CHAPTER XVI
DRAKE’S MISSION TO THE NETHERLANDS. THE EXECUTION OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS. ITS CONSEQUENCES. THE INCOMPARABLE EXPEDITION TO CADIZ.
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE had returned to a country in distress. There was to be no holiday for him with his young wife in his fine big house at the back of Plymouth, and enough municipal work thrown in to appease his zest for new things and new achievements. He had become a national asset; his name was a sort of foreign investment to be realized and used for the better security of the realm. And it wanted in this summer of 1586 every help which it could get.
The people were troubled — not afraid, but uncomfortable. The Queen was more elusive and variable than she had ever been, and her statesmen were definitely frightened. The people were troubled by the exposure of the Babington conspiracy to murder Elizabeth, whilst as yet the succession to the Crown was unsettled and Mary Queen of Scots, the natural heir, still lived. The plot, devised by Savage, a renegade officer of Parma’s army in the Netherlands, and blessed by the Pope and Cardinal Allen of the Jesuit seminary at Douai, had been taken in hand by young Mr. Anthony Babington of Yorkshire. He, with the help of Ballard, an unseemly and disreputable priest, and five others was to slay “this beast which troubleth the world,” as Cardinal Allen called Elizabeth, as she walked in her garden. It was known that she disliked a personal escort even more than statesmen and judges today dislike to have detectives treading upon their heels. She was, as the people hated to know, an easy mark for murderers. Walsingham, through the eyes of his secret service, had watched the development of the conspiracy. Queen Elizabeth had stood square to it with the indomitable courage which never failed her when her life was at stake. Taking the air with one or two of her maids of honour in Richmond Park, she came upon one of the conspirators when he was actually selecting a bush behind which the murderer could be concealed. She said to him, “Am I not well guarded today? I have not one man wearing a sword at his side near me,” and the conspirator fled. But the more courageous she was, the more her people trembled for her safety. And when it became known that Walsingham through Gifford the go-between, and Phelippes the decipherer of codes, had sure evidence that Mary Queen of Scots knew of and approved the murder, the low long-drawn growl of resentment against her rose to a roar. They had rung the church bells till the steeples rocked when the conspirators were arrested. Now they clamoured to have done with her in the only sure way, the way of death, even if her execution brought all Spain and all France together in an attack upon the realm. The Queen stood out against the clamour so long as she could. She revolted from the idea that another woman of Royal blood like herself, a Queen, though a Queen in prison, must suffer the ignominy of a criminal’s trial and execution. To Keith, who had been sent by James of Scotland with a plea for his mother’s life, she said: “I swear by the living God that I would give one of my own arms to be cut off so that any means could be found for us both to live in assurance.” But there were no such means, and Mary was transferred from Chartley to Fotheringay, there to stand her trial by the laws of England. Then, and then only, were the people eased of their discomfort.
The Queen herself was more difficult to her statesmen, more variable in her policy during these months. She had refused to accept the Crown of the Netherlands, but she had sent Leicester as Lieutenant-General with four thousand soldiers to raise the siege of Antwerp, she claiming as a guarantee of her repayment by the States the five coast towns of Flushing, Brill, Rammekins, Sluys and Ostend, and promising that she would make no peace with Philip’s Viceroy the Prince of Parma without the States’ consent. Antwerp fell, but even so the day was not lost. Parma had eight thousand men. England could have sent an army as large, with a real soldier like Lord Hunsdon to command them. The Dutch and English fleets could have closed the Narrow Seas to Spanish money and Spanish transports. Within a few months victory could have been won, and Parma driven from the Low Countries. But Elizabeth left her troops unpaid, to starve in their rags, and began secretly to treat for peace with Parma. Parma was all humanity and moderation. He wanted so little, just the suppression of the chapels and the celebration of the Mass. He jockeyed the Queen along with hopes and friendliness whilst Santa Cruz in Spain laid the keels of the ships of war in Lisbon and Biscay and the Sicilies. It is no wonder that her Ministers were distracted and despairing. She was stripping herself of her only friends, she was giving herself to an enemy set upon her destruction.
