The years of danger

Elizabeth, by Marcus Gheeraerts,
the Elder, c. 1580s.
Public domain.

In the 1580s, England and Spain edged towards war. Both sides had provoked the other, Philip by intervening in Ireland, Elizabeth by backing the privateering voyages of Hawkins and Drake and by intervening in the Netherlands. From the Spanish point of view,  the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was the final provocation, though the Armada was already in preparation at the time of the execution.

The Netherlands

The Netherlands became a area of tension after the ‘Spanish Fury’, the destruction of Antwerp and the massacre of over 6,000 people in November 1576. 

Mutinous troops of the Army of Flanders
ransack the Grote Markt
during the Sack of Antwerp in 1576.
Engraving by Frans Hogenberg.
Public domain

There was strong pressure on Elizabeth to send help to William the Silent, the leader of the Dutch revolt, but she refused, and instead the Dutch turned to the Duke of Alençon, a Catholic, who put himself at the head of a largely Protestant revolt.

In October 1578 Philip appointed as Governor-General his nephew, Alessandro Farnese, Prince of Parma. 

The Prince (later Duke) of Parma,
charged by Philip with restoring
Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
Public domain.

He described Elizabeth’s diplomacy as ‘the weavings of Penelope’. She undid every night what was done the day before; 'and all to no conclusion save to weary her councillors and lose the trust of anyone who dealt with her'.

Parma’s policy was to reconquer the whole of the Netherlands for Spain and on 29 June 1579 he captured Maastricht In 1580, Philip, conquered Portugal, thus reinforcing Spain’s status as the only European super-power. Protestant Englishmen were confronted with the terrifying prospect of Catholic hegemony. In the same year, the Jesuits arrived in England.

In England, the atmosphere of crisis deepened. Philip Sidney wrote, 'How idly do we watch our neighbours' fires burn!' His father-in-law, Walsingham, was convinced from his intelligence reports that England was in danger of a Catholic-inspired invasion.

The Throckmorton plot

These fears were not fanciful. In France there was a powerful pro-Spanish party led by Henri, Duke of Guise, the cousin of Mary, Queen of Scots, a militant Catholic prepared to ally with Spain in order to overthrow Elizabeth. 

In November 1583, Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic gentlemen from Warwickshire, was arrested. Papers discovered in his study, and confessions extracted upon the rack, provided evidence of a treasonable conspiracy for invasion headed by Guise and linked to the Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza, with the full knowledge of Mary Queen of Scots. Mendoza was expelled, Throckmorton was executed in July 1584, and the secret service budget was increased. But the would-be assassins only had to succeed once.

This was a period when some were prepared to defend assassination for political or religious reasons. In 1580, Cardinal Como, the papal Secretary of State wrote

Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt whatsoever that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit. Quoted Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I (1997), p. 516.

The assassination of William the Silent

Meanwhile, the European crisis was deepening. In June 1584, the Duke of Anjou (Alençon) died, and the Dutch lost their last foreign protector. His death provoked a crisis in France: the next heir to the throne was the Protestant, Henry of Navarre. The Guises began plotting with Spain to exclude him. 


In June 1580 William, Prince of Orange had been declared a traitor by the Parma government and a price put on his head. On 10 July 1584 he was shot down on the stairway of his house in Delft, and the assassin earned a Spanish bounty. This panicked English politicians, who feared that Elizabeth would be the next target. 

The Bond of Association

In October 1584 Burghley and Walsingham (and probably Leicester) drafted the Bond of Association. This committed itself to defend Elizabeth’s life and to 

pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge all manner of persons of what estate ... that shall attempt ... the harm of Her Majesty’s royal person. 

No ‘pretended successor by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’ would be tolerated. The Bond posed a direct threat to Mary Queen of Scots, whether guilty or not, of any plots against Elizabeth, she could be executed. It was lynch law. All the counsellors put their names to the Bond, and in spite of legal reservations, thousands rushed to join the Association. Elizabeth (characteristically) claimed not to know about it.

In February 1585 Parliament passed the Act for the Surety of the  Queen’s Most Royal Person, which established the mechanism by which Mary Queen of Scots was eventually tried. Another Act banished Catholic priests and prohibited their return on penalty of treason.

In this atmosphere, Catholics were increasingly under threat. It was not merely a crime to be a priest but to harbour one. On 25 March 1586, Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife from York, suffered the peine forte de dure: she was pressed to death for refusing to plead when charged with harbouring priests. She was the first of three women put to death for allegedly giving aid to outlawed priests.

