The one great feature of the autumn of 1587 was the private negotiation between Elizabeth and the Duke of Parma.

Before taking a glance at the nature of those secrets, however, it is necessary to make a passing allusion to an event which might have seemed likely to render all pacific communications with Spain, whether secret or open, superfluous.

For while so much time had been lost in England and Holland, by misunderstandings and jealousies, there was one Englishman who had not been losing time.  In the winter and early spring of 1587, the Devonshire skipper had organized that expedition which he had come to the Netherlands, the preceding autumn, to discuss.  He meant to aim a blow at the very heart of that project which Philip was shrouding with so much mystery, and which Elizabeth was attempting to counteract by so much diplomacy.

On the 2nd April, Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth with four ships belonging to the Queen, and with twenty-four furnished by the merchants of London, and other private individuals.  It was a bold buccaneering expedition—­combining chivalrous enterprise with the chance of enormous profit—­which was most suited to the character of English adventurers at that expanding epoch.  For it was by England, not by Elizabeth, that the quarrel with Spain was felt to be a mortal one.  It was England, not its sovereign, that was instinctively arming, at all points, to grapple with the great enemy of European liberty.  It was the spirit of self-help, of self-reliance, which was prompting the English nation to take the great work of the age into its own hands.  The mercantile instinct of the nation was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the great Protestant mutiny.  Against a decrepit superstition in combination with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and menacing to them, and with which they felt that the life and death struggle could not long be deferred.

And of these various tendencies, there were no more fitting representatives than Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Essex, Cavendish and Grenfell, and the other privateersmen of the sixteenth century.  The same greed for danger, for gold, and for power, which, seven centuries before, had sent the Norman race forth to conquer all Christendom, was now sending its Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kindred to take possession of the old world and the new.

“The wind commands me away,” said Drake on the 2nd April, 1587; “our ship is under sail.  God grant that we may so live in His fear, that the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her Majesty abroad as well as at home.”