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.
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