Though Elizabeth desired peace, she did not cease to deal blows at Philip. In the spring of 1587 (April-June), while she was most earnestly pushing her negotiations with Parma, she despatched Drake on a new expedition to the Spanish coast. He forced his way into the harbours of Cadiz and Corunna, destroyed many ships and immense stores, and came back loaded with plunder. The Armada had not been crippled, for most of the ships that were to compose it were lying in the Tagus. But the concentration had been delayed. Fresh stores had to be collected. Drake calculated, and as it proved rightly, that another season at least would be consumed in repairing the loss, and that England, for that summer and autumn, could rest secure of invasion.
The delay was most unwelcome to Philip. The expense of keeping such a fleet and army on foot through the winter would be enormous. Spain was maintaining not only the Armada but the army of Parma; for the resources of the Netherlands, which had been the true El Dorado of the Spanish monarchy, were completely dried up. So impatient was Philip – usually the slowest of men – that he proposed to despatch the Armada even in September, and actually wrote to Parma that he might expect it at any moment. But, as Drake had calculated, September was gone before everything was ready. The naval experts protested against the rashness of facing the autumnal gales, with no friendly harbour on either side of the Channel in which to take refuge. Philip then made the absurd suggestion that the army from the Netherlands should cross by itself in its flat-bottomed boats. But Parma told him that it was absolutely out of the question. Four English ships could sink the whole flotilla. In the meantime his soldiers, waiting on the Dunkirk Downs and exposed to the severities of the weather, were dying off like flies. Philip and Elizabeth resembled one another in this, that neither of them had any personal experience of war either by land or sea. For a Queen this was natural. For a King it was unnatural, and for an ambitious King unprecedented. They did not understand the proper adaptation of means to ends. Yet it was necessary to obtain their sanction before anything could be done. Hence there was much mismanagement on both sides. Still England was in no real danger during the summer and autumn of 1587, because Philip’s preparations were not completed; and before the end of the year the English fleet was lying in the Channel. But the Queen grudged the expense of keeping the crews up to their full complement. The supply of provisions and ammunition was also very inadequate. The expensiveness of war is generally a sufficient reason for not going to war; but to attempt to do war cheaply is always unwise. “Sparing and war,” as Effingham observed, “have no affinity together.”
Drake strongly urged that, instead of trying to guard the Channel, the English fleet should make for the coast of Spain, and boldly assail the Armada as soon as it put to sea. This was the advice of a man who had all the shining qualities of Nelson, and seems to have been in no respect his inferior. It was no counsel of desperation. He was confident of success. Lord Howard of Effingham, the Admiral, was of the same opinion. The negotiations were odious to him. For Burghley, who clings to them, he has no more reverence than Hamlet had for Polonius. “Since England was England,” he writes to Walsingham, “there was never such a stratagem and mask to deceive her as this treaty of peace. I pray God that we do not curse for this a long grey beard with a white head witless, that will make all the world think us heartless. You know whom I mean.”
With the hopes and fears of these sea-heroes, it is instructive to compare the forecast of the great soldier who was to conduct the invasion. Always obedient and devoted to his sovereign, Parma played his part in the deceptive negotiations with consummate skill. But his own opinion was that it would be wise to negotiate in good faith and accept the English terms. Though prepared to undertake the invasion, he took a very serious view of the risks to be encountered. He tells Philip that the English preparations are formidable both by land and sea. Even if the passage should be safely accomplished, disembarkation would be difficult. His army, reduced by the hardships of the winter from 30,000 men, which he had estimated as the proper number, to less than 17,000, was dangerously small for the work expected of it. He would have to fight battle after battle, and the further he advanced the weaker would his army become both from losses and from the necessity of protecting his communications.
Parma had carefully informed himself of the preparations in England. From the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, attention had been paid to the organisation, training, and equipment of the militia, and especially since the relations with Spain had become more hostile. On paper it seems to have amounted to 117,000 men. Mobilisation was a local business. Sir John Norris drew up the plan of defence. Beacon fires did the work of the telegraph. Every man knew whither he was to repair when their blaze should be seen. The districts to be abandoned, the positions to be defended, the bridges to be broken, were all marked out. Three armies, calculated to amount in the aggregate to 73,000 men, were ordered to assemble in July. Whether so many were actually mustered is doubtful. But Parma would certainly have found himself confronted by forces vastly superior in numbers to his own, and would have had, as he said, to fight battle after battle. The bow had not been entirely abandoned, but the greater part of the archers – two-thirds in some counties – had lately been armed with calivers. What was wanting in discipline would have been to some extent made up by the spontaneous cohesion of a force organised under its natural leaders, the nobles and gentry of each locality, not a few of whom had seen service abroad. But, after all, the greatest element of strength was the free spirit of the people. England was, and had long been, a nation of freemen. There were a few peers, and a great many knights and gentlemen. But there was no noble caste, as on the Continent, separated by an impassable barrier of birth and privilege from the mass of the people. All felt themselves fellow-countrymen bound together by common sentiments, common interests, and mutual respect.
