At no time in the advance of the Spanish--probably at no time in the retreat either--could the English have engaged close action with any certainty of success. Victory was attributable solely and entirely to the evolution of a type of ship, fast, speedy and handy, able to hit hard, and which had been more or less specially designed with an eye to offering a very small target to the clumsily designed Spanish style of gun mounting. It was “history repeating itself” in another way. As Alfred overcame the Danes by evolving something superior to the Danish galleys; so, in Elizabethan days, there was evolved a type of warship meet for the occasion. From the defeat of the Armada and onwards, English naval operations were mainly confined to raiding expeditions against the Spanish coast, with a view to checking the collection of any further Armadas. These operations were chiefly carried out by the “gentlemen adventurers”; but the real Navy itself was maintained and added to, and at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, it consisted of forty-two ships, of which the 68-gun _Triumph_ of 1,000 tons was the largest. This Navy was relied upon as the premier arm in case of any serious trouble. IV. THE PERIOD OF THE DUTCH WARS. With the accession of James I peace with Spain came about, but the Dutch being ignored in the transaction, out of this there arose that ill-feeling and rivalry which was later on to culminate in the Dutch wars. In James I’s reign no naval operations of great importance took place, but considerable interest attaches to the despatch of eighteen ships (of which six were “King’s Ships”), to Algiers in 1520. This was the first appearance of an English squadron in the Mediterranean. Under James I the numerical force of the Navy declined somewhat. The art of shipbuilding, however, made considerable advance.[11] A Shipwrights’ Company was established in 1656, and Phineas Pett, as its first master, built and designed a 1,400 ton ship named the _Prince Royal_. Pett introduced a variety of novelties into his designs, and the _Prince Royal_ and her successors were esteemed superior to anything set afloat elsewhere at the time. Here it is desirable to turn aside for a moment in order to realise the influences at work behind Phineas Pett. It has ever been the peculiar fortune of the Royal Navy--and for that matter of the inchoate “Navy” which preceded its establishment--to have had men capable of “looking ahead” and forcing the pace in such a way that new conditions were prepared for when they arrived.