208 ENGLAND'S ATTEMPTS TO REACH INDIA estant Powers of the North to break into the Eastern seas, we should not forget that it was only the last and most imperious of many influences that had been at work. At the end of the fifteenth century Portugal held a unique position, with the geographical science of the Mediterranean at her back, and the unexplored Atlantic in front. At the end of the sixteenth, owing to improvements in navigation and the labours of the Flemish map-makers, she had to share these advantages with the maritime nations of northern Europe. Sooner or later the Catholic monopoly must have collapsed. That it collapsed at the particular moment and in the exact way that it did, resulted from the same spirit of military and religious aggression to which it owed its birth. For the Portuguese Order of Christ and the conversion of the infidel, we have but to substitute the Spanish infantry of Alva and the persecution of the Protestants. The exalted fervour with which Da Gama, after his solemn vigil, received the sacred stand- ard on the Tagus beach in 1497, breathes in Don John's ejaculation as he marched forth from Namur with the Pope's banner floating over him in 1578. " Under this emblem I vanquished the Turk; under the same will I conquer the heretics." Not only had the Catholic trade through Lisbon and Antwerp been crushed, but the still older channel through Egypt and Venice was now closed. From the blocking of the Syrian trade-routes by the Turks in the fifteenth century to far on in the sixteenth, Venice had been a chief intermediary between England and the