This spirit of freedom – one might almost say of equality – made itself felt still more in the navy, and goes far to account for the cheerful energy and dash with which every service was performed. “The English officers lived on terms of sympathy with their men unknown to the Spaniards, who raised between the commander and the commanded absurd barriers of rank and blood which forbade to his pride any labour but that of fighting. Drake touched the true mainspring of English success when he once (in his voyage round the world) indignantly rebuked some coxcomb gentlemen-adventurers with, ‘I should like to see the gentleman that will refuse to set his hand to a rope. I must have the gentlemen to hale and draw with the mariners.’ ”[10 - Kingsley, Westward Ho.] Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher were all born of humble parents. They rose by their own valour and capacity. They had gentlemen of birth serving under them. To Howard and Cumberland and Seymour they were brothers-in-arms. The master of every little trading vessel was fired by their example, and hoped to climb as high.
It is the pleasure of some writers to speak of Elizabeth’s naval preparations as disgracefully insufficient, and to treat the triumphant result as a sort of miracle. To their apprehension, indeed, her whole reign is one long interference by Providence with the ordinary relations of cause and effect. The number of royal ships as compared with those of private owners in the fleet which met the great Armada – 34 to 161 – is represented as discreditably small. By Englishmen of that day, it was considered to be creditably large. Sir Edward Coke (who was thirty-eight at the time of the Armada), writing under Charles I., when the royal navy was much larger, says: “In the reign of Queen Elizabeth (I being then acquainted with this business) there were thirty-three [royal ships] besides pinnaces, which so guarded and regarded the navigation of the merchants, as they had safe vent for their commodities, and trade and traffic flourished.”[11 - Institutes, Fourth Part, Chap. 1.]
It seems to be overlooked that the royal navy, such as it was, was almost the creation of Elizabeth. Her father was the first English king who made any attempt to keep a standing navy of his own. He established the Admiralty and the first royal dockyard. Under Edward and Mary the navy, like everything else, went to ruin. Elizabeth’s ship-building, humble as it seems to us, excited the admiration of her subjects, and was regarded as one of the chief advances of her reign. The ships, when not in commission, were kept in the Medway. The Queen personally paid the greatest attention to them. They were always kept in excellent condition, and could be fitted out for sea at very short notice. Economy was enforced in this, as in other departments, but not at the expense of efficiency. The wages of officers and men were very much augmented; but in the short periods for which crews were enlisted, and in the victualling, there seems to have been unwise parsimony in 1588. The grumbling of alarmists about unpreparedness, apathy, stinginess, and red-tape was precisely what it is in our own day. We know that some allowance is to be made for it.
The movements of the Armada were perfectly well known in England, and all the dispositions to meet it at sea were completed in a leisurely manner. Conferences were still going on at Ostend between English and Spanish commissioners. On the part of Elizabeth there was sincerity, but not blind credulity nor any disposition to make unworthy concessions. Conferences quite as protracted have often been held between belligerents while hostilities were being actively carried on. The large majority of Englishmen were resolved to fight to the death against any invader. But, as against Spain, there was not that eager pugnacity which a war with France always called forth, except, perhaps, among the sea-rovers; and even they would have contented themselves, if it had been possible, with the unrecognised privateering which had so long given them the profits of war with the immunities of peace. The rest of the nation respected their Queen for her persevering endeavour to find a way of reconciliation with an ancient ally, and to limit, in the meantime, the area of hostilities. They were confident, and with good reason, that she would surrender no important interest, and that aggressive designs would be met, as they had always been met, more than half-way.
The story of the great victory is too well known to need repetition here. But some comments are necessary. It is usual, for one reason or other, to exaggerate the disparity of the opposing fleets, and to represent England as only saved from impending ruin by the extraordinary daring of her seamen, and a series of fortunate accidents. The final destruction of the Armada, after the pursuit was over, was certainly the work of wind and sea. But if we fairly weigh the available strength on each side, we shall see that the English commanders might from the first feel, as they did feel, a reasonable assurance of defeating the invaders.
Let us first compare the strength of the fleets:
The Armada carried besides 21,855 soldiers.[12 - These figures are taken from Barrow’s Life of Drake.] The first thing that strikes us is the immense preponderance in tonnage on the part of the Spaniards, and in sailors on the part of the English. This really goes far to explain the result. Nothing is more certain than that the Spanish ships, notwithstanding their superior size, were for fighting and sailing purposes very inferior to the English. It had always been believed that, to withstand the heavy seas of the Atlantic, a ship should be constructed like a lofty fortress. The English builders were introducing lower and longer hulls and a greater spread of canvas. Their crews, as has always been the case in our navy, were equally handy as sailors and gunners. The Spanish ships were under-manned. The soldiers were not accustomed to work the guns, and were of no use unless it came to boarding, which Howard ordered his captains to avoid. The English guns, if fewer than the Spanish, were heavier and worked by more practised men.[13 - We hear of thirty-three-pounders and even sixty-pounders in the Queen’s ships. Whereas the Spanish admiral, sending to Parma for balls, asks for nothing heavier than ten pounds.] Their balls not only cut up the rigging of the Spaniards but tore their hulls (which were supposed to be cannon-proof), while the English ships were hardly touched. The slaughter among the wretched soldiers crowded between decks was terrible. Blood was seen pouring out of the lee-scuppers. “The English ships,” says a Spanish officer, “were under such good management that they did with them what they pleased.” The work was done almost entirely by the Queen’s ships. “If you had seen,” says Sir William Winter, “the simple service done by the merchants and coast ships, you would have said we had been little helped by them, otherwise than that they did make a show.”
