England under the Tudors Part 31

ELIZABETH (x), 1588-98-BRITANNIA VICTRIX

[Sidenote: After the Armada]

The sceptre had pa.s.sed. The world awoke suddenly to the truth of which the great debacle was only the unexpected testimony. The Spanish People were slow to realise the overwhelming fact--overwhelming, because for the best part of a century at least they had accounted themselves the nation favoured by Heaven, chosen for the crushing of the heathen and the heretic, a.s.sured of victory. So, for a few years, had the English thought of themselves; but with a difference; for their spirit was that expressed in the later Puritan adage, "Trust in G.o.d and keep your powder dry". The Spaniard had neglected to keep his powder dry. The nation which observes both injunctions is tolerably certain to defeat that which observes only one.

The sceptre had pa.s.sed; but Spain would not acquiesce without a struggle, and, in his slow fashion, Philip set himself to adapt to his own navy the lesson taught by the fate of the Armada. England had won the lead, but she was not to hold it unchallenged, though she did maintain it convincingly. For her alertness did not leave her, and to her had been transferred not the power only but also the enormous prestige which Spain had hitherto enjoyed, and which counts for much in every struggle where it is recognised on both sides.

But the re-organisation of the Spanish Navy was a matter of time. For the moment, the result of the collision was absolutely to reverse the hypothetical though not the actual position of the two countries. Spain was reduced completely to the defensive. England no longer thought of guarding herself, but only of smiting her foe--a theory of the mutual relations on which, unofficially, the seamen had been acting for the last decade.

If during the closing ten years of his life Philip's strongest desire was to recover the lost supremacy, his energies were still divided by his extreme anxiety to prevent the Bourbon succession in France; while the conviction was proving day by day more irresistible that the Protestant Netherlands would be lost for ever to Spain. Yet the eternal series of abortive plots for restoring the old religion and placing either Philip or a tool of Philip on the English throne went on; not in fact ending till the death of Elizabeth joined England and Scotland under a single crown.

[Sidenote: A new phase]

Politically the dramatic climax of Elizabeth's reign is the dispersion of the Armada. The dragon has been fought and vanquished, and at this point, the curtain ought to ring down and leave the audience to imagine the Red-cross knight and his ladye-love living happy for ever afterwards. But in history no climax is more than an incident; at the most it is but the decisive entry on a new phase. The chain of causation, of the interdependence of events, is continuous.

The moment of the Armada then may be regarded as the conclusion of a phase. The work of the great statesmen, whose names are most intimately a.s.sociated with that of Elizabeth, was accomplished. They had kept England united and at peace within her own borders through a long period of recurring crises. They had so fostered the national spirit and the national resources that she had finally proved herself a match for the mightiest Power in Europe. They had achieved for her the premier position upon the Ocean. They had defeated every attempt to entice or to force her back to the Roman obedience. They had secured a larger lat.i.tude of religious tolerance than prevailed in any other State of Europe. These things they had definitely won, though there was still need of keen brains, stout hearts, strong hands, and st.u.r.dy consciences to hold them. They had been responsible for the planting and watering. It was left mainly to others in the last years of Elizabeth to a.s.sure the beginnings of the increase.

[Sidenote: 1588 The Death of Leicester]

Of the counsellors who had played a prominent part in Elizabeth's reign, Nicholas Bacon had died in 1579. The rest still lived, but none of them for long. The next to disappear was Leicester, who survived the dispersion of the Armada by only a few weeks. So long as he had been an aspirant to the hand of his royal mistress, he existed chiefly to trouble the minds of statesmen--a piece of grit in the machinery; an apparently quite worthless person After he had settled down into the less ambiguous position of a mere personal favourite, with no chance of satisfying swelling ambitions, he became a definite partisan of the Walsingham school whose ideal lay in the advancement of protestantism and antagonism to Spain. When not warped by the vain imaginings of his earlier years, he would seem to have been a person of respectable abilities, little decision of character, decently loyal; an ornamental figurehead whose position enabled him to serve his friends; shallow; neither dangerous, nor conspicuously incapable; not entirely deserving of the extreme contempt which is usually poured upon him; but at best a poor creature whose importance was wholly advent.i.tious.

