ight. "Their
invincible and dreadful navy," said Drake, "with all its great and
terrible ostentation, did not in all their sailing about England so much
as sink or take one ship, bark, pinnace, or cock-boat of ours, or even
burn so much as one sheep-tote on this land."

Meanwhile Farnese sat chafing under the unjust reproaches heaped upon
him, as if he, and not his master, had been responsible for the gigantic
blunders of the invasion.

"As for the Prince of Parma," said Drake, "I take him to be as a bear
robbed of her whelps." The Admiral was quite right. Alexander was beside
himself with rage. Day after day, he had been repeating to Medina Sidonia
and to Philip that his flotilla and transports could scarcely live in any
but the smoothest sea, while the supposition that they could serve a
warlike purpose he pronounced absolutely ludicrous. He had always
counselled the seizing of a place like Flushing, as a basis of operations
against England, but had been overruled; and he had at least reckoned
upon the Invincible Armada to clear the way for him, before he should be
expected to take the sea.

With prodigious energy and at great expense he had constructed or
improved internal water-communications from Ghent to Sluy's, Newport, and
Dunkerk. He had, thus transported all his hoys, barges, and munitions for
the invasion, from all points of the obedient Netherlands to the
sea-coast, without coming within reach of the Hollanders and Zeelanders,
who were keeping close watch on the outside. But those Hollanders and
Zeelanders, guarding every outlet to the ocean, occupying every hole and
cranny of the coast, laughed the invaders of England to scorn, braving
them, jeering them, daring them to come forth, while the Walloons and
Spaniards shrank before such amphibious assailants, to whom a combat on
the water was as natural as upon dry land. Alexander, upon one occasion,
transported with rage, selected a band of one thousand musketeers, partly
Spanish, partly Irish, and ordered an assault upon those insolent
boatmen. With his own hand--so it was related--he struck dead more than
one of his own officers who remonstrated against these commands; and then
the attack was made by his thousand musketeers upon the Hollanders, and
every man of the thousand was slain.

He had been reproached for not being ready, for not having embarked his
men; but he had been ready for a month, and his men could be embarked in
a single day. "But it was