The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  The arrival of a more successful commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma, gave rise to fears by 1579 that the north would soon be subdued, and to rumours that the soldiers gathering there from Spain would be used to invade England. Fear that the Spanish presence would impede access to Antwerp, England’s largest trading centre, made it imperative to seek a stronger alliance with France. There was no better way to secure it than by the queen’s marriage.

  An elaborate pavane of two years’ duration ensued between the fifty-year-old Elizabeth and the younger brother of Henry III, the Duke of Anjou, which many hoped would result in her marrying at last. For twenty-five years Elizabeth had held off against all the gentlemen of the English court–such as Robert Earl of Leicester, who won her heart and was said to have killed his wife for her–just as she had resisted the repeated requests from the House of Commons for her to marry. Anjou, who was twenty years younger than Elizabeth, became the queen’s ‘little frog’ and the object of many endearments. But he was a poor soldier who made a mess of an attempt (with English money and French troops) to aid the seven northern provinces, which continued to hold out against Spain. Like all the queen’s marriage projects it came to nothing, and Anjou returned to France. But at least he was a bulwark of Protestantism in the face of a French government growing daily more pro-Spanish.

  By 1585 the gloves were off between England and Spain. No one, apart from the queen, was in much doubt that it would soon be war. Spain was now set on invading England by the back door, from both Ireland and Scotland. In 1579 Spanish soldiers, Spanish money and Spanish priests had been sent over to Munster in Ireland to fan the embers of a Fitzgerald rebellion and turn it into a national conflagration. The revolt was savagely suppressed and the old Fitzgerald lands were ‘planted’, as the term then was, with Elizabethan adventurers like the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen. A prolonged campaign to turn Scotland Catholic was only just averted by making her king James VI the English government’s pensioner and ally, and reminding him that he was Elizabeth’s heir presumptive.

  Events now moved fast. In 1583 diplomatic relations between Spain and England were cut, when the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was expelled from London after he was revealed as the author of the Throckmorton Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. In retaliation, Philip seized all English shipping in his ports. Drake and Martin Frobisher, at the queen’s express command, set off with thirty ships to take her revenge. Sailing to the West Indies they attacked the Spanish fleet, burned the important city of San Domingo and returned with their plunder to England. Once again the silver bullion being carried by the Spanish fleet failed to reach the Netherlands, so once again Spanish troops there could not be paid. Instead the silver docked in England.

  In 1584, the threats against the queen’s life brought about the Bond of Association, a document devised by Cecil and Walsingham. Aimed at Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI, it declared that anyone on whose behalf Elizabeth’s death was procured would themselves be put to death. The Bond was endorsed by the entire Council, and was enthusiastically signed by thousands of Englishmen. Soon afterwards, Parliament passed an act making it illegal for any Jesuits or seminary priests to come to England. The international situation had already darkened with the assassination of the Netherlands’ leader William of Orange and the Spanish seizure of Antwerp under the generalship of the Duke of Parma. In France Henry III’s government was now controlled by the ultra-Catholic Guise faction, who seemed keen that their country should become little more than an outpost of Spain.

  At last the queen was persuaded to yield to Cecil’s entreaties to help the Dutch, as there was no longer any chance of the French going to their rescue–though she persisted in maintaining the fiction that she was not at war with Spain. The Netherlands campaign, under the inept leadership of the Earl of Leicester, was unmemorable, except for the gallant death of the poet Sir Philip Sidney. At the siege of Zutphen he famously gave his last cup of water to a dying soldier, saying, ‘Thy need is greater than mine.’

  Then in 1586 came the crisis Elizabeth had dreaded. Walsingham’s spies had found frequent links between Mary Queen of Scots and Spanish plotters but had never been able to make out a case against her. Now a conspiracy involving an impressionable young Catholic named Anthony Babington from Derbyshire, who like many others had fallen under the spell of the romantic Queen of Scots, and a seminary priest named John Ballard proved her undoing. Mary, believing the channel through which the letters went was impregnable, was indiscreet enough to put in writing what could be read as her approval of the assassination of Elizabeth. At last Walsingham had the evidence he needed. Even Elizabeth agreed that Mary would have to be tried for treason.

  The English government was gambling that the fragility of James VI’s hold on his throne and his allowance from the English government would discourage him from invading England on his mother’s behalf. And indeed the trial took place without incident at Fotheringhay Castle near Peterborough in October 1586. Although Mary refused to respond to the charges on the grounds that as Queen of Scotland she was not Elizabeth’s subject, she was condemned to death for treason. She had become too dangerous to live, but her cousin still would not sign her death warrant.

  Eventually, in February 1587, Elizabeth relented. But, though she had signed, she would not allow the death warrant to be sent to Fotheringhay. She became completely hysterical, with the result that members of the Council were forced to take matters into their own hands. Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary William Davison was told to take the warrant on their authority to Fotheringhay, and the Scottish queen was executed in the Great Hall there, having been denied the comforts of her own religion. Instead, while the Protestant Dean of Peterborough prayed noisily, the queen read from her own prayer book. Then, holding a crucifix in her hand, she mounted the scaffold, which all through the previous night she had heard being built, and leaned her once elegant but now stout frame across the block.

