All the Queen's Men (33 page)

The decisive victory that the English fleet had gained was not without sacrifice. Throughout the actual battle, not a single ship was lost and casualties had been light; however, once back in harbour, exhaustion and disease played havoc among the fleet. ‘Sickness and mortality begins to grow wonderfully among them. It is most pitiful to see the men die in the streets of Margate',
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a distressed Howard reported to a largely indifferent Privy Council. Supplies of food and water had run so low that the fleet was ‘driven to such extremity that the Lord Admiral has been obliged to eat beans and many of the men to drink their own water',
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Sir Francis Walsingham was informed. He was one of the few members of the Queen's Privy Council to appreciate that the fleet had been continually handicapped by a shortage of supplies and ammunition. The Queen's and Burghley's parsimonious nature had led to victory being less decisive than Howard would have wished. ‘I am sorry the Lord Admiral was forced to leave the prosecution of the enemy through the wants he sustained. Our half-doings doth breed dishonour and leaveth the disease uncured,'
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apologized the Queen's Principal Secretary. The part Walsingham had played in supporting the war effort was much appreciated by those who had taken part in the action. ‘Walsyngham has fought more with his pen than many in the navy fought with their enemies',
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wrote Lord Henry Seymour. Regrettably, the attitude of the Queen and her Council towards those who had provided England with such a glorious victory appeared to be one of callous indifference. There was even a cynical school of thought among some of the Council that the more who died, the less would have to be paid – in a realistic Elizabethan world, once they had completed their task they were expendable.

The Queen had been distracted by private sorrow following the death of her beloved Earl of Leicester in September 1588, while Burghley and the Council were wholly preoccupied in joyous celebration and waging a gleeful public relations campaign exploiting England's triumph along with Spain's acute distress and embarrassment at such a catastrophic military setback in the eyes of the entire civilized world. The loss of so many Spanish ships and lives to the forces of nature was particularly helpful to the English propaganda exercise, as it clearly demonstrated the justness of their Protestant cause. God having punished Catholic Spain, the Almighty was manifestly on England's side and Elizabeth was His chosen creature. Burghley was determined to win the propaganda war just as decisively as Howard had won the battle at sea. Elizabeth's shameful disregard of the crews of her victorious fleet was in marked contrast to the far more humane conduct shown by the King of Spain towards the wretched survivors of his supposedly invincible Armada when they finally struggled ashore in Santander, San Sebastian, Corunna and various other ports along the northern coast of Spain. The pitiable Medina Sidonia lamented:

The hardships and sufferings which have been endured cannot be described to your Majesty, for they have been greater than have ever been seen in any voyage, and there is a ship among those arrived here whose people passed fourteen days without a drop of water to drink. In my flagship 180 persons have died of the sickness, including three of the four pilots on board, and all the rest are ill, many of them of an infectious disease; and all those in my personal service, to the number of 60, are dead or so sick that only two of them remained with me.
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Philip was very sympathetic, attaching no blame whatsoever to his Captain General of the Ocean Seas for his part in the debacle. Instead, his chief naval adviser, Diego Flores de Valdes, was made the scapegoat and sent to prison on his return to Spain, while those back at home who were thought to have contributed to the Armada's downfall by poorly fitting out and victualling its ships were punished accordingly. Reports were received in England of victuallers being shot, while others were imprisoned. Among the latter was Cervantes, whose accounts as a supply officer to the Armada were so poorly recorded that the investigating authorities were unable to distinguish between corrupt behaviour and sheer incompetence and therefore sentenced him to a long term in prison. Cervantes used this period of enforced confinement to write his definitive novel
Don Quixote
, one of the world's greatest literary works.

‘Thus the magnificent, huge, and mighty fleet of the Spaniards, such as sailed not upon the ocean seen many hundreds of years before, in the year 1588 vanished into smoke',
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noted the contemporary Dutch historian Emanuel van Meteren. The downfall of the Spanish Armada confirmed England's position in the eyes of the world as the dominant maritime nation and heralded the subsequent decline and fall of the Spanish Empire, which at its peak had been larger than that of Rome. At the same time, the Armada's defeat removed the immediate threat of invasion and encouraged the Dutch to intensify their efforts to gain independence. When this was finally achieved, they conveniently overlooked the part Elizabeth's forces had played and replaced Spain as England's greatest enemy, humiliating Charles II by burning his fleet at anchor off Chatham less than a century after the defeat of the Armada.

While England may have won a famous battle in 1588, this did not mean it had won the war. The English lacked sufficient resources to successfully exploit the victory over the Armada; at the same time the Spaniards were quick to rebuild and regroup. Elizabeth was to be at war with Spain for the rest of her life, as a global conflict remorselessly raged on land and sea for the next fifteen years. This proved extremely costly to the nation and progressively more meaningless to its citizens, as the euphoria of the Armada's defeat slowly faded into a distant memory. The English victory meant little to a new younger generation, impatient to get on with their lives and indifferent to former glories, as Queen and country inexorably became prisoners of an illustrious past.

Drake and Norris jointly led an unsuccessful expedition to Lisbon and the Azores in the year following the Armada's destruction. To a large extent their failure was Elizabeth's fault in setting them over-ambitious objectives – attacking Lisbon, and placing the Portuguese Pretender Don Antonio on the throne of Portugal while capturing a Spanish treasure fleet off the Azores, proved too much, even for the resourceful Drake. Nevertheless, the Queen was most displeased and Drake in deep disgrace. His Armada exploits were completely forgotten and Elizabeth did not employ him in any further commissions for a considerable period of time.

