The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  ‘Here lieth The Toad at London’, read the spiteful notes they would post outside his house. Others viciously mocked his ‘wry neck, a crooked back, and splayed foot’. But Cecil had the last laugh. As Secretary of State he occupied a role we’d now describe as Prime Minister, and he was possibly the first to use that role in the modern sense, bypassing and even surreptitiously overruling the Queen in what he regarded as the national interest. A popular lampoon jibed: ‘Little Robert runs up and down / he ruleth both court and crown.’

  Cecil controlled a vast matrix of influence. Inspired by his mentor, the notorious spymaster Francis Walsingham, he had built up a formidable intelligence network and knew exactly what was stirring in every nest of dissent. At times he’d intervene; at other times he would sit back and silently let things develop. That was his style. No one ever knew exactly what The Toad was thinking – not even the Queen herself.

  Over supper, Boyle wasted no time revealing his news. Cecil already knew the full background – that a Spanish invasion force of nearly four thousand troops had landed in the southwest of Ireland the previous September and had taken the harbour town of Kinsale. English defenders had rapidly besieged the town, but had themselves been surrounded by a relieving force of Irish rebels. A harsh winter had taken its toll on all three forces. Cecil knew that his beleaguered English troops were exhausted, hungry and running low on supplies. Everything depended on whether the outer ring of rebels could link up with the besieged Spanish in Kinsale and, between them, crush the English. The Queen’s forces had better artillery and cavalry, but the Spanish forces included seasoned fighters with the determination of men who had their backs to the sea. With both sides now roughly equal in number, the result was almost a coin-toss.

  Boyle revealed that just a few days earlier, on Christmas Eve, the metaphorical coin had been thrown with disastrous results for the Irish relieving force. They had launched a surprise dawn thrust in a bid to link up with the Spaniards in Kinsale. But in atrocious weather conditions, they ended up in disarray. The Irish had decided to retreat and regroup, temporarily giving up their hilltop advantage and gambling that the English forces would be too fatigued to follow.

  It had been exactly the wrong call. The English commander, a thirty-eight-year-old military tactician named Charles Blount, had realised that his enemies were headed towards wide-open terrain where they could not deploy their traditional fighting technique – an ambush followed by a retreat into the safety of dense woodland or mountain glen. His cavalry pursued and forced the Irish to make a stand in the open.

  The battle that followed lasted only a few hours. It had been a rout, a catastrophe for the insurgents and their Spanish allies. By Christmas Day, around a thousand Irish lay dead, and most of the rest had begun trudging home in defeat.

  As he related his good news to Robert Cecil, Boyle must have been struck by the Secretary’s reaction. It was not one of pure delight. On the contrary, Cecil seemed anxious and worried. The two men talked long into the night. Despite Boyle’s weariness, they did not retire until 2am. The English victory had eased one threat to the realm, but it had created another.

  These were dark days at Elizabeth’s court. Less than a year ago, Cecil had uncovered a treasonous plot to topple the Queen. A group of headstrong young courtiers, led by Robert Devereux, the charismatic Earl of Essex, had tried to spark off a full-scale palace revolution in the streets of London. The revolutionaries had planned to arrest the Queen and usurp her power by forcing her to declare King James VI of Scotland as her successor.

  Essex had once been a war hero and a national idol. But his adoring public had drawn the line at insurrection, and as the Earl rode through the streets calling for popular support he had been shunned and ignored by a sceptical citizenry. The great revolution had fizzled out in a whimper as Essex and some of his fellow plotters had been tried and executed. But interrogations had shockingly revealed that hundreds of highly placed nobles and courtiers had been involved to some degree in the conspiracy. There were clearly a large number of moles in the highest ranks of the Elizabethan court who had sympathised with Essex’s aims. Some were still in positions of power, awaiting the right moment to act. The Queen was far from safe.

  Shortly before he met his death, Essex himself had admitted that his conspiracy was ‘a leprosy, that had infected far and near’. And after a painstaking analysis of the plot, the loyal courtier Francis Bacon also warned that ‘the dregs of these treasons … do yet remain in the hearts and tongues of some misaffected persons’.

