WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

A match at bowls was being played, in which Drake and other high officers of the fleet were engaged, when a small armed vessel was seen running before the wind into Plymouth harbor with all sails set Her commander landed in haste and eagerly sought the place where the English lord admirals and his captains were standing. His name was Fleming; he was the master of a Scotch privateer; and he told the English officers that he had that morning seen the Spanish Armada off the Cornish coast.

At this exciting information the captains began to hurry down to the water, and there was a shouting for the ships boats; but Drake coolly checked his comrades, and insisted the match should be played out He said that there was plenty of time both to win the game and beat the Spaniards. The best and bravest match that ever was scored was resumed accordingly. Drake and his friends aimed their last bowls with the same steady, calculating coolness with which they were about to point their guns. The winning cast was made; and then they went on board and prepared for action with their hearts as light and their nerves as firm as they had been on the Hoe Bowling Green.

Meanwhile the messengers and signals had been dispatched fast and far through England, to warn each town and village that the enemy had come at last. In every sea-port there was instant making ready by land and by sea; in every shire and every city there was instant mustering of horse and man. But England's best defense then, as ever, was in her fleet; and after warping laboriously out of Plymouth harbor against the wind, the lord admiral stood westward under easy sail, keeping an anxious look-out for the Armada, the approach of which was soon announced by Cornish fish-boats and signals from the Cornish cliffs.

The England of our own days is so strong, and the Spain of our own days is so feeble, that it is not easy, without some reflection and care, to comprehend the full extent of the peril which England then ran from the power and the ambition of Spain, or to appreciate the importance of that crisis in the history of the world. "We had then no Indian or colonial empire, save the feeble germs of our North American settlements, which Raleigh and Gilbert had recently planted. Scotland was a separate kingdom; and Ireland was then even a greater source of weakness and a worse nest of rebellion than she has been in after times.

Queen Elizabeth had found at her accession an encumbered revenue, a divided people, and an unsuccessful foreign war, in which the last remnant of our possessions in France had been lost; she had also a formidable pretender to her crown, whose interests were favored by all the Roman Catholic powers; and even some of her subjects were warped by religious bigotry to deny her title, and to look on her as a heretical usurper.

It is true that during the years-of her reign which had passed away before the attempted invasion of 1588, she had revived the commercial prosperity, the national spirit, and true national loyalty of England. But her resources to cope with the colossal power of Philip II, still seemed most scanty; and she had not a single foreign ally, except the Dutch, who were themselves struggling hard, and, as it seemed, hopelessly, to maintain their revolt against Spain.

On the other hand, Philip II, was absolute master of an empire so superior to the other states of the world in extent, in resources, and especially in military and naval forces as to make the project of enlarging that empire into a universal monarchy seem a perfectly feasible scheme; and Philip had both the ambition to form that project, and the resolution to devote all his energies and all his means to its realization.

Since the downfall of the Roman Empire, no such preponderating power had existed in the world. During the medieval centuries the chief European kingdoms were slowly moulding themselves out of the feudal chaos; and though the wars with each other were numerous and desperate, and several of their respective kings figured for a time as mighty conquerors, none of them in those times acquired the consistency and perfect organization which are requisite for a long-sustained career of aggrandizement.