The Watchers (38 page)

If much of the money was to come from the Pope and the ships and troops from the King of Spain, it was Cardinal Allen who, as the preeminent expert on England, was given the task of rebuilding the Catholic Church in his homeland. But most urgently of all in 1588 Allen put his mind to a political defence of Philip's invasion. He wanted to persuade his countrymen of how much better off they would be without Elizabeth as their queen. Till this point in his career as a pamphleteer and propagandist he had only ever denounced the queen's advisers: they were atheists and Machiavellians intent on
securing power through the murder of innocent Catholics. The nearest he had come to articulating a political argument for the overthrow of Elizabeth was in his
Modest Defence
(1584), where he explained how popes and even priests could remove temporal princes from power. Now, with the Great Armada so near, he cast off all inhibitions. For the first time ever in print he attacked Elizabeth personally and directly. In
An Admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland
Allen held nothing back. What makes his pamphlet truly gripping is that it was printed all ready to be shipped over to England once the Armada had made a successful landing.

Writing provocatively as ‘the Cardinal of England', Allen excoriated Elizabeth for her bastardy, her open rebellion against Church and Pope, her ‘Luciferian pride' in setting herself up as head of her own Church, her theft of the English crown, and her slaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. Just as venomous, in a form even more concentrated than the
Admonition
, was Pope Sixtus's sentence of deposition against Elizabeth. This too was Allen's work, in which he again explained and justified Spain's great Enterprise. In deposing ‘this woman' and her accomplices ‘so wicked and noisome to the world', Philip of Spain was England's saviour.

After years of clever evasions, William Allen's views were now plain to read. His mask, for so long held carefully in place, had at last slipped – though what Allen revealed underneath it hardly came as a surprise to Elizabeth's advisers, who knew that he was a traitor and a staunch defender of treasons. With some forewarning, Elizabeth's government saw exactly what propaganda Spain would use in its invasion. Lord Burghley had a copy of the
Admonition
four weeks before the Armada set sail. He read Allen's ‘vile book' with ‘much indignation'. He sent it immediately to Walsingham, so furious at Allen's pamphlet that he ended the covering letter to Sir Francis still ‘in choler'. But at least Burghley and Walsingham now had the satisfaction of knowing that their enemy, coming a little more into the light, was showing his true colours.

The Great Armada of Spain was probably the worst-kept secret in sixteenth-century Europe. Philip's government was notoriously leaky; indeed some of the king's most secret planning was known in the
states of Italy, long skilled at gathering foreign intelligence, within weeks of being decided in Spain. And yet it was vital nevertheless for Elizabeth's Privy Council to have reliable information of Spain's intentions. As ever, the problem was one of finding out the truth of what was really happening from the heavy fug of rumour and report. Walsingham and his colleagues knew that the news they received was often exaggerated. Sometimes the enemy planted false information. Frequently, though genuinely believed by those who provided them, reports were just plain wrong. In January 1586, for example, some sailors arrived back in England talking of rumours of great Spanish naval preparations in Lisbon. The report, Walsingham wrote, was ‘but a Spanish brag': it was simply a boast.

So how could they discover the enemy's plans? By now, after practising his technique in the Babington Plot, Thomas Phelippes was adept both before and after the Armada at using double agents to extract information from Catholic exiles in mainland Europe. One of those agents was Thomas Barnes, Gilbert Gifford's cousin, whom Phelippes used to establish a correspondence with the dangerous English exile Charles Paget. Paget believed that Barnes was his agent and sent questions for Barnes to answer in England about political and military affairs. In this way, with some skill and cunning, it was possible for Phelippes to find out what Paget and his Spanish masters knew about the state of England and its preparedness for a naval assault. Barnes's reports to Paget also allowed Phelippes to deceive and disinform the enemy. With the advice of Walsingham, Phelippes carefully answered Paget's questions. They had to do with political divisions within Elizabeth's Privy Council, the morale of her subjects, those ports and havens suitable for landing an army, numbers of English soldiers, their stores of armour and ammunition and the size of the queen's navy. All of these were important topics for Spanish war planning.

