n ready for sea.

The news that King Philip's Great Armada had been beaten back by the wild
Biscay gales reached England when the whole country was in a fever of
preparation for resistance. A commission of noblemen and gentlemen had been
appointed "to sett doune such meanes as are fittest to putt the forces of
the Realme in order to withstand any invasion." The Lord-Lieutenants of the
counties were directed to be ready to call out the local levies, which
formed a roughly armed, and mostly untrained, militia. Garrisons were
organized in the seaports, formed of more reliable and better equipped men,
and a small force was collected at Tilbury to oppose a landing in the
Thames estuary. Faggots and brushwood were piled on hill-tops from Land's
End to Berwick to send the news of the Spaniards' arrival through England
by a chain of beacon fires.

The best of the Queen's advisers, men like the Lord Admiral Howard of
Effingham, and such experienced seamen as Hawkins, Drake, and Fenner,
realized, and succeeded in persuading the Council, that it was on the sea,
and not on the land, that England must be protected from invasion. Their
letters in the Armada State Papers are full of practical lessons even for
the present time. While insisting that the main effort must be
concentrated on the fleet, they did not disregard the advisability of
subsidiary preparations on land, in case of accidents. But Howard insisted
that a few well-trained men were worth fourfold their number of irregular
levies, and wrote to the Council:--

"I pray your Lordships to pardon me that I may put you in
remembrance to move her Majesty that she may have an especial
care to draw ten or twelve thousand men about her own person,
that may not be men unpractised. For this she may well assure
herself that 10,000 men, that be practised and trained together
under a good governor and expert leaders, shall do her Majesty
more service than any 40,000 which shall come from any other
parts of the realm. For, my Lords, we have here 6000 men in the
fleet, which we shall be able, out of our company, to land upon
any great occasion, which being as they have been trained here
under captains and men of experience, and each man knowing his
charge and they their captains, I had rather have them to do any
exploit than any 16,000 men out of any part of the realm."

The fleet, from which Howard of Effingham was ready to land thes