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Eliza Triumphans

ELIZABETH REACHED HER apogee as queen with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Like so much of Elizabeth’s queenship, her role was pure theatre, it was inspirational, but it was one that was carefully orchestrated and built into mythic proportions after the event. Elizabeth herself had always believed in the wheel of fortune, which rose and dipped, bringing her from the depths of despair in her sister’s reign to the throne, and which now, in the face of invasion, threatened to dip again, before rising miraculously. ‘God blew and they were scattered,’ proclaimed one of the medals struck in the wake of victory. But fate was not so random. The defeat of the Armada was largely attributable to the superior technology of the English ships and guns and the brilliant tactics deployed by Hawkins, Drake and the other English naval commanders – and all this in spite of the fact that the parsimonious Elizabeth kept her navy dangerously short of powder, shot and provisions.

By 1588 the struggle in the Netherlands, where English troops and money had been expended since 1585 in the rebels’ cause after many years’ surreptitious aid, and the undeclared war in the Indies between Spain and the English sea dogs, had driven Philip II to the limits of his very considerable patience. Drake’s constant provocation and plundering of the Spanish treasure fleet on the way from the Indies was imperilling a major source of revenue to the perennially insolvent Spanish crown. It did not help that when Spanish ships bound for the Netherlands, laden with Genoese gold to pay Alva’s troops, took shelter from a storm in an English port, Elizabeth seized the gold. Far from discouraging these piratical activities, Elizabeth herself was taking a share of the booty. The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots – who had bequeathed her claim to the English throne to Philip, as if it were in her gift to do so – provided a further incentive for Philip, backed by the Pope, to defeat and overthrow England’s heretic Queen.

The legend of Elizabeth owes a great deal to the speech she is said to have made on the second day of her visit to the army camped at Tilbury. The idea for the Queen’s visit emanated from the Earl of Leicester, the Lieutenant and Captain-General of her land forces. The favourite’s public relations stunts were better than his military skills, which fortunately were not put to the test. The arrangement for Elizabeth’s appearance at Tilbury was made before news of the English engagement of the Spanish fleet could reach her, but she made the speech knowing that the Armada was as good as defeated. For days, the navy, led by Lord Howard of Effingham, with Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher and the other skilled seamen under his command, had been using their intimate knowledge of the winds and tides off the south coast of England to provoke, harass and attack the cumbersome great ships of the Armada, advancing towards the Channel in stately formation. Their tactics prevented the Armada from anchoring off the Isle of Wight, as planned, or making any landfall along the south coast, driving it ever onwards towards Calais Roads, the only shelter to be found on the hostile French coast.

Here the Spanish commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, was forced to drop anchor, while he waited for word that Parma’s army further up the coast at Dunkirk was ready, in its under-provisioned and leaky barges, to make the Channel crossing, theoretically at least under the protection of the Armada. Parma was dismayed that Medina Sidonia had brought the entire English fleet with him, rather than defeating it en route. Whether or not he would have embarked under these hazardous conditions is questionable, but the decision was taken from him when the English sent in fireships to break up the Armada and drive it from its anchorage. The plan succeeded beyond all expectation, since the terrified Spaniards, panicking at the sight of the hell-burners set loose among them, cut their cables, leaving at least 200 anchors behind as they fled. There was no possibility of a rendezvous with Parma now. The great Armada was at the mercy of the winds, as it was buffeted towards the dangerous shoals off the Dutch coast – where the rebels had removed all the markers – and then pushed and tossed north towards the inhospitable coast of Scotland.

On the morning of Thursday, 8 August, as the battered remnants of the Armada were struggling through mountainous seas near the Shetlands and the Queen’s victorious ships were returning to port, Elizabeth took barge at Whitehall for Tilbury, amid a cacophony of trumpets and the ringing of all the London church bells. No one in the capital could have been left in ignorance that she was going to review her troops. Reaching Tilbury at noon, she was greeted by the boom of cannon. Mounted on a white gelding, with the ageing and portly Leicester on one side and his stepson and the Queen’s kinsman, the handsome young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex on the other, Elizabeth rode through the camp. She had purposely come with a modest escort, the Earl of Ormonde carrying the Sword of State before her, and two pages in white velvet, one leading her horse, and the other ceremoniously carrying a silver helmet on a velvet cushion. The helmet, had she worn it, would have looked very strange atop her red wig and it is debatable whether Elizabeth, in a white velvet gown dripping with pearls and diamonds, really did wear a breastplate or carry a silver truncheon, as the myth-makers would have us believe. If she did, it was the only occasion that she ever donned something approximate to male dress.

