To compel Philip to listen to a compromise, without at the same time emboldening the Dutch to turn a deaf ear to it--such was the problem which Elizabeth had set herself. She therefore preferred to apply pressure in other quarters. Towards the end of 1585, Drake appeared on the coast of Spain itself, and plundered Vigo. Then crossing the Atlantic, he sacked and burned St. Domingo and Carthagena. Again in 1587, he forced his way into Cadiz harbour, burnt all the shipping and the stores collected for the Armada, and for two months plundered and destroyed every vessel he met off the coast of Portugal. Philip had so long and so tamely submitted to the many injuries and indignities which Elizabeth heaped upon him, that it is not wonderful if she had come to think that he would never pluck up courage to retaliate. This time she was wrong. The conquest of England had always had its place in his overloaded programme. But it was to be in that hazy ever-receding future, when he should have put down the Dutch rebellion and neutralised France. Elizabeth’s open intervention in the Netherlands at length induced him to change his plan. England, he now decided, must be first dealt with. In the meantime, Parma’s operations in the Netherlands were starved quite as much as Leicester’s. Plundering excursions, two or three petty combats not deserving the name of battles, half-a-dozen small towns captured on one side or the other--such is the military record from the date of Elizabeth’s intervention to the arrival of the Armada. Parma had somewhat the best of this work, such as it was. But the war in the Netherlands was practically stagnant. At the end of the first year of Leicester’s government, events of the highest importance obliged him to pay a visit to England (Nov. 1586). The Queen of Scots had been found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth, and Parliament had been summoned to decide upon her fate. CHAPTER IX EXECUTION OF THE QUEEN OF SCOTS: 1584-1587