The principal and final battle was fought off Gravelines (July 29/Aug. 8). The Armada therefore did arrive at its destination, but only to show that the general plan of the invasion was an impracticable one. The superiority in tonnage and number of guns on the morning of that day, though not what it had been when the fighting began a week before, was still immense, if superiority in those particulars had been of any use. But with this battle the plan of Philip was finally shattered. So far from being in a condition to cover Parma’s passage, the Spanish admiral was glad to escape as best he could from the English pursuit.
During the eight days’ fight, be it observed, the Armada had experienced no unfavourable weather or other stroke of ill-fortune. The wind had been mostly in the west, and not tempestuous. After the last battle, when the crippled Spanish ships were drifting upon the Dutch shoals, it opportunely shifted, and enabled them to escape into the North Sea.
It would not be easy to find any great naval engagement in which the victors suffered so little. In the last battle, when they came to close quarters, they had about sixty killed. During the first seven days their loss seems to have been almost nil. One vessel only – not belonging to the Queen – became entangled among the enemy, and succumbed. Except the master of this vessel not one of the captains was killed from first to last. Many men of rank were serving in the fleet. It is not mentioned that one of them was so much as wounded.
Looking at all these facts, we can surely come to only one conclusion. Philip’s plan was hopeless from the first. Barring accidents, the English were bound to win. On no other occasion in our history was our country so well prepared to meet her enemies. Never was her safety from invasion so amply guaranteed. The defeat of the Great Armada was the deserved and crowning triumph of thirty years of good government at home and wise policy abroad; of careful provision for defence and sober abstinence from adventure and aggression.
Of the land preparations it is impossible to speak with equal confidence, as they were never put to the test. If the Spaniards had landed, Leicester’s militia would no doubt have experienced a bloody defeat. London might have been taken and plundered. But Parma himself never expected to become master of the country without the aid of a great Catholic rising. This, we may affirm with confidence, would not have taken place on even the smallest scale. Overwhelming forces would soon have gathered round the Spaniards. They would probably have retired to the coast, and there fortified some place from which it would have been difficult to dislodge them as long as they retained the command of the sea.
Such seems to have been the utmost success which, in the most favourable event, could have attended the invasion. A great disaster, no doubt, for England, and one for which Elizabeth would have been judged by history with more severity than justice; for Englishmen have always chosen to risk it, down to our own time.[14 - The Earl of Sussex, after inspecting the preparations for defence in Hampshire towards the end of 1587, writes to the Council that he had found nothing ready. The “better sort” said, “We are much charged many ways, and when the enemy comes we will provide for him; but he will not come yet.”] No government which insisted on making adequate provision for the military defence of the country would have been tolerated then, or, to all appearance, would be tolerated now. We have always trusted to our navy. It were to be wished that our naval superiority were as assured now as when we defeated the Armada.
The arrangements for feeding the soldiers and sailors were very defective. A praiseworthy system of control had been introduced to check waste and peculation in time of peace. Of course it did not easily adapt itself to the exigencies of war. Military operations are sure to suffer where a certain, or rather uncertain, amount of waste and peculation is not risked. We have not forgotten the “horrible and heart-rending” sufferings of our army in the Crimea, which, like those of Elizabeth’s fleet, had to be relieved by private effort. In the sixteenth century the lot of the soldier and sailor everywhere was want and disease, varied at intervals by plunder and excess. Philip’s soldiers and sailors were worse off than Elizabeth’s, though he grudged no money for purposes of war.
Those who profess to be scandalised by the appointment of Leicester to the command of the army should point out what fitter choice could have been made. He was the only great nobleman with any military experience; and to suppose that any one but a great nobleman could have been appointed to such a command is to show a profound ignorance of the ideas of the time. He had Sir John Norris, a really able soldier, as his marshal of the camp. After all, no one has alleged that he did not do his duty with energy and intelligence. The story that the Queen thought of making him her “Lieutenant in the government of England and Ireland,” but was dissuaded from it by Burghley and Hatton, rests on no authority but that of Camden, who is fond of repeating spiteful gossip about Leicester. No sensible person will believe that she meant to create a sort of Grand Vizier. She may have thought of making him what we should call “Commander-in-Chief.” There would be much to say for such a concentration of authority while the kingdom was threatened with invasion. The title of “Lieutenant” was a purely military one, and began to be applied under the Tudors to the commanders of the militia in each county. Leicester’s title for the time was “Lieutenant and Captain-General of the Queen’s armies and companies.” But we find him complaining to Walsingham that the patent of Hunsdon, the commander of the Midland army, gave him independent powers. “I shall have wrong if he absolutely command where my patent doth give me power. You may easily conceive what absurd dealings are likely to fall out if you allow two absolute commanders” (28 July). Camden’s story is probably a confused echo of this dispute.
