And of course Elizabeth could seldom resist the opportunity of making a little money. So she began to invest in the expeditions, which were launched exactly like joint-stock companies, with partners investing so much money and sharing proportionately in the dividends. Therefore as time went on it became increasingly difficult for the Queen to disown her famous sea captains. The best she could say to a protesting Spanish ambassador was that So-and-so had grossly exceeded his warrant and would be suitably punished. This really deceived no one, since the Queen pocketed her profit and the captain was rarely disciplined. And the depredations became steadily more daring and more successful.
On the 4th July, three years before St Bartholomew, the most successful of the captains, Francis Drake, was married to a girl called Mary Newman at St Budeaux church in south Devon. In the year of St Bartholomew, and in the month of the massacre, Drake landed on the isthmus of Panama near where the mule-trains carried their loads of precious metal across the narrow neck of land dividing the Pacific from the Caribbean. There with a total of seventy-three men he captured Nombre de Dios, a town the size of his native Plymouth. Seriously wounded, he failed this time in his objective, but the following year, having lurked in the vicinity during the intervening months, he attacked and took a mule-train and returned presently to Plymouth with £40,000 value in gold and silver booty.
It was this sort of activity, which went so far beyond the casual privateering raid, that Elizabeth found so difficult to explain away. It was this sort of activity which was earning England the reputation of being ‘a nation of pirates’.
But of course the provocation was not on one side alone. English seamen were everywhere considered and treated as heretics when they happened by design or misfortune to land at Catholic ports. As early as 1561 a Bristol merchant had sailed to Cadiz and travelled overland from there to Malaga to buy wines. While he was absent, representatives of the Inquisition boarded his ship and searched it and, finding there books printed in English, assumed them to be blasphemous and arrested him on his return. He was flung into prison and three times racked and his ship and cargo and money seized. This was not an exceptional case.
Drake and Hawkins would ever bear with them the memory of San Juan de Ulua when the tiny English flotilla was set upon by the Spanish warships of the Flota, after having exchanged mutual guarantees of neutrality and safe conduct. While they barely escaped with their lives, many were killed and, of the seamen captured, four were burned at the stake and most of the others spent years in Spanish gaols. For this outrage Elizabeth seized Spanish gold on its way up the Channel to pay the army in the Netherlands.
Yet still both monarchs continued patiently to work for an avoidance of outright war. In 1573 indeed there was a détente, and Drake, arriving back with his booty from Nombre de Dios, was an embarrassment to the scene. He dutifully disappeared, and little was then heard of him until he undertook the voyage in the Golden Hind which ended in his circumnavigation of the world and earned him an immortality beyond the summits of war. By the time he returned to Plymouth it was September 1580; and by this time Philip, though he continued intermittently to work for peace with England, was toying with the idea of its possible destruction. He had also considered for some time the advantages which would accrue to him from Elizabeth’s assassination.
Chapter Four
Plans for War
The morale of political murder must be seen in its sixteenth-century context. In our century the assassination of kings or heads of state is usually left to the criminally unbalanced who hatch out their paranoiac hate-fantasies in private, or at most in concert with a few like-minded psychopaths. Four hundred years ago the deliberate assassination of a leader of an opposing faction was an act of power politics earning only one-sided opprobrium.
As early as 1570 the Papal Bull issued by Pius V declared all Elizabeth’s subjects absolved from their oath of fealty, and was widely interpreted as meaning that her assassination would be considered lawful in the eyes of the church. When Gregory XIII succeeded him, the Cardinal Secretary at the Vatican informed two inquiring Englishmen that ‘there is no doubt whatsoever that who sends that guilty woman of England out of the world with the pious intention of doing God’s service, not only does not sin but gains merit.’ Cardinal Allen writing a decade later urged all Englishmen to purge their souls by seeing to the death of Elizabeth.
