The Watchers (37 page)

Allen began to work more furiously than ever for his homeland's liberation, putting his faith in what he and others called the Enterprise of England: the invasion of Elizabeth's kingdoms by the combined forces of Spain and Rome. As this chapter will show, the line of causation is clear. Mary Queen of Scots was executed in February 1587. In the following months Doctor Allen and his fellow priest, the Jesuit Robert Persons, petitioned King Philip of Spain for action, energetically supporting his claim to the English throne. With preparations for an invading naval armada in fact already under way, there was at last a reality to the notion of toppling the Elizabethan regime by a Spanish invasion. In the spring of 1588 Allen wrote a bitter, caustic attack on Elizabeth's bastardy and tyranny; his pamphlet would be handed out to the English people by victorious invading forces. Then
at last, in July, King Philip's Great Armada left the coast of Spain. Driven by weather and Elizabeth's navy the Spanish fleet was dispersed before it could do any harm. But for Philip it was a temporary defeat in what became a long war against Tudor England.

Mary Stuart's execution threw open to question one of the great certainties of thirty years. Since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, the Queen of Scots was her cousin's obvious rival heir and successor. Whatever English succession law might say, everyone – even Elizabeth's advisers – knew that there was no other plausible candidate. But Mary had always been more than a successor waiting in the wings for her cousin to die of natural causes. When Pope Pius V had declared Elizabeth a bastard heretic schismatic in 1570, the insinuation was obvious: by the word successor, Catholics like William Allen meant rightful monarch. But after February 1587 the old assumption of deposing Elizabeth from power in favour of her cousin no longer held. So who was the best candidate? The exiles and émigrés of Paris were gripped by factional tussles over competing claimants to the kingdoms of England and Ireland. One group supported the title of King Philip of Spain. Others favoured Mary's son, twenty-one-year-old King James VI of Scotland, hoping that he might make a conversion to Catholicism. Certainly James vigorously protested to Elizabeth at the execution of the mother he never knew. Yet with a pension of £4,000 a year, Elizabeth's government bought the young king's neutrality. It was clear that the real danger to Elizabeth's throne came from Spain.

Doctor Allen and Robert Persons threw their considerable intellectual and political weight behind Philip's claim. They believed, surely correctly, that only Spain had the power to topple the murderous regime of the pretender-queen Elizabeth. The two men put together evidence from the complicated family trees of the English royal line and the old chronicle histories of England. Two of the justifications for Philip's title were his descent from the royal house of Lancaster and Elizabeth's excommunication from the Catholic Church by Pope Pius V in 1570. Persons and Allen also used the theory of just war: ‘conquest in a just war and for a just cause,' they wrote, ‘is usually considered to give a very valid right to a kingdom'. Besides, they
believed, once a Spanish army forced Elizabeth and her government from power, England's Catholics would certainly elect Philip as their king – as he had been, of course, many years before, as the husband of Elizabeth's sister Queen Mary. If Allen had ever believed what he wrote in 1581 – ‘We put not our trust in princes or practices abroad, nor in arms or forces at home' – the execution of the Scottish Queen had changed things once and for all. Now he, Persons and their compatriots threw themselves behind the liberation of their homeland by the global might of King Philip's Catholic monarchy.

So by appealing to genealogy, to history and to the urgent politics of Europe Allen and Persons sought to encourage Philip to commit himself to the great Enterprise of England. They were in fact pushing hard at an open door. Philip had already made the strategic decision to support the Enterprise. After years of having to live with the offensive heresy of Elizabethan England and English provocations in politics and diplomacy, Philip and his military advisers were indeed preparing to invade Elizabeth's kingdoms. Limited only by the complexity of Spain's military dispositions and the bureaucratic bulk of Philip's government, in 1587 the Great Armada was beginning to take shape.

