or long
misunderstood, and that the failure of the Spaniards should have
been represented--as it often is even now--as due to a
Heaven-sent storm. '_Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt_' was
accepted as at once a true and pious explanation of the whole
thing. It was, too, a flattering and economical belief. We were,
it has been argued, a nation peculiarly dear to the Almighty,
and He showed His favour by raising a storm to overwhelm our
enemy, when the odds against us were most terrible. From the
religious point of view such a representation is childish; from
the historical it is false. False, because the Spanish fleet,
after being hounded up Channel, had sustained a crushing defeat
from the English, a defeat in which they lost many ships and
thousands of men before they fled to the north.... Childish,
because in affairs of State Providence works by recognized
means, and gives the victory, not by disturbing the course of
nature and nature's laws, but by giving the favoured nation wise
and prudent commanders, skilful and able warriors; by teaching
their hands to war and their fingers to fight.

"But, in fact, much of the nonsense that has been talked grew
out of the attempt, not unsuccessfully made, to represent the
war as religious; to describe it as a species of crusade
instigated by the Pope, in order to bring heretical England once
more into the fold of the true Church. In reality nothing can be
more inaccurate. It is, indeed, quite certain that religious
bitterness was imported into the quarrel; but the war had its
origin in two perfectly clear and wholly mundane causes."

Professor Laughton then goes on to explain what these causes were: (1) the
attempts of Drake and Hawkins to break the Spanish monopoly of trade in the
West Indies by armed expeditions, which included the capture of Spanish
ships and the sacking of Spanish trading posts. The Spaniards regarded
Drake and Hawkins as smugglers and pirates, and in vain asked Elizabeth to
disavow and make amends for their acts.

(2) "The countenance and assistance which had been given by the English to
the King's rebellious subjects in the Low Countries."

The King was glad enough to put forward religious reasons as the motives
for his enterprise in the hope of thus enlisting new allies on his side,
but, like so many other wars, the conflict between Spain and England, w