As significant as Phelippes's system of double-cross was the intelligence Walsingham gathered from merchants and diplomats working abroad. He paid for reports from men positioned on the coast of France, especially in the Bay of Biscay. The London merchant and financier Sir Horatio Palavicino, a man of enviable contacts in foreign courts and embassies, was skilled at providing Walsingham with
secret intelligence. Equally, Palavicino found himself to be the object of Spanish efforts to deceive and disinform Elizabeth's government. In his work for Walsingham, a man as well connected as Palavicino negotiated a steady path through a hall of mirrors. Often he succeeded; occasionally he failed.

The most vital thing of all was patiently to assess the information that came from all these sources: diplomats, merchants, intelligencers, military experts and the agents and double agents who worked for Phelippes. With a timely combination of luck, ingenuity, chance, skill and the propensity of the Spanish government to leak information, Elizabeth's advisers knew much in advance of the Great Armada of the kingdom of Spain.

Two important names here are Anthony Standen and Stephen Powle, two English gentlemen living abroad. Standen was an adventurer, a Catholic exile who lived on a Spanish pension. But his loyalty was for sale, and throughout these years he was encouraged by Walsingham to offer for money intelligence to Elizabeth's government. Sir Francis canvassed Standen about Spain's preparations at sea in April or May 1587. From Florence, Standen duly sent his reports.

Powle was a less colourful character than Standen, a keen continental traveller who (as he wrote himself) was Lord Burghley's ‘feet, eyes, or ears' in Germany. In 1587 Powle moved on to Venice, from where he sent intelligence to Walsingham, proving himself a very effective gatherer of news and information. In Powle's meticulous newsletters, the earliest indications of the Armada came in December 1587. His information two months later was that the fleet would not sail out before spring of that year. By the end of March 1588, Powle's sources told him that the Duke of Medina Sidonia would command the Armada; it was intelligence that turned out to be correct.

In June and early July 1588, with the Enterprise imminent, reports began to multiply. Walsingham and other councillors turned their minds to what could be done to resist the invasion. A month before the Armada sailed from Lisbon, Walsingham's intelligence told him that the Spanish fleet would make for Sheppey, Harwich or Yarmouth on England's east coast, carrying 30,000 men of the Prince of Parma's army. Walsingham believed that the best way to defend the English coast was to have at each of the three potential landing sites a force
of 1,000 footmen and 200 cavalrymen, to remain there until the Spaniards' intentions were clear.

By now naval commanders on the English south coast were receiving and weighing news of the movements of Spanish ships. Breton sailors in Dunkirk reported seeing 150 ‘ships of war of the King of Spain' sailing in a company from Cape Finisterre. The information had reached Dover by means of an English merchant called Skofield. However, there were competing reports of the Armada's readiness. In early June Sir Horatio Palavicino received out of Italy intelligence that men, money, ships and ammunition for the Armada were far from plentiful. Palavicino believed the source, a Genoese commander in the Spanish fleet. His assessment, wrongly, was that King Philip would wait for more favourable conditions to launch the Enterprise.

But for all the uncertainty, as well as the energetic exchange of letters between Elizabeth's senior advisers in June and early July 1588, one fact was clear. Though England's defences were far from ready to withstand the sheer weight of a concerted assault by the King of Spain's forces, Walsingham, Burghley and their colleagues had a very clear idea of the form and scale of what was heading towards the coast of England.

While it prepared in the summer of 1588 for the Spanish invasion it had so long expected, Elizabeth's government engaged King Philip in peace negotiations. The simple truth was that England was poorly prepared both militarily and financially for the fight. Its limited resources of men and money were already heavily committed in the Low Countries. Royal coffers could not hope to pay for those troops and sailors waiting for the Duke of Parma to arrive, and for this purpose the government turned to the Merchant Adventurers of London and Sir Horatio Palavicino to raise the huge sum of £40,000. In a strange way, the kind of information Walsingham was able to gather about the forces of Parma and the Duke of Medina Sidonia over months only prolonged the agonies of expectation. Intelligence perhaps shifted the balance of probability one way or another, but it could not in the end win a battle at sea or on land. It certainly could not pay the bills or alter the weather.

