The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Philip’s choice of bride offers an insight into the ruthless side of his character, for Elizabeth of Valois was already betrothed to Crown Prince Don Carlos, Philip’s deformed and mentally unstable son by his first wife. He made an unsuccessful attempt to find his son an alternative partner by foisting him on Mary, Queen of Scots—a bizarre coupling of one of the most desired and desirable women in Europe with one of its least attractive princes—and then went ahead with his own wedding. The marriage provoked Don Carlos to an understandable fit of jealous, violent fury and Philip ordered him restrained within his apartments and then imprisoned. His subsequent death has never been adequately explained.

  Isolated by circumstance and geographical distance from his siblings, Philip, “the least talkative of our kings,” had a long, lonely and often tragic reign. He married four times, always for dynastic reasons, “conquest by marriage” as he himself described it, but all of the four— Maria of Portugal, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth of Valois and his cousin, Anne of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II—died young. Apart from Don Carlos, who died in 1568, only one of his other sons, the future Philip III, survived infancy; in all, seventeen members of his close family died well before their natural term. Always devout, he was driven to seek even more consolation in his religion, and his convictions hardened as he grew older and the physical decline of his body became a constant reminder of his own mortality.2

  His vast library was dominated by religious books, he attended Mass daily and spent hours at his prayers, and in his later years he shunned the Court for the spartan simplicity of San Lorenzo de Escorial, the vast, forbidding complex of buildings, more monastery than palace and in appearance more fortress than either, that he had built in the Guadarrama mountains thirty miles from Madrid. It took twenty-one years to construct and swallowed over three and a half million ducats. Dedicated to St. Lawrence, the great building was designed to resemble the gridiron upon which the saint met his death, and was conceived on an epic scale with seven towers and 12,000 windows piercing the granite walls like the firing slits in a medieval castle. The interior was richly decorated with frescoes, paintings, sculpture, alabaster, marble, jasper, rose coral, rich hardwoods, precious metals and jewels from the Indies and the New World, but for all their opulence the rooms remained cold and austere. Save for the priests and the cowled, murmuring monks in the long, echoing corridors, the Escorial could have been a mausoleum.

  Fed by intermarriage and inbreeding, a strain of insanity ran through the Habsburgs—Philip’s grandmother “Joanna the Mad” and his son, Don Carlos, had fallen prey to it—and if he himself showed no outward sign of it, the Escorial was certainly the palace of an obsessive. At its heart was a great church—only St. Peter’s in Rome was larger— and Philip used his power and wealth to acquire over seven thousand relics of the saints for his reliquary within the Royal Basilica, to the great profit of those who furnished the suitably authenticated bone fragments, heads and even whole bodies, encased in golden caskets mimicking the body parts contained within them. With so many relics, their keeper could boast that there were only “three saints of whom we do not have some part or other here.” The Escorial was also a shrine to the Habsburgs and one by one the disinterred bodies of his forebears and relatives were brought there for reburial. His father Charles V, his mother Isabella, his brothers Don Juan and Don Fernando who both died in infancy, his half-brother Don Juan of Austria, his first wife Maria, his grandmother and his aunts, all were buried in the Escorial, and the tomb that would one day be his own last resting place had already been constructed.

  A concealed doorway next to the altar of the great church led to his modest suite of private rooms. There he worked ceaselessly in his tiny office, at a long narrow table facing a blank wall, as if even the view of a barren mountainside would be too much of a distraction from his duties as king. Plagued by arthritis in his later years—he was sixty-one in the year of the Armada—he spent his days and much of his long, sleepless nights at that table, scrawling annotations and terse orders on the endless stream of papers and documents that passed before him, unable to delegate even the most minute decisions to others. He found personal contact difficult and even distasteful, and preferred to receive the reports of his subordinates in writing rather than in audience—not for nothing has he been called “the Bureaucrat King”—but the ensuing mountains of papers flooding in from every part of his empire ruined his eyesight and his health. He was also christened “Philip the Prudent” by his people, but others might have chosen a less flattering sobriquet, and he shared one trait with Elizabeth of England: a tendency to defer difficult or painful decisions, sometimes for years, only to reach an abrupt and often capricious and illogical solution. “As often happens with irresolute men when they have been forced to a decision, they are as too hasty as before they were too slow.” Even in the baking heat of high summer, as the cicadas raised their dry choruses from the branches of the stunted trees, Philip remained deep within the Escorial, shielded by layer upon layer of cold stone, poring over his state papers or on his knees praying for the success of his enterprises. 3

