England for supplies. He reached Hampton November 8, 1587.[16] He
found affairs in a turmoil. England was threatened with the great
Armada, and Raleigh, Grenville, Lane, and all the other friends of
Virginia were exerting their energies for the protection of their
homes and firesides.[17] Indeed, the rivalry of England and Spain had
reached its crisis; for at this time all the hopes of Protestant
Christendom were centred in England, and within her borders the
Protestant refugees from all countries found a place of safety and
repose. In 1585 the Dutch, still carrying on their struggle with
Spain, had offered Queen Elizabeth the sovereignty of the Netherlands,
and, though she declined it, she sent an army to their assistance. The
French Huguenots also looked to her for support and protection. Spain,
on the other hand, as the representative of all Catholic Europe, had
never appeared so formidable. By the conquest of Portugal in 1580 her
king had acquired control over the East Indies, which were hardly less
valuable than the colonies of Spain; and with the money derived from
both the Spanish and Portuguese possessions Philip supported his
armies in Italy and the Netherlands, and was the mainstay of the pope
at Rome, the Guises in France, and the secret plotters in Scotland and
Ireland of rebellion against the authority of Elizabeth.

This wide distribution of power was, however, an inherent weakness
which created demands enough to exhaust the treasury even of Philip,
and he instinctively recognized in England a danger which must be
promptly removed. England must be subdued, and Philip, determining on
an invasion, collected a powerful army at Bruges, in Flanders, and an
immense fleet in the Tagus, in Spain. For the attack he selected a
time when Amsterdam, the great mart of the Netherlands, had fallen
before his general the duke of Palma; when the king of France had
become a prisoner of the Guises; and when the frenzied hatred of the