The Spanish Armada (9 page)

However, some disquieting uncertainties remained about the consequences of a successful landing. Once London had been captured,
Zúñiga urged that Parma should
set up an interim government, pending the coronation of a new Catholic monarch – why not Mary Queen of Scots? – who should then marry a reliable and steadfast Catholic prince, perhaps
even Parma himself. If stout English resistance prevented the subjugation of the entire nation, important concessions could be wrung from the rump Tudor state: freedom of worship for English
Catholics; the surrender of English garrisons in the Low Countries (plus repatriation of English forces), and Spanish troops to continue to occupy the conquered regions until payment of hefty war
reparations to Madrid.
¹²

While the precise strategy was being worked out, early military preparations were put in hand.

Intelligence reaching Walsingham in London had dried up following Philip’s seizure of English and Dutch ships in Spanish ports in retaliation for Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch
rebels. The earliest intimation of the Armada threat came via a north German ship that docked in Plymouth from Lisbon in the first week of January 1585. Her master suggested that ‘the King of
Spain had taken up all the masts for shipping, both great and small, so there is likely [to be] war[s]’.
¹³
A message to the Privy Council from
the English merchant William Melsam on 4 February 1586 reported gossip that ‘immense quantities of grain, wine and military stores’ were being collected by Philip, who was also
increasing the size of his fleet and mobilising ‘land forces from various parts’. Melsam added:

In April, a Bristol merchant was told that a ‘great fleet’ was being prepared at Lisbon and the Amsterdam trader William Peterson reported ‘great naval
preparations’ – but difficulty in manning their navy.
¹⁵

All these straws in the wind were discounted in London, as the government was preoccupied by purely domestic issues such as its campaign against recusants, hunting fugitive seminary priests and
the dire consequences of a failed harvest. In Gloucestershire, a mob of ‘common people’ looted a ship with a cargo of malt intended for Wales and local magistrates reported that
‘the people declare they are driven to the last extremity by famine and [are] forced to feed their children with cats, dogs and roots of nettles’. Other violent disturbances were
reported elsewhere.
¹⁶

Leicester confidently told Burghley in January 1586 that the rumours of Philip’s war preparations were ‘made the greater to terrify her majesty’ and the Dutch rebels.
‘But thanks be to God, her majesty has little cause to fear him.’ In the Low Countries ‘they esteem no more of his power by sea than I do of six fishermen’s boats of
Rye’.
¹⁷
Walsingham, also unconvinced of the immediacy of the military threat, dismissed stories of naval movements and warlike preparations as
mere ‘Spanish brag’. He wrote to Leicester on 24 March predicting that the danger of invasion ‘will prove nothing this year and I hope less the next’.
¹⁸
Walsingham feared that such alarmist reports could distract Elizabeth from fully prosecuting the war against the Spanish in the Low Countries: ‘I would
to God’, he confided to Leicester, that ‘her majesty would put on a good countenance for only four months and I doubt not but Spain would seek peace greatly to her majesty’s
honour and advantage’.
¹⁹

But as the days passed, nagging doubts began to gnaw at his mind and prudently he despatched one of his agents, Antony Poyntz,
²⁰
to Spain to
collect more reliable information. In July, he drew up a list of Englishmen who would support ‘any foreign power [which] should come to invade this realm’. Ominously, his catalogue of
treason contained the names of six peers, seven knights, forty-two esquires and gentlemen, aside from yeomen, farmers and ‘priests at liberty’.
²¹

Fresh in Walsingham’s mind was the arraignment, two months before, of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, on charges that he tried to flee England without royal
permission; that he had been secretly converted to Rome and was conspiring to be restored as Fifth Duke of Norfolk. He was fined £10,000 and imprisoned in the Tower of London ‘during
the Queen’s pleasure’. The spymaster did not know that according to Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, the earl had undertaken ‘with the assistance of a few men to make
himself master of the Tower’ whilst ‘Lord Harry Howard’, his uncle, would raise troops and would be joined by the earl’s half-brother Thomas. The latter was not a Catholic,
but sought to avenge the death of his father, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk. All this was claimed to be part of a wider conspiracy in England and Ireland against Elizabeth but, like many of
Mendoza’s Machiavellian pipedreams, came to nothing.

The King of Spain meanwhile had finalised his strategy for invasion. Copies of the final shape of his naval and military expeditionary force were sent to Brussels and Lisbon on 26 July 1586. A
naval armada, with land artillery embarked, would sail from Lisbon in the summer of 1587 to seize and hold a beachhead in southern Ireland with the objective of luring Elizabeth’s navy into
battle in Irish waters. After two months, the Spanish naval element would sail into the English Channel and patrol the Dover Straits to protect a fleet of small ships collected secretly in Flanders
to carry Parma’s thirty-thousand men to their landing beaches near Margate in Kent. The troops would then march triumphantly on London to capture the queen and her government of heretics. It
was a compromise, and like all such compromises suffered from troubling weaknesses. Timing was everything and the plan depended totally on achieving complete success in all its phases. There was no
account taken of the impact of the weather, the problems of re-supply, or the potential loss of surprise.

Although this invasion plan was only the first version of Philip’s ‘Enterprise of England’, orders were drafted immediately to raise the necessary troops and buy the ordnance,
ammunition and victuals.
²²

Then Elizabeth’s Privy Council unwittingly removed a major drawback to the Spanish plans – by beheading Mary Queen of Scots.

