Elizabeth
Page 13
Unlike Philip, a control freak who invariably required his instructions to be followed to the letter, Elizabeth was flexible enough to allow her commanders some degree of initiative. Another compelling difference between the two rulers is that she chose only military leaders she knew fairly well and she often liked to brief them in person. Philip, by contrast, barely knew his commanders, to whom he would send couriers riding through the night with written orders dictated to his team of some twenty secretaries.
Compared to Elizabeth’s palaces, the Spanish Court was a cold, forbidding, austere world. Philip’s Catholic piety was becoming so intense that by now he operated almost entirely from the confines of a cell-like study-cum-bedchamber at the heart of his recently finished palace-monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, outside Madrid. Designed to resemble Solomon’s Temple, this vast site, complete with large gardens containing ‘sun passageways’ meant for convalescing monks, had a cloister and a massive basilica next to the royal apartments where Mass was regularly sung. On either side of the high altar were places already earmarked for the gilded bronze tombs of the members of Philip’s family. So close was Philip’s bedroom to this part of the basilica, he practically slept above the place appointed for his tomb. The king’s bedroom, itself filled on two sides with small images of saints, directly overlooked the high altar: an interior window allowed Philip to hear and watch the services without being observed. The walls of the small study off the bedroom, where he spent long hours on his paperwork at a tiny desk, were hung with images of the Virgin. In the private marbled and jasper-lined oratory leading off the bedroom, he prayed by candlelight before Titian’s deeply moving scene of the Passion, Christ and the Cyrenian. Fray José de Sigüenza, librarian, historian and prior of the Escorial, who worked there for many years and had seen its foundations laid, said that ‘by night, the pious king Don Philip spent long periods of time there contemplating how much he owed to the Lord who carried such a heavy cross on his shoulders for the sins of man and for his sins.’32
On Howard’s advice, Elizabeth transferred the command of the squadron sent to patrol the eastern coastline to Lord Henry Seymour, who was assigned fourteen royal ships and twenty-six auxiliaries. This was because Drake, correctly, guessed that Philip had all along aimed at a land invasion and that his strategy would be to save the Armada ships primarily for use as a shield for Parma’s troops so that they could cross the Channel. For that reason, Drake argued, it would be safer and more effective if his and Howard’s ships combined to guard the Channel’s western, and therefore windward, approaches, to confront the Spanish warships there.33
One of Howard’s chance remarks makes it plain how far Elizabeth, rather than her advisers, was in overall control. He received his final orders from the queen at an audience on 13 April at Hackney, to the east of London. Afterwards, he wrote uneasily to Burghley, ‘I would have been very glad to have seen your Lordship myself, but I could not obtain leave of Her Majesty, and yet it were fit that I should make your Lordship acquainted with Her Majesty’s resolution touching the service on the seas, which, God willing, I will do before I depart, if no sudden alarm come, which I fear hourly.’34 Elizabeth was not simply taking charge, she was still freezing out Burghley from the highest level of decision-making, even though more than a year had passed since the sending of Mary’s death warrant to Fotheringhay.
• • •
No one in England knew for certain when, where or even whether the Armada would reach its intended destination. Late spring gales and the slow pace of his supply ships forced Medina Sidonia to make first for the safety of the port of Coruña on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain. Unfortunately for him, a violent storm dispersed much of his fleet before he could enter port and it took him weeks to regroup. Progress across the Bay of Biscay and along the French coast was painfully slow. In these days of anxious waiting, false alarms – several raised by teenage pranksters – led to some premature firing of the warning beacons placed along the south coast of England. Terrified families fleeing from the coastal villages to stay with relatives living inland in the mistaken belief that the Armada had landed would only compound this confusion.
