixteenth century, and she found them in the three great Royal Tudors: Henry VII (1485-1509), Henry VIII (1509-1547), and Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603). All three fostered English sea-power, both for trade and war, and helped to start the modern Royal Navy on a career of world-wide victory such as no other fighting service has ever equalled, not even the Roman Army in the palmy days of Rome. It was a happy thought that gave the name of Queen Elizabeth to the flagship on board of which the British Commander-in-chief received the surrender of the German Fleet. Ten generations had passed away between this surrender in 1918 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. But the British Royal Navy was still the same: in sea-sense, spirit, training, and surpassing skill. Henry VII was himself an oversea trader, and a very good one too. He built ships and let them out to traders at a handsome profit for himself besides trading with them on his own account. But he was never so foolish as to think that peaceful trade could go on without a fighting navy to protect it. So he built men-of-war; though he used these for trade as well. Men-of-war built specially for fighting were of course much better in a battle than any mere merchantman could be. But in those days, and for some time after, merchantmen went about well armed and often joined the king's ships of the Royal Navy during war, as many of them did against the Germans in our own day.