by John Cooper
At the eleventh hour, Walsingham received a report which alleged that the Armada would not be sailing at all. Sir Edward Stafford had informed his brother-in-law Howard of Effingham that Spanish forces earmarked for the enterprise of England had been stood down. Howard was unsure what to make of it. ‘If it be true,’ he wrote to Walsingham, ‘I would not wish the queen’s majesty to be at this charges that she is at; but if it be but a device, knowing that a little thing makes us too careless, then I know not what may come of it’. Historians are now certain of what Walsingham merely suspected, that Stafford had been in the pay of Philip II since 1587. The opening gambit had come from Stafford himself, who told his Spanish handlers that he wanted to be revenged on Walsingham and Leicester for their hostility towards him. He also claimed, rather less plausibly, that no English warship could be made seaworthy without his first passing on a warning to the Spanish. Mendoza and Philip were both hooked, and so Stafford became the asset known variously as ‘Julio’ and the ‘new correspondent’ in return for substantial cash payments.
Agent Julio was as good as his word. Mendoza got the lists and statistics of Queen Elizabeth’s fleet which he had been promised, although it should also be said that they exaggerated English firepower by a substantial degree. Either Stafford was acting as a loyal servant of the crown, deliberately making out Elizabeth’s navy to be far stronger than it was, or he had been discovered by Walsingham and was being fed false information to pass on to his paymasters. The loss of the ambassador’s papers makes it difficult to be sure which of these two paths he had chosen. As for his mysterious letter to Howard of Effingham, in 1583 Stafford had forewarned the queen that his cables might contain passages specifically intended to deceive anyone intercepting his correspondence, indicated by a mark known only to writer and recipient. Since the original letter to Howard no longer exists, we cannot be sure whether it was intended to be read as fact or fiction. Maybe Stafford was engaged in an elaborate double bluff, earning his keep from Mendoza by encouraging Elizabeth to let down her guard while silently tipping off the privy council. As with Walsingham and the Italian banker Roberto di Ridolfi, it is difficult to tell who was ultimately fooling whom. But any argument in favour of Stafford’s sincerity has to account for some uncomfortable aspects of his career, not least the stream of misinformation which he continued to send Walsingham after the Armada had set sail: that plague had sent it scurrying back to Spain, that odds of six to one against Spanish ships reaching the Channel were being offered in Paris, and – most amazingly of all – that a fleet of 160 Turkish galleys was even now beating its way towards Spanish Italy.14
Stafford’s report that Philip had given up on his Armada was contradicted by Howard’s own sources. In February 1588 he forwarded ‘news fresh of the wonderful preparations in Spain’, and wanted to know if Walsingham could confirm the story: ‘this is the year that makes or mars, and it were a great deal better that some did weep than all England should cry’. John Hawkins, treasurer of the navy and commander of the Victory, added his own voice to the chorus assembling around Walsingham and the queen. England was faced with the starkest choice imaginable: between a peace that was dishonourable and uncertain, and a determined and resolute war. ‘If we stand at this point in a mammering and at a stay,’ declared Hawkins with a passion, ‘our commonwealth doth utterly decay’. Further delay could only benefit the enemy, allowing Philip to prepare at leisure while eating up the limited resources of the crown. Open war would give every subject who loved God and the queen the chance to ‘do somewhat for the liberty and freedom of this country’, at the same time as forcing Jesuits to declare themselves. Inaction could only lead to ‘servitude, poverty and slavery’. As a trader in human cargo between Sierra Leone and Spanish America, whose coat of arms depicted a Moor bound about the neck with a cord, John Hawkins knew what it meant to be a slave.
