Drake was lavish of his presents.  He presented the Queen with a diamond cross and a coronet set with splendid emeralds.  He gave Bromley, the Lord Chancellor, 800 dollars’ worth of silver plate, and as much more to other members of the Council.  The Queen wore her coronet on New Year’s Day; the Chancellor was content to decorate his sideboard at the cost of the Catholic King.  Burghley and Sussex declined the splendid temptation; they said they could accept no such precious gifts from a man whose fortune had been made by plunder.

Burghley lived to see better into Drake’s value.  Meanwhile, what now are we, looking back over our history, to say of these things—­the Channel privateering; the seizure of Alva’s army money; the sharp practice of Hawkins with the Queen of Scots and King Philip; or this amazing performance of Sir Francis Drake in a vessel no larger than a second-rate yacht of a modern noble lord?

Resolution, daring, professional skill, all historians allow to these men; but, like Burghley, they regard what they did as piracy, not much better, if at all better, than the later exploits of Morgan and Kidd.  So cried the Catholics who wished Elizabeth’s ruin; so cried Lope de Vega and King Philip.  In milder language the modern philosopher repeats the unfavourable verdict, rejoices that he lives in an age when such doings are impossible, and apologises faintly for the excesses of an imperfect age.  May I remind the philosopher that we live in an age when other things have also happily become impossible, and that if he and his friends were liable when they went abroad for their summer tours to be snapped by the familiars of the Inquisition, whipped, burnt alive, or sent to the galleys, he would perhaps think more leniently of any measures by which that respectable institution and its masters might be induced to treat philosophers with greater consideration?

Again, remember Dr. Johnson’s warning, Beware of cant.  In that intensely serious century men were more occupied with the realities than the forms of things.  By encouraging rebellion in England and Ireland, by burning so many scores of poor English seamen and merchants in fools’ coats at Seville, the King of Spain had given Elizabeth a hundred occasions for declaring war against him.  Situated as she was, with so many disaffected Catholic subjects, she could not begin a war on such a quarrel.  She had to use such resources as she had, and of these resources the best was a splendid race of men who were not afraid to do for her at their own risk what commissioned officers would and might have justly done had formal war been declared, men who defeated the national enemy with materials conquered from himself, who were devoted enough to dispense with the personal security which the sovereign’s commission would have extended to prisoners of war, and face the certainty of being hanged if they were taken.  Yes; no doubt by the letter of the law of nations Drake and Hawkins were corsairs of the same stuff as Ulysses, as the rovers of Norway.  But the common-sense of Europe saw through the form to the substance which lay below it, and the instinct of their countrymen gave them a place among the fighting heroes of England, from which I do not think they will be deposed by the eventual verdict of history.