Heretic Queen (39 page)

If I should say unto you that I mean not to grant your petition, by my faith I should say unto you more than perhaps I mean. And if I should say unto you that I mean to grant your petition, I should then tell you more than is fit for you to know. And thus I must deliver you an answer, answerless.
18

Nonetheless, Parliament's petition had the desired effect. Elizabeth knew full well that she could not keep the verdict against Mary a state secret forever. On December 3, 1586, she consented to proclaiming the sentence. Of course, special embassies from Spain, France, and Scotland choked the court to plead for Mary's life. Mendoza, who knew how Elizabeth thought, had rightly predicted that the embassies alone would provide a stay of execution for the Scots queen. Elizabeth had a heartfelt aversion to harming a hair of an anointed monarch, and Mary was no exception. So while Elizabeth delayed, Walsingham, in particular, was at his wits' end.

Finally, on February 1, after a long discussion with Lord Admiral Howard, Elizabeth sent for William Davison. He was to bring Mary's as yet unsigned death warrant. Davison had no sooner entered than Elizabeth commanded him to pass her pen and ink, and she signed it without hesitation. She then told him to take it to the Lord Chancellor to have him affix the Great Seal of England. As he was leaving, utterly stunned, Elizabeth added that he should stop in to see Walsingham at his home, where he had been ill for some while. She asked Davison to tell him what had just transpired, adding with a wicked smile, “The grief thereof will go near to kill him outright.”
19

With the queen's signature and Great Seal affixed to the death warrant, Burghley moved quickly to carry out the sentence. On the morning of February 8, 1587, the final act in the twenty-year drama between the two British queens was played out. As Mary mounted the scaffold in the Great Hall at Fotheringay, her sentence was proclaimed across England. She would serve as a symbol to all Catholics that “stubborn disobedience … [and] incitement to insurrection … against the life and person of her Sacred Majesty” would never again be tolerated.
20

Elizabeth, of course, recanted her signature on the death warrant. Davison was summarily taken to the Tower, entering through its notorious Traitor's Gate. Yet eventually, for Davison, Traitor's Gate swung both ways. He was later released on an eye-wateringly high bond of £10,000. Elizabeth had heavily scripted her reaction to Mary's demise, and Davison was a much-needed scapegoat. A dynamic performance, lasting all of three weeks, was put on at court by the queen, where she cried loudly, shouted her anguish for all to hear, and significantly wrote a heartfelt letter of apology and explanation to James, blaming Davison and begging James's forgiveness. James may have been many things, but he was no fool. If Elizabeth begged forgiveness, he would gladly comply. With the throne of England dangled before his eyes, how could he refuse?

When Mary's head with its elaborate auburn wig was held aloft for the executioner to say the customary words for traitors, “Long live the queen,” in Elizabeth's name, war with Spain became inevitable. After all, Philip—once king of England—held his own fair right to the throne through Edward III. Now that Mary was dead, the time had come for him to reclaim it for Catholicism.

 

TWENTY-TWO

God's Obvious Design

Let tyrants fear … that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects.

—Elizabeth I, Armada Speech, August 9, 1588

The news of Mary's execution reached Elizabeth the following day, just as Elizabeth had mounted her horse and headed off for her daily hunt. She did not take any heed of Shrewsbury's son or his apparent haste to speak to her. Instead, Burghley received the official confirmation, for which he thanked young Shrewsbury, and then did precisely nothing with his knowledge. All of Greenwich Palace buzzed with the news—as did London, where bells of deliverance were rung out from the churches, before Elizabeth herself registered the momentous turn of events. Elizabeth promptly embarked on a three-week-long grief-stricken harangue, punctuated with sobs and accusations launched at her ministers that would have made her father seem evenhanded. Still, the facts were the same. With Mary dead, Philip would most certainly invade.

News of Mary's execution at Fotheringay took longer to arrive on other shores. Channel storms prevented word reaching Paris until ten days later. Of course, the scheming Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza was the first outside the English embassy to hear the reports. His immediate reaction was to call upon the Paris Committee of Sixteen, who were fashioning the Paris mob into a revolutionary force to back Guise in his ultra-Catholic and antiroyalist conspiracy against Henry III. Among those who would fight by Guise's side were exiled Catholic Scots, Irishmen, and Englishmen. They listened intently to the report of Mary's demise. Mendoza's next stop was his own embassy, where an army of devoted emissaries convened to spread the word that the queen of Scots had been beheaded, murdered on the order of England's heretic queen. Before Elizabeth's official proclamation had arrived in the French capital, the Catholic League had made their verdict against the “English Jezebel.” Elizabeth had committed judicial murder of her Catholic rival, and Henry III was her accessory and accomplice.

