by John Guy
Had Philip joined with the pope and the Jesuits in an effort to overthrow Elizabeth at that moment, he would merely have reinforced the right of Mary and her Guise relatives to rule over the whole of the British Isles, which was hardly in his interests. Everything changed shortly before the regicide at Fotheringhay, when Mary revised her will. Naming Philip as her dynastic heir, she abruptly disinherited her son, James: that is, if James remained true to the Protestant faith in which her hated enemies in Scotland had brought him up.1 This he seemed likely to do as, shortly before Leicester had embarked on his command in 1585, Elizabeth had decided to ‘procure’ – in other words ‘bribe’ – the susceptible James ‘to depend’ on her and not on Spain.2
James had signed a league with Elizabeth, ratified in July 1586, and since then he had been in English pay, receiving a generous annual pension of £5,000 (some £5 million today).3 On top of this, Elizabeth, for the very first time, was prepared to recognize him as the rightful king of Scots. She wrote him emollient letters in her own hand addressed to Mon bon frère, le Roy d’Écosse. She even dangled before him the prospect of what she had thus far always refused to concede: the possibility of a future claim by dynastic right to the throne of England – providing that he stayed Protestant and behaved himself.4
In Rome the new pope, Sixtus V – famous for his mistrust of Spain and tendency to throw crockery about when crossed – urged Philip to ‘prove’ himself by performing some glorious deed in defence of God’s church and of papal authority. Among the pope’s suggestions was a plan to overthrow Elizabeth by converting James to Catholicism and installing him in her place. Much irked, Philip ordered his ambassador to the Vatican, Count Olivares, to make it clear to Pope Sixtus that he would gladly join him in deposing Elizabeth, but never to benefit James. He would rather, he said, put on the English throne his eldest (and only surviving) daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia.5
Confident that France would not interfere, as the struggle over the disputed succession there was so violent that Henry III no longer felt secure in Paris, Philip began assembling at Seville, Lisbon and Cádiz the individual components of what would soon become his great fleet, or Gran Armada. At that point, his information on Elizabeth’s plans was sketchy and out of date, but by the spring of 1587 Bernardino de Mendoza, Spain’s ambassador in Paris, had recruited a new spy, who was to operate under the code name of Giulio, or ‘Julio’.6
For four hundred and fifty years, the role of ‘Julio’ and the industrial scale of his espionage during the Armada crisis – as revealed in Mendoza’s secret dispatches – lay undiscovered.7 In fact, ‘Julio’ was none other than Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France. Since 1899, his name has been on a long list of potential suspects, but only modern electronic searching has had the power to cross-correlate several hundred references and so confirm his true identity. To suborn Stafford was a spectacular coup, bringing sweet revenge to Mendoza for his expulsion from England after the Throckmorton Plot. Over the next eighteen months or so, Stafford was to pass on a mass of highly secret intelligence about Elizabeth’s diplomatic and military plans, receiving regular payments of between 500 and 2,500 gold escudos (£187,000 and £937,000 today), which helped to pay off his gambling debts.
Stafford may have been motivated by more than money. His resentment at Elizabeth’s bullying tactics after he married Douglas Sheffield still rankled. Beyond that, he hoped to secure a prominent role for himself in a post-Elizabethan order should a Spanish invasion plan succeed. Walsingham suspected his treachery. For several months, he had been intercepting Stafford’s correspondence, even opening and resealing his letters to his mother, Dorothy, undeterred by her proximity to the queen. But Stafford was crafty. He took careful steps to cover his tracks, providing Mendoza with the occasional piece of false information. And, without hard evidence, it was impossible for Walsingham to arrest the queen’s ambassador, the son of one of her most trusted confidantes.
• • •
In March 1587, Sir Francis Drake, the English naval prodigy whom King Philip feared most, persuaded a reluctant Elizabeth to lend him four royal navy ships and two pinnaces to reinforce some twenty armed merchantmen he had assembled. He offered to do whatever he could to disable Philip’s naval power and, for the moment, she agreed. Specifically, his plan was to blockade the Iberian coast and to pillage ships arriving from the East or West Indies.
