This was, through life, a striking characteristic of Philip.  Enormous schemes were laid out with utterly inadequate provision for their accomplishment, and a confident expectation entertained that wild, visions were; in some indefinite way, to be converted into substantial realities, without fatigue or personal exertion on his part, and with a very trifling outlay of ready money.

Meantime the faithful Farnese did his best.  He was indefatigable night and day in getting his boats together and providing his munitions of war.  He dug a canal from Sas de Gand—­which was one of his principal depots—­ all the way to Sluys, because the water-communication between those two points was entirely in the hands of the Hollanders and Zeelanders.  The rebel cruisers swarmed in the Scheldt, from, Flushing almost to Antwerp, so that it was quite impossible for Parma’s forces to venture forth at all; and it also seemed hopeless to hazard putting to sea from Sluys.  At the same, time he had appointed his, commissioners to treat with the English envoys already named by the Queen.  There had been much delay in the arrival of those deputies, on account of the noise raised by Barneveld and his followers; but Burghley was now sanguine that the exposure of what he called the Advocate’s seditious, false, and perverse proceedings, would enable Leicester to procure the consent of the States to a universal peace.

And thus, with these parallel schemes of invasion and negotiation, spring; summer, and autumn, had worn away.  Santa Cruz was still with his fleet in Lisbon, Cadiz, and the Azores; and Parma was in Brussels, when Philip fondly imagined him established in Greenwich Palace.  When made aware of his master’s preposterous expectations, Alexander would have been perhaps amused, had he not been half beside himself with indignation.  Such folly seemed incredible.  There was not the slightest appearance of a possibility of making a passage without the protection of the Spanish fleet, he observed.  His vessels were mere transport-boats, without the least power of resisting an enemy.  The Hollanders and Zeelanders, with one hundred and forty cruisers, had shut him up in all directions.  He could neither get out from Antwerp nor from Sluys.  There were large English ships, too, cruising in the channel, and they were getting ready in the Netherlands and in England “most furiously.”  The delays had been so great, that their secret had been poorly kept, and the enemy was on his guard.  If Santa Cruz had come, Alexander declared that he should have already been in England.  When he did come he should still be prepared to make the passage; but to talk of such an attempt without the Armada was senseless, and he denounced the madness of that proposition to his Majesty in vehement and unmeasured terms.  His army, by sickness and other causes, had been reduced to one-half the number considered necessary for the invasion, and the rebels had established regular squadrons in the Scheldt,