  Who were these ‘misaffected persons’? Who were the moles? It was Cecil’s job to find out. Some of the confessions he’d read were political dynamite – so potentially devastating that they’d had to be suppressed in the interests of national stability.

  Cecil would have been especially troubled by the testimony of an executed ringleader named Sir Charles Danvers. Danvers gave credible testimony that a senior military figure had been involved in the conspiracy at an early stage. Entrusted with the command of thousands of English soldiers, he had treasonously offered to lead up to five thousand of his troops to Scotland to join King James’s army in a demonstration of power against the Queen.

  This military figure had been closely linked to the leading conspirators, including those who’d been executed. He was a friend of the ringleader, Essex. He was the illicit lover of Essex’s married sister, a ravishing society beauty named Penelope Rich, who herself had been deeply involved in the plot. Now this same military man was encamped outside the town of Kinsale, with thousands of English soldiers under his command.

  How would this man react to the changed situation? He could cut a deal with the defeated Irish commander Hugh O’Neill, as Essex had once done. He could forge a treasonous agreement with the Spanish commander who still held the town of Kinsale. Either move could give him enough power to become a kingmaker. Such temptation would be difficult to resist.

  For months Cecil had harboured deep concerns about the loyalty of this top military man – so much so that he had asked his friend General George Carew to spy upon him and keep the Secretary closely informed. Their exchanges were so sensitive that the potential traitor could not even be named. Instead, they used a numerical code – the man was ‘2026’ when Carew wrote to Cecil, and ‘2047’ in the Secretary’s replies.

  In a typical coded letter, Cecil refers to ‘2047’ guardedly, informing Carew ‘how far his unworthy friends [ie Essex and his fellow plotters] have wounded him here and what impression it hath taken’. In a cryptic phrase that Carew would immediately have understood, he adds ‘… and what it is like to be his domestic fortune’. For his part, Carew openly casts doubt on the officer’s loyalty. ‘He is [either] a noble gentleman, and all yours,’ he informs Cecil from the war zone, ‘or else he is a devil.’

  So no wonder Secretary Cecil was a worried man. Sitting at 2am over his guttering candle in the Strand, he had to face the very real possibility that the man who had just won the Battle of Kinsale – Charles Blount, commander of the English forces in Ireland – was the greatest and most dangerous mole of all.

  Cecil’s odd phrase ‘his domestic fortune’ was a coded reference to Blount’s mistress. And at that stage, deep in the heart of the Sussex countryside, Lady Penelope Rich was reduced to pacing in frustration around the prison of her gilded mansion, waiting anxiously for news from the Irish front. At thirty-eight years of age, Penelope was still being acclaimed as one of the most beautiful women in England. With her striking combination of golden blond hair and midnight-black eyes, she could turn the heads of rich men, soldiers and poets alike. Just a smile from ‘my Lady Rich’ could transform the salty, red-blooded fighting men of Elizabeth’s court into lovelorn moon-calves.

  The swashbuckling warrior-poet Philip Sidney rhapsodised about her golden hair, about jet-black eyes that could manage to beam ‘like morning sun on snow’ and about cheeks of ‘fair claret’ set against a face of alabaster. However, he also saw another side to
Penelope – a woman who was ‘most fair, most cold’. His experience of loving her was ‘as he who being poisoned, doth poison know’.

  For, besides being one of the most radiant figures of her age, Penelope was also one of the deadliest. An independent woman, centuries before her time, she had always taken a cheerfully fluid approach to the strict rules of the repressed era into which she had been born. Monogamy, religion, the constant grovelling to superiors, and above all the automatic right of monarchs to rule – to her, they were all up for debate and open to challenge.

  Independent, intelligent and ruthlessly ambitious, she was one of England’s first female revolutionaries. She had helped to plot the palace coup that aimed to reduce the Queen to a mere puppet of Penelope’s scheming brother, the Earl of Essex, and of his preferred monarch, King James of Scotland. Penelope had been right at the centre of the conspiracy – plotting, encouraging, and marshalling sympathisers.