When it came, after long months of anxious watching, King Philip's
Great Armada of 130 ships was defeated both by the weather and by the virtuosity and aggression of the formidable naval officers under the command of Elizabeth's lord admiral, Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham. Combat between the two fleets, which were roughly equal in size, was sporadic but fierce. The Armada was beset by accident. The weather in the English Channel was terrible, and Medina Sidonia's fleet was battered by gales. One ship had to be abandoned because of an explosion of gunpowder. Another, the
Nuestra Señora del Rosario
, one of the Armada's pay ships carrying 50,000 gold ducats, found itself in difficulty and had to limp behind the other ships. It was captured, with all its gold and guns, by
The Revenge
of Sir Francis Drake. There was a ferocious battle led by two English commanders, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher. Heading for Calais, Medina Sidonia's navy was harried by the English fleet, whose fire ships caused chaos in the Armada, forcing Spanish captains to cut their cables. Drake, ever aggressive, engaged the enemy ships in close combat.

All of this meant that careful Spanish preparations came to nothing. The final plan for the combined forces of the two dukes was for Medina Sidonia's fleet to give protection to the hundred or so vessels lying in Dunkirk harbour and the 200 boats at Nieuport waiting to carry Parma's army of 26,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry over to England. They never made it. Instead a broken Armada fled north around the eastern coast of Scotland, pursued as far as the Firth of Forth by an English fleet left with practically no powder and shot. As Lord Admiral Howard put it, ‘we put on a brag countenance [a boastful display] and gave them chase'. The Armada, and with it the cherished Enterprise of England, hoped for and then planned for so long, failed.

It was a positively miraculous deliverance. Queen Elizabeth ascribed victory, not to the weather, but to the agency of providence. God's victory in scattering the Great Armada was celebrated in verse:

He made the winds and waters rise

To scatter all my enemies.

But the failure of King Philip of Spain's Great Armada masked the still dangerous reality facing Elizabeth's England. No amount of English Armada propaganda could disguise what for Spain was a temporary
defeat. There were other ways and methods to carry on the fight against heresy. The Duke of Parma himself anticipated this only a few days before the Armada left port. The duke spoke to one of the English commissioners at the Anglo-Spanish conference in Flanders, saying:

In mine opinion you have more cause to desire [peace] than we, for that if the king my master do lose a battle he shall be able to recover it well enough without harm to himself, being far enough off in Spain; and if the battle be lost of your side, it may be to lose the kingdom and all.

The war could be fought in other ways. It was a lesson no sensible Elizabethan politician, innoculated against his own government's anti-Spanish propaganda, could ever afford to forget. Sir Francis Walsingham, for one, felt that the breaking up of the Great Armada had done little good: ‘our half doings doth breed dishonour,' he wrote, ‘and leaveth the disease uncured'.

Throughout the years of the 1590s the fight against Spain consumed men and money, corroding the morale of Elizabeth's subjects. English troops, ordinary men impressed into service, fought in the Low Countries. There was fighting, too, in Ireland, a long and debilitating campaign against the rebel Earl of Tyrone. The expense of all these commitments was enormous. They were paid for by loans, much of the money borrowed from the merchant community of London. The sums are eye-watering: £575,000 on the war at sea, £1,420,000 on the campaign in the Low Countries and £1,924,000 in Ireland. The Tudor crown saddled itself with debts it could not hope to repay. More than this, mutinies of troops, failed harvests, long and murderous outbreaks of plague and influenza, rising prices and fears of social unrest all punctuated and haunted the 1590s.

If this seems a cheerless way to write of the years after 1588 – was not the Armada the glorious moment of Elizabethan ambition and prosperity? – the facts speak for themselves. Elizabeth was fifty-seven years old in 1590. She had no heir and no inclination to make a new succession law. Her successor by default was likely to be King James of Scotland. What would really happen on her death was open to the vagaries of international politics and the collective will of an English
political elite now more inclined to squabbling and faction than it had been so far in Elizabeth's reign. Sheer chance would surely play its part. With the rise of young and ambitious courtiers like Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex – at twenty-five in 1590 the favourite of the queen – some of the old continuities and structures at court and in council were quickly disappearing.