The Spanish Armada

by Hutchinson, Robert

  Throckmorton was executed at Tyburn on 11 July 158483 and there was a general round-up of the usual suspects. Henry Percy, Eighth Earl of Northumberland (brother of the leader of the 1569 rebellion), was arrested but committed suicide in the Tower on 20 June 1585 by shooting himself with a pistol loaded with three bullets for good measure.

  There is little doubt that Elizabeth’s life was frequently endangered by Catholic fanatics. On 17 July 1579, William Appletree, a serving man at court, fired a gun during Elizabeth’s stately progress by barge up the Thames, hitting one of her watermen in both arms. ‘She saw him hurt; she saw him fall, yet shrank not at the same. Neither made she any fearful show to seem dismayed,’ according to a contemporary ballad. The queen dramatically exercised her prerogative of mercy at the last minute as Appletree stood on the ladder of the gallows.84

  Despite a rash of assassination conspiracies, Elizabeth developed an obstinate dislike of security precautions to protect her sacred person – much to Walsingham’s fury.

  In October 1583, some of the prisoners held in the Tower were interrogated about ‘certain speeches against the queen’s majesty supposed to have been spoken by John Somerfield’ when he protested against the treatment of Catholics. He announced that he intended to ‘shoot her through with his dagg [pistol] and hoped to see her head set on a pole [because] she was a serpent and viper’.85 He hanged himself with ‘his own garters’ in his cell in Newgate prison twenty-four hours before his execution; but one of Walsingham’s agents alleged he was killed ‘to avoid a greater evil’ by Catholic sympathisers.86

  Assassination fears were heightened by the murder on 10 July 1584 of the Dutch Protestant leader William of Orange in Delft in the Netherlands by Balthazar Gérard, a French Catholic. The result was the so-called Bond of Association, aimed at neutralising the threat of Mary Queen of Scots, as it decreed that anyone involved in Elizabeth’s death would be ineligible to succeed her as ruler. Those who ‘procured’ the queen’s assassination would also be executed, whether or not they were aware of the conspiracy to take the queen’s life.87 Furthermore, the Bond was to be signed by loyal subjects who pledged themselves to ‘act [with] the utmost revenge’ on any heirs to the pretender to the throne for ‘their utter overthrow and extirpation’. In essence, it was lynch law, but its impact was rather dissipated when Mary happily signed it herself on 5 January 1585, promising to be ‘an enemy to all those that attempt anything against Queen Elizabeth’s life’.88

  The Bond was enshrined in law in an Act for the Surety of the Queen’s Person, passed in March 1585, which created a commission of privy councillors and judges to hear evidence of the guilt of a claimant to the throne alleged to be complicit in any assassination plot or in plans for rebellion or foreign invasion. If guilty, they faced death.89 Far-sighted Burghley also tried to introduce a Parliamentary Bill to authorise the creation of an interregnum government led by a ‘Great Council’ in the event of Elizabeth’s murder. But the queen felt this impinged dangerously on her God-given right to rule, so she vetoed his proposals.90

  The same year, the deranged William Parry was executed for conspiring to kill the queen while she was riding in St James’. A special prayer of thanksgiving was written for Elizabeth’s safe deliverance which described Parry as a

  miserable, wretched, natural-born subject, a man of no religion [who] . . . determined very often most desperately to have with his own cursed hand destroyed her majesty’s sacred person.

  Fortunately, God had protected her and had ‘diverted [Parry’s] desperate heart and bloody hand’.91 Parry expected to be reprieved at the last minute, pledging on the scaffold:

  If I might be made Duke of Lancaster and have all the possessions belonging thereunto, yet I would never consent to shed the least drop of blood out of the tops of any of her [the Queen’s] fingers.

