A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The conflicts between Englishmen and Spaniards over the slave trade led to friction in the Caribbean, and this became worse as the relations between Elizabeth I and Phillip II deteriorated after 1568. When English volunteers were fighting for the Dutch against the Spaniards in the Netherlands, and Spanish volunteers were fighting for the Irish against the English in Ireland, Elizabeth agreed to allow English sailors to wage their private war against the Spaniards on the Spanish Main, where Drake and his colleagues seized Spanish ships at sea and sometimes raided Spanish towns on the mainland of Central America.

  In 1577 Drake set out on his voyage around the world, a journey which no one had accomplished except Magellan nearly sixty years before. As with all the expeditions by Elizabethan seamen, a consortium of influential courtiers put up the money and obtained letters of marque from the Queen in return for her receiving a share in the spoils of their voyage. These letters of marque made the seamen, in international law, privateers and not pirates, which was of very little use to them if they fell into enemy hands, but at least protected them against lawsuits in the English courts.

  After going to some lengths to deceive the Spaniards into thinking that he was intending to go to Guinea or the Mediterranean, Drake sailed from Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with 164 men in five ships; the largest of them, his flagship the Golden Hind, was 100 tons. He went to Brazil, and south along the east coast of South America, and through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific. He was then able to sail north, raiding the Spanish towns on the west coast, for as the Spaniards did not expect the English to enter the Pacific, all their warships were in the Atlantic, and could not reach Drake without sailing through the Straits of Magellan or around Cape Horn, for there was no other way to go by sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific until the Panama Canal was built in 1902.

  Drake sailed up the west coast at least as far north as what is now San Francisco and perhaps beyond Vancouver to some point on the coast of the modern British Columbia in Canada. He then crossed the Pacific, sailing for sixty-eight days without sight of land, and returned by the Cape of Good Hope to England, landing at Plymouth on 26 September 1580 after a voyage of nearly three years. Only fifty-seven of his crew of 164 survived the journey; but he had brought back gold and jewels worth £600,000 from an expedition which had cost £5,000, and gave every member of the syndicate which financed it a profit of £47 for every £1 which he had invested. The Queen’s share of the proceeds persuaded her to ignore the protests of the Spanish ambassador about Drake’s acts of piracy during the voyage.

  Drake’s example was followed six years later by another English sailor, Thomas Cavendish, who between 1586 and 1588 led the third expedition, and the second English expedition, to sail round the world. Drake himself continued his raids on Spanish shipping; in 1586 he looted and burned Cartagena, in the Gulf of Darien in South America, which was the richest city in the New World. His exploit made him a hero to the Protestants and a devil to the Catholics throughout Europe; when his portrait was displayed in a shop window in Ferrara, crowds gathered in the street to gaze at the features of ‘the great English corsair’. Every enterprising young Englishman longed to follow his example and win riches and glory on the Spanish Main. The courtier, sailor, soldier, poet and historian Sir Walter Raleigh decided to lead a voyage of exploration himself, and in 1595 sailed to South America and up the River Orinoco.

  Drake’s successes were the decisive factor which finally persuaded Philip II to send an expedition to conquer England, in response to the appeals from the English Catholic refugees that he should liberate their native country from the tyranny of the heretic Queen. His nephew, the Duke of Parma, who commanded the Spanish forces in the Netherlands, was to cross the sea with his army and land near Margate, from where he could march on London. But Parma had only galleys, and no larger warships, in the ports of the Netherlands. When Philip informed him of his plan, Parma offered to take his army across to Margate in the galleys, as there were no English warships in the North Sea; but by January 1588 the English and their Dutch allies had stationed a fleet off the coast of the Netherlands; and Parma told Philip that it would no longer be possible for his galleys to cross to Margate, or even to leave port, except under the protection of a powerful Spanish fleet. So Philip decided to send a large Armada, under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, to sail from Spain up the Channel to the Netherlands to escort Parma’s 18,000 soldiers to Margate.

