The exhaustion of both parties now began to be shown by the small scale of the armaments on either side. The three thousand five hundred soldiers of Don Juan del Aguila, and the fleet that carried them to Ireland, were a great fall from the standard of the Spanish expeditions of earlier years. The squadron Queen Elizabeth sent in revenge to the coast of Spain was trifling. It consisted only of nine vessels under the command of Sir Richard Levison as admiral, with Sir William Monson as his second in command. Sir William in his _Naval Tracts_, which are the best authority for the history of the navy in Elizabeth's reign, has given a very prominent place to the cruise of this year, and in particular to his own very remarkable display of courage, energy, and sagacity. Sir William was no doubt an excellent officer, and the capture or destruction of the Portuguese carracks in the roadstead of Zizembre was a creditable bit of service, but it is hardly entitled to be told at length in a general history of the navy. In the following year the same two officers commanded the squadron in the Narrow Seas, but the war was over. Queen Elizabeth herself died in this year, and was succeeded by the peace-loving James I. Philip II. had been dead for four years, and his successor was a feeble prince, under whom the power of Spain went rapidly to decay. In France, Henry IV. had established his right to the throne at the point of the sword. Everywhere, except in Holland, which would not make peace unless its independence was secured, and except in the minds of the men of the stamp of Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom war was a source of income, there was a longing for the end of hostilities. The great Elizabethan epoch was over, and when England was next to be engaged in serious warfare at sea, it was with a very different enemy, and in quite another cause.