The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  In 1545, Henry VIII had marshalled 90,000 troops to guard the coast from Lincolnshire to Cornwall against the French invasion expected that summer. The army of 22,000 that Elizabeth had raised to fight the Spanish invasion was smaller even than the 28,000 men that she sent to crush the Rising of the North in November 1569. The great reserve army that was supposed to be established near Westminster to defend the Queen did not exist on the ground at all. However, London had 10,000 men in its Trained Bands and though its defences, ditches and walls were ruinous in parts, defensive lines had been laid out within the City and the old chains last used to bar the streets to Wyatt’s rebels fifty years before had again been brought into use. Every householder was also commanded to provide himself with a leather bucket to fight fires.

  Suspicion and hatred of foreigners, always high in London, grew even more marked, and those whose speech, dress or manner marked them out as strangers—whether Catholic or Protestant, Spaniard or Swede—were harassed, arrested or beaten by armed patrols and street mobs of xenophobic apprentice boys. “They care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them; and moreover one dare not oppose them, else the street-boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to the right and left unmercifully without regard to person; and because they are the strongest, one is obliged to put up with insult as well as injury.” Other factions fought among themselves. In Southwark an exchange of taunts between the servants of Henri III’s ambassador and those of Henri of Navarre—his retainers were called heretics and the murderers of the Prince of Condé, the ambassador’s men were labelled papists, Spaniards and enemies of the Queen’s Majesty—developed into a pitched battle with swords and clubs. It was easier to find “flocks of white crows than one Englishman . . . who loves a foreigner,” and Spaniards had been the object of particular venom ever since Mary Tudor’s deeply unpopular marriage to Philip. “The English hate us Spaniards worse than they hate the Devil. They rob us in town and on the road . . . we Spaniards move among the English as if they were animals, trying not to notice them.”

  The fear of invasion, compounded by the threat that an assassin might seek to strike down Elizabeth, just as William the Silent had been murdered, had kept her from her customary lavish progress through the southern counties that summer. Instead she remained in or close to London and her contingents of Guards. However, as reports continued to arrive that the Armada had been put to flight, Elizabeth took the opportunity to mount a pageant that was extravagant even by her grandiose standards. On 17 August Seymour had written to Walsingham that “The Duke of Parma has withdrawn his sea forces to Bruges and Dixmude . . . also news came to Calais that Breda was revolted . . . the withdrawing of the Duke’s forces was either for Ostend, Bergen-op-Zoom or Breda . . . It seems the Duke is in a great chafe to find his ships no readier at Dunkirk, also to find such discomfiture of the Spanish fleet at his nose.”14

  The following morning, Thursday 18 August, the same day that the battered remnants of the Armada were struggling through mountainous seas near the Shetlands and her victorious ships were returning to port, Elizabeth rode to the covered quay at Whitehall and sailed downstream in her royal barge through the heart of the capital, preceded by a boatload of trumpeters to herald her coming, and accompanied by the peal of the church bells throughout London. Only the deaf would have been unaware that Her Majesty was going to review her troops. The yeomen of her guard and the gentlemen pensioners of her household in their plumed helmets and half-armour followed in a fleet of other barges, past citizens lining both banks of the river and leaning from the windows of the tall houses on London Bridge as they passed by on the ebb tide. The summer heat and the breeze would have made the latter stages of the journey less than fragrant for the Queen, carrying to her the stench of the sprawling slums that spread eastwards from the Tower, “a continual street or filthy straight passage with alleys of small tenements or cottages builded, inhabited by sailors’ victuallers, along by the river of Thames, almost to Radcliffe.”

  The Earl of Leicester awaited her at the camp at West Tilbury, with a force that now numbered several thousand men, though whether he would actually have led them into battle against Parma is open to question. His record in The Netherlands showed that he was sufficiently in awe if not in fear of Parma to avoid a confrontation with him, and his apparent preference was simply to retreat in the face of an invasion, laying waste the country until the Spaniards’ lack of provisions forced them to withdraw. However, lined up at West Tilbury in troops of foot and of horse, his army made a proud show. The camp had been embanked and palisaded, and pavilions decked with flags and pennants had been erected to house the nobles, while ranks of green booths accommodated the common soldiery.

  The Queen arrived at noon. Accompanied by her “court-like stately troupe,” she was led along a raised causeway across the marshes. As she reached the camp on the ridge overlooking the lower reaches of the Thames, she was greeted with dipped pikes, colours and lances and a royal salute fired from the blockhouse. The thudding of hooves on the earth and the crash of cannon were so loud that “the earth and air did sound like thunder.” Mounted on a solid white gelding, she then rode through every area of the camp “like some Amazonian Empress . . . full fraught with manly spirit.” She moved among her ranks of soldiers accompanied only by a modest escort of four nobles and two pages. The Earl of Ormonde went ahead, carrying the sword of state. Behind came two pages dressed in white velvet, one carrying the Queen’s silver helmet on a velvet cushion, the other leading her horse. The Queen’s Captain General rode at her right hand. Once the Queen’s favourite, Leicester was now white-haired and white-bearded, and forced to vie for her affections with the man who rode on the other side of her, his own stepson and the Queen’s cousin, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the latest “golden boy” in the long line of Court favourites who owed their position to their looks and their ability to be dazzled by the Queen’s radiance on demand. The handsome twenty-three-year-old had already shown his mastery of his craft, telling the fifty-six-year-old, bald, shrivelled and gap-toothed Queen, “I do confess that, as a man, I have been more subject to your natural beauty, than as a subject to the power of the king.” He was amply rewarded for his flattery and was already her Master of Horse and a Knight of the Garter. The great warrior, the Lord Marshal, Sir John Norris, marched behind them, and a standard-bearer completed the small procession, carrying Norris’s colours from the Flanders campaign “all rent and torn and burned with bullets.”15

