wish to fit out lighter vessels, and entrust the whole conduct of the
expedition to the Prince of Parma. The Cortes of Castille requested
him not to put up with the disgrace incurred, but to chastise this
woman: they offered him their whole property and all the children of
the land for this purpose. But the very possibility of great
enterprises belongs only to one moment: in the next it is already gone
by.

First the Spanish forces were drawn into the complications existing in
France. The great Catholic agitation, which had been long fermenting
there, at last gained the upper hand, and was quite ready to prepare
the way for Philip II's supremacy. But Queen Elizabeth thought that
the day on which France fell into his hands would be the eve of her
own ruin. She too therefore devoted her best resources to France, to
uphold Philip II's opponent. When Henry IV, driven back to the verge
of the coast of Normandy, was all but lost, he was by her help put in
a position to maintain his cause. At the sieges of the great towns, in
which he was still often threatened with failure, the English troops
in several instances did excellent service. The Queen did not swerve
from her policy even when Henry IV saw himself compelled, and found it
compatible with his conscience, to go over to Catholicism. For he was
clearly thus all the better enabled to re-establish a France that
should be politically independent, in opposition to Spain and at war
with it; and it was exactly on this opposition that the political
freedom and independence of England herself rested. Yet as his change
of religion had been disagreeable to the Queen, so was also the peace
which he proceeded to make; she exerted her influence against its
conclusion. But as by it the Spaniards gave up the places they
occupied on the French coasts, which in their possession had menaced
England as well, she could not in reality be fundamentally opposed to
it.

These great conflicts on land were seconded by repeated attacks of the
English and Dutch naval power, by which it sometimes seemed as if the
Spanish monarchy would be shaken to its foundations. Elizabeth made an
attempt to restore Don Antonio to the throne from which Philip II had
driven him. But the minds of the Portuguese themselves were very far
from being as yet sufficiently prepared for a revolt: the enterprise
failed, in an attack on the suburbs of Lisbon. The war interested the
English most deeply. Parliament agreed to