Her foreign policy was to have no foreign policy not alterable by the lightest touch on the helm. Her consistency was in being always inconsistent. … Time untied so many knots, cancelled the necessity for so many desperate decisions, revealed so many unexpected shifts of pattern in a kaleidoscopic world, that the shrewdest statesmen were glad to take refuge in a wise passivity, a cautious opportunism.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 70