In this confusion and failure, what part had been assigned to Drake? On July 9th, nineteen days before Drake’s return, Walsingham wrote to Leicester at The Hague that Her Majesty would be advised by her Council that “it shall in no sort be fit for Her Majesty to take any resolution in the cause until Sir Francis Drake’s return, at least until the success of his voyage be seen, whereupon in very truth dependeth the life and death of the cause according to man’s judgment.” The profits of Drake’s voyage were to pay the wages and buy the clothes for the tattered troops under Leicester’s command. But Drake had brought no profits home. He wrote to Burghley immediately after his return: “So let me assure your good Lordship that I will make it apparent to your honour that it scaped but twelve hours, the whole treasure which the King of Spain had out of the Indies this last year — the cause best known to God — and we had in that instant very foul weather.” During the fourteen days when Drake’s ships were being driven back from Matanzas to Cabo San Antonio, the gold fleet had slipped behind him up the Bahama channel and got safely away to Spain. Philip could go on building ships for the Enterprise of England; Elizabeth was short of the money necessary to pay, feed and reclothe her troops in the Netherlands. Twenty-four thousand pounds were scraped together and sent across the North Sea to Leicester in March, and thirty-two thousand half-way through June: but it was not enough, and Leicester must put his hand into his private purse, sell his cattle and burden his estates to make up the rest. Drake had come home with his pockets empty.
This fact has to be noticed. The air has been so thick with accusations against and reprimands of Elizabeth. A great Queen? Maybe. But flighty, but unreliable and weak. Deceitful too, a trimmer. Luckily two or three sound statesmen were at her elbow to cover up her wilfulness. God came to her rescue, or chance. She hesitated when she should have been forthright. She procrastinated when she should have hastened. A baffling woman, now with the heart of a lion and clothed in panoply, now shifty and timorous, a little animal bleating in a trap. With what key shall we unriddle her? Her expectation of Drake’s return laden with the gold of the Indies gives it to us. She was poor compared with the ruling princes who beset her, and she was averse from laying charges upon her people. When she came to the throne she found herself the mistress of an indigent ruined nation. For close upon thirty years by the thrifty husbandry of her resources she had nursed it into prosperity, she had introduced such modern amenities as public bath-houses, she had enforced a poor-law, she had seen public spirit grow, her adventurers break down the barriers which bigotry raised about it, its merchants claim and exact, to use the modern phrase, its place in the sun. And her revenue was two hundred and twenty thousand pounds a year. With this she had to pay the expenses of her household, her Court and the government of the realm. For other charges as they became inevitable she must tax her people. For many of those thirty years the taxes amounted to less than thirty thousand pounds, they never exceeded an average of fifty thousand. She was parsimonious, no doubt. Her ships were well found, but the crews of them were not always paid, their victuals not always sufficient, not always good. After the Armada she left them to die starving and untended in the streets of Deal. She carried to an extreme her hatred of taxation. Every now and then through some big coup made by Hawkins or Drake she received a large bonus. But she could not afford a war, and by her startling shifts she set her enemies against one another rather than against her, she promised to throw her manpower and her ship-power now on the side of France, now on the side of Spain, but the ally to be must pay the cost. The
States of the Netherlands were to pay ultimately the cost of the help she gave to them. She had their five seaboard towns in her possession as a guarantee that they would. Meanwhile she lacked the ready cash properly to equip and pay her soldiers. For that she had looked to Drake, and Drake had failed her. In consequence she made secret advances to the Prince of Parma with a view to patching up a peace. But that escape failed. Spain did not relax her preparations for the Enterprise of England.
