THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



but the brain was careful not to know what the hands 

 were doing. It is not what Burghley and Walsingham 

 were writing, but what Shakespeare and Jonson were 

 saying, that makes the greatness of the reign ; not what 

 the Treasurer of the Navy was commanded to do, but 

 what Drake and Hawkins did without waiting for the 

 Royal command. The public acts of the regularly 

 constituted Government were tame and few. But the 

 Queen knew what was going forward. The Catholic 

 power of Spain, overshadowing and threatening Europe, 

 was never out of her mind. She is sometimes accused, 

 on plausible evidence, of neglecting her Navy. ' In 

 February 1559/ says an excellent recent historian, 'she 

 possessed twenty-two effective ships of a hundred tons 

 and upwards; in March 1603, twenty-nine; practically, 

 therefore, she did little more than replace those worn 

 out by efflux of time, for only two were lost in warfare.' ^ 

 But, as the same writer justly points out, there was great 

 plenty of pirates, — some four hundred were known in 

 1563, — and, by a merciful dispensation of Providence, 

 they did far more harm to foreign commerce than to 

 English. Twenty-nine ships is not a large navy; but 

 when the Armada came, a hundred and thirty vessels were 

 waiting for it in the narrow seas. The history of the 

 Royal Navy under Queen Elizabeth is as little adequate 

 to express the growth of national sea-power as is the 

 history of the Royal Academy under Queen Victoria to 

 express the progress of the nation in the Fine Arts. 

 The Policy of The main policy of the Queen was, at any cost, to 

 prevent disunion among her subjects, and to win their 



1 M. Oppenheim, The Adminhtradon of the Royal Navy l^og-1660. 



(1896). 



