The Spanish Armada (6 page)

The duke was duly returned to the Tower. As Norfolk sat desolately considering his fate, his retainers were questioned in less salubrious accommodation within the grim fortress. Old William
Barker, one of the duke’s secretaries, was ‘three or four times examined but hitherto showed [himself] obstinate and a fool’, Sadler reported. Threatened with the terrors of the
rack, Barker’s resistance and loyalty disappeared like snow melting in the sunshine. This hellish contraption was the first choice of torture in the sixteenth century to persuade obdurate
prisoners to cooperate. It had two windlasses or capstans positioned at each end of a long wooden table, attached to chains and shackles for the victim’s arms and legs. Turning them
agonisingly stretched and dislocated the limbs of those undergoing interrogation. The first Elizabethan rackmaster was Thomas Norton, a lawyer turned playwright and poet, nicknamed with Tudor black
humour, ‘the pincher with pains’. He enjoyed his work and was later accused of leaving the Jesuit priest Alexander Briant ‘one good foot longer than ever God made him’ after
a sess ion on the rack.
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The Spanish ambassador in London reported that it was also common practice to drive iron spikes between the fingernails
and the quick – a torture that his countrymen imagined ‘would be employed by the Anti-Christ, as the most dreadfully cruel of all’.
⁴¹

No wonder that Barker talked, his words tumbling out in his anxiety to please his questioners. The old man revealed Ridolphi’s pie-in-the-sky plans for invasion: Spanish troops would land
at
Dumbarton in Scotland, at Leith, near Edinburgh, and at the Essex port of Harwich.
⁴²
Perhaps Scottish Protestants were
going to taste Spanish Toledo steel as well as their English cousins.

Norfolk was doomed. Only the grim formalities of legal process stood between him and the scaffold. He was found guilty of treason by his peers at Westminster Hall on 16 January 1572, despite his
claims of perjured evidence by his servants, and he was executed on Tower Hill on 2 June that year – mercifully with just one blow of the headsman’s axe. He had told the crowd around
the scaffold:

De Spes, the Spanish ambassador, was expelled from England after Elizabeth admonished him angrily that he was ‘secretly seek[ing] to inflame our realm with
firebrands’.

Notwithstanding the vehemence of Pius V’s rhetoric, Elizabeth and her council were opposed to persecuting her Catholic subjects on the basis of their religion alone. Their policies drew a
sharp distinction between the fanatical papist who worked assiduously to return England to Rome’s jurisdiction and those who secretly professed the Catholic faith and did not acknowledge the
queen’s spiritual supremacy but remained passive, or at best neutral, about papal authority.
⁴⁴

Despite this relatively moderate stance, by 1572, the substantial number of Catholics imprisoned in London was beginning to trouble Elizabeth’s Privy Council, which feared that hotbeds of
Catholic disaffection were being created within the capital’s many gaols.
⁴⁵
Banishing obstinate recusants overseas would only provide
unfettered opportunity for them to plot against queen and state. The solution was to establish what today we would recognise as internment camps to hold potential troublemakers at times of especial
danger to the state. This plan, first tabled in March 1572, suggested the dilapidated Wisbech Castle, in the Isle of Ely, as a suitable prison.
⁴⁶
There Catholics could be confined under guard, and as Elizabeth was always reluctant to dip into her exchequer, they would have to pay for their own accommodation and food.

Internationally, England had now become a beleaguered Protestant bulwark off the coast of Europe. The Spanish reign of terror against Protestants in the Low Countries
increased forebodings within Elizabeth’s government, which felt isolated and under constant threat from the Catholic powers. Her spies in the Netherlands reported that Alba was determined to
assist English Catholics,
⁴⁷
and de la Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in London, believed Alba’s agent in the city was in constant
touch with prominent Catholic families.
⁴⁸
More than fifty people within the royal court were said to be in his pay.

Catholic exiles were also actively working against Elizabeth, supported and encouraged by the governments that sheltered them.
A Treatise of Treasons
, published at Louvain (in
modern-day Belgium) in 1572, declared that heresy alone was creating disorder in England and would eventually lead to the destruction of all civilisation there. As a riposte, Burghley’s
proclamation of 1573 was the first to employ a palpable national threat as a means of appealing to the patriotism of Elizabeth’s subjects:

Some exiles were baffled why Spain had not yet attacked England to restore their faith. The Welshman Maurice Clenock, one of the colony in Louvain, explained their willingness
to accept foreign invasion:

His eagerness for an invasion was probably atypical among
English Catholics. Although they sought foreign assistance in their cause, most remained
suspicious of the motives in providing such help. Niccolò Ormanteo, Papal Nuncio to Spain, acknowledged that they ‘refuse all aid from abroad which might bring them under subjection,
but desire only just sufficient for the overthrow of their selfstyled queen and for replacing her by the other one from Scotland’.
⁵¹

An embittered memorandum in the Vatican archives, written in September 1570, probably by an exile living in Brussels, illustrates graphically both their consuming hatred for Elizabeth and the
resentful frustration of a lost existence amongst strangers in a lonely foreign land:

