themselves in an hour with the accumulations of a merchant’s life-time, and who had slain fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms, before each others’ eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing streets rose to many thousands; and the plunder from palaces and warehouses was counted by millions; before the sun had set on the ‘great fury.’  Those Spaniards, and Italians, and Walloons, were now thirsting for more gold, for more blood; and as the capital of England was even more wealthy and far more defenceless than the commercial metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the London ‘fury’ should be more thorough and more productive than the ‘fury’ of Antwerp, at the memory—­of which the world still shuddered.  And these professional soldiers had been taught to consider the English as a pacific, delicate, effeminate race, dependent on good living, without experience of war, quickly fatigued and discouraged, and even more easily to be plundered and butchered than were the excellent burghers of Antwerp.

And so these southern conquerors looked down from their great galleons and galeasses upon the English vessels.  More than three quarters of them were merchantmen.  There was no comparison whatever between the relative strength of the fleets.  In number they were about equal being each from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty strong—­but the Spaniards had twice the tonnage of the English, four times the artillery, and nearly three times the number of men.

Where was Farnese?  Most impatiently the Golden Duke paced the deck of the Saint Martin.  Most eagerly were thousands of eyes strained towards the eastern horizon to catch the first glimpse of Parma’s flotilla.  But the day wore on to its close, and still the same inexplicable and mysterious silence prevailed.  There was utter solitude on the waters in the direction of Gravelines and Dunkerk—­not a sail upon the sea in the quarter where bustle and activity had been most expected.  The mystery was profound, for it had never entered the head of any man in the Armada that Alexander could not come out when he chose.

And now to impatience succeeded suspicion and indignation; and there were curses upon sluggishness and upon treachery.  For in the horrible atmosphere of duplicity, in which all Spaniards and Italians of that epoch lived, every man:  suspected his brother, and already Medina Sidonia suspected Farnese of playing him false.  There were whispers of collusion between the Duke and the English commissioners at Bourbourg.  There were hints that Alexander was playing his own game, that he meant to divide the sovereignty of the Netherlands with the heretic Elizabeth, to desert his great trust, and to effect, if possible, the destruction of his master’s Armada, and the downfall of his master’s sovereignty in the north.  Men told each other, too, of a vague rumour, concerning which Alexander