It was only towards the end of the 1570s that the cold war between England and Spain started to heat up. Spanish resurgence in the Netherlands from 1578 onwards was bad enough, but worse was to come. In 1580 the direct line of succession to the throne of Portugal expired, and on a long shortlist of potential heirs, Philip II probably had the best claim. There was a Portuguese candidate, but he was a bastard, and it was difficult at that time for the illegitimate to appeal to legitimisme. Overwhelming force secured the succession for Philip, and thus brought under his control the vast financial resources of Portugal’s trade and overseas empire. With fresh resources came fresh ambition, and Philip’s agents plotted in Rome, France and England with Elizabeth’s disaffected Catholic subjects and with the militantly Catholic Guise faction in France. Vast strategic schemes were devised for the invasion of first Scotland and then England, with a view to substituting Mary Queen of Scots for Elizabeth. At home in England, plans to assassinate Elizabeth were unmasked with a regularity that was at times suspicious. But Francis Walsingham’s network of
Informers and double agents served him well, even if they often crossed the boundary between detection and entrapment.
Elizabeth in her turn gave ever more open support to the war at sea being waged by privateers such as Francis Drake, whom she knighted on board the Golden Hind, moored on the Thames, in April 1581 upon his return, laden with Spanish booty, from his circumnavigation of the globe. With English aid to the Portuguese pretender, Don Antonio, and Spanish aid to rebels in Ireland, the two countries drifted towards a war which almost everyone saw as inevitable. The new ways of the world were signalled in the absence of any formal declaration of war. Yet when Drake sailed for the West Indies in autumn 1585 with a fleet of over twenty ships, he did so under a commission from the queen which made his expedition an act of war.
The Dutch had for some time been angling for more than moral support from England, and the fall of Antwerp to Farnese in 1585 brought the situation to a critical point for Elizabeth’s government. Despite her misgivings about war, her councillors prevailed upon her to intervene directly. Under a treaty signed in August at Nonsuch Palace, the Earl of Leicester led a force of several thousand men to assist Philip’s enemies in the Netherlands. This represented an important shift in policy for the queen. Since the ill-fated expedition to Le Havre in 1562-63, she had held out against invitations or advice to send troops into foreign theatres. As a queen, she had little enough to gain from war. Kings and nobles, educated in and motivated by a tradition of chivalry and martial prowess, could seek glory in conquest, in battle, even up to a point in defeat. For all the cynicism of More’s Utopia, and for all the pacifism of a fashionable intellectual like Erasmus in his widely read essay on the proverb dulce bellum inexpertis (‘war is sweet - if you’re not in it’), the space which sixteenth-century chronicles still gave to detailed accounts of military preparations and actions reminds us that for many men of that time, war was in effect the highest form of politics. Once kings went to war, cost was no object (although at times it might become an insuperable obstacle, as it had for Henry VIII in 1525). Elizabeth had a very clear sense of the cost, and a shrewd sense that such benefits as there might be would mostly redound elsewhere. She hesitated long before agreeing to go to war (there had been pressure for this since the later 1570s). And she hesitated long before appointing Leicester to lead the expedition.
The Earl of Leicester might have been genuinely committed to the protection of Dutch Calvinists and Dutch liberties. But he saw the expedition to the Netherlands as his guarantee of a place in the history books. Elizabeth was well aware of this, and also of the danger of entrusting too many troops to one of her subjects. So she kept a close eye on his conduct in the Netherlands. Militarily, there was little splendour in the grubby business of besieging or defending the forts and walled towns with which the country was dotted. Leicester slowed, but did not halt, Farnese’s advance. He certainly lacked the resources, and probably also the skills. Politically, there were temptations aplenty, and Leicester succumbed, accepting the invitation of the Dutch to become their Governor-General in January 1586. Elizabeth was livid at what she saw as his presumptuous self-elevation to a sovereign status vying with her own. After some characteristic changes of mind, she compelled him to resign the title.
World History
