Philip II was determined to strangle the infant states at birth, and the struggles of William the Silent and the Dutch against their Spanish oppressors became the great ideological battle of late sixteenth-century Europe, comparable in the twentieth century to the much shorter and bloodier civil war in Spain. In the war between General Franco and the Republic, Europeans saw a titanic struggle for their soul, between Left and Right. In the fight in the Low Countries the question was partly a matter of local sovereignty versus Habsburg bullying. And there were plenty of Dutch Catholics who resisted Philip II. But as attitudes hardened and the fight became bloodier, it became an emblematic struggle between the Counter-Reformation, represented by Spain, and the Protestant aspiration. It was a struggle between a vast machine and a collection of individuals: between a papalist system that insisted upon obedience as a condition of salvation, and a new attitude to life, expressed by men and women who placed their consciences above a system. Deep things, therefore, were at stake, which is why so many English enthusiasts for the Reformation went to fight for the independence of the Dutch States.
The Catholic powers plotted constantly for a military and political defeat of the independent or hierarchical states, preceded by the assassination of the key figure in each drama. The Earl of Moray in Scotland had been assassinated. Admiral Coligny in France was killed at the behest of his own queen. The Pope urged the English to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. And in July 1584 William the Silent was shot at Delft, by a marksman called Balthasar Gérard. His sister, the Countess of Schwarzenburg, held his hand and asked him, ‘Do you die reconciled to your Saviour Jesus Christ?’ He was able to answer ‘Yes’ before he died.1
William had been the one man with the intelligence and the unflappability to hold together the quarrelsome states. There had always been many exasperating moments. When the burghers of Antwerp had refused him the means to save Maastricht from the Prince of Parma, William had sat with his head in his hands.2 But he knew how to lead them. Without William, the people of the Netherlands desperately needed help, and they looked to the Queen of England to supply it.
English involvement in the Low Countries was something about which Queen Elizabeth nursed ambivalent feelings. In the years 1585–6 the English soldiers serving there, and the people of the Netherlands, suffered acutely from an excess display of all her worst character traits – vacillation, tight-fistedness, hysterical rages. Presumably the ill-fated campaigns in which thousands of Englishmen, including Sir Philip Sidney, perished coincided with her menopause. That being said, events were moving in such a way that any English monarch in the circumstances would have been jittery.
The case for maintaining peaceable relations with Spain was a strong one. Philip II was the most powerful monarch in Europe. He was Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, and it was no secret that he believed that if anyone succeeded Elizabeth, it should be himself rather than Mary, Queen of Scots – too much under the influence of her French relations – or her son James, who was being brought up in Scotland as a heretic. Philip had no wish to antagonise the English people, whose king he aspired to become. Therefore he wanted peace with them, peace with their queen. He insisted to Pope Sixtus V, for example, that Elizabeth posed no real threat to the Catholic faith and that she could be talked out of her heresies. Everyone was playing an ambivalent game, however. The Pope promised Philip two million gold ducats – Dos millones de oro – if he invaded England and brought it back to the faith. Philip, for his part, disturbed the Pope with his pro-French bias. (Sixtus excommunicated Henry of Navarre in 1585, but when Henry converted to Catholicism on the celebratedly pragmatic grounds that ‘Paris is worth a Mass’, the Pope refused to ride with Philip in his attempts to limit French power.)
Moreover Elizabeth, as well as being unwilling to risk an expensive, bloody war with Spain on Dutch soil, was temperamentally unattracted to their cause. The Dutch sought her protection against the religious intolerance of Spain; but she herself did not practise religious tolerance in her own country and she intensely disliked the Calvinist creed of the Dutch States.
Walsingham and the advanced Protestants in the Queen’s entourage took a different view. The Protestant struggle was their struggle, whether in Antwerp or in London. Moreover, however much Elizabeth wanted a peaceful life, the Spanish (who had spies everywhere, including in the Queen’s own Council) had to be resisted. To conquer them in the States would be to put a check on their power and hugely reduce the chance of a Spanish invasion of England. The united fleets of England and the States would make a formidable navy and would secure the English Channel for the Protestant allies.
While the Queen dithered between the two opinions, and while the States openly asked her to become their governor, the Spanish took matters out of Elizabeth’s hands. On 29 May 1585 a decree went forth from Madrid that any English vessel found near the Spanish coast should be arrested and appropriated: the crew imprisoned; the guns commandeered for the Armada that was being assembled at Cadiz. Hundreds, certainly, and perhaps as many as thousands3 of English sailors and merchants found themselves heaving oars as galley-slaves or languishing in the prisons of Seville. One Englishman wrote, ‘Our countrymen are still in prison and in great misery; except there be better order taken, better for men to stay at home than raise the price of corn in our country to bring it hither to so ungrateful a nation.’4
Elizabeth’s reaction to this was highly characteristic. She allowed Walsingham, and her friends in the Low Countries, to remain in suspense. She said she would undertake to pay for 4,000–5,000 men in the Low Countries until the end of the war, but when this army had been dispatched, reinforced by 2,000 volunteers, they awaited her instructions and received mixed signals. Antwerp fell to the Spanish in August. It was time for a big military operation, and for an English figurehead who could match the legendarily successful general Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma. The all-but-universal view in England was that the Earl of Leicester was that man. One of the only important figures to dissent from this view was the Queen herself. When Lettice, Leicester’s wife, came down to London to join her husband, the Queen threw a tantrum and said that she would send someone in Leicester’s place to the Low Countries; or send no one. On 26 September Walsingham wrote to Leicester, ‘Unless God give her Majesty another mind, it will work her and her subjects’ ruin.’5 Already the Dutch States were in anarchy. The troops who had been sent out there were without pay, food or equipment. The companies who had been intended to garrison the town of Flushing had no commanding officer. They were kept in open boats exposed to the October rains and storms, and hundreds died before a bedraggled remainder marched into Flushing to replace the Flemish soldiers who had earlier defended the town.
