A Leader Among Men | Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada
I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.
— Excerpt of Queen Elizabeth I's speech to her troops at Tilbury, August 19, 1588 —
Only a few days ago, the man had been a shopkeeper in an Essex town. Now he stood in the ranks with the local butcher, a few farmers who had sold him some vegetables, and a tall red-haired blacksmith-turned-officer. He wore a helmet that was too large and fell over his eyes and a breastplate that felt like it belonged to a giant. In his right hand was a spear that was almost too heavy for him to carry, let alone thrust into an enemy's body. But the call had gone out across southern England for the town militias to assemble, and he was ready to do his duty and die for his country.
The ragtag group of soldiers listened to their officers talking amongst themselves and heard the words "Spanish" and "invasion." Their hearts beat faster in their chests as they saw more men marching onto the field. As the sun reached its height in the sky and the air grew warmer with each passing minute, they wondered what was going on.
Then, a hush fell as the militia saw a white horse with a figure clothed in steel riding atop it. At first, they could not make out who it was and assumed it was a knight, or perhaps an apparition from heaven. As the charger drew nearer, the shopkeeper noticed flowing red hair beneath the plumed helmet, and the rider's body seemed slight and—was it possible? It was a woman. Then a cry went up. "The Queen! The Queen is here!" It felt like a bolt of lightning crackled through the assembled host. Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith had taken the field with her countrymen. She wore a suit of armor beneath a flowing white gown, almost as if she had stepped from the pages of classical Greek myth. She spoke in a loud voice, and her clear words echoed across the field at Tilbury: "My loving people…"
Love and Death
The world-shaking events of August 1588 traced their origins back almost a century to the death of King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in the summer of 1485. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took the English throne as King Henry VII, and on his death 24 years later, his son Henry VIII became king. The new sovereign, a hulking red-headed man alternately viewed by historians as a noble king and a ruthless tyrant, consolidated his authority over the country, expanded its navy to protect the kingdom from its enemies in Europe, and broke away from the Catholic Church over Rome's refusal to grant him a divorce from his wife. Henry was desperate to produce a male heir and cashiered or murdered one spouse after another. Ultimately, his quest to secure his dynasty led to the birth of three English rulers: King Edward VI by his fourth wife Jane Seymour, Queen Mary I by his first wife Catherine of Aragon, and Queen Elizabeth I by his third wife Anne Boleyn. Each of these three sovereigns took actions that had a profound impact on the history of England, Europe, and the world.
Edward VI became king on his father's death in 1547 when he was only nine years old. As a Protestant during the turbulent early years of the English Reformation, he worked to protect the fledgling Anglican Church from Roman Catholic agents determined to destroy it. Edward was a sickly child and did not live long, but his reign did see the firm establishment of Anglicanism in the island kingdom. When he died in 1553, just a few months shy of his sixteenth birthday, a disputed succession arose that ended when the people acclaimed his half-sister Mary as their new queen. They did not seem to mind that Mary was a Catholic, and they could not foresee what was just over the horizon.
Queen Mary I, who was 37 when she took the throne, immediately reversed course in the English Reformation and suppressed the Anglican and other Protestant churches with such violence that she became known as "Bloody Mary." Parliament repealed her father's Act of Supremacy and restored the Roman pope as the highest religious authority in England, and she had more than a thousand dissident Protestants burned at the stake for refusing to reconvert to Catholicism. Mary also aligned England, and herself, with the most powerful Catholic nation in Europe at the time: Spain. The queen hoped to produce an heir and thus exclude her half-sister Elizabeth—a Protestant—from the line of succession. Mary's cousin, King Charles I of Spain, proposed that she marry his only son Philip, and the two were wed a year after Mary became queen. The marriage was never a happy one and was almost devoid of real love, but the two shared a devotion to Catholicism that drew them together in the work of expelling the Protestant heretics from English soil.
Mary and Philip tried repeatedly to conceive a child, but most scholars believe that the queen was past childbearing age. She did suffer from a false pregnancy shortly after her marriage, and then a second one in 1557. However, she never bore a child, and the second false pregnancy was probably an ovarian cyst or a tumor in her uterus. The queen grew steadily more ill, and as her health declined she became more hateful toward Protestants. She had Elizabeth imprisoned in the Tower of London, believing her to be in league with Anglican rebels, and many of her courtiers urged her to put her half-sister to death to secure her throne. However, as Mary's life neared its end, she seemed to accept that the crown would pass to Elizabeth. When she died in November 1558 after only five years on the throne, Elizabeth became the new Queen of England.