Walsingham, eager to prevent ‘Julio’ from leaking this classified information, delayed informing Stafford of Drake’s mission for almost three weeks.8 By then, a dramatic turnaround had taken place. Drake’s flotilla had barely left Plymouth when Elizabeth issued fresh instructions countermanding those she had given earlier. After brooding intently on the prospect of outright war with Philip, she had decided to pull back and sue the Duke of Parma for peace. Drake, meanwhile, was strictly ‘to forbear’ to enter any of Philip’s ports, or to pillage his towns or harbours or attempt ‘any hostility’ whatsoever upon his lands. All he might still do was to intercept and attack on the high seas Philip’s shipping to or from Asia and the New World.9
Elizabeth’s revised commission never reached Drake. Sent to Plymouth on 9 April, it arrived a week too late. By then, her peace overtures to Parma had been favourably, if cautiously, received.10 In consequence, Drake’s daring attack on Cádiz on 19 April profoundly annoyed rather than pleased her. In a masterly assault later dubbed ‘the Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard’, Drake penetrated the port’s inner harbour under the camouflage of French (or Dutch) flags. He sank or burned over thirty Spanish ships, then cheekily replenished his own fast-diminishing supplies from Philip’s well-stocked warehouses. Sailing off to the Azores, the customary rendezvous of the Spanish king’s New World and East Indian fleets, before making a final, perilous dash into home waters, he captured a hugely valuable prize, the San Felipe, a very large and rich Portuguese carrack laden with a cargo of porcelain, silks and velvet, pepper and spices, a small quantity of jewels and some slaves.
Elizabeth was deeply embarrassed by Drake’s success. What she wanted at this moment was not war but peace. Newly discovered documents in the archives in Brussels recording Parma’s side of the negotiations make it crystal clear that – subtle and seductive as the idea may have appeared to the Victorians – she was never a warrior queen.11 For her, fighting Spanish soldiers in the Netherlands, even attacking enemy shipping on the high seas, was just about acceptable, especially when it came in direct retaliation for Philip’s aggression. What she could not bear to contemplate – and what now seemed all too imminent – was the idea of the whole of northern Europe convulsed in battle and a Spanish army landing on English soil. Cheered on by the prognostications of Dr John Dee, who like Burghley and Leicester she had called upon several times before to cast horoscopes, she believed peace was attainable.12 Even if the price was high, it was the only sure way to quench a firestorm that could topple entire kingdoms and governments. In almost complete denial of the fact that Philip had already decided to invade her country, come what may, she convinced herself that, deep down, peace was really what he wanted, too.13
Burghley and Walsingham thought otherwise. Both anxiously urged Elizabeth to prepare for war rather than waste precious time on diplomacy. But she dug in her heels. She sparred tetchily with them both, still barely on speaking terms with them after the events at Fotheringhay. She resolutely refused to order the musters and naval exercises they advised, because she did not want to lay herself open to a charge of bad faith in suing for peace. Once Drake had returned, he was ordered to mothball his ships.
