History of the United Netherlands, 1587




CHAPTER XVI.

Situation of Sluys--Its Dutch and English Garrison--Williams writes
from Sluys to the Queen--Jealousy between the Earl and States--
Schemes to relieve Sluys--Which are feeble and unsuccessful--The
Town Capitulates--Parma enters--Leicester enraged--The Queen angry
with the Anti-Leicestrians--Norris, Wilkes, and Buckhurst punished--
Drake sails for Spain--His Exploits at Cadiz and Lisbon--He is
rebuked by Elizabeth.

When Dante had passed through the third circle of the Inferno--a desert
of red-hot sand, in which lay a multitude of victims of divine wrath,
additionally tortured by an ever-descending storm of fiery flakes--he was
led by Virgil out of this burning wilderness along a narrow causeway.
This path was protected, he said, against the showers of flame, by the
lines of vapour which rose eternally from a boiling brook. Even by such
shadowy bulwarks, added the poet, do the Flemings between Kadzand and
Bruges protect their land against the ever-threatening sea.

It was precisely among these slender dykes between Kadzand and Bruges
that Alexander Farnese had now planted all the troops that he could
muster in the field. It was his determination to conquer the city of
Sluys; for the possession of that important sea-port was necessary for
him as a basis for the invasion of England, which now occupied all the
thoughts of his sovereign and himself.