Elizabeth could do no more than watch and wait. Her fate and that of her country lay in the hands of her commanders, chiefly Howard and Drake. Burghley, meanwhile, drew up a gloomy statement of the kingdom’s desperate shortage of money. ‘A man would wish,’ he wrote phlegmatically, ‘if peace cannot be had, that the enemy would no longer delay, but prove, as I trust, his evil fortune.’35
His wish would soon be granted. At about four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, 19 July, the first Spanish vessels were sighted off the Lizard in Cornwall. As luck would have it, Howard and Drake were briefly off their guard, making essential repairs to their ships in Plymouth. Possibly, Drake may have been playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe, but he certainly would not have finished the game when the news of the sighting arrived, as legend claims.
The queen’s plan for mustering her land forces, drawn up largely by Burghley and Leicester in June, came instantly into effect. First, the regular county militias, on standby since May, were assembled at agreed rendezvous points, with orders to ‘impeach the enemy upon his first descent’. Next, some eight thousand troops from the counties closest to London were put under the command of Leicester, as the queen’s Lieutenant-General, and ordered to gather at Tilbury. Reinforced by three hundred gunners and pioneers, they were given orders to attack if any of Parma’s barges attempted to sail up the Thames estuary and land there. To fortify the estuary, Leicester stretched out a boom built from chains, ship’s cables and old ship’s masts across the river where it began to narrow.36 Forts, mainly earthworks but complete with gun platforms and landing wharfs built of brick, were hastily thrown up at Tilbury and Gravesend so as to face each other on the opposite banks of the river – not just to attack enemy vessels but also to make it easier for Leicester’s army to be ferried across in safety to the Kentish side if Parma landed soldiers there. Then, as the Armada neared the Isle of Wight, 26,750 more troops were ordered to march to London under the command of Lord Hunsdon, ready to defend the queen and the Court if the Spanish ships landed. (In the event, Hunsdon’s force scarcely came into being, since events in the Channel intervened.)37
‘Julio’ betrayed the full extent of these preparations to Mendoza but, by the time his information reached Philip, the Armada had been defeated.38 On the evening of Friday the 19th, the English emerged gingerly from port, sailing against the wind, and the next morning they pushed forward out of Plymouth Sound.39 Around three o’clock that afternoon they caught sight of the Spanish fleet some distance ahead. By Sunday morning, the Spaniards were within range of the English gunners. In the ensuing battle, Howard and Drake – whose ships were smaller and faster – outsailed and outgunned their opponents, falling on the Spanish rearguard without permitting them to close, pounding them for three hours with superior artillery. In a decision much criticized in Spain, Medina Sidonia chose to abandon one of the largest of his front-line ships, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, commanded by Don Pedro de Valdéz, after it was involved in a collision and dismasted.40
As ‘Julio’ informed Mendoza, the citizens of London were petrified, imagining that Spanish soldiers would be marching in at any moment. The shops were closed, heavy iron chains were hung across the streets and Elizabeth left Richmond Palace to seek refuge in the much more compact St James’s Palace, across the park from Whitehall, which had an escape tunnel and was easier to defend. Spanish prisoners captured by Drake on Sunday, among them Don Pedro de Valdéz, were rushed up to London on carts and paraded through the streets in an attempt to allay the Londoners’ fears.41
Tuesday morning saw another sharp engagement off Portland Bill, and there was a third off the Isle of Wight on Thursday, during which the Santa Ana, the flagship of the Spanish second-in-command, Juan Martínez de Recalde, was set upon by smaller English ships and so badly damag
ed that it ran ashore near Le Havre. Dispatching an ensign in a longboat to warn the Duke of Parma to be ready to embark his men and munitions near Dunkirk, Medina Sidonia continued to press on past the Solent, one of the few places on the south coast of England where a large fleet could anchor in relative safety. It was a fateful decision: no secure port lay beyond that point, and none of his pilots was familiar with the hazardous waters of the Flemish coast.42
