by Simon Schama
She hobbled into the room, shockingly, painfully infirm, dressed head to foot like a glamorous mother superior, swathed in black velvet, capped by a white headdress and veil. Seeing a grandiose chair standing on a dais Mary naturally assumed that this was her place, only to be crushingly informed it represented the presence of the queen of England. She was ushered to a small crimson chair of the accused. She began bravely. Deprived of access to the evidence marshalled against her; deprived of a defence counsel, a secretary or even pen and ink, Mary turned to Cecil and Walsingham and said that in such circumstances ‘there is not one, I think, among you, let him be the cleverest man in the world but would be incapable of resisting or defending himself, if he were in my place’. Defend herself she did, however, insisting that she never meant to take the throne of England while Elizabeth was alive but had merely asserted her irrefutable claim to succeed as the nearest in line. Far from confessing, Mary then turned the tables on her prosecutors, putting them in the dock, accusing Walsingham of forging the entirety of the Babington letter and forcing him into an unaccustomed but careful defence of his conduct: ‘As God is my witness . . . as a private person I have done nothing unworthy of an honest man, and as Secretary of State nothing unbefitted of my duty.’ The cat-and-mouse game continued with the mouse on the offensive when it was Cecil’s turn to examine her. Questioned about her transfer of the rights to the throne to Philip II, Mary replied loftily that it was not for men such as him to concern himself with the affairs of princes. When he pressed her to say how she would have acted in the event of a Spanish invasion, Mary said she wanted nothing but liberty from unlawful detention.
In the end it did not matter what she said. Since she proved such an adroit defendant, the trial was adjourned and resumed in London without her. Ten days later the commission passed swiftly to her conviction. When the sentence was made public there was rejoicing in the streets of London, and parliament petitioned the queen for a speedy execution. But this was precisely what Elizabeth was incapable of providing. For months she had ranted at the infamy of the ‘murderess’, but when it came to killing her off, the old, deep horror of the axe at the neck of those she felt and knew were kin – Norfolk and Mary – made her balk. And there was something about Mary’s veiled threat that revenge would be taken for her sacrifice which also may have made Elizabeth afraid. ‘We princes are set as it were upon stages in the sight of the world,’ Mary had said and Elizabeth knew it was true.
For three months Elizabeth agonized over the fate of her cousin – a record even by her standards of procrastination – but on 1 February 1587 she finally signed the death warrant and asked her private secretary, William Davison, to attach the Great Seal of England and take it to Walsingham. The execution, she insisted, had to be done away from the public gaze, at Fotheringhay itself. In fact, what Elizabeth really wanted, she let it be known, was for the whole ugly business to be taken out of her hands by some loyal person who would just get rid of Mary in the time-honoured way reserved for redundant monarchs. But Paulet, normally so obliging, was horrified by the suggestion: ‘God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience or so leave so great blot on my poor posterity as to shed blood without a warrant.’
If Elizabeth dreaded the publicity, Mary revelled in her coming martyrdom. All the chaos, squalor, reckless adventuring and rash conspiracy; all the delusions, histrionics, skin-of-her-teeth escapes and battlefield fiascos; the apparently arbitrary madness of her life suddenly assumed direction and meaning. God had led her through all her tribulations so that she might arrive at this one transfiguring moment: a sacrifice for the truth and endurance of the eternal Church. So when Mary was informed by a weeping Scottish courtier that she would be executed the following morning, 8 February 1587, she told him to be joyful: ‘for the end of Mary Stuart’s troubles is now done . . . Carry this message from me and tell my friends that I died like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.’
