nd, he had shipped fifteen
companies of picked troops from Middelburg, together with a flotilla
laden with munitions and provisions enough to withstand a siege of
several weeks. When the arrangements were completed, he went himself on
board of a ship of war to take command of the expedition in person. On
the 17th of April he arrived with his succours off the harbour of Calais,
and found to his infinite disappointment that the Rysbank fort was in the
hands of the enemy. As not a vessel could pass the bar without almost
touching that fortress, the entrance to Calais was now impossible. Had
the incompetent Vidosan heeded the advice of his brave Dutch officers;
the place might still have been saved, for it had surrendered in a panic
on the very day when the fleet of Maurice arrived off the port.

Henry had lost no time in sending, also, to his English allies for
succour. The possession of Calais by the Spaniards might well seem
alarming to Elizabeth, who could not well forget that up to the time of
her sister this important position had been for two centuries an English
stronghold. The defeat of the Spanish husband of an English queen had
torn from England the last trophies of the Black Prince, and now the
prize had again fallen into the hands of Spain; but of Spain no longer in
alliance, but at war, with England. Obviously it was most dangerous to
the interests and to the safety of the English realm, that this
threatening position, so near the gates of London, should be in the hands
of the most powerful potentate in the world and the dire enemy of
England. In response to Henry's appeal, the Earl of Essex was despatched
with a force of six thousand men--raised by express command of the queen
on Sunday when the people were all at church--to Dover, where shipping
was in readiness to transport the troops at once across the Channel. At
the same time, the politic queen and some of her counsellors thought the
opening a good one to profit by the calamity of their dear ally,
Certainly it was desirable to prevent Calais from falling into the grasp
of Philip. But it was perhaps equally desirable, now that the place
without the assistance of Elizabeth could no longer be preserved by
Henry, that Elizabeth, and not Henry, should henceforth be its possessor.
To make this proposition as clear to the French king as it seemed to the
English queen, Sir Robert Sidney was despatched in all haste to Boulogne,
even while the guns of De Rosne were