Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (17 page)

Compared to the canniness with which her English cousin Elizabeth steered clear of marital entanglement, Mary was worse than
impulsive: she was self-destructive. Within a year of Rizzio’s murder she was romantically involved with another homicidal
aristocrat, James, Earl of Bothwell, who devised nothing less than the blowing-up of the bedridden Darnley who, after a youth
of debauchery, had been laid low
by the ravages of syphilis. Mary herself may even have been complicit in the murder. She had spent the evening of io February
1567 visiting her ailing husband in his house at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, before leaving for Holyrood Palace between ten
and eleven o’clock. Two hours after midnight all Edinburgh was rocked as the house exploded. Darnley’s lifeless body was found
in the garden.

Mary’s marriage to Bothwell only three months later confirmed Scottish suspicions of her involvement, and ended her last chance
of being a credible ruler. In July that year she was compelled to abdicate in favour of her thirteen-month old son James (Darnley’s
child), and in May 1568 at the age of twenty-five she fled from Scotland in disgrace to throw herself on the mercy of her
cousin Elizabeth.

Elizabeth had been viewing Mary’s melodramatic adventures across the border with fascination — and not a little rivalry. Nine
years younger than Elizabeth, Mary was generally reckoned a beauty, and this piqued the jealousy of the English Queen. In
1564 she had cornered the Scottish ambassador Sir James Melville, putting his diplomacy to the test as she cross-questioned
him on the looks of his Scottish mistress. Elizabeth got crosser and crosser as Melville dodged her traps — until he let slip
that Mary was taller.’Then she is too high,’ exclaimed Gloriana in triumph.’I myself am neither too high, nor too low!’

Mary’s arrival as an uninvited asylum seeker placed Elizabeth in a dilemma. England could hardly provide money, still less
an army, to restore the deposed Queen — this would impose an unpopular Catholic monarch on Scotland’s staunch Protestants.
But since blood made Mary next in line to Elizabeth’s
own throne, she could not, either, be allowed to leave England lest she tall into the clutches of France or Spain, The Queen
of Scots would have to be kept in some kind of limbo,

To start with, the fiction was maintained that Mary, as a cousin and anointed monarch, was being received in England as Elizabeth’s
honoured guest. Yet Elizabeth did not visit Mary — the two women never met — and as the Queen of Scots was shifted across
the north of England from one residence to another, it became clear that she was under house arrest. With a bodyguard that
was curiously large for a cousin who was supposed to be trusty and beloved, Mary was shuttled from Carlisle to Bolton, then
on to Tutbury in Staffordshire.

The transfer that made her captivity plain occurred late in 1569, when the Catholics of the north rose in revolt. As the rebels
burned the English prayer books and Bibles, restoring church altars so as to celebrate the Roman mass in all its splendour,
the earls who headed the rising dispatched a kidnap squad to Tutbury. Only in the nick of time did William Cecil have Mary
whisked southwards to the fortified walls of the city of Coventry, and though the revolt collapsed, the Queen of Scots was
now clearly identified as the focus of Catholic hopes. In February 1570, Pope Pius V formally excommunicated Elizabeth and
called on all Catholics to rise up, depose and, if necessary, murder the‘heretic Queen’.

The papal decree was to become Mary’s death sentence, but Elizabeth could not bring herself to go along with the simple but
ruthless solution proposed by her anxious councillors, and particularly by her spymaster Sir Francis
Walsingham — England would not be safe, in their opinion, until the Queen of Scots was dead. In the meantime, the bodyguards
kept moving Mary onwards — from Coventry to Chatsworth, then on to Sheffield, Buxton, Chartley, and finally to Fotheringhay
Castle in Rutland, now Northamptonshire. As she travelled, Walsingham’s network of secret agents kept working to entrap her
and, after a decade and a half, in October 1586 they had finally secured the evidence they required.

Imprudently, Mary had been plotting with fellow-Catholics through coded letters smuggled in waterproof pouches hidden in beer
casks. But the whole scheme was of Walsingham’s invention — a sting devised to incriminate Mary — and when she was put on
trial at Fotheringhay it was revealed that his cipher clerks had been decoding her messages within hours of her sending them
off.

Mary Queen of Scots was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death on 4 December that year. But again Elizabeth hesitated,
and for weeks she could not bring herself to sign the death warrant — and then only in a contradictory fashion, first ordering
her secretary William Davison to seal it, then instructing that it should not be sealed until further ordered. It was her
councillors who took matters into their own hands by sealing the warrant and sending it north without informing the Queen.

On 8 February 1587, in the great hall at Fotheringhay, Mary went to the block with dignity, dressed dramatically in a blood-red
shift, her eyes blindfolded with a white silk cloth. She was praying as the axe descended, and as the second
blow severed lier head, some witnesses maintained they could see her lips still moving in silent prayer.

’God save the Queen!’ cried the executioner — but as he reached down to grasp Mary’s head, her auburn hair came off in his
hands: her wigless, grey-stubbled head fell to the ground and rolled unceremoniously across it.

Down in London, Elizabeth threw a fit of sorrow, surprise and anger at the death of her royal cousin. She raged at the councillors
who had sent off the warrant without her final authority. She dispatched Secretary Davison to the Tower for eighteen months,
and he was never restored to royal favour. When it came to necessary brutalities, Gloriana was as skilled at finding scapegoats
as her father Henry VIII.

