The Spanish Armadas Read online

  The idea of Philip and Mary’s union had originated with Philip’s father, the Emperor Charles v, and had it succeeded it would have been a stroke of political statecraft of the first magnitude. In order to appreciate it one has to look at Philip’s ancestry and at the map of Europe.

  Philip’s grandfather, Philip the Handsome, had married Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, so combining the powerful houses of Hapsburg and Burgundy with the Spanish royal dynasty. Philip the Handsome died when Charles, Philip’s father, was only six, and a succession of other deaths and misfortunes so struck the families with which he was connected that Charles before he was nineteen became master of a domain greater than Charlemagne’s. To his possessions in the Low Countries and Spain were added Mexico, Peru, the Isthmus, the Caribbean Islands, Aragon, Catalonia, the Balearics, Naples and Sicily, Austria, Styria, Tyrol, Carinthia and Germany.

  So the boy Charles became Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Born in 1500 in Ghent, Charles soon showed himself to be an able and autocratic ruler. A strong-willed, lusty and vigorous man, ever indulging his appetites, ever travelling about his domains, down-to-earth, practical, astute, gluttonous, he was both the savage persecutor of heretics and the brave defender of Christendom from the Turks. But the strain of kingship and the arduous life he lived wore down even his iron constitution, and by the time he was fifty-four he was an exhausted and sickly man. In 1540 he had created his son Duke of Milan, and, on his marriage to Mary of England, made over to him the Kingdom of Naples. With rare wisdom Charles had become convinced that the empire he had inherited was too unwieldy ever to be successfully governed by one man, and already he had given his brother Ferdinand his Austrian possessions. For the rest he planned that Philip’s son by his first wife, the infant Don Carlos, should succeed in Spain and that the child of Philip and Mary should inherit not only England but the Netherlands, thus taking the Low Countries away from Spain and giving them a strength and protection from across the Channel. One empire would become three kingdoms, each independent of the others, but all in friendly and fraternal alliance.

  If Don Carlos died, Mary’s child was to be King of Spain and of all Spain’s vast possessions in the New World too. It is not surprising that Mary had so much to hope for.

  And in those first weeks, despite the sullen looks of the English, all seemed well. It was true that the Duchess of Alva was highly offended at missing the wedding. She arrived from Southampton three days late, and even Mary’s reception of her did not assuage her injured dignity. When she was presented, with splendid ceremonial, the Queen came to meet her and kissed her and, there being only one chair in the room, would not take precedence over her by sitting on it so suggested that they should both sit together on the floor. Not to be outdone in courtesy, the Duchess insisted that she only would sit on the floor. Mary therefore sent for two stools, and the comedy continued with first one on a stool and then both on the floor and then the other up and the first down, until at last they were seated side by side and talking amicably about something other than precedence. (The Duchess was offended all over again when the Earl of Derby tried to kiss her on the mouth. No one had had the impertinence to attempt such a thing ever before, and even though she was able to turn her cheek to him she could not contain her annoyance.)

  The new and as yet uncrowned King of England used every grace and charm to engage the affections of his new subjects. He distributed gifts of silver to all the lords of the council and to many others besides. He promised pensions of thirty thousand ducats annually. He cancelled a debt of two and a quarter million ducats that his new wife had owed him. He treated everyone he met with the utmost courtesy, and scrupulously avoided any hint of interference in the affairs of the kingdom. Writing home to Spain a month after the wedding, one of his stewards, Don Pedro Enriquez, a nephew of the Duke of Alva, says:

  Their majesties are the happiest couple in the world, and are more in love with each other than I can say here. He never leaves her, and on the road is always by her side, lifting her into the saddle and helping her to dismount. He dines with her publicly sometimes, and they go to mass together on feast days.

  By this date they were at Richmond on their way to Hampton Court. The great gatherings at Winchester and Southampton had mostly dispersed. Those of the English who were not in actual attendance on their majesties had galloped off home to their baronial estates. The Spanish were in less happy case. The Admiral of Spain was on his way back with part of his fleet to Coruña; the rest had convoyed the troops to Flanders. There still remained some hundred noblemen with their servants, who had accompanied the Prince and who now in desultory fashion followed him to London.

