Perhaps the most interesting witness to the success of the English gunfounders is Sir Walter Raleigh, who in his _Discourses_ rebuked the detestable covetousness of those licensed to sell ordnance abroad. So great was the number of pieces exported, that all other nations were equipped with good English artillery for ships and forts and coast defence. “Without which,” he remarks, “the Spanish King durst not have dismounted so many pieces of brass in Naples and elsewhere, therewith to arm his great fleet in ’88. But it was directly proved in the lower house of parliament of Queen Elizabeth, that there were landed in Naples above 140 culverins English.... It is lamentable that so many have been transported into Spain.” In 1589 Lord Buckhurst wrote to the justices of Lewes Rape, complaining of their neglect in permitting the surreptitious export of ordnance. “Their lordships do see the little regard the owners of furnaces and the makers of these pieces have of their bonds, and how it importeth the state that the enemy of her Majesty should not be furnished out of the land with ordnance to annoy us.” It is not improbable, in short, that some of the Armada’s cannon had been moulded and poured on English soil. The imperfection of the sixteenth-century foundry products may be gauged from Bourne’s evidence that the use of cartridges was inconvenient because, on account of honeycombs and flaws, “you shall scant get the cartridge home unto the bottom of the piece.” On the other hand loading by ladle was still considered dangerous. In his _Art of Gunnery_, of 1627, Thos. Smith, soldier, of Berwick-on-Tweed, warns the gunner always to stand to one side of the mouth of the piece when thrusting home the ladle; otherwise, the charge being ignited by smouldering débris in the cavities of the metal, it takes fire and kills the loader--“as happened in Anno 1573 at the siege of Edinborough Castle, to two experienced gunners.”[55] At about the same date as Smith’s book was written, Sir H. Manwayring, in _The Sea-Man’s Dictionary_, described the “arming” of cross-bar shot: i.e. the binding them with oakum, yarn, or cloth, to prevent their ends from catching hold in any flaws during their passage through the gun, which might break it. § Under the Stuart kings a continuous development of ship armament took place. This development was not always in the right direction. The Commission of Reform of the year 1618 recorded, as we have already seen, the importance of artillery in naval warfare, but owing to the absence of all system it was long before the principle found effective application. Owing to divided authority, or to a lack of unity in the conception of the fighting ship, a tendency to excess in the number and weight of guns continued to be noticeable, an excess which was to react unfavourably on the performances of our ships both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.