Transcription
In July 1588, beacons were lit across England to warn of the arrival of the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth's darkest fears had come true. England was at war—open war at last. It was something that Elizabeth had twisted and turned for 20 years to avoid. She hated war because it was so expensive; it was all so unbelievably risky. The loss of Calais had destroyed her sister Mary's reputation, and Elizabeth well knew that a similar unforeseen disaster could undo all her own work.
Elizabeth loathed war because, as a woman, she couldn't lead her own armies. Instead, she had to give their command to hot-willed men who would disobey her orders and might even turn her own forces against her. The slide into war had begun nearly 20 years before. By the early 1570s, Elizabeth had triumphed over her opponents in England. She had seen off a rebellion and executed the ringleaders, including her own cousin, the Duke of Norfolk. There was a fragile peace in England, but Elizabeth was in constant danger. She had powerful enemies abroad, headed by the Pope, who, like a 16th-century Ayatollah, had signed a fatwa on the Protestant English Queen: “Whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing God’s service not only does not sin but gains merit.”
Elizabeth’s powerful Catholic enemies stemmed from her great-grandfather, Henry the Seventh. On her arrival in England, Mary identified herself passionately with Catholicism. Mary’s faith set her on a collision course with Elizabeth, especially as relations between Catholics and Protestants in Europe were about to explode. In Paris, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the 24th of August 1572, Catholics began a massacre of their Protestant neighbors. [Music] Everywhere, there were people who fled, and others who ran after them crying, “Kill! Kill!” There was no mercy, either for age or for sex. It was, in very truth, a massacre. The streets were strewn with naked, mutilated corpses; the river was covered with them. [Music] Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris, barely escaped with his life. The Queen recalled him to London and gave him a new job: masterminding England’s security. Walsingham quickly identified Public Enemy Number One. “Nothing is more necessary than that the realm might be delivered over. If the song will be not served, I feel we shall have a Bartholomew breakfast.”
Mary was a figurehead for Catholics everywhere who wanted to depose Elizabeth, and Mary knew that there could be only one way out of her confinement: “I will not leave my prison, savers Queen of England.” The symbolic, demure Massacre heightened the fear of a bloody Catholic rising in England. It also plunged France into civil war. Elizabeth had relied on France as a counterbalance to the mighty Spanish Empire, which controlled much of Europe, including the Netherlands—that is, modern-day Holland, Belgium, and northeastern France. But although England might fear their Catholic neighbors, she couldn’t live without them, because in the Netherlands was England’s biggest export market: the booming city of Antwerp. In 1532, the year before Elizabeth’s birth, this magnificent new exchange was built—it was now a combination of the city and Wall Street—and the most important commodity traded was English wool. The English traders held center stage, doing their deals here in the middle of the trading floor. As usual, money talks, and the volume of the London-Antwerp trade meant that the Netherlands were normally England’s chief overseas ally.
The rulers of the Netherlands in the 16th century were the Hapsburgs; one of them was Philip of Spain, who had been married to Mary Tudor, Elizabeth’s sister. When Mary died, Philip tried to keep hold of England by proposing to Elizabeth, but the new Queen refused him. Neither Elizabeth nor her people wanted to be ruled by a foreigner again. The people of the Netherlands didn’t much like Spanish rule either, and in 1576 they united behind Prince William of Orange. He was horrified by the brutality of Spanish rule; he turned to Elizabeth as a fellow Protestant for help. Elizabeth now proved herself to be a queen of deception. Instead of intervening directly, as her father, Henry the Eighth, might have done, Elizabeth preferred to get others to do her dirty work for her. Elizabeth’s policy towards the Netherlands trod a tightrope. She didn’t wish to be seen giving open help to Philip’s rebellious subjects, because that would break the rules of the Royal Club to which both she and Philip belonged. Nor, on the other hand, did she want to see Philip re-establish real power over the Netherlands that would enable Philip to resume the persecution of the Protestants; still worse, it would enable him to turn the Netherlands into a springboard for the invasion of England. So every time Philip looked as though he was getting the upper hand, Elizabeth threw large amounts of gold at the Dutch rebels to stiffen their resistance. But mighty Spain would not be beaten by a Dutch Revolt, and William’s rebellion began to buckle under the force of Spanish arms. Elizabeth needed someone else to try to stop Philip. Enter the Duke of Anjou. His mother had put him forward as a husband for Philip’s sabbath when he was just 18 and she was 39, but he was reputedly puny and scarred by smallpox, and Elizabeth hadn’t been interested. But six years later, he began to intrigue her. The Duke belonged to the French royal family, but as the youngest son, he had little chance of inheriting the throne, so he had to look elsewhere for a kingdom of his own. He hoped to find one in the Netherlands. If Elizabeth could pull the right strings, he would be the perfect puppet to oppose Philip. Elizabeth flourished a diplomatic top card, now a bit worn and past its best, but still playable. Marriage was on the table again.