It was during the first day at Tilbury that the Earl of Cumberland brought word of the Armada’s fate. While the Queen was dining in state with Leicester in his pavilion, as all the army captains queued to kiss her hand, she received word that there was a possibility that Parma’s army of 40,000 men would arrive with the day’s tide. English intelligence was already well informed as to the unsuitability of the barges for the Channel crossing and, in the event, the report of Parma’s imminent invasion proved false. If Parma did come, common sense and intelligence, if it could be gleaned, indicated that he would make the shortest crossing, landing on the east coast of Kent, near Margate. It is to be wondered, therefore, that Leicester had placed his army of 7,000 men north of the Thames at Tilbury. The spectacle of the Queen’s visit to Tilbury was a distraction from the reality that the English were ill prepared to meet the invaders, that their forces were inadequately trained, armed and deployed and would have been no match for Parma’s professional army of seasoned troops.

On the second day, the Queen made a formal review of her troops. Someone with Elizabeth’s supreme command of oratory and the English language would not have missed the opportunity to address them:

My loving people, I have been persuaded by some that are careful of my safety to take heed how I committed myself to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I tell you that I would not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear: I have so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too – and take foul scorn that Parma 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 venter my royal blood; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field. I know that already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns, and I assure you in the word of a prince you shall not fail of them. In the meantime, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject. Not doubting but by your concord in the camp and valour in the field and your obedience to myself and my general, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God and of my kingdom.

Marvellous, rousing words, but did she say them? There has been some doubt. Certainly the speech sounds very like Elizabeth and deploys her known expertise with language. She disliked long harangues and this one, comprising 250 words, takes two and a half minutes to deliver. Elizabeth tended to use two chief contemporary styles in writing and speeches – one complex, often ambiguous, the other simple and direct – as the need served. In the Tilbury speech she uses the succinct, English mode to convey the royal will and message. It follows the general plan of Elizabeth’s orations. She opens graciously, turns at once to business, presents her position, and then concludes with a brief but effective peroration that reiterates the main idea.

Elizabeth was delivering the speech in the open air on a flat field on a windy day and tailored it accordingly. The speech is full of doublets and triplets, a device well suited to the outdoors with its noise and distractions. If the listeners missed a few words, they could still get the sense of the whole by the constant use of repetitions such as ‘faithful and loving people’, ‘loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects’, ‘weak and feeble woman’, ‘heart and stomach of a king’, ‘chiefest strength and safeguard’ and ‘for my God and for my kingdom and for my people’.

It is reasonable to assume that the speech was Elizabeth’s own composition; if she did not give the exact version that has come down to posterity then it was probably something very similar. Most unusually for Elizabeth, the speech does not appear to have been printed and disseminated afterwards, or, if it was, no copy survives. The only explanation for this rare failure to grasp a propaganda opportunity was that she was distracted in the weeks following the defeat of the Armada. Her beloved Leicester died and she was grieving for him.

The first printed version of the Tilbury speech, as we know it, emerged in Cabala, Mysteries of State, in Letters of the Great Ministers of King James and King Charles, published in 1654, where it forms part of an ingratiating letter from Dr Lionel Sharp to the first Duke of Buckingham. The letter was probably written after Buckingham’s first expedition to Spain in 1623, when he was trying to arrange a marriage between Prince Charles and the Infanta. Sharp, who had been at Tilbury with Leicester as chaplain, comments that Elizabeth made an excellent oration at the camp. According to Sharp, who tended to exaggerate his own role at the centre of affairs and cannot be wholly relied upon, he was asked to read the speech to the army again next day, after the Queen’s departure for St James’s. He kept the text. ‘No man hath it but myself, and such as I have given it to.’

Other versions of the speech emerged, probably based on copies of the original text rather than the speech itself. Of course, only a few of those actually present at Tilbury would have caught the Queen’s words, or been able to repeat them with any accuracy.