  Philip took pride in his title of “Most Catholic Majesty.” He had established the Inquisition to root out heresy at home and believed it was his divine mission to extirpate Protestantism from Europe by any means necessary—when attending a royal auto-da-fé at Valladolid he had even announced, “If my own son was a heretic, I would carry wood to burn him myself”—but he was also shrewd enough to balance his crusading zeal with the requirements of the broader interests of the Habsburgs and Spain. By far the most powerful ruler in Europe, he was a meticulous planner and skilled manipulator of events, using Spain’s vast wealth to bribe or suborn others to his will. At the time of the Armada he had been ruler of his country for more than thirty years. Few of his advisers could match his experience and knowledge, and fewer still would have dared to query the wisdom of an absolute, divinely appointed ruler. His marriage to Mary Tudor and the brief periods in the 1550s when he had been resident in England also made him feel uniquely well qualified to comment on the country. “I can give better information and advice on that kingdom and on its affairs and people than anyone else.”

  Whether his decisions were right or wrong, Philip’s courtiers, officials and military commanders were soon made to realize that the King “did not welcome initiative, even when it succeeded, and he never excused failure to carry out his orders, even when they were impossible.”4 His belief in the rightness of his causes also bordered on the pathological. “You are engaged in God’s service and in mine; which is the same thing,” he wrote to Don Luis de Requescens, and though he often turned his powerful intellect to the smallest detail, time and again in his most extravagant and far-reaching campaigns—not least in that of the Armada—he chose to rely on God to provide the miracle that would guarantee success. Despite his faith, and the daily hours he spent bending his arthritic knees—“his old disease, aches in the bones”—in prayer upon the cold stone floors of the Escorial, God did not always deliver the victories he sought. 5

  In a portrait painted around ten years before the Armada, Philip chose to be depicted in the austere black clothes appropriate to a priest or a monk, holding a rosary in his left hand. His grey eyes give his gaze a cold and penetrating look, and the only sign of luxury is the lace at his throat and cuffs, and the emblem of the order of the Golden Fleece on his chest. He rarely dressed in any other way, ate plain, simple food, and shunned much of the pageantry and ceremony of a royal court. It was a mark both of his seriousness and of his dislike of ostentation, and there could not have been a greater contrast with the extravagant ceremonial, opulent dress, lavish banquets and grandiose royal progresses of Elizabeth of England.

  Relations between Spain and England had been steadily deteriorating ever since Mary Tudor’s death. England’s merchants and traders had a festering grievance with Spain dating back to a decree of Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and confirmed in the Treaty of Tordesil
las the following year, granting to Spain all lands, discovered and unknown, “west and south” of the forty-second meridian west of Greenwich, creating a Spanish monopoly of the trade and mineral wealth of the New World just discovered by Columbus. Portugal received lands to the east of the meridian (later adjusted to a point 370 leagues west of the Azores after Portugal’s discovery of Brazil), allowing it to exploit Africa and the spice trade of the Far East.

  The annexation of Portugal in 1580 thus gave Spain a theoretical monopoly on the trade of the whole world beyond Europe. In practice England had been breaching it ever since John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1496, within three years of Pope Alexander’s pronouncement, and when Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Englishmen no longer saw any need to pay even the slightest heed to papal pronouncements. Henry’s alliance with Charles V had ensured that there were few disputes with Spain during his reign, but relations soured almost from the moment of Elizabeth’s accession and English breaches of Spain’s God-given trading rights grew in magnitude and frequency.