  Among them discontent at their early treatment had been succeeded by profound disillusion. The English were crude and ungentlemanly. And very unfriendly. There was no attempt on their part to hide their feelings. It was a barbaric country, full of heretics and renegades. The Spaniards found themselves jeered at in the streets, overcharged wherever they went, and actually attacked by vagabonds if they strayed far afield. Don Juan de Pacheco was robbed of a large sum of money and all his jewellery. The monks had to keep out of sight for fear of being set upon. Even such grandees as the Duke of Alva were given inferior lodgings on the way. When they reached London it was little better. There were constant quarrellings, and one week three English and one Spaniard were hanged for brawling. Two of the most distinguished of Philip’s knights were set on in the streets by a raucous crowd who had taken offence at their costume and tried to strip it off their backs. What was worse, the political outcome of the marriage seemed likely to be far from what they had hoped. The Queen was surrounded by a group of powerful and suspicious councillors who would block as far as they could any Spanish influence over her decisions.

  Soon the Spanish noblemen were craving their Prince’s leave to go, and by late September all had slipped away except for Alva and four others and their personal servants. Thankfully the dukes and marquises, the counts and the knights took ship for home, bearing with them a memory of a land of uncivil and unpolished barbarians. But also a land of richness and plenty, the halls of the nobles doubly resplendent with the loot of the despoiled monasteries; a land of beautiful open harbours, of green fields and abundant flowers, of great flocks of sheep, of splendid palaces and churches and populous and prosperous villages and towns. They were memories that would linger long in the minds of the visitors. They had come to conquer in friendship. But they had received no friendship. The first Spanish invasion of England was nearly over.

  Philip stayed a little over a year. During that time Mary fell completely in love with him, and she adored him for the rest of her short life.

  In November Cardinal Pole returned from Rome to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, and was greeted with great joy by both Mary and Philip. On the 30th Pole solemnly absolved the Lords and Commons and the whole country from their apostasy and accepted England back into the Roman Catholic Church. At the end of the year the old heresy laws were revived, and the first Protestant was burned at the stake on the 4th February 1555.

  It is difficult to apportion the blame for the reign of terror that spread through England, mainly in the south and east, for the next three and a half years. Pole certainly was the instrument of Rome; yet during his fourteen years of exile in Viterbo his rule was firm but mild: no record of the persecution of heretics. Gardiner was a controversial figure, deeply involved in many of the heresy trials; yet in his own diocese no victim suffered the fire until after his death. Bonner, Bishop of London, bears the stigma of the largest number of victims condemned in any diocese; but he was several times taken to task by the Privy Council for not being severe enough.

  At the time, of course, the odium fell on Philip. The young man whose father had striven to root out heresy in his own kingdom wherever he found it and had burned the first Lutheran martyrs in Brussels in 1523, the young man who a few years later when attending a royal Auto-da-fé at Valladolid stat
ed that ‘if my own son was a heretic, I would carry wood to burn him myself’, the young man who as he grew older grew steadily more fanatical in his hatred of Calvinism, would seem the natural instigator of the fires of Smithfield. Yet the evidence shows that he constantly urged moderation and clemency on his wife and her ministers. This may have been a piece of political calculation undertaken to endear him to his enemies. If so it failed. But if it were so it showed a degree of statecraft that would have served him well in later life. One can only conclude that at this date Mary was the more rigid sectarian, and that her charity towards her enemies – which she showed even to those who had tried to rob her of her throne – did not extend towards the enemies of her Catholic faith.

  Of course some of the Protestants who burned did make things difficult for themselves. What could one do, for instance, with a preacher who on New Year’s Eve 1555 offered up prayers from his pulpit for the Queen’s death?

  In November 1554 Mary announced that she was with child, and thanks-giving services were held in London churches. In March 1555 there were joustings, and the King and Queen spent Easter at Hampton Court. By May it became clear that Mary had been mistaken. In August Philip received word of his father’s decision to abdicate in his favour, and on the 3rd September he left Dover to cross to Calais and ride to Brussels, where in the Hall of the Golden Fleece he formally accepted the sovereignty of the Netherlands. Early in the following year he became King of Spain.