During the autumn thanksgiving services were held throughout the country, culminating on 4 December 1588 in the warrior-queen’s triumphal procession in a mock-Roman chariot decorated with golden lions and dragons and topped with an imperial crown to St Paul’s. She knelt on the cathedral steps to give thanks to God, in full view of the people, for her great victory, before entering the great west door for the service. Captured Spanish flags, banners and other booty from the Armada were paraded down the aisle and draped round the altar.

It is salutary to know that beyond the spectacle was an uglier reality. Far from giving her soldiers and seamen the ‘rewards and crowns’ she had promised them ‘in the word of a prince’, they had been discharged shortly after Tilbury without pay. Seamen of Devon and Cornwall were left to make their own way home as best they could, although Howard of Effingham, Hawkins and Drake dug deep into their own pockets to make sure that their men had a few pence at least for risking their lives and saving the country from foreign occupation. The treasury was all but empty, but by the time Elizabeth rode to St Paul’s in triumph many of the brave men she had lauded at Tilbury and who had harried the Spanish ships to their destruction were dying in the streets of their wounds, hunger and disease.

Naturally, Protestant England’s victory over the Catholic-inspired Armada was seen as the miraculous sign of God’s intervention to protect His chosen people from the Antichrist. The ruling elite at court sought to emphasize Elizabeth’s personal role in the victory and to build it to mythic proportions for its own purposes. The Queen was to be symbolic of an emergent militant England, an imperial power, and, by extension, a unified political power she did not actually command. In reality, she ruled over a country divided in religion and in severe financial straits, as it embarked on more than a decade of warfare with Spain.

Elizabeth herself loathed war, regarding it as a waste of money. Unable to take the field herself as a woman, it was an area where she lacked control – as Leicester’s campaign in the Netherlands after 1585 had shown all too clearly. Against her express wishes, he had accepted the governorship offered by the rebels, bestowed countless knighthoods, and squandered her carefully hoarded treasure without rendering the proper accounting that she repeatedly requested. Nor was she altogether convinced of the value of imperialist expansion. Tilbury provided the ideal occasion to link the Queen with the Armada’s defeat, incidentally disguising the fact that her prevarication and cheeseparing attitude to her navy had almost jeopardized the victory.

Elizabeth’s chastity, or virtue, was closely associated with England’s impregnability and welfare. Elizabeth the Queen represented the body politic, but she was also a woman: hence, the defeat of the Armada could be expressed in sexual terms. The attack on England could be seen as an assault, or a rape. Nowhere is this idea more perfectly illustrated than in the three extant Armada portraits. Just as Elizabeth had compared herself with her father in the Tilbury speech, so the portrait depicts her in a bodice shaped like a breastplate and enormous padded sleeves reminiscent of Holbein’s macho depiction of Henry VIII. In the place where the muscular and masculine Henry has his codpiece, Elizabeth displays a white ribbon from which hangs a giant pearl, symbolic of her chastity. Indeed, she is bestrewn with pearls, many of them probably looted from Spanish treasure ships. The triangular composition of the portrait, drawing the eye from the two sea scenes on either side of the background down the length of the ropes of pearls in a V to the pearl placed at the Queen’s pudendum, insists on the pearl’s emblematic significance.

Behind the Queen’s head to the right of the portrait is the storm-tossed Armada in dark seas; Elizabeth stands resolutely with her back to the turmoil and darkness, confident in the power of the Protestant wind which God has used to destroy the enemy of His Church and people. On the other side, to which her luminous face is turned reflecting the light, is her own navy on calm seas, bathed in light. On the arm of the Queen’s chair, behind her, is the carved figure of a mermaid, representing the dangerous and destructive possibilities of uncontrolled female sexuality – the obverse of Elizabeth’s chastity. Her right hand rests delicately but decidedly on the globe, caressing that portion of it that represents America; by 1588 the colony of Virginia had been established as the foundation of the British Empire in the New World, although the English hold was still far from secure. The imperial crown, hers by hereditary right, is confidently placed at her right elbow, so that Elizabeth appears not only as the ruler of a victorious realm, but also as an aspiring empress of the world.