Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/156

 aristocracy, who felt that Elizabeth's conduct had been far from creditable, and was a gross affront to her professed friend and ally, the king of Spain.

The injury to English trade proved, however, less complete than the Spanish minister had anticipated. An eventual open rupture with Spain had long been foreseen and prepared for. But changes in the course of commerce were made with greater ease than he had calculated upon. Fresh openings of ports in the Baltic afforded new facilities for intercourse; and Hamburg readily took the place of Antwerp as the mart through which English goods could be carried into Germany. The merchants of London had also found new and more distant fields for their enterprise. They had pushed their way to Moscow, penetrated to Persia, and had opened out, by way of the Straits of Gibraltar, direct commercial intercourse with Constantinople and Alexandria, the ancient centres of the commerce of the world, and even with the Catholic state of Venice. Rochelle supplied the best wines and fruits of France; while its privateers intercepted the vessels sailing from the Catholic harbours, and their cargoes lay ready for export in the Huguenot storehouses. English spirit and energy having converted the loss feared by an exclusion from the Spanish and Flemish trades into gain, Elizabeth and her ministers became even more imperative in their demands. Alva, who had come to England to arrange, if possible, terms of conciliation and renewed intercourse, was informed that, if relations between Spain and England were to be re-established, the king himself must send a direct