  When Elizabeth was told that Mary was dead, she went into deepest mourning for what she said was not of her making. It was put out that she had wept in agony when she heard the news, and perhaps she had. In her fury, the luckless Davison was made a scapegoat and dismissed from government service. Nevertheless, every personal article of clothing which had belonged to the late Queen of Scots was burned or destroyed so that nothing should survive that could become a memento or holy relic for Catholics.

  The execution of the Queen of Scots was the last straw for Philip II. Now that Mary was dead there was no danger of France being drawn into conflict on behalf of her former queen. England would be his alone for the taking. William Allen, founder of the Douai seminary and by now a cardinal, assured Philip that a Spanish invasion would be greeted with an uprising against Elizabeth by English Catholics. In 1587 the alarming news spread that all the wealth of Spain was going towards preparing what her leaders called ‘the invincible Armada’ to invade England. Philip claimed the English throne as the nearest rightful descendant of John of Gaunt.

  But things did not go quite as planned. Francis Drake led a daring raid on the harbour of Cadiz and burned, sank or captured 10,000 tons of shipping. What he called ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’ delayed the Armada for a year while new ships were built. Philip’s other important miscalculation was to assume that Cardinal Allen had been correct in his belief that all English Catholics were waiting for the day when the Spanish would arrive to save them. In fact, the death of Mary Queen of Scots had assured their loyalty to Elizabeth. A Spaniard as an English king instead of the popular Gloriana was not an attractive idea. Elizabeth herself refused to approve the Council’s insulting plan to disarm the Catholics, and Lord Howard of Effingham, a prominent Catholic related to Norfolk, found his religion no bar to commanding the fleet as its lord high admiral.

  For the next year England was absorbed in war preparations. Unlike Spain, she had no standing army and had to rely on county militi
as whose training was organized by each lord lieutenant, an office invented at the time of Edward VI. But England’s military weakness meant she had to rely on repelling the invasion at sea. That was where the main battle should take place. The navy, which ever since Henry VIII had been run professionally, now came into its own under the direction of Jack Hawkins. The old pirate used his practical expertise to build ships that were technically in advance of those of the Spanish. The new vessels were deliberately built as fighting machines, compact and low in the water, able to swing round quickly after knocking holes in the sides of the high Spanish ships.

  By the early summer of 1588, the English horizon in the south-west was being scanned daily for the moment when the first pinnaces of the Spanish fleet would be seen emerging from the Bay of Biscay. But nothing happened before mid-July, for though the Armada first set sail in May it was blown back to Portugal by poor weather. A further two months had to be spent in refitting. Characteristically the queen, despite her Council’s disapproval, had by August moved the court down to Tilbury where a training camp for the land army had been established. It was commanded by her favourite, Robert Leicester, despite his poor showing in the Netherlands. At Tilbury she lived in a white tent among the troops, wearing a metal breastplate. Here, at the height of the conflict, she would make one of her greatest and most inspiring speeches to the assembled soldiers sitting on the ground. Unlike politicians today with their army of speechwriters, every word was written by Elizabeth herself.

  ‘Let tyrants fear!’ she said.

  I have always so behaved myself, that under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of all my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you to live or die amongst you all, to lay down for God and for my kingdom and my people, my honour and blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

  Although for many nights English lookouts had been posted next to the unlit beacons built on every cliff and prominent hill along the south coast to give warning of the invasion, it was not until 19 July that they were set alight. On that day a Scottish pirate named Fleming saw the first of the 136 ships of the Armada entering the Channel. He sailed east as fast as possible to Plymouth to tell the fleet that there were Spanish ships off the Lizard peninsula, near Land’s End. Drake had been playing a game of bowls with Lord Howard when the momentous news was given to them. He now put a restraining hand on the admiral’s arm, for Howard had been about to give the signal to launch the fleet. ‘We have time to finish our game of bowls,’ said Drake calmly. Howard complied. In contrast to the commander of the Spanish fleet, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had no knowledge of ships or sea-fighting yet was the absolute general of the Armada, Lord Howard was happy to leave tactics to Drake and his experienced fellow seamen.

  It was not until dusk that the signal was given. The Spaniards were rather puzzled by the English response. Instead of launching an attack from Plymouth, Howard and Drake allowed the Armada to sweep majestically on up the Channel. Only then did they set off in pursuit. One eyewitness described the Armada as being like a half-moon in front, the horns stretching out over seven miles. Drake’s plan was to force the enemy to keep going by staying behind the Spanish Armada and firing at it. He intended to use the wind, which was in the south-west, as a weapon against the Spanish. So the English fleet, with Howard in the first ship, Drake in the second, Hawkins in the third and Frobisher in the fourth, hung on to the Armada’s tail all the way up the Channel. While they could stop or go on at will, the Spaniards were unable to turn on their pursuers.

