The Spanish Armadas

  Yet it was a sorely tried young woman who came to the throne. When one thinks of the abnormalities that psychiatrists today blame upon the relatively minor traumas of youth, Elizabeth’s level head, emotional stability and unwavering judgment are qualities to be wondered at. No king’s daughter of those days could have a simple and placid childhood, constantly, as they were, in the spotlight of court interest and an inevitable pawn in the matrimonial game of European power politics. But Elizabeth’s mother had been beheaded for adultery when Elizabeth was two years and eight months old. Thereafter she was taught that her mother was an evil woman and that she was herself a bastard. When she was eight her stepmother and cousin, Katherine Howard, was executed for similar reasons. Fawned upon or ignored according to the whim of her father, she had endured the sexual attentions of one Seymour and the suspicions of another, had been the inevitable focus of plotting Protestantism under Mary and had been sent to the Tower, from which few roval personages ever safely emerged. Now at an age when most young women were happy to spend their time choosing a dress or a husband, she found herself on the lonely eminence of a throne, surrounded by advisers whose integrity she could only assess by her own fallible judgment, without a near relative on whom she could safely lean; and Queen of a country that was torn by religious bigotry, almost bankrupt, in the grip of inflation, the army defeated and the navy neglected, and at war with the French – who now had one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland.

  It was a daunting prospect.

  One of the most daunting features of it was the emergence from their holes in Germany and Switzerland of all those Protestant exiles and Calvinist fanatics who had fled the country during the Marian persecutions and who were now returning post-haste to exact their revenge and to scour out the kingdom and cleanse it of the last vile vestiges of Popery. And, only two weeks after Elizabeth’s accession, news reached her that when the announcement of Mary’s death reached France the King had proclaimed his daughter-in-law to be the true Queen of England; and from that time Mary Queen of Scots and her husband the Dauphin of France began to quarter the royal arms of England with their own.

  In these conditions Count de Feria waited upon the young Queen and brought her news of Philip’s proposal of marriage. She thanked him and said she would consider the matter.

  It is quite possible that she did consider the matter. They had met and been attracted to each other. They were of suitable age – he only six years the elder. His attempts while in England to moderate Mary’s persecution of the Protestants suggested that at heart he put politics above religion, as Elizabeth proposed to do. Further confirmation of this, as she would certainly see with her acute mind, lay in his preserving her and supporting her accession to the throne; for, apart from her desirability as a woman, he had no doubt concluded that it was better to have an independent Protestant on the English throne than a Catholic bound to France. Also Elizabeth knew of the inheritance promised to a child of Mary’s marriage, and therefore one could assume the same for any child of hers if Philip were the father. It was not to be lightly dismissed.

  Probably she toyed with it for a while, knowing in her heart that the bitterness which Mary had created in England towards Rome and Spain would make such a marriage virtually unworkable. A Catholic Elizabeth? They would not tolerate it. A Protestant Elizabeth with a Catholic husband? Balance and counterpoise. How better to preserve the country from the worst excesses of religious bigotry? It was just worth considering.

  She was still considering some months later when she learned that Philip, despairing of an answer, had married the French princess, Elizabeth of Valois, instead. She said in annoyance to de Feria: ‘Your master must have been much in love with me not to be able to wait four months!’ Yet she continued to keep his portrait in her private cabinet all through the long years ahead, while friendly rivalry gave way to hostility and hostility at last to war.

  The disruptive forces of the sixteenth century were too strong for all but the wisest and most cautious of rulers. Charles v, Philip’s father, the last and one of the greatest of the Holy Roman Emperors, abdicated from his throne and his responsibilities and retired a broken man to the monastery of Yuste where he died in 1558, conscious that most of his ideals had come to nothing and that all his strivings and battles to preserve Christian unity had foundered. For they had come into conflict with intolerances worse than his own.

  He was foredoomed to fail, as Philip failed after him. When Charles was born, Martin Luther was a chorister of seventeen waiting to read law at the university of Erfurt. Twenty-two years later, a noble and formerly dissolute Spaniard of thirty-one, Ignatius of Loyola, fasting in his cell in a Dominican convent and spending seven hours a day on his knees, began to have visions of the Virgin and her Blessed Son which led to the foundation of the Society of Jesus. At about the same date a Swiss boy, John Calvin by name, was sent by his parents to Paris to avoid the plague, and it was not many years before he too had a vision which convinced him that he alone was the chosen voice of God. In 1480 the Inquisition had been instituted, primarily then as an anti-Jewish measure, by the chaplain to Queen Isabella, a Dominican friar called Tomas de Torquemada, and had spread throughout Spain. So the forces for Reformation and Counter-Reformation were poised. An emperor who sought to reconcile these forces, whether by reason or by arms, was trying to subdue an earthquake.