[Sidenote: France, 1588-89]

Of infinitely more consequence in its influence on the political situation was the death on December 23rd, by the hands of a.s.sa.s.sins of the Duke of Guise. The murder, planned by Henry III., deprived the League of its head, and decisively forced the French King into the arms of his Protestant heir. Nine months later (August 1589), Henry III. was a.s.sa.s.sinated in turn, and Henry of Navarre laid claim to the crown, his uncle Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, being proclaimed King by the Catholics. Hence in Philip's eyes a closer union than ever between himself and the League--now headed by Mayenne, brother of the murdered Guise--became imperative. A Huguenot king in France, a heretic queen in England, and heretic rebels in the Netherlands, threatened a combination which he was bound to try and paralyse. The attempt went far to thwart itself; for numbers of the French Catholics were ready to go a long way towards a compromise with Henry of Navarre when they felt the alternative to be a Spanish domination; while that astute prince hailed the opportunity which enabled him to claim the role of patriot, and to point to the Leaguers as the clients of the foreigner. On the other hand, Philip's energies during the remainder of his life were largely absorbed in futile efforts to redress on French soil the loss of Spanish supremacy on the seas.

[Sidenote: 1588 England aggressive]

Under the new conditions, the antagonism between the two schools of English statesmanship takes a slightly altered form. Walsingham among the ministers, Drake among the seamen, had always believed fervently in the theory of breaking the power of Spain to pieces. Elizabeth and (in the main) Burghley had clung to the theory of gradually making England so secure and so formidable that Spain and England alike should ultimately recognise a condition of amicable equality as the best for both. Spain would then become amenable to reason in matters ecclesiastical and commercial, the old intercourse would be restored in its fulness, and general prosperity would result. Against their wishes, matters had been by the inevitable trend of events forced to the arbitrament of battle. But even now, terrible as the disaster of the Armada had been, Spain was by no means shattered; in fact, though the English nation was more than jubilant, the seamen themselves were evidently disappointed that they had not in the encounter inflicted more complete ruin upon their rivals. They had found the Spaniards less easy to dispose of than they had antic.i.p.ated.

[Sidenote: Alternative Naval policies]

The victory however had been won by the great captains of the aggressive party; it was followed almost immediately by the revolt of Henry III. from the Guise domination; all the conditions were in favour of an offensive campaign. For the time being, a peace-party had ceased to exist. The only question now was, how to strike. And at this stage we see the two rival theories of naval policy in war time beginning to be formulated, since naval policy on a large scale was only brought into being by the development of an oceanic field for it to work in. Of the one policy which has constantly prevailed with our great English admirals, that of making the destruction of the enemy's fighting fleet the primary object, with mere commerce-destroying secondary, Drake was in practice the father; of the other, that of concentrating on his trade-routes and menacing his commerce, not unusually favoured by France in her wars with England, John Hawkins was the advocate.

For the moment Drake, being undoubtedly the hero of the hour, appeared to triumph. His was the scheme of operations approved. But before it could be put in practice, its essential features were distorted; through no fault of his the plan failed of its full effect; disfavour followed; and war on Spanish commerce again became the prevalent policy.

Its attractions for adventurers are obvious; and its inferiority as a method of transforming superiority into supremacy was not yet recognised.

[Sidenote: Don Antonio]

Drake's actual design, however, was not on this occasion a precise exemplification of the theory just a.s.sociated with his name, although its failure brought the supporters of the opposing school to the front.

