‘He’ll cool France and Spain, and quiet the main, The Dunkirkers passage he’ll stop; To stay all commotion he’ll plough up the ocean: God send him a good harvest crop ... And then he will meet with the West India fleet, And of them will take fast hold, And bring them away for England a prey, And choke us with silver and gold.’ (Fairholt, p. 13.) Buckingham’s part in the reorganisation of the navy was forgotten by satirists, but the king’s panegyrists exaggerated the effort of Charles I. to strengthen the fleet. His attempts to assert the sovereignty of the seas furnished them with a theme. Between 1632 and 1640 Charles built about a dozen new ships, eight of which were a considerable size. The greatest of them was the Sovereign of the Seas, which was over 1,500 tons in size, carried a hundred guns, cost 40,000_l._ to build and 25,000_l._ to arm. Mr. Oppenheim describes her as ‘the largest, most ornate and most useless ship afloat,’ but after being cut down by the navy board of the commonwealth she did good service. (Oppenheim, p. 252; Clowes, ii. 6.) Launched in October 1637, she was intended, as her name shows, to assert the sovereignty of the British seas, which since 1634 Charles had been endeavouring to maintain against the French and the Dutch. Selden’s _Mare Clausum_ was published in 1636, to prove his claim; the Earl of Lindsey’s fleet in 1635, and the Earl of Northumberland’s in 1636, were sent forth to enforce it. (Gardiner, _History of England_, vii. 358, 384; viii. 154.) Lindsey’s fleet consisted of nineteen ships of the royal navy and twenty-six merchant vessels. Northumberland’s contained twenty-seven king’s ships. This display of naval force inspired the poems printed on p. 36, the first a panegyric _On His Majesties Fleet_, the second an address from Neptune to England, which was probably derived from some masque played at Court during these years. The ballad _Upon the Great Ship_ clearly belongs to 1637 (p. 37). In that year Thomas Heywood published a prose pamphlet entitled _A true Description of his Majesties Royal Ship built this year at Woolwich in Kent_, upon which these verses seem to be partly based. Heywood also wrote a long poem called _An Epigram upon his Majesties Great Ship the Sovereign of the Seas_, which is reprinted in Mr. Masefield’s collection (_A Sailor’s Garland_, p. 94).