imated. To contemporaries, at least
to the victors and their friends it appeared as the direct judgment of
God: "Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt." The gorgeous rhetoric of Ranke
and Froude has painted it as one of the turning points in world
history. But in reality it rather marked than made an epoch. Had
Philip's ships won, it is still inconceivable that he could have
imposed his dominion on England any more than he could on the
Netherlands. England was ripening and Spain was rotting for half a
century before the collision made this fact plain to all. The Armada
did not end the war nor did it give the death blow to Spanish power,
much less to Catholicism. On the Continent of Europe things went on
almost unchanged.

But in England the effect was considerable. The victory stimulated
national pride; it strengthened the Protestants, and the left wing of
that party. Though the Catholics had shown themselves loyal during the
crisis they were subjected, immediately thereafter, to the severest
persecution they had yet felt. This was due partly to nervous
excitement of the whole population, partly to the advance towards power
of the Puritans, always the war party.

[Sidenote: Puritans]

Even in the first years of the great queen there had been a number of
Calvinists who looked askance at the Anglican settlement as too much of
a compromise with Catholicism and Lutheranism. The Thirty-nine
Articles passed Convocation by a single vote [Sidenote: 1563] as
against a more Calvinistic confession. Low-churchmen (as they would
now be called) attacked the "Aaronic" {344} vestments of the Anglican
priests, and prelacy was detested as but one degree removed from papacy.

The Puritans were not dissenters but were a party in the Anglican
communion thoroughly believing in a national church, but wishing to
make the breach with Rome as wide as possible. They found fault with
all that had been retained in the Prayer Book for which there was no
direct warrant in Scripture, and many of them began to use, in secret
conventicles, the Genevan instead of the English liturgy. Their
leader, Thomas Cartwright, [Sidenote: Cartwright, 1535-1603] a
professor of divinity at Cambridge until deprived of his chair by the
government, had brought back from the Netherlands ideals of a
presbyterian form of ecclesiastical polity. In his view many "Popish
Abuses" remained in the church of England, among them the keeping of
saints' days, kneeling at