Here we have to make sense of nearly thirty years of Anglo-Spanish relations. In the dying days of Queen Mary's reign, in November 1558, Philip had sent his personal emissary, the Count of Feria, to find out what was happening at the English court, and in particular to interview the queen-in-waiting, Princess Elizabeth. Through Feria, Philip had offered friendship to his sister-in-law. Politely she had acknowledged it. Brushing aside Feria's advice to be a good and obedient Catholic queen, Elizabeth felt she was beholden to no one, and she said so. The new government felt its way carefully through the tangled and fraught politics of a Europe fractured by war and religion.

It had seemed so unlikely that Elizabeth and her government would survive as they did for decades. Foreign war, rebellion, disease, time, chance, conspiracy – life in the sixteenth century was a fragile thing. With no convincing Protestant successor to follow her, England might so easily have been swallowed up once again by a Catholic dynasty. That, after all, was what English exiles and émigrés and foreign potentates
wanted: Mary Stuart, daughter of the ultra-Catholic Guise, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, the wearer of the imperial crown of Henry VIII though loyal to God and Pope, but one monarch in a Europe dominated by the earthly powers of Spain and France.

Elizabeth and her advisers never trusted Spanish professions of friendship. Time and again they found evidence of Spanish duplicity, as Philip allied himself with the Pope and other Catholic princes. And they were right to be cautious of him. He believed passionately in the unifying authority of his Catholic monarchy, writing within months of the Count of Feria's embassy of the evil that was taking place in England – taking place precisely because Elizabeth was by then queen. By 1569 it was plain to Elizabeth's Privy Council that Spain, first of all intent on crushing Protestant resistance in the Low Countries, would sooner or later shift military operations to England, bringing across the few miles of sea between Flanders and England all the horrors of European war and the instruments of the holy inquisition. And that was before rebellion in the north of England and the proof of Spanish involvement in the Ridolfi Plot of 1569–71 on behalf of the Queen of Scots.

The reality, in fact, was that Philip of Spain was much too busy in the 1560s and 1570s to consider an invasion of Elizabeth's kingdoms. Heavily committed elsewhere, he could give neither money, ships nor troops to an English campaign. To the queen's advisers, however, the plain (if secret) intention of the European Catholic powers was to crush Elizabeth's government: everything they saw over decades, from the eager plottings of émigrés and exiles to the subversive activities of foreign ambassadors consorting with the Queen of Scots, told them that sooner or later a great contest would come. All the plots, conspiracies and plans for invasion discovered in the 1580s by Burghley and Walsingham gave cumulative weight to the feeling of dangerous emergency. And behind all of these conspiracies, in some way or fashion, were the two constants of Mary Queen of Scots and King Philip of Spain. By 1587 Mary at least had been eliminated.

So with this outlook, it is hardly surprising that relations between Tudor England and Habsburg Spain were from the beginning chilled by a rather frosty diplomatic formality. Over the years this cooled still further. Ambassadors at both royal courts were expelled. Trade
embargoes and confiscations were used as political weapons. English towns and cities gave refuge to Protestants fleeing war in the Spanish Netherlands. Spain's military commanders and government officials involved themselves in plots against Elizabeth's government. It was not open war, but nor was it an obvious peace. Indeed it was much as the seventeenth-century English political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote: ‘the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary'. Today, remembering the history of the twentieth century, we might call the troubled state that existed between England and Spain before the 1580s a cold war. But the parallel is not exact, for the two sides were disproportionately matched in their capacity to fight. Faced with the power of Spain, Elizabethan England would surely be very quickly broken.

Two critical years in the irrevocable breakdown of relations between Spain and England were those of 1584 and 1585. In October of the first year Lord Burghley wrote in a policy paper that his queen had ‘many just causes to think that the King of Spain mindeth to invade her realm and to destroy her person'. It was a stark analysis based upon two facts. The first was the continued military effort of Spain in the Low Countries to destroy Protestant resistance. The second was the assassination, on King Philip's orders, of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the leader of Dutch resistance to Spain. Coming soon after the revelations of Spanish involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, the killing of Orange provoked the appalling fear of Elizabeth's assassination. This, too, was the most powerful reason for the visceral revulsion in parliament and the Privy Council at William Parry's murder plot. A highly significant response to Orange's assassination was the Association for the revenge of any attack upon Elizabeth or her kingdom, to be followed a few months later by the Act for the Queen's Surety.

