The next day, fifty-five-year-old Leicester, who had been suffering poor health, departed for the restorative spa at Buxton in Derbyshire, making the journey in easy stages, stopping first at Rycote, near Reading. There he wrote to Elizabeth asking after her health and ‘what ease of her late pains she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good health and a long life’. The queen had given him some medicine, which he found ‘amend much better than any other thing that has been given to me’. Leicester ended: ‘With the continuance of my wonted prayer for our majesty’s preservation, I humbly kiss your foot’ and added the postscript: ‘I received your majesty’s token from young Tracey’ (a messenger).64
He stopped again at a ‘gentleman’s house’ at Cornbury, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Messia reported that he ‘supped heavily and being troubled with a distress in the stomach during the night, he forced himself to vomit’. Leicester then went down with malaria and died at ten o’clock on the morning of 4 September,65 leaving debts of ‘£20,000 more than his goods and chattels are worth’ and still owing £3,169 to the crown for exceeding his allowance as lieutenant general of English forces in the Netherlands.66
Elizabeth was grief-stricken at the loss of her long-time favourite (whom she nicknamed ‘Eyes’), shutting herself up in her chamber for some days to mourn alone ‘until the treasurer and other councillors had the doors broken open and entered to see her’.67 Until the end of her life she kept his note from Rycote in the personal treasure box by her bed, inscribing upon it the words: ‘HIS LAST LETTER’. Her anguish was only momentarily lifted by news of the Armada wrecks in Ireland, which she received ‘with tears of joy in her eyes, as if it were the final liberation from this [Spanish] attack’.68
Another service of thanksgiving was held at St Paul’s on 8 September, when the captured Spanish battle standards were proudly displayed, including one pennant ‘wherein was an image of Our Lady, with her son in her arms which was held in a man’s hand over the pulpit’. The following day, the banners were hung in Cheapside and at the Southwark end of London Bridge.69 The Privy Council wrote to the bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln, passing on Elizabeth’s desire that ‘certain sermons should be made of thanksgiving to God for the late victory it has pleased Him to give her . . . against the forces of the Spanish king’.70 A specially written prayer thanked God for ‘turning our enemies from us and that dreadful execution which they intended towards us, into a fatherly and most merciful admonition of us . . . and to execute justice upon our cruel enemies, turning the destruction that they intended against us upon their own heads’. It pledged perpetual memory in England for ‘thy merciful protection and deliverance of us from the malice, force, fraud and cruelty of our enemies’.71
Elsewhere there was similar jubilation at the defeat of the Armada. The parishioners of the church of St Faith’s at Gaywood, near King’s Lynn, Norfolk, patriotically commissioned an oil painting on a diptych panel for the wall of the south aisle showing Elizabeth arriving at Tilbury and the Spanish fleet in flames. Its inscription proclaimed: ‘Blessed by the great God of my salvation’.
Others celebrated more noisily and exuberantly: churchwardens’ accounts detail expenditure for bell-ringing or firing guns on 19 November, appointed as the national day of thanksgiving for deliverance from the Spanish. At All Saints church, Hastings, in the former front-line county of Sussex, 2s 2d was paid out for ‘meat and drink at the ringing day for the Spaniards’72 and at Lewes two barrels of gunpowder were expended ‘by the whole consent of the fellowship in shooting of the great pieces in the castle at the rejoicing day for the overthrow of the Spanish navy’.73 An allegorical play about the defeat of the Armada, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, cast the villainous Spaniards as Pride, Shame, Ambition, Treachery, Tyranny and Terror, and ended with their being routed by a bunch of English schoolboys.74
Pamphleteers had a field day, prompting Burghley to comment: ‘Friends and enemies on either side, according to their own humours, do feed the world with diversity of reports agreeable to their own affections and passions . . . yet there is only one truth whereby the reports ought to be ruled and reformed.’75 This is a passable definition of propaganda, which was a talent in which Tudor governments throughout the sixteenth century excelled.
The author of a pamphlet with the rather prolix title A Skeltonical Salutation or condigne gratulation and just vexation of the Spanish Nation devoted ten pages of doggerel verse in blackletter type to such matters as whether the fish that ate the flesh of drowned Spaniards would become infected by their venereal diseases, inquiring whether this year
it were not best to forebear
On such fish to feed
Which our coast doth breed
Because they are fed
With carcase dead
Here and there in the rocks
That were full of the pox . . .
[As] our Cods and Conger
Have filled their hunger
With the heads and feet
Of the Spanish fleet
Which to them were as sweet
As a goose to a fox
And seeing the pox
Possessed each carcase
From the slave to the marquis
No man can avoid
But he may be annoyed.
But god-fearing fish-eating Englishmen need not fear, for all would be well if the fish were ‘well dressed’ . . .