  But Philip committed an extraordinary lapse, which certainly contributed, at least to some extent, to the defeat of the Armada. Although Parma repeatedly wrote to him that it would be impossible for his galleys to leave port except under the protection of the Armada, Philip either did not appreciate this, or for some reason did not clearly explain it to Sidonia. His instructions to Sidonia were to sail to Margate and meet Parma at a place to be agreed between them. Sidonia did not realize that Parma’s troops and galleys would not leave Dunkirk and Sluys unless he went there to fetch them and escort them to Margate.

  On 30 May 1588 (20 May by the English Old Style calendar) the Armada sailed from Lisbon, which had been an important Spanish port since Philip II’s conquest of Portugal in 1580; but the fleet was scattered by storms, and forced to take shelter at Corunna, and it was not until 22 July that the Armada left Corunna, heading for Margate and the link-up with Parma. There were 130 ships in the Armada, carrying 19,000 soldiers and 8,000 sailors; the total number on board, including the administrative and medical staff and the priests, was 30,693. Most of the English ships were at Plymouth, though some of them were helping the Dutch navy to blockade Parma in the ports of the Netherlands. The total English force consisted of 197 ships. Most of them were smaller than the Spanish ships, though no ship in the Armada was as large as Frobisher’s ship, the Triumph, of 1,100 tons. Some of the English ships were only 35 tons. The English had better manoeuvrability and superior fire-power, for Sir John Hawkins, at the Admiralty, had overhauled and modernized the navy in recent years. The English cannon had longer range, and prevented the Spaniards from pursuing their usual tactic of coming alongside the enemy ships, throwing grappling hooks to hold them, and boarding them in order to fight hand-to-hand on the decks; and events proved that the English guns were also superior in close-range bombardment.

  The Commander-in-Chief of the English navy was Lord Howard of Effingham in his ship the Ark Royal. Drake had become a national hero after his expedition to the West Indies in 1585–6, but only a nobleman could hold the office of Lord Admiral and command the navy, and there would have been endless friction with the other naval commanders if Drake had been appointed as supreme commander. Drake, in the Revenge, was a Vice-Admiral under Lord Howard.

  The Armada was sighted off The Lizard on the afternoon of 29 July (19 July Old Style), and the first engagement with the English fleet took place off Plymouth on 31 July. As there was hardly any wind in the fine summer weather, the Spanish ships sailed very slowly eastwards up the Channel, pursued by the English and fighting a running battle with them during the next five days. At this time an incident took place which shows the nature of naval warfare in the Tudor Age. Lord Howard ordered Drake to lead the English fleet in pursuit of the Armada during the night of 31 July, and to place a lantern at the poop of the Revenge to show the other ships where to go. But Drake saw some ships on the starboard side which he thought might be some Spanish ships trying to turn behind the English fleet; so he extinguished the lantern and went to investigate. He discovered that the ships were German merchantmen which had nothing to do with the Armada; but he then encountered one of the most valuable ships in the Armada, the Rosario, and captured her and her booty. Modern historians have condemned Drake for disobeying the orders of his Commander-in-Chief, which in later centuries would probably have resulted in Drake being court-martialled; but neither Howard nor any of the other officers complained of his conduct, except that Frobisher was annoyed that Drake had taken more than his fair share of the prize money.

  A
fter five days’ fighting, the Spaniards had lost only three ships, and the English had been unable to prevent the others from proceeding as far as Calais. But Sidonia did not know where he was to meet Parma, though he had sent several messengers by sea to Bruges in an attempt to contact Parma and find out about the meeting place. He therefore decided to anchor in Calais Roads, and to wait there till he heard from Parma.

