Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  The Elizabethans considered the potato an exotic and aphrodisiac vegetable. When Sir John Falstaff was attempting to have his wicked way with the merry wives of Windsor, he called on the sky to‘rain potatoes’. As for tobacco, the‘herb’ was considered a health-giving medicine, which‘purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours and openeth all the pores and passages of the body’.

  Sir John Hawkins had introduced tobacco to England twenty years earlier, but it was typical of Ralegh to hijack the brand identity with a stunt to match the cloak and puddle. Talking to the Queen one day he boasted he could weigh tobacco smoke. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth challenged him, and he called for scales. Having weighed some tobacco, he smoked it in his long-stemmed pipe, then weighed the ashes and calculated the difference. As a final flourish, he proposed that the land where this remarkable plant grew should be named in her honour — Virginia.

  Ralegh’s prospective colonists set sail for the New World in May 1587 — ninety men, seventeen women and nine children — with all the supplies they needed to establish a self-sustaining and civilised community, including books, maps, pictures and a ceremonial suit of armour for John White, who was to be the governor. They landed on the island of Roanoke off modern North Carolina, and established what seemed to be relatively friendly relations with the local Croatoan Indians. But only a month after landing it became clear that more supplies would be needed, so Governor White set sail to organise a relief expedition for the following spring.

  But White arrived home to find England transfixed by the threat of Spanish invasion. Though chief promoter of the Virginia colony, Ralegh had not sailed himself with his adventurers, and now he was tied up organising ships to combat the threat of King Philip’s Armada. There was not a vessel to be spared, so it was August 1590 before Governor White could finally drop anchor off Roanoke again — nearly three years after he had departed. To his delight he saw smoke rising from the island, but when he landed he discovered it was only a forest fire. There was no trace of the colonists.

  ’We let fall our grapnel near the shore,’ White related poignantly,‘and sounded with a trumpet and call, and afterwards many familiar English tunes of songs, and called to them friendly. But we had no answer.’

  Locating the ruins of the palisade and cabins that he had helped to build, White discovered only grass, weeds and pumpkin creepers. But there were fresh native footprints in the sand — and one sign of Western habitation: a post on which were carved the letters,’CROATOAN’. White had agreed with the colonists that if they moved to a new settlement, they would leave its name carved somewhere on Roanoke. But when he investigated the nearby Croatoan Island, he found no sign of human habitation.

  In later years archaeologists and historians would search for evidence of what might have happened to Walter Ralegh’s‘lost colony’. Recent diggings have uncovered the English fort and what appears from the assembled samples of flora and fauna to be a primitive science and research centre, North America’s first. But the only clue to what happened to the colonists — and that is tenuous — has been found in modern Robertson County in North Carolina. Survivors of an Indian tribe there, called the Croatoans, speak a dialect containing words that sound a little like Elizabethan English — and some of these modern Croatoans have fair skin and blue eyes.

  MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS

  1560-87

  wHEN IT CAME TO DEALING WITH THE other kingdom that occupied their island, English monarchs sometimes sent armies north of the border, and sometimes brides. Henry VII’s daughter Margaret Tudor had been the last bridal export — she had married James Stuart, King of the Scots, in 1503 (see p. 78), and her glamorous but troubled granddaughter Mary was to provide Elizabeth I with the longest-running drama of her reign.

  Mary’s life was dramatic from the start. Her father James V of Scotland died when she was only six days old — and for the rest of her life she bore her famous title Queen of Scots. She was Queen of France too for a time, thanks to her brief first marriage to the French King François IL But François died in 1560, and his eighteen-year-old widow returned to the turmoil of the Scottish Reformation.

  The young Queen was not well received by John Knox, the fiery leader of Scotland’s evangelicals, who had just published his virulent denunciation of female rulers, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Marys Catholicism was another black mark against her in Knox’s eyes, and as Protestantism became the official religion of Scotland in the early 1560s she had to pick her way carefully, prudently confining her beliefs to her own household.

