Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/159

Ireland; perhaps half or one-third, and these mostly mere hulks, arrived at length in the harbours of Spain; the winds and waves and rocks had finished what the English guns had begun:—

Long, long in vain the waiting mothers kneel
In the white palaces of far Castile,
Weep, wide brown eyes that watch along the shore,
Your dark-haired lovers shall return no more;
Only it may be, on the rising tide,
The shattered hull of one proud bark may glide,
To moor at even on a smooth bay's breast,
Where the South mountains lean toward the West,
A wraith of battle with her broken spars,
Between the water’s shimmer and the stars.^[1]

England and Protestantism saved.Our country, and, with her, the great cause of freedom and Protestantism, were saved. Spain was now known to be mainly a bugbear to frighten children, and England and Elizabeth ruled the waves.

The last years of Elizabeth, 1589–1603.The great Queen lived for fifteen years after her victory, and her enemy, Philip, lived for ten. She never realized how complete that victory had been; when her best councillors and her bravest sailors urged her to follow it up and blow the Spanish once and for all out of the seas, she utterly refused. She allowed occasional raids on the Spanish coasts and colonies, and one of these took the city and burned the great dockyard of Cadiz; but pay for a big war she would not; though, in a big war, swift victory was all but certain, and would have produced a lasting peace. Her last years were very lonely; she had never married; the great men who had helped her to make England a first-rate power, Burghley, Walsingham, Drake, Grenville, had

1. Sir James Rennell Rodd: Oxford Prize Poem, 1880, ‘Raleigh’.