The Spanish Armada (4 page)

Although there were other more enthusiastic suitors, Elizabeth had no plans for marriage. She assured Parliament that ‘the realm shall not remain destitute of an heir’ and promised
to deal with selecting a suitable husband ‘in convenient time’ – but at present she was determined to remain single.
⁴⁷

One matter that could not wait was a decision on what would be the state religion for England. The queen sometimes appeared
bored by the endless wrangling over
liturgical minutia and testily told one French envoy: ‘There is only one Jesus Christ and one faith and all the rest that they dispute [are] but trifles.’
⁴⁸
That faith would be Protestantism in her realm, but Elizabeth tried not to alienate or disaffect her Catholic subjects. The compromise that was achieved was based on Edward
VI’s Protestant settlement but permitted ecclesiastical vestments to be used during the liturgy. She had to accept the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England, rather than her
father’s more ostentatious ‘Supreme Head’, which many (in those unenlightened days) believed was unacceptable for a woman to bear. The religious changes were enshrined in the Act
of Supremacy
⁴⁹
and the Act of Uniformity,
⁵⁰
which made attendance at church compulsory for all. The
1552 Prayer Book in English became the only liturgy allowed in England and Wales.

Unwittingly, the foundations had been laid for decades of religious turbulence. In Elizabeth’s name, more than two hundred Catholics and their priests were executed during the forty-four
years of her reign – not burnt at the stake, but butchered on the scaffold as traitors to her crown.

The yawning schism with Rome also became the catalyst for a cripplingly expensive nineteen-year war with Spain that threatened invasion of her realm and day and night made her an
assassin’s target.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

A
t seven o’clock on the evening of Sunday 16 May 1568, Elizabeth I’s personal nemesis entered her uncertain realm, stepping wearily
ashore on a remote windswept beach in north-west England.

Her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots landed from a small fishing boat near Workington in Cumbria after fleeing Scotland across the treacherously shoaled waters of the Solway Firth. She was
dirty, penniless, and like other benighted refugees from civil war, possessed only the grubby clothes she stood up in. But despite her many hardships, the thrice-married,
²
twenty-five-year-old auburn-haired woman – at 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 metres) tall, towering over her handful of exhausted, dispirited attendants – still exuded
the dignity and deportment of a queen. Only the vivacity of her hazel-brown eyes was diminished, sapped by months of fear, heartbreak and privation.

Three days before, it had taken just forty-five minutes for her army of six thousand men to be roundly defeated at Langside (now in south Glasgow),
³
by a smaller force fighting for the Scottish Protestant nobility led by her illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray.
⁴
She had earlier been forced to abdicate so that her baby
son could ascend the Scottish throne as King James VI, with Moray as all-powerful regent. Now, as
dawn broke the following morning, Mary wrote plaintively to Elizabeth, craving an immediate private audience to seek English military assistance both to recover her crown and wreak bloody vengeance
on those who had rebelled against her.

She was hardly a welcome visitor. Her personal heraldry proudly quartered the arms of England with those of France and Scotland, symbolising her claims to be the strongest heir presumptive to
the English throne through her direct descent from Henry VIII’s eldest sister, Margaret, one-time Queen of Scotland.
⁵

Even though Elizabeth enjoyed less than harmonious relations with Mary and had resolutely rejected her as her successor, she sympathised with her sister queen’s unhappy fate, believing
that her Scottish neighbours had wickedly deposed a monarch anointed by God Himself. But she knew full well that her own Catholic subjects believed her a heretic, the bastard daughter of Anne
Boleyn who had bigamously married Henry before the death of his saintly wife, Katherine of Aragon. She was also conscious that many prayed earnestly that ere long, Mary would wear the crown of
England rather than her.

Her chief minister, William Cecil, did not share Elizabeth’s regal sympathy or her constitutional concerns about the inviolable divine right of monarchs. To him, Mary Queen of Scots’
presence on English soil posed a grave threat to his mistress’s throne and his own political and personal survival. In his view, her Catholic loyalties also imperilled England’s
fledgling Protestant faith that had been forged in the cruel fires of martyrdom of Mary I’s reign. No surprise then, that within hours the Scottish queen found herself in comfortable quarters
in the south-east tower of Carlisle Castle – but under strict twenty-four-hour guard. Even in her worst nightmares, she could not have dreamt that she was to be sequestered from the outside
world for the next eighteen years as Elizabeth’s unwanted guest. Mary might be allowed to enjoy the title and a few trappings of a queen, but the cruel reality was that she was to remain a
closely guarded prisoner in five-star captivity in a succession of fortified houses in northern England and the Midlands.

Cecil’s uneasiness stemmed from his uncomfortable knowledge
that large swathes of England remained staunchly Catholic, with perhaps more than half of Elizabeth’s
three million subjects still clinging stubbornly to that faith. Lancashire, for example, was to retain a Catholic majority until very late into the sixteenth century.
⁶
In the strategically important maritime counties of Sussex and Hampshire, bordering the English Channel, the heart of the old religion was yet beating strongly, nurtured by
conservative gentry and fugitive priests. Many rood screens
⁷
stood in Sussex chancels in defiance of government order; and where they had been
dismantled, ‘the wood lies still . . . ready to be set up again’, according to a disquieting official report of 1568. Holy images were hidden, not destroyed, and ‘other popish
ornaments [were concealed] to set up the Mass again within twenty-four hours’. Chalices were secreted to await the happy return of the ancient ritual. Parishioners still brought their Latin
missals with them to Protestant services and women and the elderly openly said their rosary beads, ignoring the benefits of both God’s Word and those of the dark-clad ministers wearing sober
Geneva bands at their throats.
⁸
In Hampshire, Bishop Robert Horne had great difficulty in finding ministers who would preach ‘sound
doctrine’ and complained indignantly that some priests even in Winchester Cathedral were still stubbornly ‘inculcating popery and superstition’.
⁹