But how could England defend itself against Spanish power? At first Elizabeth's advisers had few great ambitions. Walsingham's view in the spring of 1585 was that England's naval commanders and adventurers could harry Spanish power at sea. In a proposal ‘for the annoying of the King of Spain', he suggested that English ships should engage the Spanish fleet. This was exactly the sort of thinking that lay
behind official support for Sir Francis Drake's voyage to the West Indies in 1585 and 1586 to attack Spanish ports and shipping and to intercept Spain's treasure fleet. Drake and his expedition caused havoc. To King Philip Sir Francis was a licensed pirate. To Elizabeth's government, by contrast, he was a blunt but effective instrument of policy.

A more powerful statement still was military intervention in the Low Countries. In summer 1585 Queen Elizabeth signed treaties with the Dutch whereby the English royal treasury would pay for thousands of soldiers to fight the King of Spain's forces. The Earl of Leicester, for many years one of the queen's closest advisers, was appointed commander of the expeditionary force. Already furious at Drake's devastating war at sea, the provocation of these Anglo-Dutch treaties was almost the last straw for Philip and his advisers. The final and decisive shift in the king's thinking came with more news in October 1585 of Drake's campaign in the West Indies. Late in the same month Philip informed Pope Sixtus that he accepted His Holiness's invitation to conquer England. The king was a little cautious; the Enterprise, he said, would have to be delayed till 1587; he could bear only half the cost at most. But the strategic case was clear. Its clinching argument was that Elizabeth's England, in supporting rebels in the Low Countries and setting Drake loose, was the greatest threat to Spanish global interests. Though doing so might risk the campaign in the Netherlands and the security of Spanish America, it was essential to divert resources temporarily to England. At the end of December 1585 Philip asked the Prince of Parma to set out a plan for the invasion.

By July 1586 the first of a number of evolving plans was ready. In the following summer a great armada of ships would sail from Lisbon for Ireland. Two months later the fleet would enter the English Channel, at which point, and not before, 30,000 veteran troops from the Spanish army of Flanders under the Prince of Parma's command would leave the Netherlands and land on the coast of Kent. The place of landing would be near Margate. Parma's forces would march on London, quickly taking the city with the queen and her government still in it. Over the following months, this remained the central proposition of the expedition.

One man more passionate than anybody else about the great Enterprise of England was William Allen. Allen's pen was always an effective weapon against his enemies in Elizabeth's government, and it was soon busy with a pamphlet about an English commander in the Low Countries, Sir William Stanley, who in 1587 surrendered himself, his regiment of English and Irish soldiers and the town of Deventer to Spanish forces. Allen vigorously defended Stanley's actions and made a public declaration of his own support for Spain. Stanley became one of the most feared and elusive of Elizabeth's émigré enemies. By the 1590s practically every plot against the queen's life, plausible as well as implausible, involved one or more of Stanley's desperate Irish renegades.

Knowing that only Spain could secure the success of the Enterprise of England, Allen worked tirelessly in the cause of King Philip and his invasion. While Spanish diplomats in Rome pressed the Pope to make Allen a cardinal, Allen used his formidable powers of encouragement and persuasion to urge King Philip ‘to crown his glorious efforts in the holy cause of Christ by punishing this woman [Elizabeth], hated of God and man, and restoring the country [England] to its ancient glory and liberty'.

In July 1587 Sixtus V and Philip came at last to a formal agreement on the Enterprise of England. The Pope promised money in two instalments, the first to be paid on the landing of the Great Armada in England, the second once the kingdom was captured. Sixtus granted Philip the right to name as Elizabeth's replacement one who would ‘stabilize and preserve the Catholic religion in those regions, and who will stand acceptable to the Holy Apostolic See, and accept investiture from it'. Days after the agreement William Allen became a cardinal.