The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (51 page)

Walsingham handled virtually all the paperwork generated by the works at Dover. Reginald Scot’s history of the project praised him as ‘the man without whom nothing was done, directing the course, and always looking into the state thereof’. Walsingham’s manuscript journal of 1583–4 gives us a glimpse of him running the operation from Seething Lane, despatching orders and authorising payments for men and materials. Hydraulic experts were brought over from Flanders to refine the sophisticated system of groynes and sluices devised by Digges and Ive. But it
was local know-how from Romney Marsh which underpinned the strength of Dover harbour. The key to success turned out to be the mixture of chalk and ‘ooze’, or mud, used in constructing the walls. Digges recognised that Romney men were ‘the only and fittest workmen’ for the task, so long as they were properly supervised. Throughout the summer of 1583, hundreds of Kentish carts transported building materials down to Dover. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed recorded the songs and laughter of the drivers as they tipped their loads into the water. As the local gentleman Sir Thomas Scott triumphantly reported to Walsingham, two months of effort achieved what had been expected to take two years, and at a fraction of the cost of using timber and stone. For the first time, the English navy had a usable harbour on the Channel coast closest to the continent.
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The tremor radiating out from Francis Drake’s 1587 assault on Cadiz was felt by Walsingham’s sources across Europe. Watching the Spanish reaction from his viewpoint in Florence, Antony Standen described how the Devon pirate (who had his own symbol, 22, in Standen’s cipher alphabet) ‘hath put a great terror among that people’. According to Edward Stafford, the pope was now sneering that the King of Spain was ‘a coward that suffered his nose to be held in the Low Countries by a woman’. Philip had been humiliated in his own realm by a mere mariner. Captain Thomas Fenner, who took part in the raid, judged it a miracle ‘that so great an exploit should be performed with so small loss’. Drake basked in the adulation, but was under no illusions about Spain’s ability to recover. His despatches to Walsingham and Leicester contained the same urgent warning: ‘the like preparation was never heard of nor known, as the King of Spain hath and daily maketh to invade England’. Philip had
powerful allies, and his store of provisions was sufficient to keep an army of forty thousand in the field for a whole year. Singeing his beard at Cadiz had only delayed the inevitable. Drake’s appeal to Walsingham sounded an alarum as clearly as in any Shakespeare play: ‘Prepare in England strongly, and most by sea. Stop him now, and stop him ever. Look well to the coast of Sussex … It is the Lord that giveth victory.’
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The challenge facing Walsingham and the council lay less in establishing the existence of the Armada, which was obvious, than in working out what Philip II intended to do with it. Reports were frequently contradictory, not least because Spanish plans were themselves so fluid. When the fleet still wasn’t ready by the winter of 1587, Philip amazed the Duke of Parma by urging him to launch an assault across the Channel without it. Further confusion was caused by a turnover in the Spanish high command. Santa Cruz’s death in February 1588 meant that the helm passed to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an amiable grandee who by his own admission ‘had no experience either of the sea or of war’ and was a martyr to sea-sickness. Santa Cruz’s battle plans and files were jealously guarded by his secretary, and his successor had to make an impassioned appeal to the king to be allowed to see them. Medina Sidonia did his best to make sense of the chaos at Lisbon harbour, but his natural deference to his sovereign was a poor substitute for the robust decision-making of Santa Cruz.

