The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies

by Martin A. S. Hume

Medina Sidonia was the scapegoat (perhaps not undeservedly, though Parma should bear his share of blame), and as he went in state and comfort through Spain to his home in the south, the very children and old women in the streets jeered and spat upon him for the chicken-hearted coward who had disgraced their country in the eyes of the world. Only the over-burdened recluse in the Escorial was patient and resigned under the blow. He had, as he thought, done his best for the cause of God; and if for some inscrutable reason all his labour, his sacrifice, and his prayers were to be in vain, he could only suffer dumbly and bend his head to the Divine decree. One after the other the provinces and municipalities came to him with offers of money to repair the disaster. In November the national Cortes secretly sent him word, "that they would vote four or five millions of gold, their sons and all they possess, so that he may chastise that woman, and wipe out the stain which this year has fallen on the Spanish nation."[[2]] But the Cortes and the Town Councils always tacked upon their offers two conditions, born of their knowledge that peculation and mismanagement were largely responsible for the disaster of the Armada. "First that his Majesty will act in earnest; and secondly that their own agents may have the spending of the money which they shall vote, for in this way his Majesty will not be so robbed and all affairs will go far better."[[3]] But the last condition was one that Philip could never brook: the secret of his failure through life was that he wished to do everybody's work himself and he was smothered in details. Besides this there were difficulties, diplomatic and others, in the way, of which the people at large were unaware. The star of Henry of Navarre was rising, and all France was now alive to Philip's real object in the invasion of England. Philip knew that in any repetition of the attempt he would probably not have to confront England alone. So the cries for vengeance grew fainter, and national feeling was gradually turned purposely in other directions.

But these cries had been loud enough to reach England. Exaggerated rumours of the intention to renew the Armada were industriously sent from all quarters by zealous spies and agents, and an uneasy feeling grew that perhaps, after all, England had not finished her foe; for Elizabeth's advisers had no means of exactly gauging the depth of Philip's purse, and they knew the papal coffers were overflowing. It is true that immediate danger was over. The hasty English levies had been sent home again, bragging of the prowess they would have shown if the hated Spaniard had dared to land, and the panic and fright had given place to perfectly natural congratulations on the special protection vouchsafed by the Almighty to the Virgin Queen and her people. The heroics were over, and England was free, for the present at all events, to don its work-a-day garb again.

But the easy victory had inflamed men's minds. There had been very little fighting even on the fleet, and none at all on shore; and it is not pleasant to be balked of a set-to when all is ready, and to turn swords to bill-hooks without once fleshing them in an enemy's carcase. So the idlers in England who were loath to go to work again, the turbulent youngsters who were burning for an excuse to have a go at somebody, and the lavish gentlemen who were thirsting for loot, began on their side to talk about vengeance and retaliation. It mattered little to them that for a long course of years England had been the aggressor, and that Philip had exhausted all diplomatic and conciliatory means, including even secret murder, and the subornation of treason, in England, to arrive at a peaceful modus vivendi. For thirty years he had suffered, more or less patiently, robbery, insult, and aggression in his own dominions at the hands of Elizabeth. The commerce of his country was well-nigh swept from the sea by marauders sallying from English ports or flying the English flag. His own towns, both in the Spanish colonies and in old Spain, had been sacked and burnt by English seamen without any declaration of war; and rebellion in the ancient patrimony of his house had been, and was still, kept alive by English money and English troops.

Englishmen, then as now, had the comfortable and highly commendable faculty of believing their own side always to be in the right, and they knew in this particular case that it was much more profitable to plunder than to be plundered, to attack rather than defend. Elizabeth's caution and dread of being forced into a costly national war had over and over again caused her to discountenance this tendency on the part of some of her advisers, though she was ready enough to share the profits when her official orders were disregarded and her own responsibility evaded. Only the year before the Armada she had peremptorily ordered Drake, when he was ready to sail for Cadiz, not to imperil peace by molesting any of the territories or subjects of his Catholic Majesty. But when he came into Dartmouth, after "singeing the King of Spain's beard," towing behind him the great galleon San Felipe, with its 600,000 ducats in money, the Queen smiled upon him as if he had never disobeyed her. But for her positive orders of recall indeed, Drake on this very voyage would have made the Armada impossible by destroying, as he was able and ready to do, all the ships preparing for it in Lisbon harbour.

