After passing the Goodwins the pilot of the southward-bound ship can sail on with little to trouble him till he gets near Dungeness. That was a very ‘nasty’ spot till marked by a lighthouse; the surrounding flatness added to the dangers, for over the long stretches of shingle and sand the steeple of Lydd Church rose up clear and distinct, looking in the twilight to those at sea like ‘the forme of the saile of some talle shippe’—so said the mariner of James I’s reign,—which led the steersman to shape his course ‘confidently’ that way, with a result that, darkness closing in, his ship would run upon the far-stretching sands with but slender chance of getting off again in safety. What light, if any, charity had maintained at or near Dungeness before the dissolution of the monasteries we know not; but certainly for long after it none was placed there, and shipwreck to an enormous extent happened each winter; in one over a thousand lifeless bodies of shipwrecked victims were collected at and near the ‘nesse,’ and merchandise to the value of £100,000 perished there. No wonder, then, that when, in the very early years of the seventeenth century, lighthouse building began as a financial speculation, the speculators hit upon Dungeness as a spot at which a lighthouse was necessary and expedient. And it is wonderful to find that arguments were seriously put forward against this project. A little prior to the year 1616 Sir Edward Howard, one of the king’s cup-bearers, built a lighthouse at Dungeness, and petitioned the crown for leave to gather toll for its support. The Trinity House offered an uncompromising opposition; nevertheless James I gave Sir Edward the licence he sought. But Sir Edward found that the dues were paid with reluctance, and was glad, ere long, to part with his interest in the lighthouse to one William Lamplough, Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, on whose behalf the crown, by its customs officers, interfered, directing that the tolls should be paid. That was too much for the shipowners and the Trinity House. They were, in 1621, eagerly promoting a bill in Parliament for the ‘suppression’ of the lighthouse, which they described as a nuisance to navigation; but Parliament would not interfere with the king’s grantee, and the end of it was that Lamplough was told by the crown that he must keep a better light at Dungeness than he had lately done. The remonstrance was, no doubt, needed; for it seems that the coal fire which at first had illuminated the lighthouse had been replaced by a few candles, which were kept badly ‘snuffed’ and gave a wretchedly poor light.