  The Hawkins family had been overseas traders since the time of Henry VIII, and John Hawkins made the first of several voyages to the New World in 1562, establishing the “triangular trade” by carrying English goods, principally cloth, to Guinea in West Africa, then filling his ship with 500 African slaves—some captured by his men but most prisoners bought from native chiefs—and selling them to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean, in exchange for trade goods, sugar, hides and pearls, which were then sold back in England. That voyage and the next in 1564–65, financed by unlicensed joint-stock companies, each returned a profit of 1,000 per cent and others were soon following in his wake, setting a pattern of English mercantile and colonial development that was to continue for centuries.6

  Hawkins grew rich on the trade, and was so unashamed of the prime source of his wealth that his coat of arms included the figure of a chained slave. The English slavers were far from unique; Spain enslaved Muslim prisoners captured in the Mediterranean and North Africa, the Turks and Moors did the same with Christian prisoners, and the galleys of Portugal, France, Venice and the Papacy were also full of slaves and convicts, but the activities of the English slavers and traders further heightened tensions with Spain. In the absence of any coherent and consistent strategy from the Crown, speculative syndicates of London merchant adventurers, courtiers, ship-owners, sea-captains and often the Queen herself became the prime and sometimes the only arm of English foreign policy. They carried out three-quarters of English trade—smugglers contributed a significant proportion of the remainder—but also undertook privateering and piracy, reconnaissance and exploration, and colonization and acts of war.

  Spain both resented and depended on these foreign merchants, traders and smugglers; it was incapable of supplying its New World colonies from its own resources. The “colonial and quasi-colonial goods” imported from the New World and the East were cheap to buy and commanded very high prices in Europe, and the profits to be made attracted more and more English traders. Some even settled in Seville and San Lucar and made at least an outward show of adopting the Catholic faith, but it was inevitable that they would seek ways of securing their own lines of supply in Africa, Asia and the New World rather than paying inflated prices to Spanish middlemen, and their constant attempts to expand their trade were a potent source of friction.7

  Philip took furious reprisals against attempts to breach the Spanish monopolies. A party of French Huguenots who had settled in Florida, hoping both to escape religious persecution in their homeland and to profit from trade and piracy against the treasure ships whose homeward course to Spain lay just offshore, were confronted in 1565 by a powerful Spanish force, officered by, among others, Don Diego Flores de Valdes and his cousin Don Pedro de Valdes. The Huguenots were persuaded to surrender on the promise of fair treatment and were then slaughtered. But to Philip’s impotent fury, English privateers such as Hawkins, Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake—“the master thief of the unknown world”—continued to create havoc by plundering Spanish treasure ships and possessions on the high seas, in the Caribbean and on the coast of South America. Their activities had the tacit support of the Queen, who took the lion’s share of the spoils in return. Drake’s plundering caused the Spanish treasure fleet to remain cowering in port and, deprived for a year of his wealth from the New World, Philip was unable to pay his Army of Flanders. The soldiers mutinied and rumours spread that the King might even be forced into bankruptcy. Spain was also heavily dependent on imported grain and timber, pitch and cordage from northern Europe, the Baltic and Scandinavia, and the pay and supplies for the Army of Flanders could only be carried by sea. In the face of the depredations of English, Dutch and Huguenot privateers, most ships from the Baltic and Scandinavia had to take the long route around the north of Scotland rather than the direct route through the Channel, and shipping plying between Spain and Flanders was vulnerable to interception and seizure.

