r all pacific communications with Spain, whether secret or
open, superfluous.

For while so much time had been lost in England and Holland, by
misunderstandings and jealousies, there was one Englishman who had not
been losing time. In the winter and early spring of 1587, the Devonshire
skipper had organized that expedition which he had come to the
Netherlands, the preceding autumn, to discuss. He meant to aim a blow at
the very heart of that project which Philip was shrouding with so much
mystery, and which Elizabeth was attempting to counteract by so much
diplomacy.

On the 2nd April, Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth with four ships
belonging to the Queen, and with twenty-four furnished by the merchants
of London, and other private individuals. It was a bold buccaneering
expedition--combining chivalrous enterprise with the chance of enormous
profit--which was most suited to the character of English adventurers at
that expanding epoch. For it was by England, not by Elizabeth, that the
quarrel with Spain was felt to be a mortal one. It was England, not its
sovereign, that was instinctively arming, at all points, to grapple with
the great enemy of European liberty. It was the spirit of self-help, of
self-reliance, which was prompting the English nation to take the great
work of the age into its own hands. The mercantile instinct of the nation
was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its
patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the
great Protestant mutiny. Against a decrepit superstition in combination
with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English
people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and
menacing to them, and with which they felt that the life and death
struggle could not long be deferred.

And of these various tendencies, there were no more fitting
representatives than Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Essex, Cavendish
and Grenfell, and the other privateersmen of the sixteenth century. The
same greed for danger, for gold, and for power, which, seven centuries
before, had sent the Norman race forth to conquer all Christendom, was
now sending its Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kindred to take possession
of the old world and the new.

"The wind commands me away," said Drake on the 2nd April, 1587; "our ship
is under sail. God grant that we may so live in His fear, that the enemy
may have cause to say that God doth fight