The names of the new ships were announced in due course, and represented Her Majesty’s mood on the occasion. She herself selected and appointed them with intention. It was Queen Elizabeth’s way to give her ships “telling” names. “The choice of energetic names for the ships of her Royal Navy,” it has been said, “was one of the means employed by the heroic and politic Elizabeth to infuse her own dauntless spirit into the hearts of her subjects, and to show to Europe at large how little she dreaded the mightiest armaments of her enemies.” More than that, however, needs to be said. As a rule, in the cases of her bigger ships, the Queen chose names that carried, in addition, an underlying meaning, that bore direct allusion to some national event of the hour. According to one who lived at the time, writing about the first ship launched by the Queen, to which, in accordance with old custom, the sovereign’s name was given: “The great Shipp called the _Elizabeth Jonas_ was so named by Her Grace in remembrance of her owne delyverance from the furye of her Enemys, from which in one respect she was no less myraculously preserved than was the prophet Jonas from the Belly of the whale.” In like manner our first _Victory_ and our first _Triumph_ were given those ever famous names, in the first place, of set intention to commemorate the historic double-event of the year in which they both joined the Queen’s fleet. The _Aid_, or _Ayde_, another Elizabethan man-of-war, was so called to commemorate Elizabeth’s first expedition to help the Huguenots of Normandy in their forlorn hope struggle for liberty of conscience, which was just setting out when the _Aid_ went off the stocks. Our first _Revenge_, of immortal renown, did not receive that name at haphazard in the year of Don John of Austria’s insolent threat to invade England and depose Elizabeth by force of arms. Our first _Repulse_ was appointed that name—extant to this day in the Royal Navy for one of our older battleships—in memory of the defeat of the Spanish Armada:—_Dieu Repulse_ was the earlier form of the name as the Queen gave it. And to take at random two other names from the list, it was to commemorate the same overthrow of the arch-enemy of England in those times that Queen Elizabeth chose the names _Defiance_ and _Warspite_—in curious reference, this latter name, to an incident during the fighting with the Armada—for two others of her men-of-war.