  According to the Earl of Essex, his sister had ‘a proud spirit’ and mocked him when his own revolutionary zeal had waned just before the uprising. ‘[She] did continually urge me on with telling me how my friends and followers thought me a coward, and that I had lost all my valour,’ he testified under interrogation.

  If that sounds eerily similar to the words of Lady Macbeth as she scornfully urged her husband to get rid of his monarch (‘What? Quite unmanned in folly?’), it may not be entirely a coincidence. Essex’s testimony about his sister would have been very much in the audience’s minds when Shakespeare’s play was staged.

  That may not have been the playwright’s only link with the beautiful Penelope Rich. Some, including James Joyce, have claimed that she was the mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ who inspired some of Shakespeare’s most desperately lovelorn sonnets. ‘Poor Penelope, Penelope Rich,’ muses Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, using a complex pun on both the forename and surname to contrast the fortunate Penelope Rich with her pitiable counterpart, Anne Hathaway, who waited like Homer’s Penelope for her husband, William Shakespeare, to return home.

  Now it was Lady Rich’s turn to be housebound and waiting. Lucky to escape unpunished after her clear complicity in the February rising, she had been exiled to rural Sussex, where she had been placed under virtual house arrest in the custody of her unloved husband, Robert. Here, amid the excruciating boredom of the damp fields and forests, Penelope waited for her lover, Charles Blount, to finish his task in Ireland and return to England, where they would resume their former life as the scintillatingly shameful golden couple of courtly society.

  For much of the past decade, Blount and Penelope had been the Elizabethan equivalent of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, or Taylor and Burton before their marriage – fashionably illicit lovers whose relationship was an open secret. Penelope had been compelled to marry Robert Rich in 1581, and the couple had raised four children. This minor obstacle had not prevented her carrying on a parallel ‘marriage’ with Charles Blount and having five more children with him. (Two other babies, one to each father, had died in infancy.) Despite the inevitable scandal, their high connections and invigorating conversation had combined with the delicious frisson of the forbidden to make Charles and Penelope welcome guests at the grandest mansions.

  Luckily for the couple, the Queen didn’t appear to mind. She had identified the personable Blount as a ‘favourite’ when he was barely out of his teens. In her eyes, he could do no wrong. Elizabeth had no objection to her favourites having flings with other women – provided, of course, they reserved their special, spiritual, ethereal love for the monarch herself.

  Besides being the golden couple, Blount and Penelope had been right at the heart of society’s greatest golden circle. Penelope’s brother, the Earl of Essex, had for years been among the most powerful men at court. Her lover, Blount, was one of Essex’s closest friends. Their circle was never boring – it had attracted poets, actors, playwrights, pirates, philosophers, adventurers, soldiers and (in the spirit of the age) men who were many of these things at once.

  But now, ten months after the abortive coup, the circle had been smashed – Essex beheaded, the principal plotters executed, and many of the other leading members either imprisoned, exiled or shamed. Robert Rich, sensing a change of atmosphere, was already drawing up plans to divorce his unfaithful wife. And Charles Blount was under deep suspicion – so much so that he had contemplated abandoning his command and fleeing to France. When Essex himself had broken under interrogation and named Blount as ‘an accessory’ to his conspiracy, only the Queen’s personal reassurances had kept him in place at the head of the English forces in Ireland.

  Elizabeth had no such warm feelings towards Penelope Rich, who treated the Queen with thinly disguised contempt. However, the monarch spared her for Blount’s sake. Penelope seemed to live such a charmed life that some of the more superstitious courtiers even suspected she was a witch. One poet, Thomas Campion, described her as ‘Penelope … whose sweet voice cast a spell over the Ruler of the Irish’. The man he believed was helplessly in thrall to Penelope was the English Lord Deputy, or governor, of Ireland – Charles Blount.

