The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (50 page)

The only good news came courtesy of Francis Drake, and even this would turn out to be a mixed blessing. The queen’s decision to unleash her sea-dogs against the Spanish Empire fell short of an outright declaration of war, but it undoubtedly strengthened the case being put by Philip II’s advisers for the invasion of England. The fleet which Drake led out of Plymouth in September 1585 made initially for the Spanish port of Vigo, where a number of the English merchantmen had been impounded. Christopher Carleill, captain of the
Tiger
and overall military commander of the expedition, forwarded Walsingham an account of the raiding party sent upriver by Drake. A coffer was discovered containing the vestments and treasures from the cathedral, ‘whereof one cross was as much as a man might carry, being very fine silver of excellent workmanship’. Carleill’s men skirmished with a company of
Spanish harquebusiers, and a captured English looter was beheaded. The Governor of Bayona offered a truce, at which point Drake allowed some local gentlemen ‘to view and see our ships’ as a pledge of good faith. But it had been an ugly incident, with blood spilled on both sides and the ritual plunder of church property.

Drake clearly relished the symbolism of having landed on Spanish soil, although he later discovered that the delay might have cost him the treasure fleet from Panama. Subsequent attacks on the Leeward Islands, Hispaniola and Cartagena in Colombia offered scant compensation for the casualties sustained. The queen and other investors in the 1585–6 voyage got back only fifteen shillings in the pound, contrasting with the spectacular returns on Drake’s navigation of the globe. Honour had been served and the colonists on Roanoke Island saved from an uncertain fate, but the escapade had done nothing to fill the coffers of the crown. Nor had it improved the lot of English cloth-workers suffering the collapse of their foreign markets. By the time that Drake returned to Plymouth in July 1586, food riots were breaking out across the west of England. The beacon fires standing ready to warn of an invasion had come worryingly close to signalling a popular uprising against the gentry.
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In January 1586 Philip II instructed his captain-general of the ocean seas to draw up a plan for the invasion of Britain. It was the moment which the Marquis of Santa Cruz had been waiting for. A vast armada must be made ready, with 150 warships and the auxiliaries to supply them, plus enough transports to carry artillery, cavalry horses and an astonishing fifty-five thousand infantry: a fleet of 510 ships in all. He calculated that the cost would approach four million ducats or about £1,000,000
sterling, equivalent to three years’ income for the English crown. Philip welcomed the idea, but paled at the expense. An alternative was put forward by his nephew the Duke of Parma, simpler and cheaper while being every bit as daring: thirty thousand troops floated over to England in flat-bottomed Flanders barges, a blitzkrieg across the Channel in just one night. As Spain’s most capable general, Parma was content to keep the navy in a supporting role. He was also critical of Santa Cruz’s strategy of targeting the first wave of landings against English power in Ireland. Philip himself was drawn one way and the other, with the result that the Armada which finally sailed in 1588 was a composite of both proposals: a smaller naval force than Santa Cruz had hoped and lacking the surprise element which Parma regarded as essential, but still posing a mortal threat to the Elizabethan regime.