The names of some of those who suffered assassination in this brief middle period of the century will show how often these attempts were successful. Francis, Duc de Guise, in 1563, by a Protestant. Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, in 1567, with the tacit connivance of his wife. The Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland and half-brother of Mary Stuart, in 1570, by a Catholic Hamilton. The Earl of Lennox, another Regent of Scotland and Mary Stuart’s father-in-law, in 1571, also probably by the Hamiltons. Admiral Coligny, in 1572, by order and in the presence of Henry Duc de Guise. William of Orange, after several previous attempts, in 1584 by a Catholic, under assignment from Philip II. Henry Duc de Guise in 1588 by order and in the presence of Henry III of France. Henry III of France in 1589 by a young Dominican monk.
This list is not exhaustive, but it suggests that in this respect the Protestants were more sinned against than sinning.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that as Elizabeth passed out of the child-bearing age and so could not perpetuate her line, her Council and Parliament should be in ever greater concern to perpetuate her life. Mary remained in confinement, the continuing nucleus for Catholic discontent. It was true that her son James, whom she had not seen since he was ten months old, had been brought up a strict Protestant in Scotland and might eventually be a more suitable successor, but in 1580 he was only fourteen, and a backward, shambling, spavin-shanked fourteen at that.
So in England, as one assassination plot followed another, pressure grew to remove Mary, and tighter and stricter laws were introduced to compel Catholics to conform to the new religion. Walsingham, whose spies constantly preserved Elizabeth from death, was given greater liberty to enforce his secret decrees, and the 1580s became the decade of the dungeon and the rack. Elizabeth’s great Summer Progresses through the land, which were often attended by a court and train of five hundred persons, were curtailed, and she seldom moved far from her palaces around London. Not that she took care for her own person. By her lack of simple safety precautions, by her confidence in the loyalty and good sense of her own people, she was a constant anxiety to her ministers and friends.
In 1577 Mary Queen of Scots made a will whereby she left all her rights in the English throne to Philip II of Spain. It was an open invitation to him to come and free her. The English Privy Council, and particularly the triumvirate of Cecil, Leicester and Walsingham, saw Mary’s existence as the greatest single danger to the freedom and continued independence of England. Not only was she the magnet which lay at the source of all plots of assassination and invasion; she was also the stumbling-block to any rapprochement with France. There could hardly be an understanding between the two countries while an ex-Queen of France was held captive in England. Once she was gone, the sore place would heal.
But Elizabeth still would have none of it. Others could go to the block: not Mary, not a royal person.
Lest it should appear that Elizabeth was morally elevated above the other monarchs of the day, it should be mentioned that for two years before the St Bartholomew massacre, and in the year after, Sir Henry Killigrew, that cousin of the wild and lawless Cornish Killigrews but himself one of Elizabeth’s most trusted and confidential servants, was up and down to Scotland with various secret and disreputable propositions to discuss with a succession of Regents: Moray, Lennox and Mar. The concept was that the English should release Mary and allow her to return to Scotland on condition that the Scots would guarantee to execute her as soon as she arrived. It was not at all a new idea to the Scots. Each of the Regents in turn was entirely agreeable to the proposal, indeed had assisted in its initiation, but each in turn,
while haggling over the financial details of his reward, was overtaken by death.
After St Bartholomew feeling ran high in Scotland. Knox, in the last year of his vehement life, thundered at the French Ambassador: ‘Go tell your King that God’s vengeance shall never depart from him nor from his house, and that his name shall remain an execration to posterity.’ Many Scots blamed Mary for her French blood and more than ever would have been glad to see her disposed of; but Morton, succeeding to the regency in October 1572, though no more principled than his predecessors, was, in the words of a contemporary, ‘ too old a cat to draw such a straw as that after him’. He continued to negotiate with Killigrew but without any intention of concluding the sordid pact. If the English wanted to be rid of Mary, then let them bear the odium of the deed.