  To the English people watching from the shore it was an alarming scene. The Channel was filled with huge Spanish ships heading, it seemed, inexorably for Flanders to take the Duke of Parma’s 26,000 men across to England. But that crucial rendezvous never took place. When the Spanish fleet paused to take on supplies and anchor at Calais Roads in the Straits of Dover off Gravelines on the night of 7–8 August, Drake saw his chance. With the same speed of thought he had shown at Cadiz he drove in fireships among them in the night, so alarming the Spaniards that they abandoned their anchorage. While the Armada was still in a state of confusion the English attacked it in a battle which lasted nine hours. The combination of the English fleet blocking the Channel behind them and the wind still blowing from the south-west meant all Medina Sidonia’s ideas of meeting Parma and escorting his army across the Channel vanished into the summer air. The only way for the Armada to escape the English fleet and get home was to flee north round the coast of Scotland.

  Terrible gales pursued the Spanish and blew them off course on to the coast of Norway or wrecked them on the rocky shores of Scotland and Ireland. Some 2,000 corpses were counted on the beach of Sligo Bay alone. Out of the 136 ships of what had once been called the Invincible Armada, only 53 limped home. Elizabeth caused a commemorative medal to be struck. It read, ‘God blew and they were scattered.’

  Parma had never rated the chances of the expedition very highly. Dutch rebels controlled the coastal waters off Flanders, so his soldiers could never have got past them. Later historians have believed that the odds were against the Spanish succeeding so far from home when they had none of the supply lines for food and ammunition that the English ships could call on. Nevertheless the Armada seemed a very great danger at the time and the delivery of England extremely providential. Certainly the defeat of the Spanish Armada was a massive blow to Spain and the Counter-Reformation. It preserved Protestant England and the Protestant United Provinces, which by 1588 had become the Dutch Republic, thus halving the Spanish Netherlands. By the end of the century, Catholicism–even in France–no longer possessed the threateningly pro-Spanish dimension it once had. Under the first Bourbon king Henry IV, the former Henry of Navarre, French Catholicism became more liberal and tolerant. Henry IV was a Protestant who on his accession had converted to Catholicism in order to unite the country, uttering the cynical quip, ‘Paris was worth a Mass.’ He protected Protestantism through the Edict of Nantes and closely allied himself with Elizabeth against Spain.

  There were two more Armadas in 1596 and 1597, the first of which was destroyed in Cadiz harbour by Lord Howard and Elizabeth’s new favourite Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson. Neither was on the scale of that of 1588, and both were equally unsuccessful. But by the end of the century the English sallies into Spanish territory were not the triumphs of yesteryear. In 1591 an expedition to the Azores became famous in the annals of maritime history for the last stand of the Revenge under the Cornishman Sir Richard Grenville. He was defeated by the Spanish navy after almost twenty-four hours of battle. Like the queen herself, her celebrated seamen Drake and Hawkins were growing old, and they died together at sea in 1595 after a last attempt to seize Spanish treasure.

  Though many of the queen’s favourite gallants were now dead, Gloriana herself refused to accept the passage of time. When she was nearly seventy she conceived a last great passion, for the Earl of Essex. The thirty-three-year-old’s exploits at Cadiz had made him the hero of the hour, and thanks to his relationship with the queen, he had become one of the most powerful men in the country. Elizabeth was said to be completely infatuated with him, allowing him all kinds of liberties, including quarrelling with her, which had never been granted to any other of her courtiers.

  Essex’s ambitions were limitless. He was especially keen to dislodge Burghley’s son Sir Robert Cecil from the cherished position to which he had succeeded in the queen’s counsels. Essex may in fact have been aiming to marry the queen. Whatever the truth, when she sent him to Ireland in 1599 to put down the uprising of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, there was gossip that he intended to seize the throne by turning his Irish troops on the queen herself. Mysterious meetings with Tyrone after a very unsuccessful campaign added gri
st to the rumour mill. When Essex abandoned his post in Ireland and suddenly appeared one morning in the queen’s bedroom at her palace of Nonsuch before she was up, Elizabeth herself believed it was the beginning of a coup. She was only half dressed, and had not had time to put on the huge red wig which took years off her age or the white lead make-up that set her features in a youthful mask. Wisps of her grey hair were hanging down. In a mixture of fury and fear she banished Essex from court.

  Essex began to keep wilder and wilder company, and in February 1601 he staged a revolt in London which, though intended to remove the Cecils from power and reinstate Essex himself at the queen’s side, seemed merely treasonous. He was tried and executed that same month. There is a story that Essex from the Tower despatched a great ruby ring the queen had given him in happier times to ask her to relent. But he sent it via the Countess of Nottingham and she never handed it on. Two years later when the countess was dying the queen came to visit her and the countess confessed what she had done. The queen clutched at her heart as if it would break and ran out of the room crying, ‘God may forgive you, but I never can.’ This may be an old fairy tale, but it is certainly true that no more than a month after the countess’s death the queen herself also passed away. In any case as her friends died out Elizabeth had fallen into permanently low spirits. She did not have the same rapport with her new ministers as she had had with her old, not even with Cecil’s son Robert. She was increasingly depressed as she was left alone in old age: ‘Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found,’ she remarked mournfully to one courtier.