THE DEATHS OF Anjou and William of Orange presented Spain with complementary strategic advantages. Anjou’s loss meant that the French royal house of Valois was effectively extinct, and the next heir apparent was the Protestant Henri of Navarre. This prompted Philip to formalize his alliance with the Guisard Catholic League, in order to prevent Navarre from inheriting, which in turn augmented his strength in the Netherlands. By declaring his intention to support the Leaguers against Navarre, Philip was able to assimilate their military power, which could now be deployed against the Dutch. With Orange gone and the Netherlandish rebels in disarray, Philip could proceed without fear that France would intervene against him. With the Spanish seizure of the majority of ports on the Flemish coast, the balance of power on the Continent seemed to be tilting inevitably towards the Hapsburgs. Philip’s ambition appeared terrifying. The French ambassador in London reported Catherine de Medici’s opinion that once Philip had definitively crushed the Netherlands, he would turn his attentions to France, and thence to England.
With the expulsion of Mendoza in the wake of the Throckmorton conspiracy, the anti-Spanish position of Elizabeth’s government was annealed. Psychologically, both sides were ready for conflict. On 10 October 1584, Elizabeth summoned her councilors to discuss plans for resisting the King of Spain’s “malice and forces.” Philip agreed to his alliance with the Guise in the Treaty of Joinville at the end of 1584, while at Nonsuch in August 1585, Elizabeth finally agreed to openly provide more than seven thousand men to come to the aid of the Netherlands. A month later, Drake departed on another raiding mission, with a fleet of twenty-five ships, two of which belonged to Elizabeth. This time, he had his sovereign’s express permission to attack both Spanish ships and the settlements of the Caribbean. After the long, fluid drift towards conflict, where both sides had been influenced as much by circumstance as specific policy, Drake’s departure was an overt gesture of enmity.
The immediate concern was the Netherlands. Walsingham’s question to Elizabeth in council, “if her Majesty shall not take them into her defense, then what shall she do or provide for her own surety against the King of Spain’s malice and forces which he shall offer against this realm when he hath subdued Holland?” summarized the queen’s choices.1 Either she could ally with the rebels or wait until Spain had crushed them, after which England would have to face Philip alone. The intelligence agents were filtering through news of the Joinville compact by the spring, and though the agreement contained no specific English aims, Elizabeth could no longer ignore the fact that the most effective military muster in France was now in league with the most powerful nation in the world, and that both were united in their loathing of Protestantism. Her hopes of Valois support were disappointed in March when Henri III conveyed that he was no longer prepared to engage in the Low Countries. Either Elizabeth had to support the Netherlanders or stand in isolation against Spain. Nonsuch “marked the final abandonment of Elizabeth’s heartfelt aim of distancing herself from European entanglements.”2 It is interesting to speculate on what could have happened had the queen at this juncture accepted the offer of the grateful Dutch Protestants to assume the sovereignty of the States General. Cecil advised against this, observing that sovereignty would produce a “perpetual quarrel,” while protectorship would result in the lesser evil of a “determinable war,” which would hopefully be brought to an end by Philip of Spain’s death. As a strategy, this proved hopelessly vague.
