by Neil Hanson
Philip hated Sixtus and resented any papal intrusion into his own affairs or those of his subjects, but he needed his support and forced himself to write a personal letter to the Pope in which he was at pains to stress that he was taking up the burden of the Enterprise of England with the greatest reluctance. “I am extremely grieved . . . as she [Mary] would have been so appropriate an instrument for converting those countries to our holy Catholic faith. Since God, however, has ordained otherwise . . . He will provide in other ways for the success of His cause.” Olivares was now to show Sixtus a genealogical study commissioned by Mendoza and prepared by two prominent English Catholic exiles, “proving” that Philip was the most legitimate claimant to the English throne by virtue of his descent from John of Gaunt. This required the claims of all the surviving descendants of the dozen monarchs who had ruled England since Edward III to be set aside. Feeble though Philip’s pretensions to the English throne were, they were certainly more substantial and legitimate than those of Henry VII, and he had successfully invaded England in 1485, seized the throne and founded the Tudor dynasty that Philip now hoped to end. “Right of conquest” remained a powerful and widely recognized basis for legitimacy.20
Olivares was to press Sixtus to confirm Philip as the true heir to the English throne, “his claim being a more valid one than that of any other claimant . . . besides the double disqualification of bastardy and heresy under which they all suffer.” “You will impress upon his Holiness that I cannot undertake a war in England for the purpose merely of placing upon that throne a young heretic like the King of Scotland”—but with thrones enough, Philip would immediately cede the kingdom to his twenty-one-year-old daughter, the Infanta Isabella, though that concession was qualified in a way that suggested Philip might change his mind at some later point. “The only scruple which assails him is whether he is justified in depriving the Prince, his son, of a kingdom which not only has descended to him by right, but for the recovery of which, revenues of the Crown of Spain will have been alienated to a rather greater value than the worth of the acquisition.”
When an agreement with Sixtus was eventually reached, the artful Olivares had been able to blur the question of the succession. The Pope failed to realize the significance of a bland but crucial clause inserted in the middle of the rambling document, and “the matter . . . was so wrapped up that he passed over it without cavil or difficulty . . . In the end it was left to Your Majesty and the clause was so worded that Your Majesty might appoint the Prince or the Infanta.” Olivares was also to draw the Pontiff’s attention to “the well-known fact” that Mary had made a will that “left His Majesty heir to the Crown, this being the reason of her death and of the approval of it by the King of France.” He then requested a papal contribution of one million ducats in gold towards the cost of equipping an invasion force for the Enterprise of England, citing the cost to Philip of the “Holy War” to restore The Netherlands to Catholicism (and to Spanish rule) as one of the reasons why Sixtus should underwrite a substantial part of the cost of invading England. Philip certainly needed the contribution; the cost of the Armada and the enlarged Army of Flanders—approaching 50,000 ducats a day in total—was emptying his treasury, and had already forced him to veto plans to strengthen the defences of Spanish possessions in Africa and the New World against further raids by English privateers. However, Olivares warned Philip that “Your Majesty must give up all hope of secrecy from the moment the Pope signs the warrants for the money, however much he may swear to say nothing. Other Popes might drop hints but he simply reveals everything.” 21
The garrulous Sixtus took care to nurture his image as an unsophisticated man of peasant stock, uncouth in manners and speech, and prone to violent outbursts, “throwing the crockery about furiously,” but his lack of education and boorish manner concealed a shrewd and calculating mind, and the unguarded look he directs out of a surviving portrait in the Vatican suggests a man of vulpine cunning. He was occasionally lavish in his praise of Elizabeth’s courage and independence, and often caustic and disparaging about Philip’s habitual caution, taunting his ambassador that “The King of Spain is the greatest prince in Christendom, yet he is negotiating for peace with a woman who insults him and will never give up Holland and Zeeland.” He also told the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Gritti, that “the King goes trifling with this Armada of his, but the Queen acts in earnest. We are sorry to say but we have a poor opinion of this Armada and fear some disaster.” But he was also implacably dedicated to the recovery of heretic individuals and nations to the Catholic faith—he had been Inquisitor General at Venice from 1557 to 1560, and had pursued his task with such fervour and ferocity that the Venetians had requested his withdrawal. In his new and greater mission, only Philip had the military power to aid him. There was no more stubborn barrier to the success of the Counter-Reformation than England. English money funded the Dutch rebels and the Huguenots in France, and was also the guarantor of the safety of the Protestant princedoms of Scandinavia and Germany. If England was restored to the fold, the rest of Protestant Europe might follow.