Hawkins was preaching to the converted. Walsingham shared his conviction that popery and tyranny were two sides of the same coin. But he was also full of foreboding, his sense of depression deepened by his collapsing state of health. A seizure brought on by a severe urinary complaint in summer 1587 left him dangerously ill for several months. In January 1588 he was bedridden once again, tormented by a discharge of fluid from one of his eyes. His mood was worsened by the peace negotiations in which the queen still placed an unwarranted degree of faith, what Walsingham called ‘our cold and careless proceeding’ at a time of imminent danger. His thoughts turned to divine providence as they so often had before, though without the optimism of Drake and Hawkins that the English nation would prove itself worthy. ‘Unless it shall please God in mercy and miraculously to preserve us,’ he lamented to the Earl of Leicester, ‘we cannot long stand’.15
At least the queen had come to recognise that good intelligence was worth the investment. A docket in the state papers countersigned by the signet clerk Thomas Lake notes the funds released to Walsingham in the later 1580s ‘to be paid over to such persons as her majesty hath appointed him’ – to agents and informers, in other words. The royal signet was less open to audit than the lumbering procedures of the Tudor exchequer, hence a useful means of authorising cash payments without too many questions being asked. The £500 made out to Walsingham in 1585 leapt to £2,100 the following year, a response to the Babington plot and the growing threat from Spain. A further £2,800 was paid out before the Armada set sail, placing substantial powers of patronage in the principal secretary’s hands. According to William Camden, Walsingham topped up these official resources with subventions from his own private income, paid out of the profits from his farm of the customs and various offices including the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster. Added to the debt which he had inherited from Philip Sidney, this would help to explain the financial difficulties which weighed Walsingham down during the final years of his life. The contrast with Lord Burghley, who profited handsomely from Tudor service and founded a political dynasty on the back of it, could hardly be more poignant.16
Walsingham received his first realistic report of the Armada as late as April 1588, only two months before it moved out of Lisbon harbour to brave the unseasonable storms lashing the coast. Previous estimates of Spanish strength had varied wildly. Thomas Fenner picked up a nightmarish rumour in March of a fleet of four hundred sail and fifty galleys, provisioned with vast quantities of bacon and fish, rice and cheeses. A more accurate assessment came courtesy of Nicholas Oseley, an English merchant who had stayed on in Spain in order to spy for the privy council. His story is fleshed out in a letter addressed to Walsingham in July 1588 from her majesty’s ship Revenge, where he had been allowed to join Drake as a reward for his loyal service. Oseley described the three months he had spent riding from port to Spanish port, gathering news to send to Walsingham. He also reminded his patron of ‘the long time I was prisoner for a spy’, and the bribes he had been forced to pay to be released.
Mendoza had known about his activities as early as July 1587, reporting to Philip II that Walsingham judged Oseley to be one of the cleverest men he knew. Given this fact, it seems strange that he was allowed to buy his way out of prison. One possibility is that the Spanish chose to leave agents such as Standen and Oseley untouched, on the assumption that their despatches could only increase the sense of fear among the English. Since the existence of the Armada could hardly be concealed, it could be turned into a form of propaganda. Speculation was ended in May 1588 when Medina Sidonia’s report on his 130 ships was printed in Lisbon and Madrid in all its detail, from its sixteen thousand pikes and ten thousand corselets of armour to the mules which would pull its artillery pieces and the friars who would pray for its success. The agent who copied out the book for Walsingham noted that ‘in this fleet there goeth many English, some voluntaries and some for pay’. Three English pilots sailed on Medina Sidonia’s ship alone.17
Beyond a certain point, the size of the Armada was academic: no additional English ships and mariners could be conjured up to oppose it. A mo
