The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  The carnival atmosphere in Rome, Spain and other Catholic realms caused a wave of revulsion, hatred and panic throughout Protestant Europe, uniting the Dutch rebels under William of Orange, and pushing the Protestant states and princedoms into closer alliance. Walsingham now saw “less peril to live with them [the French] as enemies than friends,” but after Charles IX died on 30 May 1574, Elizabeth renewed the Treaty of Blois with the new king, Henri III, and dabbled in marriage negotiations with his younger brother, François of Valois, Duke of Anjou, while simultaneously sending money, munitions and mercenaries to the embattled Huguenot leader Henri Bourbon of Navarre. When she delayed paying part of the money, Walsingham complained, “The whole course of Her Majesty’s proceedings shows that she has no power to do things in season as may work her security and therefore we must prepare ourselves for the cross.” Sir Walter Ralegh was equally dismissive, albeit in retrospect: “Her Majesty did all by halves.”4

  Her attitude to the Portuguese pretender Dom Antonio was also confused. She welcomed him to her Court, subsidized him and issued regular promises that “she would miss no opportunity of ruining his enemy and hers” by installing him on the Portuguese throne, but Mendoza and Philip, in a direct letter to Elizabeth, made clear how any military support for the Pretender would be interpreted. “If Dom Antonio leaves her country for any of my dominions or to injure any of my subjects, I shall understand it to be a declaration of war.” “When peace, so often shaken by you, has been quickly broken, I shall not lack force to meet the consequences.” Dom Antonio was also the target of Spanish assassination attempts. Philip offered a reward of “25,000 ducats, or even up to 30,000 . . . Get it done at once . . . If he can do it by giving him a mouthful of something it would be less dangerous to the people concerned than if it were done by steel,” but none of the attempts succeeded.

  On receipt of Philip’s letters, Elizabeth had dropped any thought of direct support for the Pretender. When his French-backed fleet was defeated by Santa Cruz, Dom Antonio, having sold the Portuguese crown jewels to raise funds, was forced to resume an impoverished exile in England, where Elizabeth kept him short of money and a virtual prisoner. She made vague promises to him but essayed no action on his behalf and merely retained him as a potential threat to Philip and a possible bargaining counter. Fearing that the peace negotiations Elizabeth was conducting with the Duke of Parma would lead to his being handed over to Philip, Dom Antonio tried to escape England with the aid of London merchants sweetened with grants of future trading privileges, but his ship was intercepted by the Lord Admiral, who reportedly realized the identity of his prisoner only when he recognized his pet dog. Dom Antonio was sent back to London and closely watched to prevent a further escape. Even when it became obvious that England was to be attacked by Spain, Elizabeth still prevaricated over open support for him. In January 1587 Leicester, Walsingham and Howard persuaded her that she should advance Dom Antonio “three years of his pension of £2,000 a year” and provide him with ships and soldiers, so as “on no account [to] miss such an opportunity of troubling” Philip by provoking an insurrection in Portugal, but Elizabeth changed her mind once more and vetoed the plan.5

  In October 1584, the Privy Council had considered methods of defence against what was now seen as an inevitable Spanish attack. As usual, her advisers were split between intervention and purely defensive actions and Elizabeth wavered between the two, avoiding direct military action but sanctioning deniable raids on Spanish shipping and possessions by English privateers. These conferred the triple benefit of hampering Spanish military preparations, depleting Philip’s Treasury and filling Elizabeth’s own coffers. By November 1584 Sir Francis Drake was ready to put to sea with a fleet of fifteen great ships and twenty pinnaces, but by then Elizabeth had yet again changed her mind and Drake was left to cool his heels for nine months. Meanwhile her half-hearted attempts to form defensive alliances were hampered by the inadequacy of the people she chose to represent her. She “often delighted to send out second-rate chamber gentlemen who, compared with the representatives of the Spanish, French and Imperial Crowns, or the Papal and Venetian courts . . . were inadequately equipped with languages and social graces.”

