The Pirate Queen (47 page)
Authors: Susan Ronald
Now, all Sir Francis could offer Lane was the
Bark Bonner
and whatever food he could spare. But Lane realized that the
Bark Bonner
could never bring them all to safety. It was as if the heavens were sending Lane a message, and he announced after consultation with his colonists that he had changed his mind and wanted to return home. The colonists stampeded to get aboard the ships that had rowed into the shallows to rescue them, upsetting maps, books, and detailed accounts of their story. The three colonists who had gone up-country in search of food and an alternate settlement site were abandoned, never to be seen again. Finally, on June 18, 1586, Sir Francis Drake had embarked
the Roanoke settlers and sailed for England. Five weeks later, on July 27, they anchored safely at Portsmouth.
19
Two weeks after that, Sir Richard Grenville returned to Roanoke, finding it abandoned. He searched the country surrounding the settlement and explored the coastline in the vain hope of finding the men he had come to relieve. He was “desolate yet unwilling to lose possession of the country,” and so he landed fifteen men on the “Isle of Roanoke,” plentifully provisioned for two years, and sailed away. Grenville, of course, left them to certain death.
Considering that the English have done so much damage in so short a time to the merchant men trading in these waters, it is likely that they will do the same to the India fleets; accordingly it would be as well to give orders that at least two more ships besides the Captain and the Admiral should be armed in each fleet…all these preparations are directed solely against the English fleet….
—MARQUIS OF SANTA CRUZ TO PHILIP II
I
n January 1585, the pope published another bull against Elizabeth, giving Philip of Spain 1.8 million crowns annually ($1.15 billion or £623 million today) over a five-year period to eradicate the “heretical state” of England. Effectively, the pope agreed to forfeit papal concessions to the crown of Spain. Proceeds would be collected in special chests at the mint in Madrid for the king’s use to rid himself of the demon Elizabeth. He raised an additional 900,000 crowns for his enterprise.
1
Philip had tired by the end of 1585 with English meddling in the Low Countries. Had he not had William of Orange assassinated to bring the Netherlands back under control? And what for? So that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, should become its effective king! Little did Philip know that Dudley’s rise to a quasi-kingship offered by the Dutch had stirred almost as much consternation at Elizabeth’s court as it had at Philip’s. The queen was so angry that she wrote a personal letter to Leicester and had it brought to him by Sir Thomas Heneage in the Low Countries. She intuitively knew that Leicester’s actions drove England ever closer to the final confrontation. Her stinging words to Leicester (though not the finest she had written) were these:
We hold our honour greatly touched by the said acceptation of that government, and least as we may not with our honour endure, or that it carries a manifest appearance of repugnancy to our protestation set out in print, by the which we declare that our only intent in sending him over to those parts was to direct and govern the English troops that we had granted to the States for their aid and to assist them with his advice and counsel for the better ordering both of their civil and martial courses, as is contained in the late contract passed between us and their commissioners that were here, so as the world may justly thereby conceive…[that] a minister [of] ours sent thither to execute and hold such a course of government as was contained in the said contract—should without our assent be pressed to assent to accept of more large and absolute authority over the said countries than was accorded by virtue of the said contract, especially seeing that we ourself, being oftentimes pressed by their commissioners to accept of the absolute government, did always refuse the same….
2
Despite the rebuke, Leicester, never a great commander in the field, didn’t stand a chance against the superior Spanish troops honed into a crack fighting force by Parma. At the end of 1586, Leicester, and what was left of his army, had been brought back to England, defeated. Sir Philip Sidney, along with thousands of others, had been killed in a fruitless, chaotic attempt to free the Dutch from the yoke of the Spanish.
Then, in February 1587 at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s home, Fotheringhay Castle, the final act in the twenty-year drama between the two British queens was played out. Despite having been thrust into the rarified atmosphere of the French and Scottish courts her entire life, Mary had allowed her heart to rule her head. Now she would lose even that. Her execution for her role in the Babington plot would serve as a symbol for all Catholics that “stubborn disobedience…Incitement to insurrection…against the life and person of her Sacred Majesty” would end in a guilty verdict for high treason and death. When Mary’s auburn wig and head were held aloft for the executioner to utter the customary words for traitors, “Long live the queen,” in Elizabeth’s name, all-out war was inevitable.