The Armada disaster had already given the English for the time complete command of the sea, and his intention was to strike a crippling blow at the Spanish power by establishing the Pretender Don Antonio on the throne of Portugal and in control of the Azores. Ever since Philip had grasped the Portuguese crown in 1580, Elizabeth had played diplomatically with the notion of helping Don Antonio to challenge his t.i.tle by force of arms, and Walsingham would have found a grim joy in turning the play into earnest. But Antonio could count upon no support worth mentioning from other quarters; Elizabeth's help had been in quality the same as and in quant.i.ty less than she had doled out to Huguenots and Netherlanders. The one real attempt in his favour, wherein there had hardly been a pretence of English partic.i.p.ation, had been crushed by Santa Cruz at the naval battle of Terceira in the Azores in 1583. But what had been impracticable before the Armada was so no longer. With the command of the sea, Portugal might now be won; the loss in itself would be a grievous weakening to Spain; and in alliance with England. Portugal would be to her neighbour very much what Scotland would have been to England had Mary been restored--and accepted--by Spanish aid.

[Sidenote: Plan of the Lisbon Expedition, 1588-89] Such was Drake's idea, which was to be carried out after the method beloved by the Queen.

It was not to be exactly a Government affair, but the enterprise of a Company, in which her Majesty was to hold shares, providing some money and half a dozen ships from her fleet, and various guarantees. It was to be a joint naval and military venture, with Drake and Norreys respectively in command of the two arms, with a free hand in the conduct of operations. All through the winter of 1588 Drake and Norreys were hard at work preparing this counter-Armada; but as spring came on, the Queen's pa.s.sion for tying her servants' hands developed on the familiar lines. It was not till April that Drake succeeded in definitely starting, and he went with a very fine armament; but with only a month's commissariat, without the siege train promised, and fettered by instructions wholly inconsistent with his own plan of campaign.

The Spaniards acquired what purported to be a statement of the terms agreed on between Elizabeth and Don Antonio, under which Portugal, with the Azores, was to be reduced to a province of England. It does not appear however that this doc.u.ment was based upon facts; and the instructions [Footnote: _Cf._ Corbett, ii, ] issued to the expedition are quite inconsistent with the whole idea. The attempt to establish Antonio in Portugal was only to be made if the conditions were favourable; if it succeeded, the English were then to retire; if it were dropped, they were to make for the Azores. But in any case they were to begin by attacking the shipping in Biscayan and other Northern harbours of Spain--an entirely superfluous proceeding, as Spain for the time had no naval force which could give trouble.

[Sidenote: 1589 May: Corunna and Peniche]

Consequently the expedition--which was accompanied by Elizabeth's latest favourite, the young Earl of Ess.e.x, a runaway and from his Mistress--instead of making straight for Lisbon attacked Corunna. The troops were landed, the town stormed and sacked, and the shipping destroyed, the Spaniards being driven into the citadel. Immediate departure being prevented by the wind, after nearly a week's operations a fierce but unsuccessful attempt was made to storm the citadel also.

This however was followed by a brilliant action, at the Bridge of El Burgo, in which Norreys decisively defeated a relieving force of greatly superior numbers, prodigies of valour being performed during the battle. But the capture of the citadel was unimportant; and the wind improving, the expedition proceeded--with many prizes and much spoil--to operate against Lisbon. On the way, for some not very intelligible reason, Peniche, some fifty miles from Lisbon, was stormed by the soldiers--as it would seem, against Drake's will. The whole army was here disembarked, to operate against Lisbon by land, while the fleet proceeded to the mouth of the Tagus.

