Many of her courtiers posted back to Whitehall, preparing for the change. Orders were issued to transport to Holland all vagrants and unknown persons found in London or Westminster; numerous gentlemen who it was thought were likely to cause trouble were arrested and put in the Tower, to be on the safe side. Arms and ammunition were supplied to the court, an armed guard put on the exchequer. The fleet was ordered to sea. All that could be put in readiness was put in readiness.
At last the Queen was forced to sink back upon some cushions, which had been spread around her, and there lay unspeaking for four more days, her finger in her mouth. Music was played to her, and this seemed to bring a little pleasure to the old eyes. More than did Archbishop Whitgift’s prayers, though he prayed unceasingly at her side. Unlike Philip, religion had never been a dominating influence in her life; this had enabled her to rise above the prevailing passions; now it provided her with small succour at the end.
From her only relative of near contemporary age, the old Lord Admiral Howard, now Lord Nottingham, she accepted one bowl of soup. To him she complained that she was tied with an iron collar about her neck. He tried to reassure her but she said: ‘No, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’
To the last she would not name her successor, though those about her thought she nodded once at the King of Scotland’s name. Towards the evening of the 23rd she allowed the Archbishop to examine her in her faith; she replied only by nods or a raising of the hand. Then he prayed at her bedside until late in the night, when she fell asleep. At three o’clock in the morning the courtiers remaining around her couch noticed a change in her and saw that she was dead. She had passed away ‘as the most resplendent sun setteth at last in a western cloud’.
Fate sometimes has a way of staging the sorry anti-climax, and one scarcely more painful could have been arranged than the succession of King James. In place of the dead Queen with her great authority, with the aura of forty-five years as a monarch, with her talent for majestic eloquence, her wit, her coarse dynamic vitality, her legendary prestige, there came a thin-shanked, pot-bellied little man, wearing a bonnet awry upon his head and clothes so thickly padded to protect him from possible dagger thrusts that he looked like Humpty Dumpty; a man who could only sit a horse if it were saddled like an armchair, whose fingers were ever fumbling with his codpiece, whose tongue was too large for his mouth, whose eyes were large and watery and his beard thin and straggling. It is extraordinary that two such handsome creatures as Mary and Darnley could ever have produced so unhandsome a son.
But underneath his shambling, drooling exterior he had a good deal of shrewd wisdom and a clear eye for the practical realities of a situation. And the situation regarding Spain was to him perfectly straightforward. As King of Scotland he never had been at war with Spain; why should he now be in his larger domain? He saw himself as the Peacemaker, and on the whole his new subjects were ready enough to accept his point of view. France was already at peace with Spain. Holland was virtually independent. It was time for England to come to terms with her old enemy.
This James did on England’s behalf very quickly, and by 1604 peace was formally signed. The terms of the peace were unsatisfactory to the adventurous and burgeoning spirit of maritime England, and could only lead – as they did – to a renewal of the struggle later in the century; but for the time the treaty sufficed. It sufficed too to see the end of the great Spanish fleets built regularly in the Atlantic ports to be launched against a heretic England. Though religious divisions were to remain as acute for another hundred years, it was the end of Spanish hegemony in Europe and Spanish monopoly in the Caribbean. Though frequently at war with England, or near war with England, Spain never again considered, or was in a position to consider, conquest. It was never again between the two countries a war à outrance.
The last of the Spanish Armadas had sailed. For two centuries England was to be free from the threat of invasion.
This is not the kind of book in which source notes at the bottom of the page are appropriate; in any case they disfigure the page and distract the reader. A full bibliography is therefore the more essential. Clearly all the books listed here are not of equal importance; from some only a few facts have been gleaned, to others my debt is considerable. Yet for the student who wishes to go to source material it is probably more helpful to list the lot, so that he may pick and choose as he wishes.
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Copyright
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