Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/162

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Their patience had become exhausted; no wonder! The flag of Spain, they said with much truth, no longer afforded them protection. To make matters worse, the English minister at the court of Madrid, during the whole of the time that these wrongs were being perpetrated by English cruisers, was professing the most sincere friendship in the name of his Queen. "It was she," he said, "who had the greatest reason to complain, as the Duke of Alva, without the slightest provocation, had arrested English ships and goods in the harbours of the Low Countries."

But, though anxious to avoid war with England, Philip was not to be deceived by the professions of friendship and fair words of her minister. He, however, waited his time. When that time came he proposed to himself measures of retaliation which he conceived to be worthy of the proud and powerful Spanish nation. With this view ever before him, he kept his secret and matured his arrangements until he felt that he could accomplish effectually his plans. To be slow and silent, to take every precaution for success, and then to deliver suddenly and unexpectedly the blow so long seriously but vaguely impending, was the policy he intended to pursue. When he did strike, he said to himself, the blow he intended should be terrible. His coasts had been plundered, his commerce destroyed, his colonies outraged by English desperadoes, in whose adventures he had heard that the Queen herself had become a partner. The seizure of his treasure he felt and knew was simply piracy on a gigantic scale, committed by the government itself.