by Neil Hanson
Under the threat of Spanish invasion, attempts had been made to modernize and strengthen some of the medieval castles, and reinforce town defences as much as the limited time and funds allowed. Blocked and overgrown ditches were cleared and deepened, crumbling ramparts repaired and strengthened a little, and earthworks were thrown up around the principal forts and castles. The “wall” of Great Yarmouth—a bank of “earth and manure more than 40 feet in breadth” topped by a rampart—had been completed in 1587 and was claimed to be “resistable, by God’s help, against any battery whatsoever,” but Parma’s engineers had years of experience in mining and reducing far more impressive fortifications and, despite the recent repairs and improvements, there were at most a handful of English castles capable of withstanding the Spanish siege artillery. The exiled Jesuit Robert Parsons did not speak from recent personal knowledge and his views were coloured by his intense desire to see England invaded and Elizabeth overthrown, but his assessment of the English defences was not a wild exaggeration: “In the whole realm there are but two fortresses which could stand a three days’ siege. They have not a man who can command in the field. The people are enervated by a long peace, and except for a few who have served with the heretics in Flanders, cannot bear their arms.” As the campaigns in The Netherlands had proved, the Army of Flanders was more than capable of advancing at a rate of ten miles a day, even against the far more organized opposition of the Dutch. Four years after the Armada, Parma invaded Normandy and marched a force of 22,000 men 65 miles in just six days. At such a rate, London would have been occupied within a week of a landing on the Kent coast, and Sir Walter Ralegh certainly believed that a Spanish advance on the capital would have been virtually unopposed.
There was also a fear in English hearts that a Catholic fifth column stood ready to rise if the Armada landed. “They stand very ill-affected to their prince . . . they deal secretly; they practise in the dark, they conspire in corners.” Mendoza identified several dozen disaffected Catholic nobles who would support an invasion, including Sir Henry Benenfield, the guardian of Elizabeth during the reign of Mary Tudor; “I wish to God they had burnt her then as she deserved,” Mendoza complained. “We should be living now in peace and quietness.” It was widely believed that so many Englishmen were open or covert Catholics that the landing of a Spanish invasion force would lead to a wholesale uprising. The once-dissident Welsh had been won over to the Tudors, but parts of the North of England, Scotland and Ireland remained indifferent or openly hostile. English Catholic exiles claimed that “the King has more friends in England than the Queen’s Majesty” and that as many as two-thirds of Englishmen would rise in support of a Spanish invasion.8
The exiles were inevitably prone to exaggeration in support of their cause, but even Protestants feared that as much as a third of England’s population might support an invasion. The Puritans and Protestants of the south and east would surely fight, but the retainers of the Catholic families of the north and west might well flock to the Spanish standard. English officers in The Netherlands had betrayed their country for Spanish gold, English troops fought for and alongside Parma, English pilots served with the Armada, and English exiles in Paris, Madrid and Rome awaited the overthrow of Elizabeth and the restoration of the old faith. There had been eight rebellions under the Tudors, including the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s revolt against Mary Tudor’s Spanish marriage in 1554 and the Rising of the North in 1569. The only successful revolt had been the one that overthrew Lady Jane Grey and installed Mary Tudor as Queen in July 1553, but none had been supported by the might and power of Spain.
Despite the ever-present fear of rebellion and Burghley’s warning of “the secret treasons of the mind and heart,” Elizabeth had held back from a wholesale incarceration of her Catholic subjects. The majority were to be left undisturbed as long as they accepted the authority of the Crown and maintained at least an outward show of conformity to the Anglican religion. It was either a daring gamble, sheer hubris or a cold calculation that most Englishmen—even Catholic ones—would prefer the stability of the status quo to the uncertainty, disorders, purges and persecutions that would inevitably follow the overthrow of a moderate Protestant regime and its replacement by an evangelical Catholic monarchy.