  Richard Boyle finally collapsed into bed, satisfied that he had fulfilled his mission. Many years later he was to recall that night with justifiable pride: ‘I made a speedy expedition to the court,’ he wrote. ‘I left my Lord President [Carew] at Shandon Castle, near Cork, on the Monday morning about two of the clock, and the next day being Tuesday, I delivered my packet and supped with Sir Robert Cecil … at his house in the Strand.’

  (Some doubt the accuracy of Boyle’s claim, but such epic journeys were possible. Just two years later, an English horseman was to ride the 162 miles from London to Doncaster in a single day, 132 miles the next, and nearly 100 the third day to carry news of the Queen’s death to Edinburgh. And in the mid-1600s, the Duke of Ormond was to leave London at 4am on a Saturday, sail from Bristol and arrive in Waterford at 9am on Monday.)

  But despite his exhaustion and his 2am bedtime, Richard Boyle was allowed to sleep for only around five hours before being jostled awake. ‘By seven that morning, [Secretary Cecil] called upon me to attend him to the court,’ he recalled.

  The road-weary messenger had no idea he was about to be presented to the Queen in person. Boyle barely had time to dress before he was being led by Cecil through the corridors of Elizabeth’s sumptuous royal court. Boyle must have been acutely conscious of his haggard appearance as he strode alongside the Secretary through the opulent corridors of the palace, glancing into the elegant rooms graced with deep Turkish carpets, lined with vividly coloured tapestries and capped with heavily moulded plaster ceilings. Scarlet-clad yeomen of the guard, their uniforms each marked with a single golden rose, paced through the corridors past huddles of courtiers, immaculate in their buttoned doublets and impractical ruffs.

  Boyle was to be received in the Queen’s own bedchamber. He would have been well aware of the significance of the privilege. Not so long ago, the hot-headed Earl of Essex had infamously violated the sanctity of this same bedchamber when he stormed into the room unbidden, before the Queen had had a chance to put on make-up or don her usual wig.

  Eventually, Boyle and Cecil were summoned into the royal chamber. They were received by a readily recognisable figure who – even by the standards of the day – must have looked truly outlandish. Although not far from her seventieth year, the Queen still appeared to believe that she was young and attractive. It was a delusion that many of her poets and sycophants did nothing to discourage.

  The reality was revealed only in despatches by foreign visitors. One French ambassador reported that she wore a massive red wig festooned with pearls, but that her face was ‘long and thin’ and her yellowed, broken teeth were in such bad shape that ‘it is difficult to understand her when she speaks’. Even more disturbingly, she had the habit of letting the bodice of her dress lie open. ‘One could see the whole of her bosom,’ he wrote – not a pleasant sight since it was ‘rather wrinkled’. Another ambassador said she
had a thin, hooked nose and her pure white skin contrasted with her tiny, black eyes.

  Boyle was gratified to find that the sixty-eight-year-old monarch remembered him. She extended a bejewelled hand for the kneeling messenger to kiss.

  —Richard Boyle, she purred. I am glad that you are the happy man to bring the first news of this glorious victory.

  Boyle hardly had a chance to stammer a reply before the royal interrogation began. This was to be no fleeting visit. The Queen made it clear that she wanted to know every detail of the siege and battle of Kinsale – those momentous three months that had culminated in this long-awaited triumph over her despised enemy Hugh O’Neill.

  Boyle was happy to oblige. For much of the campaign, he had served under General Carew, a copious collector of information. He knew the entire saga better than most people. Settling in on the silken cushions, Boyle took a deep breath and told Queen Elizabeth the full story of the Last Armada.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘HASTE, HASTE, FOR YOUR LIFE’

  Kinsale, Monday, 21 September 1601

  The Arrival

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM Saxey stared at the approaching ships and cursed his luck.

  Saxey was just one of around a dozen English army officers who’d been sent to guard the small towns dotted around the southern Irish coastline in preparation for a long-anticipated Spanish invasion. His own posting, to the quiet town of Kinsale, had never been regarded as a key target, so he had been given a mere hundred men to maintain a token presence.