The Spanish Armada

by Hutchinson, Robert

  But as the days passed, nagging doubts began to gnaw at his mind and prudently he despatched one of his agents, Antony Poyntz,20 to Spain to collect more reliable information. In July, he drew up a list of Englishmen who would support ‘any foreign power [which] should come to invade this realm’. Ominously, his catalogue of treason contained the names of six peers, seven knights, forty-two esquires and gentlemen, aside from yeomen, farmers and ‘priests at liberty’.21

  Fresh in Walsingham’s mind was the arraignment, two months before, of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, on charges that he tried to flee England without royal permission; that he had been secretly converted to Rome and was conspiring to be restored as Fifth Duke of Norfolk. He was fined £10,000 and imprisoned in the Tower of London ‘during the Queen’s pleasure’. The spymaster did not know that according to Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, the earl had undertaken ‘with the assistance of a few men to make himself master of the Tower’ whilst ‘Lord Harry Howard’, his uncle, would raise troops and would be joined by the earl’s half-brother Thomas. The latter was not a Catholic, but sought to avenge the death of his father, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk. All this was claimed to be part of a wider conspiracy in England and Ireland against Elizabeth but, like many of Mendoza’s Machiavellian pipedreams, came to nothing.

  The King of Spain meanwhile had finalised his strategy for invasion. Copies of the final shape of his naval and military expeditionary force were sent to Brussels and Lisbon on 26 July 1586. A naval armada, with land artillery embarked, would sail from Lisbon in the summer of 1587 to seize and hold a beachhead in southern Ireland with the objective of luring Elizabeth’s navy into battle in Irish waters. After two months, the Spanish naval element would sail into the English Channel and patrol the Dover Straits to protect a fleet of small ships collected secretly in Flanders to carry Parma’s thirty-thousand men to their landing beaches near Margate in Kent. The troops would then march triumphantly on London to capture the queen and her government of heretics. It was a compromise, and like all such compromises suffered from troubling weaknesses. Timing was everything and the plan depended totally on achieving complete success in all its phases. There was no account taken of the impact of the weather, the problems of re-supply, or the potential loss of surprise.

  Although this invasion plan was only the first version of Philip’s ‘Enterprise of England’, orders were drafted immediately to raise the necessary troops and buy the ordnance, ammunition and victuals.22

  Then Elizabeth’s Privy Council unwittingly removed a major drawback to the Spanish plans – by beheading Mary Queen of Scots.

  In Madrid, Philip II was stunned by the execution. But with the Francophile candidate for Elizabeth’s crown now safely dead, at least a successful invasion would not disastrously unite France and England, which was possible if Mary Stuart had been installed by her Spanish allies. That alarming outcome conveniently averted by her blood being split so copiously at Fotheringay, the shrewd king felt free to pursue his own political ambitions in Spain’s interests. In February 1587, he wrote to his ambassador in Rome, Enrique de Guzmán, Count de Olivares, instructing him to secretly brief the new Pope, Sixtus V, on his own tenuous claim to the English throne:

  Failing the Queen of Scotland, the right to the English crown falls to me.

  My claim rests upon my descent from the House of Lancaster and upon the will made by the Queen of Scotland and mentioned in a letter from her, of which [a] copy is enclosed . . .

  You will impress upon his Holiness that I cannot undertake a war in England for the purpose merely of placing upon the throne a young heretic like the King of Scotland, who . . . is by his heresy incapacitated to succeed.

  His Holiness must be assured that I have no intention of adding England to my dominions but to settle the crown upon my daughter, the Infanta.23

  Appearances had to be maintained. Another letter to Rome spoke of his grief at the Scottish queen’s death ‘since she would have been the most suitable instrument for leading those countries [England and Scotland] back to the Catholic faith. But since God in His wisdom has ordained otherwise, He will raise up other instruments for the triumph of His cause.’24 The Spanish Armada, for example.

