n all other
good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe for the assertion of
English liberty, of English ascendancy, too; and the opportunity of the
moment lay in "those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided," the
fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most eminent as he was
also, in a sense, the most unfortunate.

A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the shadow of a fierce
bird of prey hovering over its victim. Ever since Ferdinand expelled the
Moors out of Granada, Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of
universal empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant system of
European civilisation by every means of brutality and intrigue which the
activity of her arrogance could devise. The Kings of Spain, in their
ruthless ambition, encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish
world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their
vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had
spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing
braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals,
of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused
and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and they
held that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh against
justice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they meant to
inflict upon Europe. It was to be _Spanien ueber alles_.

But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of the
great enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemously
regarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one country
which more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England,
and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any other
enemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood than
after the lives of any other people of Europe." The avowed purpose of
Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England on which the
very existence of the English State depends. The significance of Sir
Walter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with which he perceived and
the energy with which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other noble
Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had been clear-sighted and
had struck hard against the evil tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism,
but no other man before or since was so luminously identified with
resistance. He struts upon the st