Men of Invention and Industry | Page 7

Holland. Dutch, Germans, Flemings, French, and Venetians continued to be our principal workmen. Our iron was mostly obtained from Spain and Germany. The best arms and armour came from France and Italy. Linen was imported from Flanders and Holland, though the best came from Rheims. Even the coarsest dowlas, or sailcloth, was imported from the Low Countries.
The royal ships continued to be of very small burthen, and the mercantile ships were still smaller. The Queen, however, did what she could to improve the number and burthen of our ships. "Foreigners," says Camden, "stiled her the restorer of naval glory and Queen of the Northern Seas." In imitation of the Queen, opulent subjects built ships of force; and in course of time England no longer depended upon Hamburg, Dantzic, Genoa, and Venice, for her fleet in time of war.
Spain was then the most potent power in Europe, and the Netherlands, which formed part of the dominions of Spain, was the centre of commercial prosperity. Holland possessed above 800 good ships, of from 200 to 700 tons burthen, and above 600 busses for fishing, of from 100 to 200 tons. Amsterdam and Antwerp were in the heyday of their prosperity. Sometimes 500 great ships were to be seen lying together before Amsterdam;[9] whereas England at that time had not four merchant ships of 400 tons each! Antwerp, however, was the most important city in the Low Countries. It was no uncommon thing to see as many as 2500 ships in the Scheldt, laden with merchandize. Sometimes 500 ships would come and go from Antwerp in one day, bound to or returning from the distant parts of the world. The place was immensely rich, and was frequented by Spaniards, Germans, Danes, English, Italians, and Portuguese the Spaniards being the most numerous. Camden, in his history of Queen Elizabeth, relates that our general trade with the Netherlands in 1564 amounted to twelve millions of ducats, five millions of which was for English cloth alone.
The religious persecutions of Philip II. of Spain and of Charles IX. of France shortly supplied England with the population of which she stood in need--active, industrious, intelligent artizans. Philip set up the Inquisition in Flanders, and in a few years more than 50,000 persons were deliberately murdered. The Duchess of Parma, writing to Philip II. in 1567, informed him that in a few days above 100,000 men had already left the country with their money and goods, and that more were following every day. They fled to Germany, to Holland, and above all to England, which they hailed as Asylum Christi. The emigrants settled in the decayed cities and towns of Canterbury, Norwich, Sandwich, Colchester, Maidstone, Southampton, and many other places, where they carried on their manufactures of woollen, linen, and silk, and established many new branches of industry.[10]
Five years later, in 1572, the massacre of St. Bartholomew took place in France, during which the Roman Catholic Bishop Perefixe alleges that 100,000 persons were put to death because of their religions opinions. All this persecution, carried on so near the English shores, rapidly increased the number of foreign fugitives into England, which was followed by the rapid advancement of the industrial arts in this country.
The asylum which Queen Elizabeth gave to the persecuted foreigners brought down upon her the hatred of Philip II. and Charles IX. When they found that they could not prevent her furnishing them with an asylum, they proceeded to compass her death. She was excommunicated by the Pope, and Vitelli was hired to assassinate her. Philip also proceeded to prepare the Sacred Armada for the subjugation of the English nation, and he was master of the most powerful army and navy in the world.
Modern England was then in the throes of her birth. She had not yet reached the vigour of her youth, though she was full of life and energy. She was about to become the England of free thought, commerce, and manufactures; to plough the ocean with her navies, and to plant her colonies over the earth. Up to the accession of Elizabeth, she had done little, but now she was about to do much.
It was a period of sudden emancipation of thought, and of immense fertility and originality. The poets and prose writers of the time united the freshness of youth with the vigour of manhood. Among these were Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, the Fletchers, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Among the statesmen of Elizabeth were Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, Howard, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. But perhaps greatest of all were the sailors, who, as Clarendon said, "were a nation by themselves;" and their leaders--Drake, Frobisher, Cavendish, Hawkins, Howard, Raleigh, Davis, and many more distinguished seamen.
They were the representative men of their time, the creation in a great measure of the national spirit. They