The Queen harked back to an older scheme. Don Antonio was living obscurely in London upon a small pension. She thought of fetching him out again and sending him off with Drake on a second attempt to win the crown of Portugal. Drake of course was willing, and Don Antonio stayed with him at Plymouth to discuss the procedure of the expedition. Action, however, was delayed whilst Walsingham endeavoured to combine with it a plan which he had been fostering for the last three years.
In the autumn of 1582, William Harborne had been sent to Constantinople to push the trade of English merchants in Turkey which was suffering from the energy of the agents of Venice and France. In 1584 Harborne took a wider view of his duties and reported that if England would attack Spain from the Atlantic, Turkey would do the same from the Mediterranean. Turkey had a large fleet. The Grand Seigneur could put a hundred ships into the battle — and he had Lepanto to avenge. The seed of this proposal fell upon very fallow ground. The Queen would have the sort of war which most appealed to her. Someone else would be bearing the greater part of the expense. Walsingham saw “the limbs of the Devil” set one against the other and “the true Church and doctrine of the gospel” growing to such strength through their contention that in the end it would suppress them both. Elizabeth’s part was to be Drake’s expedition to oust Philip from Portugal and set Don Antonio on the throne.
Harborne was instructed by Walsingham, first through one of his secret agents, James Manucci, and then in a written letter, to press this policy upon the Vizier, and was supplied with a number of casuistic persuasions. Drake was brought along to help. His was the name of might. As the late Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in his introduction to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, it cleared the seas in front of him like a wind. The Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish Navy, the Capitan Pacha, was no friend to England; and Murad, the Sultan, had been preparing for some time to make war upon Persia. Drake accordingly sent a number of silver vases as a present to the Capitan Pacha, and the Capitan Pacha was greatly flattered to receive them from the greatest sailor of the age, and all the more flattered because the two men were unacquainted. However, neither the silver vases nor the arguments of Walsingham availed to divert the Capitan Pacha from his hostility to England, nor the Grand Seigneur from his invasion of Persia.
The English expedition to Lisbon and the Azores was not abandoned, but help was now sought in another quarter. Leicester, whose incompetence was demonstrated alike by his administration as by his generalship, was clamouring always for money and stores and men. He was the most flamboyant nincompoop of the Elizabethan age, and the Queen’s tenderness for him is to be sought in some personal attraction rather than in any qualities of mind. He backed Drake both with his purse and his mouth, and perhaps that is the highest tribute which can properly be paid to him. In the first week of October Drake was commissioned to carry the reinforcements to the Netherlands. He was at the same time to solicit from the Dutch Government a contribution of ships towards his expedition. Drake sailed with eight ships and was received with the warmth to be expected from a great sea-faring people. The Government, however, refused his proposal as it stood. Individual merchants and companies might, if they wished, speculate by sending ships, but not the States officially. As a Governing body they were not confident enough that England would stand by them, and they insisted that as a preliminary the Queen should accept the sovereignty of the Netherlands. Drake, however, had no authority to deal with matters of high policy, and in December he returned with his eight ships, bringing envoys from the States to put their proposition before the Queen and Leicester himself in addition.
Drake, upon his return, sought permission at once to carry on with his expedition, but it was not granted. Walsingham was absent from the Court, distressed by one of his recurring attacks of the stone. Burghley was preoccupied by a decision as grave as any which her Ministers had persuaded the Queen to take.
