eligious opposition of the chief Catholic and the chief
Protestant power. But probably the war would never have gone beyond
the stage of privateering and plots to assassinate in which it remained
inchoate for so long, had it not been for the Netherlands. The
corner-stone of English policy has been to keep friendly, or weak, the
power controlling the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt. The war of
liberation in the Netherlands had a twofold effect; in the first place
it damaged England's best customer, and secondly, Spanish
"frightfulness" shocked the English conscience. For a long time the
policy of the queen herself was as cynically selfish as it could
possibly be. She not only watched complacently the butcheries of Alva,
but she plotted and counterplotted, now offering aid to the Prince of
Orange, now betraying his cause in a way that may have been sport to
her but was death to the men she played with. Her aim, as far as she
had a consistent one, was to allow Spain and the Netherlands to exhaust
each other.

Not only far nobler but, as it proved in the end, far wiser, was the
action of the Puritan party that poured money and recruits into the
cause of their oppressed fellow-Calvinists. But an equally great
service to them, or at any rate a greater amount of damage to Spain,
was done by the hardy buccaneers, Hawkins and Drake, who preyed upon
the Spanish treasure {340} galleons and pillaged the Spanish
settlements in the New World. These men and their fellows not only cut
the sinews of Spain's power but likewise built the fleet.

[Sidenote: England's sea power]

The eventual naval victory of England was preceded by a long course of
successful diplomacy. As the aggressor England forced the haughtiest
power in Europe to endure a protracted series of outrages. Not only
were rebels supported, not only were Spanish fleets taken forcibly into
English harbors and there stripped of moneys belonging to their
government, but refugees were protected and Spanish citizens put to
death by the English queen. Philip and Alva could not effectively
resent and hardly dared to protest against the treatment, because they
felt themselves powerless. As so often, the island kingdom was
protected by the ocean and by the proved superiority of her seamen.
After a score of petty fights all the way from the Bay of Biscay to the
Pacific Ocean, Spanish sailors had no desire for a trial of strength in
force.

But in every respect sav