The last years

'The Ditchley Portrait', by
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592
The queen stands upon England depicted
on top of a globe.
Public domain.

The 'second reign'

The fifteen years between the defeat of the Armada and Elizabeth's death was a troubled period, and we should not be deceived by the dazzling images of the Queen produced in the 1590s.

The Armada was a disaster for Spain but not a knock-out blow. In 1589 Drake headed a counter-attack, descending on Lisbon in order to put a pretender on the Portuguese throne and intercept the treasure fleet from the Indies, but this was an ignominious failure. The war with Spain dragged on.

From the point of view of Spain, Ireland was England’s greatest area of vulnerability. It was governed by a thinly-spread English colonial class headed by a Lord Deputy and it remained stubbornly Catholic. English attitudes to the Irish were profoundly racist - shown, for example in Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland.

The new men

On a personal level, the death of Leicester in September 1588 was a grievous blow to Elizabeth.  In November it was observed that she was ‘much aged and spent and very melancholy’.  Leicester’s death was the first of several events which steadily transformed the membership and profile of the Elizabethan establishment. Walsingham died in April 1590, his last years having been spent in comparative poverty because of the debts of his late son-in-law, Philip Sidney. The debt-ridden Lord Chancellor Hatton died from kidney disease in November 1591.

Sir Walter Raleigh seemed likely to become Elizabeth’s third favourite after Leicester and Hatton. She granted him most of the offices in the south-west vacated by the death of the second earl of Bedford, as well as lucrative monopolies in the east Midlands and Ireland. But he blotted his copybook, by seducing Elizabeth's maid of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, daughter of her first ambassador to Paris. In the summer of 1591 Bess discovered that she was pregnant, and the couple secretly married. In February 1592 she gave birth to a boy, but when the marriage was discovered on 31 May she was sent to the Tower.  

Raleigh at this time was on a privateering voyage to the Azores, but in July he was recalled and sent to the Tower. Although both were released in August, when his fleet captured the Madre de Dios, he remained under a cloud for the next five years. 

Burghley became more dominant than ever in the Privy Council, and he exploited his position to ensure that the former advocates of a more interventionist foreign policy were replaced by more cautious strategists. 

Elizabeth’s last years were dominated by factional conflict. Politicians jockeyed for position, ready for her death. The most deadly feud was between the followers of Essex and those of Robert Cecil.

The Armada

English ships and the Spanish Armada
English school, artist unknown.
Public domain.

There is an account of the Armada here. For this post, I am indebted to general histories by John Guy and Susan Brigden, and also to Garrett Mattingly's classic, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and Henry Kamen's Philip II of Spain.

What was it about?

Philip II believed that he had been provoked into war by England's forays into the Netherlands and the New World. The preparations were already underway at the time of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, but her death made it a certainty.

Meanwhile the war in the Netherlands was going badly for England. At the end of 1587 Leicester resigned his commission and returned to England. The zealously propagated myth of the death of Philip Sidney could not disguise the political reality: English intervention in the Netherlands had achieved nothing, yet it was regarded in Spain as an act of war. From the end of 1585 Philip had been gathering maps and intelligence, and receiving optimistic reports of Catholic support for invasion. This might have been wishful thinking, but it was certainly true that the English forces were weak and unprepared.

The preparations for the Armada could hardly be kept secret, but  many believed it was intended for a final assault on the Netherlands. But the secret plan was for the conquest of England, which would itself assure the conquest of the Netherlands. The Armada was to sail 1500 miles to the ‘Cape of Margate’ and link with Parma to secure the safe passage of the army from Flanders. If he landed unscathed, his orders were to march through Kent, capture London and await Catholic risings. 

Most historians believe the plan could never have worked - there were too many incalculable forces. 

1. It depended on highly efficient communications, which were not available in the early-modern period.
2. It ignored the geography of the Flemish coast - the lack of natural harbours, the treacherous sandbanks.

Spanish preparations

The Marquis of Santa Cruz, one of the great military commanders of the age, a veteran of the great naval victory of Lepanto and the successful Portuguese campaign of 1580, was given the task of mustering ships and men. However the Armada was delayed by Drake’s surprise incursion into Cadiz harbour on 29 April 1587 (his ‘singeing of the king of Spain’s beard’), in which he destroyed between two and three dozen Spanish ships. This made it impossible to prepare the Armada for action that year and won a valuable few months for England. All this was extremely bad for Spanish morale. 

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.