The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies — Inside the Classic

Navarre was rising, and all France was now alive to Philip's real object in the invasion of England. Philip knew that in any repetition of the attempt he would probably {7} not have to confront England alone. So the cries for vengeance grew fainter, and national feeling was gradually turned purposely in other directions.

But these cries had been loud enough to reach England. Exaggerated rumours of the intention to renew the Armada were industriously sent from all quarters by zealous spies and agents, and an uneasy feeling grew that perhaps, after all, England had not finished her foe; for Elizabeth's advisers had no means of exactly gauging the depth of Philip's purse, and they knew the papal coffers were overflowing. It is true that immediate danger was over. The hasty English levies had been sent home again, bragging of the prowess they would have shown if the hated Spaniard had dared to land, and the panic and fright had given place to perfectly natural congratulations on the special protection vouchsafed by the Almighty to the Virgin Queen and her people. The heroics were over, and England was free, for the present at all events, to don its work-a-day garb again.

But the easy victory had inflamed men's minds. There had been very little fighting even on the fleet, and none at all on shore; and it is not pleasant to be balked of a set-to when all is ready, and to turn swords to bill-hooks without once fleshing them in an enemy's carcase. So the idlers in England who were loath to go to work again, the turbulent youngsters who were burning for an excuse to have a go at somebody, and the lavish gentlemen who were thirsting for loot, began on their side to talk about vengeance and retaliation. It mattered little to them that for a long course of years England had been the {8} aggressor, and that Philip had exhausted all diplomatic and conciliatory means, including even secret murder, and the subornation of treason, in England, to arrive at a peaceful _modus vivendi_. For thirty years he had suffered, more or less patiently, robbery, insult, and aggression in his own dominions at the hands of Elizabeth. The commerce of his country was well-nigh swept from the sea by marauders sallying from English ports or flying the English flag. His own towns, both in the Spanish colonies and in old Spain, had been sacked and burnt by English seamen without any declaration of war; and rebellion in the ancient patrimony of his house had been, and was still, kept alive by English money and English troops.

Englishmen, then as now, had the comfortable and highly commendable faculty of believing their own side always to be in the right, and they knew in this particular case that it was much more profitable to plunder than to be plundered, to attack rather than defend. Elizabeth's caution and dread of being forced into a costly national war had over and over again caused her to discountenance this tendency on the part of some of her advisers, though she was ready enough to share the profits when her official orders were disregarded and her own responsibility evaded. Only the year before the Armada she had peremptorily ordered Drake, when he was ready to sail for Cadiz, not to imperil peace by molesting any of the territories or subjects of his Catholic Majesty. But when he came into Dartmouth, after "singeing the King of Spain's beard," towing behind him the great galleon _San Felipe_, with its 600,000 {9} ducats in money, the Queen smiled upon him as if he had never disobeyed her. But for her positive orders of recall indeed, Drake on this very voyage would have made the Armada impossible by destroying, as he was able and ready to do, all the ships preparing for it in Lisbon harbour.