One reason for Elizabeth permitting this deplorable state of affairs was her indecisiveness. Another was that she had a secret up her sleeve, which she did not wish to disclose to Burghley, Walsingham or any of the respectable members of her government. Whereas one side of her mercurial nature wished to make peace with Spain, and even to suggest – through the backstairs emissaries who moved between the two powers, London and Madrid – that she would contemplate conversion to Catholicism and make Philip II her heir, another aspect of her nature wanted adventure. Elizabeth the Pirate Queen wanted revenge for her imprisoned merchants and sailors. She secretly licensed Francis Drake, who was the dread of the Spanish, to wreak havoc on the Spanish coast. Elizabeth loved this sort of adventure. If it went wrong, she could disclaim responsibility. If it worked, and Drake came home with a shipload of loot, she could bag her share. The great Spanish admiral, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, spoke for his country when he said that ‘England had many teeth’, and that the man who with a single barque and a handful of men could take a million and a half of gold from under the eyes of the Viceroy of Peru might go anywhere and everywhere with such a squadron as he now had at his back.6 By 14 September Drake and his fleet were in Vigo Bay – to offer freedom to the English merchants marooned there, and to loot the place
. In the churches Drake’s soldiers took pleasure not merely in stealing anything valuable, but in stripping the statue of the Virgin of her clothes and treating her with indignity. Chalices, copes, patens and an enormous cross were collected by Drake’s pirates as so much plunder. He met with almost no resistance in Spain before sailing off to the West Indies. En route he sacked the towns of Santiago and Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands. By the middle of December they had reached the Antilles. In San Domingo he took the Spaniards completely by surprise and extracted money from the inhabitants by hanging two friars per diem until they surrendered 25,000 ducats. Drake – this was typical of his humour – asked the Spaniards to translate for him the Latin inscription over Philip II’s royal arms carved over the grand staircase: Non sufficit orbis – the world is not big enough for him. After calling at a plague-ridden Cartagena, he sailed home via the infant colony of Virginia and reached Plymouth harbour on 28 July 1586. In one voyage he had demonstrated what an English land army in the Low Countries could not do: that Spain was vulnerable.
One man who had tried to sail with Drake’s voyage was Leicester’s nephew, the thirty-one-year-old Philip Sidney.
For some years Sidney had longed for the New World. In the revised version of his Arcadia there is a characteristic account of the two princes putting out to sea, which is both a ‘poetic’ description of the process of a sail catching the wind and a vivid expression of wonder that such a process could actually work!
They recommended themselves to the sea, leaving the shore of Thessalia full of tears and vows, and were received thereon with so smooth and smiling a face, as if Neptune had as then learned falsely to fawn on princes. The wind was like a servant, waiting behind them so just, that they might fill the sails as they lifted; and the best sailors showing themselves less covetous of his liberality, so tempered it that they all kept together like a beautiful flock, which so well could obey their master’s pipe: without sometimes, to delight the princes’ eyes, some two or three of them would strive, who could, either by the cunning of well-spending the wind’s breath, or by the advantageous building of their moving houses, leave their fellows behind in the honour of speed: while the two princes had leisure to see the practice of that which before they had learned by books: to consider the art of catching the wind prisoner, to no other end, but to run away with it; to see how beauty and use can so well agree together, that of all the trinkets, wherewith they are attired, there is not one but serves to some necessary purpose.7
It is a beautiful passage, as elaborately spun as a polyphonic part song by Byrd, as encrusted with jokes, clever thoughts, allusions and visual delight as might an Elizabethan dress on a great lady gleam with a variety of fabrics, jewels, facets and surfaces. But it is landlubber’s prose, which believes it possible for two young men, if sufficiently well born and well educated, to master navigation from what ‘before they had learned by books’. This alone would have been enough to make Drake shudder. But Drake, lately promoted from pirate ruffian to admiral in the Royal Navy, did not want to incur Royal displeasure; and anxious letters from court, forbidding the admiral to take Sidney aboard, could not be gainsaid. Walsingham, Sidney’s father-in-law, attributed the young man’s yearning for America to pique at not being made governor of Flushing.
