399.  Drake’s Expedition; Sailing of the Armada (1588).

Sir Francis Drake (S392) determined to check Philip’s preparations.  He heard that the enemy’s fleet was gathered at Cadiz.  He sailed there, and in spite of all opposition effectually “singed the Spanish King’s beard,” as he said, by burning and otherwise destroying more than a hundred ships.

This so crippled the expedition that it had to be given up for that year, but the next summer a vast armament set sail.  Motley[1] says it consisted of ten squadrons, of more than one hundred and thirty ships, carrying upwards of three thousand cannon.

[1] Motley’s “United Netherlands,” II, 465; compare Froude’s “England,” XII, 466, and Laughton’s “Armada” (State Papers), pp. xl-lvii.

The impending peril thoroughly roused England.  Both Catholics and Protestants rose to defend their country and their Queen.

400.  The Battle, 1588.

The English sea forces under Lord High Admiral Howard, of Effingham, a zealous patriot, with Sir Francis Drake, who ranked second in command, were assembled at Plymouth, watching for the enemy.  Whe nthe long-looked-for Spanish fleet came in sight, beacon fires were lighted on the hills to give the alarm.

“For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war flame spread;
High on St. Michael’s Mount it shone:  it shone on Beachy Head. 
Far on the deep the Spaniard saw, along each southern shire,
Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire.” 

          
                                                                              —­Macaulay’s “Armada.”

The enemy’s ships moved steadily toward the coast in the form of a crescent seven miles across; but Howard, Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, and other noted captains, were ready to receive them.  With their fast-sailing cruisers they sailed around the unwieldy Spanish warships, firing four shots to the enemy’s one, and “harassing them as a swarm of wasps worry a bear.”  Several of the Spanish vessels were captured and one blown up.  At last the commander sailed for Calais to repair damages and take a fresh start.  The English followed.  When night came on, Drake sent eight blazing fire ships to drift down among the Armada as it lay at anchor.  Thoroughly alarmed at the prospect of being burned where they lay, the Spaniards cut their cables and made sail for the north.

401.  Destruction of the Armada, 1588; Elizabeth at Tilbury and at St. Paul’s.

They were hotly pursued by the English, who, having lost but a single vessel in the fight, might have cut them to pieces, had not Elizabeth’s suicidal economy stinted them in body powder and provisions.  Meanwhile the Spanish fleet kept moving northward.  The wind increased to a gale, the gale to a furious storm.  The commander of the Armada attempted to go around Scotland and return home that way; but