  Affairs of state, which were all-demanding, kept him away from England and his wife for eighteen months. When he returned in March 1557 and was reunited with Mary, it was to urge that England should honour her alliance with Spain and declare war on France. Easter they spent at Greenwich, together with the Duchess of Alva and the Duchess of Lorraine. But he was restive and unsettled and cold towards Mary. There are accounts of banquets and Garter processions and noble stag-hunts at Hampton Court in company with members of the Privy Council. On the 7th June England entered into a war for which she was completely unprepared, and soon after Philip announced his departure. On the 3rd July he and his Queen set out for Dover, spending a night at Sittingbourne. Mary was weak and ailing, and grieved at the thought of another separation. When he left her on the 5th July neither of them was to know that it was their last meeting. In sixteen months she was dead. Philip was never to visit England again.

  One other event of great consequence occurred during Philip’s visits to England. He met the tall, pale, slim, auburn-haired girl of twenty-one who was to succeed Mary and who was to be his adversary all his life.

  At the end of April 1555 the Queen, still convinced that she was pregnant, went to Hampton Court to await her confinement, and, this being perhaps the happiest time in her rather joyless life, with Philip still beside her and the expectation of bearing his child, her feelings softened towards her half-sister. She had never forgotten the ignominy and humiliations thrust upon her and her mother by this girl’s mother; yet although Elizabeth was kept in close confinement, Mary had been unable or unwilling to have her put to death, as she was often urged to do. Now in the warmth and burgeoning of her life (a fruitful marriage to a man she loved, a heart-warming return of England to the Old Faith) reconciliation and forgiveness were in the air. A modest forgiveness, anyhow. Elizabeth was summoned from Woodstock, but was allowed to bring only five servants and she rode under heavy guard. The journey took four days, and she entered Hampton Court by a back gate and was lodged in rooms recently vacated by the Duke of Alva.

  This meant she was near the King, and it gives a ring of truth to the account given by Antoine de Noailles, the French Ambassador, and confirmed by Giovanni Michieli, the Venetian Ambassador, that Philip visited Elizabeth secretly, before his formal introduction to her in the presence of Mary. It would not be surprising if he was curious to meet this young woman, still a heretic, but known to be witty and popular wherever she went, the issue of that scandalous and adulterous union between Henry VIII and his so-called second wife. Recently suspected of complicity in plots to dethrone Mary, walking a tight-rope to save her life, living in a world where every innocent word had to be watched lest it smell of treason, yet firmly named by her father as the next successor to the throne – as if no question of her legitimacy had ever crossed his mind – Elizabeth was very clearly a person of the greatest interest to Mary’s husband.

  Later, when Mary at last consented to see Elizabeth and taxed her angrily with plotting against her throne, there is the well-known story that Philip hid behind the arras and listened – so far as he could follow it – to what was being said. Another account states that after the first formal meeting Mary sent Philip for a private conversation with Elizabeth to try to persuade her to confess her errors and throw herself on the mercy of the Queen.

  In any event it is unquestionable that Philip and Elizabeth got on well together. Philip, at least until his middle years, always had an eye for a pretty girl, and Elizabeth, if not exactly pretty, had grace and vitality and charm and the ineffable glamour of youth – a very different person from the intent, plain, spinster-like, delicate woman who was his wife. As for Elizabeth, all her life she was susceptible, and Philip was not quite twenty-eight. He was a prince, had a charming courtesy of manner, and he was a potential ally. And she was most certainly a maiden in distress. More than ever in her life before or after, at that moment, she sorely needed an ally. Michieli, reporting later to Venice, wrote: ‘At the time of the Queen’s pregnancy Lady Elizabeth contrived so to ingratiate herself with all the Spaniards and especially the King, that ever since no one has favoured her more than he does’, and that ‘the King had some particular design towards her.’