  Elizabeth was bare-headed, but her auburn wig was richly dressed with pearls—the symbol of virginity—and diamonds, and over her white velvet gown she wore a shining silver cuirass embossed with a mythological design, and she carried a silver truncheon chased in gold in her right hand. The sight of their Queen attired in a simulacrum of battle armour inspired her soldiers to cheers and expressions of their undying resolution and devotion to her cause, and when she later dined in state in Leicester’s pavilion all the captains of her army queued to kiss her hand. Driven away in a coach ornamented with wrought gold, “diamonds, emeralds and rubies in checkerwise,” she retired for the night to the nearby manor house of “Master Rich,” Ardern Hall.

  Elizabeth preferred “crafting bellicose ceremonies . . . martial pageants and mock battles” to the dangers and uncertainties of actual warfare, not to mention its prodigious expense, and she returned to Tilbury the next day to watch a march-past of her forces and a series of cavalry exercises and “combats with spear and shield.” She was preceded to her place of honour by three sergeants bearing golden maces, nine trumpeters “bareheaded in scarlet coats” and a herald carrying a standard bearing the arms of England embroidered in gold on blue and crimson velvet. She made her carefully scripted and rehearsed great speech that day, expressing her own burning desire to play a part in a battle that she must have known was already over.

  “My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful for our safety to heed how we commit our
selves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery, but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. Therefore I am come amongst you, as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all and to lay down for my God and for my Kingdom and for my People, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body 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; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms. I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns and we do assure you, in the word of a Prince, they shall be duly paid you.”

  Elizabeth’s fire-breathing address to her army was entirely superfluous—the defeated Armada was already long gone—and whether the speech she delivered was really the one that has been handed down to us and quoted time without number is also open to serious question. The only eyewitness account was written by James Aske. He certainly mentioned the speech, and quoted extensively from it, but none of the quotations bears any relation to the words she is alleged to have used. Aske quoted her flattery of her troops’ “loyal hearts to us their lawful Queen” and their courage against “fierce and cruel foes,” and said that she pledged herself to march into battle alongside them like the Roman goddess of war, Bellona. She also promised that “the meanest man who shall deserve a mite, a mountain shall for his deserts receive.” Many of her audience would have bitter cause to remember those words. The great, almost Shakespearian speech credited to Elizabeth was clearly intended for a far wider audience than the ranks of soldiers at Tilbury, and it seems probable that it was written and polished by others in the days following her visit, to “comfort not only the thousands but many more who shall hear of it.” Copies were at once printed and widely disseminated, stirring many English hearts and burnishing still more the image of “Gloriana,” the Virgin Queen.16

  As she dined at Tilbury, word reached her that Parma was ready to come out of harbour on the next spring tide. Even without knowledge of Seymour’s dispatch to Walsingham, it was an implausible claim. With no Armada to protect him, the English knew as well as Parma how vulnerable his flimsy craft would be against the Dutch flyboats and the Squadron of the Narrow Seas. With equal implausibility it was claimed that Elizabeth had refused to desert her army in the face of the enemy—she had “a conceit that in honour she could not return” to the capital—but she then allowed herself to be persuaded that, at the least, Parma would not come out until he had news of the Armada, and on the Friday evening she went back to St. James’s in her barge. Like so many of Elizabeth’s actions, the Tilbury appearance had been pure theatre, mere show, and the speech to her forces that has echoed down the ages was a sham, delivered after the danger from the Armada had passed. The demobilization of her forces that began while her words were still ringing in their ears shows that she knew that as well as any. Such cynical exercises suggest a very modern queen, more surface and style than substance.

