A Journey Through Tudor England (18 page)
Read A Journey Through Tudor England Online
Authors: Suzannah Lipscomb
Other sights to look out for at Buckland: there are portraits of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and a lady said to be Elizabeth I, from the circle of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Also try to spot the internal remains of the original Abbey, including a carved ox of St Luke in the corner of the Georgian dining room. Of interest, too, is the Roman Catholic chapel built in 1917 on the site of the original Abbey’s high altar (the fiercely Protestant Grenville and Drake would be turning in their graves if they knew!)
THE SPANISH ARMADA
Twice during the Tudor period, the incumbent Pope authorised an attack on England. In 1538, after the break with Rome, Pope Paul III excommunicated Henry VIII and declared that English subjects no longer owed allegiance to their King. As a result, an invasion by France or the Holy Roman Empire was felt to be a very real threat. Then, in 1570, Pope Pius V issued a similar decree regarding Elizabeth I. He declared her to be a heretic, excommunicated her and released her subjects from loyalty to her. In the eyes of Catholic Europe, she was not really Queen. In some ways, then, it was only a matter of time before
a foreign Catholic power attempted an invasion, and that moment came in July 1588.
The ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada of 134 ships and 30,000 men was ready to set sail by mid-May 1588. Everyone involved had been granted a remission of punishment for sin by Pope Sixtus V for sailing against England’s heretical Queen, and their standard, which read, ‘Arise, O God, and defend your cause!’ proclaimed their agenda of Catholic restoration.
They were immediately unlucky. The weather in May was so bad that the fleet was forced to wait three long weeks to set sail. When it finally did, the Spanish ended up sailing directly into the wind, so that it took them another two weeks to reach Cape Finisterre, 160 miles away from their point of departure. After such a delay, it was necessary to stop off at Corunna for supplies. Here, they were hit by a fierce south-westerly gale. The storm lasted two days and in that time, two galleasses and twenty-eight other warships went missing. All this, and they had not even left Spanish waters. The situation was so grim that the Spanish commander, Don Alonso Pérez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia (the Marquis of Santa Cruz had died a few months before the Armada was ready to set sail), wrote to Philip II, suggesting that they abandon the expedition. Philip instead urged them on.
On 21 July, the Spanish took to sea again and, blessed with calm waters and a south-easterly breeze, they caught sight of England eight days later.
Once the Spanish ships were spotted, a series of beacons were lit to pass the news swiftly along the coast. The English, under the command of the Lord High Admiral, Lord Howard
of Effingham, and his second-in-command, Sir Francis Drake, had more ships than the Spanish — 177 — but fewer guns. The real worry was that the Spanish might manage to land and invade: the English could not beat them on the ground.
Lord Howard took fifty-four ships out of Plymouth harbour and managed to zigzag behind the Spanish, giving the English the advantage of the wind but, despite a few skirmishes, the Spanish continued unopposed. The Spanish plan was to pick up a huge army under the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands but, here, the English had their first piece of luck: Parma’s troops were not ready. Therefore, the Armada needed to anchor near Calais to await Parma’s word and, as such, they were sitting ducks. The English sent fireships — warships packed with explosives and set afire — to drift towards the middle of the Armada, forcing the fleet to scatter.
Nevertheless, the Spanish were soon able to regroup, and withstood the English in a nine-hour battle at Gravelines. When the Spanish eventually sought to flee the bombardment, they had their own luck: the wind shifted to west-south-west, allowing them an opportunity to escape the English fleet and head north-west.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth I met her army, which had assembled at Tilbury under the command of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and, on 9 August 1588, delivered her famous address to rally the troops: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman. But I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.’
In fact, the worst of the danger had already passed. Heading up into the North Sea, Medina Sidonia had sailed away
from Parma’s army and now, because of the winds, could not easily get back.
At this point, the weather dealt the Spanish another cruel blow. They met a frontal mass of cold Arctic air and ‘a most extreme wind and cruel storm, the like whereof hath not been seen or heard a long time’. The storms were accompanied by freezing fog and poor visibility. One account said that, in the height of summer, ‘the days [were] so dark, the fogs so weird, that all our senses were obliterated’. It was also punishingly cold, and the Spanish were running very short on rations. As if this weren’t enough, as they headed around the coast of Scotland and back south past Ireland, they were hit by the tail end of a tropical hurricane (something that has only happened at this latitude once since, in 1961).
In search of relief, seventeen ships headed for the Irish coast, but only two ships sailed away again: local inhabitants murdered the crews of the rest.
When the remnants of the fleet finally returned to Spain, only sixty-seven out of the original 134 ships had survived. Two-thirds of the men — 20,000 — had died of starvation, cold, disease, murder or shipwreck. Except for the fireships, not one English ship had been lost.
Philip II remarked, ‘I sent my ships to fight against men and not against the winds and waves of God.’ The unseasonable British weather had kept the Catholic threat at bay.
‘He hath been as a star at which the world has gazed; but stars may fall.’
T
he biscuit-coloured Sherborne Castle was the Tudor home of Sir Walter Ralegh (he preferred this spelling, and contemporary sources suggest it was pronounced ‘Rawley’). He built the four-storey square building between 1594 and 1600; Sir John Digby, Earl of Bristol added the H-shape wings in 1630.
