and 40 guns. Lord Henry Seymour, in the Rainbow, of precisely the same
size and strength, commanded the inner squadron, which cruised in the
neighbourhood of the French and Flemish coast.

The Hollanders and Zeelanders had undertaken to blockade the Duke of
Parma still more closely, and pledged themselves that he should never
venture to show himself upon the open sea at all. The mouth of the
Scheldt, and the dangerous shallows off the coast of Newport and Dunkirk,
swarmed with their determined and well-seasoned craft, from the flybooter
or filibuster of the rivers, to the larger armed vessels, built to
confront every danger, and to deal with any adversary.

Farnese, on his part, within that well-guarded territory, had, for months
long, scarcely slackened in his preparations, day or night. Whole
forests had been felled in the land of Waas to furnish him with
transports and gun-boats, and with such rapidity, that--according to his
enthusiastic historiographer--each tree seemed by magic to metamorphose
itself into a vessel at the word of command. Shipbuilders, pilots, and
seamen, were brought from the Baltic, from Hamburgh, from Genoa. The
whole surface of the obedient Netherlands, whence wholesome industry had
long been banished, was now the scene of a prodigious baleful activity.
Portable bridges for fording the rivers of England, stockades for
entrenchments, rafts and oars, were provided in vast numbers, and
Alexander dug canals and widened natural streams to facilitate his
operations. These wretched Provinces, crippled, impoverished,
languishing for peace, were forced to contribute out of their poverty,
and to find strength even in their exhaustion, to furnish the machinery
for destroying their own countrymen, and for hurling to perdition their
most healthful neighbour.