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256 hempe, oxe-hides, and lead, to stop holes that should be made with the battery of gunshot. To be short, they brought all things expedient, either for a fleete by sea, or for an armie by land.

"This navie (as Diego Pimentelli afterward confessed) was esteemed by the king himselfe to containe 32,000 persons, and to cost him every day 30,000 ducates.

"There were in the said navie five terzaes of Spaniards (which terzaes the Frenchmen call regiments), under the command of five governours, termed by the Spaniards masters of the field, and among the rest there were many olde and expert souldiers chosen out of the garisons of Sicilie, Naples, and Terçera. Their captaines or colonels were Diego Pimentelli, Don Franciseo de Toledo, Don Alonço de Luçon, Don Nicolas de Isla, Don Augustin de Mexia, who had eche of them thirty-two companies under their conduct. Besides the which companies, there were many bands also of Castilians and Portugals, every one of which had their peculiar governours, captains, officers, colors, and weapons."

While this huge armament was making ready in the southern ports of the Spanish dominions, the Duke of Parma, with almost incredible toil and skill, collected a squadron of war-ships at Dunkirk, and a large flotilla of other ships and of flat-bottomed boats for the transport to England of the picked troops, which were designed to be the main instruments in subduing England. The design of the Spaniards was that the Armada should give them, at least for a time, the command of the sea, and that it should join the squadron that Parma had collected off Calais. Then, escorted by an overpowering naval force, Parma and his army were to embark in their flotilla, and cross the sea to England, where they were to be landed, together with the troops which the Armada brought from the ports of Spain. The scheme was not dissimilar to one formed against England a little more than two centuries afterward.

As Napoleon, in 1805, waited with his army and flotilla at Boulogne, looking for Villeneuve to drive away the English cruisers, and secure him a passage across the Channel, so Parma, in 1588, waited for Medina Sidonia to drive away the Dutch and English squadrons that watched his flotilla, and to enable his veterans to cross the sea to the land that they were to conquer. Thanks to Providence, in each case England's enemy waited in vain!