  Although Spanish hostility towards England had thus far stopped short of open war, Philip supported intrigues and plots against Elizabeth, and she in turn aided the Dutch rebels in the Spanish Netherlands and the besieged Huguenots fighting Spain’s clients in the Catholic League in France. Now war between England and Spain could no longer be avoided. It would be a battle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but the motives of the champions of the Protestant and Catholic religions were secular as well as spiritual. Philip’s appetite for fresh thrones showed no sign of being satiated; his motto Non sufficit orbis—the world is not enough—was an accurate statement of his ambitions. His religious duty to restore the heretics of England to the true faith would also fulfil his political and dynastic ambitions, opening the way to the complete reconquest of The Netherlands and perhaps to the eventual rout of Protestantism in Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia. His dream of a Spanish Atlantic empire stretching from the Baltic to the New World would then become a reality, and with the wealth and military might of Europe under his domination even the Turks might finally be defeated and brought into the Holy Catholic Church. The long victory march, begun with the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, would at last be complete.

  Elizabeth’s faith was pragmatic; she had stated that she did not want to “make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts” and early in her reign she had remarked that there was only one Jesus Christ and one faith, and the rest—the schism that had divided the Christian world—was a mere “dispute over trifles.” She settled an argument over whether the bones of a Catholic or a Protestant divine should be reinterred in Oxford Cathedral—one had been dug up and thrown out by Protestant bigots under Edward VI and the other by Catholic bigots under Mary Tudor—by ordering the canons to bury both sets of remains together, and she would never have gone to war in the name of religion. She hesitated for a long time over military aid to the Dutch rebels, and her reluctant support of them and the Huguenots in France was born out of realpolitik, not conviction. Her policy—insofar as she had one—was “characterised by Protestant ideology and religious terminology, but she was primarily interested in commerce and national security.”

  She also despised those who sought to break the sacred union between ruler and subject, lest it set an example that Englishmen might follow. “We will not maintain any subject in any disobedience against the prince, for we know that Almighty God might justly recompense us with the like trouble in our own realm.” Even when they opposed her, Elizabeth’s first instinctive loyalty was to monarchs like Philip, not their rebellious subjects. She banned pageants in London attacking and ridiculing Philip, and even when relations had deteriorated to the point of open war, she still forbade any personal abuse of Philip; attacks on any monarch weakened all of them. But defeat for Spain and victory for England in the coming conflict would not only secure Elizabeth’s throne and yield huge economic and political dividends by throwing open the new worlds of the Americas, South Africa and Asia to British sh
ips and traders, it would safeguard the Protestant religion in its north European heartlands and embolden Philip’s opponents, even in Catholic countries, to flex their own muscles against Spanish hegemony.8

  An invasion of England was first mooted by the Duke of Alba after the English seizure of a shipment of Spanish gold in transit to Flanders in December 1568. Five ships, carrying 160,000 ducats in pay for the Spanish Army of Flanders, were pursued and scattered by French Huguenot privateers and sought shelter in Plymouth, Fowey and Southampton. From a Spanish point of view, their arrival could hardly have been worse timed, for on the third of that month the mayor of Plymouth, William Hawkins, had received news of a Spanish attack on his brother John’s trading fleet, including two of the Queen’s galleons. After his fleet was damaged in a storm, John Hawkins had put in for repairs to San Juan de Ulua in modern Mexico, a “wretched makeshift” harbour, shielded from storms only by a shingle bank, but one of Spain’s principal ports for the shipment of silver. Although foreign shipping was officially barred from all Spain’s territories in the New World, Hawkins was always careful to pay the taxes and saw no reason for alarm when a fleet led by the Spanish viceroy, Don Martin Enriquez, entered the harbour. Enriquez proclaimed peaceful intent, but then launched a treacherous surprise attack. Hawkins, Francis Drake and a handful of men escaped in two small ships, but the remainder of the fleet was captured and most of those left behind were tortured and killed, some in an auto-da-fé. Two of the handful of survivors, Miles Philips and Job Hortop, later described how the Spaniards had whipped and flogged them and “hung them up by the arms upon high posts, until the blood burst out of their finger ends.”