Religion and War
Elizabeth was 25 years old when she became queen. The early years of her reign were marked by religious turmoil in England as the resurgent Catholicism of her predecessor gave way to a revived Protestant fervor with one of their own now on the throne. Parliament restored the Act of Supremacy and named her head of the Church of England, which enraged many English Catholics. There were numerous plots to assassinate the new queen after she enacted the Elizabethan Religious Settlement that enshrined Anglicanism as the official religion of England in law but also allowed Christians of other faiths to practice freely as long as they remained loyal to the queen. Philip II, her former brother-in-law and now King of Spain, used his influence in Rome to smuggle agents into England to destabilize her rule. He intended to remove the Protestant heretic and replace her with a Catholic, and he also hoped to destabilize the English political and military system that was raiding Spanish treasure fleets crossing the Atlantic laden down with plunder from the New World. These early efforts failed, and Elizabeth's throne seemed secure as her reign entered its third decade.
However, there was still a threat to the north in the person of Mary, Queen of Scots (not to be confused with Mary I of England), who was then living under house arrest in Scotland. As the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret Tudor, she was Elizabeth's first cousin once removed, and until Elizabeth produced an heir—which she never did—the Queen of Scots had a legitimate claim to the throne. Mary was a staunch Catholic and spoke openly of her hopes that Elizabeth might be removed, or even murdered. In 1583, the silver jubilee of Elizabeth's reign, Catholics led by Sir Francis Throckmorton planned to free Mary, murder Elizabeth, and restore a Catholic monarch on the English throne. Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learned of the plot and foiled it. Throckmorton and some other conspirators were arrested and executed, but others avoided the axe by escaping to France. Walsingham expanded his network of informants in England and grew more determined than ever to protect Elizabeth from her enemies.
Three years later, a second plan to replace Elizabeth with Mary led by Anthony Babington became known to Walsingham. The wily English super-spy managed to infiltrate Babington's circle with his own men and intercepted several letters sent by the Queen of Scots from her castle-prison to Catholic loyalists. Eventually, Walsingham presented evidence of Mary's treachery to Elizabeth, who ordered her to be moved to Fotheringhay Castle for trial and execution. The would-be queen was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, and after speaking her last words, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," she was beheaded after two strokes of the executioner's axe.
Elizabeth claimed to have not intended Mary's death—despite signing the warrant for her execution—and appeared to her courtiers to be genuinely sorrowful upon hearing the news. Her grief was matched by waves of outrage across the Catholic world. Pope Sixtus V condemned her and all Anglicans as heretics who had murdered their rightful queen, and King Philip II of Spain began planning an invasion of England, both to avenge the death of his fellow Catholic monarch and to finally put an end to English piracy on the high seas. The pope funded Philip's construction of a mighty fleet of warships and transport vessels to carry an army from the Spanish Netherlands—modern-day Belgium—across the English Channel. The Spanish Armada received the blessing of the Church on April 25, 1588, and set sail over the next two days from Spanish ports bound for the shores of England.
Bowls and Battle
English agents in Madrid informed London of the armada's sailing within a few weeks, and Queen Elizabeth's government immediately set to work planning to defend the country from invasion. The Royal Navy was far smaller than the Spanish Armada, but its sailors were experienced and eager to meet the foes in battle. The fleet was sighted off Cornwall in the west of England on July 19th, and beacons flared from Devon to Kent to flash the news to the capital that the enemy was near.
One of England's greatest naval commander, the privateer Sir Francis Drake who had raided many a Spanish galleon for his queen, threw himself into the effort to defend his homeland—though there is a story that on learning of the approaching threat, he insisted on finishing a game of bowls (a form of lawn bowling) in Plymouth before boarding his ship. Though there is some doubt as to the truth of this story, it strengthens the image of Drake and the other English sea captains that they were unconcerned about the coming danger. The queen, and those around her, did not share this sense of ease.
The armada's commander believed that his best chance of victory was to attack the Royal Navy immediately on entering the English Channel, but King Philip insisted that his ships first pick up the invasion army stationed in the Spanish Netherlands. The fleet thus remained close to the southern coast of the Channel and gave Drake and the English time to organize their defenses. The Royal Navy was severely outmatched in the Channel because its ships were smaller and thus more lightly-armed than those of Spain, and Drake had less than half as many vessels under his command. However, England was not without advantages in the coming battle.