Only just before the Armada, in June, 1588, the idea of diverting and dividing Philip's forces by attacking him in his own country, ostensibly in the interest of Dom Antonio, the Portuguese pretender, was broached by Lord Admiral Howard in a letter to Walsingham, now in the Record Office. The scheme assumed definite form soon after the flight of the Armada, when, in September, Sir John Norris presented to the Queen a complete plan for fitting out an expedition with this object by means of a joint-stock company, which might be made both patriotic and profitable at the same time. Such a proposal was one eminently likely to suit the Queen, frugal and evasive of responsibility as she was. Norris and his associates suggested that the capital of the company should be £40,000 at least, out of which the Queen was to subscribe £5,000, and to appoint a treasurer, who was to supervise the expenditure of the whole. The Queen's contribution was only to be spent by permission of this treasurer, and if the enterprise fell through for want of subscribers she was to have her money returned to her or the munitions of war which had been purchased with it. The Queen, as was her wont, discreetly hesitated about it; and it was not until addresses had been presented from Parliament begging her to adopt some such action that she consented to take shares in the enterprise. But her treasury was well-nigh empty; and willing as she was that anything should be done to weaken her enemy, her poverty and Tudor frugality forbade her from undertaking to defray any very large portion of the cost herself. So she answered her petitioners that although she would sanction the enterprise and subscribe something to it, the main cost must be borne by others.

The story of this ill-starred expedition is usually disposed of in a few lines by English historians, although its success would have completely changed the status of England on the Continent. What is known of it hitherto is practically confined to the official documents and letters in the Record Office, which have only become accessible of late years, a few letters in the Bacon and Naunton Papers, and a curious tract printed in Hackluyt and ascribed to Captain Anthony Wingfield, minutely describing and apologising for the proceedings. The account was written in the same year, 1589, as the expedition took place; and the writer, whoever he was,[[4]] evidently witnessed the events he relates. His description is most graphic and interesting, and presents the English view of the enterprise in its best possible light, although all his explanations and palliations cannot succeed in conjuring away the utter failure of the expedition, or the bad conduct of the men who took part in it. The English account, however, all indulgently unflattering as it is, is not the only one extant. The publication of the latest volume of the Calendar of Venetian State Papers puts us into possession of the version of the affair current in the Spanish Court and conveyed to the King from his officers in Portugal; and in addition to this I possess the transcript of an unpublished contemporary manuscript which exists in the library of Don Pascual de Gayangos at Madrid, written by a Castilian resident in Lisbon at the time of the invasion, containing a detailed diary of the event.[[5]] This manuscript, I believe, has never yet received the attention it deserves from historians, but it is nevertheless valuable as confirming in the main the English accounts, but relating the incidents from an entirely different point of view. I have also recently discovered in the Pombalina Library in Lisbon still another contemporary manuscript diary of the English invasion, written by a Portuguese gentleman in Lisbon who was present at the scenes he describes, and whose standpoint is widely different from those of the Castilian and the Englishman.[[6]] The Spaniard is full of scorn and contempt for the chicken-hearted Portuguese in Lisbon who, though sympathising with the native pretender, slunk into hiding at his approach; whilst the Portuguese diarist insists vehemently upon the loyalty of the Portuguese nobles to Philip, and ascribes the instability of the common people to their weakness and incredulity, to their fear of the anger of Saint Antonio if they opposed his namesake the pretender, to their desire to protect their wives and families, to any other reason but the obvious one that high and low, rich and poor, in the city were in a state of trembling panic from first to last, utterly cowed and appalled by the few Spaniards whom they hated as much as they feared.

In 1578, ten years before the Armada, the rash young King Sebastian of Portugal had disappeared for ever from the ken of men on the Moorish battlefield which had seen the opening and closing of his mad crusade. For centuries afterwards the Portuguese peasants dreamt of his triumphant return to lead to victory the hosts of Christendom. But he came not, unless indeed one of the many claimants who long afterwards assumed his name was indeed he; and in the meanwhile, when his uncle, the childless Cardinal King Henry, died, Portugal wanted a monarch.

It had a large choice of descendants of Dom Manoel, grandfather of the lost Sebastian, but the Magna Charta of the Portuguese, the laws of Lamego (apocryphal as we now believe them to have been), were then universally accepted, and strictly excluded foreigners from the throne; and all the claimants were aliens but two, the Duchess of Braganza, daughter of the elder son of Dom Manoel, and doubtless the rightful heiress; and Dom Antonio, a churchman, prior of Ocrato, the questionably legitimate offspring of Manoel's second son.

