sent it out against men, and not against the billows.”
Down to the very last year, it had been the common,
and all but universal opinion, that, if the Spaniards
had succeeded in landing in England, they would have
been beaten, so resolute were the English in their
determination to oppose them, and so extensive were
their preparations for resistance. Elizabeth
at Tilbury had been one of the stock pieces of history,
and her words of defiance to Parma and to Spain have
been ringing through the world ever since they were
uttered after the Armada had ceased to threaten
her throne. We now know that the common opinion
on this subject, like the common opinion respecting
some other crises, was all wrong, a delusion and a
sham, and based on nothing but plausible lies.
Mr. Motley has put men right on this point, as on
some others; and it is impossible to read his brilliant
and accurate narrative of the events of 1588 without
coming to the conclusion that Elizabeth was in the
summer of that year in the way to receive punishment
for the cowardly butchery which had been perpetrated,
in her name, if not by her direct orders, in the great
hall of Fotheringay. She was saved by those winds
which helped the Dutch to blockade Parma’s army,
in the first instance, and then by those Orcadian
tempests which smote the Armada, and converted its
haughty pride into a by-word and a scoffing.
The military preparations of England were of the feeblest
character; and it is not too much to say, that the
only parallel case of Governmental weakness is that
which is afforded by the American history of last
spring, when we had not an efficient company or a
seaworthy armed ship with which to fight the Secessionists,
who had been openly making their preparations for war
for months. The late Mr. Richard Rush mentions,
in the second series of his “Residence at the
Court of London,” that at a dinner at the Marquis
of Lansdowne’s, in 1820, the conversation turned
on the Spanish Armada; and he was surprised to find
that most of the company, which was composed of members
of Parliament and other public men, were of the opinion
that the Spaniards, could they have been landed, would
have been victorious. With genuine American faith
in English invincibility, he wondered what the company
could mean, and also what the English armies would
have been about. It was not possible for any
one then to have said that there were no English armies
at that time to be about anything; but now we see
that those armies were but imaginary bodies, having
not even a paper existence. Parma, who was even
an abler diplomatist than soldier,—that
is, he was the most accomplished liar in an age that
was made up of falsehood,—had so completely
gulled the astute Elizabeth that she was living in
the fools’ paradise; and so little did she and
most of her counsellors expect invasion, that a single
Spanish regiment of infantry might, had it then been
landed, have driven the whole organized force of England
from Sheerness to Bristol. Those Englishmen who