Two principles guided the art of naval warfare in the 16th century: the "weather gage," or good winds, and massing ships together to present large broadsides from cannons mounted on their sides. The smaller English ships could defeat a large Spanish galleon in single combat, but they had to first break up the enemy's mass formation in the Channel. Drake sent some ships into action on July 20th and again three days later, and his ships had the weather gage. They harassed the armada with long-range cannon-fire but could not force the Spanish to break formation. By July 27th, the armada was approaching the port of Dunkirk, where the Spanish army in the Netherlands was waiting to board ship. England had to act.
Fire was the greatest danger to warships of this era. England had eight purpose-built fireships in its fleet, and on July 28th, the crews set these vessels alight and drove them into the Spanish Armada's main body. The winds were high and the sea was rough, and the damage would be severe if these weapons of mass destruction could penetrate the mass of Spanish warships. Seeing the burning ships on the horizon, the armada broke formation off the coast of Gravelines in the Spanish Netherlands, and the English then attacked. The two fleets met in a furious battle, the Royal Navy again holding the weather gage and outmaneuvering the immense but slow-moving galleons. The English sank five Spanish ships, and three more ran aground near Gravelines. The armada then moved north and away from the shore, where Spanish troops watched helplessly as their barges to England burned.
Of course, England was still under threat because the armada already had thousands of battle-hardened Spanish soldiers aboard. A small English militia army of four thousand soldiers gathered at Tilbury to defend the approaches to London. Still expecting an enemy attack by land, Queen Elizabeth rode out to Tilbury dressed in a suit of armor to review the troops and stand with them in battle. In a speech to the men, she urged them to take heart and fight alongside her, but the Spanish did not come. The armada feared renewed attacks by the Royal Navy and how a loss would destroy King Philip's power and prestige. Rather than land troops in southern England, it sailed up the east coast toward Scotland. The English continued to harass their enemy during the journey north and then around the island of Great Britain. Spanish losses from English attacks and bad weather, and by the time the armada returned home, there were only 67 ships and fewer than ten thousand men left. Nearly half of Spanish naval power had been destroyed.
The Spanish Armada's defeat was a turning point in the affairs of Europe. Once only a master of the English Channel and the Irish Sea, England became the greatest naval power on the continent and held this position for centuries. Elizabeth's popularity soared with her people, and the nation's culture entered a golden age as the empire began to grow. Spain never recovered from the losses of 1588. Its naval power was spent, and disease had weakened the army in the Spanish Netherlands as it awaited transportation to England. Financially, the armada's construction bankrupted Spain. When Philip II died in 1598, three days after signing the fourth bankruptcy declaration and asking the pope for new loans, his kingdom's decline was evident to all the world.
Learning from History
In recent decades, it has become popular for students and teachers of history to classify the religious struggles of the early modern era in Europe as two sides clashing over minor points of theology as an excuse for achieving political ends by violence—meaning that European Catholics and Protestants did not truly believe what they said about each other, but rather labeled their enemies as heretics to make it easier to demonize and destroy them. But a closer study of the events in these turbulent decades reveals two lessons from history. First, one ought not to discount the deeply-held beliefs of religious adversaries in the past. English Catholics were ready to die for the cause of papal supremacy in their country, and Anglicans were equally prepared to give their lives to protect their nation from what they saw as a mortal threat from Rome. Theological questions surrounding the means of salvation or the role of Church versus state in national affairs should not be discounted so easily.
More importantly, there is a second trend in modern historiography, a belief that humanity should move beyond the petty disputes over religion or politics and come together by laying them aside. This is a deeply troubling idea because it ignores one of the fundamental truths of the human condition. Each one of us has within us a set of firmly-held beliefs that arise from our sense of what is true—not what is provable. If the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the period which followed the religious wars in Europe, taught humanity anything, it is that science cannot answer every question we have about our world. We must believe in something. Some choose to place their faith in a religion, others in politics, and still others in traditions rooted in the past. While we may no longer see religious violence in most parts of the West, the tendency to demonize rather than understand those who believe differently from us is still present. We see it in our politics, on our streets, and sometimes in our homes. To truly understand the roots of human conflict, we must go beyond the simplistic idea of what Carl von Clausewitz referred to as "politics by other means." The pursuit of peace and tolerance is not uniformity of ideas but rather respect for all ideas in a society that embraces pluralism and diversity of beliefs. We may not all believe the same thing about God, or the role of different people or groups in society, or the nature of government. But if we dismiss those who do not agree with us, if we "otherize" them and call them names rather than trying to engage in conversation with them, we risk a resurgence of violence like that which plagued so much of the tragic history of our planet.