re pressing question was where it intended to make landfall, and who might be there to greet it. Exasperated at the queen’s orders to ‘ply up and down’ every possible invasion route against both England and Ireland, a strategy which he described as a ‘thing unpossible’, Howard of Effingham vented his anger to Walsingham: ‘I would to God her majesty had thought well for it that she had understood their plot, which would have been done easily for money’. An official memorandum set out the reasons why the Spaniards might choose to land in the Isle of Wight, easily overrun and an ideal base to launch raids against the mainland. The Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire was fearful that his county was about to become the front line of the invasion. But Walsingham’s reply was adamant: ‘their whole plot and design is against the City of London, and they will bend their whole forces that way’. This was fact rather than opinion, ‘very certainly discovered’, though Walsingham did not explain how. The privy council sent a similar letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Sussex, explaining that ‘they do not think that the Spanish navy will or dare attempt to land on that coast’. Walsingham’s source was sufficiently trustworthy to justify the concentration of Elizabeth’s army at Stratford and Tilbury on the flat north bank of the Thames, which the Spanish would prefer (or so Elizabeth’s council of war predicted) over fighting their way through Kent.18
As for Parma’s welcoming parties of English Catholics, they entirely failed to materialise. Recusants were made to give up their weapons and a number of gentlemen were confined to quarters or imprisoned, but otherwise Catholics were treated with restraint and even a degree of dignity under Walsingham’s direction. The mayor and corporation of Reading were thanked for discovering a cache of ‘popish books’, which were ordered to be burnt, and some priest’s vestments which were defaced before being handed out to the poor of the parish. But the privy council also received numerous declarations of loyalty from among the Catholic gentry. Some sank their differences with the Church of England, attending ‘divine prayers and sermons’ for the duration of the crisis, while others offered to enlist as common soldiers in order to prove their devotion to queen and country.19
From the moment that the beacon fires warned of the Armada’s sighting off the Lizard on 19 July, the privy council sat in session at Richmond and St James’s. Walsingham was present at every meeting, sweating over the deployment of troops and weapons and communicating with the lords lieutenant in the counties. Keeping the navy supplied with gunpowder and ammunition soon became a major problem. ‘For the love of God and our country’, pleaded Howard in his letter of 21 July informing Walsingham of his first engagement with the enemy, ‘let us have with some speed some great shot sent us, and some powder with it’. The city of London was searched for any private stores of gunpowder, while the Governor of Upnor Castle was ordered to send his powder and gunners to the Earl of Leicester’s army in Essex. Decisions made by the council were passed down the military chain of command. Lieutenant of the Ordnance Sir Robert Constable was urged to send as many wheelbarrows as he could find, or else ‘twenty dozen of baskets or more’, to assist in strengthening the blockhouse which Henry VIII had built at Gravesend. Brewers in Dover and the Cinque Ports were set to work ‘with all expedition’ to provide beer for the navy. The master smith of the royal ordnance in Ireland was authorised to manufacture pikes and muskets, so long as ‘the Irishry might not be permitted to buy the same to arm themselves’.
More intimidating even than the scale of the Armada was the discipline with which it held together. At first contact with the enemy, the English had watched in awe as the Spanish reorganised themselves into a defensive crescent, a complex manoeuvre perfected against Turkish forces in the Mediterranean and in convoy duties in the Atlantic. The formation proved difficult to break. English gunners maintained an impressive rate of fire without making a decisive impact on ships or mariners. The San Lorenzo, an oar-and-sail galleass which subsequently ran aground at Calais, was found to be intact in its hull despite a bruising encounter with Martin Frobisher off Portland Bill. The stalemate was only ended by a freshening wind from the south-west on 25 July, pushing the Armada onward towards its intended rendezvous with the Duke of Parma. Walsingham responded rapidly, redeploying the English squadron in the Narrow Seas to patrol the waters off Dunkirk. Anchoring off Calais on 27 July, Medina Sidonia was horrified to find the Flanders army still six days away from embarkation. Now dangerously short of ammunition and powder, Howard was persuaded to use ‘hell-burners’ against the Spaniards. On the night of 28–29 July, eight English fireships were packed with pitch and set adrift among the Armada. Ordnance was charged with shot and primed to explode. Many vessels scattered in the ensuing panic, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of Drake and Frobisher. For a time it looked as if the entire Spanish fleet might be wrecked in the shallows off Zealand, but at the last moment a change in the wind allowed it to beat into the North Sea. On 2 August, contact with the Armada was lost.20
