For, during all the months of suspense; the soldiers and sailors, and many statesman of England, had deprecated, even as the Hollanders had been doing, the dangerous delays of Ostend.  Elizabeth was not embodying the national instinct, when she talked of peace; and shrank penuriously from the expenses of war.  There was much disappointment, even indignation, at the slothfulness with which the preparations for defence went on, during the period when there was yet time to make them.  It was feared with justice that England, utterly unfortified as were its cities, and defended only by its little navy without, and by untaught enthusiasm within, might; after all, prove an easier conquest than Holland and Zeeland, every town, in whose territory bristled with fortifications.  If the English ships—­well-trained and swift sailors as they were—­were unprovided with spare and cordage, beef and biscuit, powder and shot, and the militia-men, however enthusiastic, were neither drilled nor armed, was it so very certain, after all, that successful resistance would be made to the great Armada, and to the veteran pikemen and musketeers of Farnese, seasoned on a hundred, battlefields, and equipped as for a tournament?  There was generous confidence and chivalrous loyalty on the part of Elizabeth’s naval and military commanders; but there had been deep regret and disappointment at her course.

Hawkins was anxious, all through the winter and spring, to cruise with a small squadron off the coast of Spain.  With a dozen vessels he undertook to “distress anything that went through the seas.”  The cost of such a squadron, with eighteen hundred men, to be relieved every four months, he estimated at two thousand seven hundred pounds sterling the month, or a shilling a day for each man; and it would be a very unlucky month, he said, in which they did not make captures to three times that amount; for they would see nothing that would not be presently their own.  “We might have peace, but not with God,” said the pious old slave-trader; “but rather than serve Baal, let us die a thousand deaths.  Let us have open war with these Jesuits, and every man will contribute, fight, devise, or do, for the liberty of our country.”

And it was open war with the Jesuits for which those stouthearted sailors longed.  All were afraid of secret mischief.  The diplomatists—­who were known to be flitting about France, Flanders, Scotland, and England—­were birds of ill omen.  King James was beset by a thousand bribes and expostulations to avenge his mother’s death; and although that mother had murdered his father, and done her best to disinherit himself, yet it was feared that Spanish ducats might induce him to be true to his mother’s revenge, and false to the reformed religion.  Nothing of good was hoped for from France.  “For my part,” said Lord Admiral Howard, “I have made of the French King, the Scottish King, and the King of Spain, a trinity that I mean never to trust to be saved by, and I would that others were of my opinion.”