The Spanish Armada (8 page)

In October 1583, some of the prisoners held in the Tower were interrogated about ‘certain speeches against the queen’s majesty supposed to have been spoken by John Somerfield’
when he protested against the treatment of Catholics. He announced that he intended to ‘shoot her through with his dagg [pistol] and hoped to see her head set on a pole [because] she was a
serpent and viper’.
⁸⁵
He hanged himself with ‘his own garters’ in his cell in Newgate prison twenty-four hours before his
execution; but one of Walsingham’s agents alleged he was killed ‘to avoid a greater evil’ by Catholic sympathisers.
⁸⁶

Assassination fears were heightened by the murder on 10 July 1584 of the Dutch Protestant leader William of Orange in Delft in the Netherlands by Balthazar Gérard, a French Catholic. The
result was the so-called
Bond of Association,
aimed at neutralising the threat of Mary Queen of Scots, as it decreed that anyone involved in Elizabeth’s death would be ineligible to
succeed her as ruler. Those who ‘procured’ the queen’s assassination would also be executed, whether or not they were aware of the conspiracy to take the queen’s
life.
⁸⁷
Furthermore, the Bond was to be signed by loyal subjects who pledged themselves to ‘act [with] the utmost revenge’ on any heirs
to the pretender to the throne for ‘their utter overthrow and extirpation’. In essence, it was lynch law, but its impact was rather dissipated when Mary happily signed it herself on 5
January 1585, promising to be ‘an enemy to all those that attempt anything against Queen Elizabeth’s life’.
⁸⁸

The Bond was enshrined in law in an Act for the Surety of the Queen’s Person, passed in March 1585, which created a commission of privy councillors and judges to hear evidence of the guilt
of
a claimant to the throne alleged to be complicit in any assassination plot or in plans for rebellion or foreign invasion. If guilty, they faced death.
⁸⁹
Far-sighted Burghley also tried to introduce a Parliamentary Bill to authorise the creation of an interregnum government led by a ‘Great Council’
in the event of Elizabeth’s murder. But the queen felt this impinged dangerously on her God-given right to rule, so she vetoed his proposals.
⁹⁰

The same year, the deranged William Parry was executed for conspiring to kill the queen while she was riding in St James’. A special prayer of thanksgiving was written for
Elizabeth’s safe deliverance which described Parry as a

Fortunately, God had protected her and had ‘diverted [Parry’s] desperate heart and bloody hand’.
⁹¹
Parry
expected to be reprieved at the last minute, pledging on the scaffold:

The crowd were having none of his protestations of innocence. They chanted: ‘Away with him’, urging the executioner to get on with his bloody business.
⁹²

Walsingham was determined to entrap Mary Queen of Scots, ‘that devilish woman’, as he called her, and finally destroy the threat she posed to England. Elizabeth ostensibly shared his
opinions of her; in 1578 she told a French envoy who came to London to plead on Mary’s behalf, that her ‘head should have been cut off years ago’.
⁹³
Walsingham’s opportunity came when he intercepted and decoded letters to and from the Scottish Queen which discussed an invasion, her rescue and Elizabeth’s murder.
Anthony Babington, the naïve twenty-five-year-old leader of the plot and his fourteen fellow conspirators were executed 20–21 September 1586.
⁹⁴

For all her grave misgivings about taking the life of an anointed queen, Elizabeth was finally persuaded to sign a death warrant authorising the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 1 February
1587. She dropped broad hints that it would be far more convenient if Mary was assassinated, but her gaoler, Sir Amyas Paulet, was having no truck with such illegalities,
despite his sovereign’s fury at his non-cooperation.
⁹⁵
Elizabeth’s Privy Council, fearful that she would change her mind and spare her
cousin, hastened to execute her, sending down Bull, the Tower’s executioner, in disguise to Fotheringay Castle, Northamptonshire, where Mary was imprisoned. He agreed a price of £10 (or
£1,880 at today’s prices) for the job and duly completed the grisly task on 8 February, holding aloft her severed head and crying out: ‘God save the queen!’