The latest suitor added to the bloody salt on Anjou’s ambition: he needed money. He began a secret correspondence with Elizabeth, but his letters didn’t talk of interest rates; instead, they used the language of love. She was his “belle Majesty”; he was her slave. His declarations combined devotion and passion with just a tasteful hint of eroticism. Anjou sent a close friend, Jean Simier, to England to continue the seduction and the financial negotiations on his behalf. Simier, a “most choice courtier, exquisitely skilled in love toys and courtly balances,” was described as such. Elizabeth was more than half in love with his master without even having met him. Simier arrived at Greenwich in the small hours of the 17th of August 1579. His first thought was to rush straight to the Queen’s bedchamber. Instead, Simier persuaded him to take some rest, but then Simier wrote a letter to Elizabeth that was almost as titillating as though the Duke really had burst in on the slumbering Queen and got him between the sheets. Simier wrote, “And would to God you were there too, so that he could explain his mind to [Music] Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth allowed Simier heated off immediately. She’d steel herself to meet an ugly little fella. What she saw instead was a mature and attractive man. She nicknamed him “the Frog.” The Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, remarked, “The Queen has, with the difficulty of being able to entertain the Duke, being captivated, overcome with love. She told me she’s never found a man whose nature and actions suited her better.” Elizabeth was in love. The Ice Maiden had melted; the Virgin Queen was longing to become a blushing bride. Anjou caught her on the rebound. She’d just learned that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a favorite of 20 years standing, had betrayed her by daring to get married in secret. But she was also fascinated by Anjou himself. All of the Englishmen who had attracted her, from Thomas Seymour when she was a teenager to Leicester himself, were bold, athletic men who barnstormed their way into Elizabeth’s favor. Anjou was different. With his quirky face, his expressive hands, and his French ways, he charmed her into love. Elizabeth was in love with a man twenty years her junior, a Catholic, and a Frenchman. But would the marriage be a real one—that is to say, was Elizabeth, unlike her sister Mary, still able to have children? The minister Burleigh had thought of this problem too, and he had had confidential discussions with her doctors and her ladies-in-waiting, and they’d all said the same thing: that she was apt to have children, even at this day. [Music]
After just two weeks, the lovers were torn apart. Anjou was recalled to Paris after a friend was killed in a duel. He sent Elizabeth three love letters tied with pink ribbons before he had even left English soil, calling himself “the most faithful and loving slave on earth.” Elizabeth, intoxicated with the attention, couldn’t wait for him to return. Elizabeth’s old favorites were enraged. Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, was particularly jealous. “Leicester is much put out, and all the councillors are disgusted,” a close friend of Leicester tells me. He’s cursing the French. A pamphlet appeared on the streets of London. It was venomous in its opposition to the match: “Elizabeth will be drawn into a Catholic den of idolatry. If she died in childbirth, Anjou might become King of England. Besides, the Frenchmen probably had the pox.” Elizabeth was incandescent with rage. She ordered that the author, John Stubbs, and his printer have their right hands struck off. Stubbs spoke of his loyalty to the Queen before having his hands severed with a butcher’s cleaver, the stumps seared with a red-hot iron. Tudor England wasn’t a democracy. The men whose opinions Elizabeth would listen to were the members of her Privy Council. The council debated the marriage all day. Finally, opinion was split 50-50 for and against. In those circumstances, the council felt that it could offer the Queen no formal opinion. Elizabeth was genuinely astonished. For 20 years, ministers have been telling her she had to marry; now she’d found the ideal marriage, and they refused to endorse it. She took her council’s lukewarm reaction as an effective veto on the Anjou marriage. So Elizabeth wouldn’t marry her Prince Charming. She remained extremely sad after the conversation and was so cross and melancholy that it was noted by everyone who approached her. “She’s been greatly alarmed by all this,” Elizabeth wrote to Anjou, explaining why public opinion made it impossible for her to marry him: “The public practice of the Roman religion so sticks in their hearts. I beg you to consider this deeply as a matter which is so hard for Englishmen to bear that it passes all imagination. For my part, I confess there is no Prince in the world to whom I think myself more bound, nor with whom I would rather pass the years of my life, both for your rare virtues and sweet nature. With my commendations to my dearest Frog.” Elizabeth thought she’d seen the last of him.
