"Nobody has any right to murder my mamma," was the reply of the boy, who again opened the sluices of his grief, and allowed the tears to irrigate his face with a couple of meandering rivulets. At length, silence being obtained, the ambassador declared that the amputation of Mary's head was accidental as far as Elizabeth was concerned; but, "axe-i-dental, you mean," was the bitter reply of her sobbing offspring. The messenger, nevertheless, persisted that the Queen of England meant nothing by signing the death-warrant; that, in fact, she had been "only in fun"; and as he wound up with the offer of an increased pension to James, the heartless brat dried his eyes, with the observation that "What's done can't be undone," and pocketed a quarter in advance of his enlarged income. That Elizabeth had really been determined upon Mary's death, is a point upon which our sagacious readers will require no enlightenment; for to them the character of the royal catamountain—we use the Johnsonian word, in preference to the old, familiar term of catamaran—will be clear, from the gallons of midnight oil which we have bestowed upon it. How to get rid of Mary was, in fact, a subject of frequent deliberation between the English queen and her creatures—pretty creatures they were—among whom Leicester and Walsingham stood prominent. Leicester had proposed poison, while Elizabeth suggested assassination; but the dagger and bowl, the emblems of legitimate tragedy, were both laid aside for the farce of a trial. When the sanguinary business was done, the chief actors in it threw the blame upon the subordinates, and poor Mr. Secretary Davison was declared by Elizabeth to have been the sole cause of the execution of the Scottish queen, because he had assisted in executing the deed that consigned her to the Scaffold. When Davison was accused of the act, he went about exclaiming, "I! Well, that is the coolest!—'Pon my word! What next?" But he soon found what was next, for he was committed to prison, and fined £10,000, merely to give colour to the accusation. When confidentially apprised of the cause of his detention, he went into hysterics at the half-ridiculous, half-melancholy, idea of his being impounded to give colour to a charge which was altogether false; and "It only just cleans me out!—ruins me, by Jove!" was the touching remark he made as he paid the entire fine imposed upon him, and quitted the prison.
Philip of Spain was now becoming desirous of an attack upon England, without having any definite views, beyond a desire for mischief, which was inherent in his character. He had got together a very formidable fleet, and Elizabeth taking alarm, tried all sorts of plans to check his warlike purpose. One of the expedients of her ministers—and it was not a bad one—was to throw discredit on a quantity of Philip's bills, in the hope of his finding a difficulty in getting them discounted. Sir Francis Drake was despatched to Cadiz with a fleet of thirty sail, and Elizabeth having on his departure said to him, affectionately, "Go, and do your best, Drake—there's a duck," he dashed into Cadiz Bay, knocked down four castles, sunk a hundred ships—forecastles included—and going home by the Tagus, took a large man-of-war from under the very nose of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, and then made him a polite obeisance from the bow of the vessel.
Philip did not relax in his preparations for invading England, and he got together a very numerous fleet, by hiring vessels wherever he could, and sending his emissaries to engage a whole squadron at a time, like an individual, who, jumping into the first cab on a stand, desires the whole rank to follow him. The Armada—for such it was called—became, of course, rather numerous than select; but there is no doubt that if its quality was queer, its quantity was most respectable.
The naval service of England had been so shabbily provided for, that the British fleet did not exceed thirty-six sail of the line; though by-the-by, as the authorities have just told us that Drake took or demolished one hundred ships at Cadiz, there seems a slight error in figures, which will occasionally happen in the best regulated histories. As it was not known where the enemy was to land, the High Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, was obliged to exclaim—"Now, gentlemen, spread yourselves, spread yourselves!" as he ordered Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher to the command of their various detachments. The gallant Drake took up his station at Ushant, as if he would have said "You shan't!" to any foe who might have come to that point to effect a landing. Hawkins cruised near the Scilly Islands to look out, as he said, for the silly fellows who should come in his-way; and Lord Henry Seymour cruised along the Flanders coast, while other captains vigorously scoured the Chops of the Channel. It was expected that the Spanish Armada would have come down the Thames, and perhaps amused themselves with an excursion to Rosherville, which was strongly fortified, as well as all the places on the river. The Boshervillians threw themselves into the arms of their resident baron; and the peaceful inhabitants of Sheerness prepared to fight, out of sheer necessity. Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in eagerness to repel the invader from their shores; and the gallant fellows living near the Tower, declared in their blunt but expressive language, that "though the foe might pass a Gravesend, outlive a Blackwall, or go in safety through a Greenwich, he would most assuredly never survive a Wapping!"