  Within two days of her great speech, the armies at Tilbury and throughout the South East were being sent home, confirming that, for all the stirring propaganda, neither Elizabeth nor her ministers really believed that a Spanish invasion was imminent. Some 6,000 troops were retained at Tilbury for a further week, but they were then reduced to a rump of 1,500, and the casting of guns in the foundries of the Weald and the Forest of Dean was terminated soon afterwards. The demobilization went ahead despite reports from The Netherlands on 22 August of “intelligence . . . of the return of the Spanish fleet.” Howard at once wrote a further letter to Walsingham “praying you, with all possible speed, to send down all the shipping and mariners from London that you can . . . powder and shot . . . pitch and tar,” but Drake took a more sceptical view. “The uncertainty of the reports . . . make me rather to rest upon mine own conjecture than upon any of them, they disagreeing so much as they do, the one affirming that the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, with his fleet, is coming back again . . . the other affirming that it is for certain that the fleet of Spain is passed without Scotland for their way homewards.” Drake also stated that if the Armada did return through the North Sea, it would not be to resurrect the invasion plan but because “the wind will not permit them good passage to go about the other way at this time of the year.” He added that, even to attempt the crossing to England, the Spaniards would need the conjunction of “fair weather, the highest of a spring [tide], good wind and the Duke of Parma embarking all in one day.”

  The prospect of any return of the Armada became even more remote after the receipt of a report from the crew of a fishing boat off the Shetlands. On 18 August they had seen “a very great fleet of monstrous great ships . . . their course was to run betwixt Orkneys and Fair Island.” With the wind blowing from the south-east throughout the following week, the fishermen believed that the Armada “could fetch no part of Scotland except some of the out isles.” Drake counselled keeping a watch on Parma for another twenty days; after that the winter weather would be all the defence that England would need, although “it were good we saw the coast of Flanders as often as we might.” Edward Wynter brought further news from Flanders at the end of the month. “The Duke of Parma is retired in some haste with certain troops of horse from Bruges, up into Brabant as high as Brussels, fearing, as it was thought, some sudden revolt. He has commanded such victuals as were aboard his fleet in Dunkirk to be unshipped, which they are now performing and already they have taken from many ships the sails from their yards. His mariners run away daily, many of whom he has caught and imprisoned sharply. They are all generally ill affected towards this service . . . Young Norris, that was sent after the enemy’s fleet to discover which way they meant to take their course, brings certain news that he left them to the westward of the Islands of Orkney, which is their course directly for Spain.”

  Rumours about the return of the Armada continued long after its ultimate fate was known. As late as March 1589 George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, was summoned to action “upon a letter from Her Majesty, commanding me to repair with my fleet to the road of Calais and to bring with me all such ships as I should find fit to do her service there.” But most shared the belief voiced by one Spanish prisoner about the prospect of the Armada’s return. “Those in the ship that he is in do say that they will go into the ground sooner than they will come such a journey again.”17

  Secure in her victory, Elizabeth had been further entertained by a series of reviews, pageants and jousts mounted in London by “the forces which had been raised by private persons”—the nobles and their retainers. The most lavish was staged by the Earl of Essex, involving “60 musketeers, 60 arquebusiers on horseback and 200 light horse,” jousting between two of the Queen’s favourites, Cumberland and Essex himself, and a series of mock cavalry battles during which “the musketeers and arquebusiers fired off their pieces at the same time. It was a beautiful sight.” The rest of the populace was also given a spectacle: a series of public executions of men, and one woman, “condemned for being traitors and Catholics. An enormous crowd of people who were exhibiting every sign of rejoicing” followed them to the gallows, and a gentlewoman present who “said some words expressive of pity” was immediately arrested and imprisoned.

  Several commemorative medals were struck to celebrate the defeat of the Armada. One showed Elizabeth in a triumphal chariot, holding the Book of Common Prayer in one hand and the palm of victory in the other, while on the obverse, fledglings in a nest fought off a menacing eagle. The myth of a “Protestant wind” that had blown the Armada to destruction was aired on another medal carrying the inscription “Flavit e
t dissipiati sunt” (“God blew and they were scattered”), even though on five separate occasions a “Catholic wind” had blown in the Armada’s favour, not least when a sudden shift in the wind direction saved it from the Banks of Zeeland. Many Spaniards, including Cervantes, also sought to see the defeat in terms of divine, not human intervention. “What turns them back is the irresistible storm of wind and sea and heaven itself, which allows the enemy for a little while to raise its head, hateful to Heaven and detestable to earth.” But it was not the wind that had wrought the Armada’s destruction. When Burghley received a list of ships wrecked on the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, he wrote in the margin “but in truth they were lost in Zeeland” (i.e., in the fighting off Gravelines). Spanish and Portuguese ships had been strong enough to round the Cape, sail through the Straits of Magellan and survive Caribbean storms and hurricanes in the past. What brought them low was not the weakness of their construction, or the wild and unseasonal weather, or divine intervention. The main factor was undoubtedly the assaults of the English guns. That was why the Armada lost so many of its vessels while the English fleet lost not a single ship. Indeed, so superior were English ships, guns and gunners that in thirty years of more or less open war between England and Spain not one was ever sunk by enemy fire.18

  Victory was not achieved because the English and Dutch were braver than the Spaniards, or because God was on their side. Neither was the Spanish defeat attributable to poor strategy or tactics, nor even to the sheer hubris of Philip II; such problems were not insignificant, but they could have been overcome. At root, the difference between the two sides came down to technology. English warships were faster, more manoeuvrable and armed with weapons that were, by the standards of the day, precision engineered, delivering projectiles with greater frequency, velocity and accuracy, over a greater range.