Events were to justify Cecil’s hard-nosed assessment of the ramifications of Mary Queen of Scots’ ill-omened arrival in England. By the middle of the following year, 1569, Thomas
Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk, the egotistical premier peer of England, was up to his innocent eyes in plans to marry the imprisoned Scottish queen, motivated by fevered dreams of becoming king
consort of Scotland one day, if not of England the next. Mary herself also proved a compulsive conspirator. Not content with pledging her love for the naïve duke as a possible means of
escaping Elizabeth’s unwelcome and unwilling hospitality, she had written secretly to the Catholic earls of Northumberland and Westmorland seeking their assistance in freeing her, by force of
arms if necessary.

Generations of sixteenth-century Howards had been flawed by a fatal arrogance and Norfolk’s pride inescapably became his downfall. Describing his fabulous wealth and his opulent palace at
Norwich, he bragged shamelessly that his annual revenues were ‘not much less than those of Scotland . . . and when he was in his tennis
court at Norwich, he thought
himself equal with some kings’. If he had hopes of reassuring the mistrustful and always penny-pinching Elizabeth, these were hardly appropriate blandishments. Peremptory royal summonses to
Norfolk to attend court were seemingly wilfully disobeyed and the queen suspected that the duke’s suspicious absence was a curtain-raiser to rebellion by her Catholic subjects, with him as
their noble figurehead. Inevitably, that October Norfolk was arrested en route to Windsor and carted off to the Tower of London, where so many of his family had been incarcerated before him and
where his father had been executed in January 1547 for conceitedly (and treasonably) including the royal arms of Edward the Confessor in his heraldry.
¹⁰

As in many rural counties, the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 had made little difference to the beliefs of the traditionalist populations of those immediately south of the Scottish
border. Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire were a world way from London and the carefully contrived splendour of the royal court. The much-loved pre-Reformation rituals continued habitually as if
Mary I was still occupying the throne, with holy water, rosaries, images and devotional candles being used in defiance of official Protestant doctrine.
¹¹
It was only a matter of time before the cauldron that was the Catholic north, containing a heady, seething mix of religion, resentment and reaction, finally boiled over.

On 9 November 1569, Thomas Percy, Seventh Earl of Northumberland and Charles Neville, Sixth Earl of Westmorland, rose in revolt – church bells being rung backwards to warn their tenantry
to muster. They intended to head south to free Mary Queen of Scots from her new prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, ‘as next heir, failing issue of Her Majesty’ and return England
to Catholicism.
¹²
On 14 November they arrived in Durham, marching, with heavy symbolism, behind the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, last
carried by rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace against Elizabeth’s father thirty-two years before. They swept through the eleventh-century cathedral, tearing down any emblem of Protestantism
they could find and triumphantly burnt the English prayer books and Bible in an iconoclastic pyre. They then joyfully celebrated Mass.

The Lord President of the North, Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex, had only four hundred badly armed cavalry with him at
York and was fearful of facing the rebels on
the battlefield with such a small force of perhaps doubtful loyalty. For Elizabeth, 265 miles (425 km) away in firmly Protestant London, the insurrection was a startling recurrence of the perilous
threats that had persistently haunted her Tudor forebears and siblings.
¹³
Her grandfather, Henry VII, whose claim to the crown was in reality of
only paper-thin legality, had faced a series of uprisings after his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485. Her father Henry VIII put down rebellions against the dissolution of the
monasteries in the north in 1536–7, but only with the greatest difficulty. Her teenage half-brother, Edward VI, was forced to hide in Windsor Castle during the dangerous revolts in the West
Country, the south, midlands and in Yorkshire in 1549 over the introduction of the English prayer book, and also had to counter Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk that same year. Further
insurrections followed in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Rutland in 1551, involving ‘light knaves, horse-coursers and craftsmen’. Finally, Mary I had defeated rebel forces in
London in 1554 over her planned marriage with Philip of Spain. Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to face the anger and rude weapons of the commons and, with characteristic Tudor truculence, she
raged at delays in confronting and crushing them on the field of battle.

In York, Sir Ralph Sadler, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, explained patiently to Cecil why Sussex could not risk fighting the rebel forces immediately. ‘The ancient faith’, he
counselled, ‘still lies like lees at the bottom of men’s hearts and if the vessel is ever so little stirred, comes to the top.’

The earls paused on their way south on 16 November at Darlington, County Durham, to issue a proclamation seeking popular support to safeguard
England’s ancient customs and Catholic religion. It contained a compelling message, resonant both of patriotism and religious faith, designed to appeal to the region’s sullen
conservative masses. Declaring themselves ‘the Queen’s most true and lawful subjects’, they railed against the
arriviste
upstarts surrounding Elizabeth who, they claimed,
daily sought the overthrow ‘of the ancient nobility’ and had for ten years ‘maintained a new-found religion and heresy, contrary to God’s word’. Foreign powers, they
warned darkly, would force England to return to Catholicism at the point of the sword and intended ‘shortly to invade this realm, which will be to our utter destruction, if we do not
ourselves speedily [achieve] the same’.