by Neil Hanson
After the death of Sebastian of Portugal in 1578, anti-Spanish factions in Lisbon were desperate to find a means of preventing Philip from adding yet another realm to his dominions, and Parma’s son by his marriage to Princess Maria of Portugal, daughter of Prince Dom Duarte, arguably had a stronger claim to the Portuguese throne. The Dutch rebellion was also growing in strength and Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned in England, was still plotting to seize Elizabeth’s throne. Parma’s royal blood and military genius would have made him invaluable to any of them as a military commander, a regent, a king-consort or even a king, and while Don Juan replaced the Duke of Alba in The Netherlands, charged with quelling the Dutch, Philip ordered Parma back to his duchy. There he stayed for two years, while Don Juan, hampered by lack of funds and his own abrasive nature, saw the rebellion in The Netherlands rage out of control. Summoned at last in the depths of winter, Parma and three companions rode out of Parma in the dead of night, leaving his wife and his two sons behind. It was the last time he would ever see them, for Philip never permitted him to return during the remaining fifteen years of his life. He and his men rode through the snowbound Alps and north to Flanders at breakneck speed, arriving after twelve continuous days in the saddle. Within days, he wrote to Philip that no compromise was possible with William of Orange and the Estates-General. The only solution was to crush those in rebellion against their God and King.
Parma chose his first battles with care—a small cavalry action in which the Dutch were routed and then a siege of the small town of Sichem. Sieges sometimes ended with the defenders surrendering and marching out with “honours of war”—taking their weapons and horses with them—but a victorious attacker could enforce a surrender “at mercy,” leaving him free to decide their fate; a number equal to his own casualties might be killed, or the entire garrison might be slaughtered. Parma surrounded the castle and reduced its walls but, seeking to make an example that would send a message throughout The Netherlands, he refused to accept its surrender and after overrunning the defences he ordered the commander hanged from the highest tower of the castle. The man wrestled free of his guards and threw himself off the battlements to escape his fate, but the fall failed to kill him and Parma had his broken body dragged up the tower a second time and hanged. All the other officers and men were then hung by their feet from every window and tree, or marched through the castle hall between lines of Spanish soldiers and clubbed to death.
Parma’s success sealed his own reputation and his uncle’s fate. Don Juan was recalled to Madrid—he died en route, before Philip could exact punishment for his failures—while Parma was appointed as supreme commander in his place. The Spanish Army of Flanders that Parma had inherited had always been feared for its brutality, but it was poorly paid, ill-equipped and in low morale. Having persuaded Philip to increase his funding, Parma raised his soldiers’ wages and improved their equipment, while their morale was greatly restored by the looting and rapine that followed the victory at Sichem. He now began to weld them into a cohesive and fearsomely effective force. The core of hard-bitten Spanish fighting troops was augmented by German, Walloon and Italian mercenaries, and they became a professional army, paid and fully trained, and provided with medical care, welfare payments and even marriage allowances. The English career soldier Sir Roger Williams, who fought against them in The Netherlands for many years, had no doubt about their capabilities. “No army that ever I saw passes that of the Duke of Parma for discipline and good order.” It contained few “raw recruits. They were powerful men, well armed and of martial aspect, highly trained and always ready . . . to fight,” and there was only unending, implacable slaughter and destruction for those who continued to oppose them.
A portrait of the era shows Parma arrayed with a ruff of the finest jewel-encrusted lace and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He stares out in three-quarter profile, emphasizing his high forehead and aquiline nose. His mouth is hidden beneath his waxed moustache, and he could be any Court dandy of his age but for the piercing look in his eye and the glint of the steel breastplate beneath his finery. This was a man born to martial action, a dedicated student of military strategy and tactics, an able administrator and a veteran of many campaigns, and he brought a cold and formidable intellect to bear on the task that Philip had set him. He could act with ruthless speed when necessary, but he also had the patience to play a long game if required. Before any fighting even began, Parma’s engineers had often done the crucial groundwork, building new canals, bridging dykes, constructing earthworks and mining defences—digging tunnels under fortifications that would then collapse or be demolished by explosions. Inscrutable as the sphinx, he also deployed other weapons alongside his military power: diplomacy, persuasion, espionage, bribery, treachery and murder.
Three southern provinces were won back without a fight, and “Spain’s golden bullets made a greater breach in the heart of the traitor” than their guns did in some city walls, but where bribery failed he would use assassination, a semi-legitimate arm of state policy and widely practised. In 1582 the first attempt was made on the life of the Dutch leader, William the Silent. The assassin’s gun was fired so close to his head that the powder-flash set fire to his hair, but somehow, though severely wounded, he survived. Four further unsuccessful attempts on his life were made the following year, but on 10 July 1584 another hired killer, Balthasar Gerard, at last shot dead the Dutch leader on the stairs of his house in Delft. In revenge, Gerard was captured by the Dutch, horribly tortured and executed. Philip had offered a reward of 25,000 crowns for William’s death, and he showed his gratitude for the actions of their dead son by granting Gerard’s parents lands and titles in Franche-Comté.9
Parma next led another savage onslaught on Maastricht, leaving 1,700 women and thousands of men butchered in the streets when the city fell, and when the town of Lierre was betrayed to him by its Scottish Catholic commander, Colonel William Semple, it was then reduced to rubble. Ypres prepared itself for a siege by sending out of its gates all those inhabitants too young, old or infirm to fight. Parma refused to allow them through his lines and, trapped without shelter, food or water, they remained encamped in no-man’s-land, dying by hundreds, until the final storming of the town, when those who had survived were slaughtered like their menfolk.
