Part 31 (1/2)
ELIZABETH (x), 1588-98-BRITANNIA VICTRIX
[Sidenote: After the Armada]
The sceptre had pa.s.sed. The world awoke suddenly to the truth of which the great debacle was only the unexpected testimony. The Spanish People were slow to realise the overwhelming fact--overwhelming, because for the best part of a century at least they had accounted themselves the nation favoured by Heaven, chosen for the crus.h.i.+ng of the heathen and the heretic, a.s.sured of victory. So, for a few years, had the English thought of themselves; but with a difference; for their spirit was that expressed in the later Puritan adage, ”Trust in G.o.d and keep your powder dry”. The Spaniard had neglected to keep his powder dry. The nation which observes both injunctions is tolerably certain to defeat that which observes only one.
The sceptre had pa.s.sed; but Spain would not acquiesce without a struggle, and, in his slow fas.h.i.+on, Philip set himself to adapt to his own navy the lesson taught by the fate of the Armada. England had won the lead, but she was not to hold it unchallenged, though she did maintain it convincingly. For her alertness did not leave her, and to her had been transferred not the power only but also the enormous prestige which Spain had hitherto enjoyed, and which counts for much in every struggle where it is recognised on both sides.
But the re-organisation of the Spanish Navy was a matter of time. For the moment, the result of the collision was absolutely to reverse the hypothetical though not the actual position of the two countries. Spain was reduced completely to the defensive. England no longer thought of guarding herself, but only of smiting her foe--a theory of the mutual relations on which, unofficially, the seamen had been acting for the last decade.
If during the closing ten years of his life Philip's strongest desire was to recover the lost supremacy, his energies were still divided by his extreme anxiety to prevent the Bourbon succession in France; while the conviction was proving day by day more irresistible that the Protestant Netherlands would be lost for ever to Spain. Yet the eternal series of abortive plots for restoring the old religion and placing either Philip or a tool of Philip on the English throne went on; not in fact ending till the death of Elizabeth joined England and Scotland under a single crown.
[Sidenote: A new phase]
Politically the dramatic climax of Elizabeth's reign is the dispersion of the Armada. The dragon has been fought and vanquished, and at this point, the curtain ought to ring down and leave the audience to imagine the Red-cross knight and his ladye-love living happy for ever afterwards. But in history no climax is more than an incident; at the most it is but the decisive entry on a new phase. The chain of causation, of the interdependence of events, is continuous.
The moment of the Armada then may be regarded as the conclusion of a phase. The work of the great statesmen, whose names are most intimately a.s.sociated with that of Elizabeth, was accomplished. They had kept England united and at peace within her own borders through a long period of recurring crises. They had so fostered the national spirit and the national resources that she had finally proved herself a match for the mightiest Power in Europe. They had achieved for her the premier position upon the Ocean. They had defeated every attempt to entice or to force her back to the Roman obedience. They had secured a larger lat.i.tude of religious tolerance than prevailed in any other State of Europe. These things they had definitely won, though there was still need of keen brains, stout hearts, strong hands, and st.u.r.dy consciences to hold them. They had been responsible for the planting and watering. It was left mainly to others in the last years of Elizabeth to a.s.sure the beginnings of the increase.
[Sidenote: 1588 The Death of Leicester]
Of the counsellors who had played a prominent part in Elizabeth's reign, Nicholas Bacon had died in 1579. The rest still lived, but none of them for long. The next to disappear was Leicester, who survived the dispersion of the Armada by only a few weeks. So long as he had been an aspirant to the hand of his royal mistress, he existed chiefly to trouble the minds of statesmen--a piece of grit in the machinery; an apparently quite worthless person After he had settled down into the less ambiguous position of a mere personal favourite, with no chance of satisfying swelling ambitions, he became a definite partisan of the Walsingham school whose ideal lay in the advancement of protestantism and antagonism to Spain. When not warped by the vain imaginings of his earlier years, he would seem to have been a person of respectable abilities, little decision of character, decently loyal; an ornamental figurehead whose position enabled him to serve his friends; shallow; neither dangerous, nor conspicuously incapable; not entirely deserving of the extreme contempt which is usually poured upon him; but at best a poor creature whose importance was wholly advent.i.tious.
[Sidenote: France, 1588-89]
Of infinitely more consequence in its influence on the political situation was the death on December 23rd, by the hands of a.s.sa.s.sins of the Duke of Guise. The murder, planned by Henry III., deprived the League of its head, and decisively forced the French King into the arms of his Protestant heir. Nine months later (August 1589), Henry III. was a.s.sa.s.sinated in turn, and Henry of Navarre laid claim to the crown, his uncle Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, being proclaimed King by the Catholics. Hence in Philip's eyes a closer union than ever between himself and the League--now headed by Mayenne, brother of the murdered Guise--became imperative. A Huguenot king in France, a heretic queen in England, and heretic rebels in the Netherlands, threatened a combination which he was bound to try and paralyse. The attempt went far to thwart itself; for numbers of the French Catholics were ready to go a long way towards a compromise with Henry of Navarre when they felt the alternative to be a Spanish domination; while that astute prince hailed the opportunity which enabled him to claim the role of patriot, and to point to the Leaguers as the clients of the foreigner. On the other hand, Philip's energies during the remainder of his life were largely absorbed in futile efforts to redress on French soil the loss of Spanish supremacy on the seas.