  Mendoza, oozing sycophancy, was not only hopelessly optimistic but unaware of the new policy on who would succeed Elizabeth after she was deposed. ‘It would seem to be God’s obvious design to bestow upon your majesty the crowns of these two kingdoms,’ he unctuously told the king.

  But one nightmare remained ever-present, haunting Philip’s every waking hour: the lack of money. The cost of the Armada preparations was a huge drain on his already mortgaged exchequer and he was forced to rein back government expenditure in many areas. The king had already turned down pressing requests to strengthen the defences of Spanish towns and bases in the Caribbean, writing:

  As you can imagine, no one resents the damage [done by Drake] more than I do and no one desires more to repair it, if only there was a way to execute it as we wish.

  But your plans create a lot of problems and the biggest one is the lack of money with which to pay for it all.

  His puppet Portuguese administration had also postponed an assault on the sultanate of Atjeh in Sumatra and its plans to build a fortress at Mombasa in modern-day Kenya, because of the financial drain caused by the Armada.25

  Walsingham in London was fully aware of Spain’s fiscal woes26 and reasoned that economic warfare might delay or cripple the projected invasion. He suggested, via the London financiers, that the great banking houses of northern Italy, like the Crosinis, and the gold exchanges of Genoa and Florence, should refuse to extend any credit to the King of Spain, thereby starving the Armada of necessary funds. Thomas Sutton, the merchant, banker and founder of the Charterhouse almshouses in London, may have been one of his agents in persuading his Italian counterparts to turn down or at least prevaricate over Philip’s increasingly imperative requests for loans.27

  Thus stymied, the Spanish king reluctantly and regretfully had to turn to the Vatican for financial assistance in 1587. Not only was he suffering the mortification of having to go cap in hand to the Pope, but he was simultaneously seeking another indulgence: the award of a cardinal’s hat to the English exiled priest William Allen to provide a Catholic figurehead for the faithful in England.

  Count de Olivares, Philip’s ambassador in Rome, was far from sanguine at the prospect of Sixtus making a generous contribution to the Spanish war chest: ‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ he reported despondently to his royal master.28

  Sixtus had succeeded his political enemy Gregory XIII in April 1585 and had quickly restored the straitened papal finances by levying harsh new taxes and selling off appointments to the highest bidder. He was notoriously proud of his gigantic hoard of gold and silver, held securely in the papal fortress of Castel di Sant’Angelo on the River Tiber, and was reluctant to part with a single coin unless it was spent on defending the Holy See or in a crusade against the infidel Turks. Olivares sneered that he cared more for ducats than devotion. Despite his miserliness, Sixtus spent huge sums on public works, including draining 9,500 acres (38 km2) of Rome’s Pontine Marshes, piping fresh water to parts of the city and completing the dome of St Peter’s. The new Pope was impulsive, irascible, obstinate and autocratic. He also held a jaundiced view of Philip and thoroughly mistrusted him, while unfortunately expressing an almost unbridled admiration for Elizabeth I. In this view, he was at odds with Allen, who predicted grimly that March that the Armada would ‘chastise our heretics and that woman hated by God and man’.29

  In March 1587, Olivares reported on his discussions on the loan and Allen’s hat with Cardinal Antonio Carrafa, the papal secretary of state, who agreed to put the requests to the pontiff: ‘The next day, being Holy Wednesday, he postponed it as he thought it would not be a good time to find the Pope in a favourable temper. He therefore decided to go again on Holy Saturday when the Hallelujah
was sung.’30 Its soaring notes did not help the Spanish requests; Sixtus merely prevaricated. In June, Olivares reported some startling shenanigans in the Vatican: ‘His Holiness was in a great rage at table, railing at those who served him and throwing the crockery about furiously, which he is rather in the habit of doing but not often so violently as this.’31

  The Pope nurtured doubts about the validity of Philip’s claim to the throne of England and his true motives in sending the Armada. His suspicions probably focused on Mary Queen of Scots’ supposed eleventh-hour will in which she named the Spanish king as her heir to the English crown. A Spanish memorandum submitted to Sixtus in June maintained that, although the new will ‘had been concealed by the Queen of England’, Philip possessed an autographed letter from Mary to Mendoza, dated 20 May 1586, in which she declared her intentions about the succession ‘in case her son should not be converted to Catholicism at the time of her death’. The document emphasised that Philip’s claim was more valid ‘than that of any other claimant who could arise’ and anyway, he would enjoy ‘the right of conquest in a war whose justice is evident, even if the queen were not a heretic which of itself would justify it’.