And your stomachs not oppressed
You need them not detest
Howsoever they are fed
Or where so ever they are bred
Be no more afraid
Of sea fish to feed
If them thou love or need.76
The polemicist Thomas Deloney, whom we met at Tilbury, penned a trenchant ballad celebrating the capture of Pedro de Valdés’ ship Nuestra Señora del Rosario, sung to the French tune Almain. Its title, A Joyful new Ballad, is something of a misnomer, as it makes grim reading. The loss of Moncada’s flagship San Lorenzo at Calais saw many Spanish drown: ‘There might you see / the salt and foaming flood / Dyed and stained like scarlet red / with store of Spanish blood.’ Working himself up into a patriotic fervour, Deloney’s next verses leave no stone unturned to describe Spanish perfidy:
They do intend by deadly war,
to make both poor and bare,
Our towns and cities,
to rack and sack likewise
To kill and murder man and wife
As malice doth arise
And to deflower
our virgins in our sight;
And in the cradle cruelly
the tender babe to smite
GOD’S HOLY TRUTH
they mean to cast down
And to deprive our noble Queen
Both of her life and crown.
Our wealth and riches,
which we enjoyed long;
They do appoint their prey and spoil
by cruelty and wrong
To set our houses
a fire on our heads
And cursedly to cut our throats
As we lie in our beds
Our children’s brains
to dash against the ground
And from the earth our memory
for ever to confound.
Then he raised the horrid spectre of the Armada’s consignment of those infamous Spanish scourges:
One sort of whips they had for men,
so smarting, fierce and fell
As like could never be devised
by any devil in hell:
The strings whereof with wiry knots,
like rowels77 they did frame.
That every stroke might tear the flesh,
they laid on with the same.
Women were not to be spared:
And for our silly women,
their hearts with grief to clog;
They made such whips, wherewith no man
would seem to strike a dog.
So strengt
hened with brazen tags
and filed so rough and thin
That they would force at every lash,
the blood abroad to spin.78
A long tract, written at Burghley’s behest, was more measured but the message was just as powerful. The Copy of a Letter to Don Bernardin[o] Mendoza was said to have been found ‘in the chamber of one Richard Leigh,79 a seminary priest who was lately executed for high treason’, whose identity was conveniently stolen for propaganda purposes. The pamphlet claimed that after the defeat of the army, many English Catholics were appalled by this forcible attempt to return England to Rome’s authority:
I do find that many good and wise men, which of long time have secretly continued in most earnest devotion to the Pope’s authority, begin now to stagger in their minds . . . and to conceive that this way of Reformation intended by the Pope’s Holiness is not allowable in the sight of God . . . to put [the temporal sword] into a monarch’s hand to invade this realm with force and arms, yes, to destroy the queen . . . and all her people addicted to her, which are in very truth now seen, by great proof this year, to be in a sort infinite and invincible so as some begin to say that this purpose by violence, by blood, by slaughter, by conquest, agrees not with Christ’s doctrine.
The truths of English naval supremacy or the omnipotence of the Protestant God were undeniable. ‘The Spaniards did never take or sink any English ship or boat or break any mast or took any one man prisoner’, which amazed the Spanish prisoners in London who exclaimed that ‘in all these fights, Christ showed himself a Lutheran’.
Medina Sidonia attracted special vilification: he spent much of his time ‘lodged in the bottom of his ship for his safety’. The propaganda tract concluded with this scornful and contemptuous phrase: ‘So ends this account of the misfortunes of the Spanish Armada which they used to call INVINCIBLE .’80
But the most lasting propaganda image of the Armada’s misfortunes is a giant picture painted with oils on a wooden panel now at Woburn Abbey. The ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth, measuring 52.4 by 41.3 inches (133 by 105 cm) shows her in a gown covered with suns, with a large pearl, symbolising chastity, suspended from her bodice. Her right hand rests upon a globe with her fingers pointing to the New World; her left elbow is alongside an imperial crown on a table. In the background, English fireships threaten the Spanish fleet on the left, and on the opposite side enemy ships are being driven ashore by God’s Own Breath. The figure of a mermaid is carved on the arm of her chair, representing the power of feminine wiles luring unwary sailors to their death.81
Elizabeth finally celebrated her victory over Spain at another service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s on Sunday 24 November. She was drawn from Somerset House in the Strand in a chariot with a canopy topped by a crown with two pillars in front bearing the figures of a lion and dragon, supporters of the heraldic arms of England at that time.82
The campaign to defend her realm had cost her exchequer around£167,000 (£463,000,000 in 2013 spending power). Of this only £180 had been spent on government ‘rewards to the injured’.
The queen was closely guarded. Not only were there continuing fears that she may be endangered by an assassin’s attack, there was also concern that the large number of discharged and disgruntled soldiers and sailors in London might attempt some kind of angry protest.83 They had good reason for discontent. Not only were they unpaid, but more than half of those who had fought the Armada were now dead from disease and starvation.
Many did not know it, but these surviving veterans were soon to face their old enemy once again in combat.
