They bound themselves not merely to serve and obey their sovereign but to pursue, “as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge all manner of persons of whatsoever estate they be” that aimed at Her Majesty’s life. They pledged themselves to the utter extermination of them. They devoted a special paragraph to the case of Mary Stuart. If an attempt at murder were made by any that have, may or shall pretend title to the Crown by the untimely death of Her Majesty, they would not merely disallow their succession but would prosecute such person or persons to their death. The declaration flamed through the land like a comet. Town and countryside stumbled in their haste to acknowledge their debt to the great woman who for twenty-seven years had paced about her throne and never found a peaceful moment in which to rest upon it. The surly, disloyal Lords of the North sat apart in their great castles, the Dacres, the Percies, and the Westmorlands, hatching new murders, new treasons. For them, in the word of the Priest, England would never be merry England again so long as the Bible was read in English. But the new England which she had fostered was on fire to guard her, the new England which was familiar with comfort and prosperity and revelled in great undertakings; the England with the spirit of the sea; the England which was feared. It is the fashion nowadays to decry her as a creature of vanities and deceits and paltry shifts; to assign the triumph of her reign to the wisdom of her counsellors. But her own age knew her better. “Look at Elizabeth,” cried Pope Sixtus V. “She is surely a great Queen. Were she only a Catholic we should love her dearly. See how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all.” So far from owing everything to her statesmen, she steered a wise course between the over-prudent diplomacy of Burghley and the aggressive pugnacity of Walsingham. As the result she held the hearts of her people in her hands, and she held them close to her own breast. There was never a happier name for a Queen of England than Elizabeth.
The Bond of Association was embodied within a few months in a legal Act by Parliament. But Elizabeth herself had modified it first. The right to kill must be preceded by a trial and, even after sentence was delivered, could only be used on Her Majesty’s declaration.
Thus, when Davison called upon Walsingham with the death-warrant every condition of the Statute had been filled. Mary Stuart had plotted the Queen’s death; she had been tried; the Queen gave her direction. Rough justice — lynch law made State Law, the hand of every man instead of the axe of the executioner and the formalities of the scaffold! No doubt, but murder is not a gentle thing, even when planned in a seminary and blessed by Christ’s Vicar; and the Queen had the right in deciding the manner of Mary’s death to consider what consequences might befall her realm. Mary was the widow of the Dauphin of France. The ignominy of a public execution might bring France and Spain together in an alliance to avenge her. Her private taking off might be slurred over, even as Drake’s outrages in Spain had been.
So the letter was written to Sir Amyas. But Sir Amyas, though he had signed the Bond of Association, was too shocked to honour his signature. “It was an unhappy day for him,” he wrote, “when he was required by his Sovereign to do an act which God and the law forbade.” It was a little late in the day for Sir Amyas to think of the shipwreck of his conscience.
“A precise and dainty fellow,” said Elizabeth.
Whether even now she would have stayed the warrant, who can say? She was furious after it was acted on. She sent Davison to the Tower, where he remained until after the defeat of the Armada; and perhaps it was lucky for Walsingham that he had suffered this timely attack of the stone. He was “her Moor” when she was in the mood of affection, but she had threatened before now to “set him by the feet,” and this time she might have done it. But the warrant was out of her hands. On February 1st she had signed the warrant. On February 2nd she asked for it back again unsealed. Davison told her that the Lord Chancellor had already sealed it. He sought the advice of Hatton, who took him to Burghley. Burghley summoned those of the Council who were near to his bedroom, where he lay chained by the gout. They met on the 3rd, and hearing from him that he would execute the warrant if he had their support, they supported him; and early on the Saturday morning of the 4th, Mr. Secretary Beale rode with it out of London. Mr. Beale rode fast — under orders — lest he should be overtaken and his mission be countermanded by the Queen, through the night, through the next day. He was wise to ride fast. But he should have ridden even faster and taken more time before he started. In the small company which rode with Secretary Beale northwards through the counties of Bedford and Huntingdon there was missing one grim necessary figure, the executioner from the Tower. In the fluster and hurry of departure he had been overlooked. Late on the Sunday night in the darkness the little cavalcade clattered through the village street at the gates of Fotheringay Castle and halted at the butcher’s shop. Whether he served well or ill, the man who kept the shop must serve on the morrow. He served — not well; yet there had been worse bunglings on Tower Hill; and the sight of that lady as her maids took her black cloak from her shoulders on the scaffold in the great hall with the blazing fire and set her forth robed in scarlet from head to foot was terrifying enough to daunt the most practised hand. By the morning of Wednesday, February 8th, all was ready for the last scene of that tortuous unhappy life. Before noon she had played out her part with an unwavering dignity. Before nightfall every scrap of her clothing on which a drop of blood had fallen had been burnt in the great fire so that no relics might keep alive the legend of a martyrdom; the hearth was black, the hall dismantled, the butcher back in his shop; and all Europe waited in the stunning silence, as it waits now between the air-raid warning and the thunder of the raid.