  Then, just in one brief paragraph, comes a fleeting glimpse of Philip’s hidden agenda: ‘The possession of these dominions is of the most vital importance for the maintenance of the States of Flanders in union with the crown of Spain and also for the preservation of the Spanish Indies.’ It ends piously:

  His majesty prays His Holiness to consider the question . . . as his opinion, dictated by prudence and aided by the Holy Spirit, will have great weight with the king, who desires to hold or dispose of that realm [England] for the service of the Apostolic See and the Catholic faith with the blessing and approval of His Holiness.32

  An unexpected and unlikely complication to Philip’s plans for the crown of England arose that June with the appearance in Madrid of a twenty-seven-year-old Catholic youth named Arthur Dudley, who claimed sensationally to be the illegitimate child of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was interrogated by another exile, Sir Francis Englefield, now the king’s English secretary, and the story superficially rang true, or at least was carefully constructed. Dudley recounted how he was brought up by Robert Southern, a servant of the queen’s old governess Catherine (‘Kat’) Ashley, after he was asked by a lady of Elizabeth’s court to obtain a nurse for a ‘new-born child of a lady who had been so careless of her honour that if it became known, it would bring great shame upon all the company and would highly displease the Queen if she knew of it’.

  Dudley was well cared for and expensively educated, and Southern, on his death-bed, ‘told him secretly that he was the son of the Earl of Leicester and the queen . . . Arthur begged him to give him the confession in writing but he could not write as his hand was paralysed.’ The youth later met Leicester, ‘whereby his tears, words and other demonstrations, he showed so much affection for Arthur that the latter believed he understood the earl’s deep intentions towards him’. According to Dudley, Leicester had warned him: ‘You are like a ship under full sail at sea, pretty to look upon but dangerous to deal with.’ After many adventures the young man was shipwrecked on the Biscayan coast, apprehended by the Spanish and taken to Madrid.

  Englefield was suspicious, advising Philip that the youth’s revelations ‘may originate in the Queen of England and her Council and possibly with an object that Arthur himself does not yet understand . . . They may be making use of him for their iniquitous ends.’ He urged that Arthur

  should not be allowed to get away but should be kept very secure to prevent his escape. It is true that at present his claim amounts to nothing but with the example of Dom Antonio [the pretender to the Portuguese throne] before us, it cannot be doubted that France and the English heretics . . . might turn to their own advantage or at least make it a pretext for obstructing the reformation of religion in England (for I look upon him as a very feigned Catholic) and the inheritance of the crown by its legitimate master.

  The king noted in the margin: ‘It would be certainly safest to make sure of his [Dudley’s] person until we know more about it.’33 The youth was therefore confined in a monastery near Madrid and his subsequent fate is unknown.34

  There was a further source of friction with the Vatican caused by Philip’s decision to unilaterally nominate Spaniards as new Catholic archbishops and bishops once England had been subjugated. This was an intolerable infringement of papal powers and Sixtus wrote to the Spanish king – addressing him as ‘Dear Son in Christ’ – to object:

  On undertaking this enterprise [the Armada] I exhort your majesty first to reconcile yourself with God the Father, for the sins of princes destroy peoples and no sin is so heinous in the eyes of the Lord as the usurpation of the divine jurisdiction, as is proved by history, sacred and profane.

  Your majesty has been advised to embrace in your edict, bishops, archbishops and cardinals and this is a grievous sin.

  Erase from the edict, these ministers of God and repent – or otherwise a great scourge may fall upon you . . .

