Not the least daring of the English aristocratic freebooters were the sons of Lord Cobham of Cowling Castle. Having distinguished themselves during their youth in Wyatt’s rebellion, they had grown up after the type of their boyhood, lawless Protestants, half knight-errants of the Reformation, and half pirates roving the seas, with a combined spirit of revenge and love of plunder. Thomas Cobham, the most intrepid and daring of the sons, was one of many whom Elizabeth was, for some time, powerless to suppress, even had she been so disposed. Indeed, he was continually at war on his own account with the enemies of the truth wherever he could combine the service of the cause of Protestantism with pecuniary gain. Although in his case there may have been more of the crusader than of the marauder, he had become so desperate a rover, that Elizabeth was at last forced to proclaim him an outlaw, but she was evidently not anxious about his capture. Alike cruel and daring, Cobham had resolved not to be outdone in this respect by the Inquisitors of Spain. Froude says of him[121] that, whilst cruising in the Channel, he caught sight of a Spanish ship, which had been freighted in Flanders for Bilbao, with a cargo valued at eighty thousand ducats, and forty prisoners who were going to Spain to serve in the galleys, and that he chased her into the Bay of Biscay, where he fired into her, killed the captain’s brother and a number of his men, and, boarding her when all resistance had ceased, sewed up the captain himself and the survivors of the crew in their own sails, and flung them overboard. Having scuttled the ship, Cobham made off with the booty to his pirate’s den in the south of Ireland. Though English hearts had often been broken with the news of brothers, sons, or husbands wasting to skeletons in the dungeons of Cadiz, or burning to ashes in the Plaza at Valladolid, the eighteen drowned bodies, with the mainsail for their winding sheet, which were washed upon the Spanish shores, tended only to increase the horrors and to magnify the punishments to which English prisoners in Spain had long been subjected.[122] [Sidenote: and of other privateers or marauders.] English privateers, however, licensed by the Crown, still swarmed in the Channel, and though limited by their commissions to make war only on acknowledged enemies, were unwilling to be restricted to less lucrative game. Flemings and Spaniards, if laden with valuable cargoes, were still too frequently the objects of their plunder, under the pretext that as neutrals they had articles on board which the government of England held to be contraband of war. [Sidenote: Piratical cruises of the mayor of Dover.]