Sixtus had continually prompted Philip to intervene against Elizabeth. In August 1587 he urged him “not to delay” and the following month sent him a golden sword, just as Pope Pius had done to the Duke of Alba fifteen years earlier. It was a symbol of the crusade in God’s name that Philip was about to undertake but, in the face of appeals for financial support for the Armada, Sixtus also showed a parsimony that even the English Queen would have envied. He begrudged every penny he spent, even though he stood to recoup a handsome return on his investment if the Enterprise of England succeeded. If Elizabeth was deposed and the old religion restored, Sixtus’s million ducats would be a mere trifle against the torrents that would once more begin flowing into the Vatican coffers from England, yet he displayed even more than his usual ill-temper at having to part-fund Philip’s attempts to add yet another dominion to his already overpowering array. He sought to make his support conditional on Philip’s agreement that the new sovereign of England would be neither a Spaniard nor a Spanish puppet, but, whatever may have been said to reassure him on that account, it was inconceivable that Philip would take the massive risk of attacking England without claiming the throne as part of the spoils of victory.22
Sixtus also made an implicit attack on Philip’s hubris in claiming to act as God’s instrument. “No sin is as heinous in the eyes of the Lord as the usurpation of the divine jurisdiction.” At first he promised nothing towards the cost of the Armada, arguing that it served Philip’s own vested interests more than God’s, and when he at length made the pledge of a million ducats in gold, the terms were composed with typical cunning. The sum would be payable only when the first Spanish boots trod English soil; “until the men are landed it will be impossible to get anything out of his Holiness.”
Defeat or failure for the Armada would therefore cost him nothing, but if the outcome of a battle between the English and Spanish fleets was unpredictable, there was almost no one in the whole of Europe who doubted the result of a clash between the crack Spanish Army of Flanders and the raggle-taggle militias and Trained Bands who “would sooner kill one another than annoy the enemy” but who were all that Elizabeth could put in the field. If Parma succeeded in landing his battle-hardened, professional soldiers on English soil, most observers, including many Englishmen, expected the invasion to become a rout. The only delays to the remorseless advance of the Army of Flanders on London would be occasioned by the attendant slaughter, raping and pillaging. Lord Howard wrote to Burghley, “God send us the happiness to meet with them before our men on the land discover them, for I fear me a little sight of the enemy will fear the land men much.”23
Philip’s suspicion of the Vatican made him require an undertaking from every cardinal that Sixtus’s pledge would be honoured even if the Pontiff died before the invasion had taken place, lest their suspicions that he was “forwarding the enterprise mainly out of regard to his individual advan
tage” rather than his Christian zeal should lead them to refuse. He was right to be concerned. The cardinals echoed Sixtus’s hostility towards Spain to such an extent that the Venetian ambassador remarked on the absence of any “sign of that fervent zeal for the extirpation of heresy and the salvation of souls” that he would have expected on the eve of a crusade against Protestant England.
