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.
And this approaching destruction of England--now generally believed in--was like the sound of a trumpet throughout Catholic Europe.

Scions of royal houses, grandees of azure blood, the bastard of Philip II., the bastard of Savoy, the bastard of Medici, the Margrave of Burghaut, the Archduke Charles, nephew of the Emperor, the Princes of Ascoli and of Melfi, the Prince of Morocco, and others of illustrious name, with many a noble English traitor, like Paget, and Westmoreland, and Stanley, all hurried to the camp of Farnese, as to some famous tournament, in which it was a disgrace to chivalry if their names were not enrolled.