“I will not leave my prison, savers Queen of England.” Mary Queen of Scots had now been Elizabeth’s prisoner for 11 years. She dreamed of rescue, and she dreamed of taking her rightful throne. So she became the center of a web of Catholic conspiracy, keeping contact with her supporters at home and abroad via vast, secret letters. Some of these letters contained encouraging news. Although Catholicism in England had been driven underground, Jesuit priests were being trained abroad to keep the faith alive. The Jesuits were spiritual revolutionaries who were being smuggled into England in disguise. Among them was Edmund Campion, one of the outstanding churchmen of his age. Campion had left the Church of England to become a Catholic. “I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics. The enemy have so many eyes, so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts. I often changed my name; threatening edicts come forth against us daily. I read letters sometimes that tell news that Campion is taken.”
Campion had a very attractive personality—clearly a man of integrity, a man of ambition, a man of great intelligence. The Protestant authorities viewed him as a dangerous individual. And because he was so gifted, because he was so attractive, because he had such a great name already in the country from his early days at Oxford and as a member of the Anglican Church, he represented a new kind of religion—not just establishment religion of either sort, if you like, enthusiastic religion—and that’s always dangerous, particularly if you’re trying your best, as Elizabeth was very understandably from her point of view, to form an established church which didn’t satisfy anybody particularly but kept everybody more or less quiet. One thing Campion was not was quiet. The Catholic Mass was illegal in England; that didn’t stop Campion moving from house to house, saying Mass and hearing confessions. He published pamphlets which challenged the very basis of Elizabeth’s church. Elizabeth had met Campion at Oxford 15 years earlier, before he had converted to Catholicism. She had been greatly impressed by him, but she couldn’t ignore the gauntlet that he was now throwing down. Like it or not, she had to treat him as the enemy. Elizabeth and Campion actually had a lot in common. Both believed that it should be possible to distinguish between religion and politics. At the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth had claimed passionately that she wouldn’t make windows into men’s souls, whilst Campion, for his part, insisted that he had no political motives and was the Queen’s loyal subject. But in the circumstances of the European Cold War between Protestant and Catholic, the distinction between religion and politics was almost impossible to maintain. After all, Campion was the loyal servant of the Pope, and the Pope claimed authority to depose Elizabeth. He had already, in the 1560s, authorized her subjects to rebel against her, and he could and would do so again. Campion’s solitary journey now brought him to Lyford Grange near Oxford. Here, a priest captured discovered him and alerted the authorities. The house was ransacked, and after a search of two days, a shaft of light betrayed Campion’s hiding place. Campion was taken to London, where he had a secret meeting with Leicester and Elizabeth herself. The Queen offered him pardon and preferment if he would recant. Campion refused and, in turn, reminded Elizabeth of her glorious Catholic ancestors whom she had betrayed. Campion was returned to the Tower and, five days later, was put to the rack to extract a confession of treason. At his trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the scaffold, Campion prayed to God to grant the Queen a long, quiet reign with all prosperity. The effect of Campion’s death on the Catholic world was tremendous, strengthening—and as always, you know, when you make martyrs you usually increase the cause you’re trying to oppose—and that certainly is the case with Campion. Word got round of his heroic death by any standards, so tremendous encouragement for the Catholic world, the very thing that Elizabeth was trying to cool down: enthusiastic commitment to religion of any sort was the very thing that he strengthened. [Music] Elizabeth was provoking her Catholic enemies. Most aggrieved of all was Philip of Spain. Whilst Campion’s death was insulting his faith, another of Elizabeth’s subjects had been busy emptying his pockets.