I
N ENGLAND HIS NAME DESCRIBED A MALE
waterfowl that might be seen bobbing placidly on the village pond — but in Spanish the drake became a dragon. El Draque was
a name with which to frighten naughty children, a fire-breathing monster whose steely, glittering scales‘remained impregnable’,
wrote the sixteenth-century dramatist Lope de Vega,‘to all the spears and all the darts of Spain’.

By the 1580s, Francis Drake’s reputation provoked panic in the seaports of Spain and in its New World colonies. In a series
of daring raids, the rotund Devon-born pirate had pillaged Spanish harbours, looted Catholic churches and hijacked King Philip’s
silver bullion as it travelled from the
mines of the Andes to the Spanish treasury in Seville. In his most famous exploit, during 1577-80, Drake had sailed round
the world claiming California for Queen Elizabeth and arriving home laden with treasure. No wonder she knighted him — and
that his ship the
Golden Hind,
moored at Dept-ford near London, became the tourist attraction of the day.

Now, on 20 July 1588, Sir Francis was taking his ease at Plymouth with the other commanders of the English navy, preparing
to confront the great war fleet —
armada
in Spanish — that Philip II had marshalled to punish the English for their piracy and Protestantism. According to the chronicler
John Stow, writing a dozen years after the event, the English officers were dancing and revelling on the shore as the Spanish
Armada hove into sight.

It was not until 1736, 148 years later, that the famous tale was published of how Drake insisted on finishing his game of
bowls before he went to join his ship. But the story could well be true. The tide conditions were such on that day in 1588
that it was not possible to sail out of Plymouth Sound until the evening, and the Spanish ships were scarcely moving fast.
Indeed, their speed has been calculated at a stately walking pace —just two miles an hour — as they moved eastwards in a vast
crescent, heading for the Straits of Dover, then for the Low Countries, where they were planning to link up with the Duke
of Parma and his army of invasion.

According to folklore, the Spanish galleons were massive and lumbering castles of the sea that towered over the vessels of
the English fleet. In fact, the records show the chief fighting ships on both sides to have been of roughly similar size —
about a thousand tons. The difference lay in the ships’
designs, for while the English galleons were sleek and nippy, custom-made for piracy and for manoeuvring in coastal waters,
the Spanish ships were full-bellied, built for steadiness as they transported their cargo on the long transatlantic run.

More significantly, the English ships carried twice the cannon power of their enemies’, thanks, in no small part, to the zeal
of Henry VIII. Elizabeth’s polymath father had taken an interest in artillery, encouraging a new gun-building technology developed
from bell-founding techniques: in 1588 some of the older English cannon that blasted out at the Spanish galleons had been
recast from the copper and tin alloy melted down from the bells of the dissolved monasteries.

Popular history has assigned Francis Drake the credit for defeating the Spanish Armada. In fact, Drake almost scuppered the
enterprise on the very first night: he broke formation to go off and seize a disabled Spanish vessel for himself. The overall
commander of the fleet was Lord Howard of Effingham, and it was his steady strategy to keep pushing the Spanish up the Channel,
harrying them as they went.‘Their force is wonderful great and strong,’ wrote Howard to Elizabeth on the evening of 29 July,
and yet we pluck their feathers by little and little.’

Ashore in England, meanwhile, the beacons had been lit. A chain of hilltop bonfires had spread the news of the Armada’s sighting,
and the militia rallied for the defence of the shires. Lit today to celebrate coronations and royal jubilees, this network
of‘fires over England’ dated back to medieval times. Seventeen thousand men rapidly mustered in the south-east, and early
in August Queen Elizabeth travelled to inspect them at Tilbury as they drilled in preparation for
confronting Parma’s invasion force. According to one account, the fifty-four-year-old Queen strapped on a breastplate herself
to deliver the most famous of the well-worded speeches that have gilded her reputation:

I am come amongst you, as you see… in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all… I know I have the
body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and the stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think it foul
scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm
… We
shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, my kingdom and my people.

By the time Elizabeth delivered this speech, on 9 August 1588, the famous victory had already been won. Several nights previously,
Howard had dispatched fire ships into the Spanish fleet as it lay at anchor off the Flanders coast, and in the resulting confusion
the Spanish had headed north, abandoning their rendezvous with Parma. Fleeing in front of their English pursuers, they took
the long way home, heading round the top of Scotland and Ireland. Almost half the Armada, including many of the best warships,
managed to make it back to Spain. But over eleven thousand Spaniards perished, and the great crusade to which the Pope and
several Catholic nations had contributed ended in humiliation.

Drake himself died eight years later on a raiding expedition in the Caribbean that went disastrously wrong. He was buried
at sea, and great was the celebration when the news of his death reached Spain. In England, however, he
became an instant hero, inspiring implausible tales of wizardry. According to one, he increased the size of his fleet by cutting
a piece of wood into chips, each of which became — hey-presto! — a man-o’-wan

His legend has been revived particularly at times of national danger. In the early 1800s, when Napoleon’s troops were poised
to cross the Channel, an ancient drum was discovered which was said to have travelled everywhere with Drake, and the Victorian
poet Sir Henry Newbolt imagined the old sea dog dying in the tropics on his final voyage, promising to heed the summons whenever
England had need of him:

Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

Strike et when your powder’s runnin low-,

If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,

An, drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.