Although the earliest portholes were merely small circular holes which did not allow of any training, and though the idea of them was probably directly derived from the loopholes in castle walls, the influence of the porthole on naval architecture was soon very great indeed. By means of this device a new relation between size and power was established, hence the “big displacements” which began to appear at this time. The hole for a gun muzzle to protrude through, quickly became an aperture allowing of training the gun on any ordinary bearing in English built ships. The English (for a very long time it was English only) realisation of the possibilities of the porthole in Henry VIII’s reign contributed very materially to the defeat of the Spanish Armada some decades later. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the porthole was to that era what the torpedo has been in the present one. Introduced about 1875 as a trivial alternative to the gun, in less than forty years the torpedo came to challenge the gun in range to an extent that as early as 1905 or thereabouts began profoundly to affect all previous ideas of naval tactics, and that by 1915 has changed them altogether! Another great change of these Henry VIII days was in the form of the ships.[6] At this era they began to be built with “tumble-home” sides, instead of sides slanting outwards upwards, and inwards downwards as heretofore. With the coming of the porthole came the decline of the cross-bow as a naval arm. In the pre-porthole days every record speaks of “showers of arrows,” and the gun appears to have been a species of accessory. In the early years of the Sixteenth Century it became the main armament, and so remained unchallenged till the present century and the coming of the long-range torpedo. Henry VIII’s reign is also remarkable for the first institution of those “cutting out” expeditions which were afterwards to become such a particular feature of British methods of warfare. This first attempt happened in the year 1513, when Sir Edward Howard, finding the French fleet lying in Brest Harbour refusing to come out, “collected boats and barges” and attacked them with those craft. The attempt was not successful, but it profoundly affected subsequent naval history. Therefrom the French were impressed with the idea that if a fleet lay in a harbour awaiting attack it acquired an advantage thereby. The idea became rooted in the French mind that to make the enemy attack under the most disadvantageous circumstances was the most wise of policies. That “the defensive is compelled to await attack, compelled to allow the enemy choice of the moment” was overlooked!