Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 10.djvu/441

I577-] THE SPANISH TREATY. 421 the Isthmus four years later, built a pinnace in the Pacific, and made prizes among the coasters, which, dreaming of no danger in that undisturbed ocean, were bringing bullion from Lima. He had not brought home his plunder. He had wasted precious time at the Isle of Pearls, toying with a Spanish lady. Armed boats were sent after him. He was taken and hanged as a pirate, and the gold was recovered. But the ease had been again demonstrated with which some great blow might be struck in those quarters at the heart of the Spanish power, and there was a man of far higher qualities than Oxenham, who was ready to undertake the enterprise. Some one whose signature is erased, and whose name it would be unjust to conjecture, had volunteered his services for an exploit of a less worthy kind. ' Your Majesty/ wrote this man in language curiously characteristic of the time, ' must first seek the kingdom of heaven, and make no league with those whom God has divided from you. Your Majesty must endeavour to make yourself strong and to make them weak, and at sea you can either make war on them openly or by colourable means ; by giving license, under letters patent, to discover and inhabit strange places, with special proviso for their safeties whom policy requires to have most annoyed by which means the doing the contrary shall be imputed to the executors' fault ; your Highnesses letters patent being a manifest show that it was not your Majesty's pleasure so to have it. Afterwards, if it seem well, you can avow the fact, or else you can disavow the fact and those that did it as