The great crisis, however, was now at hand.  The Armada was coming to destroy England, and when England was destroyed the fate of the Netherlands would soon be sealed.  But in both England and the Netherlands the national spirit ran high.  The great fleet came; the Flemish ports were held blockaded by the Dutch.  The Spaniards had the worse of the fighting in the Channel; they were scattered out of Calais roads by the fireships, driven to flight in the engagement of Gravelines, and the Armada was finally shattered by storms.  Philip received the news cheerfully; but his great project was hopelessly ruined.

Of the events immediately following, the most notable were in France—­the murder of Guise, followed by that of Henry III., and the claim of Henry IV. to be king.  The actual operations in the Netherlands brought little advantage to either side, and the Anglo-Dutch expedition to Lisbon was a failure.  But the grand fact which was to be of vital consequence was this:  that Maurice of Nassau was about to assume a new character.  The boy was now a man; the sapling had developed into the oak-tree.

III.—­Maurice of Nassau

The crushing blow, then, had failed completely.  But Philip, instead of concentrating on another great effort in the Netherlands, or retrieval of the Armada disaster, had fixed his attention on France.  The Catholic League had proclaimed Henry IV.’s uncle, the Cardinal of Bourbon, king as Charles X. Philip, to Parma’s despair, meant to claim the succession for his own daughter; and Parma’s orders were to devote himself to crushing the Bearnais.

And this was at the moment when Barneveld, the statesman, with young Maurice, the soldier, were becoming decisively recognised as the chiefs of the Dutch.  Maurice had realised that the secret of success lay in engineering operations, of which he had made himself a devoted student, and in a reorganisation of the States army and of tactics, in which he was ably seconded by his cousin Lewis William.

While Parma was forced to turn against Henry, who was pressing Paris hard, Breda was captured (March 1590) by a very daring stratagem carried out with extraordinary resolution—­an event of slight intrinsic importance, but exceedingly characteristic.  During the summer several other places were reduced, but Maurice was planning a great and comprehensive campaign.

The year gave triumphant proof of the genius of Parma as a general, and of the soundness of his views as to Philip’s policy.  Henry was throttling Paris; by masterly movements Parma evaded the pitched battle, for which Bearnais thirsted, yet compelled his adversary to relinquish the siege.  Nevertheless, Henry’s activity was hardly checked; and when Parma, in December, returned to the Netherlands, he found the Spanish provinces in a deplorable state, and the Dutch states prospering and progressing; while in France itself Henry’s victory had certainly been staved off, but had by no means been made impossible.