Or perhaps not. Elizabeth always made a good show of saying what she didn’t mean, and meaning what she didn’t say. She lashed out at her Councillors, singling out Walsingham, for tricking her into signing Mary’s death warrant. Her former agent in the Low Countries, William Davison, now one of her secretaries, was judged to be the most culpable and was thrown unceremoniously into the Tower through its notorious Traitor’s Gate. Yet, for Davison, the Traitor’s Gate swung both ways, and he was later released upon a bond of £10,000. For now Elizabeth had written the script, and for the time being, Davison would need to be sacrificed for the good of the realm. Elizabeth, meanwhile, put on the best performance of her life to avoid any backlash from Scotland. She wailed for a solid three weeks, then wrote a heartfelt letter of apology and explanation to the King of Scotland, James, blaming her secretary and begging the King’s personal forgiveness. James was no fool and felt he was a step closer to becoming Elizabeth’s heir. If the queen asked forgiveness he would comply. With the throne of England dangled in front of his nose, how could he refuse?
3
When the dramatic news reached the King of Spain on March 23, Philip recognized that he, too, could dither no longer. Aside from Mary’s Calvinist son, James VI of Scotland, he believed (as did Mendoza, by his genealogical chart showing Philip directly descended from Edward III) that he had the best claim to England’s throne, and would need to seize it for Catholicism.
4
Orders were sent out to Don Alvaro de Bazán, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, to prepare the fleet for the “Enterprise of England” he had so long wanted to undertake. Santa Cruz’s estimate was for 150 great ships, which included all Spain’s galleons and most of her merchantmen. Over forty
urcas
—round tublike freighters used for provisions—would also be required. Some 320 dispatch boats and cruisers would also be needed, bringing the total estimate to 510 sail, along with 30,000 mariners and 64,000 soldiers. The naval ordnance alone would cost around 3.8 million ducats ($4.20 billion or £2.27 billion today). Such a force was as far beyond Philip’s reach as it would have been beyond Elizabeth’s. And so, the king came up with an alternative plan for Santa Cruz to meet up with Parma’s troops in the Low Countries and for them to invade England together. It was a perfect solution for the armchair strategist: marry his premier
naval commander with the ruthless and skilled Parma.
5
But as preparations progressed through the spring of 1587, costs soared, making Philip feel literally ill. Spending rose to 10,000,500
reals
per day for his officers’ commissions alone ($1.06 billion or £570,322 million). Yet Santa Cruz required another 3 million
reals
in gold urgently.
6
Almost as bad as the financial strain that the Enterprise was putting on Spain’s coffers were the blithe remarks from his officers that an invasion of England would be a dawdle.
Disparo!
(Nonsense!) Philip scrawled on these papers before he would toss them aside, or into the fire. After all,
he
had been King of England, and he knew something of English stubbornness and character. The uncertainty of the outcome of the Enterprise weighed heavily on his conscience. But as Mendoza wrote to Philip and later shared his thoughts with the Pope, “since God in His wisdom has ordained otherwise [than for Mary to rule England], He will raise up other instruments for the triumph of His cause…. So it would seem to be God’s obvious design to bestow upon your majesty the crowns of these two kingdoms.”
7
Yet Philip’s “Enterprise of England” was the worst-kept secret in Europe, and Elizabeth, too, was left no alternative but to try to cut it off at the knees. She would unleash Drake again, and pray.
I’ve Singed the beard of the King of Spain.
—SIR FRANCIS DRAKE
P
hilip II had been in his sickbed crippled by gout and self-doubt for the past six months. Though ill, he knew decisive action had to be taken that spring to hold out any palpable hope to be rid of his great demons—Elizabeth and Drake—once and for all. More recently, Raleigh and his Virginia colony troubled his aching mind. The man Davis had already made two voyages in search of the Northwest Passage, and would soon undertake a third! And now he had been advised that a certain Thomas Cavendish had sailed for Peru in his ship the
Desire
.