  But after several years of delicate and quite skilful balancing, Mary succumbed to the first of the headstrong impulses that would turn her promising young life to tragedy. In July 1565, she plunged into a passionate marriage with her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, whose good looks masked a vain, drunken, jealous and violent nature — as he proved within months, when he arranged for a gang of cronies to set upon Mary’s Italian private secretary, David Rizzio. Darnley’s possessiveness could not tolerate the trust that his wife placed in her chief of staff, and as the hapless Italian clung screaming to the Queen’s skirts — she was now six months pregnant — he was murdered in front of her eyes.

  Compared to the canniness with which her English cousin Elizabeth steered clear of marital entanglement, Mary was worse than impulsive: she was self-destructive. Within a year of Rizzio’s murder she was romantically involved with another homicidal aristocrat, James, Earl of Bothwell, who devised nothing less than the blowing-up of the bedridden Darnley who, after a youth of debauchery, had been laid low by the ravages of syphilis. Mary herself may even have been complicit in the murder. She had spent the evening of io February 1567 visiting her ailing husband in his house at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, before leaving for Holyrood Palace between ten and eleven o’clock. Two hours after midnight all Edinburgh was rocked as the house exploded. Darnley’s lifeless body was found in the garden.

  Mary’s marriage to Bothwell only three months later confirmed Scottish suspicions of her involvement, and ended her last chance of being a credible ruler. In July that year she was compelled to abdicate in favour of her thirteen-month old son James (Darnley’s child), and in May 1568 at the age of twenty-five she fled from Scotland in disgrace to throw herself on the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had been viewing Mary’s melodramatic adventures across the border with fascination — and not a little rivalry. Nine years younger than Elizabeth, Mary was generally reckoned a beauty, and this piqued the jealousy of the English Queen. In 1564 she had cornered the Scottish ambassador Sir James Melville, putting his diplomacy to the test as she cross-questioned him on the looks of his Scottish mistress. Elizabeth got crosser and crosser as Melville dodged her traps — until he let slip that Mary was taller.’Then she is too high,’ exclaimed Gloriana in triumph.’I myself am neither too high, nor too low!’

  Mary’s arrival as an uninvited asylum seeker placed Elizabeth in a dilemma. England could hardly provide money, still less an army, to restore the deposed Queen — this would impose an unpopular Catholic monarch on Scotland’s staunch Protestants. But since blood made Mary next in line to Elizabeth’s own throne, she could not, either, be allowed to leave England lest she tall into the clutches of France or Spain, The Queen of Scots would have to be kept in some kind of limbo,

  To start with, the fiction was maintained that Mary, as a cousin and anointed monarch, was being received in England as Elizabeth’s honoured guest. Yet Elizabeth did not visit Mary — the two women never met — and as the Queen of Scots was shifted across the north of England from one residence to another, it became clear that she was under house arrest. With a bodyguard that was curiously large for a cousin who was supposed to be trusty and beloved, Mary was shuttled from Carlisle to Bolton, then on to Tutbury in Staffordshire.

  The transfer that made her captivity plain occurred late in 1569, when the Catholics of the north rose in revolt. As the rebels bu
rned the English prayer books and Bibles, restoring church altars so as to celebrate the Roman mass in all its splendour, the earls who headed the rising dispatched a kidnap squad to Tutbury. Only in the nick of time did William Cecil have Mary whisked southwards to the fortified walls of the city of Coventry, and though the revolt collapsed, the Queen of Scots was now clearly identified as the focus of Catholic hopes. In February 1570, Pope Pius V formally excommunicated Elizabeth and called on all Catholics to rise up, depose and, if necessary, murder the‘heretic Queen’.

  The papal decree was to become Mary’s death sentence, but Elizabeth could not bring herself to go along with the simple but ruthless solution proposed by her anxious councillors, and particularly by her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham — England would not be safe, in their opinion, until the Queen of Scots was dead. In the meantime, the bodyguards kept moving Mary onwards — from Coventry to Chatsworth, then on to Sheffield, Buxton, Chartley, and finally to Fotheringhay Castle in Rutland, now Northamptonshire. As she travelled, Walsingham’s network of secret agents kept working to entrap her and, after a decade and a half, in October 1586 they had finally secured the evidence they required.