  I have shed many tears over this great sin of yours and I trust you will amend it and that God may pardon you.35

  The ecclesiastical spoils from a Spanish victory over England caused other problems in Rome that year. Olivares complained to the king that the English priest Robert Parsons was ‘worrying me to death to get the Pope to make him Archbishop of Canterbury . . . He greatly exalts the dignity of the office and urges the desirability of the [cardinal’s] hat going with it. I have not countenanced this as it would divert the Pope from the matter of the cardinalate [for Allen].’36

  Eventually Sixtus promised Philip 1,000,000 gold ducats (£662,000,000 in 2013 spending power) but cannily stipulated that the first half was only to be paid when Spanish forces actually set foot in England with the remainder in equal instalments every two months thereafter. On 29 July 1587, the sum was transferred to two Roman bankers with strict instructions that it was only to be paid once a public notary had verified that the invasion of England had taken place.37 Olivares reported: ‘Until the men are landed it will be impossible to get anything out of His Holiness . . . Everybody believes that the real object is to make peace and nothing will shake the Pope’s belief in this respect. The small trust that can be placed in him may be judged by the little trust he places in us.’38 In return, Philip could bestow the crown of England on whomever he wished, providing that the new monarch pledged that the defeated realm would be immediately returned to the Catholic faith. The Church’s properties and rights, alienated since the time of Henry VIII, were also to be restored.39 Allen was finally made a cardinal on 7 August.

  With no advance on the papal subsidy forthcoming, Philip was still confronted by problems in paying for the Armada preparations. These were partially solved that September when the Spanish plate fleet, escorted by Santa Cruz’s warships, arrived safely from the West Indies with 16,000,000 gold ducats on board, of which 25 per cent went straight into the king’s depleted exchequer.

  Olivares, whose patience in dealing with Sixtus approached saintlike proportions, was also worried that the Vatican’s institutional passion for gossip could compromise the Spanish invasion plans: ‘I tremble at the Pope’s lack of secrecy,’ he confided to Philip. One probably apocryphal story, first written eighty years after Walsingham’s death, tells how the spymaster learned of a letter from Philip to Sixtus, written in his own hand, briefing him on the Armada strategy. English agents in Rome were alerted and they bribed, threatened or somehow induced one of the gentlemen of the pontiff’s bedchamber to copy the Spanish king’s letter, safely locked up in the Pope’s writing desk. This was achieved by stealing Sixtus’s keys out of his robes while he slept.40

  Certainly, confirmation of the extent of the ‘Enterprise of England’ did come from Rome immediately after the college of cardinals were told of Philip’s plans in case the sixty-seven-year-old Pope suddenly died.41 Moreover, a correspondent from th
e same city told Burghley that the Spanish plan was to capture Elizabeth alive and send her as a prisoner to the Vatican:

  He heard the cardinal say that the King of Spain gave great charge . . . to all the captains that in no way they should harm the person of the queen.

  Upon taking her, use the same with reverence, looking well to the custody of her.

  And further . . . take order for the conveyance of her person to Rome, to the purpose that His Holiness the Pope should dispose thereof in sort, as it should please him.42

  In February and March 1587, fresh intelligence reached Walsingham about the extent of the Armada preparations. The first report came from Hans Frederick, a merchant from Danzig, who counted three hundred ‘sail of shipping stayed in south Spain’. At Lisbon ‘they have taken up all the victuals in every ship that comes out of Holland or the [Baltic nations], both bacon and beef, butter and cheese and whatsoever else. They encourage all strangers, affirming that the Catholics will yield up [England] unto the king without bloodshed.’43 The second was submitted by a Portuguese citizen in Nantes in France, who had a kinsman involved in provisioning the Spanish fleet. The report spoke of four hundred ships and fifty galleys docked in and around Lisbon, with seventy-four thousand soldiers being recruited or mustered in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Flanders. The provisions already accumulated included 184,557 quintals of biscuit, 23,000 quintals of bacon, 23,000 butts of wine, 11,000 quintals of beef and 43,000 quintals of hard cheese.44