The Spanish Armada (44 page)

Yet Catholics still suffered for their faith. We last met Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, allegedly praying for the success of the Armada while imprisoned in the Tower. He was found guilty of
high treason by his peers in a trial in Westminster Hall on 14 April 1589.
²³
Although attainted and condemned to death, Elizabeth never signed his
execution warrant and Arundel lingered on for six years in the Tower, the sword of death always hanging over his head. He grew sick and malnourished and appealed to the queen to be permitted to see
his wife and children. Elizabeth was resolute:

The earl’s response was equally determined: ‘On such condition, I cannot accept her majesty’s offer. If that be the cause in which I am to perish, sorry am I
that I have but one life to lose.’ He died on 19 October 1595 (some say by poison) and was buried in the church of
St Peter ad Vincula within the walls of the fortress,
in the same grave as his father, the Duke of Norfolk, was buried twenty-three years before. Arundel’s funeral was designed to vilify him and his faith. The Minister humbly beseeched God

The earl was canonised as a saint by Pope Paul VI as a witness of Christ and an example of the Roman Catholic Church on 25 October 1970. The following year, his remains were
placed in a shrine in the Catholic cathedral in Arundel, West Sussex.
²⁴

That other Howard, the lord admiral, was of course, a Protestant of unquestionable loyalty, and was created Earl of Nottingham – the second peer of the realm – on 22 October 1597.
Two years later, he was appointed ‘lieutenant general of all England’ but finally retired from public life in January 1619, aged eighty-three. One of his favourite pastimes was hunting
with dogs – he was a leading breeder of spaniels – and he continued to hunt enthusiastically right up to his final illness. He died on 14 December 1624 and was buried in the Effingham
family vault at Reigate in Surrey.

Francis Drake spent some years labouring under the disgrace of his failures on the Portuguese expedition. Times were changing and he may have sensed that the glory days of his buccaneering
exploits were drawing to a close, especially once the Spanish introduced a convoy system which, with improved intelligence, increasingly frustrated English privateer attacks on their treasure
fleets from the New World. Perhaps deciding it was better to go out with a bang than a whimper, Drake joined Sir John Hawkins in embarking on a punitive expedition to the West Indies, intending to
prey upon Spanish settlements. Hawkins, old, tired and sick, succumbed to dysentery at sea off Puerto Rico on 12 January 1596.

Drake had heard alluring talk of treasure hulks anchored in the harbour of Puerto Bello, on the coast of Panama, but after a fortnight of sickness, he died aged fifty-five, also from dysentery,
at four in the morning of 28 January 1596. His body was dressed in his
armour, encased in a lead coffin, and buried at sea, three nautical miles (5.56 km) off Puerto Bello,
amidst salvoes fired in salute from the ships of his fleet. A foreigner who had met him at court had been captivated by his character, describing him as ‘perceptive and intelligent . . . his
practical ability astonishing, his memory acute; his skill in managing a fleet virtually unique; his general manner moderate and restrained so that individuals are won over and gripped by affection
for him’.
²⁵
Despite his charm, his career marked him out as little more than a pirate.

In 1594, Spanish forces landed in France at Blavet, opposite Lorient in Brittany, in support of their Catholic League allies. They went on to capture and fortify Crozon, a rocky promontory
dominating Brest harbour. Fearing that Spain would now capture a Channel port, the English mounted an expedition that November under a rehabilitated Sir John Norris and one of the last of
Elizabeth’s Armada sea-dogs, Sir Martin Frobisher, to expel the Spaniards. Frobisher was shot in the thigh as he gallantly led his sailors up a scaling ladder in an assault on the
fort’s walls. He was wounded at close range: the wadding used to tamp down the bullet in the musket barrel was trapped in his wound and he died from blood poisoning two days later on 15
November.
²⁶

We have seen how Elizabeth subsidised the Protestant forces in France’s bloody religious wars. After the Duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic League, forced Henri III to flee Paris, he
was appointed lieutenant general of France. Guise was summoned to attend the king at the Château de Blois on 23 December 1588 and he was assassinated there, crying out ‘Treachery’
as the royal guards thrust their daggers into his body. There is an apocryphal story that Henri looked down at the body of his slain opponent and commented: ‘How tall he is! I had not thought
he was so tall. He is even taller dead than alive.’
²⁷
The bloodshed at the château was not over. Guise’s brother, Cardinal Louis,
was killed by pike thrusts from the king’s bodyguard the next day.

Henri himself was assassinated on 1 August 1589 at Saint Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine. Jacques Clément, a Dominican friar, stabbed him with a dagger before being killed by the king’s
guards. The king lingered on until the next morning and died after naming the Protestant Henri of Navarre as his successor. The religious wars continued but
the new king
realised that he would need to convert to Catholicism if he were to have any chance of holding Paris. Accordingly, King Henri IV was received into the Catholic Church in 1593 and entered the French
capital in March the following year. France’s tragic civil wars of almost four decades were only resolved by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted substantial rights to Protestants, as
well opening up a path towards secularism and tolerance.

Parma also became involved in the French religious wars. In September 1590, he attempted to relieve Paris, besieged by Huguenot and royalist forces. Two years later he invaded Normandy but was
wounded in the hand. He returned to Flanders only to be removed from the governorship. He died in Arras, France, aged forty-seven.

Philip was the first of the two warring monarchs to die. He had spent the winter of 1598 in Madrid but, when spring arrived, he had become so ill with gout and fever that his doctors refused to
allow him to be moved. That June, he insisted on returning to the Escorial Palace so that he could die in peace ‘to lay down my bones in my own house’.