Writers who are loth to admit that the trust, the gratitude, the enthusiastic loyalty which Elizabeth inspired were the first and most important cause of the great victory, have sought to belittle the grandest moment of her life by pointing out that the famous speech at Tilbury was made after the battle of Gravelines. But the dispersal of the Armada by the storm of August 5th was not yet known in England. Drake, writing on the 8th and 10th, thinks that it is gone to Denmark to refit, and begs the Queen not to diminish any of her forces. The occasion of the speech on the 10th seems to have been the arrival of a post on that day, while the Queen was at dinner in Leicester’s tent, with a false alarm that Parma had embarked all his forces, and might be expected in England immediately.[15 - Sir Edward Radcliffe to the Earl of Sussex. —Ellis, 2nd Series, vol. iii. p. 142.]
But the Lieutenant-General had reached the end of his career. Three weeks after the Tilbury review he died of “a continued fever,” at the age of fifty-six. He kept Elizabeth’s regard to the last, because she believed – and during the latter part of his life, not wrongly – in his fidelity and devotion. There is no sign that she at any time valued his judgment or suffered him to sway her policy, except so far as he was the mouthpiece of abler advisers; nor did she ever allow his enmities, violent as they were, to prejudice her against any of her other servants. His fortune was no doubt much above his deserts, and he has paid the usual penalty. There are few personages in history about whom so much malicious nonsense has been written.
We cannot help looking on England as placed in a quite new position by the defeat of the Armada – a position of security and independence. In truth, what was changed was not so much the relative strength of England and Spain as the opinion of it held by Englishmen and Spaniards, and indeed by all Europe. The loss to Philip in mere ships, men, and treasure was no doubt considerable. But his inability to conquer England was demonstrated rather than caused by the destruction of the Armada. Philip himself talked loftily about “placing another fleet upon the seas.” But his subjects began to see that defence, not conquest, was now their business – and had been for some time if they had only known it:
Cervi, luporum præda rapacium,
Sectamur ultro quos opimus
Fallere et effugere est triumphus.
Elizabeth’s attitude to Philip underwent a marked change. Till then she had been unwilling to abandon the hope of a peaceful settlement. She had dealt him not a few stinging blows, but always with a certain restraint and forbearance, because they were meant for the purpose of bringing him to reason. Thirty years of patience on his part had led her to believe that he would never carry retaliation beyond assassination plots. At last, in his slow way, he had gathered up all his strength and essayed to crush her. Thenceforward she was a convert to Drake’s doctrine that attack was the surest way of defence. She had still good reasons for devolving this work as much as possible on the private enterprise of her subjects. The burden fell on those who asked nothing better than to be allowed to bear it. Thus arose that system, or rather practice, of leaving national work to be executed by private enterprise, which has had so much to do with the building up of the British Empire. Private gain has been the mainspring of action. National defence and aggrandisement have been almost incidental results. With Elizabeth herself national and private aims could not be dissevered. The nation and she had but one purse. She was cheaply defending England, and she shared in the plunder.
The favourite cruising-ground of the English adventurers was off the Azores, where the Spanish treasure fleets always halted for fresh water and provisions, on their way to Europe. Some of these expeditions were on a large scale. But they were not so successful or profitable, in proportion to their size, as the smaller ventures of Drake and Hawkins earlier in the reign. The Spaniards were everywhere on the alert. The harbours of the New World, which formerly lay in careless security, were put into a state of defence. Treasure fleets made their voyages with more caution. “Not a grain of gold, silver, or pearl, but what must be got through the fire.” The day of great prizes was gone by.
Two of these expeditions are distinguished by their importance. The first was a joint-stock venture of Drake and Norris – the foremost sailor and the foremost soldier among Englishmen of that day – in the year after the great Armada (April 1589). They and some private backers found most of the capital. The Queen contributed six royal ships and £20,000. This fleet carried no less than 11,000 soldiers, for the aim was to wrest Portugal from the Spaniard and set up Don Antonio, a representative of the dethroned dynasty. Stopping on their way at Corunna, they took the lower town, destroyed large stores, and defeated in the field a much superior force marching to the relief of the place. Norris mined and breached the walls of the upper town; but the storming parties having been repulsed with great loss, the army re-embarked and pursued its voyage. Landing at Peniché, Norris marched fifty miles by Vimiero and Torres Vedras, names famous afterwards in the military annals of England, and on the seventh day arrived before Lisbon. But he had no battering train; for Drake, who had brought the fleet round to the mouth of the Tagus, judged it dangerous to enter the river. Nor did the Portuguese rise, as had been hoped. The army therefore, marching through the suburbs of Lisbon, rejoined the fleet at Cascaes, and proceeded to Vigo. That town was burnt, and the surrounding country plundered. This was the last exploit of the expedition. Great loss and dishonour had been inflicted on Spain; but no less than half of the soldiers and sailors had perished by disease; and the booty, though said to have been large, was a disappointment to the survivors.