For someone who failed at almost everything he did, it is remarkable that we remember Ralegh as a great hero. Although he tried his hand at many things: chemistry, poetry, exploration, history and war, he did little to deserve his extravagant posthumous reputation. Any schoolboy knows that Ralegh introduced potatoes and tobacco to England: but he didn’t — according to the latest research — although he did make smoking fashionable in England (at Sherborne, there is a pipe of Virginian maplewood said to have been smoked by Ralegh on the scaffold in 1618). And the fable that he spread his cloak over a ‘plashy place’ so that Elizabeth could cross it is unreliable gossip. Worse still, he was said to be ‘damnably proud’, with an ‘awfulness and ascendancy in his aspect over other mortals’ that won him few friends. Or perhaps he was simply a terribly ill-fated man, disproportionately punished in life for his pride and vanity.
Although the castle is now a memorial to the generations of Wingfield-Digbys who lived here after him — filling the house with their Georgian and Victorian furnishings — rather than a monument to Ralegh, the vigilant can spot Tudor elements in the original central house.
For a start, although the original house was smaller (comprising only the central square, not the H-shape wings), the exterior lime-rendered walls match the house’s original appearance. We can be sure of this because maintenance work in 2002 exposed part of the outside wall of Ralegh’s house, which you can see at the corner of the Green Drawing Room, formerly Ralegh’s Great Chamber. The Solarium (‘sun room’), Ralegh’s parlour, has the original plasterwork ceiling adorned with Tudor roses, and there are Tudor ceilings in the Green Drawing Room, featuring acorns and fleurs-de-lis, and in Lady Bristol’s Bedroom, once Ralegh’s Great Bedroom, which bears his badge of a buck. Also, the fireplace in the Green Drawing Room has a gilt mantelpiece and overmantle showing Ralegh’s coat of arms and his motto, ‘
Nul q’un’
(‘None but one’). More obviously Tudor are the small dining room, kitchens, bakehouse and Hall, which was the original entrance to the house. The floor here has since been raised (the Tudors were, on average, a few inches shorter than us, but not hobbit-sized!)
In fact, Ralegh was known for his height: at six feet tall, he was dark-haired and handsome, with a light curling moustache and fine clothing. As you might be able to see in the portrait of him by Zucchero hanging in the Hall, Ralegh was thought to be devastatingly attractive. This was crucial to his success at court because, as the antiquary John Aubrey put it, ‘Queen Elizabeth loved to have all the servants of her court proper men.’ You can see her surrounded by some of her ‘proper men’ in the
Procession of Queen Elizabeth I
painting, by Robert Peake the Elder, in the Red Drawing Room.
Before coming to court, Ralegh had had a chequered career. Born around 1552—1554, he had served in France with the Huguenot armies, studied at Oriel College, Oxford (but not stayed long enough to gain a degree) and sailed with Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonising enterprise to the New World as the luckless captain of the
Falcon
(his ship disappeared for six months and probably didn’t get further than Cape Verde before turning round and coming home). His introduction to court may have come through his aunt Kat Astley, Elizabeth’s former governess; in 1580, he was given the privileged position of Esquire of the Body Extraordinary (part of a group of affable young men available, unpaid, for minor duties at court). His first mission for the Queen was to transport 100 soldiers to Ireland to tackle the Irish ‘rebellions’; in Ireland, he is still remembered as the perpetrator of the Smerwick massacre in which 600 people died.
Nevertheless, he had gained the Queen’s favour — according to an account fifty years later, Elizabeth ‘took him for a kind of oracle’ — and his rise was rapid. In 1585, Ralegh was knighted and appointed both Vice Admiral of the West and Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, and when Sir Christopher Hatton died in 1591 [see K
IRBY
H
ALL
], Ralegh became Captain of the Guard: a high status position that made Ralegh effectively Elizabeth’s bodyguard. The Queen granted him Durham Place in London (where Katherine of Aragon lived before her marriage to Henry VIII) and in January 1592, sub-let him estates near Sherborne, including Sherborne Old Castle, now in ruins.
Ralegh’s actual achievements range from the exaggerated to the downright false. Although he secured the patent for colonisation and sent two expeditions to Virginia (he never went himself), they were not successful. The colonists failed to consider the resolve of the Algonquin whose lands they were settling. The secret to the mystery of what happened to Ralegh’s lost colony at Roanoke Island may simply have been a massacre by the Indians.
He may yet have been successful, but for his secret marriage to Bess Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s maids-of-honour in 1591, which was discovered after Bess gave birth in March 1592. Elizabeth was furious — the monarch had to grant permission when her maids or courtiers wanted to wed — and both husband and wife were sent to the Tower of London. They were soon released but banished from court. Ralegh spent the next five years renovating the Old Castle at Sherborne, and built himself a smaller, more modern house next door: the present Sherborne Castle.
Ralegh’s second misstep was his failure to court Elizabeth’s other courtiers. As a result, Robert Cecil almost certainly blackened Ralegh’s name with Elizabeth’s successor, James I, so that when Ralegh was, probably unjustly, implicated in a plot to kill the King and put Lady Arbella Stuart, granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick [see H
ARDWICK
H
ALL
] on the throne, he was inevitably found guilty. Although initially spared the death sentence, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for thirteen years. During this time, his wife was allowed to visit (and bore him a son) and Ralegh passed his days dabbling in chemistry and writing his
History of the World
— a monumental work of some one million words.
Ralegh bargained for release on the grounds that he would go to South America — as he had done unsuccessfully once before — and find El Dorado, the fabled hidden city of gold deep in the jungles of Guiana. Sickly, old and paralysed in one leg, he was released in March 1616 and set sail the next year. On arrival, contrary to the terms of their licence, the English sacked the Spanish town of San Thomé. Ralegh’s son died in the mêlée, and despite going 300 miles inland, the expedition found neither gold nor silver. The crew grew mutinous and, in his grief, Ralegh was forced to return to England empty-handed, to face a charge of treason for fomenting war between England and Spain.