It took six agonising days to carry him by litter the 28 miles (45 km) to the palace. The Spanish king had four suppurating sores on the fingers of his right hand, another on one foot and an
abscess on his right knee. He could not eat or sleep and his stomach was agonisingly distended by dropsy. His pain from diabetic gangrene was so intense that it became impossible to move him and so
for fifty-two days he remained unwashed, lying in his own excrement on his bed. Holes were cut in his mattress to drain his urine. Both his doctor and his daughter fled the sick-room because of the
stench. As Philip lay wretchedly in constant humble prayer, he stoically told his son: ‘Look at me! This is what the world and all kingdoms amount to in the end.’ He died at dawn on 13
September 1598, aged seventy-one, clutching a crucifix in his hands, and was succeeded by Philip III, his son by his fourth wife, Anne of Austria.
²⁸

Elizabeth was scornful of the new Spanish monarch: ‘I am not afraid of a King of Spain who has been up to the age of twelve learning his alphabet,’ she declared. This was not just
her curmudgeonly nature speaking: old age was creeping up on Gloriana and she became increasingly depressed by the loss, through death, of those she was accustomed to have around her.

Walsingham, her ‘dark Moor’, had died, heavily in debt, in the early hours of 6 April 1590, probably from testicular cancer.
²⁹
Burghley, her loyal minister of four decades, was taken ill two years later, possibly from a stroke or heart attack. The queen spent hours sitting at his bedside, tenderly
nursing him and feeding him with a horn spoon.
³⁰
In a rare moment of sentiment, she told him that she would not wish to outlive him – a
statement that brought tears to her old minister’s eyes – and that she gave ‘hourly thanks’ for his services. She urged him to ‘use all the rest possible you may, that
you may be able to serve me at the time that cometh’. Although still suffering from decayed teeth and gout in his legs, Burghley did recover enough to regularly attend her council right up
his last illness in 1598. He died at his London home, Cecil House in Covent Garden, at seven o’clock on the morning of 4 August, after declaring in his agony: ‘Oh what a heart have I
that I will not die.’ He was succeeded as Elizabeth’s chief adviser by his son Robert (by his second wife), whom Elizabeth had nicknamed ‘her little pygmy’.

On top of all this, she had lost her favourite, Essex, who was clumsily beheaded with three strokes of the axe in February 1601, following a typically botched attempted
coup
d’état
in London. Treason was an unforgivable offence to a Tudor monarch and overwhelmed even her affection for this ambitious and spendthrift courtier.

The queen spent the melancholy Christmas and New Year of 1602 at the Palace of Whitehall, but soon caught a severe cold and developed a painful boil on her face, which damaged both her rampant
vanity and her regal dignity. On 21 January the court travelled to Richmond Palace in dank, cold and wet weather and Elizabeth fell ill again, experiencing difficulty in swallowing, possibly
through the severe dental sepsis she was suffering from.

Almost exactly two months later she collapsed as she was processing into chapel and was carried, limp and barely conscious, into her bedchamber. She refused to be put to bed but sat on a spread
of cushions on the floor, silent and brooding, one finger in her mouth, while her attendants watched anxiously, fearing to disturb her. More by force than by persuasion, the queen was finally got
into bed. Despite her refusal to take nourishment, Howard, her cousin, brought her a small bowl of soup. She complained to him that she was tied with an iron collar about her neck. He tried to
reason with her, but she
replied firmly: ‘No, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’

Soon afterwards, she entirely lost the power of speech. On the evening of 23 March 1603 Archbishop Whitgift sat with her, praying at the bedside until she fell asleep. She died about three
o’clock the following morning, aged sixty-nine, probably from broncho-pneumonia brought on by oral sepsis and suppurative parotitis.
³¹
A
Londoner with friends at court reported Elizabeth’s death:

At ten that morning, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed her successor, becoming James I of England. On the night of 23 April, Elizabeth’s corpse was taken downriver in a
black-draped barge lit by flaring torches to Westminster. She was buried in the Abbey five days later and in one of history’s little ironies, she rests side by side with her half-sister Mary
in a tomb paid for by the new king. An inscription reads:
REGNO CONSORTES ET VRNA
,
HIC OBDORMIMUS ELIZABETHA ET MARIA SORORES IN SPE RESVRRECTIONIS
:
‘Consorts in realm and tomb, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters in hope of resurrection.’ They were unlikely friends in life and are equally so in death.

Nearby, on the south aisle of Henry VII’s chapel, is the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots, erected there in 1613 by her son, James I. Its iconography includes the figure of Victory.

James I moved quickly to end the cripplingly expensive nine-teen-year-old war with Spain. Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil and Howard were among the English negotiators hammering out a
peace treaty with the Spanish and Habsburg delegations, the latter representatives of the rulers of the Habsburg Netherlands. The Treaty of London, signed on 28 August 1604, finally ended the
conflict, ironically granting the Spanish much of what Philip II had demanded if only partial conquest of England had been achieved by the Armada. England ended its support of the Dutch rebellion
and renounced its privateers’ attacks on Spanish shipping.
³³
On Spain’s part, the treaty acknowledged that its hopes of restoring
Catholicism in England were over for ever.

The accession of James I had marked a change in official policy towards Catholics. The new king seemed more moderate, promising not to persecute any ‘that will be
quiet and give an outward obedience to the law’.

At last some measure of religious tolerance had arrived in England, but not sufficient or speedily enough for some. Around midnight on 4 November 1605, a search of the undercroft below the House
of Lords revealed Guy Fawkes guarding thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, hidden under piles of firewood and coal. He was waiting to blow up James, his nobility and his Parliament during the state
opening ceremony the next day as a precursor to a revolt by Catholic gentry in the Midlands.

They planned to kidnap the king’s nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth and put her on the throne as a Catholic queen.

APPENDIX I

ORDER OF BATTLE OF ENGLISH FLEET