The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (54 page)

‘I know that God hath a great work to work by me,’ Essex told Anthony Bacon, his secretary, in 1596. That great work was not to flatter an ageing queen, although that seemed to be his fate, but to carry war into Spain for England’s honour, and his own. Essex could not easily play the favourite, yet it was by devout attendance on the Queen, and endless persuasion, that military command was won. Philip Sidney had bequeathed his sword, his chivalry and his hopes to Essex, and in 1590 Essex came with his followers to the tiltyard, arrayed in mourning black for Sidney, ‘whose successor he in love and arms had ever vowed to be’. To the Queen’s displeasure, Essex married Sidney’s widow. The great design of the old advocates of militant Protestantism – Walsingham, Leicester, Knollys, Mildmay and Sidney – for a coalition against the forces of militant Catholicism lived on in Essex, who believed that peace could come only by resolute war. Against that view stood, perennially, the Queen and Burghley, ‘old Saturnus’, whose influence was now greater than ever, as he monopolized the offices of Lord Treasurer, Master of the Court of Wards and acting Secretary of State. Elizabeth was always averse to the grand design; reluctant that religion should dictate national policy. The Queen’s temperament, her lack of impulse to martial greatness and empire, and her just assessment of her poverty always inclined her to arm for defence rather than to make war. But Essex was contemptuous of those who, lacking honour, sought peace abroad. For the Queen’s sake, he said truly, he would have counted ‘danger a sport, death a feast’.

The repulse of the ‘invincible Armada’ was not the end but the beginning of England’s outright war with Spain. For Spain, war became not a matter of retaliatory raids but of revenge and of total conquest in England, France and the Netherlands. Events moved Elizabeth to that offensive war from which she naturally recoiled. In 1589 the Armada lay temporarily helpless in Spanish harbours, unmanned and unseaworthy, while urgent preparations were made to restore it. Now was the chance to send a force into ‘the bowels of Spain’. Remarkably, Elizabeth took it. In April 1589 an English Armada sailed; with 19,000 soldiers and 4,000 sailors, it was scarcely less formidable than Spain’s. Its purpose was to destroy Spanish ships, to place Dom Antonio on the throne of Portugal, and to seize the Islands – the Azores – in order to prey upon Spanish commerce.

Divided counsels and conflicting purposes wrecked this ‘enterprise of Portugal’ even as it sailed, for this was less a royal armada than a
massive privateering venture; the commanders, Drake and Norris, were adventurers before they were admirals. The first aim of the Queen – the destruction of the fleet in order to prevent another invasion – was not theirs. They dreamt of prizes and the sack of Lisbon. Sea and land forces were deployed on an uncoordinated attack upon Lisbon, but the Portuguese people failed to rise for Dom Antonio. The enterprise was a disaster for the Queen, but a greater one for more than half of her forces, who deserted or died. Elizabeth was confirmed in her opposition to the great venture for martial glory. Not so Essex. Escaping court as the enterprise began, defying the Queen’s absolute command to stay, Essex (not being Master of the Horse for nothing) rode 220 miles in a day and a half to join the expedition at Plymouth. Into the gates of Lisbon he stuck his pike: a promise that he would return.

England had so far avoided the civil wars which racked France and the Netherlands. France was a ‘theatre of misery’ where anxious observers in England watched religious fervour metamorphose into revolution and saw the extreme courses which attended the extinction of a dynasty. The Catholic League, reconstituted in 1584 to restore ‘holy Church’ and prevent the accession of the Protestant heir, had moved to purge the eastern provinces of Huguenots. In Paris, the leading Leaguers, the Sixteen, organized thousands of militants into neighbourhood cells and planned similar networks throughout France. Knowing that Henry III lacked ardour in the Catholic cause, the Sixteen planned a coup against him, and in May 1588 the citizens took to the barricades and drove out their king. The Duke of Guise was master of Paris. At the end of the year Henry, on the point of losing his kingdom, successfully ordered the assassination of the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise and was denounced as a new Herod by the Paris preachers. The League moved to more desperate courses, sanctioned neither by law nor precedent but by religious mission, and repudiated their duty of allegiance to a King who had violated his sacred trust. The Sixteen ruled Paris by terror, and established a revolutionary commune. Henry III was driven into an unholy alliance with his heir, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, and in April 1589 Valois and Bourbon armies advanced against the League. The alliance did not last long, for in July Henry III, the last of the Valois, was assassinated. Reports reached England of the anguished piety, the spectacular torchlit processions, the
extreme penitential fervour which attended this period of political crisis.