Although she was shrewd enough to whip up religious fervour when it suited her ends—she ordered that every sea-captain should take a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to sea and read it to his crew “to teach them the nature of the Papist enemies”—Elizabeth was at pains to avoid the doctrinal religious controversy that had riven Europe. The persecutions and burnings of Mary Tudor’s reign had aroused genuine horror in England, but the purges and executions of Elizabeth’s middle to later years aroused much less revulsion because they were carried out in the name of national security, not doctrinal purity; the victims were tortured and killed not because they were heretics but because they were traitors plotting against the Crown.
The Oath of Supremacy required every office holder, cleric, MP and lawyer to swear an oath of allegiance to Elizabeth, and the deeply ingrained belief that breaking or falsely swearing an oath was a mortal sin endangering the soul made it a potent weapon, even though the Pope attempted to ease the path for Catholics by granting a dispensation to those who swore a false oath under duress. English Catholics had always been urged to keep separate from the heretics—attendance at an Anglican service was a deadly sin—but if the faith was kept pure and strong as a result, it also forced Catholics to declare themselves openly, increasing their peril in the face of Protestant reprisals after the Rising of the North, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the plots against Elizabeth. Recusants were readily identified at first and subject to increasing harassment and state persecution, often triggered by their neighbours’ reporting comings and goings in the night. The mere suspicion of holding a forbidden Mass was enough to bring arrest.
In 1580, recognizing this dilemma, Pope Gregory XIII amended the Bull of Excommunication, the “roaring bull” Regnans in Excelsis issued by Pope Pius V ten years before, which had proclaimed the excommunication of “Elizabeth, pretended Queen of England, the serpent of wickedness” (begging the question of how one who was not of the faith could be excommunicated from it), as a heretic and a persecutor of the true religion, her deposition from the throne, and the excommunication of all those who continued to recognize her as their sovereign. It was an open invitation to English Catholics to overthrow their Queen; Elizabeth had responded with the first penal legislation against Catholics of her reign, and a man who had nailed a copy of the Bull to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace was tortured and executed.
Gregory authorized English Catholics to profess their loyalty in public while privately preparing to overthrow her at the first opportunity and gave advance absolution as an incitement to her murder. “There is no doubt whatsoever that who sends that guilty woman of England out of the world with the pious intention of doing God’s service, not only does not sin but gains merit.” His Secretary of State, the Cardinal of Coimo, gave written approval to an assassination attempt soon afterwards. In response, English persecution of Catholics increased. The fine for non-attendance at church, twelve pence a Sunday in 1559, had risen to twenty pounds a month by the 1580s and an Act of Parliament authorized the seizure of the land and goods of those who could not pay. Over the remainder of the decade, the Treasury collected a windfall of £45,000 from just 200 individuals. Those whose conscience brooked no compromise paid fines as long as they could raise the funds or went to prison—and Puritans as well as Catholics were imprisoned and persecuted for their beliefs—but the majority fell into acceptance of the religious status quo as much through habit as conviction. Few could afford the fines, and even the wealthiest Catholic gentry were worn down. Most became “schismatics,” attending Anglican services even if privately adhering to the old faith. Lord Montagu’s confessor reassured him that it was “expedient something to give to the time . . . they durst no
t determine such a fact to be sin,” and many Catholics “did not discern any great fault, novelty or difference from the former religion . . . save only change of language . . . and so easily accommodated themselves thereto.”