[Sidenote: Failure at Lisbon]

Drake at once captured Cascaes, which commanded the entry. But he could do nothing more till the army was ready to co-operate. Norreys arrived presently: but he had no siege train, and resolved that unless the Portuguese rose, as Don Antonio had promised, the attempt on Lisbon must be abandoned. It is practically certain that had the attack been made, the resolute commandant and his slender garrison would have been easily overpowered, the mob favouring the a.s.sailants. But Norreys was unaware of the facts; the partisans of Don Antonio did not rise; and the English fell back to Cascaes to reimbark; having destroyed a considerable quant.i.ty of stores, and defied Spain on her own soil with a handful of men, but otherwise having failed to accomplish the purpose of the expedition. Drake however also captured a great convoy of store- ships. Contrary winds prevented the fleet from proceeding to the Azores, and nothing more was accomplished but the destruction of Vigo, while in the subsequent storms a number of ships were damaged or lost. The business was a failure, though it had given convincing proof that even in Spanish territory--much more on the seas--Spain was incapable of taking the offensive. The expedition found its way home about the end of June; a few weeks before the a.s.sa.s.sination of the French King, which transformed the Prince of Navarre into Henry IV., a legitimate monarch fighting for his throne against a threatened alien domination.

The ships had suffered; the booty was small; the crews and the troops had been wasted by sickness and sharp fighting. Consequently Drake and Drake's policy were generally discredited. It had in fact been quite clearly demonstrated that Spain was on her knees, and that nothing but inadequate armament and deficient supplies had prevented the admiral from reducing her to a condition still more desperate. But superficially, he had failed.

[Sidenote: Policies and Persons]

Now the policy of the forward school, of which Drake was the leading example and Walter Raleigh was to be the exponent both with sword and pen, was twofold; to prostrate Spain and her naval power, and to plant English colonies in direct compet.i.tion with and open antagonism to the colonies of Spain. But the men who had grasped the whole conception were few. Walsingham, the one among the elder statesmen who was in touch with these ideas, had but a few months to live. The ordinary idea of the ordinary Anti-Spaniard was to damage Spain as much as possible; but the means to that end which he recognised lay mainly, if not entirely, in the raiding of Spanish commerce and the interception of treasure-fleets. This was avowedly the view of John Hawkins, which naturally appealed to the Adventurers of the day.

On the other side was the school of Burghley himself, and of Elizabeth; who had never wished, and did not now wish, to see Spain prostrate, and had never been without hopes of converting the rivalry into an alliance, though not averse to the bringing of severe pressure to bear for the recovery of commercial privileges and the suppression of political antagonism. Burghley had not by any means always approved of Elizabeth's methods; when it was only by those tortuous wiles that peace could be preserved he had joined with Walsingham and Leicester in counselling war; but if war could be with honour avoided, it had been his constant desire to avoid it; while he had consistently and honourably opposed Drake, condemned his buccaneering methods, and refused to profit by his daring ventures. Burghley's second son Robert, destined to be the old statesman's successor, already establishing his position, was the agent of his father's policy. The Queen's latest favourite, the young Earl of Ess.e.x--a son-in-law of Walsingham, and stepson of Leicester--was no statesman in fact, though he fancied himself one. His ambition was unlimited; and while, as an anti-Spaniard, he was a leader of the party opposed to the Cecils, he was not less hotly jealous of his rival within that party, Walter Raleigh (at an earlier period, and also afterwards, a.s.sociated with the Cecils), whose large conceptions he could hardly appreciate. Finally the Queen herself, with the same political ideals as her old minister, had still never been able to resist the temptation of the profits accruing from the unauthorised raiding policy--a policy which dealt no blows from which it was impossible for Spain to recover, while it kept her in too bruised a condition to have any prospect of fighting again at an advantage.

It was Elizabeth who had ensured the failure of Drake's expedition, for which Drake himself was made responsible. Drake's policy was in consequence driven off the field, which was held by that of Ess.e.x and Hawkins--to which, as a policy, the Cecils were not vehemently opposed, while it satisfied the aroused bellicosity of the nation. Private enterprise was left to struggle with schemes of colonisation; and Spain held her trans-oceanic possessions.

[Sidenote: France, 1589-93]

But Spain's activity was crippled, her recuperation checked; and thus, indirectly, as well as with some direct a.s.sistance from England, Henry IV was enabled more than to hold his own in France, until in 1593, by accepting the Ma.s.s, he definitely won over to his side all but the extreme supporters of the League: from which time his ultimate triumph and that of at least limited toleration in France was secured: since Alexander of Parma, the one man whose military genius was more than a match for that of Henry, died in 1592.