  Philip had already considered and dismissed the possibility of an English-led coalition of hostile states. Although William Harborne, an envoy of Elizabeth to the Ottoman Empire, had persuaded Sultan Murad III that no material benefit would accrue to him from renewing his armistice with Spain, he also had nothing to gain from further hostilities when the Turks were already fighting a war with the Persians. Even if Murad did attack Spain while the Armada was at sea, Philip’s Mediterranean galley fleets remained intact to face the threat. France was riven by civil war and “in no condition to help, owing to their internal feuds; the rebels in Holland and Zeeland care more for their own interests. The German Protestants are at most able to create some slight diversion which cannot avert the blows which the Armada will deliver. The Danish king . . . who could have reinforced the English fleet, is dead.” “That news,” Philip noted with satisfaction, “has caused hope to fade in England of receiving help from that quarter.” “As for the King of Scotland, no help can be looked for from him, for the blood of his beheaded mother is not yet congealed. One might rather expect that the Scottish forces would themselves move to attack the English from their side. Thus there appears to be no possibility of considerable reinforcements or help reaching the enemy from any source whatsoever.”6

  In her desperate search for allies, Elizabeth had even tried to woo the Duc de Guise from Spain’s embrace, but her attempt was an embarrassing failure. He replied to her overtures that his aim was to see her “ruined and hanged, and if a hangman could not be found, he himself would willingly put the rope around her neck.” He added that any further messenger from Elizabeth would be thrown from the highest window of his castle. There were few other potential allies, even among the Protestant states. The death of the King of Denmark was a particular blow, for he was sympathetic to Elizabeth and commanded a powerful fleet. He “was to have been present at the meeting of Protestant Princes in Germany,” but his death left his young son on the throne and he and his advisers had no appetite for foreign adventures until the succession had been assured.

  The Swiss had already reached an accommodation with Philip and would not be lending or hiring their fierce fighters to Elizabeth, and though many of the princedoms of Germany were Protestant, most of them, led by the conservative Elector of Saxony, preferred to co-exist with the Austrian Habsburgs and avoid provocations to the other Catholic powers. Many of their subjects were mercenaries, offering themselves at the spring Frankfurt hiring fair, but it was a purely commercial transaction, and they were as likely to sign for a Catholic as a Protestant employer. The men of the Palatinate, under their militant, proselytizing Calvinist leader John Casimir, were the exceptions and pursued an aggressive anti-Catholic policy, but the Palatinate and the Dutch rebels were Elizabeth’s only certain allies. Casimir had no navy and could offer little aid against the Armada, but the Dutch fleet of heavily armed, shallow-draught “flyboats” might yet prove invaluable assets in the maze of shallows and shoals off the coast of Flanders through which Parma’s invasion force would have to pass.7

  The prospect of open war with Spain moved closer in 1585. On the last day of the previous year Philip of Spain and Henri, Duc de Guise, had signed the secret Treaty of Joinville, giving de Guise 500,000 Spanish ducats a year, in return for a pledge to use the forces of the Catholic League to subvert Henri III and prevent Henri of Navarre from ever succeeding to the French throne. News of the treaty reached the ears of Walsingham and Elizabeth by March 1585. Such a development threatened to confront England with a wall of Spanish-ruled or -dominated territories stretching from the Rhine to the Adriatic. As a result, she was persuaded to cement her loose bonds with the Dutch rebels into a formal alliance and suspend all trade with the Spanish Netherlands.

  Spanish retaliation was swift. In May 1
585 Philip issued an appeal for wheat to make up the deficiencies of the previous year’s poor harvest. Scenting large profits, English merchants were among those to comply, only to find that all foreign ships in Spanish ports were being seized and their cargoes confiscated. The attempt to embargo one English ship, the Primrose, in Bilbao was a fiasco. The captain and crew overpowered the soldiers sent to impound the ship and put to sea with the Spanish official himself on board, still carrying Philip’s written instructions to welcome English crews to allay their suspicions and then imprison them and requisition their ships, armaments and victuals for the Armada.

