For they were reduced to such extremity, that they
would willingly have yielded, as divers of them confessed that were
shipwrecked in Ireland.
By this we may see how weak and feeble are the designs of men, in
respect of the great Creator; and how indifferently he dealt between the
two nations, sometimes giving one the advantage sometimes the other; and
yet so that he only ordered the battle.
SECTION VI.
_Account of the Relief of a part of the Spanish Armada, at Anstruther in
Scotland, in 1588_[349].
However glorious and providential the defeat and destruction of the
_Invincible Armada_, it does not belong to the present work to give a
minute relation of that great national event. It seems peculiarly
necessary and proper, however, in this work, to give a very curious
unpublished record respecting the miserable fate of the Spanish armada,
as written by a contemporary, the Reverend James Melville, minister of
Anstruther, a sea-port town on the Fife, or northern, shore of the
Frith of Forth.
[Footnote 349: From MS. Memoirs of James Melville, a contemporary.]
James Melville, who was born in 1556, and appears to have been inducted
to the living of Anstruther only a short time before the year 1588, left
a MS.
