proper victuals. In the meantime the religious aspect of the expedition was kept prominently in view by the erection on an island in the harbour of tents and altars, where the people once more confessed, and received the Sacrament.
Philip's motives, viewed from our present standpoint, are sufficiently apparent. He was animated by personal pique, for his matrimonial advances had been repulsed by Elizabeth, and he knew that he was detested in England. He had patriotic reasons for his action; for his huge empire oversea had suffered sorely from the depredations of the wild spirits of England, and his subjects in the Low Countries were being abetted in their struggle for freedom by English help and sympathy. And he had the religious incentive; for, himself a zealot of the most extreme type, he could have regarded no mission as more glorious or more worthy of a Christian sovereign than the bringing back of England to the fold of the Roman Church.
Yet, in the eyes of the England of the third quarter of the sixteenth century, Philip, naturally enough, found no justification whatsoever. If he had been repelled by England and her queen, his gloomy ad fanatic character had richly merited the rebuff. If he had suffered in his possessions oversea, the attitude of his representatives there had invited, nay, even compelled, hostile English action. If his Netherlands subjects were in arms against him, Spanish tyranny and oppression were merely meeting with their inevitable reward. And, if he stood for the Roman Catholic faith, Elizabeth stood as conspicuously for a faith which, though new, was already much dearer to the majority in England. Even the English Roman Catholics were not, with very rare exceptions, won over by Philip's assumption of the Crusader's cross. They were not religiously free, it is true, in those days; yet they knew well that, upon the whole, they were little worse off under Elizabeth than they would have been under Philip. In England, liberty had shown its head, and could not but grow and flourish. Already toleration was slowly extending. And the inspirations of a new and lusty youth had seized upon all Englishmen and rendered them proud of their nationality, no matter whether they agreed or disagreed with the Reformation. So it was that many English Roman Catholics gallantly fought for England in that crisis, with arms as well as with diplomacy; and that few, indeed, cared to range themselves, even passively, against her.
