The small portholes of the Spanish ships, which permitted neither of training, nor elevation, nor depression, are not altogether to be put down to stupidity or neglect of progress, for all that they were mainly the result of ultra-conservatism. The gun--as Professor Laughton has made clear--was regarded in Spain as a somewhat dishonourable weapon. Ideals of “cold steel” held the field. Portholes were kept very small, so that enemies relying on musketry should not be able to get the advantage that large portholes might supply. To close with the enemy and carry by boarding was the be-all and end-all of Spanish ideas of naval warfare. When able to employ their own tactics they were formidable opponents, though to the English tactics merely so many helpless haystacks. On shore, in England, the coming of the Armada provoked a good deal of panic; though the army which Elizabeth raised and reviewed at Tilbury was probably got together more with a view to allaying this panic than from any expectations that it would be actually required. The views of the British seamen on the matter were entirely summed up in Drake’s famous jest on Plymouth Hoe, that there was plenty of time to finish the game of bowls and settle the Spaniards afterwards! [Illustration: THE SPANISH ARMADA--1588.] Yet this very confidence might have led to the undoing of the English. The researches of Professor Laughton have made it abundantly clear that had Medina Sidonia followed the majority opinion of a council of war held off the Lizard, he could and would have attacked the English fleet in Plymouth Sound with every prospect of destroying it, because there, and there only, did opportunity offer them that prospect of a close action upon which their sole chance of success depended. Admiral Colomb has elaborated the point still further, with a quotation from Monson to the effect that had the Armada had a pilot able to recognise the Lizard, which the Spaniards mistook for Ramehead, they might have surprised the English fleet at Plymouth. This incident covers the whole of what Providence or luck really did for England against the Spanish. To a certain extent a parallel of our own day exists. When Rodjestvensky with the Baltic fleet reached Far Eastern waters, there came a day when his cruisers discovered the entire Japanese fleet lying in Formosan waters. The Russian admiral ignored them and went on towards Vladivostok. The parallel ends here because the “Japanese fleet” was merely a collection of dummies intended to mislead him.[9]