Warfare was very expensive. Over two full years, from 30 December 1556 to 30 December 1558, Benjamin Gonson received £144,941, of which £131,154 came from the Exchequer. According to his own account, he spent £157,638 of which victualling amounted to £73,503 and wages to men at sea a further £43,492. This should have left him with a deficit of over £12,000, but when he commenced his next regular account on 1 January 1559, he acknowledged arrears of only £841. So either the difference had been written off or the statement of his income is incomplete. These accounts cover all but the last three months of the war, when peace negotiations were ongoing and military operations had virtually ceased, so the cost of the navy during the run-up to the war, and while hostilities were active, was some £78,000 a year, more than three times the peacetime level, in spite of the fact that no Navy Royal was sent out. Neither Elizabeth nor William Cecil, now her principal man of affairs, had previously received any detailed information about the working of the Admiralty, and it is not clear that Lord Clinton, who was retained as Lord Admiral,was much better informed. Consequently on 12 December, less than a month into the new reign, a memorandum was drawn up for Cecil's benefit. This showed that at the moment of Mary's death there had been six royal ships and seven auxiliary merchantmen on patrol in the Narrow Seas, carrying a total of 335 masters, mariners and gunners. If these figures are accurate, they must all have been small ships, but we do not know which ones they were. It was essentially a costing estimate for what was actually happening (and had happened) between 1 October and 31 December 1558, and the patrols, which presumably remained constant over that period, would, it was judged, require £3,167. At the same time 184 shipwrights and other craftsmen were currently rebuilding the Peter at Woolwich, and the Jennet and the Hare at Portsmouth, work which it was estimated would cost a further £2,123. By the time that the regular wages and expenses at the other yards were added to these totals, they would have amounted to some £6,000 for the quarter, or £24,000 for the full year – assuming, of course, that the peace negotiations were successful.