On the evening of Saturday, 27 July, the Armada anchored off Calais to await news from Parma, shadowed by the English. When at last it came, it was disastrous: Parma was delayed and his troops could not be assembled and embarked for another week. More seriously, his flat-bottomed barges, originally designed for river use, were found to be quite unsuitable for heavy seas. If that were not sufficient, the Dutch were blockading the Flemish coast with their much nimbler flyboats. And yet it hardly made much difference. Medina Sidonia now had to face up to a critical defect in Philip’s plans. Even if the Spanish fleet could somehow control the deep water between the Kent coast and Flanders, that still left ten miles of shoal water where the larger Spanish vessels could not go but through which the English could move with relative ease. Philip’s inflexible orders that he should cover Parma’s troops but make no independent landing until the flat-bottomed barges had been escorted safely across the Channel condemned the Spanish plan of attack to certain failure.43
Sunday was quiet until shortly before midnight, when the English directed eight improvised fire-ships towards the enemy fleet, their skeleton crews jumping to safety straight after lighting the fuses. In the men’s haste to flee, many of the Spanish ships lost their hawsers and anchors. Medina Sidonia was driven north-east along the coast towards Dunkirk, abandoning his largest, most heavily armed galleass, the flagship San Lorenzo, which ran aground off Calais, where it was quickly looted.44
Philip’s strategy was doomed: with a freshening wind and the tide driving the Spanish ships northwards and with the English close behind them, the Armada could never return to Calais; and, once the Spanish ships entered the North Sea, they could never link up with Parma’s forces. The decisive battle, lasting a whole day, took place on Monday, 29 July, off Gravelines. Seymour’s ships reinforced those of Howard and Drake, so that for the first time the entirety of the rival fleets became locked in deadly combat. Despite intense bombardments from both sides, the Spaniards did not manage to board or inflict significant harm on a single English vessel. Stocks of ammunition were running dangerously low, but the English were nonetheless able to sink at least three Spanish ships and drive several others ashore. Casualties on the Spanish side were heavy. Despite these losses, Medina Sidonia at first believed he had lived to fight another day, but a fierce gale blew his ships perilously close to the Flemish sandbanks. On Tuesday, confronted by even stronger winds and heavier seas, he made the decision to attempt what one of his critics called a ‘voyage of Magellan’: he meant to bring the main body of his fleet back to Spain by sailing it up the North Sea and around the coasts of northern Scotland and western Ireland, leaving the slower ships behind to fend for themselves.45
• • •
Partly to boost the flagging morale of his soldiers in the long, anxious days before news arrived from the fleet, partly with an eye on Elizabeth’s place in history, the Earl of Leicester asked her to inspect his troops in the camp at Tilbury. In his invitation, issued on the day the Armada lay at anchor off Calais, he warned her to keep well away from the coast but assured her that ‘by coming, you shall comfort not only these thousands but many more that shall hear of it.’46 His plan was genuinely inspired: a lover of stage plays and a notable patron of the theatre with his very own company of actors, he meant from the outset to choreograph Elizabeth’s visit so as to reinvent her for ever as the Warrior Queen she had never really been. Little did he know how successful he would be.
It took just over a week to make the arrangements. On Monday, 5 August, he wrote to her again, rejoicing that she had consented to come and declaring that suitable lodgings – ‘a proper sweet cleanly house’ – had been found for her within easy riding distance, where she would be just as safe as at St James’s.47
Arriving at Tilbury by barge with her bodyguards on Thursday the 8th, Elizabeth landed about noon at the wharf beside the fort. Whether she was then led on horseback to view the camp, which was pitched on the summit of a nearby hill, as Burghley afterwards claimed, or rode immediately to dinner at her lodgings at Ardern Hall in Horndon-on-the-Hill, four miles away, is impossible to say. Either way, Ardern Hall had been turned into a temporary ‘palace’ over the past four days: the yeomen and ushers of the Privy Chamber had been busy supervising the cleaning of the house and the moving of furniture, bedding and kitchen utensils.48
Next morning, Elizabeth returned on horseback to the camp to inspect her troops. Leicester rode out to greet her. Possibly, she was mounted on a white stallion: there is a portrait of what purports to be this very same horse, now at Hatfield House, commissioned by Burghley and handed down to Robert, his younger son. Nothing is known about what she wore, despite a proliferation of legends depicting her as a latter-day Boudicca, or as Britomart from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. A later report that she wore a cuirass and carried a silver truncheon while dressed in a white gown and sporting ostrich feathers in her hair is pure invention.