On September the 26th 1580, a battered ship dropped anchor in Southampton Harbor. The ship was the Golden Hind; the captain was one of the most outstanding Elizabethan seamen, Sir Francis Drake. Drake’s voyage had begun three years before as a pirate expedition to the Pacific. One of the investors was the Queen herself. Drake’s target was the Spanish treasure ships. Drake had waged a private war against the most powerful empire on earth. As he sailed back into Southampton, Drake must have had the odd doubt whether or not the Queen would still welcome her pirate subject. “I think Drake would have had a great deal of trepidation when they returned. He’d been away for three years, and he obviously had no idea what had happened during that time, and I think the first one of the first things he asked was, ‘Was the Queen still alive?’ As coming back with all that gold and silver, if the political situation had trained changed dramatically, he could have been hailed as a hero or condemned as a villain.” When he had returned to England, Drake was lucky. Elizabeth was fascinated by his stories and entranced by his loot. And in the event, his piracy suited her devious foreign policy. Gold from the New World paid for Spain’s troops in the Netherlands; so by diminishing the supply, she had weakened Philip’s grip. But his anchorage at Deptford, Drake’s ship renamed the Golden Hind, quickly became a tourist attraction. And in April, Queen Elizabeth herself joined the throng. Elizabeth, despite the outraged protests of the Spanish ambassador, had already pocketed her share of Drake’s loot. This amounted to the staggering sum of nearly one year’s parliamentary revenue and represented a 5,000 percent return on the money that she’d invested. Now she’d arrived to confer respectability, in the most public fashion possible, on Drake. She jokingly told him that she brought a buildin sword with which to cut off the head of this notorious pirate. Instead, Elizabeth gave the sword to the Duke of Anjou’s representative and told him to knight Drake there on the deck of the Golden Hind, by asking the friction to knight her pet pirate. Elizabeth was making her allegiances very clear: England was still ranged with France against Spain. The alliance with France meant that her liaison with the Duke of Anjou would continue. After an absence of two years, he returned, asking for more money for his campaign against the Spanish in the Netherlands, accompanied by the French ambassador. He also decided to pop the marriage question again. Elizabeth’s answer? [Music]
At the age of 48, Elizabeth was engaged. It was a formal, public betrothal in front of witnesses. Messengers were dispatched round Europe with the astonishing news, and church bells were rung in Antwerp. Back home in England, the reaction was more mixed. Burleigh rejoiced; Leicester was furious; and other courtiers burst into tears. That same evening, the opponents of the marriage instructed some of her ladies-in-waiting to paint in graphic terms the restrictions of married life and the horrors of childbirth, with the result that the Queen spent a miserable and sleepless night. For one extraordinary moment, Elizabeth had ruled her head, but it didn’t last long. In the morning, she told Anjou that she couldn’t marry him because the welfare of her subjects must come first before her own happiness. [Music] What accounts for this extraordinary on-off behavior? Elizabeth had certainly abandoned any serious intention of marrying Anjou two years earlier, but he was politically useful, and she found his company attractive. So for one moment, she fondly allowed herself to imagine what might have been. Then the following morning, in the cold light of day, the pretense was abandoned, and she ditched, with many expressions of regret, her dream. Elizabeth might have thrown her French suitor back in the water, but her Frog didn’t swim away. He stayed on for three months, begging for more money. Finally, Elizabeth was driven to pay him 10,000 pounds. Anjou sets sail for the Netherlands to pursue his quest for another kingdom. She would never see him again. [Music] She could no longer pull the strings of her puppet Prince. For instead of helping the people of the Netherlands fight the Spanish, all Anjou tried to do was set them against each other in a cynical attempt to seize absolute power for himself. But his plan failed. In 1583, Anjou retreated to France in disgrace. A year later, he died. Elizabeth was genuinely saddened. She wrote to his mother, “If you could see a picture of my heart, you would see a body without a soul.” There would be no more pretense of marriage. Elizabeth would rule alone, and she would die without a natural heir.
