way up the Channel, and was driven off the English ports into the German Ocean; there a south-west gale drove it far from its rendezvous, and completed the havoc which the English ships had begun. A miserable remnant alone escaped destruction in its perilous flight round the north and west of Scotland. The defeat of the armada was the beginning and not the end of the war; and there were moments between 1588 and 1603 when England was more seriously alarmed than in 1588. The Spaniards seized Calais in 1596; at another time they threatened England from Brest, and the "invisible" armada of 1599 created a greater panic than the "invincible" armada of 1588. It was not till the very end of the reign that what was in some ways the most dangerous of Spanish aggressions was foiled at Kinsale. Nor were the English counter-attacks very happy; the attempt on Portugal in 1589 under Drake and Norris proved a complete failure. The raid on Cadiz under Essex and Raleigh in 1596 was attended with better results, but the "Islands" voyage to the Azores in 1597 was a very partial success. Still it was now a war upon more or less equal terms, and there was little more likelihood that it would end with England's than with Spain's loss of national independence. The subjection of the Netherlands was now almost out of the question, and although Elizabeth's help had not enabled the Protestant cause to win in France, Henry IV. built up a national monarchy which would be quite as effectual a bar to the ambitions of Spain. Last years of Elizabeth. Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the struggle to assert its national independence in religion and politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance which had been opened up for the nations of Europe; and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as the embodiment of England's aspirations somewhat cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the "scribes," Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift's rigorous persecution of the Puritans whose discontent with her _via media_ was rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts. Essex's folly and failure to crush Hugh O'Neill's rebellion (1599), the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies, and even Mountjoy's success in Ireland (1602-1603) failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange as it may seem, the accession of James I. was hailed as heralding a new and gladder age by Shakespeare, and minor writers (March 24, 1603). (A. F. P.) VIII. THE STUART MONARCHY, THE GREAT REBELLION AND THE RESTORATION (1603-1689)