In 1580 Philip annexed Portugal. King Sebastian of Portugal, when only twenty-four, had been killed while fighting a religious crusade against the Moors, and he died without issue. Philip’s mother had been sister to King João III, Sebastian’s grandfather, and Philip’s first wife had been sister to the Crown Prince João, Sebastian’s father. The legitimacy of Philip’s claim to the throne was supported by thirty thousand of the best soldiers in Europe, and the ill-organized resistance was brief. Don Antonio, the natural son of João III’s brother, fled abroad; and in a stroke Philip had gained for himself a huge overseas empire second only to the Spanish, and an ocean-going fleet, a little run down but potentially as good as or better than his own. Additionally he had unified the Iberian Peninsula and had acquired in Lisbon and Oporto two fine ports on the Atlantic coast to match Cadiz.
As Elizabeth continued obdurately to hold out, to survive the secret infiltration of Jesuit priests, and to oppose him apologetically on all fronts, the idea of an actual open invasion of the island became more clearly the one ultimate sanction left. Pope Gregory had for some time been urging Philip to land in Ireland and build up a powerful force there before launching his attack on England. Don John of Austria, Philip’s half-brother, had proposed to the Pope that he personally should lead an invasion across the narrow seas from the Netherlands. But Philip was slow to move. It was his nature. Also he knew England and knew Elizabeth and perhaps still had a grudging respect for the tall, slim, auburn-haired girl of his memory who had somehow survived and, ever protesting friendship, had defied him so long.
There had in fact already been landings on the Irish coast. In 1579 Papal volunteers under Dr Nicholas Sanders had arrived there, together with Spanish and Italian volunteers. A serious insurrection had developed, but it had been put down by the English in the following year.
In the meantime in the Low Countries, the Duke of Alva, whose savage tyranny had provoked the civil war it was designed to prevent, had been supplanted, after an intermediate period under Requesens and Don John, by Alexander Farnese, the greatest soldier of his day.
Farnese, who became Duke of Parma on his father’s death in 1586, was the son of Ottavio Farnese and Margaret of Austria, the illegitimate daughter of the Emperor Charles. Philip II’s father was therefore Parma’s grandfather; and Farnese was eighteen years younger than Philip. Parma, a strategist and a tactician of the first order, was a man of great personal bravery, ruthless towards his enemies but tolerant and humane as an act of policy to those he conquered; and he very quickly perceived and took advantage of religious and political differences within the revolutionary states of the Netherlands and was able to split them. Where a swift and decisive use of his troops in battle was likely to achieve his end, no one was his equal in deploying and leading them. Where his charm or the offer of money or a title or an appeal to an old religious prejudice would do the work better, he used them.
For a time it seemed that this adroit combination of conquest, moderation and pacification would win the day, and that all, or nearly all, the revolting States would again come under the authority of Spain. Only the iron will and dedication and equally gifted diplomacy of one man appeared to prevent it. William Prince of Orange had begun life as a Lutheran and the son of Lutherans, but on the order of the Emperor Charles had been brought up a Catholic and had played his full part in the brilliant court life of Brussels. Until his mid-twenties he lived the easy-going extravagant life of a prince of the blood, and his splendid Nassau palace was the meeting place for gay and dissipated young noblemen like himself. In his youth William was a personal favourite of the Emperor, and at first was on terms of friendship with Philip too. But gradually as he perceived the tightness of the Spanish grip upon all aspects of life and administration and he witnessed the terrible persecution of the Protestants, his attitude changed and he found himself becoming an antagonist of Philip and of all Philip’s policies in the Netherlands. After the judicial murder of Egmont and Hoorn, he became the principal antagonist and indeed the one figure around whom the forces of revolt and independence could centre. So his life changed, he left his palaces and his lands and his rich living and became the head of a forlorn but dedicated group of men and states determined to throw off the Spanish tyranny. He lived in the harsh world of soldiering, with the simplicity of a peasant, sometimes in want, always in danger. In 1582 he narrowly survived a first attempt at assassination when a pistol was fired into his head so close that the powder set fire to his hair and beard. In the following year four more attempts were made, and in 1584 a sixth was successful when he was shot dead in a disused convent known as the Prinsenhof which he was then using as his home. The assassin, a young clerk called Gérard, was tortured to death, and therefore could not receive the twenty-five thousand crowns Philip had offered as a reward for this ‘ laudable and generous deed’; so instead Gérard’s parents were granted three seigniories in the Franche Comté and at once elevated to the landed aristocracy.