The friars of Paris preached fanatical and treasonous calumny against their king. Rumors flew about crypto-Protestants close to the throne, their poisonous heresies and witchcraft devouring the French king's court. Priests warned of ten thousand secret Huguenots, lurking in the shadows of Parisian cellars and alleyways, armed to the teeth, just waiting to slit the throats of the city's Catholics. Libelous pamphlets and ballads fluttered across the Channel, back to England. Yet Henry III seemed oblivious to the dangers.

*   *   *

In Brussels, Parma had
heard of Mary's execution long before Mendoza's letter had reached him. A thoughtful man and phenomenal military leader, Parma immediately assessed what the news would mean for the war in the Netherlands. For the commander of an army of largely heterogeneous mercenaries, it was a sensible time-out to take. History would judge Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, as the chief architect of modern Belgium. His reconquest of the southern ten rebellious “Dutch” provinces had brought a period of reconstruction to the south, and he was not about to jeopardize his years of hard-won gains by taking his eye off the military map of the Netherlands.

Parma already knew that the English intervention was doomed in 1586. In his eighteen months in Holland, Leicester had managed to achieve the inconceivable, alienating and infuriating his friends and the Dutch by his arrogance and incompetence, and he had made Parma warm to him. Sir John “Black Jack” Norris, who had faithfully served under William of Orange for years, had been relieved of his command by Leicester and shipped back to England. Leicester's ablest field commander after Norris was the mercenary Count Hohenlo. Within months of Leicester's appointment as governor-general, Hohenlo's closest friends claimed that if he met Leicester again, blood would be shed. So Parma, learning about Mary's execution and assessing the situation, penned a letter to Philip saying that he fully supported the Enterprise of England, which must happen sooner rather than later, since this murder of the Scots queen was an offence against Spain's honor and the Catholic faith.

*   *   *

Enrique de Guzmán,
Count of Olivarez, Spain's ambassador to Rome, only received word from Mendoza on the morning of March 24 when Mendoza's courier rode into the courtyard of the Spanish embassy. Olivarez lost no time in digesting Mendoza's message. Mary, the primary hope of salvation for English Catholics, had died a martyr to her religion. His Holiness should also know that Mary had rejected her heretic son, James VI, and willed her claim to the English throne to Philip II of Spain. As for France, His Holiness should be aware that Henry III was Mary's enemy, and thereby the enemy of His Holiness and Spain. Mendoza's last suggestion was for William Allen to be made a cardinal at once so that he could be the religious leader of the invading army. English Catholics would, of course, rush to his standard.
1

Mendoza's message betrays a certain concern that Felice Peretti, Pope Sixtus V, would not share his own zeal for the English Catholic cause. It was a mistake even Philip II made. Despite the veritable gushing of accolades Sixtus V heaped upon Elizabeth, calling her “his worthy opponent” and sighing, “Ah, if only she were a Catholic,” Mendoza should have looked to his actions rather than words. They spoke volumes. Though he made withering remarks about Philip, Sixtus V was nonetheless yoked to the Spanish king's slow-moving wagon to restore the breakaway northern European Protestant dominions to Catholicism. Certainly Dr. William Allen, resident in the small house adjacent to the English College in Rome, never doubted Sixtus for a moment.

*   *   *

Still, the Roman Catholic
world waited for Philip's reaction. The news reached him in his lofty palace of San Lorenzo de El Escorial nestled in the Guadarrama Mountains near Madrid. The Escorial, as it became known, was more of a retreat or monastery than a royal palace. As far as the eye could see, there was no other human habitation. Philip, it is believed, had the news for over a week before he was stirred into action. Where Elizabeth had gained a reputation for hesitation and prevarication, Philip's motto was
festinare lente
—hasten slowly.