Mary was wearing an auburn wig, and the head fell from his grasp and rolled across the scaffold, grey-haired and nearly bald, leaving a shocked Bull with only her dainty white cap and wig in his
hand.
⁹⁶
Horribly, with the nerves in her dead face still twitching, her lips continued to move soundlessly as her blood soaked the straw and black
cloth of the platform.

She had enjoyed the very last word.

RUMOURS OF WAR

F
rancis Drake hated the Spanish with a burning, all-consuming passion, born out of a humiliating naval defeat, snatched dishonourably by his foes
in the harbour of San Juan de Ulúa, off Veracruz in Mexico,
²
in September 1568. He and his second cousin and fellow privateer John Hawkins had
been illegally trading with Spanish settlers in the New World – exchanging slaves from Sierra Leone for commodities
³
– when their flotilla
put into the port for repairs. A thirteen-strong Spanish fleet arrived and after agreeing a gentlemanly truce of convenience, sailed into the harbour. Several days later, they attacked the English
and, exploiting their advantage of surprise, destroyed four vessels. Hawkins and Drake ignominiously fled in the
Minion
and
Judith
respectively, arriving in Plymouth with only a
handful of survivors. There was more than a hint of animosity in Hawkins’ later statement that ‘the barque
Judith
, the same night, orsook us in our misery’.
⁴

Drake swore to inflict a heavy revenge on the Spanish nation and embarked enthusiastically upon a lucrative career of preying on the treasure looted from their new empire across the Atlantic
– producing a highly profitable return for his financial backers of £47 for every £1 they had invested.
⁵
These fortunate speculators
included Elizabeth herself, who showered honours upon him, including a knighthood. Philip of Spain was enraged, reportedly offering a bounty of 20,000
ducats
(£15,000,000 at current prices) on Drake’s head, dead or alive.

The Spanish king was, however, more preoccupied with building a powerful navy with which to defend his country’s burgeoning colonial interests around the globe, rather than with scratching
away the irritant that Drake’s forays represented. In August 1580, Lisbon was captured and Portugal swiftly annexed. This not only provided an important new maritime base on the Iberian
peninsula’s Atlantic coast, but the conquest of his neighbour also brought its well-equipped fleet to augment existing Spanish sea power. As if to underline this tectonic shift in
Europe’s strategic balance, almost two years later, his admiral, Álvaro de Bazán, First Marquis of Santa Cruz, defeated a largely French mercenary squadron supporting Dom
Antonio, Prior of Crato and pretender to the Portuguese crown, at the Battle of Sâo Miguel off the Azores.

On the diplomatic front, Philip sought to further isolate Elizabeth’s realm, with France the first target of his behind-the-scenes plotting. At the end of December 1584, the Spanish king
had secretly signed the Treaty of Joinville between Spain and Henri, Third Duke of Guise (cousin of Mary Queen of Scots) and the French ‘Catholic League’, promising support for the
Catholic cause in France.

It was not only Drake’s predatory raids on the gold and silver extracted from the New World that incensed Philip; Elizabeth was now also overtly assisting the Protestant rebels in his
possessions in the Low Countries, believing it was better to fight the Spanish on someone else’s territory rather than on English soil. Her frontline against Spain would therefore be drawn in
the Spanish Netherlands. In August 1585, the queen had signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Nonsuch, which committed her to assist the rebel Dutch provinces. As well as providing a generous annual
subsidy of 600,000 florins (£181,000,000 in current spending power), she later sent a seven-thousand-strong English army to the Low Countries under her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester. Its operational costs were to be paid by the Dutch. Unfortunately they turned out to be less-than-prompt payers. Moreover, corruption and rampant fraud ensured that her soldiers remained
unpaid and sometimes starving. No wonder she exclaimed petulantly that her Dutch war was ‘a sieve, that spends as it receives, to little purpose’.
⁶

Drake’s brief occupation of ports in Galicia in north-west Spain
the following October (when he gleefully sacked local churches) and his later raids on the Canary and
Cape Verde Islands and efficient burning and pillaging of Spanish towns in the Caribbean, sealed Philip’s determination to invade England.
⁷

Never one to be dragooned into unconsidered action, he mulled over the problem carefully for nearly two months. That December, he invited his nephew Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the
successful general who had defeated the Dutch in Brabant and Flanders, to draw up plans for an expeditionary force to cross the narrow seas to invade England.