The incredible performance was played for all it was worth, right to the end. Harangued by Richard Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, she turned her back on him, rejecting his invitation to join his prayers. ‘Mr Dean I am settled in the ancient Roman Catholic religion and mind to spend my blood in defence of it.’ Undeterred, Fletcher walked round to the other side of the scaffold and continued to berate Mary. The two voices, English and Latin, rose in unseemly competition. Attempts were made to prevent her from kissing her crucifix. When, finally, she undressed for the executioner, the demure black gown fell away to reveal a petticoat of blood-red crimson: the stain of the martyr. Her eyes were tied with a white silk cloth, embroidered in gold, and she lay with such complete stillness that it gave the executioner a bad case of sweaty palms. His first blow cut deep into the back of her head. She was heard to cry softly ‘sweet Jesus’ before the second blow severed all but a hanging tendon so that the executioner was now forced to use his axe like a hacksaw.
And Mary, of course, was not going to allow a little matter like death to get in the way of her total domination of the proceedings. With the large audience of invited spectators in shock, the lips on her severed head, so witnesses reported, continued for some minutes to move as if in silent prayer. And when the executioner, by now probably wanting to die himself, went to perform his obligatory duty of holding up the head and calling out ‘God Save the Queen’, he made the mistake of grasping it by the mass of auburn curls. It was, of course, a wig. To general horror, Mary’s skull, covered only with a mat of grey stubble, fell from the hair and rolled across the floor like a bowling ball. The next task was to remove the clothes from the headless trunk to prepare the body for embalming – and to deprive the relic trade of valuable inventory. But as the blood-soaked petticoat was being pulled away, something moved from within its folds and began to howl. The something was Mary’s lapdog, a Skye terrier, which gripped the gory fabric with his teeth. When it was finally detached from the wreckage of his mistress, the dog was scrubbed down. But it was no good. The clots clung to his coat. Clean or dirty it made no difference. The dog refused food, languished and died, just another sad little victim of Mary’s tragic touch. The dog was Mary’s first mourner. But he certainly wouldn’t be her last.
While bells rang and Londoners sang ‘An excellent ditty made as a general rejoicing for the cutting off of the Scottish queen’s head’, Elizabeth I plunged into an abyss of remorse. If the messenger who brought her news of Mary’s death was expecting a show of gratitude, he was in for a surprise. Fearing yet another change of mind, Cecil and Walsingham had decided not to tell Elizabeth of the appointed time an hour until it was all over. No matter how many times they flattered the queen by telling her – or by tolerating others to tell her – how much more than a ‘mere’ woman she was, there were times when they thought and acted as if she was just that: the chronically irresolute and inconstant female, ruled by the ebb and flow of her emotions, just as surely as her under-utilized matrix was ruled by the cycles of the moon and stars. Usually, they got away with the faits accomplis, but not this time. When Elizabeth got the news of Mary’s death, according to William Camden: ‘her countenance changed, her words faltered and with excessive sorrow she was in a manner astonished insomuch as she gave herself over to grief putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears’. And instead of congratulating her servants on doing her bidding, Elizabeth turned on them, banishing Cecil from her presence for an unprecedented six months and attempting to have secretary Davison, who had taken the warrant to Walsingham, arrested and hanged for insubordination. This was not a disingenuous show and the tears were not crocodile tears; rather, a massive case of denial. Elizabeth really did seem to think that she had expressly told Davison to delay the execution, not hasten it, and that he had violated her orders. But it was inconceivable that he would have taken this risk, knowing full well lives, including his own, depended on it. Everyone took their portion of the unmerited blame, knowing that the queen had to be allowed to wail and rave and d
elude herself that Mary’s death had happened in spite of, not because of, her.
Elizabeth’s inability to face the truth may have been prompted by a bad conscience but also by a well-grounded anxiety about the consequences that Mary’s execution would have on European politics. She might now be branded a killer of princes as well as a notorious heretic, and instead of stopping conspiracy in its tracks, the execution at Fotheringhay might actually reinforce the determination of those who thought they might please the pope by getting rid of the queen of England. Instead of isolated plotters, she might now have to face a full-scale war of sovereigns.