The relentless tide of Spanish successes caused consternation in England. The Earl of Leicester had long urged Elizabeth to allow him to lead an English expeditionary force to The Netherlands, and she was briefly persuaded, but at the brink she hesitated and changed her mind, reverting to discreet financial support and offers of mediation between the Dutch and Philip. In default of stronger action from the Crown, Thomas Morgan, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir John Norris led forces of several thousand volunteers to the aid of the rebels. The Dutch had offered Elizabeth the hereditary sovereignty of the United Provinces in 1576 and been rebuffed since she was reluctant both to add to her financial burdens and to further antagonize Philip. Casting around for support, they now turned instead to France. In 1581 they declared Philip to have been deposed and the Dutch leader William of Orange offered sovereignty and the title “Defender of the Liberties of the Low Countries” to the heir to the French throne, François, Duc d’Anjou. Backed by 10,000 French troops and subsidized by Elizabeth, he took up residence in his new domain, but he proved to be both arrogant and incompetent, and rapidly alienated his Dutch and English allies alike. The last of his support evaporated when his troops attempted to take control by force of Antwerp and several other towns and cities—the “French Fury” as it was christened by the Dutch in an echo of the Spanish Fury of Alba’s troops—and he left the country in disgrace in June 1583. He died the following year.
Parma wasted no time in exploiting the dissension in the enemy camp. Dunkirk, Nieuport and Ostend all fell to his troops and, as the relentless advances continued, he began to temper the worst of his troops’ brutal excesses, winning fresh victories as much by the promise of peace and security after long years
of war as by his military power. Bruges was allowed to surrender, Ghent followed in 1584 and Brussels, the city of the Emperor Charles V’s court, fell in spring 1585, by which time Parma’s troops had already encircled the great port of Antwerp, the richest city in northern Europe. Parma had a massive timber bridge half a mile in length constructed to block the Scheldt river, cutting off supplies of food and the trade on which the city’s wealth depended, and after a bloody year-long siege the starving city surrendered on 17 August 1585.
The conquest of the rest of The Netherlands now seemed as inevitable as time itself, but the murder of William the Silent had already thoroughly alarmed Elizabeth—the assassination of a Protestant ruler by a hired killer, paid in Spanish gold, could not have failed to concentrate her mind—and the fall of Antwerp, threatening a further loss of allies and markets for English goods now forced her always hesitant hand. Even before the city’s fall, on 7 July 1585, English pro-interventionists had given Elizabeth a formal statement of the case for action to secure “protection from Spain,” outlining the weakness and vulnerability of England, the unrelenting hostility of the Spanish Crown and the papacy in Rome, and the prospect that Spain and France under the leadership of de Guise might unite in a Catholic crusade throughout Europe. To counter this, Elizabeth was urged to form a citizens’ militia modelled on that of ancient Rome, to improve the navy and to create a Protestant coalition to oppose Spain.
In June of that year the Dutch had again offered Elizabeth sovereignty over the United Provinces, but once more she had turned it down; now she was at last persuaded to make a direct intervention in the conflict in The Netherlands, believing that if the Dutch were beaten, Philip would at once launch an attack on England. On 10 August 1585, with Antwerp already doomed, she signed a treaty at Nonsuch Palace that was as good as a declaration of war on Spain. It committed an army of 4,000 foot and 400 horse (later increased to 5,000 foot and 1,000 cavalry) to the defence of the Dutch United Provinces, together with £126,000 a year for their support. The “cautionary towns” of Flushing and Brill, the two deep-water ports that could serve as embarkation points for a Spanish invasion force, were to be garrisoned by a further 700 troops, but purely as security for England’s interests rather than as conquest by stealth. She was also to appoint a nobleman, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to command the forces and, with two others, serve as an adviser to the Dutch States General. His military qualifications were obscure. He had not seen action since serving in Mary Tudor’s army in France thirty years previously, and owed his command entirely to his position as one of Elizabeth’s oldest Court favourites and his enthusiastic championing of the Dutch cause.
A veteran of the English volunteers in The Netherlands, Sir John “Black Jack” Norris, led the first 2,000 infantry ashore at Middelburg at the end of August 1585, but Leicester did not arrive at Flushing to take command until 10 December. By the end of that year, some 8,000 Englishmen were stationed in The Netherlands, but yet again the Queen had changed her mind and, having committed her troops, she ordered them to restrict themselves to defensive operations. Norris was even rebuked for attacking Parma’s forces and Leicester was ordered to avoid “the hazard of a battle” but to embargo Dutch trade with Spain—one of the ways the Dutch funded their own resistance was to continue to trade with their Spanish oppressors—suggesting that her bolstering of them was only to encourage them to seek a settlement with Spain. But whether or not their sovereign wished it, her forces were inevitably drawn into confrontations with the Army of Flanders. The English troops ranged against Parma’s battle-hardened veterans were poorly armed and ill-trained, and many were barely clad. One captain remarked that there were “not three whole shirts” in his company and another contingent was armed only with bows and arrows. Yet though the Dutch were sometimes scathing about their worth, the English forces showed their value in that summer’s campaign. The infantry resisted a Spanish advance at the Meuse and the English heavy cavalry repeatedly broke through enemy lines at Warnsfeld. For the first time in years, Parma made few gains during the fighting season. He had still reconquered only ten of the seventeen rebel provinces during a war that had laid waste the whole country.