In Madrid, Philip II was stunned by the execution. But with the Francophile candidate for Elizabeth’s crown now safely dead, at
least a successful invasion would not
disastrously unite France and England, which was possible if Mary Stuart had been installed by her Spanish allies. That alarming outcome conveniently averted by her blood being split so copiously
at Fotheringay, the shrewd king felt free to pursue his own political ambitions in Spain’s interests. In February 1587, he wrote to his ambassador in Rome, Enrique de Guzmán, Count de
Olivares, instructing him to secretly brief the new Pope, Sixtus V, on his own tenuous claim to the English throne:

Appearances had to be maintained. Another letter to Rome spoke of his grief at the Scottish queen’s death ‘since she would have been the most suitable instrument for
leading those countries [England and Scotland] back to the Catholic faith. But since God in His wisdom has ordained otherwise, He will raise up other instruments for the triumph of His
cause.’
²⁴
The Spanish Armada, for example.

Mendoza, oozing sycophancy, was not only hopelessly optimistic but unaware of the new policy on who would succeed Elizabeth after she was deposed. ‘It would seem to be God’s obvious
design to bestow upon your majesty the crowns of these two kingdoms,’ he unctuously told the king.

But one nightmare remained ever-present, haunting Philip’s every waking hour: the lack of money. The cost of the Armada preparations was a huge drain on his already mortgaged exchequer and
he was forced to rein back government expenditure in many areas. The king had already turned down pressing requests to strengthen the defences of Spanish towns and bases in the Caribbean,
writing:

His puppet Portuguese administration had also postponed an assault on the sultanate of Atjeh in Sumatra and its plans to build a fortress at Mombasa in modern-day Kenya, because
of the financial drain caused by the Armada.
²⁵

Walsingham in London was fully aware of Spain’s fiscal woes
²⁶
and reasoned that economic warfare might delay or cripple the projected
invasion. He suggested, via the London financiers, that the great banking houses of northern Italy, like the Crosinis, and the gold exchanges of Genoa and Florence, should refuse to extend any
credit to the King of Spain, thereby starving the Armada of necessary funds. Thomas Sutton, the merchant, banker and founder of the Charterhouse almshouses in London, may have been one of his
agents in persuading his Italian counterparts to turn down or at least prevaricate over Philip’s increasingly imperative requests for loans.
²⁷

Thus stymied, the Spanish king reluctantly and regretfully had to turn to the Vatican for financial assistance in 1587. Not only was he suffering the mortification of having to go cap in hand to
the Pope, but he was simultaneously seeking another indulgence: the award of a cardinal’s hat to the English exiled priest William Allen to provide a Catholic figurehead for the faithful in
England.

Count de Olivares, Philip’s ambassador in Rome, was far from sanguine at the prospect of Sixtus making a generous contribution to the Spanish war chest: ‘When it comes to getting
money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ he reported despondently to his royal master.
²⁸

Sixtus had succeeded his political enemy Gregory XIII in April 1585 and had quickly restored the straitened papal finances by levying harsh new taxes and selling off appointments to the highest
bidder. He was notoriously proud of his gigantic hoard of gold and silver, held securely in the papal fortress of Castel di Sant’Angelo on the River Tiber, and was reluctant to part with a
single coin unless
it was spent on defending the Holy See or in a crusade against the infidel Turks. Olivares sneered that he cared more for ducats than devotion. Despite his
miserliness, Sixtus spent huge sums on public works, including draining 9,500 acres (38 km
²
) of Rome’s Pontine Marshes, piping fresh water to parts of the city and completing the
dome of St Peter’s. The new Pope was impulsive, irascible, obstinate and autocratic. He also held a jaundiced view of Philip and thoroughly mistrusted him, while unfortunately expressing an
almost unbridled admiration for Elizabeth I. In this view, he was at odds with Allen, who predicted grimly that March that the Armada would ‘chastise our heretics and that woman hated by God
and man’.
²⁹

In March 1587, Olivares reported on his discussions on the loan and Allen’s hat with Cardinal Antonio Carrafa, the papal secretary of state, who agreed to put the requests to the pontiff:
‘The next day, being Holy Wednesday, he postponed it as he thought it would not be a good time to find the Pope in a favourable temper. He therefore decided to go again on Holy Saturday when
the
Hallelujah
was sung.’
³⁰
Its soaring notes did not help the Spanish requests; Sixtus merely prevaricated. In June, Olivares
reported some startling shenanigans in the Vatican: ‘His Holiness was in a great rage at table, railing at those who served him and throwing the crockery about furiously, which he is rather
in the habit of doing but not often so violently as this.’
³¹

The Pope nurtured doubts about the validity of Philip’s claim to the throne of England and his true motives in sending the Armada. His suspicions probably focused on Mary Queen of
Scots’ supposed eleventh-hour will in which she named the Spanish king as her heir to the English crown. A Spanish memorandum submitted to Sixtus in June maintained that, although the new
will ‘had been concealed by the Queen of England’, Philip possessed an autographed letter from Mary to Mendoza, dated 20 May 1586, in which she declared her intentions about the
succession ‘in case her son should not be converted to Catholicism at the time of her death’. The document emphasised that Philip’s claim was more valid ‘than that of any
other claimant who could arise’ and anyway, he would enjoy ‘the right of conquest in a war whose justice is evident, even if the queen were not a heretic which of itself would justify
it’.