When the Cardinal King died in 1580, Philip II., who for two years had been intriguing, suborning, and threatening the leading Portuguese to acknowledge his right to the succession, stretched out his hand to grasp the coveted crown. Of the two native claimants one, the Duchess of Braganza, was timid and unready; the other, Dom Antonio, was ambitious, bold, and eager. Around him all that was patriotic grouped itself. The poorer classes bitterly hated the foreigner, and particularly the Spaniard, whose King was really the only other serious claimant to the throne. The churchmen were devotedly attached to the ecclesiastical claimant, the nobles were Portuguese before all, and Antonio was acclaimed the national sovereign. But not for long; the terrible Alba swept down upon Lisbon, as years before he had come down upon the Netherlands, and crushed the life out of Portuguese patriotism. There was no religious question to stiffen men's backs, and no William of Orange to command them here. The Portuguese were made of different stuff from the stubborn Dutchmen, and Alba rode roughshod over them with but little resistance. Antonio was soon a fugitive, hunted from town to town, holding out for weeks in one fortress, only to be starved into another; proclaimed a bastard and a rebel, with a great price set upon his head; and yet for eight long months he wandered amongst the mountain peasantry, as safe from betrayal as was Charles Edward amongst the Scots Highlanders. At last Antonio gave up the game and fled to France, and thence to England. He came in July, 1581, and was immediately made much of by the Queen and Leicester. In vain did Mendoza, Philip's ambassador, demand his surrender as a rebel. The Queen said she had not quite made up her mind to help him, but she had quite decided that she would not surrender him to be killed. He was too valuable a card in her hand for her to let him go, and she made the most of him. He was treated with royal honours, and covert aid was given to him to strengthen the Azores, which were faithful to him. He had taken the precaution to bring away the crown jewels of Portugal with him, the spoils of the two Indies, but he had no money. The greedy crew that surrounded the Queen soon scented plunder, and money for warlike preparations, the purchase of ships, and the like, was speedily forthcoming on security of diamonds and pearls such as had rarely been seen in England. Elizabeth and Leicester, in presents and by a quibble, managed to grab some of the best; and most of those pledged to the London merchants ultimately fell into the Queen's hands.[[7]] Some were left with Walsingham for safety, but when they were demanded Walsingham alleged that he was personally responsible for some provisions Antonio had ordered, and made difficulties about giving them up. So long as the money lasted Antonio might spend it in England and leave his diamonds, but some specious excuse was always invented to prevent any openly hostile expedition to attack Philip leaving an English port under Antonio's banner. The rascally Dr. Lopez, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn for attempting to poison the Queen, was Dom Antonio's go-between and interpreter at Court, and he, greedy scamp as he was, made a good thing out of it until the money began to run short, when, in his usual way, he sold his knowledge to Philip, and attempted more than once to poison the unhappy Pretender. Antonio, indeed, was surrounded by spies though he knew it not,[[8]] but he found he was being frustrated, betrayed, and defrauded in every way in England, and his precious jewels the meanwhile were slipping away. So, in dudgeon with the greedy English, he fled to France and took such of his vessels as he could gain possession of with him. Catharine de Medici, the Queen-mother, was, for form's sake, a claimant to the Portuguese throne herself, but her shadowy claim was soon abandoned when she had an opportunity of cherishing such a thorn as Antonio promised to be in the side of her powerful late son-in-law Philip. Antonio still had jewels, and whilst they lasted he was treated with consideration and regal splendour in that gay and dissolute Court. He certainly got more return for them there than he got in England. Many were scattered in bribes amongst the easy-going ladies and painted mignons of the Court, and most of the rest went to pay for two costly naval expeditions fitted out in France in the Queen-mother's name, to enable Antonio to hold the islands faithful to him.[[9]] But Santa Cruz swooped down upon Terceira as Alba had pounced upon Lisbon, and the merry-making crew of revellers was soon disposed of. Then poor Antonio fell upon evil days. The emissaries of Philip, false friends of Antonio, tried time after time to put him out of the way by poison and the dagger, but he was ever on the watch; and for help and safety, still sanguine and hopeful, drifted from France to England and from England to France, the plaything in the game alternately of Elizabeth and Catharine, to be taken up or cast aside as the interests of the players dictated.

Philip's open attempt to invade England in 1588 seemed once more to offer him a chance of success, and his hopes rose again. One gem, and one only, of all the rich store he brought from Portugal was left to him; but that was the most precious of them all, the eighth greatest diamond in the world, the chief ornament in the Russian imperial crown to-day.[[10]] It was his last stake, and he decided to risk it on his chance. It was pledged to Monsieur de Sancy, whose name it ever afterwards bore, and with the money so raised Antonio started for England to tempt Elizabeth to link his desperate cause with her hopes of revenge upon Spain.