ench aid was the more momentous to the
Netherlands that at this moment Parma won his crowning triumph in the
capture of Antwerp. Besieged in the winter of 1584, the city surrendered
after a brave resistance in the August of 1585. But heavy as was the
blow, it brought gain as well as loss to the Netherlanders. It forced
Elizabeth into action. She refused indeed the title of Protector of the
Netherlands which the States offered her, and compelled them to place
Brill and Flushing in her hands as pledges for the repayment of her
expenses. But she sent aid. Lord Leicester was hurried to the Flemish
coast with eight thousand men. In a yet bolder spirit of defiance
Francis Drake was suffered to set sail with a fleet of twenty-five
vessels for the Spanish Main. The two expeditions had very different
fortunes. Drake's voyage was a series of triumphs. The wrongs inflicted
on English seamen by the Inquisition were requited by the burning of the
cities of St. Domingo and Carthagena. The coasts of Cuba and Florida
were plundered, and though the gold fleet escaped him, Drake returned in
the summer of 1586 with a heavy booty. Leicester on the other hand was
paralyzed by his own intriguing temper, by strife with the Queen, and by
his military incapacity. Only one disastrous skirmish at Zutphen broke
the inaction of his forces, while Elizabeth strove vainly to use the
presence of his army to force Parma and the States alike to a peace
which would restore Philip's sovereignty over the Netherlands, but
leave them free enough to serve as a check on Philip's designs against
herself.

[Sidenote: The Catholic Plots.]

Foiled as she was in securing a check on Philip in the Low Countries,
the Queen was more successful in robbing him of the aid of the Scots.
The action of King James had been guided by his greed of the English
Crown, and a secret promise of the succession sufficed to lure him from
the cause of Spain. In July 1586 he formed an alliance, defensive and
offensive, with Elizabeth, and pledged himself not only to give no aid
to revolt in Ireland, but to suppress any Catholic rising in the
northern counties. The pledge was the more important that the Catholic
resentment seemed passing into fanaticism. Maddened by confiscation and
persecution, by the hopelessness of rebellion within or of deliverance
from without, the fiercer Catholics listened to schemes of assassination
to which the murder of William of Orange lent a terrible signific