Nathaniel Boteler, who had served in the Jacobean navy and wrote on
the subject early in the reign of Charles I, was ignorant of it. In
his _Dialogues about Sea Services_, he devotes the sixth to
'Ordering of Fleets in Sailing, Chases, Boardings and Battles,' but
although he suggests a battle order which we know was never put in
practice, he is unable to give one that had been used by an English
fleet.[2] It is not surprising. In the despatches of the Elizabethan
admirals, though they have much to say on strategy, there is not a
word of fleet-tactics, as we understand the thing. The domination of
the seamen's idea of naval warfare, the increasing handiness of ships,
the improved design of their batteries, the special progress made by
Englishmen in guns and gunnery led rapidly to the preference of
broadside gunfire over boarding, and to an exaggeration of the value
of individual mobility; and the old semi-military formations based on
small-arm fighting were abandoned.

At the same time, although the seamen-admirals did not trouble or were
not sufficiently advanced to devise a battle order to suit their new
weapon, there are many indications that, consciously or unconsciously,
they developed a tendency inherent in the broadside idea to fall in
action into a rough line ahead; that is to say, the practice was
usually to break up into groups as occasion dictated, and for each
group to deliver its broadsides in succession on an exposed point of
the enemy's formation. That the armed merchantmen conformed regularly
to this idea is very improbable. The faint pictures we have of their
well-meant efforts present them to us attacking in a loose throng and
masking each other's fire. But that the queen's ships did not attempt
to observe any order is not so clear. When the combined fleet of
Howard and Drake was first sighted by the Armada, it is said by two
Spanish eye-witnesses to have been _in ala_, and 'in very fine