required some dozen lines, and one was sufficient for her answer.

"Ad Graecas, [Note 2] bone Rex, fient mandata kalendas!" was the prompt
reply of England's Elizabeth.

Which may be rendered--preserving the fun--

"Great King, thy command shall be done right soon,
On the thirty-first day of the coming June."

Some knowledge of the terrible magnitude of Philip's preparations is
necessary, in order to see what it was which England escaped in 1588.
The Armada consisted of 134 ships, and, reckoning soldiers, sailors, and
galley-slaves, carried about 32,000 men. [The exact figures are much
disputed, hardly two accounts being alike.] The cost of sustenance per
day was thirty thousand ducats. The cannon and field-pieces were
unnumbered: the halberts were ten thousand, the muskets seven thousand.
Bread, biscuits, and wine, were laid in for six months, with twelve
thousand pipes of fresh water. The cargo--among many other items--
consisted of whips and knives, for the conversion of the English; and
doubtless Don Martin Alorcon, Vicar-General of the Inquisition, with one
hundred monks and Jesuits in his train may be classed under the same
head. Heresy was to be destroyed throughout England: Sir Francis Drake
was singled out for special vengeance. The Queen was to be taken alive,
at all costs: she was to be sent prisoner over the Alps to Rome, there
to make her humble petition to the Pope, barefoot and prostrate, that
England might be re-admitted to communion with the Holy See. Did Philip
imagine that any amount of humiliation or coercion would have wrung such
words as these from the lips of Elizabeth Tudor?

On the 19th of May, the Invincible Armada, as the Spaniards proudly
termed it, sailed from Lisbon for Corufia.

The English Fleet lay in the harbour at Plymouth. The Admiral's ship
was the "Ark Royal;" Drake commanded the "Revenge:" the other principal
vessels were named the "Lion," the "Bear," the "Elizabeth Jonas," the
"Galleon Leicester," and the "Victory." They lay still in port waiting
for the first north wind, which did not come until the eighth of July.
Then Lord Howard set sail and went southwards for some distance; but the
wind changed to the south, the fleet was composed entirely of sailing
vessels, and the Admiral was afraid to go too far, lest the Armada
should slip past him in the night, between England and her wooden walls.
So he put back to Plymouth.

If he had only known the state of affair