Mendoza's letters had been followed swiftly by Parma's and the pope's. Santa Cruz, Philip's able admiral in charge of the Armada fleet already assembling at Cádiz and Lisbon, demanded 150 great galleons (the battleships of their day), 40
urcas
(tubby vessels that were used to store provisions), and 320 auxiliary craft, from dispatch boats to cruisers. Santa Cruz demanded a total of 510 ships at sail besides 40 galleys and 6 galleases to be manned by 30,000 sailors, carrying 64,000 soldiers. In other words, the largest force by far ever to be assembled at sea.

Parma, on the other hand, urged Philip
not
to use his navy but to allow him to attack instead, using the 30,000 infantry and 4,000 horse at his disposal from the Low Countries. Above all else, Parma stressed, the element of surprise would be crucial to success. Philip must have shaken his head in dismay at such a thought while he scrawled his reply across the page:
“Hardly possible!”

*   *   *

Just as Parma stressed
the importance of the element of surprise to Philip, so Drake urged Elizabeth, “The advantage of time and place in military action is half the victory.”
2
Drake, like Hawkins, itched to spring into action, to embark on some naval endeavor to cripple Spain's worst-kept secret—its Armada. The wisdom of a preemptive strike against Spain depended largely, however, on England's ability to mobilize as many ships as possible into the Channel when the winter of 1587 allowed. “Her Majesty shall also make preparation of all the strength that she can make by sea…,” Burghley wrote to Leicester, “that her own ships shall be removed to Portsmouth in March next and a great number of her subjects' ships shall also be made ready … as by further intelligence of the King of Spain's preparations shall be requisite.”
3

By March, the plan had been pieced together. On March 27, 1587, Drake set sail with a total of forty-two vessels for his secret mission to “singe the beard of the King of Spain.” Drake's secret plan was to use Dom Antonio, the dethroned Portuguese king, as a decoy for his mission to destroy as much of the fleet at Cádiz as time would allow. Drake met with Walsingham to agree on the spread of disinformation. Traitors to England and Philip's various English spies were well known to Walsingham by now but had been left in place for this very purpose. Most prominent among these was Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris. Philip's own machinery of espionage was left to do the rest. Stafford's acceptance of 8,000 crowns from Philip as a pension only weeks earlier had been known to Walsingham and Elizabeth on the very day it occurred.

Before Drake set sail from London, Stafford passed the intelligence to Mendoza. “The Queen of England's secretary writes to the new confidant [Stafford] telling him,” Mendoza scrawled to Philip urgently, “to be careful what reports he sends from here … The Queen had not decided anything about sending out the fleet, as the intelligence sent by the ambassador here had cooled her.”
4
Ten days later the “true advices from England” were in Mendoza's hands. It was too late. Drake, the feared El Draco, had set sail two weeks earlier. Aside from a storm off Finisterre where one ship was lost, the voyage had gone swiftly. Within eighteen days of sailing, Drake stood in the roads off Cádiz.

*   *   *

Philip had been crippled
by gout and self-doubt for the previous six months. Nonetheless, orders for his ships to finally set sail went out. As ever well informed, Philip fulminated while envying the swift and intrepid English navy. Raleigh and his inconvenient Virginia colony had been troubling his planned conquest of North America. That mariner Davis had already attempted two voyages to discover the Northwest Passage to Cathay (China) and would soon be making a third. Now another captain, called Thomas Cavendish, had set sail for Peru in his ship
Desire.

Though the Spanish king toured his gardens at Aranjuez—his oasis of calm—he found no peace from the English. They always had at least two hundred ships at sea plundering his empire. Even the English Admiralty took a share of the registered plunder. While Philip shambled through his perfumed gardens in the sunny April afternoons of 1587, he was said to muse repeatedly about Elizabeth, “Clearly God must be allowing her waywardness on account of her sins and unfaithfulness.” Even the pope's offer of a million ducats toward the Armada had only been conditional on the successful invasion of England, with the stipulation that Philip “would not maintain the throne” for himself. When Sixtus V's spies reported back to Rome that this was precisely the king of Spain's goal, Sixtus thundered threats of divine vengeance aloud unless Philip “repented of his great sin, and obeyed the Vicar of Christ.”
5
When an urgent dispatch arrived from Mendoza while Philip reflected on the sorry state of his affairs, he ignored it, turning one last time to shuffle as best he could through those gardenia-scented gardens he so adored. The message, of course, carried momentous news regarding Drake's intentions.