Their captaines or colonels were Diego
Pimentelli, Don Francisco de Toledo, Don Alonco de Lucon, Don Nicolas de
Isla, Don Augustin de Mexia, who had eche of them thirty-two companies
under their conduct. Besides the which companies, there were many bands
also of Castilians and Portugals, every one of which had their peculiar
governours, captaines, officers, colors, and weapons."
While this huge armament was making ready in the southern ports of the
Spanish dominions, the Duke of Parma, with almost incredible toil and
skill, collected a squadron of war-ships at Dunkirk, and a large
flotilla of other ships and of flat-bottomed boats for the transport to
England of the picked troops which were designed to be the main
instruments in subduing England. The design of the Spaniards was that
the armada should give them, at least for a time, the command of the
sea, and that it should join the squadron that Parma had collected off
Calais. Then, escorted by an overpowering naval force, Parma and his
army were to embark in their flotilla, and cross the sea to England,
where they were to be landed, together with the troops which the armada
brought from the ports of Spain.
The scheme was not dissimilar to one formed against England a little
more than two centuries afterward. As Napoleon, in 1805, waited with his
army and flotilla at Boulogne, looking for Villeneuve to drive away the
English cruisers and secure him a passage across the Channel, so Parma,
in 1588, waited for Medina Sidonia to drive away the Dutch and English
squadrons that watched his flotilla, and to enable his veterans to cross
the sea to the land that they were to conquer.
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