Well before William of Orange’s death, Parma’s brilliant combination of warfare and diplomacy had been regaining lost ground for Philip. One fortress after another had fallen and one town after another had been captured or gave way. Nowhere now was there sign of the ‘Spanish fury’. Troops entering a town behaved with discipline and restraint; fair terms were offered everywhere. Protestant worship was suppressed but Protestants were allowed to leave and given time to leave, and could take their goods with them. In many towns Catholics were in a large majority and had been themselves oppressed by fanatical Calvinists who had desecrated their churches and murdered their priests. So it was half a conquest, half a liberation.
Soon after William’s death Ghent fell, and then Brussels. Bruges had already gone, and one could see that Antwerp was doomed. The Protestant secessionists were falling back everywhere leaderless and in disarray. It looked like the end of the war. Philip thought so. The States General in despair approached Henry III of France, offering him the crown in return for his aid. But Henry, who not infrequently dressed as a woman, loved to play with little dogs, and wore his hair in ruffles, was embroiled in the first stages of a civil war in which two other and altogether more formidable Henrys fought across his kingdom: Guise to try to drive the last Protestants from France, Navarre to try to prevent him and to survive as the heir to the throne. So Henry of Valois refused the honour. The States General thereupon offered it to Elizabeth.
She too refused. But now she offered more aid than she had ever done before, and of a different kind. Hitherto it had been money, reluctantly squeezed out, volunteer regiments led by gentlemen adventurers and soldiers of fortune, a trickle of supplies and some naval help. Now, after long negotiation, she signed a treaty in September 1585, by which she undertook to send an army of six thousand men, a thousand of them mounted; and their commander was to be her first and oldest favourite and close adviser, Robert Earl of Leicester. At the same time she published and had distributed an apologia, a justification, an announcement of her reasons for this action, which, in its statement of ideals and the ideals worth striving for, has been likened to the American Declaration of Independence. It was printed in English, French, Italian and Dutch, and she saw that Parma received a cop
y.
It was not a declaration of war but it was as near as Elizabeth was ever prepared to get. It was a declaration of intent; and it must have helped Philip to concentrate his mind wonderfully on the final issues which separated him and his sister-in-law.
The ultimate issue was whether she could be allowed to continue to attack and damage the priceless convoys bringing their treasure from the New World, and at the same time to prop up with her own army the rebels in the Low Countries. One of these activities could have been tolerated. Not both.
So Philip no longer continued to toy with the idea of invasion, to listen to other people’s suggestions. He began to make his own plans.
The early historians of the Great Armada, because most of them were Protestant, depicted a tiny England, with its simple godly seamen fighting David-like against the great Goliath that Spain launched upon her. Only God, one felt, and the rightness of the Cause, and the splendid bravery and skill of the sailors enabled a few brilliantly handled but undersized warships to take on this great fleet and defeat it. The running battle up Channel, the fireships of Calais, the destructive in-fighting of Gravelines, and the great gales which followed, were all part of a divine pattern. Patriotism and religion triumphed together; great courage and simple faith walked hand in hand and the colossus was shattered.
Most later historians, suffering no doubt from the reaction from this medieval legend, have leaned in greater or less degree the other way, estimating that the fleets were roughly equal in size, with a great mobility and fire-power advantage to the English, depicting the Armada as a clumsy almost useless assembly of unseaworthy galleons, over-manned and under-gunned, herded together into a great unmanageable fleet and sent to keep an impossible rendezvous on the directions of an absolute monarch writing out his impractical orders from a cell in the Escorial.