Drake suspected that the Armada might drop anchor off the Sussex coast, where the Throckmorton plotters had hoped to welcome a Spanish landing back in 1583, but in truth the intended landing-zone kept on shifting. Ireland remained a plausible target until late in the day, where Catholic insurgents might be expected to do Philip’s work for him. The Isle of Wight was also considered as a bridgehead, a plan which would very quickly have exposed Sir George Carey’s folly in building a fine
house before reinforcing the defences at Carisbrooke. Meanwhile every month that the Armada didn’t sail cost the Spanish crown another seven hundred thousand ducats, testing the discipline and sapping the morale of soldiers and sailors confined to port. Finally the Isle of Thanet was decided upon, an unfortified spur of land on the eastern tip of Kent. Parma’s seventeen-thousand-strong Flanders army would be joined by a similar number who had sailed from Spain, while the faster ships of the Armada patrolled the approaches to the Medway and the Thames. Thanet was also symbolically important, the place where St Augustine of Canterbury had begun his mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Catholic Christianity. By choosing to land here, Philip II could portray his invasion as the second liberation of the English people from pagan heresy, nearly a thousand years since the first.

Comparatively little thought seems to have gone into the shape of the post-invasion regime in England. It was deeply unlikely that Philip would want to rule in person, while the execution of the Queen of Scots had put paid to ideas of a puppet government under Mary and the Duke of Parma. The sealed orders which Medina Sidonia intended to hand to Parma plotted more than one possible outcome. The Armada was to avoid battle unless forced into it, focusing on preserving its artillery pieces and marines and making its rendezvous at Gravelines. Once the troop transports had been escorted across the Channel, everything would depend on the scale of English resistance. If the landing became bogged down or failed, Parma was authorised to negotiate with Queen Elizabeth. Spanish terms would be, firstly, the free exercise of the Catholic faith in England, and a passport for religious exiles to return home; secondly the surrender of the cautionary towns to King Philip, together with any other parts of the Netherlands in English hands; and finally the payment of damages for acts of piracy
against Spanish interests. As for the queen’s ministers, Lord Burghley might just have survived – he had, after all, made his peace with the Spanish once before – but Walsingham’s execution would have been non-negotiable.
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To see the Spanish Armada as a kind of gunboat diplomacy, an attempt to enforce Catholic toleration rather than to annihilate English liberty and religion, goes against more than four centuries of national myth-making. To be fair, Parma’s sealed orders would only come into play if the land campaign began to falter; conquest was the prime objective, at least in the eyes of the commander in the field. But a parallel strategy of negotiating from a position of military strength makes some sense of Philip II’s protracted peace talks, dismissed as a ruse by Walsingham. It would also be consistent with the attitude of a man who, even though he had once been King of England, displayed little interest in ruling it again.

Following Drake’s capture of the
Nuestra Señora del Rosario
on the first day of the battle, the English had the chance to question her officers and crew about the intentions of the Armada. The aristocrat Don Pedro de Valdés was haughty and obstructive, maintaining that it wasn’t the place of a subject ‘to judge the actions of his prince’, but other prisoners of war in London’s Bridewell were quicker to talk. Their replies suggest that, as in many large armies, speculation was rife among the soldiers and mariners who made up the Armada. The master of the
Rosario
claimed not to know where the army would have disembarked, though he was clearer about its purpose – ‘to conquer the land and to set up the mass’ rather than to subjugate the English people, many of whom were expected to rise up in support of their liberators. The ship’s doctor wondered if Philip’s nephew the Viceroy of Portugal might have been installed as Governor of England, whereas the captain of the
Rosario
reckoned that Parma was the likelier candidate. ‘It was a question among
them,’ as he told his interrogators, ‘if the Duke of Parma should conquer this land, who should then enjoy it, either the king or the duke; and it was suspected that it would breed a new war between them’. Regarding tactics, however, all were agreed: captains and ordinary soldiers had determined ‘to put all to the sword that should resist them’.
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At the eleventh hour, Walsingham received a report which alleged that the Armada would not be sailing at all. Sir Edward Stafford had informed his brother-in-law Howard of Effingham that Spanish forces earmarked for the enterprise of England had been stood down. Howard was unsure what to make of it. ‘If it be true,’ he wrote to Walsingham, ‘I would not wish the queen’s majesty to be at this charges that she is at; but if it be but a device, knowing that a little thing makes us too careless, then I know not what may come of it’. Historians are now certain of what Walsingham merely suspected, that Stafford had been in the pay of Philip II since 1587. The opening gambit had come from Stafford himself, who told his Spanish handlers that he wanted to be revenged on Walsingham and Leicester for their hostility towards him. He also claimed, rather less plausibly, that no English warship could be made seaworthy without his first passing on a warning to the Spanish. Mendoza and Philip were both hooked, and so Stafford became the asset known variously as ‘Julio’ and the ‘new correspondent’ in return for substantial cash payments.

