Leaving the Duke for the moment, we must now glance at the preparations made in England to receive him.  It might almost be said that there were none at all.  The winter months had been wild and changeable, but not so wild and not so fluctuating as the mind of England’s mistress.  In December her fleet had been paid off at Chatham.  The danger of leaving the country without any regular defence was pressed on her so vehemently that she consented to allow part of the ships to be recommissioned.  The Revenge was given to Drake.  He and Howard, the Lord Admiral, were to have gone with a mixed squadron from the Royal Navy and the adventurers down to the Spanish coast.  In every loyal subject there had long been but one opinion, that a good open war was the only road to an honourable peace.  The open war, they now trusted, was come at last.  But the hope was raised only to be disappointed.  With the news of Santa Cruz’s death came a report which Elizabeth greedily believed, that the Armada was dissolving and was not coming at all.  Sir James Crofts sang the usual song that Drake and Howard wanted war, because war was their trade.  She recalled her orders.  She said that she was assured of peace in six weeks, and that beyond that time the services of the fleet would not be required.  Half the men engaged were to be dismissed at once to save their pay.  Drake and Lord Henry Seymour might cruise with four or five of the Queen’s ships between Plymouth and the Solent.  Lord Howard was to remain in the Thames with the rest.  I know not whether swearing was interdicted in the English navy as well as in the Spanish, but I will answer for it that Howard did not spare his language when this missive reached him.  ‘Never,’ he said, ’since England was England was such a stratagem made to deceive us as this treaty.  We have not hands left to carry the ships back to Chatham.  We are like bears tied to a stake; the Spaniards may come to worry us like dogs, and we cannot hurt them.’

It was well for England that she had other defenders than the wildly managed navy of the Queen.  Historians tell us how the gentlemen of the coast came out in their own vessels to meet the invaders.  Come they did, but who were they?  Ships that could fight the Spanish galleons were not made in a day or a week.  They were built already.  They were manned by loyal subjects, the business of whose lives had been to meet the enemies of their land and faith on the wide ocean—­not by those who had been watching with divided hearts for a Catholic revolution.

March went by, and sure intelligence came that the Armada was not dissolving.  Again Drake prayed the Queen to let him take the Revenge and the Western adventurers down to Lisbon; but the commissioners wrote full of hope from Ostend, and Elizabeth was afraid ’the King of Spain might take it ill.’  She found fault with Drake’s expenses.  She charged him with wasting her ammunition in target practice.  She had it doled out to him in driblets,