The other great expedition was in 1596. The capture of Calais in April of that year by the Spaniards, had renewed the alarm of invasion, and it was determined to meet the danger at a distance from home. A great fleet, with 6000 soldiers on board, commanded by Essex and Howard of Effingham sailed straight to Cadiz, the principal port and arsenal of Spain. The harbour was forced by the fleet, the town and castle stormed by the army, several men-of-war taken or destroyed, a large merchant-fleet burnt, together with an immense quantity of stores and merchandise; the total value being estimated at twenty millions of ducats. This was by far the heaviest blow inflicted by England upon Spain during the reign, and was so regarded in Europe; for though the great Armada had been signally defeated by the English fleet, its subsequent destruction was due to the winds and waves. Essex was vehemently desirous to hold Cadiz; but Effingham and the Council of War appointed by the Queen would not hear of it. The expedition accordingly returned home, having effectually relieved England from the fear of invasion. The burning of Penzance by four Spanish galleys (1595) was not much to set against these great successes.
One reason for the comparative impunity with which the English assailed the unwieldy empire of Philip was the insane pursuit of the French crown, to which he devoted all his resources after the murder of Henry III. In 1598, with one foot in the grave, and no longer able to conceal from himself that, with the exception of the conquest of Portugal, all the ambitious schemes of his life had failed, he was fain to conclude the peace of Vervins with Henry IV. Henry was ready to insist that England and the United Provinces should be comprehended in the treaty. Philip offered terms which Elizabeth would have welcomed ten years earlier. He proposed that the whole of the Low Countries should be constituted a separate sovereignty under his son-in-law the Archduke Albert. The Dutch, who were prospering in war as well as in trade, scouted the offer. English feeling was divided. There was a war-party headed by Essex and Raleigh, personally bitter enemies, but both athirst for glory, conquest, and empire, believing in no right but that of the strongest, greedy for wealth, and disdaining the slower, more laborious, and more legitimate modes of acquiring it. They were tired of campaigning it in France and the Low Countries, where hard knocks and beggarly plunder were all that a soldier had to look to. They proposed to carry a great English army across the Atlantic, to occupy permanently the isthmus of Panama, and from that central position to wrestle with the Spaniard for the trade and plunder of the New World. The peace party held that these ambitious schemes would bring no profit except possibly to a few individuals; that the treasury would be exhausted and the country irritated by taxation and the pressing of soldiers; that to re-establish the old commercial intercourse with Spain would be more reputable and attended with more solid advantage to the nation at large; and finally, that the English arms would be much better employed in a thorough conquest of Ireland. These were the views of Burghley; and they were strongly supported by Buckhurst, the best of the younger statesmen who now surrounded Elizabeth.
Elizabeth always encouraged her ministers to speak their minds; but, as Buckhurst said on this occasion, “when they have done their extreme duty she wills what she wills.” She determined to maintain the treaty of 1585 with the Dutch; but she took the opportunity of getting it amended in such a way as to throw upon them a larger share of the expenses of the war, and to provide more definitely for the ultimate repayment of her advances.
We have seen that three years before the Armada Elizabeth had lost the French alliance, which had till then been the key-stone of her policy. Since then, though aware that Henry III. wished her well, and that he would thwart the Spanish faction as much as he dared, she had not been able to count on him. He might at any moment be pushed by Guise into an attack on England, either with or without the concurrence of Spain. The accession, therefore, of Henry IV. afforded her great relief. In him she had a sure ally. It is true that, like her other allies the Dutch, he was more in a condition to require help than to afford it. But the more work she provided for Philip in Holland or France, the safer England would be. The armies of the Holy League might be formidable to Henry; but as long as he could hold them at bay they were not dangerous to England. She had never quite got over her scruple about helping the Dutch against their lawful sovereign. But Henry IV. was the legitimate King of France, and she could heartily aid him to put down his rebels. From 2000 to 5000 English troops were therefore constantly serving in France down to the peace of Vervins.
Philip, in defiance of the Salic law, claimed the crown of France for his daughter in right of her mother, who was a sister of Henry III. To Brittany he alleged that she had a special claim, as being descended from Anne of Brittany, which the Bourbons were not. Brittany, therefore, he invaded at once by sea. Elizabeth, alarmed by the proximity of this Spanish force, desired that her troops in France should be employed in expelling it, and that they should be vigorously supported by Henry IV. Henry, on the other hand, was always drawing away the English to serve his more pressing needs in other parts of France. This brought upon him many harsh rebukes and threats from the English Queen. But she had, for the first time, met her match. He judged, and rightly, that she would not desert him. So, with oft-repeated apologies, light promises, and well-turned compliments, he just went on doing what suited him best, getting all the fighting he could out of the English, and airily eluding Elizabeth’s repeated demands for some coast town, which could be held, like Brill and Flushing, as a security for her heavy subsidies.
