Brighthelmstone had its “quiver” at the thought of the Armada, a little less than half a century later. During a false alarm in 1586, when a fleet of fifty sail appeared in the offing, great activity was shown by the inhabitants, who immediately dispatched a messenger to Lord Buckhurst, lord lieutenant of Sussex, telling him of the suspicious vessels, and he promptly assembled all the men he could muster, “with their armes,” and took up a position between Brighthelmstone and Rottingdean. By nightfall we are told his force numbered 1,600 men, and was later on reinforced by the addition of a body of Kentish men. As the fleet made no movement to attack nor any demonstration of hostile intent, at last a fishing boat or two, “with bold men who feared neither death nor capture,” put off from the beach to reconnoitre. They then discovered that the supposed Armada was but the Dutch wine fleet from Spain, held back by the unfavourable direction of the wind from proceeding to their destination up Channel, and thus, so far as Brighthelmstone is concerned, ended its doings with the Armada. In the terrific storms of December 27, 1703, and in 1705, Brighthelmstone suffered so severely that it is scarcely too much to say that it was ruined. So greatly also did it decline in the next few years that in 1725 the author of _A Tour Through Great Britain_ speaks of the place as “a poor fishing town, old-built on the very edge of the sea,” and goes on to say that it has a likelihood of being soon entirely swallowed up owing to the rapid encroachment of the sea. With Brighton, as it came to be called later on, in the days when it was emerging from decline and obscurity to flourish under the Georgian patronage it received, and with the Brighton of to-day, which is one of the great seaside resorts of the world, there is neither necessity nor space to deal. We must on to Shoreham, the quaint little fishing village of smuggling days, now threatened in the near future with development as a seaside resort. Here there is a haven into which one can run in stress of weather, although few, we imagine, would choose to remain in it longer than necessary.