  Because of this religious conflict the sixteenth became the bloodiest, bitterest century in Europe until the ignoble twentieth dawned. For, in whatever mood the Reformation was conceived, by the middle of the century its intolerance was as narrow, as cruel and as bigoted as the Catholic opposition. As John Buchan once said, there is no such disruptive force as a common creed held with a difference. Looking at the picture of devastation and persecution, particularly in France and the Low Countries, it is sometimes hard to believe that both sides could so completely have lost sight of the principles of the founder of their faith and of the tenets of tolerance, charity, loving kindness, humility and brotherly love that he preached. At least in the twentieth century some of the cleavages, some of the issues, seem to have been real. One believes that even when viewed from the perspective of four hundred years they may still appear to have been real. But in the sixteenth, both sides committed the atrocities they did carrying the same New Testament in their hands.

  Yet as it happens most of the rulers of the day, excepting Philip, were humanists. Catherine de’Medici, although she bears the terrible stigma of the massacre of St Bartholomew, was no religious fanatic, and, so long as it ministered to the well-being of her house and children, she was all for moderation. William of Orange, though in a sense a willing prisoner of the Reformed Church, since it alone provided the dynamic of revolt, was personally a believer in freedom of conscience and worship for everyone. Henry of Navarre changed his religion twice – once to save his life and once to gain his kingdom. The rule of Mary Queen of Scots was perhaps too brief and stormy to assess, but her son James would certainly not have allowed a mere sectarianism to obstruct his view of the main chance, and it was he who shrewdly observed that ‘one Puritan presbiter equals one Papist priest’.

  The most successful of all these rulers was the one most successful in balancing the disruptive forces which threatened her kingdom, first from within and then from without. Elizabeth was fortunate in that the great mass of the people of her kingdom shared her views: they wanted the Anglicanism of Henry, not the fanatical Calvinism of Edward’s time nor the savage Catholicism of Mary. They were fortunate in that they found in her the perfect expression of their will. Early in her reign she remarked that there was only one Jesus Christ and one faith, the rest was dispute over trifles.

  In the destruction of the monasteries the bones of St Frideswide of Oxford, a holy woman who died in 735 after founding a nunnery on the site of the cathedral there, were cast out upon a dung heap, and the body of the wife of a Canon of Christ Church, a distinguished Protestant divine, was buried in their place. When
Mary succeeded, the remains of the newly dead lady were thrown out too. On Elizabeth’s accession a dispute arose among the Canons as to who should be reinterred in the place of honour in the cathedral. Elizabeth’s reply was terse and to the point, and with great ceremony the bones of the two women were reburied together.

  It was a portent of the new reign; and only the cold winds of bigotry from outside England, the revolt in the Netherlands, the bloody massacres in France, the anathemas of Rome, the claims of Mary of Scotland and the threat of invasion from Spain, forced Elizabeth and her Council into the narrowing restrictive measures of the 1580s.

  Elizabeth and Philip corresponded from time to time in the early years of their reigns. Indeed both were assiduous correspondents and incredibly devoted workers at the tasks to which God had called them. Elizabeth, who spoke French and Italian fluently by the time she was eleven and could write to her brother in Latin at thirteen, dealt with visiting potentates without needing an interpreter and treated her Council early to the quality of her mind and tongue. Perhaps the most English of monarchs since Harold, she never left the country even to visit her grandfather’s Wales.

  Philip, although his mother was Portuguese and his father born in Ghent of Burgundian blood, was as true a Spaniard at heart as Elizabeth was English. After his return from England he travelled little and was only happy in Spain. And unlike his father, who was a big clumsy man of enormous appetites and popular appeal, Philip was reserved, dignified, quiet-mannered, proud, the perfect Spanish grandee. He became as well loved in Spain as Elizabeth did in England and gave expression to the Spanish will as truly as she did to the English.

  The period following his marriage to Elizabeth of Valois was the happiest of his life. He fell in love with the fourteen-year-old princess, who was fresh and charming and appeared untouched by the corrupt French court in which she had been brought up. She bore him two daughters, who were always his favourite children, and died when she was twenty-three – almost inevitably – in childbirth. By this time Philip was forty-one and had shouldered the responsibilities of kingship for thirteen years. It had aged him, made him more cautious, more exacting, more set in his religious convictions and more prone to withdraw from court society. More than ever he sought not compromises but solutions to every problem. (Elizabeth of England, on the contrary, had realized that solutions are rare in politics; if one shelves a problem often enough it may in the end disappear. At least it is likely to be superseded by another more urgent!)

  By this time Philip had just begun his life’s monument by laying the foundation stone for his great palace-monastery of El Escorial, dedicated to St Lawrence the Martyr, whose convent in St Quentin had been burned by Spanish troops when taking the town from the French in 1557. Ever since, Philip, who had a special devotion to this saint, had been looking for a suitable site to build a commemorative monastery near his new capital of Madrid. From 1563 until 1584 the great project was in process of building, employing three thousand workmen for over twenty-one years and costing in all over three and a half million ducats. Whenever he could spare the time in those early years Philip would go to a seat quarried out of rock at the foot of the mountains called the Hermits to watch the work in progress. The building was designed to the shape of an upturned gridiron, the instrument on which St Lawrence was put to death, and four great towers one hundred and eighty feet high represented the feet of the gridiron. The whole giant sombre building is six hundred and eighty-two feet long and five hundred and eighty-one feet deep, and is settled on the south-western slopes of the Guadarramas, with the gaunt and gloomy mountains rising behind. Without shelter and exposed as it is to the searing heat of summer and the blighting winds of winter, it has a loneliness and a harshness and a dignity peculiarly in keeping with the nature of the King who conceived it. Built of dark grey almost greenish granite, it has seven towers, fifteen gateways and twelve thousand windows and doors, almost all of them small, and within the building the great monastery church resembles St Peter’s, Rome.