The subsequent campaign in the Netherlands showed neither the queen nor its most ardent supporter, the Earl of Leicester, in their best light. They had argued a decade before during the Kenilworth festivities, when Leicester had dared to portray himself as the savior-captain of the Netherlands; when this situation became a reality, it precipitated the most furious quarrel of their relationship. Leicester’s eagerness to serve was reportedly motivated by “an itching desire of rule and glory,” though he was also piously convinced that in serving he was doing God’s work. As a commander, he had little to recommend him apart from his status and willingness to fund the mission from his own purse, as his active military experience had been confined to a single battle thirty years previously. But even Leicester was better than Elizabeth, whose constant retractions of his orders and unwillingness to release sufficient finances left his starving soldiers deserting and his authority nugatory. Leicester’s opponent, Farnese, the Duke of Parma, was the most brilliant commander of his generation, and though Leicester’s troops (who soon looked like scarecrows, according to witnesses) were commendably brave, they were being deployed by a courtier, not a general. Given the English soldiers’ ancient equipment, hopeless lack of organization, and ignorance of tactics, it “is a miracle that some military action occurred.”3 Parma drove a ruthless military machine, and all Leicester could really hope to do was delay its advance. Antwerp had surrendered even before his arrival, and for all that he was greeted with fireworks displays and ecstatic crowds, pageants featuring pleasingly grateful young ladies and banners extolling the Virgin Queen as the Provinces’ savior, he knew even before he set sail that the whole enterprise was hopeless, writing despairingly to Walsingham that
I am sorry her Majesty doth deal in this sort, content to overthrow so willingly her own cause. . . . There never was a gentleman or general so sent out as I am. My cause is the Lord’s and the Queen’s. If the Queen fail I trust in the Lord, and on him I see I am wholly to depend.4
Having left Leicester to his own devices at the beginning of the campaign, Elizabeth furiously refused to grant him further discretion when the earl accepted the title of Governor General of the United Provinces (the role she herself had refused) at The Hague in January 1586. Her letter to him was both hysterical and hypocritical:
How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to be used by you . . . that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favored by us, above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honor.
It has been suggested that what particularly enraged Elizabeth in Leicester’s careerings around the Netherlands was her jealousy that his wife, Lettice, was planning to join him “with such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches, litters and sidesaddles as her Majesty has none such, and that there should be a court of ladies that should far pass her Majesty’s court here.” As ever with Elizabeth, there has been too much keenness to see the personal behind the political. Leicester was eventually permitted to keep his empty title, but in flaunting it, he was drawing attention to the failure of the English venture as a whole. Elizabeth did pathetically mismanage the Netherlands campaign, but not because she was jealous of the Countess of Leicester’s sidesaddle.
Parma had perceptively observed to Philip that Elizabeth was by no means fond of expense, yet even the inadequate monies she was prepared to grant absorbed half of the ordinary royal revenues in the three years before 1588. This expense was all the more intolerable in that the Netherlands enterprise was actually proving advantageous to Spanish interests. Any projected attack on England now had a justification, while the financial burden of the war could only diminish the likelihood of the English forces being prepared for it. Elizabeth had authorized the intervention in the reasonable fear of an imminent Spanish threat, and in doing so had made that threat ever more likely. The presence of Leicester’s army was a provocation, but his force was too small and ill funded to present a serious challenge to Parma, while equally representing an unforgivable challenge to Spanish sovereignty. It was wasteful, horribly careless of life, and ultimately fruitless. The “hawkish” members of Elizabeth’s council had seen the combination of Throckmorton and Joinville as the preparations for the long-feared Catholic crusade against reform, but in 1585, there was no pressing reason to seek confrontation. It was English policy which was influencing Spain, not the other way around. The rebels’ cause looked more or less lost, particularly if England could be kept out of the equation, but after the first English forces landed at Middelburg, Philip finally acceded to the pope’s demands for the “recovery of England.” When Leicester appeared in Holland, he might as well have been carrying an invitation to the Armada.
Sir Anthony Standen, a Walsingham agent at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, provided a copy of a terrifying document to Elizabeth just weeks after Philip himself had seen it in April 1586. It detailed an invasion plan projected by the Marquess of Santa Cruz, numbering a fleet of 206 warships, 60,000 troops, and 200 landing-barges, to sail from Spanish harbors to Ireland, where they would depose English authority. Elizabeth would then be offered a reprieve if she agreed to come to terms; if not, the vast fleet would sail on. The details were less threatening than the fact that the idea was being mooted so openly, as while Santa Cruz’s suggestions were so absurdly expensive that neither Philip nor Elizabeth took them seriously, Parma was formulating an alternative strategy, of invading via Flanders. At the same moment in London, Walsingham was examining another set of documents, the correspondence between Mary, Queen of Scots, and a young Catholic named Anthony Babington.