But this time the fighting would be on Spanish soil.
– 11 –
THE ENGLISH ARMADA
In our march towards Lisbon, the King and the Prince of Portugal . . . looked for the nobility and chief of the country to come . . . But none came, save only . . . poor peasants without stockings or shoes and one gentlewoman who presented the king with a basket of cherries.
William Fenner to Anthony Bacon, Plymouth, 1589.1
After the Armada’s humiliating retreat, Queen Elizabeth was haunted by two worrying and pressing issues. Firstly, the Spanish fleet was far from vanquished. Her spies suggested it could return to threaten England’s shores once again, with Parma’s undefeated veterans in Flanders still available as a formidable invading army. Next time, assuming the Spanish high command could learn from their disastrous mistakes, the land and naval forces might link up successfully. Secondly, Elizabeth’s exchequer was uncommonly and uncomfortably bare. Her continuing paucity of cash threatened to jeopardise not only the defence of her realm but also her continued payments to the Dutch for the war against the Spanish in the Netherlands and to Spain’s enemies in France. Lord Treasurer Burghley had been driven to distraction to find the money to confront the Armada and was forced to borrow at exorbitant, if not punitive, interest rates, including arranging a £30,000 loan from the City of London in July 1588. There was a real danger that the sweet savour of victory could soon be transformed into the sour taste of defeat in all the queen had striven for at home and overseas.
The queen’s regular annual income amounted to £250,000 and Parliamentary subsidies had brought in £215,000 in 1585–8. Additional contingency funding totalling £245,000 had been drawn from the exchequer’s £300,000 reserves – her ‘chested treasure’ – accumulated through Burghley’s far-sighted management of her budget over the previous decade. This money had disappeared at an alarming rate. Elizabeth’s financial support to the Dutch rebels had totalled more than £400,000 over the last three years, despite cynical attempts to economise by only part-paying her seven thousand troops based in the Low Countries. After deducting the £167,000 cost of defence against the Spanish threat, by early October 1588 there was just £55,000 left in the exchequer. Even at peacetime rates of spending, this would barely last eight months.2
It would take time to collect any new income voted to her by Parliament and her ministers were increasingly worried by mounting popular resistance to new taxation. Burghley had warned Walsingham in July of ‘a general murmur of the people and malcontented people will increase . . . the comfort of the enemy’.3 Notwithstanding these fears, the counties were instructed to impose an enforced loan on the gentry totalling about £50,000 in December, and in February 1589 the merchant adventurer William Milward was sent to Germany to arrange a huge credit of £100,000. He was ordered to disguise the identity of the debtor (lest the lenders be tempted to demand exorbitant interest rates) and, under no circumstances, to agree to anything higher than 10 per cent. But his mission proved fruitless: no one would advance him a penny, not even the Fuggers, who had lent money so willingly to the queen’s father, Henry VIII, almost five decades before.4 Elizabeth was therefore forced to adopt what she called the ‘vicious policy’ of selling off her properties – an anathema to a Tudor monarch, forever rapacious for wealth and always conscious of status.
Throughout those worrying days, Burghley may have reminded her how Henry had bankrupted England by his runaway expenditure on wars with France and Scotland in the 1540s, leaving himself with no option but to debase the coinage, generating rampant inflation and wreaking havoc with the economy of the realm for more than a decade afterwards. That fiscal policy could not be repeated.
Given all these bleak financial realities, it is unsurprising that Elizabeth was enthused by a new strategy that could resolve both her monetary and defence quandaries at a stroke. Sir John Hawkins and Walsingham had long been its advocates, and even the cautious Burghley was now an eager supporter. It was simple, relatively safe and, with its successful conclusion, the queen could enjoy the satisfaction of revenge on Philip of Spain.
By attacking Philip’s annual convoy carrying silver bullion from the New World colonies to Cadiz, Elizabeth stood to reap several million pounds’ worth of plundered ingots, which would fall like ripe plums into her welcoming and thankful exchequer. Moreover, this sequestering of the king’s revenues would leave him unabl
e to meet the cost of a new Armada, fund his armies in Flanders and subsidise the Catholic League in France. Who knows? The threat, real or implied, of repeated interdiction of his treasure fleets, or the loss of even part of one shipment, might coerce Philip to sue for peace so that Elizabeth’s cripplingly expensive war could at last be ended.
There was just one snag, as there always is with any simple plan offering alluring benefits.
The queen’s ships, after being at sea on active service for up to eight months, required refurbishment, a process that would take many weeks to complete. When the time required to sail to the Azores to intercept the treasure fleet was factored into the operational planning, it became obvious the English vessels would arrive on station too late to seize the ponderous Spanish ships. Quite literally, Elizabeth had missed the boat. And her financial and defence imperatives dictated that she did not have the luxury of waiting until the 1589 bullion convoy crossed the Atlantic from Havana in Cuba.
The Spanish Armada Page 29