  Philip’s actions turned the screw of escalation again. Even those English courtiers, ship-owners and merchants who had previously opposed hostilities with Spain—there were rich profits to be made in trading with the wealthiest but also one of the least productive nations on earth—were now roused to call for reprisals, and for once Elizabeth acted without prevarication or delay. On 7 July she authorized the issue of “letters of marque, mart or reprisal” to “merchants and others” who claimed to have incurred losses of “ships, goods and merchandises in Spain, Portugal or elsewhere in the King of Spain’s dominions.” Any holder of letters of marque was authorized to “set upon by force of arms and take and apprehend upon the seas any of the ships or goods of the subjects of the King of Spain” to the value of the losses suffered at Spanish hands. English soldiers were also sent to The Netherlands to stiffen Dutch resistance to Parma’s armies, and Walsingham drew up a plan “for the annoyance of the King of Spain,” in which Bernard Drake was dispatched to sink or seize the Spanish fishing fleet on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, further breaching Spanish claims of sovereignty of the Western Seas, while his brother Francis was to be set loose upon the coast of Spain.

  Francis Drake was born in Devon, the son of Edmund Drake, a poor, Puritan “hedge preacher” who had been forced to flee his home during Mary Tudor’s religious purges. He went into hiding on St. Nicholas’ Island [now Drake’s Island] in Plymouth Sound and eventually made his way to the Medway in Kent where he eked out a bare existence living “in one of the hulks on the river, in considerable poverty and no little danger, since he read prayers and preached religious sedition to the seamen in the Queen’s ships on the Medway.” As a young boy, Drake sailed in cargo boats operating between the Medway and Antwerp, but in time he became one of a number of young men serving in the Plymouth house of his kinsman William Hawkins, a prosperous merchant and seafarer with a profitable sideline in piracy. When still in his teens, Drake was sailing the oceans in company with his older cousin, John Hawkins.

  His father’s faith and a burning sense of injustice and hatred for Catholics stayed with Drake throughout his life, and he was also fuelled by an equally potent desire for revenge against Spain. In 1568, he had been in command of the Judith, part of John Hawkins’s fleet, when it was attacked at San Juan de Ulua. Hawkins later reported that “the barque Judith, the same night forsook us in our great misery,” and though there was no other public criticism of Drake’s actions, his honour was tarnished, and “in Sir Francis was an insatiable desire of honour, indeed beyond reason.” His purse was also emptied, for he had invested all his money in the voyage. “All is lost, save only honour,” he wrote to the Queen, who had also lost her investment and her ships.8

  Drake returned to the Caribbean in search of plunder in 1570, 1571 and 1572, and in those raids and several more during the following decade he rebuilt his reputation and revenged himself many times for the indignities he had suffered, but his hatred of Philip of Spain and the treacherous Spaniards who had attacked him at San Juan de Ulua burned as bright at the end of his life as it had done in his youth. In his eyes, the campaign against Philip, “the wolf with the privy paw,” was God’s battle against the forces of Rome, but it was also the means by which Drake’s self-aggrandizement could continue. He had already taken a rich harvest of plunder from Spanish treasure ships and possessions, but his appetite was far from sated. He often carried letters of marque from the Crown, authorizing him to carry out reprisal raids on Spanish shipping, but he was always likely to take every prize he could find, whether or not English losses merited it. The gifts he made to the Queen and the cash dividends she received on the sale of the plunder he brought home were almost invariably sufficient to overcome any objections that he had exceeded his brief.

  He first forced himself upon the attention of Elizabeth—and of Philip—in 1573. On Sunday 9 August, “about sermon time,” he and his tiny crew returned to Plymouth in triumph with a captured Spanish frigate and a hold full of silver, the result of a raid in which, in concert with French Huguenots and a group of cimarrones (black slaves who had escaped from their Spanish masters in Panama), he had seized a mule train carrying silver near Nombre de Dios. He had been wounded in the leg during the raid and walked with a limp for the rest of his life, but his exploits made his fortune and his reputation, and he secured financial backing for his next voyage from a prominent group of courtiers, led by Walsingham.

