In public, it is true, this grave note was not allowed
to be heard. When out of France came, as was assumed
from Mendoza's cabinet, a false account of the campaign
favourable to the Spaniards, it was answered from England
in all the old boisterous high spirits. Howard wished
his kinsman, the ambassador in Paris, to 'let Mendoza
know that her Majesty's rotten ships dare meet him with his
master's sound ships, and in buffeting with them, though
they were three great-ships to one of us, yet we have
shortened them some 16 or 17, whereof there is three of
them a-fishing in the bottom of the seas, God be thanked
of all!' Eventually a full reply in the truculent and
reckless style, which the journalism of the day approved,
was published, telling 'how their Navy, which they termed
Invincible, consisting of one hundred and forty sail of
ships, not only of their own country, but strengthened
with the greatest argosies, Portugal carracks, Florentines,
and large hulks of other countries, were by thirty of Her
Majesty's own ships of war, and a few of our merchants
. . . beaten and shuffled together from the Lizard to
Calais, and from Calais chased out of sight of England
round about Scotland and Ireland'; and the writer
exults to boast how 'with all their great terrible ostenta-
tion they did not, in all their sailing round about England,
so much as sink or take one ship, bark, pinnace, or cockboat
of ours, or even burn so much as one sheepcote on this
land.' ¹

But in whatever light a patriotic policy might repre-

-308-