It was in vain that Drake and the other friends of England prayed and entreated and stormed and swore. In vain they pointed across the Narrow Seas to Parma in the Netherlands at the head of 30,000 of the finest troops in Europe, and to the ports of Spain and Portugal, once more swarming with shipping and echoing with the noise of warlike preparations. For a time the liars and traitors had things their own way again. Drake and Howard implored her to let them get their ships fitted and go and fight the Armada in its own ports. No, she would do nothing. And she did nothing till at last arrived that fatal evening on which—
“There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay.”
Golden weeks and priceless opportunities had been wasted by the fatal lethargy of the Court. Drake and Howard, instead of falling, as they longed to do, on the wind-bound Armada in Vigo Bay, and doing with it as Drake had done at Cadiz, were kept on the defensive, straining like bloodhounds at the leash, knowing that every moment that the good wind lasted was heavily fraught with fate for England and perhaps the world.
At length the wind went round, and Drake, marvelling in angry wonder “how God could have sent a south-west wind just then,” found himself baffled and beaten back, while Medina-Sidonia with his released Armada sailed triumphantly for the Channel. There was only one thing now to do if England was to be saved. Valour and heroism, self-devotion and skill, must repair the damage that treason, lying, and weakness of head or heart had done. By this time the Armada should have been a crushed and tangled mass of burning wreckage, and so it would have been if Drake had had his way, and now here it was stronger than ever, its ships covering the hitherto Inviolate Sea; and there was Parma, with his transports still undestroyed, only waiting to join hands with Sidonia to once for all strangle the Heretic in their pitiless grip.
In the mighty and memorable fight that followed, our Little Pirate commanded on his own ship, the immortal Revenge. With almost incredible labour and skill the English fleet was somehow worked and warped out to the westward until, when that famous Sunday morning dawned, the sun looked, as has been truly said, upon a sight glorious for England. There was the great Armada, crescent-shaped, rolling up the Channel, and there, right in the wind’s eye and on its rear, were two English squadrons, and a third was gallantly advancing out of Plymouth.
This one, with true Elizabethan insolence, steered right across the front of the huge fleet, firing into such of the Dons as came within range. Then it went about, and joined the other English ships to windward.
Every one has read of the long, running, seven-day fight that followed; every one knows how the little, light-heeled English ships ran in and out among the great unwieldy galleons, tempting them out of their formation, and, having isolated one, fell on her like a pack of dogs on a wolf; and how, in spite of all that the English Admiral and his captains could do, the ever-changing wind and the ever-succeeding calms so helped the Spaniards, that in the end they reached the Straits of Dover but little worse off than they started.
If Drake could have had his way, these tactics would have been pushed farther, and every mile of the way would have been disputed; but Lord Howard, though a brave man, lacked the all-daring assurance of the conqueror of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. He would not fight until he had joined with Seymour and Wynter in the Straits. So it came about that on the seventh day—that is to say, Saturday afternoon—the Great Armada, the poorer only by some dozen craft that had been captured or battered into wreck and ruin, was sailing gloriously past Calais with the French and English land well in sight, and Dunkirk, the trysting-place with Parma, only eighteen miles away.
England has never passed through such anxious hours as she did that afternoon and night. It seemed as though, after all, her new-found sea-strength had failed her, and that, despite all the brilliant exploits of Gloriana’s Little Pirate in the West, he was powerless to protect her nearer home. What would have happened in the ordinary course of events no one now knows, for the Spaniards, stricken by some inexplicable madness, suddenly altered the whole course of events by what can only be called a freak of idiocy.
Medina-Sidonia, after having accomplished the most brilliant feat of seamanship that his age had seen, gave orders for the Armada to anchor! A few hours more and its work would have been done, with what results to England one scarcely cares to picture. So unexpected was this piece of priceless good fortune by the English captains that they had to drop their own anchors within range of the Spanish guns to save entangling themselves with the big Spanish ships.