Sir Philip Sidney hath taken a very hard resolution to accompany Sir Francis Drake in this voyage, moved hereunto for that he saw Her Majesty disposed to commit the charge of Flushing unto some other; which he repeated would fall out greatly to his disgrace, to see another preferred before him, both for birth and judgement inferior unto him. This resolution is greatly to the grief of Sir Philip’s friends, but to none more than to myself. I know Her Majesty would easily have been induced to have placed him in Flushing, but he despaired hereof, and the disgrace that he doubted he should receive hath carried him into a desperate course . . .8
It appears that the Queen was going to give the governorship of Flushing to Thomas Cecil – ‘Burghley’s talentless eldest son’,9 as Katherine Duncan-Jones calls him. If so, the dig in Walsingham’s letter about Sidney’s superiority of birth has a distinctly acid flavour. Sidney was, as it happened, eventually sworn in as the governor of Flushing on 22 November 1585. He had ten months left to live and they were all spent in the Low Countries. He missed the baptism of his daughter Elizabeth (at St Olave, Hart Street, on 20 November – the Queen attended in person as a godmother), his father’s death on 5 May 1586 (the Queen refused Philip leave to come back to the deathbed), his mother’s death on 9 August and the illness of his beloved sister, the Countess of Pembroke.
Sidney was confronted in the United Provinces by chaos, caused by lack of organisation and exacerbated by the Queen’s parsimony. The troops stationed there were sick, many of them starving. It was a period when Protestant refugees were flooding from the southern Netherlands into Holland and Zeeland, rents and food prices were high, shortages acute; it was obvious that in such circumstances starving English and Welsh soldiers would turn into marauders. One of the English members of the Council of State (Raad van State), Thomas Wilkes, admitted, ‘So great is the lack of discipline among the garrisons, especially of our nation, that I am ashamed to hear the continual complaints which come to the councell-bord against them . . . We beginne to grow as hatefull to the people as the Spaniard himself who governeth the townes of conquest with a milder hand than we doe our frends and allyes.’10
Leicester’s remit was an impossible one: it was to defeat, or hold at bay, the Spanish in the Low Countries; and it was to ‘bring the rebel provinces under the benign protection and control of a foreign ruler’11 himself. The disadvantages with which he contended included: a recalcitrant population who disagreed among themselves; a formidably powerful Spanish army under a superb general, Parma; a capricious queen, who was not prepared to spend money on the campaign and was prepared secretly to negotiate for the destruction of the Dutch. She wanted to make peace, and her ever-volatile relationship with Leicester was going through one of its volcanic phases. The fact that he had brought his still-loved second wife to London to see him off scarcely improved Elizabeth’s mood. When the States offered Leicester the governorship of the new republic, and he accepted it, this was a sure sign that her creature was getting above himself. He was ‘one of her own raising’, she stormed. Rumours that Lady Leicester was setting out for the Low Countries in fine clothes and carriages, as a Dutch First Lady, exacerbated Elizabeth’s fury: ‘The Earl and the States had treated the Queen with contempt’ . . . either the world would ‘refuse to believe that a creature of her own would have presumed to accept the government contrary to her command, without her secret asset’ or it would be thought that she could not rule her own subjects.12
While Elizabeth played out these comic operatic tantrums at home, to the flinching of courtiers and the cowering of ambassadors, the campaign limped on. Sidney was not enjoying cordial relations with his uncle; Leicester, in his turn, did not think highly of his nephew’s capabilities, ‘despising his youth for a counsellor, but withal bearing a hand upon him as a forward young man’.13 Sidney, who was made colonel of a Zeeland regiment, tried to shift the role of English forces from defence to offence. He took part – with his brother Robert and Count Holenlohe – in attacks on the Spanish army around Breda; with Prince Maurice, he successfully besieged Axel. He narrowly escaped Spanish capture during a miserable little battle at Gravelines, and as summer ended he took part in another successful siege: of Doesburg, this time fighting alongside his uncle, Leicester. Then, on 14 September 1586, the English army moved off towards Zutphen, having heard that Parma and the Spaniards were on their way there. It was on 22 September, a thickly misty day, that Sidney rode out against the Spanish army outside Zutphen. The enemy were more numerous than, in the mist, the 200 English and Dutch horsemen and 300 or 400 foot-soldiers had realised – numbering 2,200 musketeers and 800 foot-soldiers.14 Sidney was not wearing thigh armour and was hit by a musket-shot just above the knee. The skirmish
failed to stop the Spanish relief of Zutphen. Sidney, accomplished in the tilts, kept his saddle – ‘The foe shall miss the glory of my wound.’15 The seriousness of his wound was hard to assess. Leicester was now impressed by his nephew’s courage. Sidney was taken by barge down the River Issel to Arnhem, where he lay at the house of Mademoiselle Gruithuissens. He lay there for twenty-five days. His mind was lucid and, we are told, he wrote a large epistle to Belerius, the learned divine, in very pure and eloquent Latin – alas, it is now lost and scholars do not know who Belerius was. But Sidney, in death, as in life, like the twentieth-century poet, could ‘teach the free man how to praise’. As in later examples of squalid wars, nothing is remembered of Leicester’s disgraceful and unsuccessful Netherland’s campaign – nothing but the death of a poet. Sidney’s wound developed gangrene, and on 17 October he died.
The Elizabethans Page 29