guard made some resistance, but was soon broken and put to flight, leaving the Spaniards of Castlehaven to their fate these fell bravely in the field, excepting the very few who were made prisoners, amongst which number was Ocampo. The main body, commanded by Tyrone, was next broken; while the rear, in which O'Donnel was stationed, fled without striking a blow. In this rout 1200 men were slain and 800 wounded, whilst, it is said, on the part of the English army, only one cornet was killed and a few soldiers wounded. Tyrone was still for reanimating and keeping his confederates together, but they pleaded the necessity of returning to their homes. O'Donnel, in terror and despair, fled to Spain; and Tyrone, stung with disappointment and shame, concealed himself in his own territory, with the wasted remnant of his followers.

The news of this disaster reaching the Spanish general Don Juan, he could form no other opinion of so unexpected a result than that it had been occasioned through treachery, and immediately determined to surrender Kinsale with all the other forts in the possession of the Spaniards, on condition that they should be permitted to return to their own country. These terms were granted, and Tyrone, finding his case desperate, sent, offering submission to the queen's authority, and praying pardon for his past offences: the lord deputy would have listened to no terms; but at that instant he received private intelligence of the queen's death, and fearing the effect which might be produced on the minds of the Irish, and the revival of the hopes of Tyrone when that event should become publicly known, he sent sir William Godolphin with the offer of even honourable conditions. Tyrone made the most unqualified submission on his knees, renouncing for ever the name of O'Neal, with all its pretensions, powers, dignities, rights, and pre-eminences: he was received with the stateliness of an offended sovereign by her representative, who, on the part of the queen, promised him a full pardon for himself and his followers,—also the restoration of his blood and honours, with a new patent for his lands, except some portions reserved for certain chieftains received into favour, and some for the use of the English garrisons. To these reservations Tyrone freely consented, and he thereupon accompanied the lord deputy to Dublin; no insurgent remained in the whole island who had not either obtained or sued for mercy, and thus nearly at the same hour in which Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, breathed her parting sigh, she became the real sovereign of Ireland, that country having been 450 years in the merely nominal possession of the English crown. Tyrone immediately after the above submission heard of the queen's death revolving in his mind the mighty fortune from which he

had just fallen, and cursing his precipitation, he burst into a flood of tears; but the opportunity he had lost was not of a nature to be ever after recalled.

Elizabeth's notion of the extent of the royal prerogative was as unbounded as that of her father or grandfather: but her actions were mostly governed by justice and moderation; and the people willingly submitted to those very tribunals of the Star Chamber and High Commission Court, which under her successors called forth the opposition of the whole nation. It was no uncommon thing for the crown at this time to interfere with the selection of jurors and the nomination of representatives to parliament. Loans or benevolences were frequently extorted, notwithstanding the statute of Richard III.; and on one occasion, in 1586, Elizabeth ventured to levy an assessment on the clergy not voted by convocation: but the most obnoxious of all the extensions of the prerogative was the assumption of arbitrary power by individual privy councillors, who assuming to be clothed, as it were, with an emanation of royal authority, committed men to prison, on their own responsibility; and so frequently interfered with the administration of justice and the personal liberty of the subject, that in 1592, when a freer spirit had already begun to be manifested in the constitution, the judges addressed the chancellor and treasurer for some remedy against this abuse, which threatened to deprive the people of the security of the laws. But the house of commons in Elizabeth's reign contained men of a bold and steady patriotism, well read in the laws and records of old time, sensible of the dangers of their country, and conscious that it was their privilege and their duty to watch over the commonweal. This led to several conflicts between the crown and parliament; wherein if the former often asserted the victory, the latter sometimes kept the field, and was left on the whole a gainer at the close of the campaign. For nearly half a century Elizabeth had conducted the country through a period of unexampled difficulty, and while the surrounding nations were convulsed by intestine dissensions and foreign wars, her wisdom and energy had maintained peace and laid the foundation of a permanent prosperity. "When Elizabeth came to the throne,' says Lingard, England ranked only among the secondary kingdoms; before her death it had risen to a level with the first nations of Europe;" and this not by the acquisition of vast territorial dominion, or the still more hazardous greatness of foreign conquest, but by the development of the internal resources of her kingdom. She was the first sovereign under whom the constitutional right of parliament to grant supplies was rendered practically available, and by the security and encouragement afforded

