Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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It was of set purpose that Queen Elizabeth, in the year of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, chose the name Dreadnought for one of her ships of war. The intentions of the Catholic League towards England were an open secret in every council chamber of Europe. The papal Bull, excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth, had been nailed on the doors of Lambeth Palace. It was at their disposal. Alva’s butcheries in the Netherlands were fresh in the recollection of the world, and the memory of other dark doings came still more closely home to our own people; how Englishmen had been “seized in Spain and the New World to linger amidst the tortures of the Inquisition or to die by its fires.” Burghley and Walsingham, and others as well, had fully understood the menace for England and the warning of Lepanto only two years before. Their secret agents had supplied them with a copy of De Spes’ confidential report to Alva and King Philip to the effect that the ports of England were poorly fortified, and that only eleven at most of Queen Elizabeth’s twenty ships of war were worth taking into account. They had not forgotten what had happened three years before, when, under the guise of an escort for the new Queen of Spain from Flanders to the Tagus, an extremely formidable Spanish fleet, fully equipped for war, had come north and lain for some weeks in the Scheldt, acting throughout in a very suspicious way. That was a twelvemonth before Lepanto. Now the situation seemed even more menacing for England. The Queen’s so-called Agreement with Spain, lately come to, for practical purposes was hardly worth the paper it was drafted on. There was Mary Stuart and her partizans to be reckoned with also; the restless intriguing of the Roman Catholics all over England; open rebellion in Ireland. What might not the consequences of the Paris massacre involve in the near future? It was at such a moment that the name Dreadnought was first appointed to an English man-of-war, and the Queen’s choice in the circumstances partook of the nature almost of an Act of State, specially designed to express the temper of the nation. In the same spirit of exalted patriotism in which, at a later day, Elizabeth, from Tilbury camp, with proud scorn bade King Philip and the Prince of Parma and all other enemies of the realm do their worst, the great Queen, of her own royal will and pleasure, named for the Royal Navy its first Dreadnought.