And the impatience of the soldiers and sailors on board the fleet was equal to that of their commanders.  There was London almost before their eyes—­a huge mass of treasure, richer and more accessible than those mines beyond the Atlantic which had so often rewarded Spanish chivalry with fabulous wealth.  And there were men in those galleons who remembered the sack of Antwerp, eleven years before—­men who could tell, from personal experience, how helpless was a great commercial city, when once in the clutch of disciplined brigands—­men who, in that dread ’fury of Antwerp,’ had enriched themselves in an hour with the accumulations of a merchant’s life-time, and who had slain fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms, before each others’ eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing streets rose to many thousands; and the plunder from palaces and warehouses was counted by millions; before the sun had set on the ‘great fury.’  Those Spaniards, and Italians, and Walloons, were now thirsting for more gold, for more blood; and as the capital of England was even more wealthy and far more defenceless than the commercial metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the London ‘fury’ should be more thorough and more productive than the ‘fury’ of Antwerp, at the memory—­of which the world still shuddered.  And these professional soldiers had been taught to consider the English as a pacific, delicate, effeminate race, dependent on good living, without experience of war, quickly fatigued and discouraged, and even more easily to be plundered and butchered than were the excellent burghers of Antwerp.

And so these southern conquerors looked down from their great galleons and galeasses upon the English vessels.  More than three quarters of them were merchantmen.  There was no comparison whatever between the relative strength of the fleets.  In number they were about equal being each from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty strong—­but the Spaniards had twice the tonnage of the English, four times the artillery, and nearly three times the number of men.

Where was Farnese?  Most impatiently the Golden Duke paced the deck of the Saint Martin.  Most eagerly were thousands of eyes strained towards the eastern horizon to catch the first glimpse of Parma’s flotilla.  But the day wore on to its close, and still the same inexplicable and mysterious silence prevailed.  There was utter solitude on the waters in the direction of Gravelines and Dunkerk—­not a sail upon the sea in the quarter where bustle and activity had been most expected.  The mystery was profound, for it had never entered the head of any man in the Armada that Alexander could not come out when he chose.