  The crowd were having none of his protestations of innocence. They chanted: ‘Away with him’, urging the executioner to get on with his bloody business.92

  Walsingham was determined to entrap Mary Queen of Scots, ‘that devilish woman’, as he called her, and finally destroy the threat she posed to England. Elizabeth ostensibly shared his opinions of her; in 1578 she told a French envoy who came to London to plead on Mary’s behalf, that her ‘head should have been cut off years ago’.93 Walsingham’s opportunity came when he intercepted and decoded letters to and from the Scottish Queen which discussed an invasion, her rescue and Elizabeth’s murder. Anthony Babington, the naïve twenty-five-year-old leader of the plot and his fourteen fellow conspirators were executed 20–21 September 1586.94

  For all her grave misgivings about taking the life of an anointed queen, Elizabeth was finally persuaded to sign a death warrant authorising the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 1 February 1587. She dropped broad hints that it would be far more convenient if Mary was assassinated, but her gaoler, Sir Amyas Paulet, was having no truck with such illegalities, despite his sovereign’s fury at his non-cooperation.95 Elizabeth’s Privy Council, fearful that she would change her mind and spare her cousin, hastened to execute her, sending down Bull, the Tower’s executioner, in disguise to Fotheringay Castle, Northamptonshire, where Mary was imprisoned. He agreed a price of £10 (or £1,880 at today’s prices) for the job and duly completed the grisly task on 8 February, holding aloft her severed head and crying out: ‘God save the queen!’

  Mary was wearing an auburn wig, and the head fell from his grasp and rolled across the scaffold, grey-haired and nearly bald, leaving a shocked Bull with only her dainty white cap and wig in his hand.96 Horribly, with the nerves in her dead face still twitching, her lips continued to move soundlessly as her blood soaked the straw and black cloth of the platform.

  She had enjoyed the very last word.

  – 2 –

  RUMOURS OF WAR

  I cannot but . . . advise Your Majesty to prepare every way for the worst . . . Set out a very strong navy to keep the seas forthwith . . . [and] provide, by your subjects, . . . to have a store of money which is the sinew to hold all by.

  Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to Elizabeth I;

  Flushing, 21 November 1587.1

  Francis Drake hated the Spanish with a burning, all-consuming passion, born out of a humiliating naval defeat, snatched dishonourably by his foes in the harbour of San Juan de Ulúa, off Veracruz in Mexico,2 in September 1568. He and his second cousin and fellow privateer John Hawkins had been illegally trading with Spanish settlers in the New World – exchanging slaves from Sierra Leone for commodities3 – when their flotilla put into the port for repairs. A thirteen-strong Spanish fleet arrived and after agreeing a gentlemanly truce of convenience, sailed into the harbour. Several days later, they attacked the English and, exploiting their advantage of surprise, destroyed four vessels. Hawkins and Drake ignominiously fled in the Minion and Judith respectively, arriving in Plymouth with only a handful of survivors. There was more than a hint of animosity in Hawkins’ later statement that ‘the barque Judith, the same night, orsook us in our misery’.4

  Drake swore to inflict a heavy revenge on the Spanish nation and embarked enthusiastically upon a lucrative career of preying on the treasure looted from their new empire across the Atlantic – producing a highly profitable return for his financial backers of £47 for every £1 they had invested.5 These fortunate speculators included Elizabeth herself, who showered honours upon him, including a knighthood. Philip of Spain was enraged, reportedly offering a bounty of 20,000 ducats (£15,000,000 at current prices) on Drake’s head, dead or alive.

  The Spanish king was, however, more preoccupied with building a powerful navy with which to defend his country’s burgeoning colonial interests around the globe, rather than with scratching away the irritant that Drake’s forays represented. In August 1580, Lisbon was captured and Portugal swiftly annexed. This not only provided an important new maritime base on the Iberian peninsula’s Atlantic coast, but the conquest of his neighbour also brought its well-equipped fleet to augment exi
sting Spanish sea power. As if to underline this tectonic shift in Europe’s strategic balance, almost two years later, his admiral, Álvaro de Bazán, First Marquis of Santa Cruz, defeated a largely French mercenary squadron supporting Dom Antonio, Prior of Crato and pretender to the Portuguese crown, at the Battle of Sâo Miguel off the Azores.

  On the diplomatic front, Philip sought to further isolate Elizabeth’s realm, with France the first target of his behind-the-scenes plotting. At the end of December 1584, the Spanish king had secretly signed the Treaty of Joinville between Spain and Henri, Third Duke of Guise (cousin of Mary Queen of Scots) and the French ‘Catholic League’, promising support for the Catholic cause in France.

