But, though anxious to avoid war with England, Philip was not to be deceived by the professions of friendship and fair words of her minister. He, however, waited his time. When that time came he proposed to himself measures of retaliation which he conceived to be worthy of the proud and powerful Spanish nation. With this view ever before him, he kept his secret and matured his arrangements until he felt that he could accomplish effectually his plans. To be slow and silent, to take every precaution for success, and then to deliver suddenly and unexpectedly the blow so long seriously but vaguely impending, was the policy he intended to pursue. When he did strike, he said to himself, the blow he intended should be terrible. His coasts had been plundered, his commerce destroyed, his colonies outraged by English desperadoes, in whose adventures he had heard that the Queen herself had become a partner. The seizure of his treasure he felt and knew was simply piracy on a gigantic scale, committed by the government itself. English harbours had been the home of a Dutch privateer fleet; ships built in England, armed in England, and manned by Englishmen had held the Channel under the flag of the Prince of Orange; and if Alva attempted to interfere with them, they were sheltered by English batteries. Dover had been made a second Algiers, where Spanish gentlemen were sold by public auction. The plunder of the privateers was openly disposed of in the English markets, even royal purveyors being occasionally its purchasers. Philip felt, and not without cause, that he was free in equity from any obligations to a nation which had set at defiance the usages of civilised countries, or to a government which had permitted and even aided these piratical expeditions. Open war would have been the legitimate remedy; but that did not suit his policy, and he thought that the wrongs and insults his people had sustained demanded a retribution of a more terrible character. He had also his own ends to serve on behalf of the Catholic faith, and he knew that if, while inflicting a summary though revolting punishment upon England, he could restore the people to the Church of their fathers, Catholic Europe would applaud his conduct, while the Pope would of course readily grant him pardon for any crimes he might commit for so just an end. In a word, the design he had been so long secretly maturing was nothing short of an invasion of England, the murder of Elizabeth, and the establishment of Mary Queen of Scots on the throne of that country. [Sidenote: Philip intrigues with Hawkins, and is grossly deceived.]