Elizabeth had always avoided open war, and she had maintained peace by persuading others to fight her battles for her. But her policy was about to collapse, thanks to events in the Netherlands. At about midday on the 10th of July 1584, William, Prince of Orange, was dining with his family in the Prinsenhof in Delft. William had already survived several attempts on his life, so by 16th-century standards, the security around him was tight. And here, in his own house at least, he should have been relatively safe. About two o’clock, William left the dining room to go upstairs to his study. He was going to meet a recent contact. The man had introduced himself as Balthazar Gérard, a French Protestant. William had decided to send him to France with letters. He gave Gérard money to buy clothes for the journey. Balthazar Gérard wasn’t a Protestant at all; it wasn’t even his real name. Instead, he was an undercover Catholic fanatic, and he’d spent William’s money not on clothes but on pistols. He fired three shots at the Prince; two bullets passed through William’s body; one lodged in the wall. The Prince died a few minutes later. His triggers his last words were, “God have mercy on my soul, and on my poor country.” His death was appalling news for Elizabeth. It left her as the only Protestant leader in Europe. Spain could overrun the whole of the Netherlands and then invade England. There was no one left to fight England’s battles for her. Elizabeth had no choice; she finally had to send English troops overseas. Her old friend Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, was in command, but still Elizabeth was wary of declaring all-out war. She discouraged Leicester from going on the offensive. She hoped the display of English muscle would scare off the Spanish. But Leicester’s opponent was the Duke of Parma, Philip’s greatest general. For him, England and Spain were at war, and he didn’t hesitate to attack. The war put Elizabeth under huge strain. She was now at her most contrary, and things weren’t helped by Leicester’s mixture of high-handedness and incompetence. In defiance of Elizabeth’s explicit instructions, he accepted the governor-generalship of the Netherlands, and he proved as hopeless as a general as well. So Parma’s troops swallowed the Netherlands bit by bit. Elizabeth recalled Leicester, her favorite, but he had failed her. Only the sea now stood between England and invasion. There was one person in the kingdom who welcomed the news: Mary Queen of Scots.
