This game of duplicity went on merrily; Elizabeth was intriguing behind the backs of her own ministers; Parma was deliberately deceiving and hoodwinking her, with no thought of anything but her destruction. In France, civil war practically, between Henry of Navarre and Henry of Guise was raging. In the Netherlands, the hostility between the Estates, led by Barneveld and Leicester continued. When the earl was finally recalled to England, and Willoughby was left in command, it was not due to him that no overwhelming disaster had occurred, and that the splendid qualities shown by other Englishmen had counter-balanced politically his own extreme unpopularity. The great crisis, however, was now at hand. The Armada was coming to destroy England, and when England was destroyed the fate of the Netherlands would soon be sealed. But in both England and the Netherlands the national spirit ran high. The great fleet came; the Flemish ports were held blockaded by the Dutch. The Spaniards had the worse of the fighting in the Channel; they were scattered out of Calais roads by the fireships, driven to flight in the engagement of Gravelines, and the Armada was finally shattered by storms. Philip received the news cheerfully; but his great project was hopelessly ruined. Of the events immediately following, the most notable were in France--the murder of Guise, followed by that of Henry III., and the claim of Henry IV. to be king. The actual operations in the Netherlands brought little advantage to either side, and the Anglo-Dutch expedition to Lisbon was a failure. But the grand fact which was to be of vital consequence was this: that Maurice of Nassau was about to assume a new character. The boy was now a man; the sapling had developed into the oak-tree. _III.--Maurice of Nassau_ The crushing blow, then, had failed completely. But Philip, instead of concentrating on another great effort in the Netherlands, or retrieval of the Armada disaster, had fixed his attention on France. The Catholic League had proclaimed Henry IV.'s uncle, the Cardinal of Bourbon, king as Charles X. Philip, to Parma's despair, meant to claim the succession for his own daughter; and Parma's orders were to devote himself to crushing the Béarnais. And this was at the moment when Barneveld, the statesman, with young Maurice, the soldier, were becoming decisively recognised as the chiefs of the Dutch. Maurice had realised that the secret of success lay in engineering operations, of which he had made himself a devoted student, and in a reorganisation of the States army and of tactics, in which he was ably seconded by his cousin Lewis William.