means accept Raleigh’s offer to prevent further aid being given to Don Antonio and to stop piracy, wrote Philip; but to the suggestions for direct peace negotiations he made no reply. In the meanwhile the arsenals and harbours of Philip’s realms were ringing with preparations for the great enterprise. The peace conference so much desired by Elizabeth might meet in Flanders and talk, but no pause was made in the feverish activity in the Spanish preliminaries for war. Old Santa Cruz had waited patiently after the King’s gentle rebuff to him in 1583,[276] until the circumstances detailed in the foregoing pages had rendered war with England inevitable early in 1586, when he wrote to the King from Lisbon a letter full of fiery zeal, recalling his former offer to conquer England when his victorious fleet was ready, and deploring the shame that had fallen upon Spain since by reason of the continued insults and injuries inflicted upon it by the heretics, much to the material gain and moral prestige of the Queen of England. They had, he said, plundered a million and a half of ducats in the last five months, and had defied the King of Spain successfully at all points. Everything was now propitious, urged the admiral, for dealing a final blow at these daring heretics, and he prayed the King to arise in his wrath and smite his enemy before the occasion passed. “I am not moved to this,” he proudly added, “by a desire for fresh battles or the ambition for new victories, but by no other motive than the service of God and your Majesty.” This time the hero’s appeal found the King ready, for all his peaceful diplomacy had failed to bring England to his side; and Santa Cruz was requested to submit to the King a plan for carrying out the enterprise he proposed. It took Santa Cruz two months, as he says, to draw up from his papers and the experience of forty years at sea a complete scheme for the irresistible descent upon England; and the estimate with which he furnished Philip stands to-day, after three centuries and a quarter, an unexampled monument of foresight, skill, and boldness. Nothing was forgotten in this prodigious estimate: naval and military requisites, arms, stores, clothing and material, down to the minutest detail, are set forth, with estimates of price and with surprising clearness; the salaries to be paid to men of every rank are given; the weight and bulk of every article, the best place where it may be obtained, the rations to be provided, and the discipline to be observed on land and sea, are all written in due order, and to such a lover of formal papers as Philip the estimate of Santa Cruz must have been a pure delight from the bureaucratic point of view.