The Great Turning Points of British History (15 page)

Second, despite the sheer size of the Armada, the contest was not completely unequal. Largely constructed in the 1570s, the English navy’s ‘race-built’ vessels were fast, heavily armed and weatherly. They proved far more manoeuvrable than anything in the Spanish fleet, which never managed to implement its plan of grappling and boarding them. The English onboard, unlike the Spanish, were all skilled seamen and even the aristocrats in command, men like Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham and Lord Henry Seymour, all had some sailing experience and joined in the crews’ labours. The royal navy consisted of thirty-six fighting ships with six smaller pinnaces, essentially message ships. They were backed up by 143 merchant vessels, some of them heavily gunned for privateering – preying on the enemy’s shipping to make money out of captures. The best of the fleet, especially the ten biggest race-built vessels, was superb, but it was a small force to hold off the massive crescent-shaped formation coming up the Channel.

Third, the situation was rendered even more dangerous since the English privy council misread Spanish intentions and ordered troops to gather at Tilbury in Essex. Medina Sidonia intended to land his formidable forces in Kent. He would establish a base for Parma’s men, then, as soon as they were streaming across the Channel, the veterans carried on the Armada would storm to London. However, English strategy was superior to Philip’s over-ambitious plan of linking up Medina Sidonia’s fleet with Parma’s army.

English land forces were in the wrong place, but the navy was not, for Drake had correctly divined Spanish intentions. The English ships initially tried to engage the Armada in Atlantic waters, but failed and returned to Plymouth. There, on 30 July 1588, over a hundred ships assembled in Plymouth Sound. Under cover of darkness, they skilfully tacked across the face of the oncoming Armada and round its southern tip. Advantageously placed upwind of their opponents, English vessels continually harassed the Spanish formation as it sailed eastwards.

Parma could not move his men safely across the Channel until the Armada had cleared it of English warships. He also faced a threat from rebel Dutch vessels trying to blockade him in, ready to fire on his unarmed barges if they put to sea. As long as the English navy remained capable of fighting, Parma’s forces were unlikely to embark. Competently, Medina Sidonia brought most of his great fleet relatively unscathed into Calais Roads on 6 August, but the English still controlled the Channel.

The final point is that the English won the key battle. On the night of 7 August, eight fireships bore down on the Spanish galleons clustered off Calais. Faced suddenly with the burning vessels, most Spanish captains cut their anchors and fled. The Armada was transformed from a cohesive and still formidable fighting force to a scattering of panic-stricken vessels. Remarkably, they managed to regroup, but the following day, off Gravelines, the English came within artillery range and the battle raged for nine hours. Morale on the Armada was broken and Medina Sidonia hanged a captain who disobeyed his orders to continue fighting. Twenty officers were arrested: a recent discovery in the Spanish archives has shown that even surrender was briefly considered.

Although the Armada sustained great damage, so far only six major galleons had been lost. Worse was to come on the way back; more than thirty ships, weakened by English guns, sank in severe storms off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. But, as the experienced admiral of the Biscayan squadron observed in his journal, the whole venture was lost when the English retained command of the Channel, preventing them from linking up with Parma. The ships went down as they were fleeing for home, long after their enterprise had ended in defeat.

There have been attempts, at the time and more recently, to argue that the outcome was just due to luck, or weather, or more in the nature of a draw, since Spain rebuilt a substantial navy in the early 1590s. Those arguments are unconvincing. The campaign of summer 1588 was an outstanding English victory. It was hard fought, and by the end, the English were almost out of ammunition. However, Drake’s fireships were a brilliant tactical device and Gravelines must count as one of the greatest English naval actions. It is clear from the profusion of pamphlets across Europe that everyone accepted Spain had been resoundingly defeated. Philip II never again considered an invasion of England by combined sea and land forces: the best his rebuilt navy could do was to raid Cornwall.