  On 7 August (28 July Old Style) Lord Howard, Drake, Winter and the other English naval commanders held a Council of War and decided to attack the Armada that night with fireships. Eight burning ships were sent to be driven by the wind into the Spanish fleet as it lay at anchor in Calais Roads. The Spaniards had been afraid of fireships ever since Drake had used them in his attack on Cadiz fifteen months before, and many of the sailors panicked, and weighed anchor. Seeing this, Sidonia ordered the whole fleet to weigh anchor, and a gale arose and scattered the Spanish ships. They fought a battle off Gravelines with the English fleet, in which the English had much the better of the exchange of cannon fire, chiefly because the Spaniards were short of ammunition; and the gale drove the Armada north, up the east coast of England. Many ships were lost, and many Spaniards were drowned off the coasts of Zeeland and Friesland. The English pursued the Spaniards as far north as Newcastle, but by that time, like the Spaniards, they had used up their ammunition, and turned back. After the remaining Spanish ships had rounded the north of Scotland, more of them were wrecked on the Irish coast, and the survivors who landed were massacred by the English garrisons, in one case after they had surrendered on a promise that their lives would be spared. Only sixty-seven of the 130 ships returned to Spain.

  While the Armada was sailing up the Channel, the English government was making preparations to defend the Queen and realm if Parma landed. An army of 22,000 men was assembled at Tilbury, under Leicester’s command, ready to meet Parma if he arrived, as the English expected, on the Essex coast; and a bridge of boats was built across the Thames between Tilbury and Gravesend across which the army could march if Parma landed in Kent. Leicester persuaded Elizabeth to visit the troops, and she spent two days at Tilbury on 8 and 9 August (Old Style). By this time, the danger was past, as the shattered remnants of the Armada were already north of the Forth; but the English could not be sure of this.

  On the second day, Elizabeth addressed the army, and probably made the speech which has come down to us as her ‘Tilbury speech’. A poet who was present, and said that he heard her words, included a different version of them, in verse, in a poem about the Armada which he published a few weeks later; but thirty-five years afterwards the Earl of Essex’s chaplain, who had been at Tilbury with the Queen, sent a copy of her speech to the Duke of Buckingham. It seems to have been either the draft of the speech written by a speech-writer, or a note taken down immediately after the speech with a view to publishing it as an official report, although in fact this was never done. It probably approximates very closely to the words which she spoke that day.

  For Elizabeth, the defeat of the Armada was marred by a personal tragedy. Leicester, whom she would have married twenty-eight years earlier if this had been politically possible, died of a disease at the age of fifty-six, only twenty-seven days after she had been with him at Tilbury. A few days before, he had written to her asking a favour for an old servant. She wrote on the letter ‘His last letter’, and kept it in a chest in her bedchamber till the day of her death.

  The victory over the Armada saved England from invasion, but it did not end the war, which continued with varying success for the remaining fifteen years of the Tudor Age. The English expedition to Portugal in 1589, which was largely financed by a private consortium, was a disaster; for too few of the Portuguese rose in revolt against the Spaniards, and Drake, because of faulty intelligence, missed the opportunity of destroying the Spanish fleet at Santander. The battle at the Azores in 1591 was also unsuccessful, though the heroism of Sir Richard Grenville, and his fight in the Revenge against fifty-three Spanish ships, won the admiration of the people of England. These defeats were more than avenged by the burning of Cadiz in 1596 and the victory at Kinsale in 1602 over the Spanish forces in Ireland; but the war dragged on until James I, to the disgust of many of his English subjects, made peace with Spain in 1604.

  12

  LAW-ENFORCEMENT AND WAR

  FROM A TWENTIETH-CENTURY point of view, one of the contradictions of Tudor society is that laws were constantly being made and directives issued by the government which interfered with every aspect of the lives of English men and women to an extent which even a modern totalitarian state has never attempted, while at the same time there was hardly a trace of the bureaucracy, of the hordes of civil servants, secret policemen and army officers and soldiers who have been a feature of nearly every state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Tudor monarchy was a despotism, but it was a despotism run very much on the cheap, and largely by unpaid but enthusiastic amateurs.