Sometimes, the long arm of Elizabeth’s intelligence network could reach out and strike at these Catholic fugitives. An easy target was Dr John Story, Regius Professor of
Canon Law at Oxford, who had used his home in Greyfriars, London, to interrogate Protestant suspects during Mary’s short reign. According to the evangelical polemicist John Foxe, Story
boasted in 1555 that ‘there has been yet never one burnt but I have spoken with and have been a cause of his dispatch’.
⁵⁵
He escaped
from the Marshalsea gaol and fled to Flanders in 1563, renounced his allegiance to Elizabeth and served as a customs officer in the Spanish Netherlands, receiving a pension from Philip. In 1570, he
was lured by English agents on to a ship in Antwerp harbour and was landed at the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth. At his trial in May 1571 he faced charges of high treason for supporting the
1569 rebellion and encouraging a Spanish invasion. Story claimed he was now a Spanish subject, citing the Biblical precedent: ‘God commanded Abraham to go forth from the
land and country where he was born, from his friends and kinfolks into another country.’ He had followed the prophet’s example to allay his conscience and ‘so forsake his country
and the laws of this realm . . .’ ‘Every man is born free,’ Story declared, ‘and he has the whole face of the earth before him to dwell and abide in where he likes
best.’
⁵⁶
Vengeance was not to be denied. His plea was rejected and he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 June 1571.
⁵⁷

Burghley also tried to discourage those considering fleeing the country by introducing legislation to confiscate their property. The Fugitives Act of 1571 declared that any subject who departed
England without licence and did not return within six months would forfeit the profits from their property, as well as losing their goods and chattels.
⁵⁸
But no legislation can quench the fire of religious faith. By 1575, there was a two-hundred-strong company of exiles, commanded by an English captain, in the Spanish army in
the Netherlands, all of whom had sworn allegiance to Philip. Their ranks were later swelled by Irish and Scottish Catholics.
⁵⁹

Another, more single-minded opponent of the Catholic cause in England now began to manipulate events. On 20 December 1573, Sir Francis Walsingham was appointed joint principal secretary of state
with Burghley, who was also lord treasurer. As a devout and radical Protestant he, like around a thousand others, had fled England after Mary’s accession to the throne, fearing persecution.
Elizabeth, whose own Protestant beliefs were insipid by comparison,
⁶⁰
believed him a ‘rank puritan’ and sometimes unfairly castigated
him for caring more for his fellow evangelicals than he did for England. The queen nicknamed him her ‘dark Moor’ because of his swarthy, brooding appearance.

She had little grasp of what febrile nightmares haunted him. As English ambassador to the French court, he had been a horrified witness to the terrors of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre
of Huguenots in Paris on Sunday 24 August 1572. More than three thousand Protestants were shot or hacked to death by a Catholic mob and disciplined troops of soldiers in a carefully planned pogrom
that began at dawn. The carnage continued into October with seventy
thousand killed in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyons, Rouen and Orléans. So many corpses floated in the
Rhône at Lyons that the river water was not drunk for three months.

Walsingham, together with a number of terrified fugitives, was besieged in his residency in the quai des Bernardins in Faubourg St Germain.
⁶¹
The
Huguenot general François de Beauvais was dragged out of the building and lynched by the Parisians.
⁶²
Eventually the ambassador was granted
protection by soldiers sent by the French king Charles IX
⁶³
and he managed to smuggle his wife and four-year-old daughter safely out of the
city.

In Rome, a new Pope, Gregory XIII, triumphantly called for public rejoicing and had a
Te Deum
sung to celebrate this famous victory over the heretics. He struck a medal to commemorate
the event with an image on its reverse of an avenging angel, armed with a cross and drawn sword, slaying the Huguenots.
⁶⁴
Giorgio Vasari was
commissioned to paint three frescoes portraying the destruction of the Protestants on the south wall of the Vatican’s Sala Regia state reception room, an antechamber to the Sistine
Chapel.
⁶⁵

Given Walsingham’s harrowing experience, it was predictable that after his appointment there would be strenuous efforts by Elizabeth’s government to punish Catholic recusants. Their
arrests and punishments increased by leaps and bounds.
⁶⁶

In addition to his role as secretary of state, Walsingham served as the queen’s spymaster. He created an astonishing organisation for covert action against enemies of the state, as well as
for counter-intelligence and espionage. He also established a network of informers to defeat domestic threats.
⁶⁷

But all these efforts failed to suppress recusancy in England, now bolstered and succoured by a succession of singularly brave seminary priests, smuggled into the realm to shore up the harassed
faithful.

The first to be captured was Father Cuthbert Mayne, arrested on 8 June 1577 in Probus, Cornwall.
⁶⁸
Papers found on him declared that if

Many more priests followed him to the traitor’s scaffold after being
betrayed by Walsingham’s agents or hunted down by his questing pursuivants
in the narrow, stinking streets of London or in cramped, cunningly disguised hiding places in country houses.

That same month, the new Bishop of London, John Aylmer, wrote to the secretary, warning that Catholicism was enjoying a worrying resurgence; he and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal,
had received complaints from their brother bishops that ‘the Papists do marvellously increase, both in number and in [the] obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and service of
God’.
⁷⁰