France became ‘the stage of Christendom wherein all nations seek to play their tragical parts’. So Sir Henry Unton said in Parliament in 1593. Philip II had bound himself to prevent Henry of Navarre ever ascending the French throne. Now, in September 1589, a reluctant Prince of Parma was ordered to lead the Army of Flanders to aid the League. Here were new alignments in Europe’s wars of religion. The war in the Netherlands was reduced to a defensive holding operation, just when the many victories and long attrition seemed at last to be leading to Spanish victory. Only a rump of the Spanish army was left behind to face Dutch forces, supported by English auxiliaries, who grew confident under their brilliant commander Maurice of Nassau. English aims in the Netherlands had not changed: Dutch liberties must be defended, but Dutch independence was not to be fought for, because an independent Netherlands could never withstand an aggressive France. As always, England’s safety lay in a balance of the two great powers: she needed a restored France to counter a militant Spain.

Philip’s move from the ‘enterprise of England’ to the ‘enterprise of France’ in 1589 was only a temporary reprieve for England. As Parma’s army marched towards the French border, England’s danger grew, for if the French Channel coast fell to Spain the Spanish Armada’s task would be easy. The power of the Catholic League stretched from Lorraine in the east to Brittany in the west: a proximate threat to England, which had known invasion from Normandy before. Elizabeth had offered a loan in 1587 to fund Henry of Navarre’s German mercenary levy, and could not now avoid sending aid and money; not only to protect Henry’s right and to save France from Spanish domination but also to save England. In September 1589 Lord Willoughby crossed to France with 4,000 troops as auxiliaries. Without them Henry could hardly keep the field, yet he could not provide for them. Unpaid, unfed, consumed by disease, the English troops suffered a terrible attrition. Henry, beleaguered and indigent, controlling only half of France, with his camp as his court, could hardly drive the League from the north. His prime objective lay elsewhere. Paris was in the hands of the Sixteen, and the King must capture his capital before he could win his kingdom. In 1590 he laid siege to Paris; unavailingly, for in September Parma and his army arrived to relieve it.

Normandy became the focus of international politics: it was the heartland of militant Catholicism. In 1591 Elizabeth sent two
expeditionary forces: one to Brittany, one to Normandy. A great effusion of English manpower and money followed: 20,000 men sent and £370,000 spent between 1589 and 1595. All to little purpose. Henry’s strategies and exigencies were never Elizabeth’s. He could not be induced to keep his promises, to arrive on time, or to give full support to English forces he regarded as his mere auxiliaries. Henry, for his part, told Elizabeth that she ‘made war good cheap against so great an enemy’, looking on while he did her fighting for her. Yet the war seemed costly enough to her war-weary commanders, forced to decisions which they knew would be ill received at home, and to their ragged and broken armies drifting purposelessly through the devastated French countryside. As Henry IV tired of endless campaigning and faced the prospect of failure, rumours reached England in April 1593 that he was preparing to ‘make that metamorphosis’: to abjure his Protestantism. In July 1593 he attended Mass at St Denis: the price of Paris. Elizabeth was distraught, pained by his apostasy, and fearful that he would ally with Spain and repudiate his great debt to her. She sought the consolations of philosophy and translated the Stoic Boethius.

War in France had been unsuccessful and inglorious. Yet it had seemed a great chivalric moment to England’s martial nobility, who saw themselves as born to command but were still untested. Essex wrote to Elizabeth, pleading for command: while the armies campaigned there, Normandy was the ‘great school of our age’. Resistant to the Crown’s attempts to domesticate and pacify them, emulating their glittering commander, Essex’s ‘gallants’ vied with each other in acts of chivalry, skirmished in ‘bravadoes’ which were usually futile, sometimes – as for Essex’s brother, Walter – fatal. Elizabeth, warning Henry IV of Essex’s recklessness, advised that he would need the bridle rather than the spur. Outside Rouen, Essex challenged the Duke of Villars, Governor of Le Havre, to single combat. The Queen, unimpressed, accused him of venturing ‘like the forlorn hope’ that went first into battle.

