CHAP. V. SECTION III.-FROM THE EXECUTION OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, TO THE END OF THE REIGN. 1587-1603. I. THE SPANISH ARMADA. We 39. The spirit of hostility between England and Spain. have now arrived at the most interesting and memorable epoch in the reign of Elizabeth, when the great crisis came which her council had long foreseen, and Englishmen had to fight desperately for their religion and liberty against the mightiest prince of the age, Philip II., the ruler of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands; the possessor of the wealth and resources of both the Indies; whose armies traversed Europe from sea to sea; and whose fleets kept the coasts of Devon and Sussex in alarm, and yet scoured the furthest shores of the American continent. In this great crisis the patriotism of Englishmen stood firm as a rock. The Puritans, in the depths of the prisons to which Elizabeth had sent them, prayed fervently that she might be preserved from the dagger of the assassin, that rebellion might be put down under her feet, and that her arms might be victorious by sea and land.* The Roman Catholics, whose loyalty had been subjected to the severest trials, displayed no less patriotism. They armed their tenants; they equipped vessels; they enlisted in the ranks as privates; they placed their lives and fortunes at the Queen's command,; and the prisoners even declared their readiness to fight to the death against the common enemy. The whole country was at unity with itself; the dark treasons and conspiracies which had hitherto kept society in alarm were gone; and Elizabeth sat on the throne, the Queen of a loyal and affectionate people, determined to stake their all for the safety of her person, and the preservation of her government. A hatred against Spain had been deeply rooted in the nation by the sufferings which Philip and Mary had inflicted upon it; and the two governments had from that time gradually manifested a more hostile feeling towards each other. Philip welcomed most of the Roman Catholic exiles who fled from Elizabeth's persecution, and received them into his service; and he and his ambassadors were the chief conspirators against Elizabeth's life. The English Queen retaliated, as we have seen, by aiding Philip's rebels in the Low Countries. But it was at sea, on the Spanish Main, that Englishmen showed their determined hatred of the Spaniards; the ravenous strangers who greedily thirsted for English blood, * Macaulay, I., 63. 1562-67 and hated the English, says old Hakluyt, more than any nation in Europe. 40. English piracies on the Spanish Main. When the Spaniards founded their colonies in South America, the acquisition of the precious metals, and not the extension of commerce, was their chief object. In order to work the mines, they imported negroes into the colonies, and made slaves of the natives; and to reserve to themselves the profits of the mines, they placed numerous limitations and restrictions upon trade, and entirely excluded foreigners from sharing in it. But the immense extent of coast of those thinly populated territories opened facilities for contraband trade, which not all the fleets of the world would have prevented; and the adventurous and hardy mariners of England, inured to danger and daring by the storms and inclemencies of northern voyages, early began to make encroachments on the colonies. In 1562, the renowned Sir John Hawkins Expeditions began to interfere in the slave trade. In 1567, during of Hawkins. his third voyage, he was surprised in the Bay of St. Juan d'Ulloa, by a large Spanish fleet, and, after a sharp engagement, was defeated with the loss of all his ships save one, the Judith, a bark of fifty tons, commanded by Francis Drake.* Francis This seaman was the most distinguished among those freebooters whom the spirit of adventure sent forth, and his name soon became a terror to the Spaniards. According to Stowe, he was born at Tavistock, and was brought up under the care of his kinsman, Sir John Hawkins. His father was a reformer, and was subsequently vicar of Upnor Church, on the Medway, where young Drake was apprenticed to the master of a coasting vessel which traded to France and Zeeland. The apprentice, on his master's death, became owner of the vessel; but hearing And of Sir that Hawkins was fitting out an expedition for the New Drake. World, he sold his bark, repaired to Plymouth, and joined the adventure. The voyage was unfortunate, and Drake lost all that he had accumulated by his former industry; but a divine belonging to the fleet comforted him with the assurance that, having been thus treacherously used by the Spaniards, he might lawfully recover his own by plundering them in return. "The case," says Fuller, was clear in sea divinity," and the doctrine, so rudely preached, was very taking in England at that time, so that no sooner had Drake published his design to follow it than he found numbers of volunteers ready to join him. In 1572, having first made two or three voyages to the West Indies to gain * Southey's Lives of British Admirals, III., 69-97. 66 round the CHAP. V. intelligence, he set sail from Plymouth, and captured in the Gulf of Mexico more than one hundred vessels; took and plundered Nombre de Dios; made an expedition by land in the company of the Symerons, or fugitive negroes, and intercepted a convoy of mules laden with gold and silver. In a hazardous journey across the Isthmus of Panama, his negro guides showed him, from the top of a high mountain, the great Pacific Ocean; and, in a transport of enthusiasm, he fell upon his knees, and called God to witness, that if life were given him, he would one day unfurl the English flag on that sea, hitherto unknown to his countrymen. When he returned to England, Walsingham, Hatton, and some other counsellors, applauded his purpose; Elizabeth herself staked 1,000 crowns on the issue of the expedition, and directly encouraged his enterprise, saying, "We do account that he which striketh at thee, Drake, striketh at us." With 5 ships and 160 men he His voyage crossed the Atlantic, and reached the coast of Brazil globe. (November 15th, 1577); passed the Straits of Magellan, and reached the small port of St. Jago, on the Spanish Main. From this place to Lima he took and plundered the towns on the coast and the vessels in the harbours; and the Caccafuego, a Spanish trader of considerable value, was captured at sea. But the alarm was now raised, and a squadron was stationed at the straits to intercept his return. Drake therefore