In 1596, Howard, Ralegh and Essex led a more successful sortie to Cadiz. The town was captured, many large ships destroyed and significant amounts of treasure fell into English hands. The Queen was better pleased, particularly when learning that her latest favourite, the Earl of Essex, had displayed considerable valour. Yet these types of action merely goaded the Spanish bull and completely failed to administer a decisive
coup de grâce
. Philip was to build two more Armadas, one in 1596, and another the following year, only to see them beaten back by storms, causing severe losses. The King died not long afterwards, yet even the demise of the Queen's long-time adversary failed to end the war. A farcical situation now existed whereby although this prolonged conflict was extremely costly to England, it had to be continued in the hope of capturing a substantial treasure ship to produce much-needed revenue for Elizabeth's kingdom; for example, a vessel such as the
Madre de Dios
which conveniently fell into English hands with a very valuable cargo in 1592. This was a highly unorthodox and unsatisfactory way of improving the country's financial affairs, and it was not surprising that the tidy-minded Robert Cecil speedily concluded a peace treaty with Spain shortly after the Queen had died in 1603. The Spaniards had been equally anxious to conclude hostilities and relationships between the two countries soon improved to a point where James I's son, later Charles I, was able to journey to Madrid to woo the Spanish King's daughter.

War had also dragged on in both the Netherlands and France, where the Queen's forces under Lord Willoughby were supporting the Huguenot king Henry IV after his predecessor Henry III had been assassinated by a monk in 1589. English troops fought ineffectively against Spanish soldiers in Normandy and Brittany. Among their number was the Earl of Essex, who childishly saw war as a glorious game to be pursued energetically in all directions regardless of the real military objectives. This campaign ended abruptly when the French King converted to Catholicism and made peace with Spain. His airy comment, ‘Paris is well worth a mass',
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must go down as one of history's more cynical exit lines. The Queen then made one of her rare major mistakes in appointing Essex as her commander in the long-running war with Ireland. Military reputations disappeared in the Irish bog with monotonous regularity and fearful atrocities were committed which produced the lasting legacy of our time. The following description of the actions of one Elizabethan officer in the late sixteenth century would now land him in front of a war crimes tribunal:

. . . his manner was that the heads of all those which were killed in the day should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night and should be laid on the ground by each side of the way leading to his own tent so none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a line of heads which he used ad terroram, the dead feeling nothing the more pains thereby and yet it did bring greater terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, kinsfolk and friends lie on the ground before their faces when they came to speak with the said Colonel.
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Even in the brutal world of the late sixteenth century, the conduct of the English troops in Ireland was particularly barbaric.

Essex floundered around Ireland in fruitless pursuit of the rebel leader Tyrone. The Earl became progressively more angry and disillusioned with the Queen's apparent lack of interest in his endeavours and unexpectedly returned to England without permission, bursting in on the Queen unannounced while she was still in her nightgown, looking decidedly unregal. The Earl's ill-considered action was highly embarrassing to Elizabeth and signalled the beginning of the end for the Queen's last great favourite in the final years of her reign.

Elizabeth was invariably quick to face up to her mistakes and Essex was speedily replaced as her commander in Ireland by his one-time friend and colleague in arms, Sir Charles Blount. They had previously campaigned together and Blount had been on Essex's ill-fated Islands Voyage in 1597, the Earl's sister, Lady Penelope Rich, being at one time Blount's mistress. Blount had now become Lord Mountjoy. He had first served under the Earl of Leicester at the age of fifteen in the Low Countries, had fought with ‘Black John' Norris in France and been a member of the English fleet which overcame the Armada.

Appointing Mountjoy to take charge of her military effort in Ireland heralded a return of the Queen's instinctive ability to pick good men to undertake difficult tasks on her behalf. First, he defeated a substantial Spanish invasion force in Munster during 1601 and following three years' relentless effort, he was able to flush Tyrone and his troops out into the open for a decisive battle near Kinsale, where the rebel leader was comprehensively defeated. Peace was finally restored in Ireland after many years of bloody but inconclusive conflict, there having been ‘an Irish problem' for the English since Norman times. Elizabeth had given Mountjoy her unswerving support throughout his arduous campaign. Thus it was sad that the news of his triumph was received in England several days after the Queen's death. Mountjoy later became the Earl of Devonshire and married Lettice Knollys, the attractive widow of the Earl of Leicester.

These numerous long-running conflicts involving English forces both on land and sea inevitably took a heavy toll on Elizabeth's men at war, as one by one they were struck down in battle. Grenville died on his ship
The Revenge
, while single-handedly engaging an entire Spanish fleet off the Azores in 1591; Frobisher was mortally wounded when storming a Spanish-held fort in Brittany the following year. The greatest of the Queen's sea captains, Hawkins and Drake, both perished on the Spanish Main some four years later. Thus in a period of barely five years Elizabeth had lost the services of almost all her most capable combat veterans. The professionals were gone, leaving only gentlemen playing at soldiers, the likes of Ralegh and Cumberland, who fought the good fight with rather more enthusiasm than skill.

The glory days were well and truly over for Elizabeth's men at arms. The English sovereign had lost most of her outstanding sword-bearers along with her most eminent statesmen, all dead and gone, no longer serving Queen and country. Time was also running out for Elizabeth – the Tudor age was finally drawing to a close, as its last and arguably most able monarch lay dying at her favourite palace at Richmond:

This yeere Queene Elizabeth departed this mortall life at Richemonde, the xxiiijth daie of March and in the morninge and that same daie by nyne of the clocke James the Kinge of Scotlande was pclaimed in London to be oure Kinge . . . at which tyme here was greate trivmphe with Bondfiers, gunnes and ringinge of bells with other kinds of musicke.
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The Queen was dead. Long live the King.

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