[Sidenote: 1588 England aggressive]
Under the new conditions, the antagonism between the two schools of English statesmans.h.i.+p takes a slightly altered form. Walsingham among the ministers, Drake among the seamen, had always believed fervently in the theory of breaking the power of Spain to pieces. Elizabeth and (in the main) Burghley had clung to the theory of gradually making England so secure and so formidable that Spain and England alike should ultimately recognise a condition of amicable equality as the best for both. Spain would then become amenable to reason in matters ecclesiastical and commercial, the old intercourse would be restored in its fulness, and general prosperity would result. Against their wishes, matters had been by the inevitable trend of events forced to the arbitrament of battle. But even now, terrible as the disaster of the Armada had been, Spain was by no means shattered; in fact, though the English nation was more than jubilant, the seamen themselves were evidently disappointed that they had not in the encounter inflicted more complete ruin upon their rivals. They had found the Spaniards less easy to dispose of than they had antic.i.p.ated.
[Sidenote: Alternative Naval policies]
The victory however had been won by the great captains of the aggressive party; it was followed almost immediately by the revolt of Henry III. from the Guise domination; all the conditions were in favour of an offensive campaign. For the time being, a peace-party had ceased to exist. The only question now was, how to strike. And at this stage we see the two rival theories of naval policy in war time beginning to be formulated, since naval policy on a large scale was only brought into being by the development of an oceanic field for it to work in. Of the one policy which has constantly prevailed with our great English admirals, that of making the destruction of the enemy's fighting fleet the primary object, with mere commerce-destroying secondary, Drake was in practice the father; of the other, that of concentrating on his trade-routes and menacing his commerce, not unusually favoured by France in her wars with England, John Hawkins was the advocate.
For the moment Drake, being undoubtedly the hero of the hour, appeared to triumph. His was the scheme of operations approved. But before it could be put in practice, its essential features were distorted; through no fault of his the plan failed of its full effect; disfavour followed; and war on Spanish commerce again became the prevalent policy.
Its attractions for adventurers are obvious; and its inferiority as a method of transforming superiority into supremacy was not yet recognised.
[Sidenote: Don Antonio]
Drake's actual design, however, was not on this occasion a precise exemplification of the theory just a.s.sociated with his name, although its failure brought the supporters of the opposing school to the front.
The Armada disaster had already given the English for the time complete command of the sea, and his intention was to strike a crippling blow at the Spanish power by establis.h.i.+ng the Pretender Don Antonio on the throne of Portugal and in control of the Azores. Ever since Philip had grasped the Portuguese crown in 1580, Elizabeth had played diplomatically with the notion of helping Don Antonio to challenge his t.i.tle by force of arms, and Walsingham would have found a grim joy in turning the play into earnest. But Antonio could count upon no support worth mentioning from other quarters; Elizabeth's help had been in quality the same as and in quant.i.ty less than she had doled out to Huguenots and Netherlanders. The one real attempt in his favour, wherein there had hardly been a pretence of English partic.i.p.ation, had been crushed by Santa Cruz at the naval battle of Terceira in the Azores in 1583. But what had been impracticable before the Armada was so no longer. With the command of the sea, Portugal might now be won; the loss in itself would be a grievous weakening to Spain; and in alliance with England. Portugal would be to her neighbour very much what Scotland would have been to England had Mary been restored--and accepted--by Spanish aid.
[Sidenote: Plan of the Lisbon Expedition, 1588-89] Such was Drake's idea, which was to be carried out after the method beloved by the Queen.
It was not to be exactly a Government affair, but the enterprise of a Company, in which her Majesty was to hold shares, providing some money and half a dozen s.h.i.+ps from her fleet, and various guarantees. It was to be a joint naval and military venture, with Drake and Norreys respectively in command of the two arms, with a free hand in the conduct of operations. All through the winter of 1588 Drake and Norreys were hard at work preparing this counter-Armada; but as spring came on, the Queen's pa.s.sion for tying her servants' hands developed on the familiar lines. It was not till April that Drake succeeded in definitely starting, and he went with a very fine armament; but with only a month's commissariat, without the siege train promised, and fettered by instructions wholly inconsistent with his own plan of campaign.
The Spaniards acquired what purported to be a statement of the terms agreed on between Elizabeth and Don Antonio, under which Portugal, with the Azores, was to be reduced to a province of England. It does not appear however that this doc.u.ment was based upon facts; and the instructions [Footnote: _Cf._ Corbett, ii, ] issued to the expedition are quite inconsistent with the whole idea. The attempt to establish Antonio in Portugal was only to be made if the conditions were favourable; if it succeeded, the English were then to retire; if it were dropped, they were to make for the Azores. But in any case they were to begin by attacking the s.h.i.+pping in Biscayan and other Northern harbours of Spain--an entirely superfluous proceeding, as Spain for the time had no naval force which could give trouble.
[Sidenote: 1589 May: Corunna and Peniche]
Consequently the expedition--which was accompanied by Elizabeth's latest favourite, the young Earl of Ess.e.x, a runaway and from his Mistress--instead of making straight for Lisbon attacked Corunna. The troops were landed, the town stormed and sacked, and the s.h.i.+pping destroyed, the Spaniards being driven into the citadel. Immediate departure being prevented by the wind, after nearly a week's operations a fierce but unsuccessful attempt was made to storm the citadel also.