The departure of Leicester and a strong English army to Holland, at the end of 1585, finally brought England and Spain nationally face to face in the field. We have witnessed the slow process by which Philip and Elizabeth, both haters of war, had been drawn into this position. For the former it was vital that England should be amenable to his direction in foreign policy, or the cause for which he lived was doomed, and the decadence of Spain as a dominant power in Europe was certain; and, with his patient, inflexible belief in the fated triumph of his methods, he had striven through twenty-eight years to secure his object by peaceful means. He had failed, and it was to be war after all. Not now against a Queen whose throne was unstable, but against a popular sovereign and a nation which, since he had seen it, had been born to a new sense of power, a consciousness of potential grandeur, and a determination to live its own life without interference from its neighbours. But though Philip’s plans were thus changed late in the struggle and he saw himself faced by new forces, he, at least, never doubted of the result. For him the idea of failure, in a cause that in his eyes was that of God Himself, was impossible. With a limited mental scope, which shut out all views but one, he was incapable of understanding that there were two sides to every question, or that Elizabeth was actuated in her resistance to his advances by anything else than an impious desire to do evil for evil’s sake. A small spice of imagination would have enabled him to see that she was fighting for her own and her country’s life and greatness, as surely as he was fighting for his; and perchance the knowledge might have made harmony, or at least neutrality, possible. But, given Philip’s character and Elizabeth’s circumstances, it was inevitable, after the autumn of 1585, that the antagonists should come to close grip, and that one or the other should be reduced to impotence for harm. Philip was convinced of this at last, and with his leaden-footed deliberation he set about making success as certain as he knew how to make it. He was laborious, unsparing of himself and others, a man of great personal ability, sagacious and wise within his limitations; but his ingrained distrust of other men—part of his father’s teaching—led him to take upon himself the care of every detail in all his enterprises and deprived his officers of initiative and independence. From his cell in the Escorial, far away and difficult of access from the coast, he insisted upon pulling the wires which controlled the smallest actions of his subordinates, and we shall see how in the crowning effort of his life these fatal characteristics cast a blight over the vast enterprise, upon which depended the fate of Christendom for centuries. [Illustration: CARDINAL ALLEN]