action, it was calculated that more than half of the men forming the expedition lost their lives. The total product of the cruise was £60,000. Of this, £40,000 was due to the adventurers, and the remaining third was to be divided between the soldiers and sailors who manned the ships. This can have given only about £6 a head to those who had risked their lives and had survived the fevers and the weapons of the Spaniards. The adventurers cannot have done much more than cover the expenses of fitting out their ships.
We are now approaching perhaps the most famous passage, and certainly the most picturesque, in the naval history of England. From the beginning of 1586 England was threatened by invasion from Spain, throughout 1587 she was taking measures to avert the danger, and in 1588 the great Armada, which has been baptized in sarcasm with the name of Invincible, actually approached our shores, and then passed away to destruction without having as much as burned one sheepcote in this island.
It was the habit of Philip II. to be very slow in his preparations. His flatterers, knowing the kind of praise that would give him pleasure, described him as thorough and prudent. In point of fact, the course he followed was singularly inefficient and practically rather rash. It would have cost Philip less, and would have redounded much more to his glory, if he had armed three or four well-appointed squadrons of active ships to protect his galleons on their way across the Atlantic, and to keep the West Indies clear of invaders. It must be obvious that if fifteen or twenty Spanish warships had made their appearance in the neighbourhood of San Domingo while the English soldiers were disembarked for the purpose of attacking the town, the squadron could hardly have escaped destruction, and in that case the soldiers must sooner or later have shared the fate of those members of Hawkins's crew who were left behind in Mexico in 1567, to the "little mercy" of the Spaniards. But when a small active squadron would have been of immense service to Philip, he had nothing but the first beginnings of the raw material of the great fleet with which he intended one day to exterminate the power of Elizabeth. His admiral, Don Álvaro de Bazan, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, told him, when the news of the sailing of the expedition of 1585 came, that there was nothing to prevent Drake from sweeping the West Indies, or from entering the Pacific, and there doing as he pleased with the ill-armed and unprepared Spanish settlements. King Philip had ships and guns and men enough among his subjects, but when they were wanted, the guns were not in the ships and the crews were not collected. Thus the "potent" King of Spain, as he was called, and as he might have been with better management, had to sit helpless while a privateering fleet ranged at will through his possessions and plundered his subjects. As it was in 1585, so it was in 1586 and 1587: Philip was toiling laboriously to collect his armament, but as he would not put the various parts together till he had collected all he wanted, no portion of his inchoate fighting forces was ready on a sudden call.
There are few more ludicrous passages in history than the cruise of Drake in 1587. Queen Elizabeth and her ministers were aware that preparations were being made for an invasion of England. Although the queen's passion for intrigue induced her to keep up a laborious show of friendly negotiations with the Prince of Parma, Philip's viceroy in the Low Countries, she did not in practice forget that she was at war. In the spring of 1587 she decided to despatch Sir Francis Drake for the purpose of looking into the preparations reported to be making in the Spanish ports. As in 1585, the queen bore only a part of the expenses. Of the thirty ships despatched, four, the Bonaventure, the Lion, the Dreadnought, and the Rainbow, with two pinnaces attached as tenders, belonged to the Royal Navy; the others were "tall ships" of London, not hired by the queen, but joined in partnership with her for the purpose of making what profit they could by plundering the Spaniards.
Drake sailed from Plymouth early in April, and in the 40th degree of latitude he learned from two German merchant ships that great quantities of naval stores were being collected at Cadiz to be transported to Lisbon, where the King of Spain's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," Don Álvaro de Bazan, had his headquarters. Portugal, it may not be superfluous to remind the reader, had been annexed a few years before by Philip II., who claimed to be the heir of Dom Sebastian, slain at the battle of Alcázar el Kebir, and it continued to be joined to the many other crowns of the King of Spain till 1640. Drake immediately made for Cadiz, where he found the outer harbour crowded with ships. These were the vessels which were designed to take part in the invasion of England. But, by a piece of ineptitude of a kind not at all rare in Philip's reign, they were for the most part unmanned. It was easy work for the thirty efficient ships to capture, burn, sink, or drive on shore such of these vessels as were not able to make a timely escape into the inner harbour. The work was done thoroughly, and to the no small profit of the adventurers. Enormous quantities of booty were transferred from the Spanish to the English ships; and although they were subject to an irritating fire from the distant Spanish batteries, and to attack by the galleys, the English sailors met with little difficulty in the discharge of their task. The work was hard, and the men are said to have been really glad when the Spaniards set fire to the vessels which had not yet fallen into our hands, and thereby put a stop to the toil of collecting more plunder. Nothing more disgraceful to the management of Philip II., nothing which more fully revealed the essential weakness of his power, could well have happened. From Cadiz Drake stretched along the coast to Lisbon, landing as he pleased, and plundering as he thought fit. At the mouth of the Tagus he anchored and sent in a challenge to the Marquis of Santa Cruz. But the king's admiral, though he was a man of great natural courage and of an enterprising character, could not accept it, for his vessels were in no condition to take the sea without the stores burned at Cadiz. From Cascaes Drake stood across to the Azores, and lay there undisturbed on the track of the carracks, the great merchant ships employed by the Portuguese at that time in the trade with the East Indies. One of these, named the St. Philip, fell into his hands. She was the first of these ships ever taken by us, and the sight of her cargo must have had a good deal to do with arousing the desire of English merchants to share in the trade of the East. This capture, added to the plunder taken at Cadiz, secured the profits of the voyage, and therefore Drake made sail for England with his fleet and the prize, where they all arrived "to their own profit and due commendation, and the great admiration of the whole kingdom."
This check did not make Philip any wiser than before, but neither did it in any way damp his determination to collect such a fleet as should make an end of the English pirates. He began the work of getting his stores together again with imperturbable patient industry. Drake described his feat in the outer harbour of Cadiz as the singeing of the King of Spain's beard, and the phrase was accurate as well as humorous. He had insulted the enemy, and had done him as much injury as would compel him to abstain from action for the time being, but he had not seriously crippled his power. By the spring of the following year the Spanish fleet was ready for service, and if Don Álvaro de Bazan had lived, it might have sailed sooner than it actually did. The old man's own plan, communicated to the king some years before, had been to embark a sufficient army in Spain, and sail direct to the coast of England, but the resources of King Philip were not adequate to a scheme of the scale proposed by his admiral. He had to maintain an army under the Prince of Parma in Flanders, and could not meet the expense of organising another. He had therefore decided to make the fleet he was collecting in Spain co-operate with the army he already had in the Low Countries. It was indeed to carry reinforcements to the Prince of Parma, but it was on him that the task of providing an army for the invasion of England was to be laid. The Spaniards have always counted it fortunate for England that the Marquis de Santa Cruz died on the 9th February 1588. Perhaps it was, though it may be doubted whether the very complicated task set by the king could have been successfully performed even by him. To bring a fleet from Spain into the Channel, to carry it to the Low Countries, to embark an army there and transport it to the coast of England, would have made a long and complicated operation, to be conducted in difficult seas, of which the Spaniards had little knowledge, and in the face of the most determined opposition from Dutch and English seamen. However that may be, the Spaniards were deprived of such chance of victory as they might have had under the command of the "Iron Marquis" by his death; and then the king, acting on motives which are not a little mysterious, selected from among his subjects as leader of this great enterprise perhaps the gentleman who was more fitted than any other then living to lead it to ruin. This was Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia. He was a youngish man, small, of a swarthy complexion, and somewhat bandy-legged,