Drake had no hand in these great matters. They were not within his province. He was the sword, not the hand which drew it from the scabbard. He remained at Plymouth, forbidden to continue his preparations with Don Antonio, and chafing, no doubt, at his inaction. Meanwhile the threatened storm did not break over England. Philip of Spain was squabbling with Pope Sixtus over the Papal contribution to the Enterprise. The Pope was probably the richest of the Continental Princes and he wanted security for his money. He would pay, but on the day when the Spanish troops set foot on the land of England. In France, Mary’s champion was the Duc de Guise, and between the Duke and Henri de Valois there raged so great an enmity that a common understanding could hardly be achieved. The Duc de Guise proposed to avenge Mary Stuart’s death by putting James of Scotland on the English throne. Henri de Valois and his mother Catherine were no partisans of that cold unlikeable King, who was prepared to do a deal with Elizabeth over his mother’s execution and had not yet made a public subscription to the Catholic Faith. Moreover, in the south-west of France another Henri, the Bourbon King of Navarre, whose agent was high in favour at Elizabeth’s Court, was complicating the web of French policy by his growing strength.
Philip’s case, on the other hand, was clear enough. So long as Mary Stuart was alive the Enterprise of England was a vast and costly expedition to set upon the throne a woman to whom France was more dear than Spain. Moreover, he did not dislike Elizabeth. But for his priest-ridden bigoted conscience and the continual pressure of Santa Cruz, he might, for all we can know, have been more than glad to conclude a real peace with England. The death of Mary Stuart, however, altered entirely his point of view. A successful invasion would no longer mean the setting up upon the throne one who, in spite of being a Papist, might be his enemy the day after she had mounted it. It meant the possession of the throne purely and simply. Mary Stuart had bequeathed it to him in her Will. He could trace his descent from John of Gaunt. By Mary’s testament, by his own lineage, by the force of his arms, England might become not that island kingdom which had so harried him and so extorted his admiration, but a mere province of the great Empire of Spain. It is not to be wondered at that reports reached not merely Walsingham through his spies, but the London merchants throu
gh their correspondents, of preparations quickened, soldiers assembled, and stores purchased from the ports of Biscay down to Naples. At some time during the summer of this year, 1587, Philip’s Armada was to sail.