Agent Julio was as good as his word. Mendoza got the lists and statistics of Queen Elizabeth’s fleet which he had been promised, although it should also be said that they exaggerated English firepower by a substantial degree. Either Stafford was acting as a loyal servant of the crown, deliberately making out Elizabeth’s navy to be far stronger than it was, or he had been discovered by Walsingham and was being fed false information to pass on to his paymasters. The loss of the ambassador’s papers makes it
difficult to be sure which of these two paths he had chosen. As for his mysterious letter to Howard of Effingham, in 1583 Stafford had forewarned the queen that his cables might contain passages specifically intended to deceive anyone intercepting his correspondence, indicated by a mark known only to writer and recipient. Since the original letter to Howard no longer exists, we cannot be sure whether it was intended to be read as fact or fiction. Maybe Stafford was engaged in an elaborate double bluff, earning his keep from Mendoza by encouraging Elizabeth to let down her guard while silently tipping off the privy council. As with Walsingham and the Italian banker Roberto di Ridolfi, it is difficult to tell who was ultimately fooling whom. But any argument in favour of Stafford’s sincerity has to account for some uncomfortable aspects of his career, not least the stream of misinformation which he continued to send Walsingham after the Armada had set sail: that plague had sent it scurrying back to Spain, that odds of six to one against Spanish ships reaching the Channel were being offered in Paris, and – most amazingly of all – that a fleet of 160 Turkish galleys was even now beating its way towards Spanish Italy.
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Stafford’s report that Philip had given up on his Armada was contradicted by Howard’s own sources. In February 1588 he forwarded ‘news fresh of the wonderful preparations in Spain’, and wanted to know if Walsingham could confirm the story: ‘this is the year that makes or mars, and it were a great deal better that some did weep than all England should cry’. John Hawkins, treasurer of the navy and commander of the
Victory
, added his own voice to the chorus assembling around Walsingham and the queen. England was faced with the starkest choice imaginable: between a peace that was dishonourable and uncertain, and a determined and resolute war. ‘If we stand at this point in a mammering and at a stay,’ declared Hawkins with a passion, ‘our commonwealth doth utterly decay’. Further
delay could only benefit the enemy, allowing Philip to prepare at leisure while eating up the limited resources of the crown. Open war would give every subject who loved God and the queen the chance to ‘do somewhat for the liberty and freedom of this country’, at the same time as forcing Jesuits to declare themselves. Inaction could only lead to ‘servitude, poverty and slavery’. As a trader in human cargo between Sierra Leone and Spanish America, whose coat of arms depicted a Moor bound about the neck with a cord, John Hawkins knew what it meant to be a slave.

Hawkins was preaching to the converted. Walsingham shared his conviction that popery and tyranny were two sides of the same coin. But he was also full of foreboding, his sense of depression deepened by his collapsing state of health. A seizure brought on by a severe urinary complaint in summer 1587 left him dangerously ill for several months. In January 1588 he was bedridden once again, tormented by a discharge of fluid from one of his eyes. His mood was worsened by the peace negotiations in which the queen still placed an unwarranted degree of faith, what Walsingham called ‘our cold and careless proceeding’ at a time of imminent danger. His thoughts turned to divine providence as they so often had before, though without the optimism of Drake and Hawkins that the English nation would prove itself worthy. ‘Unless it shall please God in mercy and miraculously to preserve us,’ he lamented to the Earl of Leicester, ‘we cannot long stand’.
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