when it came it was far less
vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was not
Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginning
of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find
heroic--the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was
to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--a
victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was
Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable
since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It
was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only
when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as
undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate
the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can
only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of
the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The
Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate--logically, it is hard to see
what else he could say, having declared her mother's marriage invalid;
but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England
from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who
had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the
South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; only
technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged
with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in an
imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for its
centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a
navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed
island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors or
pirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon,
fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of
grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island,
and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and
abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that has
never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless
hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope.
The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small
thing which escaped would survive the greatn