Francis Walsingham had a copy of Santa Cruz’s report in his hands by April 1586, only days after Philip himself had seen it. This extraordinary intelligence coup was achieved by Antony Standen, an English Catholic émigré who had come to rest in Florence and assumed a new identity as Pompeo Pellegrini. Walsingham was sometimes prepared to overlook the activities of his agents’ families when the quality of information was high, which may explain why Standen agreed to work for him. Or perhaps it came down to patriotism, an unwillingness to see England overrun by Spain in the name of religion. Whatever his motivations, he was a first-class spy with unrivalled access to the enemy camp. As a friend of the Tuscan ambassador to the Spanish court, Standen was able to take soundings of current opinion on the English question. He also recruited an agent of his own, the brother of a trusted servant of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who sent letters to Standen from Lisbon by way of the diplomatic bag at Madrid. Standen travelled to Spain in person in the spring of 1588, from where he was able to report
to Walsingham directly. His reward would be ‘reintegration to her highness’s favour’ and a pension of £100 – the same sum that Gilbert Gifford received for unearthing the Babington plot.
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Thirty years before, Philip of Spain had helped his wife Mary Tudor to shepherd the English people back into the fold of the true faith. Now the chance to resume the re-Catholicisation of England stirred him to the core. And yet some doubts remained: the military wisdom of opening up another front before the Netherlands was finally reduced to order, and the sharply political problem of what to do with Elizabeth once her kingdom had been conquered. She was, after all, his sister-in-law and a former candidate for his hand in marriage. Officially Philip and Parma continued to talk the language of peace until the last possible moment, though Walsingham dismissed this as a feint to split the States from their English allies and buy time to assemble an armada. Lord Howard of Effingham, admiral of the fleet, shared his sense of scepticism: ‘Sir, there was never, since England was England, such a stratagem and mask made to deceive England withal as is this treaty of peace’. Whatever his previous reservations, the martyrdom of Mary Stuart in February 1587 convinced Philip that God would absolve him of striking against an anointed monarch. Having shed tears over Mary and ordered a requiem mass, he gave the word to assemble the fleet at Lisbon. In the words of Walsingham’s counterpart at the Spanish court, it was time to put England ‘to the torch’.
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Faced with a decision which might provoke a war, Elizabeth’s instinct was usually to back away. But for a few critical weeks in the spring of 1587, the balance of power at court was turned upside down. Enraged and shaken that Mary had been executed without her express command, Elizabeth did as she had never done before and banished Burghley from her presence. Suddenly Walsingham and Leicester had the opportunity to present their
case for war without interference from the lord treasurer. Intelligence gathered in Portugal and Spain had the desired effect on the queen, and she duly authorised Drake ‘to impeach the joining together of the King of Spain’s fleet’. Drake was exultant. He set out from Plymouth on 2 April 1587 with a farewell salute to Walsingham. It is a biographer’s dream of a letter:

I thank God I find no man but as all members of one body to stand for our gracious queen and country against Antichrist and his members … The wind commands me away. Our ship is under sail. God grant we may so live in His fear as the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her majesty as well abroad as at home, and give her long and happy life, and ever victory against God’s enemies and her majesty’s.

In his haste to engage the enemy, Drake succeeded in outrunning the letter countermanding his orders which he correctly anticipated would soon be chasing him. Ignoring the fortified harbour at Lisbon, he sailed onward south and east to the port of Cadiz. For its sheer daring as well as its role in disrupting preparations for the Spanish Armada, the raid on Cadiz has never been forgotten. Walsingham’s heart must have surged when he read Drake’s description of the scene: five merchantmen and one of Santa Cruz’s own galleons looted and sunk, four cargo ships taken and a further two dozen stripped and burned at anchor, and a squadron of Philip’s galleys repulsed and humiliated, all under a hail of artillery fire from the shore. The English fleet then sailed to Sagres on the Algarve, where the castle was bombarded into surrender and a monastery was ransacked and set on fire. Drake told the tale in the language of the Old Testament, casting the Catholic Spanish as ‘upholders of Baal or Dagon’s Image, which hath already fallen before the ark of our God with his hands and arms and head stricken off’.
But there was also hard detail in his reports to Walsingham, wooden casks to the weight of 1,600 tons ‘consumed into smoke and ashes’ along with the nets on which the Spanish navy depended for its supply of salted fish. Drake’s ships and soldiers were not in Sagres for long, but they succeeded in deterring Philip’s Mediterranean fleet from joining the force assembling at Lisbon. If Elizabeth’s countermand had reached him in time, the Spanish Armada might well have launched a year earlier than it did.
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The delay proved a godsend to those charged with readying England’s defences. The threat of a French invasion back in the 1530s had been met by a chain of coastal forts and gun batteries to the latest designs, paid for with the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries. But once Henry VIII’s Reformation windfall had been spent, the full burden of maintaining fortress England had fallen on the ordinary revenues of the crown. The consequences were all too predictable. The Elizabethan military engineers tasked with preparing to repel a Spanish attack discovered that once-proud castles had been weakened and left obsolete by two generations of neglect. A survey of artillery forts in Dorset in the early 1580s found their wooden platforms rotten and their guns dismantled. Walls were in danger of sliding into the sea. Spanish forces landing in Cornwall or Devon would have encountered defences which had hardly altered since the days of Henry VIII. There had long been talk of a new fort on Plymouth Hoe, but nothing was achieved until several years after the Armada had come and gone. The massive bulwarks at Pendennis Castle above Falmouth harbour and Star Castle in the Isles of Scilly both date from the 1590s rather than any earlier.