The English in the Netherlands

Following Orange’s assassination, Parma began the reconquest of the towns of Flanders and Brabant. Ghent fell in the autumn of 1584. By the end of the year only Brussels, Mechelen and Antwerp still resisted. Elizabeth was under enormous pressure to intervene to save the Protestant cause. But could she risk offending Spain?

On 24 June 1585 commissioners from the Netherlands arrived in England offering Elizabeth sovereignty of the Netherlands. In the Treaty of Nonsuch in August, England and the Dutch entered an alliance. Elizabeth knew this would invite retribution from Spain, but she felt she had no choice. But the Treaty came too late to save Antwerp.

In December 1585 Leicester arrived in the Netherlands as Elizabeth’s Lieutenant-General, with 5,000 foot and a thousand horse. Unknown to the queen and against her wishes, he accepted the governor-generalship of the United Provinces; she was furious when she found out, but she was also powerless. This was one of the disadvantages of being a woman ruler who could not lead troops into battle.

In 1586 England experienced a series of military failures. The most notable casualty was Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester’s nephew, poet, failed courtier, who was mortally wounded at Zutphen. His elaborate state funeral was a rebuke to Elizabeth.

The funeral of Sir Philip Sidney,
by Theodore de Bry. Public domain.
The funeral was an implied rebuke to  Elizabeth.

The English in the New World

Elizabeth had been drawn into the Netherlands against her will. Her instinct was to be cautious and not to risk making an enemy of Philip, and she held out against intervention for as long as she could. On the other hand, in the New World she seemed to be encouraging a reckless provocation of Spain.

From the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) the New World had been seen as a Spanish/Portuguese sphere of influence. Following the Treaty, a rigorous trade monopoly over Spanish and Portuguese New World territories was enforced. However, the English and French (and later the Dutch) never accepted this treaty. In 1577 the Welsh astrologer and mathematician, John Dee, claimed that by virtue of her descent from King Arthur and Prince Madoc, Elizabeth had a claim to the New World. He coined the term ‘British Empire’.

The voyages of John Hawkins: Dee’s claim was made against a background of licensed piracy. In the 1560s and 70s English privateers plied the slave trade between West Africa and the Spanish Indies. In 1562, the Plymouth seaman, John Hawkins, sailed to West Africa, then took 300 slaves to Hispaniola. In 1564 he set out in a second voyage. The leading ship, the Jesus, was partly kitted out by a loan from the Queen. The Spaniards protested to Elizabeth, who pretended to refuse to sanction further voyages. 

In 1567 Hawkins set out from Plymouth on his third voyage.  As before he sailed to Sierra Leone, then sailed for the West Indies with 500 Africans. In September 1568, his fleet was driven by a storm into the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa. A few days later, it was attacked by a Spanish fleet. Hawkins and some of his men escaped but others were taken prisoner and handed over to the Inquisition. The Spaniards took possession of bullion to the value of £100,000. 

The news of Hawkins’ defeat was brought to England by Francis Drake in his ship, the Judith. He had previously traded with the Spaniards, but now he turned corsario (pirate). In 1572, he sailed to Panama and led a daring raid on the treasure house at Nombre de Dios. In the following year he successfully ambushed a mule train carrying silver from Peru across the Isthmus of Panama. From Panama he had caught a glimpse of the Pacific from the top of a tall tree and prayed that God would give him leave ‘to sail once in an English ship on that sea’. 

Drake circumnavigates the world: On 13 December 1577 he sailed from Plymouth in the Pelican. His object was to conclude trading treaties with the people who lived south of the Spanish sphere of influence. On 20 August 1578 he  entered the Straits of Magellan and renamed his flagship the Golden Hind (the emblem of his patron, Christopher Hatton). On 1 March off Cape Francisco, the English captured and plundered a Spanish treasure ship, the Cacafuego.

Off the coast of what may have been California, he accepted the sovereignty of what he called ‘New Albion’ in the name of the queen. In July 1579 he sailed across the Pacific. He arrived in England on 26 September 1580. On 4 April 1581 Elizabeth knighted him on board the Golden Hind at Deptford. None of his plundered money was handed back to Spain - partly because Elizabeth was furious with Philip II for encouraging a revolt in Ireland.