However, the million ducats was duly transferred to a bank— Olivares forwarded the warrant to Philip on 30 July 1587—where it was held in escrow against notification that the invasion of England had begun, but the involvement of so many loose-tongued cardinals in the decision-making process removed the last hope of keeping the Armada’s target a secret. When the Dutch captured and interrogated the nephew of one of those cardinals, he disclosed the full details of the papal contribution and the Armada’s timetable and destination. The information was at once passed to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, but it was disregarded for several crucial months because it was flatly contradicted by the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, who continued to supply Philip with English secrets and Elizabeth with Spanish disinformation: “The Queen had not decided anything about sending out the fleet as the intelligence sent by her ambassador here has cooled her.” Even when the Armada had already been sighted off the English coast, Stafford’s dispatches from Paris continued to insist that it had never left harbour.24
CHAPTER THREE
The Master of the Sea
During her lifetime, with her own active encouragement, a cult of the Virgin had developed around Elizabeth I. She remained unmarried, claiming that she was wedded to her people, and many of her subjects—though inevitably fewer than her courtiers claimed or she herself believed—worshipped her with a similar fervour to that devoted to the Virgin Mary before the breach with the Church of Rome. Her concern to promote and control her public image has an undoubted resonance today, and the cult of Elizabeth has gained many new adherents in modern times, when she has been hailed as England’s greatest monarch ever, an omniscient blend of patriotism, statesmanship, diplomacy, high principle and low cunning.
Like her father, she was pragmatic in matters of religion, and science and literature benefited from her tolerance, but her Court was a snake-pit of favourites and sycophants—“a glittering misery, full of malice and spite,” “it glows and shines like rotten wood”—and her government was venal and corrupt. “Her vanity was notorious, her tongue sharp, and, despite her declared intention to ‘live and die a virgin,’ sexual jealousy soured many of her personal relationships.” She was also intemperate in the extreme, and regularly slapped and punched her advisers and ladies in waiting. “When she smiled it was pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bask in if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.” So monumental was her vanity that any artist aspiring to paint her portrait had to base it on a standard template issued by Court officials. Artists’ studios were liable to be searched and any unauthorized portrayals were “by her own commandment knocked in pieces and cast into the fire.” Our best idea of what she really looked like comes not from the scores of official portraits but from the descriptions written by foreign visitors to England.
The French King, Henri III, complained that “The Queen of England always thinks that everyone must be in love with her,” and courtiers were expected to be so dazzled by her beauty, even when withered by age, that they would have eyes for no other woman. It was a pretence that must have been harder and harder to maintain, for in later years she was an alarming prospect. Her balding pate was concealed beneath a lurid red wig and her face showed the ravages of age and smallpox beneath a thick mask of death-white make-up. Her cheeks were sunken, her skin “wrinkled, her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to, for their too great use of sugar).” She used mouthwashes to try to conceal her foul breath and when she spoke quickly, covering her gap-toothed mouth with her hand, her speech was so slurred that her courtiers had difficulty in understanding her.1
Despite all this, Elizabeth continued to demand the flattery and flirtatiousness she regarded as her due. Her courtiers obliged with fulsome and increasingly ludicrous compliments to “youthful, beautiful, virginal Gloriana,” and those who allowed themselves to be distracted by other women felt the lash of Elizabeth’s rage. Sir Walter Ralegh forfeited the leadership of an expedition to the Indies that he himself had largely funded and was also imprisoned for a dalliance with one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour. Women other than her ladies-in-waiting were excluded from the Court—Elizabeth wanted the undivided attention of her courtiers, who, if they had the temerity to marry at all, were forced to banish their wives to the country, while they fawned upon and flattered Elizabeth. She required unquestioning devotion and obedience from the cradle to the grave—even on her deathbed, her oldest lady-in-waiting, Kat Carey, was forced to remain at Court, separated from her husband, because Elizabeth would not allow her to leave. Her need for favourites and sycophants may help to explain why she retained traitors such as the Staffords, Sir James Croft and Lord Henry Howard in her inner circles for years, and entrusted Sir Edward Stafford and Croft with two of the most crucial posts in the Armada years, when she must have known that all were at least sympathetic to Spanish aims and at worst—as was in fact the case—in Spanish pay.
