had
stimulated and elevated the Spanish character. The subjects of
Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and Philip II., were
extraordinary men and accomplished extraordinary things. They
stretched the limits of the known world; they conquered Mexico and
Peru; they planted their colonies over the South-American continent;
they took possession of the great West-Indian islands, and with so
firm a grasp that Cuba at least will never lose the mark of the hand
which seized it. They built their cities as if for eternity. They
spread to the Indian Ocean, and gave their monarch's name to the
Philippines. All this they accomplished in half a century, and as it
were, they did it with a single hand; with the other they were
fighting Moors and Turks, and protecting the coasts of the
Mediterranean from the corsairs of Tunis and Constantinople.

They had risen on the crest of the wave, and with their proud _Non
Sufficit Orbis_ were looking for new worlds to conquer, at a time when
the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond
their own fishing grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing
from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting
collier. And yet within the space of a single ordinary life these
insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards'
grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign.
How did it come about? What Cadmus had sown dragons' teeth in the
furrows of the sea, for the race to spring from who manned the ships
of Queen Elizabeth, who carried the flag of their own country round
the globe, and challenged and fought the Spaniards on their own coasts
and in their own harbors?

The English sea power was the legitimate child of the Reformation. It
grew, as I shall show you, directly out of the new despised
Protestantism. Matthew Parker and Bishop Jewell, the judicious Hooker
himself, excellent men as they were, would have written and preached
to small purpose without Sir Francis Drake's cannon to play an
accompaniment to their teaching. And again, Drake's cannon would not
have roared so loudly and so widely, without seamen already trained in
heart and hand to work his ships and level his artillery. It was to
the superior seamanship, the superior quality of English ships and
crews, that the Spaniards attributed their defeat. Where did these
ships come from? Where and how did these mariners learn their trade?
Historians talk enthusiastically