524 E. p. Cheyney Armada fight " sickened one day and died the next "' of ship-fever, until " many of the ships had hardly men enough to weigh their anchors." On the Portugal expedition of 1589 about 20,000 men embarked, less than 9,000 returned. Of 1,100 gentlemen volunteers on the expedition 700 died.^ The subsequent expeditions of 1595, 1596, 1597, 1599, and 1601 were only somewhat less destructive to life. In 1598 Elizabeth ceased to pay the English troops in the ser- vice of the Netherlands, but they still remained there in the service of the States and were constantly recruited in England. Indeed the peace between England and Spain signed in 1604 made no change in their position except that the king made a barren and ineffective promise that he would try to persuade the Englishmen in the Netherlands service to return and would discourage others from going there." English troops were kept in the cautionary towns in Holland and Zealand by the government till 1616, and English recruits were as a matter of fact obtained by the Dutch gov- ernment. To these must be added those obtained for the arch- duke's service, in accordance with the permission given by the treaty. In 1610, the third year of the colonization of Virginia, there were 4,000 English troops in the Netherlands to be sent to the war in Cleves.^ Thus notwithstanding the generally peaceful policy of James, there was still a steady drain of English population for military purposes going on, as well as the necessity for recupera- tion from the larger losses of Elizabeth's time. The losses by legal execution (although impossible, from the records now accessible, of statistical statement) can be roughly estimated, or at least can be discovered to have been considerable. In the years from 1608 to 1618, which cover the first decade of the settlement of Virginia, the court of jail-delivery of the county of Middlesex, which does not include the city and liberties of London, sent to execution 704 persons, an average of seventy a year. The number for that county for the whole of James's reign, so far as recorded, was 1,003, an average of about forty-five a year.* In the county of Devon in the year 1598, a chance year, at the Lent assizes seventeen persons were hanged, at the autumn assizes eighteen, at the four quarter-sessions thirty-nine, making altogether seventy-four persons executed in the year. In the year 1596, forty persons were executed in the county of Somerset. To these are to be added 229 ' State Papers, Dom., Eliz., cxxiii, No. 75 ; Cal. St. Papers, Dom., 15S1- 1590. P- 534; Lodge, Illustrations of British History, II. 355, etc. - Winwood, Memorials, II. 27. ^Gardiner, History of England, II. 100, 183; I. 219; Motley, United Nether- lands, IV. 228.
- Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records, II. xvii-xx.
5 Hamilton, Devonshire Quarter-Sessions, 30-31.
