the responsibility, she would probably have experienced great trouble in controlling her new subjects; for in the following year, 1576, the privateers of Holland and Zeeland, under the pretence that English merchants had been assisting Dunquerque, Spain and Antwerp, did so much damage to English shipping that the repressive services of Mr. Holstock had to be again called for. He proceeded to sea with a small squadron and captured a number of Dutch seamen, two hundred of whom he sent to English prisons. The queen, moreover, sent Sir William Wynter and Mr. Robert Beal,[1] Clerk of the Council, to Zeeland to endeavour to obtain restitution of wrongfully captured goods; but in this they were not successful.[2]
Elizabeth, nevertheless, did not cease to show numerous kindnesses to the continental Protestants, and especially to those of them who took refuge in England. This policy of hers had the incidental effect of drawing into her realm many excellent artificers and workpeople, whose advent greatly benefited the trade and manufactures of the country and correspondingly weakened those of the places whence they came. Spain deeply resented the injury thus done to her Netherlands dominions; and signs are not wanting that, as early as 1580 or before, the more far-seeing of English statesmen realised that Spain's enmity was of a kind which would not exhaust itself in vapourings, nor indeed in hostile action of the ordinary kind. It was perceived that sooner or later there must come a moment when the great champions of Catholicism and of Protestantism, antagonised not only by differences of religion and by trade rivalry, but also by the savage piratical warfare that had long unofficially subsisted between them in the New World,[3] would stake their all, the one for dominion, and the other for liberty and existence.
Yet probably it was not then understood, and assuredly it has not always been since comprehended, how much depended upon the result of the struggle. It was not merely that Spain and England were pitting themselves one against the other; it was not merely that Catholicism challenged Protestantism; it was not merely that the Latin race threatened the Anglo-Saxon one.