Unless its sailing could be delayed. The Queen and her Council turned to Drake at last. The English ports were closed so that no whisper of what was going forward might be heard abroad. Until half-way through March, even London was in the dark. Walsingham in his despatches never breathed a word of it, so that even Mendoza in Paris could send no warning to his master. At Plymouth, all through the month of March, Drake was mobilizing a squadron; four men-of-war from the Royal dockyards, the Lion, the Dreadnought, the Rainbow, with the Elizabeth Bonaventure once more to fly the Admiral’s pennant, and two pinnaces as their hand-maids; four tall ships contributed by the City of London; the Lord Admiral’s vessel the White Lion with the little Cygnet pinnace to keep her company; and enough craft belonging to private merchants to bring the number up to thirty. William Borough, Clerk of the Ships, a great authority upon naval warfare, hoisted his Vice-Admiral’s flag on the Lion; and in accordance with one of the many privileges of the City of London, Captain Robert Flick, Admiral of the London Squadron on the Merchant Royal, became Vice-Admiral of the whole fleet. Thomas Fenner, who had sailed as Drake’s Flag-Captain to San Domingo and Cartagena in 1585, now commanded the Dreadnought, and the fourth of the Queen’s ships sailed under Henry Bellingham. Of them only one, the Dreadnought, had a tonnage of less than five hundred, and the London ships were in equipment, seaworthiness and the quality of their officers up to the standard of the Royal Navy. Drake himself brought three ships and a frigate of seventy tons. With a fleet of this efficiency one would have thought that the General in the port to which he had given so bright a lustre would have found little or no difficulty in fitting it out for sea. He had his old shipmates to draw upon, his reputation for generosity to guarantee their good treatment, the splendour of his name to promise a triumph for the voyage. Yet some malicious influence was at work. As he enrolled his mariners they deserted, and not by twos and threes but in great bodies. Ten companies of soldiers were enlisted with Captain Anthony Platt as Lieutenant-General and Captain John Marchant as his Sergeant-Major; and no doubt Drake insisted upon the observance of the rule which he had first put in force at Port Saint Julian, that the soldiers must hale and draw with the mariners.
Drake’s ships were ready on the 1st of April and his instructions in his hands. The swift march of events had given to the expedition quite a new complexion. Don Antonio was no longer even so much as an excuse for it. That unfortunate man, as he saw his throne of Portugal for the second time swept out of his reach, sulked in his dingy lodging at Stepney and threatened, under his breath to be sure, to ask for his passport. Sir Francis Drake’s Commission, as set forth in a despatch by Walsingham to the English Ambassador at Paris, was “to impeach the joining together of the King of Spain’s fleet out of their several ports, to keep victuals from them, to follow them in case they should come forward towards England or Ireland and to cut off as many of them as he could and impeach their landing, as also to set upon such as should either come out of the West or East Indies unto Spain or go out of Spain thither.”
This was a Commission wide enough to satisfy even so tempestuous a venturer as Sir Francis Drake. He could choose his moment of attack and his object, and he could seek them in whatever seas he would. To help him he was given authority to commandeer any English ship with which he fell in upon the voyage. Was this the limit of his powers? He would hardly have shipped a thousand soldiers if it had been. There was a final direction upon which Walsingham set great store. “He was particularly directed to distress the ships within the havens themselves.” San Domingo and Cartagena had taught Drake the value of a small well-trained land-force which could be secretly thrown ashore and take the haven by the flank.
Towards the end of March the fleet already assembled was ready. Drake waited only for the four tall ships from the City of London; and he waited in a fever. Messengers were still going backwards and forwards between Parma and Elizabeth. The Queen still hoped somehow out of these untimely dealings to force an authentic peace. At any moment up there on the Hoe there might appear a rider on a horse white with foam bearing an order countermanding all. But the London ships sailed into the Sound on the last day of March, and early on the morning of the 2nd of April the anchors rattled up to the bows, and with a fair wind, at the head of his twenty-three ships, Drake put out to sea on the most memorable of his expeditions. His ships were well found; he had the freest hand that a leader could wish for; he sat in his cabin, and as the great bay widened out wrote a letter to Walsingham, a paean of anxieties ended and victories to come: “Let me beseech your honour to hold a good opinion not of myself only, but of all those servitors in this action, as we stand nothing doubtful of your honour. The wind commands me away. Our ship is under sail....Let me beseech your Honour to pray unto God for us that He will direct us the right way, then we shall not doubt our enemies, for they are the sons of men. Haste! From aboard Her Majesty’s good ship Elizabeth Bonaventure, by him that will always be commanded by you and never leave to pray to God for you and all yours.”