She was right. Even before Mary’s trial, Philip II had accelerated plans for an ‘Enterprise of England’, an invasion to restore the Catholic Church. But although he invoked the papal bull that had called Elizabeth ‘an incestuous bastard begotten and born in sin of an infamous courtesan’, for Philip the Armada was always a matter of imperial self-defence rather than religious retribution. For years, even while the English government was ostensibly discussing peace, the committed Protestants on the council, such as Leicester and Walsingham, had been encouraging pirates like Francis Drake and John Hawkins to attack Spanish shipping. The jackpot would have been the great treasure fleet, which every spring and autumn carried huge quantities of silver from the mines of Peru back to Seville and which alone sustained the immense war effort in the Netherlands. Drake and Hawkins never quite made the big hit, but throughout the late 1570s and 1580s they managed nonetheless to haul home considerable amounts of booty, much to the delight of their investors, including, of course, the risk-free sleeping partner, Elizabeth I. To the queen it all made sense as part of a two-prong effort to get the Spanish out of the Netherlands. Instead of using an immense and costly army over there, they should cut the supply lines. By all means try peace negotiations, but use the pirates to give Spain an incentive to come to terms. To Philip, however, this was bare-faced hypocrisy. The raids on Spanish America were just state-sponsored acts of terrorism, and if Elizabeth would not stop them, he would have to go to the root of the problem in England itself.
Not only did the raids not stop, but in the spring of 1587 the maritime attacks reached a new peak of audacity. While Elizabeth was sending envoys to talk peace, Drake pulled off his cheekiest raid yet, attacking the Spanish fleet in Cadiz harbour itself, destroying ships and sailing with impunity through its roadsteads: a sixteenth-century Pearl Harbor. In Madrid the news was greeted with fury and panic. Was the king of Spain’s authority to be of no account in his own waters?
But although Philip had virtually no alternative now but to launch the Armada, from the beginning many of his councillors foresaw the inevitability of its disaster. When the great Spanish admiral Santa Cruz estimated that, to have any chance of success, between 50,000 and 90,000 troops and 200 ships would be needed, he must have assumed that this kind of scale would be prohibitive. But Philip merely stripped the size of the effort down, just to the point where he virtually guaranteed its failure.
What followed, in the summer of 1588, was one of the great epics of insular patriotism. Whenever, in subsequent generations, England seemed to be facing impossible odds, the ‘Fires over England’ (the coastal beacons lit to warn of the approaching invaders) were re-lit, in print and celluloid. In 1798 Henry Dundas, William Pitt’s colleague, alarmed by news of a planned French invasion, consulted the speeches of Elizabeth I and was comforted to find her anticipating his own provisions. But despite the undoubtedly terrifying spectacle of the 130-odd ships sailing past the Lizard in July, the odds actually favoured the defenders not the attackers. Drake was right to keep cool and finish his apocryphal game of bowls. As they sailed towards their moment of truth, the Spanish commanders knew this too. From bitter experience they were well aware that the English ships had a huge edge in speed and manoeuvrability and especially in the rapid-fire technology of their guns, which could discharge a full fusillade once an hour rather than, as in the Spanish case, once a day! They also knew that the English fleets were not about to sit and wait for them to join with the Duke of Parma’s barge-borne invasion army before taking them on. All this made the Spanish deeply uneasy, and more than once the admirals attempted, in vain, to persuade Philip to call the whole thing off before it was too late.
At every stage it was geography and the weather that decided the outcome. The Armada survived Drake’s initial attacks on it in the Solent with hardly enough casualties to be noticed and sailed on imposingly towards Calais and its rendezvous with Parma and his forces in the Netherlands. But there, the wind did indeed turn Protestant, halting the progress of the barge flotilla that carried the troops and making it impossible for them to reach their deepwater junction. At the same time, the Armada, hit by English fire-ships, couldn’t get close enough into the shallows to take the soldiers aboard. It was those few miles of deadly Channel seabed that made the difference between disaster and triumph.