Elizabeth was certainly a remarkable woman, talented and well educated, fluent in several languages, but she was also grotesquely vain, mean of purse and spirit, capricious, choleric and fundamentally incapable of taking difficult, and sometimes any, decisions. Some—male— historians have attempted to attribute Elizabeth’s chronic indecision in the 1580s to the onset of the menopause and her emotional turmoil over her failure to marry and have children to secure the succession. But Elizabeth was nothing if not consistent; she had been showing the same vacillation and prevarication throughout her reign. She spent twenty years agonizing over the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, and “her hesitations about her marriage may have been chiefly due to her inability to make up her mind, which she carried to extraordinary lengths.” Elizabeth had learned to dissimulate young, as a vulnerable rival at the Court of Mary Tudor, and she continued the habit even when circumstances did not require it. Her foreign policy was one of “procrastination, evasion and simulated innocence,” and she continually “vacillated when faced by important decisions: unless panicked, she could delay for years.”2
Arguing backwards from results to supposed causes, some of Elizabeth’s modern admirers have argued that despite her limited means, she maintained consistent, clever strategies in domestic and foreign affairs, alternately wooing and rebuffing foreign monarchs and diplomats, playing one off against another and employing her talent for obfuscation to conceal her true intents. Yet there is no real evidence that Elizabeth ever conceived such a strategy at home or abroad, and it is equally easy to argue that everything she did throughout her reign was simply a knee-jerk reaction to events as she floundered from crisis to crisis with no clear destination in mind. As with all expenditure not directed towards her own aggrandizement, she spent as little as she could, as late as she could; and to turn her cheese-paring into acts of brilliant statesmanship requires too great a leap of faith for many to make.
Throughout the period of covert hostilities between Spain and England, two factions had been competing for Elizabeth’s ear. The group led by her Lord Treasurer, Burghley, always a conservative voice in her Council, had little appetite for an aggressive policy of expensive military interventions and argued that Spain could be held at bay purely by diplomacy and defensive alliances and by strengthening England’s land and sea defences. “So would England become impregnable and she on every side be secure at home and a terror to her enemies.”
Leicester and Walsingham, two of “the principal devils that rule the Court,” led the interventionist faction, urging an aggressive policy to expand England’s overseas trading
and privateering activities at Spain’s expense, and arguing that to allow the seemingly inevitable Spanish reconquest of The Netherlands to proceed undisturbed was to guarantee the same fate for England. They believed that an aggressive alliance of Protestant states supporting the Dutch rebels and the French Huguenots offered the best guarantee of security, but Elizabeth was reluctant to intervene militarily in Europe, partly because of fear of the costs and partly, perhaps, after her humiliation in France in 1562. She had sent troops and money to support the Huguenots in return for the right to garrison the ports of Le Havre and Dieppe, until Calais— lost to the French under Mary Tudor—could be restored to the English Crown. Her troops had been roundly defeated, and at the Treaty of Troyes she had been forced to abandon for ever and without compensation the English claim to Calais. Any territorial ambitions she might have harboured in Europe had been ended there and then, and instead of direct intervention, her policy, “if the defensive expediency of 1572–85 can be dignified with that term, attempted to reconcile conflicting strategic, commercial and religious interests at minimum cost.”3
The Treaty of Blois, signed on 19 April 1572, had united the historic enemies, France and England, against Spain. “If Spain will now threaten . . . it will be afraid hereafter, seeing such a wall adjoined.” However, four months later, on 24 August, Catherine de’ Medici conspired with her son Henri and the young Duc de Guise to arrange the shooting of the Huguenot Admiral de Coligny, and then covered her tracks by persuading her feeble-minded elder son, King Charles IX, to sanction the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre to save his own throne from a fictitious Protestant plot. Some 8,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris and perhaps twice as many in the country as a whole. The political consequences were disastrous for France, leaving the Treaty of Blois in tatters and fomenting civil war at home, but when Philip of Spain received news of the massacre, he “began to laugh” and in high good humour sent congratulations to Catherine de’ Medici on having such a son and to Charles on having such a mother. Pope Gregory called the massacre a hundred times more welcome than the outcome of the battle of Lepanto, and ordered fireworks and the striking of a commemorative medal in celebration.