Philip was willing, in his cool, cautious way, to smile upon such attempts, when he could do so without committing himself prematurely or too far. They might turn out well by chance, and he might reap the harvest where others had sown the grain and nourished it with their blood. But through it all thenceforward there was slowly maturing in Philip’s mind, and preparing in his chancelleries, the great enterprise to which he had been forced by the logic of events—the conquest and domination of England by his own arms and for his own benefit. Such a scheme necessitated patient plotting in every capital in Europe before the material preparations could be even commenced. Of the secret preliminaries, the laborious concentration, and the final disaster of the great Armada in which Philip’s ambitions were wrecked the next chapter will tell. CHAPTER IX 1584-1588 English Catholics _versus_ Scottish—Santa Cruz’s proposal to conquer England—Enlisting the Pope—Intrigues in Rome—Mary Stuart and Philip—Drake’s raid on Galicia—Elizabeth assumes the protectorate of the Netherlands—War at last inevitable—The preliminaries of the Armada—The Babington plot—Philip’s consent—His distrust—Discovery—Elizabeth’s fears of war—Her approaches to Spain—Santa Cruz’s fresh proposals to invade England—His great plan—The Scottish Catholics try again to share the attack upon England—Failure of Huntly’s scheme—Guise not allowed by Philip to interfere—Mendoza in favour of the Scottish plan—Philip’s claims to the English crown—The peace negotiations—Drake’s dash upon Cadiz—Parma and the Armada—Death of Santa Cruz—Medina Sidonia—The Armada—The failure and its causes—The end of the struggle to win England