In January 1585, Mary was brought to the hilltop castle of Tutbury in Staffordshire. The assassination of William of Orange abroad and a series of plots in England brought home the danger that Mary presented to Elizabeth’s life. So far, Mary had been kept in honourable custody; now it became a real imprisonment. She had a jailer—the harsh, unsympathetic Puritan Sir Amyas Paulet. There were armed soldiers who patrolled the battlements, and Mary was cut off from all correspondence with the outside world. She was isolated, bored, and resentful. But the devil, in the form of Sir Francis Walsingham, soon found work for Mary’s idle hands. Elizabeth’s patient spymaster set a trap and then waited for Mary to walk into it. A servant offered to smuggle Mary’s letters in a beer bottle from a local brewery. The servant and the brewer were in Walsingham’s pay. Every letter she sent or received was intercepted and decoded by Walsingham’s private secretary, Thomas Phelippes. [Music] Six months after the setting up of the “barrel post,” Mary received a letter from Anthony Babington. Babington came from a rich Derbyshire family. He was young, Catholic, and idealistic, and he’d organized a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Babington saw the murder in terms of high heroics. He even had a group portrait painted of himself and his fellow conspirators with the motto, “We are comrades, united in danger.” It was intended to be their monument; instead, it was their tombstone. Babington became involved in the plot against Elizabeth mainly due to his connections with Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned early on in her life and while he was a young page in her service. We can only believe that he had a crush on her and was infatuated by her, if not besotted, which remained for most of his life and her life. Anthony was politically naive; he was very impressionable, and he was used by conspirators who had much stronger beliefs than he had on the wider European front. Babington wrote to Mary. [Music] Mary’s reply, when it came a few days later, was clear enough: “The affair being thus prepared, and forces in readiness within and without the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work upon the accomplishment of their design. I may suddenly be transported out of this place.” At last, there was evidence enough to send Mary to the scaffold. Babington and his fellow conspirators were arrested a few days later. They were tortured, tried for treason, and sentenced to a traitor’s death. Pressure from the country and Council was now building up; they were determined to have Mary’s head. And Elizabeth was forced to agree to a trial. The trial was to take place at Fotheringhay Castle, and Burleigh himself threw out the seating plan. But despite these careful preparations, the trial nearly didn’t take place at all. Mary Queen of Scots absolutely refused to accept the jurisdiction of the court. “I am NOT a subject,” she said, “and would rather die a thousand deaths than acknowledge myself as one.” Instead, she was a sovereign Prince and so answerable to God alone. Elizabeth retaliated: “You have, in various ways, attempted to take my life and to bring my kingdom to destruction. I have never proceeded so harshly against you; on the contrary, I have maintained you and preserved your life. It is my will that you arm southern nobles and peers of the Kingdom as if I were myself present.” [Music] Eventually, a form of words was found that enabled the trial to go ahead. Mary defended herself.
A Blee. In two days of examination, she denounced the Babbington letters as forgeries, and she managed to wriggle out of the most incriminating questions. But finally, she was cornered; she could only say that she had to be believed because she spoke on the word of a prince. This cut no ice with her judges. The court adjourned to Westminster for the final decision. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: death.
Elizabeth now had to decide Mary's fate. The two queens had never met, although Mary had been Elizabeth's prisoner for twenty years. Elizabeth agonized over the decision. She was reluctant to execute Mary because she, too, was a member of the royal club; cutting her head off might set a very unwelcome precedent. Elizabeth asked Mary's jailer, Sir Amyas Paulette, to assassinate her by poison or suffocation so that the Queen would not have to take responsibility for her death. Paulette refused.
As Elizabeth hesitated, England seethed with rumors. The Spanish had invaded; London had been burned. Finally, on the 1st of February 1587, Elizabeth signed the death warrant. Seven days later, the sentence was carried out in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle. Mary herself behaved with a theatrical courage. She included Elizabeth in her final prayers. Then her ladies removed her outer clothes to reveal a petticoat of scarlet, the Catholic color of martyrdom. She knelt at the block, but the executioner bodged his task; he took two strokes of the axe to remove her head. Still worse, when he tried to hold up the head, he found himself clutching only a wig, whilst the head, with its thin grain stubble, rolled at his feet. England celebrated Mary's death. Elizabeth grieved; her countenance changed, her words faltered. She gave herself over to GUI, putting herself into mourning weeds and shedding abundance of tears.