took the bold resolution of stretching across the Pacific to the Moluccas, whence, after many dangers and adventures, he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and returned to Plymouth in the autumn of 1580, after an absence of almost three years. His arrival was celebrated as a triumph; and though he had returned with only one ship, the Golden Hind, it was laden with treasure to the amount of £800,000, one-tenth of which was distributed among the officers and crew, a portion given to the Spanish ambassador, and the rest appropriated by the Queen and her favourites. Four months, however, elapsed before Elizabeth would give Drake any public testimony The Queen of her approbation. His ship had been placed in the dock of Deptford, that it might be preserved as a memorial of his daring adventure. On the 4th of April, 1581, the Queen dined on board, and before her departure conferred on him the honor of knighthood. When the Golden Hind fell into decay it was broken up; a chair made out of its planks was presented to the University of Oxford, and probably is still to be seen in the Bodleian Library. Cowley wrote a Pindaric ode upon it. Drake had now established his reputation as the first seaman of the day; and in 1585, when Elizabeth openly declared visits his ship at Deptford. 1585-6 war against Spain, by entering into a treaty of alliance with Holland, she entrusted him with the command of an expedition against the Spanish colonies. With a fleet of twenty-one sail he directed his course to the West Indies (September, 1585); burnt the town of St. Jago, near Cape Verd; plundered the towns of St. Domingo and Carthagena, and razed two Spanish forts on the coast of Florida. He lost 700 men by sickness, and brought back to England the survivors of a colony which Sir Walter Raleigh had sent out to Virginia. round the At the same time Thomas Cavendish, a gentleman of Suffolk, fitted out three small vessels, and sailed in quest of Cavendish's adventures to the Spanish Main (July, 1586). The voyage inhabitants were upon their guard, and for seven months world. his exploits were confined to the capture of a few coasting vessels, and the conflagration of two or three villages. But just before his return he met with the Santa Anna, a merchantman from the Manillas, laden with silver, gold, and other valuable commodities. He captured it, and returned home by the Moluccas, Java, and the Cape of Good Hope, being the second English circumnavigator (September, 1588). 41. Philip II.'s preparations for the invasion of England. Such were those bold and brilliant expeditions which, together with the nobler and more dangerous enterprises of Frobisher and the Arctic navigators, prepared England for the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada; gave a fresh impulse to naval and commercial enterprise; and taught the English sailors to behold without fear the towering bulk of the Spanish vessels. But it must not be supposed that Philip merely sought to revenge himself for the injuries he had received from English freebooters on the high seas, or from English volunteers in the Low Countries. His grand object in the naval preparations he was making was, to depose Elizabeth and re-establish the Popish religion in England. He had meditated it for fifteen years, and during the last five. had devoted the whole of his immense resources to its accomplishment. These preparations were proportionate to the importance of the undertaking. The forest of Waes, in Flanders, was cut down; the dockyards of Antwerp, Newport, Gravelines, and Dunkirk swarmed with artificers; and the rivers and canals of the Low Countries were covered with flat-bottomed boats destined to transport to the English shores 30,000 infantry and 18,000 cavalry, which had been collected under distinguished captains from every part of Europe, and were placed under the command CHAP. V. of the famous Farnese, Duke of Parma. In Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Sicily also, the ports echoed with the din of warlike preparation, with the building of ships, the casting of guns, the preparation of shot, and the conveyance of provisions and naval stores. 135 men-of-war, of 59,120 tons, carrying 3,165 guns, 8,000 seamen, and 19,000 soldiers, rode in the Spanish harbours under the command of Santa Cruz, a naval veteran, who had been the hero of numerous victories. Pope Sixtus V. revived the bulls of excommunication against Elizabeth; he appointed Dr. Allen, the principal of the Seminary at Rheims, cardinal legate to England, to regulate the concerns of religion, as had been done by Cardinal Pole, and to confer on the conqueror the investiture of the kingdom; and still further to aid the expedition, he blessed and sanctified it, furnished it with rosaries, crucifixes, and other talismans of the Roman Church, and promised to pay a subsidy of one million crowns as soon as the invading army had landed on the English coast. Thus armed and prepared, the Spaniards looked upon their conquest as already made. They remembered the easy conquests of England by the Saxons, Danes, and Normans; they saw between them and their triumph only two battles-one at sea, the other on land; and, in the security of victory, they denominated their armament, "The Invincible Armada.' 42. Elizabeth's preparations. The English nation beheld these mighty preparations with a resolution worthy of the occasion and their cause; and every class of the people not only contributed loans and free gifts liberally, but sent out vessels, hired, manned, and armed, at their private charge. Elizabeth, however, was not so eager to enter into the contest. Her policy was cautious and pacific; she had always dreaded a serious contest with Spain, and she, therefore, sought to prevent hostilities by negotiations. Her parsimony also led her to distrust both the advice of her ministers, and the warnings of their spies; and she alternately quickened or retarded her preparations, as hope or fear preponderated in her mind. Yet she despatched Drake from Drake's against Cadiz. Plymouth with a fleet of 30 sail, with orders to destroy expedition every ship he could find on the Spanish coasts; and no commission was ever more ably or more boldly executed. On the 19th of April, 1587, this daring seaman dashed into Cadiz Roads, and sunk, burnt, or captured no less than 80 vessels, many of which were richly laden merchantmen just arrived from the Indies. He then turned back along the coast, and, between Cadiz Bay and Cape St. Vincent, took and destroyed 100 other vessels, |