Confined to bed for a fortnight with a debilitating attack of gout (from which he would increasingly suffer as the years went by), Burghley knew that Parma would profit from Elizabeth’s inaction. The Duke, he warned, would use the peace talks to lull her into a false sense of security, while continuing to mobilize for war. As Lord Treasurer, Burghley was concerned that the Exchequer’s cash
reserves were spent, but Elizabeth rejected any attempt to replenish them. When he sent her a written protest, she slapped him down, berating him as ‘old and doting’.14
As ‘Julio’ drily informed Mendoza, Burghley was forced to concede that there were matters she alone could decide, ‘like the beheading of the Queen of Scotland’. After almost thirty years as queen, she had finally taught her chief minister that a woman ruler was capable of taking her own decisions, right or wrong, and that they were not to be challenged. Walsingham was less compliant. He bitterly complained that Elizabeth ‘would only follow her own will, which would bring about her ruin and that of all her councillors’.15
Elizabeth proposed that a peace conference be held at Emden, in Lower Saxony.16 She suggested that King Frederick II of Denmark and Norway mediate between her and King Philip, and she used Andreas de Loo, whom she had employed before, to broker the preliminary negotiations in Brussels. When she was an adolescent, one of her Latin and Greek tutors had been Danish, and she felt a bond with the country as a result.17 Parma, however, rejected these proposals, not least as Frederick was a Lutheran. The remaining months of 1587 were wasted in fruitless haggling, much of it over the proposed venue for the talks.18
Deeply pessimistic as to the outcome, Burghley grumbled to de Loo that ‘the only foundation which Her Majesty maketh to proceed in this treaty’ was Parma’s reputation as a man of honour.19 For his part, Leicester, remembering his bruising experiences in dealing both with the Duke and with the Dutch, was horrified at what he saw as the queen’s gullibility. ‘What a treaty is this for peace’, he fulminated, ‘that we must treat altogether disarmed and weakened and the king [of Spain] having made his forces stronger than ever.’20
Fearful of a looming catastrophe, Leicester took his courage in both hands. On or about 7 November, he confronted Elizabeth face to face and urged her to prepare for a military confrontation with Spain. He begged her to unshackle Drake and let him build up a strong reserve of ships. They quarrelled furiously; so much so that the embers were still smouldering over Christmas. At eleven o’clock at night on Boxing Day, Elizabeth could contain herself no longer. Suddenly losing her temper, she berated her favourite, lashing out at him with her arms and fists and telling him that ‘it behoved her at any cost to be friendly with Spain.’ When Leicester reminded her of the damage Drake had successfully inflicted on Philip’s ships with a relatively small force, she countered, realistically perhaps, that for all his prowess as a mariner, Drake had never engaged in an open battle at sea. ‘I do not see’, she snapped, ‘that he has done much damage to the enemy, except to scandalize him at considerable loss to me.’21
• • •
On the evening of 2 February 1588, Candlemas Day, shortly before seating herself in her Presence Chamber at Greenwich Palace to watch a comedy by the dramatist John Lyly about the Man in the Moon, Elizabeth ordered a messenger to ride post-haste to her allies in Holland.22 He was to deliver a letter she had dictated earlier, strongly denying rumours of a secret accord with Parma. She was, the letter somewhat disingenuously declared, greatly wronged ‘that such false and malicious bruits should be given out’.23
She protested too much. Scarcely a month later, to the dismay of the Dutch, she formally opened peace talks with Parma. Representing her were five commissioners, led by the Earl of Derby. Beginning at Ostend and then moving to nearby Bourbourg, Derby sat down with Parma’s representatives to discuss her proposals.
Elizabeth was determined to retain control so refused to let Burghley make more than a handful of minor amendments to her instructions. Derby’s orders were to secure a general truce with Spain covering the whole of the British Isles. Nothing, however humiliating or dishonourable, was to stand in the way of such a truce. Belatedly, after intense pressure from the States General, she asked for religious toleration for the Dutch for ten (later reduced to two) years and demanded that Spanish troops withdraw from the Netherlands. But, with Philip denying that he had ever authorized Parma to begin this diplomacy, all the Duke could do was offer to suspend Spain’s attacks on the queen’s auxiliary forces in the Netherlands for a brief interval. Even then, his spokesman warned ominously, ‘It should be lawful in the mean time for the Queen of England to invade Spain and for the Spaniard to invade England out of Spain and the Low Countries.’24
The peace talks foundered. They were bound to: what Elizabeth never knew was that ‘Julio’ was revealing in advance to Mendoza, and thus to Parma, every diplomatic move she intended to make, and also reporting Walsingham’s alarm at the poor state of English war preparations.25 Still she refused to change course. Even when Parma admitted that Philip would never agree to a general truce, she ordered Derby to resume the talks without preconditions. The new documents in Brussels confirm that she was still suing abjectly for peace as late as 20 June, a month after the combined forces of the Spanish Armada, numbering some 140 ships, finally sailed out of the port of Lisbon into open waters, presumed to be heading north towards the English Channel.26
• • •
Philip had appointed the same man he had commissioned to plan his Gran Armada, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, to lead it, but in January 1588 a typhus epidemic in Lisbon carried away the Marquis and hundreds of his men. To replace him, Philip chose the Duke of Medina Sidonia. For all his efforts to excuse himself on grounds of ill health, inexperience and poverty, Medina Sidonia was in fact very well qualified. A practical, strong-willed general who had been involved in the planning from the outset, he had a good theoretical knowledge of navigation, handed down from his father. It was true that he lacked combat experience but, according to the Venetian ambassador, he was the only one of Philip’s men to have kept his head when Drake attacked Cádiz. His main drawback was an extreme vulnerability to seasickness.27
Elizabeth believed she had exposed Philip’s duplicity when he ordered his fleet to set sail before the peace talks were over. In reality, she had stood little chance of avoiding war. Parma, as Burghley suspected all along, had been keen to string out the diplomacy, but only to give himself more time to prepare for his critical role in the invasion plan.