In September 1585, a month after signing the Treaty of Nonsuch, Elizabeth formally authorized the most destructive of his expeditions. She put at his disposal a large fleet of twenty vessels, making him no mere pirate but a state-sponsored national hero. In November, he plundered in the Cape Verde islands. He then plundered the cities of Cartagena in Colombia, St Augustine in Florida and San Domingo (Hispaniola). 

This was a disaster for Spain. The marquis of Santa Cruz pointed out that Drake’s naval attacks had cost the crown four times its current war costs. The Bank of Spain broke, the Bank of Venice (to which Philip was the principal debtor) nearly foundered, and the great German bank of Augsburg refused to extend the king any further credit. 

The news of Drake’s raid confirmed Philip’s commitment to the building of an Armada against England. His secretary wrote,

The policy of defence is not enough. We need to direct our fire at their own country. … the objective of this Armada is both the security of the Indies and the reconquest of the Netherlands. Quoted Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1998), p. 264.

Spain was already building a fleet and the Italian bankers were lending money.  Meanwhile, Mary Queen of Scots, believing that her Guise relatives had deserted her, was beginning to talk openly about linking her cause to Philip’s.

The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

In April 1585, Mary, then at Tutbury, the prison she most disliked, was put in the custody of Sir Amyas Paulet, a radical puritan, who sealed her from the outside world. He deprived her of her privileges. He deprived her of her privileges,  and broke open her letters, which were then forwarded to Walsingham. In December she was moved to Chartley Hall in Staffordshire, a moated manor house belonging to the Earl of Essex. The imprisonment was more lenient but the surveillance continued. 

In January 1586 Walsingham began to use a double agent, Gilbert Gifford, a defecting Catholic refugee, and a former student at the English seminary at Rheims. He established a monitored channel of communication between Mary and the French ambassador, using a watertight casket which was slipped through the bung hole of the beer casks delivered to Chartley. 

The Babington plot: Anthony Babington, a young Derbyshire squire, plotted to combine a revolt of the English Catholics, a Spanish invasion, Elizabeth’s assassination and the final liberation and triumph of Mary.  On 6 July 1586, not knowing that Mary’s correspondence was being intercepted, he wrote to tell her of the proposed conspiracy and of the ‘six noble gentlemen’ ready for the ‘despatch of the usurping Competitor’. Walsingham’s agent, Thomas Phelippes, wrote: ‘We await her very heart in the next [letter].’

Mary received the letter on 14 July. In a dictated letter of 17 July 1586 (composed by her in French and then drafted into English by her secretaries) she endorsed the plot and was trapped. A gallows mark was drawn on the letter before it was passed to Walsingham, whose decipherer then added a forged postscript, though this was not used in evidence against Mary. 

Composite image of forged postscript to a letter
by Mary Queen of Scots to Anthony Babington,
(SP 12/193/54) and alongside Babington's
record of the cipher used. (SP 53/18/55).
National Archives.
Public domain.

Alarmed for her safety. Elizabeth took refuge in Windsor Castle Babington panicked and fled and was discovered on 14 August. In September the conspirators were executed.

Trial, warrant and execution: Mary was sent to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, and on 14 November her trial before appointed commissioners began under the procedure established by the Act for the Queen’s Surety. Facsimiles were  produced of the Babington letter, and her response meant that the verdict was not in doubt. On 4 December she was sentenced to death, and the warrant for her execution was drawn up, though Elizabeth was reluctant to sign it. She wanted Mary dead but not executed!

On 1 February 1587, at her palace in Greenwich, Elizabeth finally ordered her secretary, William Davison, to bring the document authorizing Mary’s execution, and signed it. Davison took the warrant to Burghley, and it was sealed by the Lord Chancellor.  On 3 February at a crisis meeting of eleven councillors, including Burghley, Leicester and Hatton, it was decided to despatch the warrant and not to inform the queen until after the execution. The warrant reached Fotheringhay on 4 February. Mary was executed on 8 February 1587.

The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Public domain.

Consequences

1. Mary’s death caused outrage in Catholic Europe, and raised again the succession question. For Protestants it was now much clearer: they could support the Protestant James VI.  But to English Catholics, James was a heretic, and Mary, outraged at what she saw as his betrayal, had passed him over and bequeathed her claim to Philip of Spain. For Catholics like William Allen, this meant that Philip was now his lawful king.
2. Already trees were being felled and ships built for the Armada. The Duke of Parma, the governor of the Netherlands, had taken time off from his plans of marching on the rebel cities of Groningen and Utrecht and was studying maps of the mouth of the Scheldt, from where troops were to await the ships that would take them to England.