1
Desire…it was a word that haunted him. He now desired peace. Even Aranjuez, his oasis of calm, could not provide him with the balm to soothe his troubled thoughts. The undeclared war against “that Englishwoman” continued to escalate despite his best efforts. Still, he often wondered how things had degenerated to such an impasse. How had he gone from brother to would-be suitor to her persecutor in twenty-eight years? But when the nostalgia cleared, Philip remembered that Elizabeth often claimed no knowledge of her adventurers’ undertakings, while simultaneously counting her third of the cash they plundered.
The king was, as ever, well informed. Since 1585, her firsthand knowledge of the two hundred vessels sailing each year carrying out her business of piracy and plunder had made her, at the very least, an accessory. The rules of these naval engagements had been well defined by the English Admiralty: the queen received a one-third share of the registered plunder, the investors a third, and the crew a third. The Admiralty would get a 10 percent slice off the top, after customs officials (who also paid out to the queen and her councillors) were paid on the ships’ arrivals into harbor.
2
What good were all the riches of the world, Philip asked his councillors, if none of his Indiamen reached Spanish or Portuguese ports? He knew full well that not one treasure ship had docked in Spain the previous year, and prayed that the Queen of England’s intelligencers had not been informed. Her sailors would be the ruin of him. Yet Elizabeth had been her own worst enemy, and left him with no alternative once she had eliminated the Queen of Scots.
And so, it had been with some reluctance that Philip gave the order to his great admiral, Santa Cruz, to press ahead with a Spanish Armada to invade England to claim the throne for Spanish interests. It was a matter of self-defense, a matter of national pride. It was also an economic necessity.
While Philip II shambled through the perfumed gardens in the afternoons of April 1587, he mused repeatedly, “Clearly God must be allowing her waywardness on account of her sins and unfaithfulness, so that she will be lost.” As ever, the Spanish monarch sought the financial—as well as spiritual—support from Pope Sixtus V for his enterprise against England. However, this time, the pope’s offer of a million ducats was conditional on the successful invasion of England, ordering that “your Majesty would not maintain the throne for yourself.” When the pope—through his own spy network—learned about Philip’s plan to keep England as part of his enlarged empire, Sixtus fulminated against the king with threats of divine vengeance unless he “repented of his great sin, and obeyed the Vicar of Christ.”
3
Meanwhile, Elizabeth, of course, knew everything. Drake begged to be allowed to sail and attack Philip on his home territory. Walsingham and Leicester agreed. A plan was hatched to use Antonio, the dethroned Portuguese king, as their decoy, and Walsingham spread as much disinformation as he could to keep the object of Drake’s mission an utter secret.
4
For the job ahead, Drake was given six of the queen’s ships: her four best galleons—the
Elizabeth Bonaventure
, the
Golden Lion
, the
Dreadnought
, and the
Rainbow
—and two of her swiftest pinnaces. Elizabeth personally authorized Drake to “obtain as many ships as would join him from the London merchants,” and the lord admiral offered his own galleon and pinnace. Drake invested four of his own ships in the
venture.
5
By March 27, 1587, Drake had obtained a total of forty-two vessels for his secret mission.
To help keep Philip’s spies off the scent, Drake stayed behind in London for twenty-four hours for an unrecorded meeting with his great friend, Sir Francis Walsingham, before joining the Londoners at Dover and boarding the
Elizabeth Bonaventure
with his wife, Lady Elizabeth.
6
Walsingham then leaked the latest disinformation to Philip’s newest spy—the English ambassador in Paris—Sir Edward Stafford. As an excellent spymaster, Walsingham knew that Stafford had accepted 8,000 crowns from Philip only weeks earlier, and he chose specifically to leave the traitor in place so that he could better serve the English crown by his treachery. Stafford did not disappoint him.
7