The Spanish strategy aimed at a land campaign, not a naval war. It required Parma to ferry a pioneering task force of twenty-six thousand crack troops from the Army of Flanders across the Channel in a flotilla of some three hundred flat-bottomed barges. At the heart of the plan was an order from Philip that the ships of the Armada should not attempt to make an independent landing on the south coast of England: their role was to patrol the waters between the Flemish coast and the Isle of Thanet, off the coast of Kent, to provide cover for Parma’s barges. On board the main Armada fleet were 18,500 troops, mostly raw recruits, ferried from Spain. But they were Philip’s reserve force: only after Parma’s troops had landed in England were they to disembark. The combined armies were then to march at breakneck speed through Kent towards London. Success depended on the precise coordination of these events.
After Christmas 1587, Parma warned Philip repeatedly that this plan was too complicated and that, although work on the barges was well advanced and he was mustering troops at Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort, the king’s timetable was too inflexible. The Army of Flanders, Parma explained, was far from ready to spearhead an invasion. Besides, it would be risky for his men to attempt to board their barges before Spanish troops had captured a large enough port on the Dutch coast. The sandbanks were treacherous, the tides perilous and the Dutch were experts at harrying enemy ships in shallow coastal waters from the relative safety of their flyboats.
Elizabeth was less dogmatic. While she stubbornly refused to muster a land army until she at last received confirmation that the Armada had been sighted, she had begun to make naval preparations earlier. On 20 December, even as her quarrel with Leicester was festering, she decided to gather her fleet for possible defensive action along the south coast. Uncertain whether Philip’s target would be England, Scotland or Ireland and so ill-equipped
to prioritize the threats she faced, she instructed the Lord Admiral, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, to make plans to thwart all of them.28 A gentleman of the Privy Chamber since 1558 and the son of her first Lord Chamberlain, Howard had found his fortunes transformed in 1563 when he married Katherine Carey (better known as Kate), Lord Hunsdon’s eldest daughter.* In Mary’s reign, Kate had been one of Elizabeth’s maids, and in 1560 she was made a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber when she was barely fifteen. A year later, as a prank, the queen famously disguised herself as Kate’s maid so that she could sneak out to watch Robert Dudley shoot at Windsor. The disappearance of the Howard of Effingham papers makes Kate’s life impossible to reconstruct but, like other favoured gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, she had custody of some of the queen’s jewels, and in 1579 Bernardino de Mendoza had seen her presiding over the table of the ladies of the Privy Chamber.29
Elizabeth instructed Howard to ‘ply up and down’ the North Sea, ‘sometimes toward the North and sometimes toward the South’, to guard against an attack by Parma’s forces on the east coast of England or Scotland. ‘Our servant Drake’, meanwhile, was to take the rest of the fleet to the West Country, where he would ‘ply up and down between the realm of Ireland and the west part of this our realm’. If Parma’s army should attempt to cross the Channel, Howard should do whatever he could to intercept and repulse it. But if the Armada were to arrive first, then he should at once send reinforcements to assist Drake.30 ‘Julio’ informed Mendoza (with a number of unavoidable inaccuracies, since his own information was incorrect) that Howard and Drake had assembled a force of 160 ships (the correct number was 105) at Plymouth by 30 May (the correct date was the 23rd). Of these, twenty were royal navy ships, the rest auxiliaries, meaning armed merchantmen hastily requisitioned.31