The Spanish Armada (5 page)

The proclamation ended, somewhat ambiguously, with the traditional words: ‘God save the Queen’.

However, beyond the two earls’ tenantry, there was little enthusiasm for rebellion – perhaps painful memories of Henry VIII’s vicious retribution against the Pilgrimage of
Grace three decades before lingered on amongst the yeomen’s grandsires. So when the insurgents concentrated at Bramham Moor, west of Tadcaster, north Yorkshire, on 16 November, only 3,800
ill-armed infantry and 1,600 better equipped cavalry could be mustered.
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The raggle-taggle foot soldiers hardly resembled an all-conquering army
and Northumberland and Westmorland began to be assailed by doubts. Discretion being the better part of valour, they decided to head home with barely a shot fired.

Meanwhile, the new Spanish ambassador in London, the wily Don Guerau de Spes, was aghast that the rebels had not marched on the capital, as he sensed something approaching
panic in Elizabeth’s government’s reaction to the uprising. The City of London had raised two thousand men ‘of mean sort’ for the royalist army now gathering in
Leicestershire; there was a shortage of horses and the queen was trying desperately to borrow money from foreign merchants to pay for her hastily recruited army.
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There were whispers that Elizabeth planned to establish a last-ditch redoubt at Windsor Castle and had ordered infantry there as her bodyguard. Frustrated at the slow progress
in restoring her rule in the north, the queen could only order the removal of Northumberland’s banner as a traitor from his stall as a Garter Knight in St George’s Chapel,
Windsor.
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Would the uprising spread? ‘The Catholics in Wales and the west have not yet followed the example of those in the north, although it is said they are about to do so,’ de Spes
reported to Philip in Spain.
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The Spanish king pondered over the ambassador’s dispatch as he sat in his austerely furnished study within the
palace of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in the Sierra de Guadarrama, 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Madrid. He had regarded English Catholics as special kindred since his marriage to Mary I, so he was
cautiously pleased by news of the uprising. Philip wrote immediately to his captain-general, Fernando Alvárez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, busy suppressing Protestantism in the Spanish
Netherlands, musing that force might now be needed to drag Elizabeth back to the Catholic faith:

Philip was hardly delighted that Mary Queen of Scots, with her close ties to the French monarchy, could now become Queen of England – but his
unqualified fidelity to Holy Mother Church overrode such diplomatic misgivings. Her accession, he declared, ‘would be very agreeable to the Pope and all Christendom and would encounter no
opposition from anyone’.
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Back in England, despite their retreat, the northern rebellion was still alive and kicking. In the first week of December, more than 4,500 rebels besieged Sir George Bowes, a grizzled veteran of
the Scottish border wars, in Barnard Castle where he suffered a mass desertion by troops of his garrison who jumped over the low walls of his defensive outworks, some killing themselves in the
process. Others treacherously opened his gates to the insurgents and he was forced to surrender on generous terms that permitted him to take four hundred of his men unmolested into
Yorkshire.
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Another rebel victory came with the easy capture of the port of Hartlepool, where the ruinous defensive walls had collapsed in places.
The rebels hoped that Spanish troops would soon land there as reinforcements. These were forlorn hopes indeed.

Elizabeth’s revenge was drawing ever nearer.

Advance elements of her ten-thousand-strong army reached the freezing banks of the River Tees on 16 December and the demoralised earls stood down their infantry and fled first to Hexham, then
across the Scottish border, seeking sanctuary from their queen’s retribution. Cecil wrote to Sadler on Christmas Day, employing a contrived hunting analogy to describe the royalist
forces’ pursuit of the fugitives:

Even now, there was optimism amongst England’s enemies that this flight was merely a timely strategic withdrawal. The Venetian ambassador in France, Alvise Contarini,
reported as late as mid-January 1570 that the insurgents were marching on the border town of Berwick to establish a winter base there ‘and seeing that every day their forces continue to
augment, they expect to be stronger . . . by the spring’.
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De Spes in London soon realised the bleak truth: ‘The
Catholics are . . . ashamed that their enterprises should have turned out so vain . . . [They] are lost by bad guidance and although they are undertaken with impetus, they are not
carried through with constancy,’ he admitted ruefully.
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The brutal aftermath was that Northumberland was betrayed to the Earl of Moray and ignominiously handed over to the English authorities in return for £2,000 in coin. He was beheaded at
York in 1572.
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Westmorland fled to the Spanish Netherlands and, his estates forfeited, survived only on hand-outs from Spain.
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Elizabeth jubilantly informed the French ambassador that she had completely defeated the rebels and pardoned the population in Yorkshire and
Durham,
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claiming to ‘have always been of our own nature inclined to mercy’. But behind the polite language of diplomacy, she had
demanded bloodshed and urged her generals to put to death, under martial law, any captured rebels. More than eight hundred were executed, mainly those ‘of the meanest
sort’.
²⁸

Sussex feared it was taking too long to hang the miscreants and dreaded that ‘the queen’s majesty will find cause [for] offence’. He told Bowes on 19 January that ‘the
queen does much marvel . . . that she does not hear from me that the executions [are] not ended. Therefore I heartily pray you to expedition for I feel this lingering will breed [her] displeasure
to us both.’ The scale of vengeance was such that Sir Thomas Gargrave suspected that these judicial killings ‘will leave many places naked and without inhabitants’.
²⁹
The fearful destruction visited upon the homes and property of the insurgents ensured that the economy of this part of England would not recover for almost
two centuries.

