The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (50 page)

Philip had never wanted war with England. He had given half-hearted help to Guise’s proposed ‘enterprise of England’ in 1583, but was not yet planning his own. When Pope Sixtus V adjured him in the summer of 1585 to undertake some glorious enterprise for the faith, Philip was reluctant. All Elizabeth’s provocation invited retaliation, but for that a mere punitive expedition to Ireland might have sufficed. Then Philip changed his mind: he determined instead upon a great crusade to restore the faith to England. Drake’s voyage around the world had raised the spectre of constant English raids against the Spanish empire. In the spring of 1586 the Pope agreed that once Mary, Queen of Scots was on the English throne, Philip could choose her successor. That the succession would pass to his own dynasty – not to himself, but to his daughter, the Infanta Isabella – Philip kept secret. Through 1586 preparations were made for a great Armada. The felling of so many trees, the storing of provisions, the levying of thousands of men throughout Italy and Iberia, could not be hidden. A great fleet would sail, but where and against whom? That spring the talk among soldiers in the Netherlands was of the invasion of England. Others thought the Armada was intended for a final assault upon Holland and Zeeland. Speculation was universal, but only Philip and his most senior commanders knew the strategy, and Philip’s mind kept changing. In the summer of 1586 he had sent a message to Parma, for Parma’s eyes alone, that he would command an expeditionary force from the Netherlands to join the Armada for a combined invasion of England through Kent. This was a grand plan which left much unplanned.

Philip had bought powder and shot and biscuit. He had also bought the English ambassador in Paris. Sir Edward Stafford, feuding with Walsingham and Leicester and now looking to the rising sun, the next monarch, made his own the fourth generation of traitors in his family. Early in 1587 he promised Don Bernadino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to London until 1584, and subsequently in Paris, that not a single warship would be equipped in England without Spain’s knowledge. That April he revealed the most secret of plans: the Queen’s
instructions to Drake to sail to Spain and destroy all the Spanish shipping and property he could; to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’. But his information arrived just too late to prevent Drake’s spectacular raid on 19 April. In January 1588 Stafford sent news to England that the Armada was abandoned; in April that it sailed for Algiers; in June that it was bound for the Indies, and then that it had been diverted back to Spain: all false, all treason, at a time of consummate danger for England. At the end of May the great Armada sailed from Lisbon, under the reluctant command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia. A fleet of 130 ships, with 18,000 soldiers and 7,000 sailors, left La Coruña in July 1588 – the greatest fleet ever seen – and still no one in England knew its exact destination or purpose.

On 19 July the Armada was sighted off the Scilly Isles. The Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham led the Queen’s fleet out of Plymouth harbour, and the next day it saw the Armada sailing slowly up the Channel under full sail in its awesome crescent formation; its galleons, with their high turrets, like floating wooden castles. On the 21st the Lord Admiral sent the
Disdain
to bear his challenge to the Spanish admiral. His flagship,
Ark Royal
exchanged broadsides with the Levant squadron, while Drake in the
Revenge
, Hawkins in the
Victory
, and Frobisher in the
Triumph
assailed the Armada’s ‘rearguard’ commanded by Vice-Admiral Recalde. The English ships were smaller than the Spanish, but they were faster, more weatherly and, crucially, they had seized the advantage of the wind. Through the terrifying days ahead the English evaded the Spanish tactics of grappling and boarding, and were fleet enough to keep the distance they chose and to use their superior guns.

In deciding to let the Armada pass and to pursue it up the Channel, the English commanders had taken a terrible risk. They could never break its grim formation, and the Armada sailed on towards the Calais Roads and its rendezvous with Parma. Parma had an assault force of 17,000 men, including some of the best fighting men in Europe, yet he had already lost confidence in the enterprise, and wished to halt it. Medina Sidonia anchored off Calais on the 27th, waiting to escort Parma’s invading transports to Kent. What he could not have known was that Parma was helpless to help, blocked by the Dutch flyboats which controlled the banks and shoals of the Flanders coast. As the Spanish waited for the meeting that never came, there appeared out of the dark of the night of the 28th blazing fireships, borne upon the wind

towards them. In horror that these were ‘hell burners’, explosive as well as incendiary, the Armada scattered. It re-formed, and engaged the English fleet the next day. The sea battle off Gravelines was fiercer even than that at Lepanto, so Spaniards remembered, but that had been a great Spanish victory and this was not.

The Armada sailed north before the wind, with the English in pursuit. Driven to leeward by wind and current, it was within minutes of grounding on the Zeeland sands, to be saved only by the providential backing of the wind. Still the Spanish commanders planned to re-engage, but the Armada fled on northwards, driven by storms, making for Scotland and, by the longest route, for home. Shortage of water forced the Spaniards to throw their horses into the sea where, later, a Dutch merchantman came upon them swimming, swimming. Philip had collected charts of the English coast, but there were none for the lethal west coast of Ireland. Spanish wrecks lie still in the waters off Kerry, Donegal and Sligo. There was little comfort for those Spaniards driven ashore in Ireland by shipwreck or famine. The Irish, wrote Sir George Carew, stood ‘agaze until the game be played’. Only a few chiefs, like O’Rourke and MacClancy in Leitrim, dared offer shelter. Others, fearful of retribution, handed over hundreds of Spaniards for summary execution by English officers. On Clare Island the O’Malleys murdered survivors from Don Pedro de Mendoza’s ship for their gold. By sword or sea, Spaniards died in their thousands in Ireland. Since the Spanish were allies of the Irish against England, they could be given no quarter by Ireland’s English rulers. At the height of the scare the English-born councillors in Dublin added a secret postscript to a dispatch, ‘signed only by us of the English’: in their terror that not only Gaelic Ulster but the Pale would rise with the Spanish, they called for 2,000 men.