When Henry was reconciled to the Catholic Church, Elizabeth went through the form of expressing surprise and regret at a step which she must have long expected, and must have felt to be wise (1593). Her alliance with Henry was not shaken. It was drawn even closer by a new treaty, each sovereign engaging not to make peace without the consent of the other. This engagement did not prevent Henry from concluding the separate peace of Vervins five years later, when he judged that his interest required it (1598). Elizabeth’s dissatisfaction was, this time, genuine enough. But Henry was no longer her protégé, a homeless, landless, penniless king, depending on English subsidies, roaming over the realm he called his own with a few thousands, or sometimes hundreds, of undisciplined cavaliers, who gathered and dispersed at their own pleasure. He was master of a re-united France, and could no longer be either patronised or threatened. Elizabeth might expostulate, and declare that “if there was such a sin as that against the Holy Ghost it must needs be ingratitude:” gratitude was a sentiment to which she was as much a stranger as Henry. The only difference between them was the national one: the Englishwoman preached; the Frenchman mocked. What made her so sore was that he had, so to speak, stolen her policy from her. His predecessor had always suspected her – and with good reason – of intending “to draw her neck out of the collar” if once she could induce him to undertake a joint war. The joint war had at length been undertaken by Henry IV., and it was he who had managed to slip out of it first, while Elizabeth, who longed for peace, was obliged to stand by the Dutch.
The two sovereigns, however, knew their own interests too well to quarrel. Henry gave Elizabeth to understand that his designs against Spain had undergone no change; he was only halting for breath; he would help the Dutch underhand – just what she used to say to Henry III. She had now to deal with a French King as sagacious as herself, and a great deal more prompt and vigorous in action; not the man to be made a cat’s-paw by any one. She had to accept him as a partner, if not on her own terms, then on his. Both sovereigns were thoroughly veracious – in Carlyle’s sense of the word. That is to say, their policy was determined not by passion, or vanity, or sentiment of any kind, but by enlightened self-interest, and was therefore calculable by those who knew how to calculate.
CHAPTER XI
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS: 1588-1601
IT was a boast of Elizabeth that when once her servants were chosen she did not lightly displace them. Difference of opinion from their mistress, or from one another, did not involve resignation or dismissal, because, though they were free to speak their minds, all had to carry out with fidelity and even zeal, whatever policy the Queen prescribed. This condition they accepted; not only the astute and compliant Burghley, but the more eager and opinionated Walsingham; and therefore they had practically a life-tenure of office. Soon after the Armada the first generation of them began to disappear. Bacon, Sussex, and Bedford were already gone. Leicester died in 1588; his brother Warwick, and Mildmay in 1589; Walsingham and Randolph in 1591; Hatton in 1592; Grey de Wilton in 1593; Knollys and Hunsdon in 1596. Of the trusty servants with whom she began her reign, Burghley alone remained. The leading men of the new generation were Robert Cecil, the Treasurer’s second son, trained to business under his father’s eye, and of qualities similar, though inferior; Nottingham (formerly Howard of Effingham), a straightforward man of no great ability, but acceptable to the Queen for his father’s services and his own (and not the less so for his fine presence); the accomplished Buckhurst; the brilliant Raleigh; and, younger than the rest, Essex. The last was the son of a man much favoured by Elizabeth. Leicester was his step-father, Knollys his grandfather, Hunsdon his great-uncle, Walsingham his father-in-law, Burghley his guardian. Ardent, impulsive, presumptuous, a warm friend, a rancorous enemy, profuse in expense, lawless in his amours, jealous of his equals, brooking no superior, impatient of all rule or order that delayed him from leaping at once to the highest place, – he was possessed with a most exaggerated notion of his own capacity, which appears to have been only moderate. As the ward of Burghley he had been much in the company of his future enemy, Robert Cecil, whose sly prim ways were most unlike his own. The contrast did him no harm with the public, to whom the younger man was a Tom Jones and the elder a Blifil. Two vastly abler men, Francis Bacon and Raleigh, less advantageously placed, but unhampered with any scruples, were busily trying to profit by the all-pervading animosity of Cecil and Essex.
Belonging, as Essex did by his connections, to the inner circle who stood closest to Elizabeth, it was natural that she should take an interest in him, and give him opportunities for turning his showy qualities to account. In 1586 he was sent to the Low Countries as general of cavalry under his step-father, Leicester. He distinguished himself by his fiery valour in the expeditions to Spain, and as commander of the English army in France, though he does not seem to have had any real military talent. But Elizabeth’s regard for him was soon shaken by his presumptuous and unruly behaviour. When he fought a duel with Sir Charles Blount because she had conferred some favour on the latter, she swore “by God’s death it were fitting some one should take him down and teach him better manners, or there were no rule with him.” He displeased her by his quarrels with Cecil and Effingham, and his discontented grumbling. She was highly dissatisfied with his management of the Azores expedition in 1597. In July 1598, at a meeting of the Council, she was provoked by his insolence to strike him; and though after three months he obtained his pardon, he never regained her favour.
