been the favourite.  Guise had always preferred Scotland when it was intended that Guise should be the leader.  Santa Cruz had been in close correspondence with Guise on this very subject, and many officers in the Armada must have been acquainted with Santa Cruz’s views.  The Scotch Catholic nobles were still savage at Mary Stuart’s execution, and had the Armada anchored in Leith Roads with twenty thousand men, half a million ducats, and a Santa Cruz at its head, it might have kindled a blaze at that moment from John o’ Groat’s Land to the Border.

But no such purpose occurred to the Duke of Medina Sidonia.  He probably knew nothing at all of Scotland or its parties.  Among the many deficiencies which he had pleaded to Philip as unfitting him for the command, he had said that Santa Cruz had acquaintances among the English and Scotch peers.  He had himself none.  The small information which he had of anything did not go beyond his orange gardens and his tunny fishing.  His chief merit was that he was conscious of his incapacity; and, detesting a service into which he had been fooled by a hysterical nun, his only anxiety was to carry home the still considerable fleet which had been trusted to him without further loss.  Beyond Scotland and the Scotch Isles there was the open ocean, and in the open ocean there were no sandbanks and no English guns.  Thus, with all sail set he went on before the wind.  Drake and Howard attended him till they had seen him past the Forth, and knew then that there was no more to fear.  It was time to see to the wants of their own poor fellows, who had endured so patiently and fought so magnificently.  On the 13th of August they saw the last of the Armada, turned back, and made their way to the Thames.

But the story has yet to be told of the final fate of the great ‘enterprise of England’ (the ’empresa de Inglaterra’), the object of so many prayers, on which the hopes of the Catholic world had been so long and passionately fixed.  It had been ostentatiously a religious crusade.  The preparations had been attended with peculiar solemnities.  In the eyes of the faithful it was to be the execution of Divine justice on a wicked princess and a wicked people.  In the eyes of millions whose convictions were less decided it was an appeal to God’s judgment to decide between the Reformation and the Pope.  There was an appropriateness, therefore, if due to accident, that other causes besides the action of man should have combined in its overthrow.

The Spaniards were experienced sailors; a voyage round the Orkneys and round Ireland to Spain might be tedious, but at that season of the year need not have seemed either dangerous or difficult.  On inquiry, however, it was found that the condition of the fleet was seriously alarming.  The provisions placed on board at Lisbon had been found unfit for food, and almost all had been thrown into the sea.  The fresh stores taken in at Corunna had been consumed, and it was found