Perhaps half of the great fleet returned to Spain by mid October; the ships battered, as many as 9,000 men lost, and the remnant starving, thirsty, even dying. So much had gone wrong in the preparation for this invasion: too few seamen, too little food and water, and, crucially, the failed embarkation of Parma’s troops. Yet England had lain open. The fortifications of the south coast were pathetically inadequate; the land forces there ‘artificers and clowns [craftsmen and peasants]’ who knew nothing of war. Raw, untrained, unprovisioned levies, under the command of Leicester, so unsuccessful a commander, gathered at Tilbury in Essex for the defence of London. After the Armada had fled north, but before fears of its return had subsided, Elizabeth came in glorious person
to the camp to rally her troops: ‘I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.’ So magnificent, so gallant, and yet so useless if the Spaniards had landed, as planned, in Kent. The English fleet had been too short of food and shot to pursue the Armada north. Against nature, the Lord Admiral ate beans (which were peasants’ food) and his mariners drank their urine.

In the Tower, where he languished for his suspected complicity in Catholic ‘practices’, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel had composed a prayer and had a Mass of the Holy Ghost said for the ‘happy success’ of the Armada. This was treason, and unavailing. Parma had feared early in 1586 that ‘God will soon weary of working miracles for us’. Now it seemed He had. Both English and Spanish saw God’s hand in every victory and defeat. Drake rejoiced that God had sent ‘this proud enemy of His truth by storm and tempest’, and certainly most of the providential winds had blown to England’s advantage. Many were complacent. Armada medals were struck, parodying Caesar’s boast: ‘It came, it saw, it fled’. But many saw instead what had been lost. ‘Our parsimony at home,’ wrote Captain Henry White, ‘hath bereaved us of the famousest victory that ever our nation had at sea.’ Elizabeth had been unable to raise money: at home, because of a trade recession; abroad, because no one thought the English could win. Lack of provisions had left the victory inconclusive, and the Armada defeated only for a while. Walsingham, perennially pessimistic, lamented, ‘So our half-doing doth breed dishonour and leaves the disease uncured.’ Elizabeth now seemed set to hazard her kingdom by disarming, yet few doubted, either in Spain or England, that another Armada would sail. And when it did, God might not again send England the victory. The Armada was, for England’s godly, not merely an enterprise by the national enemy, but an emissary from the papal Antichrist; only one event in the inevitable apocalyptic confrontation.

ELIZABETHAN WORLD VIEWS

An incendiary rumour persisted in Essex through the 1580s and 1590s, of the arrival of an avenging army of vagrants, led by the King of Spain and the long-exiled Earl of Westmorland, to free the poor of England. This was the delusion of despair. In the 1590s the suffering and privation of the poor was worse than anyone could remember. In their distress, would they seek remedy? Hearing the news that wheat was on sale at nine shillings a bushel at Bicester market in the autumn of 1596 – three times the price of earlier in the decade – a man asked, ‘Then what shall poor men do?’

‘Rather than they would be starved, they would rise,’ came the reply.

The Elizabethan governing orders looked on the poor, usually so passive and deferential, with mounting alarm.

The years of peace before 1585 had been years of prosperity; ‘the mother of riches… the father of many children’, so William Lambarde, the Kentish antiquarian and JP, described them. The population of England had expanded at a startling rate: perhaps by 1 per cent every year between 1576 and 1586, and by as much as 35 per cent during Elizabeth’s reign – from 3.3 million in 1571 to 4.15 million in 1603. The growth of London had been more spectacular still. In 1548 perhaps as many as 60,000 people lived within the walls of the City and in its precincts north and south of the river; by Elizabeth’s death the population of the growing metropolis, extending beyond its ancient walls, may have been as many as 200,000. Migrants swarmed to the City, and there, in the crowded alleys, the mortality rate continually exceeded the birth rate. The poor did not come to London in order to die, but that was very often the consequence.

All these mouths had to be fed, an exigency which presented new opportunities and new dangers. There were many gentry and yeomen farmers who rose to the challenge, producing surplus food for sale in
the markets, and farming more intensively and more cost-effectively. They bought up smaller farms, engrossing the subsistence holdings of their poorer neighbours into their own more economically efficient holdings. As the population grew, they exploited the increased supply of labour by cutting wages; as competition for land increased and the law of supply and demand drove up rents, they outbid those who were struggling. The enclosure of open fields under tillage or of common pasture land was the most infamous device adopted by rationalizing landlords to wipe out customary rights. In many areas enclosure had taken place long ago, but in others aggressive landlords continued to enclose, and each new enclosure was more bitterly resented by those it deprived. As important as the real map of enclosure was the map in the minds of those it threatened. The economic advantage of enclosure – for the enclosers – was overshadowed by its social and moral costs. Preachers like William Harrison of Radwinter in Essex saw enclosure as the unbridled pursuit of self-interest, and as unregenerate use of divinely given resources.