In the end the greatest blow to Catholic hopes was probably none of the dramatic events such as the crushing of the Rising of the North or the failure of the succession of plots against Elizabeth, but simply the numbing effect of the passing years. In 1558 Protestants were in the majority only in London and Kent, but by the time of the Armada thirty years later they formed the majority in every single county, even in the traditionally Catholic north. The sheer length of Elizabeth’s reign and the short life expectancy of her subjects—an average of twenty-five years for the poor and thirty-five for the rich—meant that by the time of the Armada, there were few alive, even among Catholics, who could remember or had witnessed the rituals of the old Catholic faith, prompting one ageing English adherent to lament, “Dead cold is our age, there is blue ice in our churches.” 9
William Allen, a prominent English exile in Rome, was made a cardinal by Pope Sixtus “to please Your Majesty” (Philip, who was paying Allen a substantial retainer), with the express intention of installing him in England after the Spanish invasion. Allen had published “an admonition to the nobility and people of England concerning the present war . . . [and] the excommunication pronounced by Pius V against Elizabeth, as well concerning her illegitimation and usurpation and inability to the Crown of England as for her excommunication and deprivation in respect of her heresy, sacrilege and abominable life.” Citing natural law, because Elizabeth was a tyrant, and divine law, because she was a heretic, Allen relayed Sixtus’s command that no Englishmen must obey or defend Elizabeth and all were to be ready “at the arrival of his Catholic Majesty’s forces . . . to join the said army . . . to help towards the restoring of the Catholic faith and deposing the usurper.” Only by purging their country of Elizabeth and all her doings could Englishmen save their own and their children’s souls. Allen urged all Englishmen at home or abroad “in the service of the Almighty and of the greatest and justest monarch in all the world [Philip] and under a General so peerless [Parma] . . . reduce our people to the obedience of Christ’s Church and deliver our Catholic friends and brethren from the damnable and intolerable yoke of heresy.” Some Englishmen welcomed the prospect. “If I heard that the entire destruction of England was for the greater glory of God and the welfare of Christianity, I should be glad of its being done.”
In the face of this threat, Jesuits, itinerant “seminary priests” and their accomplices were seized by Walsingham’s agents and tortured to extract information. Most were then executed, the remainder deported—60 per cent of those sent to England fell into the hands of the authorities—but English exiles believed that 300 priests were still living undetected in the houses of gentlemen and nobles, keeping alive the Catholic faith in England. The weapons of all known recusants had been confiscated in 1586, and after January 1588 some were taken into custody and others confined to their parishes or sometimes their houses, but only in late July, with the Armada at the gates, were a large number of the leading English Catholics interned in Wisbech Castle, “in the custody of Lord North.” When Henry VIII had been threatened by a French invasion supported by the Papacy, he had put to death many of the leading Catholic nobles “whom he suspected to favour their enterprise . . . The Queen, disliking this as a cruel counsel, thought it sufficient to commit some of the Papists, and those not of the chief, to custody.” Even then, the polite fiction was maintained that “for their own safety’s sake, they ought not to be at large and at the mercy of their infuriated Protestant neighbours” in the event of a Spanish invasion. 10 It did not convince Philip’s English secretary, Sir Francis Englefield. “Those Machiavellian scholars, the Queen’s ministry were too cunning to put eighty Catholics openly to death at once, but sent them to Wisbech Castle, where the ill air would consume them privately.”
There was more than a grain of truth in suggestions that Catholics would be at risk from hostile Englishmen. England was largely insulated from foreign influences and most travellers abroad were soldiers going to fight in The Netherlands or France. Others had to convince officials of their probity and ideological and doctrinal correctness, and give sureties as to their conduct. Only sixty “licences to pass beyond the seas” were granted to Englishmen between 1572 and 1578 and the travellers were closely watched by spies hoping to augment their income by denouncing them for meeting with papists or attending a Mass. Communities of Huguenots and Flemish weavers had settled in England and there were many foreign merchants, traders and diplomats and their retinues in London. “Because of the common danger, watch had to be kept on the great crowd of foreigners from the Low Countries, France and other places, who lived in London on their earnings as craftsmen. No more was known of some of them except that they had come on account of their religion; but the city was full of such as might be faithful or not under the cloak of the same religion . . . Every day these foreigners received insulting words from the prentices and the lower classes, people who are naturally the enemies of foreigners.” The threat of the Armada tangled with fears buried in the psyche of every Protestant: the burning of the Marian martyrs, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Spanish Fury in Antwerp and the “Black Legend” of the bestial cruelties of the Conquistadors and the Inquisition were all widely known and disseminated throughout England. Broadsheets sold on the streets of London recounted the deaths of Protestant martyrs, illustrated by woodcuts depicting tortures and mutilations in specific and horrific detail.