It was at this time that Burghley died (August 4), in his seventy-eighth year. Elizabeth, though she could call him “a froward old fool” about a trifling matter (March 1596), could not but feel that much was changed when she lost the able and faithful servant who had worked with her for forty years. “She seemeth to take it very grievously, shedding of tears and separating herself from all company.” Buckhurst was the new Treasurer.
Essex had for some time cast his eyes on Ireland as a field where glory and power might be won. There can be little doubt that he was already speculating on the advantage that the possession of an army might give him in any difficulty with his rivals or with the Queen herself. Cecil perfidiously advocated his appointment to a post which had been the grave of so many reputations. The Queen at length consented, though reluctantly. Essex was a popular favourite. He had managed – it is not very clear how – to win the confidence of both Puritans and Papists. The general belief was that, for the first time since she had mounted the throne, Elizabeth was afraid of one of her subjects.
During the whole of the reign Ireland had been a cause of trouble and anxiety. Elizabeth’s treatment of that unhappy country was not more creditable or successful than that of other English statesmen before and after her. There was the same absence of any systematic policy steadily carried out, the same wearisome and disreputable alternation between bursts of savage repression and intervals of pusillanimity, concession, and neglect. In the competition of the various departments of the public service for attention and expenditure, Ireland generally came last. All other needs had to be served first whether at home or abroad.
In the early years of the reign the chief trouble lay in Ulster, then the most purely Celtic part of Ireland, and practically untouched by English conquest. Twice, in her weariness of the struggle with Shan O’Neill, Elizabeth conceded to him something like a sub-kingship of Ulster in return for his nominal submission. In the end he was beaten, and his head was fixed on the walls of Dublin Castle (1566). But nothing further was done to anglicise Ulster. During the attempt of the Devonshire adventurers to colonise South Munster (1569-71), and the consequent rebellion, the northern province remained an unconcerned spectator. Nor did it join in the great Desmond rising (1579-83), which, with the insurrection of the Catholic lords of the Pale and the landing of the Pope’s Italians at Smerwick, was the Irish branch of the threefold attack on Elizabeth directed by Gregory XIII. The attempt of the elder Essex to colonise Antrim (1573-75) was a disastrous failure, and Ulster still remained practically independent of the Dublin Government.
The most successful Deputy of the reign was Perrot (1584-87), a valiant soldier and strict ruler, who, after long experience in the Irish wars, had come to the conclusion that what Ireland most wanted was justice. The native chiefs, released from the constant dread of spoliation, and finding that English encroachment was repressed as inflexibly as Irish disorder, became quiet and friendly. But this system did not suit the dominant race. The Deputy was accused to the Queen of seeking to betray the country to the Irish and the Spaniard. Recalled, and put upon his trial for treason, he was found guilty on suborned evidence, and sentenced to death. It is usually said that his real offence was some disrespectful language about the Queen, which he confessed. But it seems that she forbore to take his life precisely because she would not have it thought that she was influenced by personal resentment.
His successor, Fitzwilliam, was a Deputy of the old sort – greedy, violent, careless of consequences, and always acting on the principle that, as against an Englishman, a Celt had no rights. The execution of MacMahon in Monaghan, and the confiscation of his lands on a trivial pretext, alarmed the North. Ulster had not been bled white like the rest of Ireland. The O’Neills had a nephew of their old hero Shan for their chief, who had been brought up at the English Court and made Earl of Tyrone by Elizabeth. An educated and remarkably able man, he had none of his uncle’s illusions. He clung to his ancestral rights and dignity, but he hoped to preserve them by zealously discharging his obligations as a vassal of the Queen. He served in the war against Desmond, and exerted himself to maintain order in Ulster. But he had no mind to sink into the position of a mere dignified land-owner like the English nobles; nor indeed, under such a Deputy as Fitzwilliam, was he likely to preserve even his lands if he lost his power. Rather than that, he determined to enter into what he knew was a most unequal struggle, on the off-chance of pulling through by help from Spain. It is clear that he was driven into rebellion against his inclination. But when he had once drawn the sword he maintained the struggle against one Deputy after another with wonderful tenacity and resource. For the first time in Irish history, the rebel forces were disciplined and armed like those of the crown, and stood up to them in equal numbers on equal terms. At length, in August 1598, Tyrone inflicted upon Sir Henry Bagnall near Armagh the severest defeat that the English had ever suffered in Ireland; slaying 1500 of his men, and capturing all his artillery and baggage. Insurrections at once broke out all over Ireland.