The outcome of 1588 was a European turning point. England’s successful resistance showed that Spain was not invincible, encouraging Protestants in the Netherlands and France to continue their struggle. The Dutch threw off Spanish rule and Henri of Navarre became king of France, bringing religious peace and economic recovery. The young James VI of Scotland, bound to England by the treaty of Berwick in 1586 but alienated by the execution of his mother Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, shrewdly seized the Armada moment to emphasise his claim as Elizabeth’s heir. He wrote at the height of the crisis in summer 1588, assuring her of his support ‘as your natural son and compatriot of your country’. In 1589 James also composed a ‘Meditatioun’ on the unity of ‘the Ile of Britain’, jointly protected by ‘our virtewe’ and God’s ‘michtie wind’. Scotland’s king presented the events of 1588 as a victory for ‘Britain’ and for himself as the future first king of ‘the Ile’. James had done little to help, but he recognised that the defeat of the Spanish Armada was already becoming a defining moment in the development of a national identity that would be both British and Protestant.

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After 1588, the second part of Elizabeth’s reign was darker, with England involved in continental wars and faced after 1594 with a gathering revolt in Ireland. The majority of the Irish population were still Gaelic in language and culture, and remained Catholic. Led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, they seized the chance of throwing off the English yoke, and hoped for Spanish aid. In England, a rising population put pressure on limited resources. Military costs led to heavy taxation and inflation; harvest failures and poor trade due to wartime disruption made life more difficult for most, and desperate for the poor. As the queen aged, there was concern over the succession. After the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, Mary’s son James VI of Scotland was the most likely heir. Elizabeth never confirmed him as successor, but after 1586 she paid him a pension. On her death in March 1603, the new King James I was peacefully proclaimed by her privy council.

1558
Accession of Elizabeth
. Queen Mary had been a persecutor, burning over three hundred people at the stake for their beliefs. Her successor, her half-sister Elizabeth, was a moderate Protestant who hoped to avoid religious division by constructing a national Church acceptable to everybody. The Church of England never became completely comprehensive, but Elizabeth’s mostly benign rule brought peace and security to England.

1560
Scottish Reformation
. The absence of the half-French Mary Queen of Scots (who as wife of the heir to the French throne was at the French court) allowed a Protestant group to seize control. In 1560 they dominated the Scottish Parliament, abolishing the power of the papacy and the Mass. In England Sir William Cecil persuaded Elizabeth to use English troops to evict the French, who were forced to withdraw. The Protestants, initially a minority, steadily transformed Scotland into a Presbyterian country. This was crucial in developing Anglo-Scottish Protestant solidarity, allowing a sense of ‘Britishness’ slowly to emerge on both sides of the Border.

1570
Rebellion and excommunication
. Northern England remained conservative in religion, and its leading nobles, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, joined a conspiracy in 1569: the duke of Norfolk would marry the widowed Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic and Elizabeth’s nearest heir, while the north would rise in rebellion. Just as the plot collapsed, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth, releasing her Catholic subjects from loyalty to her. This major tactical miscalculation made the plight of English Catholics more difficult.

1580
Drake returns to England
. Drake left Plymouth in November 1577. Three years later, he returned, becoming only the second captain, and the first English one, to complete the circumnavigation of the globe. He brought with him booty from Spanish ships and settlements, so when the queen knighted Drake at Deptford on the deck of his weatherbeaten flagship
Golden Hind
she was condoning attacks on Philip II’s subjects.

1596
Oxfordshire Rising
. In November 1596, a few men gathered in western Oxfordshire to complain about recent enclosures. They plotted to throw down the fences enclosing new fields, to seize weapons from the houses of the gentry, perhaps even to murder some landowners. Two were executed, but the following year the privy council also rebuked the local gentry for their enclosures. The real problem was the disastrous series of four harvest failures from autumn 1594 to autumn 1597, which sent food prices soaring and hit the poor hardest.