Remarkably, the peacetime business of the privy council managed to carry on amidst the mêlée. An investigation was launched into a house burglary in Worcestershire, and a fraud case pursued through the ecclesiastical Court of Arches. A dispute over lands in Cork and Limerick was dealt with at the same meeting which discussed the best strategy for defending the Thames. The council also found time to monitor the spiritual welfare of the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury was requested to lead his bishops and clergy ‘in public prayers to Almighty God, the giver of victories, to assist us against the malice of our enemies’. A book of Armada prayers was hastily printed for use in parish churches, recalling God’s past mercies in ‘preserving our most gracious queen, thine handmaid, so miraculously from so many conspiracies, perils and dangers’. Elizabeth was compared to King David, the slayer of Goliath. A broadside prayer for the armed forces called on God to ‘strengthen them with courage and manliness, that they may suppress the slights of Antichrist’.21
The surge of patriotism and propaganda reached its high-water mark in Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury on 8 and 9 August. The decision to concentrate royal forces in Essex had come late in the day, a response to the latest intelligence that the Armada was aiming for London. A letter from Burghley to Walsingham dated 19 July refers to five thousand foot-soldiers and a thousand horsemen ‘for defence of the enemy landing in Essex’, and Leicester was confirmed as captain-general four days later. Reinforced with troops from the coastal counties which the Armada had already passed by, the army that welcomed Elizabeth to the ‘camp royal’ at Tilbury had swollen to 16,500: equivalent in size to the one which had sailed from Spain. A boom of ships’ cables and anchored lighters was thrown across the Thames. Leicester described his soldiers to Walsingham as ‘forward men, and all willing to meet with the enemy, as ever I saw’, though how they would have coped in combat against experienced Spanish tercios and mercenaries is an unanswerable question.22
As the organiser of many of Elizabeth’s progresses around her kingdom, Leicester had seen for himself the invigorating effect which the queen could have on her subjects. ‘I trust you will be pleased with your poor lieutenant’s cabin’, he wrote in his letter inviting Elizabeth to review the troops at Tilbury. Her decision to accept his offer was braver than it may seem. The crowds of Londoners cheering the royal row-barges setting off from the privy stairs at Whitehall cannot have known which side was faring better in the atrocious weather now sweeping the North Sea. The Duke of Parma also remained an unknown quantity. The queen was having dinner in Leicester’s tent when a report arrived that Parma had set sail and ‘would be here with as much speed as he possibly could’. Walsingham picked up the same rumour a few days later, though was able to discount it on Drake’s advice that the neap tides would now prevent any troopships from being able to leave Dunkirk.
Walsingham was far from happy about the queen leaving London. Nevertheless, as he explained to Leicester, he decided ‘to steal to the camp when her majesty shall be there’ to see the assembled army for himself. Rec
ording Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury was a young poet named James Aske, who rushed to register a pamphlet turning its pageantry into verse. Elizabetha Triumphans depicted the Spanish Armada as the latest in a long line of ‘damned practices that the devilish popes of Rome have used ever since her highness’s first coming to the crown’. The rebellious northern earls and the Desmonds in Ireland, Francis Throckmorton and ‘proud Babington with all his wretched crew’, had all been destroyed like moths in a flame; yet the pope still plotted to destroy Christ’s flock. Now he had met his match in Elizabeth, cast variously as the Virgin Queen and a nursemaid suckling the English nation. Aske described the ‘sacred goddess of this royal soil’ arriving at Tilbury blockhouse to a salute of guns, the army falling to its knees and dipping its ensigns as her jewelled coach passed by. Elizabeth spent her second day riding around the camp on horseback, reviewing the troops with a marshal’s baton in her hand,
In nought unlike the Amazonian Queen,
Who beating down amain the bloody Greeks,
Thereby to grapple with Achilles stout,
Even at the time when Troy was sore besieg’d.
According to Aske, it was as she was heading back to her barge that the queen stopped to offer a parting message to her troops, delivered from her coach to Sergeant-Major Nicholas Dawtry. If she did claim to have the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ as later generations believed, then Aske made no mention of it. What he did describe was still a rousing piece of oratory: an offer to lead her troops into battle in person, marching ‘in the midst and very heart of them’ rather than cowering behind castles or palaces of stone. Nor is there any reason to doubt what she said. More than thirty years before, her sister Mary had donned armour to rally her forces against Wyatt’s rebellion; now Elizabeth could prove her leadership in a just and holy war. As Walsingham reported ruefully to Burghley, ‘your lordship seeth that this place breedeth courage’.23