Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/540

526 adventures in the Pacific, coasted the Brazils, passed the straits of Magellan, and reached Santiago, from which place to Lima he found the coast unprotected, and took the vessels and plundered the towns at will. Amongst his prizes was the Cacafuego, a Spanish merchantman of great value, which he captured in the spring of 1579. By this time, however, the Spaniards had sent out a squadron to meet and intercept him at the straits; and Drake, becoming aware of it, took the daring resolution of sailing to the Moluccas, and so home by the Cape of Good Hope. The hardihood of this determination we can scarcely at this day realise, for it implied the circumnavigation of the globe, which had never yet been accomplished, Magellan himself having perished on his voyage at the Philippines. He reached Plymouth safely, November 3rd, 1580, after a voyage of three years. The dangers and hardships which he had endured in this unprecedented exploit may be conceived from the fact that only one of his five vessels reached home with him; but that vessel contained a treasure of £800,000.

Elizabeth was in a great strait. The wealth which Drake had brought, and of which she expected an ample share, was too agreeable a thing to allow her to quarrel with the acquirer; but the ravages which he had committed on a power not openly at war with her, were too flagrant to be acknowledged. For four months, therefore, Drake remained without any public acknowledgmentacknowledgement [sic] of his services, further than his ship being placed in the dock at Plymouth, as a trophy of his bold circumnavigation of the globe. At length, however, the queen consented to be present at a banquet which Drake gave on board, and she there broke from her duplicity by knighting him on the spot. A tithe of the enormous amount of money was distributed as prize amongst the officers and men; the Spanish ambassador, who had laid claim to the whole as stolen property, was appeased by a considerable sum; and the huge remainder was, according to report, shared by the queen, her favourites, and the fortunate commander.

It was not long before Sir Francis Drake was placed in commission and sent out as the queen's own admiral against Spain. In 1585 he sailed for the West Indies with a fleet of twenty-one ships, where he took and burnt down the town of St. Jago, ravaged Carthagena and St. Domingo, and committed other mischief. The following year Thomas Cavendish followed in Drake's track with three ships which he had built out of the wreck of his fortune, and reaching the Spanish main, committed many depredations. In 1587 he secured the freight of gold and silver of a large Manilla merchantman, and returned home by the new route which Drake had pointed out.

These terrible chastisements of the Spanish colonies had embittered the mind of Philip and his subjects even beyond the warfare of the Netherlands; and he was now steadily preparing that mighty force and that host of vessels by which he vowed to prostrate the power of the heretic queen, and reduce the British Islands to the Spanish yoke and to the yoke of the Papal Church. Elizabeth, having endeavoured in vain to arrange a peace, buckled on the armour of her spirit, and determined to meet the danger with a fearless front. She dispatched Drake with a fleet of thirty vessels to examine the Spanish harbours where these means of invasion were preparing, and to destroy all that he could come at. No task could have delighted him more. On the 18th of April, 1587, he entered the roads of Cadiz, and discovering upwards of eighty vessels, attacked, sunk, and destroyed them all. He then sailed out again, and running along the coast as far as Cape St. Vincent, demolished above a hundred vessels, and, besides other injuries, battered down four forts. This Drake called "singeing the King of Spain's beard." In the Tagus he encountered the grand admiral of Spain, Santa Cruz, but could not bring him to an engagement, owing to the orders which the admiral had received; but he captured, in his very teeth, the St. Philip, one of the finest ships of Spain, and laden with the richest merchandise. Santa Cruz took it so much to heart that he was not permitted to engage Drake, that he is said to have died shortly afterwards of sheer mortification.

When Drake returned from this expedition he was received by the public with acclamations; but Elizabeth was perfectly frightened by the extent of the calamities inflicted, believing that they would only rouse Philip to more inveterate hostility—and in that she was right. She made actually an apology to the Prince of Parma, Philip's general in the Netherlands, for the deeds of Drake, assuring him that she had only sent him out to guard against any attacks on herself. Farnese replied that he could well believe anything of the kind of a man bred as ho was in piracy, and professed still to be ready to make peace. But Philip was in no peaceful mood. He was now eagerly employed in forwarding his huge preparations; and the name of the Spanish Armada began to be a familiar sound in England. He prevailed on the Pope to issue a new bull of excommunication against Elizabeth, and to advance him large sums of money for this holy enterprise, which was to restore these rich but recreant islands to the Holy See. He collected his best vessels into the Spanish ports, and went on industriously building others in all the ports of Spain, Portugal, and those portions of the Netherlands now belonging to him. He collected all the vessels that his Sicilian and Neapolitan subjects could furnish, and hired others from Genoa and Venice. In Flanders he prepared an immense shoal of flat-bottomed boats to carry over an army of 30,000 men to the coasts of England, under the command of the Prince of Parma.

The time appeared to have arrived which was to avenge all the injuries and insults which, during twenty years, the English queen had heaped upon him. She had, in the first place, refused his hand; she had year after year incited and encouraged his subjects in the Netherlands to rebel against his rule; she had supplied them first secretly, then openly, with money; she had hired mercenary troops against him; and, finally, sent the Earl of Leicester to assume the position of a viceroy for herself. Whilst this state of intolerable interference on land had been growing, she had sent out men to attack and plunder his colonies, intercept his treasure ships, and chase from the high seas the merchant vessels of his nation. All this time she had been with an iron hand crushing the Church which he believed the only true one, and had ended by putting to death a queen who was regarded as the champion of that Church in Britain. We are apt, in