  All nations, including Spain, saw reprisals as a legitimate means of obtaining redress for wrongs done to them, and English privateers were following in the footsteps of the French and Scots who had pioneered raids on Spain’s New World territories and shipping as far back as the 1520s. The first significant English attack on Spanish shipping for profit was by Robert Reneger, who plundered the treasure ship the San Salvador off Cape St. Vincent in 1545. Spain impounded English ships in Andalusian ports in retaliation and Henry VIII then welcomed Reneger at Court, putting an official seal of approval on his piracy and signalling the end of the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Henry also hired out his “great ships” to merchant adventurers and privateers, and though His Majesty’s Shipkeeper sailed with them, the merchants supplied their own captains and crew. Mary Tudor’s accession and Spanish marriage brought a temporary halt to attacks on Spanish shipping, but as relations deteriorated during Elizabeth’s reign the privateers became more and more active. John Hawkins, “the most respectable of pirates,” led the way, but his privateering and piracy was a way of making extra profits from his semi-legitimate trading voyages, not an end in itself. Like many of the later generation of privateers, Hawkins’s young cousin was uninterested in trade. Ever since his first voyage to the Spanish Main, Drake’s main purpose had been to seize Spanish ships and raid settlements for the prizes, plunder and ransoms that they could yield.

  Drake began his greatest voyage on 15 November 1577, leading a flotilla of five small ships carrying a total of just 164 men. Even his flagship, the Pelican, was of only 100 tons burthen. He had let it be known that he was planning to make for Guinea or the Mediterranean, but instead sailed for Brazil and Cape Horn on a voyage that was partly a reconnaissance mission for a future colonization attempt and partly a privateering raid. After being battered by storms, one ship turned for home and another foundered even before they entered the Straits of Magellan, but Drake carried on in the Pelican, renaming it the Golden Hind, and raided the shipping and the Spanish colonies on the virtually undefended Pacific coast of South America. At Tarapaza he “found by the seaside a Spaniard lying asleep, who had lying by him 13 bars of silver . . . we took the silver and left the man.” Further north he took a far richer prize, a ship carrying 26 tons of silver bars, “so much silver as did ballast the Golden Hind.”

  He crossed the Pacific, made landfall at Java and filled the remaining space in his holds with spices from the Moluccas, including six tons of cloves, half of which had to be thrown overboard along with eight cannon after he ran aground on a reef off the coast of Celebes (in modern Indonesia). He then returned home by the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, arriving back in Plymouth on 26 September 1580. Only 57 of his original crew had survived and Drake’s wife had given him up for dead, but he brought home £600,000 in gold, silver, jewels, silks, cloves, ginger and pepper. The investors received £47 for each pound they had speculated, a dividend of almost 5,000 per cent. The Queen�
�s share—over £160,000, almost as much as her total annual income—was enough to clear her foreign debt and leave a surplus of £42,000, which she invested in the newly formed Levant Company. He also gave her the pick of the treasures he had stolen, including five enormous emeralds that she incorporated into a new crown.9

  The low-born Drake rose rapidly in Tudor society and enjoyed flaunting his new-found wealth. Even aboard ship he was “served on silver dishes with gold borders and gilded garlands . . . he carries all possible dainties and perfumed waters . . . dines and sups to the music of viols.” He bought a substantial estate, Buckland Abbey, and after his first wife, Mary, died in 1582 or 1583, he married a well-born and much younger woman, Elizabeth Sydenham, on whom he lavished almost as many jewels as in the tribute he paid to the Queen. A portrait painted at the time of their wedding shows a beautiful and poised woman, dressed in the height of court fashion and richly arrayed with the spoils of Drake’s voyages: ruby and emerald rings on her fingers, a belt of gold filigree and precious stones, pearls decorating her head-dress and full sleeves, two huge pearl earrings and a four-stranded necklace containing around 800 matching pearls, reaching to below her waist.