  Yet, despite its forbidding appearance, the interior of the Escorial when it was completed showed the rich garnerings of an Empire. White and coloured marbles from the Apennines, green and black jaspers from Granada, wrought bronze from Flanders, veined and spotted alabaster from Tuscany, rose-coloured coral from Sardinia, delicate ironwork from Aragon, all contributed to the magnificence. The new woods of the Indies had been brought to combine with fine brocades from Florence, crystal chandeliers from Venice and the silk damasks of Seville. Artists and sculptors had worked for two decades decorating the walls and ceilings with carvings and frescoes, statuary and paintings.

  Even so, it is still more the pantheon than the palace, and here in due time Philip brought many of his relatives to be reburied, including his father and mother, Charles and Isabella; his aunts, Queen Leonore of Portugal and Queen Mary of Hungary; his first wife Maria; his two brothers, Don Fernando and Don Juan, who had died in infancy; his son Don Carlos; his half-brother Don John of Austria; and his grandmother Joanna, who had been insane for thirty-nine years before she died. Picturing this slightly-built, humourless, deeply religious, self-contained man sitting with his cloak wrapped round him to protect him from the winds of the Sierras, watching the slow growth of his own monastery and his own tomb, one thinks of the fourth dynasty Egyptians building their great pyramids at Giza. Perhaps no one since the Pharaohs had been so preoccupied with death. Perhaps no one since the Pharaohs had so closely intermarried as did the Hapsburgs of Philip’s time. The result was a strain of insanity running through the family, together with hyperaesthesia and melancholia.

  At the time of the death of Elizabeth of Valois, Philip’s son, Don Carlos, also died, after being imprisoned in his rooms for six months hopelessly insane. Six years earlier he had seriously injured his head in a fall and had almost died; and some blame this fall for the deterioration which followed. But the Venetian Ambassador, writing soon after the accident, says that for three years already Don Carlos had ‘ suffered an alienation of the mind’. It was the dread hereditary weakness claiming another victim.

  These deaths left Philip without a wife and without a male heir, but there is no record of his having approached Elizabeth again. In the ten years since she came to the throne the two countries had drifted too far apart on the tides of religious conflict. A political system in Europe which had endured since the last decades of the fifteenth century was dissolving, and no man knew how – or if ever – it would solidify again.

  Chapter Three

  The Widening Chasm

  For some seventy years the pattern of alignment in Europe had been relatively unchanged. On the one side was the Holy Roman Empire, a loosely associated group of nations and states, consisting of Spain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, to which, ever since Henry VII had concluded an alliance with Spain, England and the Tudors had adhered. Confronting this group, almost surrounded by it, and relatively smaller, but powerful, homogeneous and militant, was France, to which Scotland under the Stuarts was allied.

  Now the explosion of the religious dynamic shattered these easily drawn frontiers. The revolt in the Netherlands gradually drew English sympathy towards the struggling co-religionists of the Low Countries and away altogether from Spain; and the rapid spread of Calvinism in Scotland meant an inevitable strain on her relations with a still Catholic France. And in countries unlike Spain (where Protestantism was early rooted out by the Inquisition), in countries where people of both creeds sought to live in peace, the demand by the fanatics was that religious loyalties should cut across national loyalty.

  In its early days Calvinism was the religion of the opposition. Catholicism represented the older monarchies and the aristocratic and propertied families of the Middle Ages; Protestantism, though led by aristocrats, the thrusting new middle classes. The Protestant faith, by going back to the poverty and simplicity of the early Church, more closely resembled Christianity in its first days. But in the sixteenth century it was disfigured,
as both extreme wings of religious belief were equally disfigured, by what D. M. Loades calls ‘criminals whose anti-social neuroses were driven into religious channels by the atmosphere of the time’.

  When Philip married his Elizabeth of Valois he was, apart from marrying a young girl whom he fancied, attempting a change of policy which would lead to Spanish friendship with France and would also, he hoped, help to combat the rise of Lutheranism there. But wedding celebrations in France that century had a way of going wrong. (It was another such event which sparked off the massacre of St Bartholomew.) On this occasion Elizabeth’s father, Henry of France, a robust and vigorous man of forty who loved violent exercise, took part in the tournament celebrations, and after several passages at arms, wanted to break another lance before retiring and so commanded that the Count de Montgomery should be his opponent. Montgomery pleaded to be excused. The Queen told Henry that he was tired and should ride no more. Henry would have none of it and so the two men galloped towards each other and broke their lances after the approved style. But Montgomery forgot to release the broken end of the lance from his gloved fingers, and the splintered end entered the King’s visor and pierced his eye. The King fell forward on the neck of his horse, which carried him with slowing pace to the end of the enclosure. In ten days he was dead.