[Sidenote: 1590 Death of Walsingham]

Here however we are antic.i.p.ating. From the summer of 1589, Drake drops into the background. How matters might have gone if Walsingham or even Leicester had lived and retained their influence, it is not easy to say; both were staunch supporters of the admiral. But Leicester was already dead; and though the Queen had full confidence in the Secretary, she never liked him. Already he was practically in retirement; and in the following April he too died. With him, a very genuine puritanism and a determined antagonism to Spain had always been first principles.

No man had expressed himself more openly in Council or more bitterly in private correspondence in condemnation of the tricks and the falsehoods which const.i.tuted--with a success which cannot be denied--the stock in trade of the Queen's diplomacy. He repeatedly risked favour and position by his outspokenness. His own policy and conduct had at all times been conducted in accordance with a standard of morals and of honour which was none the less strict though it does not always command sympathy. To Mary Stewart he was a relentless enemy. He had no compunctions in his system of espionage, and in his employment of traitors and of the _agent provocateur._ He, more than anyone else, was probably responsible for the extensive and extended application of torture as a means to extract information. These, in his eyes, were methods without which it was impossible to fight the enemy who must be fought at any cost. He was ready, even eager, to join battle openly with Spain in the cause of the Religion, which to him was a reality, while to Elizabeth, if not also to Burghley, it was only a political factor which it annoyed her to be obliged to recognise. And of his high personal integrity, the final proof is that when he died, he left means insufficient to provide a decent funeral. If his mantle may be said to have fallen on anyone, it was on Walter Raleigh; and Raleigh was not of the Council, while his favour with the Queen was at best an extremely fluctuating quant.i.ty.

[Sidenote: Operations in 1590]

It was not Drake then, but Hawkins and Frobisher who in 1590 commanded the armaments sent out to Spanish waters; with the primary intention of intercepting the annual convoy of treasure-ships. Disappointment was again in store, for the Spaniards had news of the expedition, the treasure-fleet did not sail, and the admirals returned home without spoils. Not, however, without hurting the enemy; for Spanish finance was dependent on the arrival of the bullion, Philip was crippled for want of it, and for the same reason Parma was almost paralysed. The Huguenot cause was advanced in France by Henry's victory at Ivry. In spite of his difficulties, however, Parma prevented the King from capturing Paris and so completing his triumph; but, with his resources so exhausted, even his genius was unable to accomplish more.

In the same year the splendid qualities developed by English seamen were ill.u.s.trated by a valiant fight, in which twelve Spanish ships of war attacked a flotilla of ten English merchantmen, who fought so stubbornly that after six hours of conflict the Spaniards drew off, fairly defeated; the English having lost neither a ship nor a man.

[Sidenote: 1591 The "Revenge"]

In the meantime, however, Philip was making strenuous efforts to adapt his navy to the conditions of maritime warfare introduced by the English. In Havana, ships were being built of a greatly improved construction for fighting and manoeuvring, and the Spanish yards were busy. So when in 1591 a fleet sailed from England under Lord Thomas Howard [Footnote: Son of the Duke of Norfolk (executed in 1572) by his second wife; and half-brother of the Earl of Arundel, who died in the Tower in 1589.] and Richard Grenville, with much the same intent as that of Hawkins and Frobisher in 1590, they found themselves no longer in possession of the same complete command of the seas. Their squadron was a comparatively small one, including only six regular fighting ships; and as they lay in the Azores, in waiting for the treasure-fleet, tidings reached them that an armada of fifty-three vessels was hard at hand on its way to convoy that fleet. Howard put to sea at once, avoiding an action; but Grenville on the _Revenge_ [Footnote: The _Revenge_ was Drake's ship in the Armada conflict.] of set purpose allowed himself to be entangled in the Spanish fleet; and thereupon ensued that great fight, that glorious folly, which has been told in immortal prose and sung in immortal verse; in which for fifteen hours Drake's favourite vessel did battle, almost unaided, with fifty-three Spaniards. Not more splendid, not less irrational, were the great deeds of the three hundred at Thermopylae, of the six hundred at Balaclava.