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to enterprise, capital rapidly flowed into England. In former times, when the English monarchs had been in want of supplies, they had been compelled to borrow of foreign merchants, who exacted exorbitant interest for their money; but in this reign sir Thomas Gresham, a patriotic and enterprising citizen, who had negotiated the repayment of the debt left by Mary on the bourse at Antwerp, succeeded in establishing the Royal Exchange, and started a company of English merchants in London to advance money to the government. As Elizabeth was punctual in the repayment of her loans, the credit of the exchequer rose, and many of the rich merchants of Italy and Antwerp resorted to England. The persecutions in France and Spain drove many of the more skilful workmen from Flanders and Paris, who brought with them into England a knowledge of the manufacture of the finer woollen fabrics; and as the raw material was more plentiful in England, the finer descriptions, instead of being imported from Flanders, as was formerly the case, actually became a staple article of export: the making of paper and various other handicrafts were introduced with like success, and the intercourse with foreign countries became so extensive, that a regular system of insurance sprang up, which greatly diminished the risk of transport and encouraged a larger number of men to embark their capital in a branch of industry which opened so fair a field for enterprise. The demand for shipping increased, and as the foreign builders of Lubeck, Hamburg, Genoa, and Venice, who supplied the greater part of Europe with vessels, were unable to meet the increased demands of England and Spain, the English took to build vessels in their own harbours, and soon outstripped their neighbours in the lightness and durability of their craft. The new lines of commerce opened up by the discovery of the compass were diligently pursued by the English merchants. In the preceding reign a commercial treaty had been entered into with Russia, and in 1569 czar Ivan Basilovitz granted the monopoly of the Russia trade to the English merchants, who established factories in all the principal towns, and by way of the Caspian sent their commodities to Persia and Bactria. A few years later a new route to the commerce of the Levant was established by the straits of Gibraltar, and the English merchants concluded a special treaty with the sultan of Turkey, at which court they maintained a resident ambassador at their own charges. The nearer markets being already engaged, voyages of discovery were undertaken into distant parts of the world for the object of trade or plunder. John Hawkins went to the coast of Africa, and there opened a trade with the natives for gold and ivory : when these could not be procured, he carried off the people and

sold them as slaves to the Spaniards in America, thus commencing the traffic of the slave trade; while Frobisher and Davis made excursions into the northern seas, and traversed the coasts of Canada and Norway with the hopes of discovering a shorter route to India and China by the north of America or Europe; and although their efforts were ineffectual, these voyages served to make the English acquainted with the rich fisheries off Newfoundland, Spitzbergen, and Greenland. But the two men who most distinguished themselves at this period were Drake and Cavendish, who circumnavigated the globe and visited the furthest countries of the Pacific and Southern oceans. In 1572 Drake went on his first voyage to the West Indies, where he took and plundered the Spanish settlement of Nombre de Dios, on the Isthmus of Panama, and captured a rich caravan laden with the treasures of Mexico. On his return he was employed for some time in the queen's service; but in 1577, the English not being on good terms with Spain, he determined again to visit the Southern ocean, and taking with him five ships and 163 mariners, he set sail from Plymouth on the 13th of December. Before, however, reaching the straits of Magellan, he had been compelled to abandon two of his ships as unseaworthy, and on rounding Cape Horn the remaining three were scattered in a storm: one returned through the Straits, another was lost, and the third, in which Drake was, succeeded in gaining the still waters of the Pacific. Undismayed by these disasters, Drake continued his voyage, and sailing along the western coast of America with his one ship, he made frequent descents on the Spanish settlements, plundering the towns and burning the shipping without resistance; for the Spaniards, having never before met with an enemy in these seas, were taken by surprise, and everywhere threw down their arms and fled. Having amassed a rich booty, and fearing to return by the way he had come, as the Spaniards were now acquainted with his strength, he boldly stretched across the Pacific, and arriving at the Spice Islands, trafficked with the natives: thence sailing by Java he came to the Cape of Good Hope, and departed for England, arriving at Plymouth on the 3rd of November, 1580, after an absence of nearly three years, as already mentioned. His return to England was hailed with every demonstration of joy; the queen condescended to breakfast with him on board his ship, and the treasures being unladen at Deptford, were placed in the royal storehouses till their value could be estimated. It was found to be £800,000, a sum so exorbitant as had scarcely been conceived before, amounting to four times the queen's ordinary revenue. This sum was divided between the queen, the merchants who adven

tured their money in the expedition, the commander, and the mariners,—the latter receiving one-tenth, which gave above a thousand pounds to each,-a very comfortable fortune in those days, when the annual income of many justices of the peace was assessed at £10. The success of this adventure led the English merchants to bolder attempts. In 1600 the earl of Cumberland and 215 knights associated themselves into a company to trade to the Indies, and obtained a royal charter of incorporation under the title of the Honourable East India Company: the expense of their first outfit, in ships, goods, &c., was £72,000; on its homeward passage their fleet took possession of the island of St. Helena as a commodious station for watering and refitting.

The improvement effected in the currency by Elizabeth greatly tended to facilitate the extension of trade, by supplying a better medium of exchange. During her reign no less a sum than £5,513,717. 11s. was coined, viz., £4,632,932. 3s. 2d. in silver, £795,138. 8s. 4d. in gold, besides £85,646. 19s. 5 d. of base money for Ireland. The demand for agricultural produce rendered land more valuable, and the nobles began to pay attention to the cultivation of their estates. Proclamations were issued for the gentry to return home, and to keep hospitality at their country seats, instead of spending their incomes in the towns; laws were made against the increase of buildings in London; and with a view of improving the condition of the labouring classes, it was enacted that all cottages to be hereafter erected should have at least two acres of land attached to them, so as to enable the peasant to cultivate his own land, and to secure him from becoming burdensome to the parish. The introduction of cauliflowers, artichokes, asparagus, and other garden plants, shows the improvement in horticulture,—and the use of carriages, tea, and other articles of luxury, the refinement of the national taste. But, above all, the eminence to which learning and poetry attained mark Elizabeth's reign as the Augustan age of England's splendour: the works of Sydney, Spenser, Shakspeare, Jonson, and Massinger would alone render the English language immortal; while Ascham, the tutor of lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth, sir Walter Raleigh the historian, Hooker the divine, and sir Edward Coke the legal antiquary, all contributed to the standard literature of Europe, besides a host of other names of less note who flourished at this time, as Southwell, Beaumont, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Fletcher, and Daniel.

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