This ‘very great gap’ on the American side of the Atlantic was soon to be matched by the still greater gap Drake was to make on the European side by destroying the Spanish Armada and thus securing that mightiest of ocean highways through which the hosts of emigration afterwards poured into a land endowed with the goodly heritage of English liberty and the English tongue.

The year of Drake’s return (1586) was no less troublous than its immediate predecessors.  The discovery of the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and to place Mary on the throne, supported by Scotland, France, and Spain, proved Mary’s complicity, produced an actual threat of war from France, and made the Pope and Philip gnash their teeth with rage.  The Roman Catholic allied powers had no sufficient navy, and Philip’s credit was at its lowest ebb after Drake’s devastating raid.  The English were exultant, east and west; for the True Report of a Worthie Fight performed in the voiage from Turkie by Five Shippes of London against 11 gallies and two frigats of the King of Spain at Pantalarea, within the Straits [of Gibraltar] Anno 1586 was going the rounds and running a close second to Drake’s West India achievement.  The ignorant and thoughtless, both then and since, mistook this fight, and another like it in 1590, to mean that English merchantmen could beat off Spanish men-of-war.  Nothing of the kind:  the English Levanters were heavily armed and admirably manned by well-trained fighting crews; and what these actions really proved, if proof was necessary, was that galleys were no match for broadsides from the proper kind of sailing ships.

Turkey came into the problems of 1586 in more than name, for there was a vast diplomatic scheme on foot to unite the Turks with such Portuguese as would support Antonio, the pretender to the throne of Portugal, and the rebellious Dutch against Spain, Catholic France, and Mary Stuart’s Scotland.  Leicester was in the Netherlands with an English army, fighting indecisively, losing Sir Philip Sidney and angering Elizabeth by accepting the governor-generalship without her leave and against her diplomacy, which, now as ever, was opposed to any definite avowal that could possibly be helped.

Meanwhile the Great Armada was working up its strength, and Drake was commissioned to weaken it as much as possible.  But, on the 8th of February, 1587, before he could sail, Mary was at last beheaded, and Elizabeth was once more entering on a tricky course of tortuous diplomacy too long by half to follow here.  As the great crisis approached, it had become clearer and clearer that it was a case of kill or be killed between Elizabeth and Mary, and that England could not afford to leave Marian enemies in the rear when there might be a vast Catholic alliance in the front.  But, as a sovereign, Elizabeth disliked the execution of any crowned head; as a wily woman she wanted to make the most of both sides; and as a diplomatist she would not have open war and direct operations going down to the root of the evil if devious ways would do.