  Imprudently, Mary had been plotting with fellow-Catholics through coded letters smuggled in waterproof pouches hidden in beer casks. But the whole scheme was of Walsingham’s invention — a sting devised to incriminate Mary — and when she was put on trial at Fotheringhay it was revealed that his cipher clerks had been decoding her messages within hours of her sending them off.

  Mary Queen of Scots was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death on 4 December that year. But again Elizabeth hesitated, and for weeks she could not bring herself to sign the death warrant — and then only in a contradictory fashion, first ordering her secretary William Davison to seal it, then instructing that it should not be sealed until further ordered. It was her councillors who took matters into their own hands by sealing the warrant and sending it north without informing the Queen.

  On 8 February 1587, in the great hall at Fotheringhay, Mary went to the block with dignity, dressed dramatically in a blood-red shift, her eyes blindfolded with a white silk cloth. She was praying as the axe descended, and as the second blow severed lier head, some witnesses maintained they could see her lips still moving in silent prayer.

  ’God save the Queen!’ cried the executioner — but as he reached down to grasp Mary’s head, her auburn hair came off in his hands: her wigless, grey-stubbled head fell to the ground and rolled unceremoniously across it.

  Down in London, Elizabeth threw a fit of sorrow, surprise and anger at the death of her royal cousin. She raged at the councillors who had sent off the warrant without her final authority. She dispatched Secretary Davison to the Tower for eighteen months, and he was never restored to royal favour. When it came to necessary brutalities, Gloriana was as skilled at finding scapegoats as her father Henry VIII.

  SIR FRANCIS DRAKE AND THE SPANISH ARMADA

  1588

  IN ENGLAND HIS NAME DESCRIBED A MALE waterfowl that might be seen bobbing placidly on the village pond — but in Spanish the drake became a dragon. El Draque was a name with which to frighten naughty children, a fire-breathing monster whose steely, glittering scales‘remained impregnable’, wrote the sixteenth-century dramatist Lope de Vega,‘to all the spears and all the darts of Spain’.

  By the 1580s, Francis Drake’s reputation provoked panic in the seaports of Spain and in its New World colonies. In a series of daring raids, the rotund Devon-born pirate had pillaged Spanish harbours, looted Catholic churches and hijacked King Philip’s silver bullion as it travelled from the mines of the Andes to the Spanish treasury in Seville. In his most famous exploit, during 1577-80, Drake had sailed round the world claiming California for Queen Elizabeth and arriving home laden with treasure. No wonder she knighted him — and that his ship the Golden Hind, moored at Dept-ford near London, became the tourist attraction of the day.

  Now, on 20 July 1588, Sir Francis was taking his ease at Plymouth with the other commanders of the English navy, preparing to confront the great war fleet — armada in Spanish — that Philip II had marshalled to punish the English for their piracy and Protestantism. According to the chronicler John Stow, writing a dozen years after the event, the English officers were dancing and revelling on the shore as the Spanish Armada hove into sight.

  It was not until 1736, 148 years later, that the famous tale was published of how Drake insisted on finishing his game of bowls before he went to join his ship. But the story could well be true. The tide conditions were such on that day in 1588 that it was not possible to sail out of Plymouth Sound until the evening, and the Spanish ships were scarcely moving fast. Indeed, their speed has been calculated at a stately walking pace —just two miles an hour — as they moved eastwards in a vast crescent, heading for the Straits of Dover, then for the Low Countries, where they were planning to link up with the Duke of Parma and his army of invasion.