The battle of Gravelines, fought over 28–29 July, was now a struggle, not for the survival of England but for the survival of the Armada. When its commander, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, finally pulled away from the battle, eleven ships short, and set a course northeast to begin a long, ruinous odyssey home, his fleet was still substantial enough to deter pursuing attacks. It was when the Armada rounded the northwest tip of Scotland and ran into merciless Hebridean gales and tempests that it was destroyed. Ironically, then, it was in the waters between Scotland and Ireland that the Enterprise of England truly came to grief: the sailors and soldiers were drowned, starved, ravaged by typhus or picked off by the Irish.
It wouldn’t do to write off the narrow escape of 1588 as purely patriotic mythology. If, with hindsight, we can see that the chances of a successful Spanish invasion were always slight, that is certainly not the way it was seen at the time. Philip II went into mourning for the 15,000 dead and his annihilated fleet, but the defeat was not so overwhelming that he could not try again in the 1590s. In England the response to the crisis was perhaps even more important than the military logistics, for it produced a moment of intense national self-definition. If you asked yourself what was a queen for, the answer was for 1588, to give a sense to the people, indoors and on the streets, in great houses and in taverns, that the nation was somehow more than the sum of its parts, and that its prince, somehow both king and queen in one frame, was its authentic and imperishable embodiment. It was Elizabeth’s genius (as it was Churchill’s in 1940) to understand how to project this to her fearful, agitated people, and Leicester, grievously ill, probably with stomach cancer, but rehabilitated as Her Majesty’s Lieutenant against Foreign Invasion, was ready to campaign one last time as the impresario of her public image. He may have been a hopeless commander of armies and an even worse foreign diplomat and politician, but when it came to patriotic shows there was no one to touch him.
Like the rest of the council he had been dismayed by Elizabeth’s apparent determination to lead her armies in person, should it come to fighting a Spanish invasion force in England itself – ‘Your person being the most dainty and sacred thing we have in this world to care for, a man must tremble when he thinks of it’ – and in early August the danger was by no means past. Instead, Leicester organized the extraordinary occasion at Tilbury camp (where he had complained of alarming disorder) on 9 August when the queen reviewed and addressed the defence levies. Paradoxically, the very abundance of reports and images of what happened at Tilbury make it difficult to know for certain exactly what Elizabeth wore or what she said, but she certainly arrived on 8 August in a great gilded coach and was escorted by 2000 ecstatic troops to her lodgings at Arden House. The next day she probably did walk on foot through lines of men before mounting a grey gelding with Leicester holding the bridle, accompanied by pikemen, drums and pipers. She may not, in fact, have actually worn the breastplate said in some versions to have been produced by Leicester, but she certainly made an impression on the troops as a commander as much as the virgin-mother of the country. An eye
witness, James Aske, described her as ‘king-like’ and a ‘sacred general’.
The speech, which was repeated the next day by the military chaplain, Leonel Sharp, has deservedly passed down to posterity as one of the greatest orations of British history, all the more extraordinary for being delivered at a moment of such trepidation.
My loving people, We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery, but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let Tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all. To lay down for God, my kingdom and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King and a King of England too and think it foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your General, Judge and Rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a Prince, they shall be duly paid you.
There are other versions of the speech, less Shakespearean, but preserving the essence of Elizabeth’s performance: a sovereign imagined not as a remote and a forbidding presence but as one of the people in their hour of crisis. And though she was a woman, the love her subjects bore her made her an Amazon, a Penthesilea, a fighter: in the words of the 1612 version ‘the enemy perhaps may challenge my sex for that I am a woman, so may I likewise charge their mould for that they are but men’. And there is no doubt whatever that at Tilbury Elizabeth assumed the status of a national icon. Shortly after, Leicester wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury that ‘Our Gracious Majesty hath been here with me to see her camp and her people, which so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects as I think the weakest person amongst them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dare land in England.’ An extraordinary panel in the church of St Faith at King’s Lynn shows the haloed Virgin Queen enthroned, as if in heaven, above the spectacle of the Armada in flames, while her Tilbury persona on the dappled grey rides before the troops.