In 1592 Essex returned from command in Normandy to court and learnt bitter lessons: that military honour went unrewarded and was little regarded; that his whispering adversaries had undermined him in his absence; that, in Elizabethan politics, the pen was mightier than the sword. Burghley intended to hand over his power and offices to his immensely able son, Robert Cecil. In 1592 it was alleged that Burghley deliberately suppressed the ancient nobility, and it soon became commonplace to say that the Cecils promoted only ‘base, pen clerks’. The
contrast between the splendid Essex and the hunch-backed Cecil personified the Renaissance antithesis between chivalry and bureaucracy. As Cecil determined to assume his father’s monopoly, so Essex set himself to prevent him. He pressed for a part as Privy Councillor as well as favourite. Determined to command the knowledge that would allow him to direct events, Essex began to appoint a secretariat of brilliant men, worthy of the most educated of English nobles, to procure intelligence of foreign affairs and ‘practices’. In February 1593 Essex was at last sworn Privy Councillor.

One of Essex’s rivals was removed, for a time. In the summer of 1592 Elizabeth discovered that Ralegh had secretly married Bess Throckmorton, a Lady of the Bedchamber, so defiling one of her vestals, and violating the inner sanctum of her court with all its secrets. Ralegh was banished, and the Earl’s friends rejoiced that he had chased him out of court and into Ireland.

In May 1593, exiled from favour, Ralegh wrote despairingly to Robert Cecil, ‘We are so busied and dandled in these French wars, which are endless, as we forget the defence next the heart’: the danger from Ireland, which was almost a matter of home defence, to which everything else, even national solvency, must yield precedence. That spring Ralegh had warned of the acute danger of a new ‘Irish combination’, but like ‘the Trojan soothsayer’ he was not believed. The Queen had already spent a fortune in Ireland, he complained; she might have bought a better kingdom cheaper; yet its security was less assured than ever. Now Spain, by arming the Irish, had raised up ‘troops of beggars on our backs’. Ralegh’s letter exposed, too, the deepening disillusion and division among Ireland’s governors. A great chance had been lost in the 1580s, Ralegh believed, when Ireland ‘lay bare to the sword’.

In 1580 Sir Henry Sidney, advising Lord Grey of Wilton, his successor as chief governor, had alluded to a crisis in counsel in Ireland: should English governors temporize, or aspire ‘to a perfect reformation of that accursed country’? Grey had chosen the second course in Munster and the Pale; one of brutal repression. Impelled by what he saw as moral and political necessity, Grey could show no pity and give no pardons to the Irish who were addicted, he thought, to ‘treachery and breach of fidelity’. There, compassion was delusive. To the hardliners, Grey had shown what could be done to bring ‘perfect reformation’ by famine and
the sword, but those who held still to an ideal of reform by diplomacy and persuasion saw the limitations to repression, the failure to exploit short-term devastation for any long-term political gain. Grey had left under a cloud in 1582. He was replaced two years later by Sir John Perrot, past President of Munster, who had plied the Council with ambitious schemes through the 1570s, and came with all the zeal of a reforming governor. He aimed to bring a final settlement to Munster and to establish extensive plantations there; he planned to drive the Scots from the north-east, where Turlough Luineach O’Neill and his wife, the Lady of Kintyre, were seeking to create a ‘new Scotland’, and finally to pacify Ulster for, as always, if Ulster were settled so might all Ireland be. He saw an assault upon tanistry as a way of ending the seemingly endless succession disputes and the consequent militarization of the Gaelic lordships. More ambitious still was his scheme, inherited from Sidney, to negotiate and complete throughout Ireland a general ‘composition’ or agreement to commute ‘cess’ (a range of impositions), in order to give the government a regular income and a local militia.