Santa Cruz, his confidence buoyed by naval victories in the Azores, meanwhile boasted that he could easily defeat England at sea, if only Philip chose to give the order. He offered to
‘serve your majesty in the enterprise in the firm hope that . . . I will emerge just as victorious from it as in the other things I have done for you’.
⁸
It was probably to the admiral’s subsequent dismay that the king readily took him at his word. In January 1586 he was ordered to produce estimates of the extent of forces
necessary to successfully invade England and finally eradicate this Protestant bulwark that had become so troublesome to Spain’s interests and ambitions.

Philip knew that to defeat England meant he had to destroy its navy to enable him to control the sea. Thirty years before, when he had been such an unenthusiastic husband to Elizabeth’s
half-sister, he had noted: ‘The kingdom of England is and must always remain strong at sea, since upon this the safety of the realm depends.’
⁹
He was now destined to test the veracity of his maxim.

The Spanish king was no warmonger, however. The exiled English priest Robert Persons acknowledged that Philip ‘fears war as a burned child dreads the fire’.
¹⁰
But that fear emanated from more prosaic issues rather than simple scruples over the shedding of Christian blood. Philip, always debt-ridden, was more worried about the
costs involved and the economic consequences of war.

His very worst misgivings were realised when Santa Cruz submitted his ambitious estimates on 12 March 1586, asking for one hundred and fifty-six ships plus 55,000 troops to land in England,
supported by four hundred auxiliary vessels. Like any modern military planner he had built in extra contingencies in case his requirements for the invasion force were cut back, but he had carefully
worked
out that such a military operation would cost an eye-watering four million ducats (about £3 billion at today’s prices). Philip probably gasped in pain when
he saw the row of noughts on the paper before him, rather than from the agonising gout that frequently afflicted him.

Parma, in his twenty-eight-page plan delivered that June, envisaged a thirty-thousand-strong force plus five hundred cavalry transported in flat-bottomed barges launching a surprise attack on
the Kent coast between Dover and Margate, before assaulting London, 67 miles (107 km) inland. The crossing, the general declared confidently, would probably take around ten or twelve hours –
or less, with a following wind. Naval protection was only necessary if Elizabeth’s government had learned of the invasion plans beforehand, but either way, Spanish ships could lure the
English fleet away from the Straits of Dover. Sceptical that surprise could be achieved, Philip scrawled ‘Hardly possible!’ alongside this requirement in Parma’s plan.

Other strategies were submitted to the Escorial Palace. Bernardino de Escalante, who was a member of the entourage accompanying Philip to England for his marriage to Mary I in 1554, had fought
as a soldier in the Netherlands in 1555–8 before becoming a priest two decades later. In June 1586, he drew up a campaign map, urging a diversionary attack on Waterford in southern Ireland by
thirty-two thousand men to decoy Elizabeth’s fleet from the English Channel, so allowing a landing in Kent by Spanish troops from Flanders. The invaders could then mount a swift and decisive
seizure of London, which was only defended by the ‘
E Greet Tuura
’, the great Tower of London.
¹¹
The ill-trained English
militias would in any case melt away before the onslaught of Parma’s battle-hardened veterans.

One of Philip’s advisers, Don Juan de Zúñiga, charged with coordinating the now weighty range of invasion plans, was impressed by the priest’s strategy, appending only
the sensible requirement for reinforcements and supplies to be delivered as soon as the queen’s navy had been neutralised. This ‘Enterprise of England’, he suggested, should be
launched in August or September 1587.