  No doubt their friendship was politic on either side, but it was a genuine attraction too. Mary became jealous – it was the last emotion that Elizabeth would have wished to arouse – and Philip saw little more of her. But she was preserved. Philip pressed Mary to promise this before he left England. He also pressed it on various members of the Council and received an assurance from them. After being kept in close confinement at a house a few miles from Hampton Court, Elizabeth was permitted to see Philip off at Greenwich on his way to Dover at the end of August, though she was not allowed to take part in the state procession.

  It is improbable that Philip saw Elizabeth on his second visit, for she was at Hatfield. There he sent the Duchess of Parma and the Duchess of Lorraine to press Elizabeth into a marriage with Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. This would have meant that, if Mary died, the new Prince Consort would have been a devoted friend of Spain and an enemy of France. But Elizabeth, with that genius for dissimulation and delay she was to show so often, succeeded in putting off a decision until the crisis was past.

  So Mary, after hoping a second time, though less publicly, that she was with child, slowly slid into her last illness and died, as sad a woman as she had lived, at the age of forty-two. When he knew of her grave illness King Philip pleaded pressure of business and sent Count de Feria to represent him. When Mary died de Feria made it known to the Privy Council that the King of Spain would support Elizabeth’s claim to the throne.

  Shortly after Elizabeth was crowned Count de Feria craved a private audience of the new Queen and there presented to her Philip’s formal proposal of marriage. The proposal was couched in warmly diplomatic terms; but, being a Spanish prince, Philip forbade his ambassador to remind Elizabeth of any favour that she might owe him. It appears, however, that de Feria disobeyed his royal master, for Elizabeth’s reply is documented in a manuscript still lying in the Spanish archives in Simancas. ‘It is the people who have placed me in the position I at present hold as the declared successor to the Crown.’

  Chapter Two

  Philip and Elizabeth

  When in 1514 Louis XII of France lost his Queen, Anne of Brittany, Henry VIII of England proposed a marriage between Louis and his youngest sister Mary. Louis, who was fifty-two, agreed to the match. Mary was eighteen and passionately in love with the rich and charm
ing Charles Brandon, later Duke of Suffolk. She stormed and raged and wept at her brother’s decision, but finally had to surrender to it. When at last she sailed to meet her French husband in October of that year a splendid retinue accompanied her; among them a pretty little maid of honour called, in the Cottonian MSS., Madamoyselle Boleyn.

  The following January the narrow-shouldered and sickly Louis died – they said that his English wife danced him to death – and the young Queen contrived after some vicissitudes to marry her charming duke and retire to Suffolk, where in the due course of time she became the grandmother of Lady Jane Grey. Madamoyselle Boleyn, however, stayed on at the French court until 1522 when she returned to England, with consequences that we all know.

  Madamoyselle Boleyn’s daughter ascended the English throne in 1558. She had the disadvantage, like Mary, of being a woman, with the added drawback of being, in the eyes of many of her subjects, illegitimate. All Henry’s thunderings and contrivings failed to convince the people that his true wife was not alive in the person of Catherine of Aragon when he married Anne Boleyn; and when Elizabeth was born the junketings and bonfires held throughout England were privately to celebrate that the child was but a girl and Henry had only got his just deserts.

  Yet twenty-five years later England – which throughout its history had refused, often to its cost, to consider talented and brave royal bastards as having any claim to the throne at all – accepted this girl without hesitation, indeed with great rejoicing.

  The reasons are numerous and quite clear. Henry VII’s will still counted for something in people’s minds. And there was no alternative male of the Tudor line. The only alternative, and legitimate, female was married to the Dauphin of France, which put her right out of the running. The majority of the country, although preferring the old forms of worship, did not like being under the tutelage of Rome. The new rich, although confirmed in some of their spoils by Mary, felt safer with a Protestant ruler. Everybody – except a crust of rigid fanatics – was disgusted and revolted by Mary’s reign of terror. And Protestantism under persecution had increased rapidly through the country. These reasons, and a last personal one: Elizabeth was already popular and a convincing figure among those who knew her, and the word had spread.