  It was not only Drake’s predatory raids on the gold and silver extracted from the New World that incensed Philip; Elizabeth was now also overtly assisting the Protestant rebels in his possessions in the Low Countries, believing it was better to fight the Spanish on someone else’s territory rather than on English soil. Her frontline against Spain would therefore be drawn in the Spanish Netherlands. In August 1585, the queen had signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Nonsuch, which committed her to assist the rebel Dutch provinces. As well as providing a generous annual subsidy of 600,000 florins (£181,000,000 in current spending power), she later sent a seven-thousand-strong English army to the Low Countries under her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Its operational costs were to be paid by the Dutch. Unfortunately they turned out to be less-than-prompt payers. Moreover, corruption and rampant fraud ensured that her soldiers remained unpaid and sometimes starving. No wonder she exclaimed petulantly that her Dutch war was ‘a sieve, that spends as it receives, to little purpose’.6

  Drake’s brief occupation of ports in Galicia in north-west Spain the following October (when he gleefully sacked local churches) and his later raids on the Canary and Cape Verde Islands and efficient burning and pillaging of Spanish towns in the Caribbean, sealed Philip’s determination to invade England.7

  Never one to be dragooned into unconsidered action, he mulled over the problem carefully for nearly two months. That December, he invited his nephew Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the successful general who had defeated the Dutch in Brabant and Flanders, to draw up plans for an expeditionary force to cross the narrow seas to invade England.

  Santa Cruz, his confidence buoyed by naval victories in the Azores, meanwhile boasted that he could easily defeat England at sea, if only Philip chose to give the order. He offered to ‘serve your majesty in the enterprise in the firm hope that . . . I will emerge just as victorious from it as in the other things I have done for you’.8 It was probably to the admiral’s subsequent dismay that the king readily took him at his word. In January 1586 he was ordered to produce estimates of the extent of forces necessary to successfully invade England and finally eradicate this Protestant bulwark that had become so troublesome to Spain’s interests and ambitions.

  Philip knew that to defeat England meant he had to destroy its navy to enable him to control the sea. Thirty years before, when he had been such an unenthusiastic husband to Elizabeth’s half-sister, he had noted: ‘The kingdom of England is and must always remain strong at sea, since upon this the safety of the realm depends.’9 He was now destined to test the veracity of his maxim.

  The Spanish king was no warmonger, however. The exiled English priest Robert Persons acknowledged that Philip ‘fears war as a burned child dreads the fire’.10 But that fear emanated from more prosaic issues rather than simple scruples over the shedding of Christian blood. Philip, always debt-ridden, was more worried about the costs involved and the economic consequences of war.

  His very worst misgivings were realised when Santa Cruz submitted his ambitious estimates on 12 March 1586, asking for one hundred and fifty-six ships plus 55,000 troops to land in England, supported by four hundred auxiliary vessels. Like any modern military planner he had built in extra contingencies in case his requirements for the invasion force were cut back, but he had carefully worked out that such a military operation would cost an eye-watering four million ducats (about £3 billion at today’s prices). Philip probably gasped in pain when he saw the row of noughts on the paper before him, rather than from the agonising gout that frequently afflicted him.

  Parma, in his twenty-eight-page plan delivered that June, envisaged a thirty-thousand-strong force plus five hundred cavalry transported in flat-bottomed barges launching a surprise attack on the Kent coast between Dover and Margate, before assaulting London, 67 miles (107 km) inland. The crossing, the general declared confidently, would probably take around ten or twelve hours – or less, with a following wind. Naval protection was only necessary if Elizabeth’s government had learned of the invasion plans beforehand, but either way, Spanish ships could lure the English fleet away from the Straits of Dover. Sceptical that surprise could be achieved, Philip scrawled ‘Hardly possible!’ alongside this requirement in Parma’s plan.

  Other strategies were submitted to the Escorial Palace. Bernardino de Escalante, who was a member of the entourage accompanying Philip to England for his marriage to Mary I in 1554, had fought as a soldier in the Netherlands in 1555–8 before becoming a priest two decades later. In June 1586, he drew up a campaign map, urging a diversionary attack on Waterford in southern Ireland by thirty-two thousand men to decoy Elizabeth’s fleet from the English Channel, so allowing a landing in Kent by Spanish troops from Flanders. The invaders could then mount a swift and decisive seizure of London, which was only defended by the ‘E Greet Tuura’, the great Tower of London.11 The ill-trained English militias would in any case melt away before the onslaught of Parma’s battle-hardened veterans.

