The political chessboard was divided into na tional and religious squares, and the moves were often complex; for while the bishops were supposed to keep to their own color, the rival queens and their knights might move on either. From the dynastic point of view Elizabeth was handicapped. Precluded from matrimony by a physical defect, she had to leave the succession to look after itself, and makeshift with suitors She prolonged this game almost beyond the limits of public decency; but it was done with inimitable skill and gave England an invaluable breathing space of 30 years. At length the success of Parma in consolidating his pincer in the Southern Netherlands (1580-84) and the stroke of fortune which gave 'Philip the Crown of Portugal with its colonial empire, its har bors and its navy (1580) induced him to make a bid for the title of which the death of Mary Tudor had deprived him, and the death of Mary Stuart had left him heir. It was a for lorn hope from the first. Philip's failure in the Netherlands might have warned him of the odds against him under circumstances far less favorable. There is no reason to suppose that Philip would have been successful even if the Armada had disgorged its hosts on English shores. Drake and his colleagues saved Eng land not from conquest but from a bloody and perhaps a long drawn struggle fought on Eng lish soil.
With the defeat of the Armada the work of the Tudors was done. Their dictatorship was the result of an emergency at first domestic and then foreign. So long as the danger lasted of internal disruption or external attack, Eng lishmen acquiesced in the despotic maxims of droit adtninistratif and Roman civil law. The people supported arbitrary government to avoid a greater ill; but with the danger there passed the need and the inclination to subordinate self government to national security. Elizabeth lingered a few more years on the stage, but she was losing touch with her people. Her
waywardness, as Parliament told James I, was only tolerated because of her age and her sex, and the Commons were girding themselves for their hundred years' war with the crown.
Bibliography — Documents.—