The royal docks at Portsmouth fared rather better. In February 1584 Walsingham had authorised the hiring of several hundred pioneers to repair and extend the fortifications around the town.
But the earthworks were far from complete by the time the Armada sailed, partly because the labour force had been reduced to just a hundred on the orders of the queen. On the opposite side of the Solent, the lion’s share of the money spent on Carisbrooke Castle had gone on a superior new dwelling for Sir George Carey. Upnor was a rare example of a new-build Elizabethan castle, offering some protection to the Medway and the important anchorage at Chatham, yet incapable of defending itself from an attack on the landward side; a fault which it shared with many Tudor fortifications. The Essex port of Harwich was allocated £1,000 for defences only in 1588, while Ipswich had to fend for itself by employing Walsingham’s surveyor and counterfeiter Arthur Gregorye to build it a gun platform.
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In the words of the privy council to the citizens of Hastings, ‘the strength of her majesty’s navy is their surest defence, and of the whole realm’. Given the chronic degree of overstretch in the royal finances, the strategic decision to concentrate on warships rather than shore defences made good sense. A campaign of construction and purchase since the early 1570s had furnished Elizabeth with a fleet of thirty-four ships by 1587, although a dozen were of less than 250 tons’ burden and only ten had been designed with gunnery rather than close-quarter grappling in mind. Supplemented by vessels taken up from trade or supplied by the London livery companies, the entire English fleet numbered fewer than sixty ships. With a fair wind and a blessing from God, they could hope to deflect and defeat an invasion armada if not to destroy it outright. But even the newest race-built ships needed harbours where they could shelter and replenish, and here the geography of the coastline east of Portsmouth presented the government with a major headache. The ancient ports of Winchelsea, Rye and Sandwich had all silted up by the later sixteenth century, making them useless to the great galleons of the royal navy. That left only Dover at the
narrowest point of the Channel, a scrape between two cliffs offering limited protection from the fierce tides and prevailing winds. Until, that is, Francis Walsingham initiated one of the most impressive civil engineering projects undertaken by the Elizabethan state.

Walsingham had become aware of Dover’s potential in 1576, when he appointed the navigator William Borough to report on the possibility of building a better haven for the navy. A plan was hatched to take advantage of a great bank of shingle which had drifted down from the remnants of earlier Tudor experiments to create a harbour. After several false starts, Walsingham found the right overseer in the mathematician and MP Thomas Digges. A pupil of John Dee and his acknowledged ‘mathematical heir’, Digges had already proved his worth by surveying the strength of Dutch fortifications during Walsingham’s and Cobham’s embassy in 1578. He was also a committed Protestant, a prime mover of the 1584 bond of association to legislate for a provisional government in the event of Elizabeth’s assassination and a keen supporter of intervention in the Netherlands. Digges’s theoretical understanding of the formidable challenges at Dover was complemented by the practical experience of Paul Ive, a military engineer who had also seen service in the Low Countries. Ive would dedicate his treatise
The Practise of Fortification
jointly to Walsingham and Cobham in 1589.