He sent the letter ashore in a pinnace belonging to the Port and set his course south-west for Ushant. His departure was just in time. The rider on the foam-flecked horse galloped into Plymouth on the same day. Drake was allowed to go, but his powers were shorn. The provision on which Walsingham set such great store was struck out.
“You shall forbear,” ran the new order, “to enter forcibly into any of the said King’s ports or havens; or to offer any violence to any of his towns or shipping within harbouring, or to do any act of hostility upon the land.”
A pinnace was despatched with dutiful speed to overtake Drake. But, fortunately for England, the pinnace belonged to Hawkins. Though Drake sailed with a fair wind, the pinnace following on the same course met with an adverse gale. There were blind eyes before Nelson’s day. The pinnace never caught Drake’s squadron, but as a solace it picked up a prize “worth five thousand pounds and better.”
Drake, unaware of any new restriction upon his freedom of action, held his course, and before the day was out had added to his squadron two ships of war from Lyme. On April 5th he was abreast of Cape Finisterre, but there the weather broke. A gale scattered his fleet, and ten days passed before it reassembled at the given rendezvous of Cabo Roca, a promontory to the north of the Tagus. Drake had the good fortune whilst waiting at this cape to intercept two ships on their way home from Cadiz to Middelburg. He learnt from them of a great concentration of big ships and supplies in the harbour of Cadiz. All the galleons and galleasses which Philip could build in his States of Italy or buy or borrow from his reigning neighbours then put into Cadiz on their way to Lisbon. There they took in their food and guns, their ammunition and ropes and tools, all that they were wanted to contribute to the Enterprise. When they were ready, or as ready as Spanish things were wont to be, they were grouped in convoys and sent off round Cape St. Vincent to Lisbon. But meanwhile Cadiz was choked with them.
An attack on Cadiz, the destruction of the galleons and their stores gathered there, “the impeachment in fact of the joining together of the King of Spain’s fleet out of their several ports,” lay thus in the very front of Drake’s first instructions. He set every sail that his ships could carry and, leaving the slower and smaller vessels to follow as their speed served them, approached that harbour on the morning of the 19th. Whilst he was still out of sight of land, as in duty bound by the regulations of the Navy, he called on board the Elizabeth Bonaventure a council of the ships’ Captains. It will be remembered that such had been his practice when he was sailing round the world, before he was a Queen’s officer. But his councils were not of the kind customary in the Royal Navy. His habit was to listen without argument to each counsellor’s advice and then to announce his decision. Unless time pressed; when that happened he announced his decis
ion straight away without the preliminary courtesy of listening to everyone else. In neither case was there any debate.
But this was not a council as William Borough, a veteran sailor, cradled in red tape, understood the word. He was shocked when Drake announced at once his intention to attack Cadiz that afternoon. Cadiz was a fortified town. It had besides a squadron of guard-ships to protect it. To decide to attack it without the proper criss-cross of debate and a vote taken was contrary to wisdom and to custom. Besides, no rules for the action had been drawn up. You could not fight a naval action until you had drawn up rules for its conduct. Drake had one rule and thought it sufficient. The other ships were to follow his, and do as he did. They would get their orders from his signals in a particular emergency. Admiral Borough returned to the Lion fearing the worst. There is no reason to charge him with disloyalty to his chief. It was a case of the age-old antagonism between tradition and novelty, the Royal Academician and the Impressionist, the champions of the wooden ship and the inventors of the steel ship, the cavalry diehards and the tank school, the old sailors who wanted to grapple and fight a land battle at sea and the new sailors who put their faith in the weather gauge. Borough defended his point of view afterwards in London, but had the honesty to admit, “albeit things happened reasonably well.”
There was certainly a good deal to be said for a plan of action more formulated than Drake’s. But neither he nor Borough had personal knowledge of the Port of Cadiz, and the overwhelming victory which was won could not have been won without the swift improvisation which was the secret of Drake’s success. “Something must be left to chance,” Lord Nelson wrote on board H.M.S. Victory off this same port of Cadiz, two hundred and twenty years afterwards, “nothing is sure in a sea fight beyond all others.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 886