If Leicester’s troops had fought bravely enough, their commander, “greatly hated by everyone,” had showed himself to be as incompetent as Anjou before him. In January 1586, without consulting Elizabeth, he accepted a Dutch offer of “the absolute government of the whole provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Friesland and Utrecht,” and assumed the title of Governor-General that had been in the gift of Philip of Spain. It was a flagrant provocation of the Catholic King, and an attempt to secure de facto recognition of Elizabeth as the Dutch sovereign, when she herself had refused to consider the idea. She sent a coruscating letter to him to signal her displeasure at a move “sufficient to make me infamous to all princes . . . We could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that a man raised up by ourselves and extraordinarily favoured by us above any subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort, broken a commandment.” She forced him to make a public retraction and went on to threaten him that the hand that had raised him could also “beat him to the dust.” 10
Leicester also grossly overspent the budget she had allocated to him, yet left his troops unpaid and ill-equipped. He banished to England Sir John Norris, his most effective subordinate, quarrelled with Count Hohenlo, a bold commander with a fearsome temper, alienated Maurice of Nassau, and provoked discord and unrest among his own troops and his allies. The furious Dutch sent emissaries to Elizabeth to lambast Leicester’s folly and cowardice, and complain that, far from aiding them, he had succeeded only in provoking rival factions to the point of near civil war. “He had more of Mercury than he had of Mars . . . his device might have been without prejudice to the great Caesar, veni, vidi, redivi.” They sought further help from Elizabeth, but instead were harangued by her; she might criticize her favourite, but no others would be allowed such liberties. “She swears by the living God it is terrible and she does not believe such ungrateful people as they live upon the earth; if she had accepted for herself the title they had offered her, by God they would have found she would not put up with such treatment.” She told them that “it was for the Queen to advise them, and not for them to advise the Queen,” and they were summarily dismissed with a scornful promise that whatever peace she agreed with Spain would include them. The Dutch declared themselves perfectly willing to fight on alone, “requesting the Queen to surrender the fortresses she held as they themselves will defend them,” but their words must have rung hollow even in their own ears, for their one strength was at sea, where the fleet under William of Orange’s illegitimate son, Justin of Nassau, maintained its blockade of the coast of Flanders and the western Scheldt.11
Had they known the lengths to which Elizabeth was willing to go to achieve peace, they would have been even more alarmed. Elizabeth continued to show an unwarranted faith in the possibility of peace, but if it came to open war, she could not realistically expect to inflict a total defeat on Spain, and nor would she have wished to do so. England’s long-term strategic aim was to use the two European great powers, France and Spain, as checks and counter-weights to each other. French weakness in the 1570s and 1580s had invited Spanish domination of the continent, but a weak Spain was equally and possibly even more dangerous to England, for France had long coveted Flanders and the French history of alliances with Scotland would then threaten England with complete encirclement. Elizabeth never stated her war aims and perhaps never formulated them even to herself, but they may have been as modest as a promise of non-interference by direct or indirect means in England, and a fig leaf of religious tolerance and freedom of trade in The Netherlands.
She would have accepted, even welcomed, a return to Spanish rule of the rebellious Dutch provinces, and her peace commissioners negotiating with Parma were told that Spain only had to concede religious toleration for the Dutch for two years after regaining control.
After that, it would be an internal matter for a government that would, of course, be appointed by Philip. Whether the Dutch would accept such modest gains from their long years of suffering and struggle did not concern her; the terms would be imposed on them and if they refused to accept them, she could abandon them to fight alone and face certain defeat. However, even such modest terms were never likely to be acceptable to Philip; the father of the Inquisition would tolerate no heresy in his own kingdom nor in any of the possessions he ruled. Those who opposed him, in The Netherlands and in England, would submit to his will or be crushed.
Although she had dismissed the Dutch complaints about him, Elizabeth remained privately furious with Leicester. Disgraced, he submitted his resignation in September 1586 and returned to England in early December to placate the Queen and restore his fortunes, accompanied by some near-mutinous troops “so poor and dissatisfied that the Queen, out of fear they might raise sedition, has ordered that no more than twenty of them may enter any village.” His estrangement from Elizabeth did not last long and he had soon reclaimed his former power and influence at Court. However, through arrogance or stupidity he had left two Catholic captains, Sir William Stanley and Rowland York, in command of vital links in the chain of Dutch defences: the newly captured city of Deventer and the Sconce of Zutphen, a fortress constructed to threaten the Spanish garrison in the town.