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 were the offspring of long generations of seamen and lovers of the sea.

They could not have been great but for the nation which gave them birth, and imbued them with their worth and spirit.

The great sailors, for instance, could not have originated in a nation of mere landsmen.
They simply took the lead in a country whose coasts were fringed with sailors.