On the 14th of October 1586, Mary Queen of Scots had been put upon her trial at Fotheringay Castle for her complicity in the Babington plot. There was not a shadow of doubt about her guilt; and on the 15th the Commissioners who tried her were prepared to find her guilty and proceed to sentence. But a letter arrived from Davison, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary, bidding the Commission adjourn until the 25th day of the month and then meet in Westminster. The Commissioners did meet on that day in the Star Chamber, and after hearing the Queen of Scots’ secretaries affirm in speech what they had already deposed in writing, one after another gave their sentence against her as a conspirator who had plotted the murder of the Queen. But Elizabeth would not sign the warrant for Mary Stuart’s execution. And even the fact that sentence had been passed was still an official secret. The Privy Council forced her hand by advising the convocation of Parliament. On October 29th Parliament assembled, and Burghley before the Lords and Hatton in the Commons stated the case against Mary Stuart. A joint petition from the two houses praying for the speedy execution of Mary, late Queen of Scots, was presented to Elizabeth on November 12th. But still she would not sign the warrant. She would not even promise to sign it. She replied:
“If I should say unto you that I mean not to grant your petition, by my faith I should say unto you more than perhaps I mean. And if I should say unto you that I mean to grant your petition, I should then tell you more than it is fit for you to know. And thus I must deliver you an answer, answerless.”
The French Ambassador, Châteauneuf, pleaded that the secret should still be kept from public knowledge. Elizabeth consented throughout ten days. Then the common sense of Burghley prevailed. Parliament had been convoked for the special purpose of dealing with the Scottish Queen. It had passed no other laws. If it were prorogued now without a reason for its convocation given, it would be known as a Parliament of words; and if there were no publication of the sentence, the sentence would be known as a dumb sentence. Elizabeth consented to the publication on December 1st, and two days later it was publicly proclaimed.
But still the Queen would not sign the warrant. Bernardino de Mendoza, then Ambassador at Paris, said she never would sign it. Special Embassies arrived from Scotland and from France to persuade her not to sign it. But that sort of interference with her domestic affairs was never to the liking of Queen Elizabeth, and she was forthright enough in her answers to please the staunchest ranter in her realm. But, even with this provocation, she would not sign the warrant. It was never easy to persuade her to count her personal danger as an affair of State, the possible loss of her life as a motive for State action. She was the least bloodthirsty of women and she was class-conscious. By signing the warrant, she, a Queen, would be killing a Queen. Above all, she was intolerant of intolerance whether it came from Papist or Protestant. Walsingham was almost at the end of his wits. He drew up a Discourse on “The Dangerous Alteration likely to ensue both in England and Scotland in case the execution of the Scot. Q. be stayed.” He produced a list of other plots against the Queen’s life devised abroad. It is just possible that he invented one. It is also possible that he pestered her, she treated him with so much unkindness. He retired to his house of Barn Elms in such grief that it brought on an attack of the stone so violent that he was laid aside for months.
In the end, however, she gave way to the arguments of her Privy Council and the joint-petition of her Parliament. She had a final interview with Lord Admiral Howard, a Catholic of unblemished loyalty, on February 1st. When it was ended, she sent word to William Davison, her secretary, to bring her the death-warrant, and in his presence she signed it. She commanded him, then, to take
it to the Lord Chancellor to be stamped with the Great Seal, and on his way to stop at Barn Elms and give the news to Walsingham. “The grief thereof,” she explained with a grim smile, “will go near to kill him outright.”
But even so she made a shift to avoid the responsibility of her signature. Walsingham was not merely to be shown the warrant. He was to join with Davison in writing a letter to Sir Amyas Paulet, who had charge of the Royal prisoner at Fotheringay Castle, urging him to find some way “to shorten the life of that Queen.” To the modern ear the invitation sounds unqueenly. But it asked him to do no more than all the loyal gentlemen of England had pledged themselves to do when they bound themselves by the Oath of Association. Less, indeed.
The Bond of Association was in no way the work of Queen Elizabeth. It came into being after the Throgmorton conspiracy in 1584. Assassination had become in the eyes of Continental rulers an item of foreign policy. Cardinals plotted it, Popes blessed it, and the Prince of Orange had already met his death by it. So far Elizabeth had escaped by the watchfulness of her Ministers rather than by prudence of her own. “We and every of us,” so the Bond ran, “calling first to witness the name of Almighty God, do voluntarily and willingly bind ourselves, every one of us to the other, jointly and severally in the band of one firm and loyal society.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 885