Possibly she watched a military march-past; more likely, she rode around the camp with Leicester at her side to view the soldiers arrayed in their different companies. According to Burghley, who made a special trip to Tilbury to bring Elizabeth news of the interrogation of the captured Don Pedro de Valdéz, Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, carried the sword of state before her. If so, Leicester would have had to bite his tongue, since the tall, dark, handsome Ormond had once tried to unseat him: in 1566, when Leicester was briefly in disgrace, Ormond had even taken the favourite’s place beside the queen’s chair. For some unknown reason, she nicknamed him ‘Tom Duff’ or ‘Old Lucas’.49
With her review of the troops completed, Elizabeth now addressed them. What she said has been hotly contested ever since. There are at least six different versions of this famous speech, all claiming authenticity, and several of them based only on second- or third-hand reports. ‘Julio’ is no help here. As soon as word arrived in Paris that Parma had failed to link up with the Armada as he was supposed to do, the treacherous Stafford changed sides again and began feeding so much false intelligence to Mendoza that his pay was cut.50
It is impossible to say now whether Elizabeth spoke off the cuff or merely created the impression that she did so. Her habit when delivering important speeches to Parliament was to prepare a draft in advance to shape her thoughts, master it, then put it away.51 Much ink has been spilt over her exact words. The most authentic version of the speech is the handwritten one now in the British Library, copied down either at the time or shortly afterwards by Dr Lionel Sharpe, Leicester’s chaplain. Sharpe was ordered to transcribe the speech verbatim as the queen was delivering it, so that he could repeat it the next day to those who had been unable to hear it. (This was an age without microphones or amplification.)52
‘My loving people,’ Sharpe’s handwritten version of the speech begins, ‘I have been persuaded by some that are careful of my safety to take heed how I committed myself to armed multitudes for fear of treachery: but I tell you that I would not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people.’
Let Tyrants fear: I have so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom and for my people, my Honour and my blood even in the dust.
Elizabeth then delivered her punchline: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomac
h of a King, and of a King of England too, and take foul scorn that Parma, or any Prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.’
She concluded with promises of tangible rewards to her troops for their loyalty and affection. ‘To the which,’ she said, ‘rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will venture my royal blood. I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of your virtue in the field.’
I know that already for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and I assure you in the word of a Prince, you shall not fail of them. In the mean time my Lieutenant-General shall be in my stead, than whom never Prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject. Not doubting but by your concord in the camp and valour in the field and your obedience to myself and my general we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God and of my kingdom.53
Sharpe, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and an accomplished rhetorician in his own right, may conceivably have edited or rewritten what he heard of the speech on the day it was delivered to give it greater impact. Suspicions of this nature have been much encouraged by his observation that, besides repeating the speech next day, he was also required ‘to send it gathered to the Queen herself’, meaning he was asked to supply her with a fair transcript, conceivably for publication.54
Almost certainly, however, Sharpe’s version of the speech comes closest to the one Elizabeth delivered on the day. Its preference for the first person singular instead of the royal ‘we’ and its gendered metaphors are typical of the style she adopted in her most intensely passionate moments. Just as telling is the emphasis she placed on ‘the word of a Prince’ as a guarantee of her good faith. As a young woman, she had read with her tutors the first and third Orations of Isocrates to Nicocles, the young king of Cyprus. She often said that a crucial passage on the duties of rulers from the first oration was permanently etched on her consciousness: ‘Throughout all your life’, it read, ‘show that you value truth so highly that a king’s word is more to be trusted than other men’s oaths.’55 Most persuasive of all is the stress the queen placed on the trust of her ‘faithful and loving people’ as her greatest ‘strength and safeguard’, a direct echo of the rhetorical trope she had first played on thirty years before while giving an audience to Philip II’s ambassador, the Count of Feria.56