The first and second clauses would have been of little import in Elizabeth's eye's, except as they implied her yielding to dictation; the real sting lay in the last. And the last was the one which Philip would be most loth to yield. With a touch of grim humour, His Catholic Majesty sent his ultimatum in Latin verse. The royal lioness of England rose from her throne to return her answer, with a fiery Plantagenet flash in her eyes. She could play at Latin verse quite as well as Philip; rather better, indeed,--for his question required some dozen lines, and one was sufficient for her answer. "Ad Graecas, [Note 2] bone Rex, fient mandata kalendas!" was the prompt reply of England's Elizabeth. Which may be rendered--preserving the fun-- "Great King, thy command shall be done right soon, On the thirty-first day of the coming June." Some knowledge of the terrible magnitude of Philip's preparations is necessary, in order to see what it was which England escaped in 1588. The Armada consisted of 134 ships, and, reckoning soldiers, sailors, and galley-slaves, carried about 32,000 men. [The exact figures are much disputed, hardly two accounts being alike.] The cost of sustenance per day was thirty thousand ducats. The cannon and field-pieces were unnumbered: the halberts were ten thousand, the muskets seven thousand. Bread, biscuits, and wine, were laid in for six months, with twelve thousand pipes of fresh water. The cargo--among many other items-- consisted of whips and knives, for the conversion of the English; and doubtless Don Martin Alorcon, Vicar-General of the Inquisition, with one hundred monks and Jesuits in his train may be classed under the same head. Heresy was to be destroyed throughout England: Sir Francis Drake was singled out for special vengeance. The Queen was to be taken alive, at all costs: she was to be sent prisoner over the Alps to Rome, there to make her humble petition to the Pope, barefoot and prostrate, that England might be re-admitted to communion with the Holy See. Did Philip imagine that any amount of humiliation or coercion would have wrung such words as these from the lips of Elizabeth Tudor? On the 19th of May, the Invincible Armada, as the Spaniards proudly termed it, sailed from Lisbon for Corufia. The English Fleet lay in the harbour at Plymouth. The Admiral's ship was the "Ark Royal;" Drake commanded the "Revenge:" the other principal vessels were named the "Lion," the "Bear," the "Elizabeth Jonas," the "Galleon Leicester," and the "Victory." They lay still in port waiting for the first north wind, which did not come until the eighth of July. Then Lord Howard set sail and went southwards for some distance; but the wind changed to the south, the fleet was composed entirely of sailing vessels, and the Admiral was afraid to go too far, lest the Armada should slip past him in the night, between England and her wooden walls. So he put back to Plymouth.