The danger to the crown posed by Mary Queen of Scots may have been averted but Cecil knew it remained dormant and ever-present. Elizabeth’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, lived up to his reputation
for plain-speaking by warning her bluntly on 30 January 1570:

As in much of the Vatican’s dealings with the Tudor monarchy, Pope Pius V acted too slowly to assist the abortive Catholic uprising. On 25 February 1570 he signed the
papal bull
Regnans in Excelsis
,
which excommunicated Elizabeth – ‘that servant of all iniquity’ – and deprived her of any ‘pretended
right’ to the English throne that she had so ‘monstrously usurped’. This was not only a religious sanction but also a very personal attack. Pius carefully catalogued
Elizabeth’s every sin in a veritable litany of heresy and cruelty. By ‘main force’ she had destroyed the true religion; oppressed ‘the professors of the Catholic
faith’; compelled her subjects ‘to submit to her accursed laws to abhor the authority of the Roman pontiff and to acknowledge herself alone as mistress in both temporal and spiritual
matters’. She had ‘cast many bishops and prelates into prison, where after many sufferings they had miserably perished’. Furthermore, Pius declared:

So, in wielding his sword of anathema, the Pope had instructed Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects that to obey her or her laws would automatically invoke their own
excommunication – ‘utter separation from the unity of the body of Christ’. With this admonition, the Holy Father had sown sedition in the green fields of England and made every
English Catholic a potential traitor in the eyes of the queen’s ministers. Some, they reasoned, could become her assassins.

Publication of the bull was naturally prohibited in England but a few months later, a copy was cheekily nailed on to the garden gate of the Bishop of London’s home in St Paul’s
churchyard in the small hours of the morning. The perpetrator was John Felton of Southwark, a prosperous Catholic gentleman whose wife had been a maid of honour to Mary I. Felton, a ‘man of
little stature and of a black complexion’, was arrested within twenty-four hours, tortured, and executed near where he pinned up the felonious document. He reportedly cried out Jesus’
name when the public hangman held aloft his still beating heart, as the grim sentence meted out to traitors – hanging, drawing and quartering – was bloodily carried out.
³²

New penal laws were passed in April 1570 to isolate and prosecute the religious zealots. The Second Treasons Act of Elizabeth’s reign broadened the crime of treason to encompass the
‘imagining,
inventing, devising, or intending the death or destruction, or any bodily harm’ to the queen ‘or to deprive or depose her’ from the
‘style, honour or kingly name of the imperial crown of this realm’. It also became treasonous to claim that Elizabeth was ‘a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or a usurper of
the crown’.
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A second Act of the same Parliamentary session criminalised the importation of papal bulls or ‘writings, instruments and
other superstitious things from the See of Rome’.
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Non-attendance at church services was now viewed in more sinister light and regular
worship according to Protestant rites became a test of loyalty.
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The papal attack on Elizabeth coincided with another plot to overthrow her. Within days of the Duke of Norfolk’s release in August 1570 from the Tower into house arrest at his London
townhouse at the former Carthusian monastery in Charterhouse Square, he was reluctantly embroiled in a plot involving the Florentine double agent Roberto Ridolphi, who begged him to write to the
Duke of Alba, to seek assistance for Mary Queen of Scots. She was still outwardly keen to wed Norfolk, encouraging him to escape on 31 January 1571 – ‘as she would do [herself],
notwithstanding any danger’ – so that they could be swiftly married.
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On 12 April, Charles Bailly, a young Fleming in her service, was arrested in the Channel port of Dover and found to be carrying seditious books from Catholic exiles. Two letters, ‘hid
behind his back secretly’, were addressed to one of Mary’s agents, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, and sent from Ridolphi, now safely living in Brussels. Under torture, Bailly admitted
that the Italian had departed England on 25 March carrying Mary’s appeals to Alba, Philip and the Pope urging a Spanish invasion of England. A copy of the invasion plan had been lodged with
Norfolk, together with a damning list of forty nobles, identified as Mary’s secret supporters. Alongside each name was a number, to be used in coded correspondence by the duke.
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Ridolphi’s loquacious efforts to convince Alba to invade England fell on stony ground. During a somewhat one-sided conversation, he talked enthusiastically of how Spain should supply six
thousand men equipped with twenty-five cannon to reinforce an English Catholic army (led by Norfolk) which would free Mary and seize Elizabeth. Alba was singularly unimpressed, reporting to Philip
that Ridolphi was a ‘great babbler’ and had learned his lessons ‘parrot fashion’. A
better strategy, he suggested, would be that Spanish military
assistance should be provided only after the English Catholics had risen and when Elizabeth was already ‘dead . . . or else a prisoner’. He added: ‘We may tell [Norfolk] that
these conditions being fulfilled, he shall have what he wants.’
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Agents working for Cecil, now raised to the peerage as Lord Burghley, scoured Norfolk’s London home, Howard House, for evidence of his guilt, watched haughtily by a silent but fretful
duke. Their search was soon successful: his codebook was discovered hidden under some roof tiles, and deciphered documents were found beneath a rug outside the duke’s bedchamber. Sir Ralph
Sadler warned a ‘submissive’ Norfolk that for ‘his obstinate dealing and denial of his great faults, her majesty was sore offended . . . and had determined to use him more
severely’.
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