And in Calais roads the great fleet—­sailing slowly all next day in company with the English, without a shot being fired on either side—­at last dropped anchor on Saturday afternoon, August 6th.

Here then the Invincible Armada had arrived at its appointed resting-place.  Here the great junction—­of Medina Sidonia with the Duke of Parma was to be effected; and now at last the curtain was to rise upon the last act of the great drama so slowly and elaborately prepared.

That Saturday afternoon, Lord Henry Seymour and his squadron of sixteen lay between Dungeness and Folkestone; waiting the approach of the two fleets.  He spoke several-coasting vessels coming from the west; but they could give him no information—­strange to say—­either of the Spaniards or, of his own countrymen,—­Seymour; having hardly three days’ provision in his fleet, thought that there might be time to take in supplies; and so bore into the Downs.  Hardly had he been there half an hour; when a pinnace arrived from the Lord-Admiral; with orders for Lord Henry’s squadron to hold itself in readiness.  There was no longer time for victualling, and very soon afterwards the order was given to make sail and bear for the French coast.  The wind was however so light; that the whole day was spent before Seymour with his ships could cross the channel.  At last, towards seven in the evening; he saw the great Spanish Armada, drawn up in a half-moon, and riding at anchor—­the ships very near each other—­a little to the eastward of Calais, and very near the shore.  The English, under Howard Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins, were slowly following, and—­so soon as Lord Henry, arriving from the opposite shore; had made his junction with them—­the whole combined fleet dropped anchor likewise very near Calais, and within one mile and a half of the Spaniards.  That invincible force had at last almost reached its destination.  It was now to receive the cooperation of the great Farnese, at the head of an army of veterans, disciplined on a hundred battle-fields, confident from countless victories, and arrayed, as they had been with ostentatious splendour, to follow the most brilliant general in Christendom on his triumphal march into the capital of England.  The long-threatened invasion was no longer an idle figment of politicians, maliciously spread abroad to poison men’s minds as to the intentions of a long-enduring but magnanimous, and on the whole friendly sovereign.  The mask had been at last thrown down, and the mild accents of Philip’s diplomatists and their English dupes, interchanging protocols so decorously month after month on the sands of Bourbourg, had been drowned by the peremptory voice of English and Spanish artillery, suddenly breaking in upon their placid conferences.  It had now become supererogatory to ask for Alexander’s word of honour whether he had, ever heard of Cardinal Allan’s pamphlet, or whether his master contemplated hostilities against Queen Elizabeth.