tress. In
December her fleet had been paid off at Chatham. The danger of leaving
the country without any regular defence was pressed on her so vehemently
that she consented to allow part of the ships to be recommissioned. The
_Revenge_ was given to Drake. He and Howard, the Lord Admiral, were to
have gone with a mixed squadron from the Royal Navy and the adventurers
down to the Spanish coast. In every loyal subject there had long been
but one opinion, that a good open war was the only road to an honourable
peace. The open war, they now trusted, was come at last. But the hope
was raised only to be disappointed. With the news of Santa Cruz's death
came a report which Elizabeth greedily believed, that the Armada was
dissolving and was not coming at all. Sir James Crofts sang the usual
song that Drake and Howard wanted war, because war was their trade. She
recalled her orders. She said that she was assured of peace in six
weeks, and that beyond that time the services of the fleet would not be
required. Half the men engaged were to be dismissed at once to save
their pay. Drake and Lord Henry Seymour might cruise with four or five
of the Queen's ships between Plymouth and the Solent. Lord Howard was to
remain in the Thames with the rest. I know not whether swearing was
interdicted in the English navy as well as in the Spanish, but I will
answer for it that Howard did not spare his language when this missive
reached him. 'Never,' he said, 'since England was England was such a
stratagem made to deceive us as this treaty. We have not hands left to
carry the ships back to Chatham. We are like bears tied to a stake; the
Spaniards may come to worry us like dogs, and we cannot hurt them.'

It was well for England that she had other defenders than the wildly
managed navy of the Queen. Historians tell us how the gentlemen of the
coast came out in their own vessels to meet the invaders. Come they did,
but who were they? Ships that could fight the Spanish galleons were not
made in a day or a week. They were built already. They were manned by
loyal subjects, the business of whose lives had been to meet the enemies
of their land and faith on the wide ocean--not by those who had been
watching with divided hearts for a Catholic revolution.

March went by, and sure intelligence came that the Armada was not
dissolving. Again Drake prayed the Queen to let him take the _Revenge_
and the Western adventurers down to Lisbon; but the commissioners