Froude’s second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of 1893, was entitled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name, was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation.  He was in his element, and his success was complete.  How Protestant England ousted Catholic Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia’s realm, was a story which he loved to tell.  “The young King,” Henry viii., “like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of the kingdom.”  It was “the secret determined policy of Spain to destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of the Inquisition.”  In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy, and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons.  There was work for Hawkins and Drake.  They were both Devonshire men, like Raleigh.

’Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess,
Who ruled as well as a mortal can,
When she was stogged, and the country in a mess,
To send for a Devonshire man.

Spain paid heavily for the persecution of British sailors.  In his fifth lecture, Parties in the State, Froude read with dramatic emphasis, and in a singularly impressive manner, the application of a seaman to Elizabeth for leave to attack Philip’s men-of-war off the banks of Newfoundland.  “Give me five vessels, and I will go out and sink them all, and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz Harbour for want of hands to sail them.  But decide, Madam, and decide quickly.  Time flies, and will not return.  The wings of man’s life are plumed with the feathers of death.”  When he uttered these tragic words, Froude paused, and looked up, and it seemed to those who heard him as if he felt that the time of his own departure was at hand.  Elizabeth herself was never moved by sentiment, and final vengeance on Spain had to wait for the Armada, with which these lectures, like the History, conclude.  The consequences he left to others who had more years before them than he himself.  He loved to dwell on the glories of seamen, especially Devonshire seamen, whose descendants he had known from his boyhood.  The open sea and the open air, the stars and the waves, were akin to him.  His companions sometimes thought that he cared too little for the perils of the deep.  A lady who went boating with him, and hazarded the opinion that they would be drowned, got no warmer comfort than “Very likely,” which struck her as grim.  Probably he knew that there was no danger.  He was accustomed to storms, and rather enjoyed them than otherwise.  His lectures on the Elizabethan heroes of the sea had a fascination for young Englishmen which no historical discourses ever surpassed.