  There were a small number of secretaries and clerks who accompanied the King as he moved from Greenwich to Westminster and from Richmond to Hampton Court, and when he went further afield to Windsor and Grafton during his summer progress; and there were other secretaries and clerks who stayed and worked in Westminster. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII, many of the leading members of the secretariat and government were churchmen, like Wolsey, Gardiner, Ruthall, Pace, Vannes and Edward Fox; but from the beginning of the Tudor Age, some of the most influential of them were common lawyers and other laymen of comparatively low rank, like Henry VII’s ministers, Edmund Dudley, who was a simple Sussex gentleman, and his colleague, Richard Empson, a Northamptonshire man of lower rank. After 1530, an increasing number of these higher government officials were laymen, and under Elizabeth I there were hardly any churchmen left. Many of the secretaries in the last years of Henry VIII and under Edward VI were prominent intellectuals, like the poet Thomas Wyatt, the Regius Professors of Civil Law and Greek, Thomas Smith and John Cheke, and the authors Thomas Elyot and William Thomas.

  These secretaries and courtiers usually attached themselves to some influential nobleman at court, under the system which was known as ‘faction’. There is nothing mysterious or particularly Tudor about faction, which has existed, and still exists today, in civil service departments, in large commercial organizations, and in many office buildings. It is the system by which the most powerful men in an organization engage in a struggle for power and position with each other, while their subordinates tend, for reasons of personal affection, loyalty and self-interest, to attach themselves to one or other of these leaders, and rise and fall with him. The sixteenth-century preachers and writers, including Shakespeare, were always condemning faction, and glorifying the ideal courtier and royal servant who thought of nothing except rendering loyal service to his master, the King; but that shrewd and experienced politician, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, advised his son that if he wished to advance at court, it was essential that he should attach himself to some powerful nobleman and win his patronage; and Shakespeare and everyone else knew that in practice most people at court supported some faction.

  If an official in the King’s service found that the leader of his faction had been arrested as a traitor, he tried to join the faction of the man who had supplanted his former leader. Under Henry VIII, whenever a leading courtier was arrested as a traitor, the other courtiers wrote to the King and the new favourite, denouncing the fallen minister in the most violent language and asking to be rewarded for their services by a grant of part of the traitor’s lands when they were forfeited to the King after his trial and conviction. There was no time to lose, for there were always plenty of other courtiers hoping to get their share of the traitor’s lands; so people wrote, staking their claims, as soon as they heard of the arrest, and long before the fallen minister had been convicted, or even charged, with high treason. Often the traitor’s son and other members of the family joined in these denunciations in the hopes that the King would remit the forfeiture an
d restore the traitor’s lands to his family. The traitor himself probably approved of his family’s attitude, hoping that something would be saved by their action.

  Local government was administered by the sheriff of the county, by the mayors in the cities and boroughs, by the JPs in the shires, and by the parish bailiffs and constables and the officers of the watch. The sheriff was appointed by the King. He was always one of the most prominent gentlemen of the county. There was a sheriff in most of the counties of England, but there were a few counties which had to share a sheriff with a neighbouring county. Surrey and Sussex shared a sheriff; so did Essex and Hertfordshire, Somerset and Dorset, Warwickshire and Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and Oxfordshire and Berkshire. In 1566 a statute was passed which explained that this was because, in the past, these counties ‘were not then so well inhabited with gentlemen of good ability to serve in the said office as (thanks be to God) they be at this present’. The Act enacted that henceforth each of these counties should have its own sheriff; but this had to be modified by a new Act in 1571 which provided that Surrey and Sussex should once again share a sheriff. By this time another officer had been appointed to increase the control of the central government in the counties. After 1550 it became the practice to appoint a Lord Lieutenant in every county, with precedence over the sheriff, for the Lord Lieutenant was a nobleman and the sheriff a knight or a gentleman.

  The sheriff was responsible for arresting criminals and holding them in custody in the county jail; and an Act of 1504 enacted that the sheriff should pay a fine if a prisoner escaped because of his negligence. The fine was to be at least £40 if the prisoner who escaped was accused of high treason, £20 if he was accused of petty treason or murder, and £10 if he was accused of any other felony; but the JPs could impose a higher fine if they thought fit.