Rumours were spread, fuelled by black propaganda from the Crown, “that in the Spanish ships were many instruments of torture with which to afflict the English people,” and pamphleteers produced ever more graphic descriptions of Armada ships laden with pox-ridden prostitutes, thousands of wet-nurses to suckle all the infants who were to be orphaned, “strange and most cruel whips” and scourges “to whip and torment English men and women” and nooses to hang them. “All men and women who would not have bowed the knee to Baal, had then been put to the sword; their children had been tossed at the pike’s end or else their brains dashed out by some ill-faced Dons or other.” All English males between the ages of seven and seventy would be put to death, and younger children branded with a mark of shame that they would carry for the rest of their lives—“certain irons graven with marks, to be heated for the marking of all children in their faces, being under seven years of age, that they might be known hereafter to have been the children of the conquered nation.” “We know that the only object of this is to incense the people against the Spaniards,” but “these things being easily believed, the whole of the lowest and most credulous part of the people were moved to a mortal and dangerous hatred of all foreigners.”11
Such a tide of popular fear and hatred made it inconceivable that up to two-thirds of the English population would rise in support of a Spanish invasion or that it would have been as easy as many have suggested. The Dutch had demonstrated how counter-productive the Spanish atrocities were—the inhabitants of Leiden burned their own town to the ground rather than allow it to fall into Spanish hands—and even though Parma had introduced greater discipline and shown restraint as well as ruthlessness, the stories of Spanish atrocities were too well engraved on Protestant minds. There would have been no willing surrenders, no easy victories on the march to London.
The English militias were woefully under-trained and under-armed, but people, both soldiers and civilians, facing an enemy they believe is intent on their extermination, will fight to the death rather than surrender, even if it means matching pitchforks against muskets and pikes, and Englishmen went armed at all times. “Seldom shall you see any of my countrymen above eighteen or twenty years old to go without a dagger at the least at his back or by his side although they be aged burgesses or magistrates of any city who in appearance are most exempt from brawling and contention. Our nobility we
ar commonly swords or rapiers with their daggers, as does every common serving man also that follows his lord and master. Finally, no man travels by the way without his sword or some such weapon.” And even if the militias were poorly equipped with firearms, there was no lack of martial spirit in Elizabeth’s subjects. George Owen of Henllys, commenting on a game of knappan, a Welsh form of football that pitted whole villages against each other in a rowdy and often brutal ritualized conflict, reported the comment of a stranger witnessing the game in 1588. “If this be but play, I could wish the Spaniards were here to see our plays in England. Certainly they would be in bodily fear of our war.”
The belated preparations against the Armada were feeble enough in the face of the forces ranged against them, but England’s primary defence did not rest on fortifications and land forces. Ever since the battle of Sluys in 1344 under Edward III, English gold coinage had included a representation of a warship, a recognition of the vital importance of the navy in the nation’s defence and the national wealth. There was no royal navy in Spain beyond that annexed from Portugal, no state dockyards or shipyards, and all ships were hired or impounded in time of war. England had a navy of fine ships, augmented by scores of armed merchantmen, and dockyards at Chatham, Deptford and Woolwich, Portsmouth (albeit almost moribund) and Plymouth. There had been no Royal Navy until 1535; by “ancient custom” the Crown created and dissolved armies and navies at will, and merchant ships were simply requisitioned from their owners, with or without compensation, and returned to them when the crisis was past. The first permanent navy, established by Henry VIII at ruinous expense and largely paid for out of the revenues confiscated from the Church of Rome at the Dissolution, had laid the foundations of the Grand Fleet that Elizabeth could now command. On acceding to the throne, she could draw on only 27 active fighting ships from her father’s great navy, many already in a dilapidated condition, plus a further seven in dry dock in varying stages of disrepair, and seven armed merchantmen. A few new ships were built over the following decade, but they merely replaced the older ones taken out of service, and by 1575 she could still draw on only 23 men-of-war. By 1588, she had 34 galleons in her fleet, only a modest increase in numbers, but while six of them still dated back to Henry’s reign, under the inspired leadership of John Hawkins the majority of the Queen’s galleons had recently been redesigned on revolutionary lines.