False moves in the game of war, all of them, from the scientific point of view; objectless, unreasoning, without possibility of material gain accruing; but for all that, deeds which for their sheer daring will ring for ever in the ears of men; of which the bare memory is an inspiration; whereof the fame in their own day roused the emulous courage of every Spartan and of every Englishman, making them ready to face any odds, and chilling the blood of their foes. Vain deeds, when we count the cost and the tangible gain--but very far from vain when we take into account the intangible moral effect.

Yet it was but the supreme example of that heroic spirit, shown times and again, at Zutphen, at the Bridge of El Burgo, in countless fights with Spaniards and with the elements, which in Elizabeth's day raised England to be the first among the nations. A deed therefore to be dwelt upon, if we would understand aright the history of those times, in which the historian must perforce discourse most frequently and at greatest length on doings of a less inspiring order. The craft of the statesman, the skill of the general, are the prominent factors in the making of history; but the character, the types, of the men of whom nations are const.i.tuted, are no less fundamental and vital.

[Sidenote: France, 1590-93]

In the meantime, the death in France of Henry IV.'s nominal rival, his uncle the t.i.tular Charles X., had increased the difficulties of the League, which was reduced to putting forward as its candidate the Infanta Isabella, the daughter of Philip and his third wife Elizabeth of Valois--whom also Philip destined as his nominee for the English throne when he should overthrow the heretic Queen. This involved the setting aside of the Salic law of succession, and an unmistakable Spanish ascendancy, which no conceivable marriage could make satisfactory to any one but Philip. Thus Elizabeth still found herself compelled to give Henry material a.s.sistance, and the English contingent before Rouen, which the French King was seeking to capture in the latter part of 1591, was commanded by Ess.e.x. Again however Parma intervened, compelling the siege to be raised: though his death a year later left no commander of equal ability to oppose Henry.

[Sidenote: Operations of 1592-94]

During the next three years, 1592-94, no attacks were made on a large scale. One was planned for the first year, to be commanded jointly by Raleigh and Frobisher. But Raleigh was recalled; the men who had joined his flag were indisposed to serve under Frobisher; the squadron divided, and ultimately accomplished little beyond the capture of a single rich prize. Nevertheless, the process of raiding Spanish commerce by privateering ships or squadrons was carried on, with much injury to Spanish trade, and collection of considerable spoils; the chief of the raiders being perhaps the Earl of c.u.mberland, who never failed to conduct at least one such expedition annually. But though Philip's finances continued thereby to be materially crippled, he was not prevented from carrying on the work of reorganising his navy; while towards the end of 1593 he had secured more than one station at Blavet and elsewhere on the coast of Brittany, where he hoped to establish an advanced base from which he could constantly threaten the Channel and Ireland. This scheme however was frustrated at the end of 1594 by a successful joint attack of Frobisher by sea and Norreys by land on a position at Crozon which threatened to dominate Brest; and by the expulsion of the Spaniards from other points in that neighbourhood where they had sought to plant themselves. Frobisher however died from a wound he received in the fighting. The move was one that Raleigh had advocated zealously; and it proved thoroughly effective.

Important as was this blow to Philip's naval aspirations, the political situation was still more decisively affected during these three years by the death of Parma in December 1592, Henry's acceptance of the Ma.s.s in July 1593, and his consequent recognition by the bulk of the French Catholics early in 1594: although the extremists of the League continued their opposition to him, and their support of the Spanish Infanta, a course which secured the maintenance of the alliance between Henry and Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: 1589-94 A survey]