The point of special interest is the account which he gives
of the state of parties and general feeling in the English people. Was
there that wide disposition to welcome an invading army in so large a
majority of the nation? The question is supposed to have been
triumphantly answered three years later, when it is asserted that the
difference of creed was forgotten, and Catholics and Protestants fought
side by side for the liberties of England. But, in the first place, the
circumstances were changed. The Queen of Scots no longer lived, and the
success of the Armada implied a foreign sovereign. But, next, the
experiment was not tried. The battle was fought at sea, by a fleet
four-fifths of which was composed of Protestant adventurers, fitted out
and manned by those zealous Puritans whose fidelity to the Queen Parsons
himself admitted. Lord Howard may have been an Anglo-Catholic; Roman
Catholic he never was; but he and his brother were the only loyalists in
the House of Howard. Arundel and the rest of his kindred were all that
Parsons claimed for them. How the country levies would have behaved had
Parma landed is still uncertain. It is likely that if the Spanish army
had gained a first success, there might have been some who would have
behaved as Sir William Stanley did.
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