1599
The Globe Theatre
. Shakespeare was already established as a playwright, but in 1599 he and his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, moved into the Globe. They became the capital’s leading company, performing among other great plays
The Merchant of Venice
,
Henry V
,
Julius Caesar
and
Hamlet
. Between 1570 and 1630, England produced a profusion of literary talent that has hardly ever been matched, with the Globe dominating the London scene.

To appreciate the importance of 1638, we need to understand the diversity of British politics, religion and society in the early seventeenth century. England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland only became a unified monarchy in 1603 with the Union of the Crowns. Administratively, Wales and Ireland had been closely integrated into the English state since the time of Henry VIII. Scotland had its own Parliament, a separate legal and administrative system, a different currency, and a distinct Church of Scotland. The 1603 Union worked to secure the English succession and to reduce lawlessness on the Border. Yet there was always a legacy of what John Morrill calls ‘distrust, double-dealing, broken promises, and betrayal’.

Understanding was limited by the diversity of the three kingdoms. England was firmly Protestant (less than 10 per cent were Catholics) as was Lowland Scotland; the Church of Ireland was Anglican, but most Irish people were Catholics, as were many in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Land ownership was widespread in England, but society was much more polarized in Scotland and Ireland. At least a third of the population of Scotland spoke only Gaelic, 90 per cent of Irish and a similar proportion of Welsh spoke only their native language. Few people had a direct political voice. Restricted to perhaps a quarter of adult Englishmen, the parliamentary franchise in Scotland was minuscule, but riots gave more opportunity for women, workers and the young to express themselves.

England and Wales was the wealthiest and most economically dynamic part of Britain. It had about five million people, Ireland just over a million and Scotland somewhere between eight and nine hundred thousand. Most lived in the countryside: 10 per cent of English people lived in towns of 5,000 or more, but just 3 per cent of Scots and 1 per cent of Irish were urban dwellers. Men married for the first time at about 26, women at 23 and a third of marriages were remarriages caused by a partner’s death. Life was short. Diseases like plague and typhus, over which people had almost no control, could kill thousands; one child in five born alive was dead by its first birthday. This was a violent society, which saw the highest rate of capital punishment in recorded British history.

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Crowned king of England in 1625, Charles I progressed north for his coronation as king of Scots in 1633. On his visit, he basked in the compliance of Scotland’s still separate Parliament and the utter obedience of his instruments of government in Scotland – privy council, Church and court. His power within the multiple monarchy of Britain and Ireland, newly made at the accession of his father James I in 1603, seemed absolute. Yet, just five years later, Scotland was convulsed by a revolution that caused monarchical authority to evaporate throughout the three kingdoms of England (with Wales), Scotland and Ireland, and eventually led to Charles’ execution in 1649. Intelligent, flexible yet tenacious, James proved a much better king of Scotland than of England, but he was able to keep all his kingdoms together – and apart. His second son, Charles, proved to be good at neither.

At the heart of Charles I’s failure was the close link between religion and politics. Europe’s Renaissance princes had grown politically powerful – too potent for many subjects. They feared monarchs were ready to use the authority they had by virtue of simply being princes (‘prerogative’ powers) to establish arbitrary or ‘absolute’ government untrammelled by representative institutions such as England’s Parliament or the rule of law. Rulers also preferred their subjects to follow their religion. James was a Protestant, but not a Calvinist. Charles was thought to be a closet Catholic and was married to an open one, Henrietta Maria.

To a modern reader, dislike of ‘big government’ may be understandable, but religious affiliation seems a personal choice. In the seventeenth century religion had very public implications, especially for a monarch, because princes ruled as well as reigned. To contemporaries faced with the last great war of religion on the Continent, the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and the real threat of the extirpation of Protestantism, Catholicism or ‘popery’ was viewed as a danger not only to faith, but also to all rights, liberties, property and privileges enjoyed by British Protestants. Catholics were seen as an early modern fifth column, forever ready to plot and implement treason. More specifically, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury since 1633, introduced religious changes around a Catholic-leaning doctrine known as Laudianism that emphasized ceremony in church and what he called ‘the beauty of holiness’.