  One of Philip’s advisers, Don Juan de Zúñiga, charged with coordinating the now weighty range of invasion plans, was impressed by the priest’s strategy, appending only the sensible requirement for reinforcements and supplies to be delivered as soon as the queen’s navy had been neutralised. This ‘Enterprise of England’, he suggested, should be launched in August or September 1587.

  However, some disquieting uncertainties remained about the consequences of a successful landing. Once London had been captured, Zúñiga urged that Parma should set up an interim government, pending the coronation of a new Catholic monarch – why not Mary Queen of Scots? – who should then marry a reliable and steadfast Catholic prince, perhaps even Parma himself. If stout English resistance prevented the subjugation of the entire nation, important concessions could be wrung from the rump Tudor state: freedom of worship for English Catholics; the surrender of English garrisons in the Low Countries (plus repatriation of English forces), and Spanish troops to continue to occupy the conquered regions until payment of hefty war reparations to Madrid.12

  While the precise strategy was being worked out, early military preparations were put in hand.

  Intelligence reaching Walsingham in London had dried up following Philip’s seizure of English and Dutch ships in Spanish ports in retaliation for Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch rebels. The earliest intimation of the Armada threat came via a north German ship that docked in Plymouth from Lisbon in the first week of January 1585. Her master suggested that ‘the King of Spain had taken up all the masts for shipping, both great and small, so there is likely [to be] war[s]’.13 A message to the Privy Council from the English merchant William Melsam on 4 February 1586 reported gossip that ‘immense quantities of grain, wine and military stores’ were being collected by Philip, who was also increasing the size of his fleet and mobilising ‘land forces from various parts’. Melsam added:

  They [are] saying . . . that the Pope does send fifty-thousand men out of his diocese which shall come with twelve galleasses and other shipping.

  More, the King of Spain prepares [an]other fifty-thousand men [for] which he has taken up many soldiers in the country, as the poor people say . . .

  They do mean to land in the Isle of Wight fifty-thousand men, [another] fifty-thousand men into Ireland, fifty-thousand men also in the backside o
f Scotland . . . For one of these three armies, the Pope has ordained that the King of France or Duke of Guise should make ready.

  Moreover, they say that the king [Philip] has more friends in

  England than the Queen’s majesty which is a grievous hearing.

  God preserve her grace and send her long to reign and to confound her enemies.14

  In April, a Bristol merchant was told that a ‘great fleet’ was being prepared at Lisbon and the Amsterdam trader William Peterson reported ‘great naval preparations’ – but difficulty in manning their navy.15

  All these straws in the wind were discounted in London, as the government was preoccupied by purely domestic issues such as its campaign against recusants, hunting fugitive seminary priests and the dire consequences of a failed harvest. In Gloucestershire, a mob of ‘common people’ looted a ship with a cargo of malt intended for Wales and local magistrates reported that ‘the people declare they are driven to the last extremity by famine and [are] forced to feed their children with cats, dogs and roots of nettles’. Other violent disturbances were reported elsewhere.16

  Leicester confidently told Burghley in January 1586 that the rumours of Philip’s war preparations were ‘made the greater to terrify her majesty’ and the Dutch rebels. ‘But thanks be to God, her majesty has little cause to fear him.’ In the Low Countries ‘they esteem no more of his power by sea than I do of six fishermen’s boats of Rye’.17 Walsingham, also unconvinced of the immediacy of the military threat, dismissed stories of naval movements and warlike preparations as mere ‘Spanish brag’. He wrote to Leicester on 24 March predicting that the danger of invasion ‘will prove nothing this year and I hope less the next’.18 Walsingham feared that such alarmist reports could distract Elizabeth from fully prosecuting the war against the Spanish in the Low Countries: ‘I would to God’, he confided to Leicester, that ‘her majesty would put on a good countenance for only four months and I doubt not but Spain would seek peace greatly to her majesty’s honour and advantage’.19