or personal courage, may be pardoned
for having come reluctantly to a country where he had to bring
men-at-arms for servants, and his own cook for fear of being poisoned.
The sea, too, was hateful to him, for he suffered miserably from
sickness. Nevertheless, he was coming, and with him such a retinue of
gallant gentlemen as the world has rarely seen together. The Marquis
de los Valles, Gonzaga, d'Aguilar, Medina Celi, Antonio de Toledo,
Diego de Mendoza, the Count de Feria, the Duke of Alva, Count Egmont,
and Count Horn--men whose stories are written in the annals of two
worlds: some in letters of glorious light, some in letters of blood
which shall never be washed out while the history of mankind survives.
Whether for evil or good, they were not the meek innocents for whom
Renard had at one time asked so anxiously.

In company with these noblemen was Sir Thomas Gresham, charged with
half a million of money in bullion, out of the late arrivals from the
New World; which the emperor, after taking security from the London
merchants, had lent the queen, perhaps to enable her to make her
marriage palatable by the restoration of the currency.[333]

[Footnote 333: Gresham's Correspondence: _Flanders
MSS._ State Paper Office. The bullion was
afterwards drawn in procession in carts through the
London streets.]

Thus preciously freighted, the Spanish fleet, a hundred and fifty
ships, large and small, sailed from Corunna at the beginning {p.140}
of July. The voyage was weary and wretched. The sea-sickness
prostrated both the prince and the troops, and to the sea-sickness was
added the terror of the French--a terror, as it happened, needless,
for the English exiles, by whom the prince was to have been
intercepted, had, in the last few weeks, melted away from the French
service, with the exception of a few who were at Scilly. Sir Peter
Carew, for some unknown reason, had written to ask for his pardon, and
had gone to Italy;[334] but the change was recent and unknown, and the
ships stole along in silence, the orders of the prince being that not
a salute should be fired to catch the ear of an enemy.[335] At last,
on the 19th of July, the white cliffs of Freshwater were sighted; Lord
Howard lay at the Needles with the English fleet; and on Friday, the
20th, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the flotilla was safely
anchored in Southampton Water.