The queen herself, having driven down in her tilbury to Tilbury Fort, mounted a saddle-horse, and, flushed by her nautical enthusiasm, she looked a very horse-marine as she cantered about upon, her steed in the presence of her people. The Earls of Essex and Leicester having held her rein, she majestically bridled up, and sent forth among the crowd a volley of clap-traps, declaring she had come among them, as the song says—
"To conquer, to conqu-e-e-er,
To co-o-onquer, or to boldly die-i-i-i-e."
At length it was determined by Philip that the Spanish Armada should set out; and, as Strype pleasantly tells us, "a pretty set-out they made of it." Poor Santa Cruz, the high admiral, made a most unlucky hit to begin with, by falling ill and dying, when his second in command, the Duke of Parma, followed his leader's example, with most inconvenient rapidity.
The chief command was given to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, "who was a very good man, but a very bad sailor," * and knew so little of maritime affairs, that he is reported to have sent to a dealer in marine stores for an outfit. At length the Invincible Armada was ready to put to sea, and they succeeded in "shoving her off," on the 20th of May, 1588, from the Tagus. The seas, which evidently had no notion of being ruled by any but Britannia, turned turbulent under the Spanish usurpers, and a generalising of the waves made it a toss-up whether Medina Sidonia and his fleet would ride out the storm in safety. Four of the ships were actually lost, and nearly all the rest dispersed, and when the high admiral called upon his subordinate officers to be "calm and collected," he found that the storm had not allowed them to be either the one or the other. Having got his forces together again, as well as he could, the Spanish admiral made another start towards the English coast, and appeared off the Lizard Point, with his fleet drawn up in the form of a crescent, being seven miles from horn to horn, and presenting to the enemy the horns of a dilemma. The English were on shore at Plymouth, playing at bowls on the Hoe, and Drake, who was getting the better of the game, declared he would play it out, for there was no hurry, as he could beat his companions first, and the Spaniards afterwards. Having, at length, taken to their vessels, the British watched the foe as they came rolling in their heavy, lumbering ships up the channel. Their guns were planted so high up that they shot entirely over the English vessels, and into one another, while their unwieldy size rendering them unmanageable, several of them being banged to bits by a series of frightful collisions. To add to the confusion, one of the vessels took fire, and was burnt, by an accident of the cook on board, who, it has been ingeniously suggested, was trying to fry some of the celebrated chops of the channel, "which," as Mrs. Markham says, in her very excellent Abridgment, "you know, my little dears, you have all heard talked about."
* Vide George Cruikshank's renowned etching.
Another large vessel sprung her mast, another sprung a leak, a third burst her binnacle, a fourth shivered her timbers, a fifth lost all her fore part; and the crew were driven by stern necessity into the stem; while on all sides, there prevailed the utmost confusion. Medina Sidonia retired to the back yard of one of his ships, where he sat dejected and alone, and after a good deal of skirmishing, in which the Spaniards got the worst of it at all points of the compass, the duke made the best of his way home again. He arrived at Santander about the end of September, 1588, with the mere skeleton of the force he had started with, and every sailor he brought back was in himself a complete wreck of what he had been when he quitted his own country. Thus ended the grand design of invading England by means of the Spanish Armada, which, to say the truth, did more mischief to itself than it sustained at the hands of the enemy. Had a public meeting been held at the time to celebrate the victory, we are sure that any English patriot might have proposed a vote of thanks to the Armada, for the "able and impartial manner in which it banged itself almost to pieces, with a total disregard of its own interests, and to the incalculable advantage of England."