us
schemes were laid out with utterly inadequate provision for their
accomplishment, and a confident expectation entertained that wild,
visions were; in some indefinite way, to be converted into substantial
realities, without fatigue or personal exertion on his part, and with a
very trifling outlay of ready money.

Meantime the faithful Farnese did his best. He was indefatigable night
and day in getting his boats together and providing his munitions of war.
He dug a canal from Sas de Gand--which was one of his principal
depots--all the way to Sluys, because the water-communication between
those two points was entirely in the hands of the Hollanders and
Zeelanders. The rebel cruisers swarmed in the Scheldt, from, Flushing
almost to Antwerp, so that it was quite impossible for Parma's forces to
venture forth at all; and it also seemed hopeless to hazard putting to
sea from Sluys. At the same, time he had appointed his, commissioners to
treat with the English envoys already named by the Queen. There had been
much delay in the arrival of those deputies, on account of the noise
raised by Barneveld and his followers; but Burghley was now sanguine that
the exposure of what he called the Advocate's seditious, false, and
perverse proceedings, would enable Leicester to procure the consent of
the States to a universal peace.

And thus, with these parallel schemes of invasion and negotiation,
spring; summer, and autumn, had worn away. Santa Cruz was still with his
fleet in Lisbon, Cadiz, and the Azores; and Parma was in Brussels, when
Philip fondly imagined him established in Greenwich Palace. When made
aware of his master's preposterous expectations, Alexander would have
been perhaps amused, had he not been half beside himself with
indignation. Such folly seemed incredible. There was not the slightest
appearance of a possibility of making a passage without the protection of
the Spanish fleet, he observed. His vessels were mere transport-boats,
without the least power of resisting an enemy. The Hollanders and
Zeelanders, with one hundred and forty cruisers, had shut him up in all
directions. He could neither get out from Antwerp nor from Sluys. There
were large English ships, too, cruising in the channel, and they were
getting ready in the Netherlands and in England "most furiously." The
delays had been so great, that their secret had been poorly kept, and the
enemy was on his guard. If Santa Cruz had come, Alexander declared that