the responsibility, she would probably have experienced great trouble in controlling her new subjects; for in the following year, 1576, the privateers of liolland and Zeeland, under the pretence that English nerchants had been assisting Dunquerque, Spain and Antwerp, did so much &;mage to English shipping that the re- pressive services of Mr. liolstock had to be agMn called for. lie 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 hVilliam hVynter and Mr. Robert 13eal, t Clerk of the Council, to Zeeland to endearour to obtain restitution of wrongfully captured goods; but in this they ;;'ere not successful.

Elizabeth, nevertheless, did not cease to show numerous kind- nesses to the continental Protestants, and especially to those of them who took refuge in England. This policy of hers had the iucidental effect of drawing into her reahn many excellent artificers and workpeople, whose advent greatly benefited the trade and manufactures of the country and correspondingly weakened those of the places ;;'hence they came. Spain deeply resented the injm'y thus done to her Netherlands dominions; and signs are not want- ing 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 vapom'ings, 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 I'rotestantism, 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 hVorld, a would stake their all, the one for dmninion, and the other for liberty and existence.

Yet probably it ;;'as not then understood, and assuredly it has not always been since comprehended, how nuch depended upon the result of the struggle. It was not merely that Spain and England were pitting themselves one against the other; it ;;'as not merely that Catholicism challenged I'rotestantism; it was not merely that the Latin race threatened the Anglo-Saxon one.

Stoe, 681; II,,linshed, ii. 1262; Camden, ii. 303, 30t. - In 1576 John arker made a voyage to the West Indies, and %Iartin Frobiser started o the search fi)r a N.W. passage. ,See Uhap. XVI. s 1)rake began his famous voyage round the world in 1577. St.,. Chap. XVI.

VOL. I. I