What a performance it was, even more complex and self-contradictory than her usual behavior. Some of those tears were real. Elizabeth had been profoundly reluctant to execute Mary, and when the deed was actually done, she was horrified. But they were also tears of rage. She strongly suspected that she'd been jumped into the action by the council. They'd met secretly and decided not to tell her that the warrant had been dispatched to Fotheringhay. That's why she tore strips off her ministers and Secretary William Davison in particular, who'd actually dispatched the warrant. He was imprisoned, fined, and even threatened with hanging. But finally, they were crocodile tears as well. By exaggerating her grief and scapegoating Davison, Elizabeth was trying to deflect responsibility from where it really and finally lay—with her.
The news of Mary's execution exploded across the Catholic world. It gave Philip of Spain the excuse he needed to declare war on the heretic Queen. Philip ordered the Duke of Parma to prepare an army in the Netherlands for the invasion of England. The Armada would sail from Spain to collect Parma's force and land them on the English coast. Philip's deadly intentions were now secret no longer. Reluctantly, Elizabeth ordered that the English fleet be readied for the threat. Even now, she hoped to avoid war. She tried negotiating with Parma as the Armada set sail, but there was no mood for compromise amongst her Catholic opponents. "She's an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin, of an infamous courtesan," Cardinal William Allen judged in 1588.
English lookouts scour the horizon. The enemy sails—they sighted them on July the 19th. The Spanish did not really expect to be challenged on their voyage of the Channel. The English fleet was half the size of the Armada, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in design. The English ships were much smaller than the Spanish ships. The Spanish ships tended to have large fore castles and large after castles, which were fortified areas on the ship where they could house men when they engaged in battle, men who could then board other ships. But as the rigs were fairly small—in fact, too small really for powering the ships along—it meant that the Spanish ships were largely only used in trade, wooden sailing, in following the routes between Spain and the Americas, rather than in tactical fighting within the English Channel. And I think that is where the English ships scored, because they were relatively smaller and therefore more maneuverable and had the tactical advantage.
The English still weren't ready to engage the Spanish fleet head-on. Sir Francis Drake, now promoted to Vice Admiral, favored skirmishing tactics. As the Armada sailed up the Channel, there was a scatter of vicious dogfights.
Elizabeth went on a morale-boosting visit to her troops on land. Finally, she had found a rhetorical way of reconciling the paradox of being a woman and being a leader in war. "I am come amongst you, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all, to lay down for God and for my kingdom and for my people my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and think foul scorn that Spain, or any Prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms."
But Elizabeth did not need to take up arms herself. The English had a secret weapon; they called it the hellburner. They packed five ships with pitch and timber, set fire to them, and put them adrift amongst the Spanish galleons. That was panic. Many of the Spanish ships up anchor and fled and were scattered by the wind. Incredibly, Medina Sidonia, the Spanish Admiral, managed to reunite his scattered ships; they even resumed their powerful crescent formation. Then, off Gravelines on the coast of the Netherlands, the two fleets, for the first time, came into battle at close quarters. Each side used its favorite tactics. The Spaniards tried to board; the English brought their heavy guns into play at close quarters, and it was the English guns that won the day. They killed thousands of Spaniards, and they did terrible damage to the structure of the Spanish ships. Only a handful actually went down. The winds and the weather now finished what the English fleet begun. Many of the Spanish ships were wrecked off the coasts of the British Isles as they tried to find their way home.
The defeat of the Armada was England's and Elizabeth's finest hour. Little wonder that she had this portrait painted as a symbolic memorial. Elizabeth was now mistress of the seven seas as well as of her own people.
Elizabeth had entered the war against Spain with a deep sense of foreboding, but she'd emerged triumphant. Above all, she'd shown that a woman could be an inspirational leader in war as well as in peace. Of course, the weather had played its part in the victory over the Armada; God's winds blew, and they were scattered, as it said on the back of the commemorative medal. But this fact does nothing to diminish the extent of the English victory or the scale of Spain's defeat and humiliation. At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, the heralds had proclaimed that she was Empress from the Orkney Isles to the Pyrenean mountains. Then the claim to English overlordship of the Seas was empty bombast. With the defeat of the Armada, it became sober reality. It was an astonishing achievement; the only problem now was living up to it.