  According to folklore, the Spanish galleons were massive and lumbering castles of the sea that towered over the vessels of the English fleet. In fact, the records show the chief fighting ships on both sides to have been of roughly similar size — about a thousand tons. The difference lay in the ships’ designs, for while the English galleons were sleek and nippy, custom-made for piracy and for manoeuvring in coastal waters, the Spanish ships were full-bellied, built for steadiness as they transported their cargo on the long transatlantic run.

  More significantly, the English ships carried twice the cannon power of their enemies’, thanks, in no small part, to the zeal of Henry VIII. Elizabeth’s polymath father had taken an interest in artillery, encouraging a new gun-building technology developed from bell-founding techniques: in 1588 some of the older English cannon that blasted out at the Spanish galleons had been recast from the copper and tin alloy melted down from the bells of the dissolved monasteries.

  Popular history has assigned Francis Drake the credit for defeating the Spanish Armada. In fact, Drake almost scuppered the enterprise on the very first night: he broke formation to go off and seize a disabled Spanish vessel for himself. The overall commander of the fleet was Lord Howard of Effingham, and it was his steady strategy to keep pushing the Spanish up the Channel, harrying them as they went.‘Their force is wonderful great and strong,’ wrote Howard to Elizabeth on the evening of 29 July, and yet we pluck their feathers by little and little.’

  Ashore in England, meanwhile, the beacons had been lit. A chain of hilltop bonfires had spread the news of the Armada’s sighting, and the militia rallied for the defence of the shires. Lit today to celebrate coronations and royal jubilees, this network of‘fires over England’ dated back to medieval times. Seventeen thousand men rapidly mustered in the south-east, and early in August Queen Elizabeth travelled to inspect them at Tilbury as they drilled in preparation for confronting Parma’s invasion force. According to one account, the fifty-four-year-old Queen strapped on a breastplate herself to deliver the most famous of the well-worded speeches that have gilded her reputation:

  I am come amongst you, as you see… in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all… I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and the 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… We shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, my kingdom and my people.

  By the time Elizabeth delivered this speech, on 9 August 1588, the famous victory had already been won. Several nights previously, Howard had dispatched fire ships into the Spanish fleet as it lay at anchor off the Flanders coast, and in the resulting confusion the Spanish had headed north, abandoning their rendezvous with Parma. Fleeing in front of their English pursuers, they took the long way home, heading round the top of Scotland and Ireland. Almost half the Armada, including many of the best warships, managed to make it back to Spain. But over eleven thousand
Spaniards perished, and the great crusade to which the Pope and several Catholic nations had contributed ended in humiliation.

  Drake himself died eight years later on a raiding expedition in the Caribbean that went disastrously wrong. He was buried at sea, and great was the celebration when the news of his death reached Spain. In England, however, he became an instant hero, inspiring implausible tales of wizardry. According to one, he increased the size of his fleet by cutting a piece of wood into chips, each of which became — hey-presto! — a man-o’-wan

  His legend has been revived particularly at times of national danger. In the early 1800s, when Napoleon’s troops were poised to cross the Channel, an ancient drum was discovered which was said to have travelled everywhere with Drake, and the Victorian poet Sir Henry Newbolt imagined the old sea dog dying in the tropics on his final voyage, promising to heed the summons whenever England had need of him:

  Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

  Strike et when your powder’s runnin low-,

  If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,

  An, drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

  SIR JOHNS JAKES

  1592

  TODAY WE ASSOCIATE SEWAGE DISPOSAL with water — the push of a button, the pull of a chain and whoosh… But conveniences were rarely so convenient in Tudor times. A few castles had‘houses of easement’ situated over the waters of the moat, and Dick Whittington’s famous‘Longhouse’ (see p.13) had been built over the River Thames. One of the advantages of occupying the hundred or so homes built on the sixteenth-century London Bridge was the straight drop from privy to river — though this was also a hazard for passing boatmen.

  For most people, a hole in the earth did the job — inside a fenced enclosure or little hut at the back of the house, Moss or leaves served for toilet paper and a shovelful of earth for a flush. When the hole was full, you simply upped sticks and found, or made, a new hole,