This was the situation with which Essex undertook to deal. He had loudly blamed other Deputies for not vigorously attacking Tyrone in his own country. Vigour was the one military quality which he himself possessed. He went with the title of Lieutenant and Governor-General, and with extraordinary powers, at the head of 21,000 men – such an army as had never been sent to Ireland (April 1599). The Queen, who trembled at the expense, and did not wish to see any of her nobles, least of all Essex, permanently established in a great military command, enjoined him to push at once into Ulster, as he had himself proposed, and finish the war. Instead of doing this, he went south into districts that had been depopulated and desolated by the savage warfare of the last thirty years. Even here he met with discreditable reverses. When he got back to Dublin (July) his army was reduced by disease and desertion to less than 5000 men. Disregarding the Queen’s express prohibition, he made his friend Southampton General of horse. When she censured his bad management, he replied with impertinent complaints about the favour she was showing to Cecil, Raleigh, and Cobham, and began to consult with his friends about carrying selected troops over to England to remove them. Rumours of his intention to return reached the Queen. “We do charge you,” she wrote, “as you tender our pleasure, that you adventure not to come out of that kingdom.” He declared that he could not invade Ulster without reinforcements. They were sent, and at length he marched into Louth (September). There he was met by Tyrone, who, in an interview, completely twisted him round his finger, and obtained a cessation of arms and the promise of concessions amounting to what would now be called Home Rule. A few days later, on receipt of an angry letter from the Queen forbidding him to grant any terms without her permission, he deserted his post and hurried to England. The first notice Elizabeth received of this astounding piece of insubordination was his still more astounding incursion into her bedroom, all muddy from his ride, before she was completely dressed (September 28, 1599).
Elizabeth seems to have been so much taken aback by the Earl’s unparalleled presumption, that she did not blaze out as might have been expected. She gave him audience an hour or two later, and heard what he had to say. Probably he adopted an injured tone as usual, and inveighed against “that knave Raleigh” and “that sycophant Cobham.” But his insubordination had been gross, and no talking could make it anything else. It was more dangerous than Leicester’s disobedience in 1586, because it came from a vastly more dangerous person. The same afternoon the Queen referred the matter to the Council. Essex was put under arrest, and never saw her again. The more she reflected, the more indignant and alarmed she became. “By God’s son,” she said to Harington, “I am no Queen; this man is above me.” After a delay of nine months, occasioned by his illness, the fallen favourite was brought before a special Commission on the charge of contempt and disobedience, and sentenced to be suspended from his offices and confined to his house during the Queen’s pleasure (June 1600). In a few weeks he was released from arrest, but he could not obtain permission to appear at court, though he implored it in most abject letters.
There are persons who consider themselves to be intolerably wronged and persecuted if they cannot have precedence and power over their fellow-citizens. Essex was such a person. Instead of being thankful that he had escaped the punishment which under most sovereigns he would have suffered, he entered into criminal plots for coercing, if not overthrowing, the Queen. He urged the Scotch King to enforce the recognition of his title by arms. He tried to persuade Mountjoy, his successor in Ireland, to carry his army to Scotland to co-operate with James. These intrigues were not known to the Government. But it did not escape observation that he was collecting men of the sword in the neighbourhood of his house; that he was holding consultations with suspected nobles and gentlemen (some of whom were afterwards engaged in the Gunpowder Plot); that the Puritan clergy were preaching and praying for his cause; and that there was a certain ferment in the city. Essex was therefore summoned to attend before the Council. Instead of obeying, he flew to arms, with Lords Southampton, Rutland, Sandys, Cromwell, and Monteagle, and about 300 gentlemen. But the citizens of London did not respond to his appeal, and the insurrection was easily suppressed, less than a dozen persons being slain on both sides (February 8, 1601). A more senseless and profligate attempt to overthrow a good government it would be difficult to find in history. It was not dignified by any semblance of principle, and it would sufficiently stamp the character of its author, even if it stood alone as an evidence of his vanity, egotism, and want of common sense.
The trial and execution of the principal malefactor followed as a matter of course and without delay (February 25). It would have been scandalous to spare him. Elizabeth had once been fond of him, and had no reason to be ashamed of it. To talk of her “passion” and her “amorous inclination,” as Hume and others have done, is revolting and malignant nonsense. It is creditable to old age when it can take pleasure in the unfolding of bright and promising youth. But royal favour was not good for such a man as Essex. It developed the worst features in his showy but faulty character. As he steadily deteriorated, her regard cooled; but so much of it remained that she tried to amend him by chastisement, “ad correctionem” as she said, “non ad ruinam.” She had long before warned him that, though she had put up with much disrespect to her person, he must not touch her sceptre, or he would be dealt with according to the law of England. She was as good as her word, and, though the memory of it was painful to her, there is not the smallest evidence that she ever repented of having allowed the law to take its course.[16 - The story of the ring, said to have been intercepted by Lady Nottingham, has been shown to be unworthy of belief. See Ranke, History of England, vol. i. p. 352; transl.] Only three of the accomplices of Essex were punished capitally. The five peers, none of them powerful or formidable, experienced Elizabeth’s accustomed clemency.
It has been suggested by an admirer of Essex that he failed in Ireland because his “sensitively attuned nature” shrank from the systematic desolation and starvation afterwards employed by his successor. No evidence is offered for this suggestion. In a letter to the Queen (June 25, 1599) he advocates “burning and spoiling the country in all places,” which method “shall starve the rebels in one year.” This course Mountjoy carried out. With means far inferior to those of Essex, and notwithstanding the landing of 3000 Spaniards at Kinsale (September 1601), he was the first Englishman who completely subdued Ireland. Tyrone surrendered a few days before the Queen’s death.