time.  But Charles had stayed their hand.  Now that the ruler of England was an open heretic, who appeared to reject the accepted forms of Catholic belief as well as the Papal forms of Roman discipline, the hour had come to strike.  War would have followed in ordinary times.  But the Reformation had produced a cross-division among the subjects of all the Great Powers.  If Charles went to war with a Protestant Lord Protector of England then some of his own subjects in the Netherlands would probably revolt.  France had her Huguenots; England her ultra-Papists; Scotland some of both kinds.  Every country had an unknown number of enemies at home and friends abroad.  All feared war.

Somerset neglected the navy.  But the seafaring men among the Protestants, as among those Catholics who were anti-Roman, took to privateering more than ever.  Nor was exploration forgotten.  A group of merchant-adventurers sent Sir Hugh Willoughby to find the Northeast Passage to Cathay.  Willoughby’s three ships were towed down the Thames by oarsmen dressed in sky-blue jackets.  As they passed the palace at Greenwich they dipped their colors in salute.  But the poor young king was too weak to come to the window.  Willoughby met his death in Lapland.  But Chancellor, his second-in-command, got through to the White Sea, pushed on overland to Moscow, and returned safe in 1554, when Queen Mary was on the throne.  Next year, strange to say, the charter of the new Muscovy Company was granted by Philip of Armada fame, now joint sovereign of England with his newly married wife, soon to be known as ‘Bloody Mary.’  One of the directors of the company was Lord Howard of Effingham, father of Drake’s Lord Admiral, while the governor was our old friend Sebastian Cabot, now in his eightieth year.  Philip was Crown Prince of the Spanish Empire, and his father, Charles V, was very anxious that he should please the stubborn English; for if he could only become both King of England and Emperor of Germany he would rule the world by sea as well as land.  Philip did his ineffective best:  drank English beer in public as if he liked it and made his stately Spanish courtiers drink it too and smile.  He spent Spanish gold, brought over from America, and he got the convenient kind of Englishmen to take it as spy-money for many years to come.  But with it he likewise sowed some dragon’s teeth.  The English sea-dogs never forgot the iron chests of Spanish New-World gold, and presently began to wonder whether there was no sure way in far America by which to get it for themselves.

In the same year, 1555, the Marian attack on English heretics began and the sea became safer than the land for those who held strong anti-Papal views.  The Royal Navy was neglected even more than it had been lately by the Lord Protector.  But fighting traders, privateers, and pirates multiplied.  The seaports were hotbeds of hatred against Mary, Philip, Papal Rome, and Spanish Inquisition.  In 1556 Sebastian