The report of the Armada’s inadvertent flight north reached Queen Elizabeth as she was addressing her troops at Tilbury camp on 18 August, more than a week after the event. But even this good news did not come rumour-free, for now the Duke of Parma and his army were said to be on their way across the Channel. It was not until the end of August that the Dean of St Paul’s was ordered to announce officially that the Armada had been defeated and Philip II’s agent in London was able to write home to Spain on 7 September that ‘the Lords of the Council went to St Paul’s to give thanks to God for having rescued the realm from its recent danger’. Just three days later, though, another alarm was spread that the Armada was on its way back. By the beginning of November, after ten weeks of continued uncertainty, the public’s nerves were frayed to unravelling point. Parliament, which was to have met on 12 November, was prorogued until February ‘as it was seen that both people and nobles were weary of so much trouble’, wrote Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London. ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They look rather like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’ Even Elizabeth, who was not normally chary when it came to her own personal safety, was persuaded by her Council to stay away from St Paul’s ‘for fear that a harquebuss might be fired at her’. Micea noted that the fifty-five-year-old Queen looked ‘much aged and spent’. Perhaps the Spanish fleet had made for Scotland and had succeeded in persuading King James VI to avenge his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution of the year before; or perhaps they had rounded Scotland and were now in Ireland, stirring up trouble among the rebels there. In response to this new fear the Queen ‘sent Sir Thomas Perrot to raise 2,000 men in Wales, and take them over [to Ireland] with all speed’. The extent of Elizabeth’s anxiety may be measured by her willingness to throw yet more money at the conflict.14
But if in England no one could quite believe they had won, on the Continent no one could believe that the Spanish had lost. The French ambassador in London had spent his summer merrily reporting stories of heavy English casualties, so when the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, produced 400 pamphlets giving the English version of events, he was met with frank incredulity. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed stating that the English had been victorious,’ wrote Don Bernadino Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, ‘but the people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies. One of the ambassador’s secretaries began to read in the palace a [report] which he said had been sent from England, but the people were so enraged that he was obliged to fly for his life.’ Only Pope Sixtus remained unimpressed by the European rumour-mill, refusing to loosen his grip on the million gold ducats he had promised Spain until he had better proof of Spanish success.15
On 24 November England at last felt confident enough to celebrate its victory and ‘a solemn procession…was held to give thanks to God for the scattering of the Spanish fleet’. Through winter streets hung with blue cloth, Elizabeth ‘was carried in a gilded chair…drawn by two grey horses royally caparisoned…to the great cathedral of St Paul’s’, from the battlements of which eleven captured Armada banners streamed out above the city. Here, Elizabeth read out a prayer she had composed specially for the occasion. The mood was one of relief, but also, more pertinently, of sober thanksgiving. In the words of the medal struck to celebrate England’s victory: ‘God blew and they were scattered’. The victory was His.16
And in giving this victory to God, Elizabeth extended a process begun by her father, Henry VIII, many years before: the process of nationalizing England’s state religion.* It was an inadvertent process, born out of fear: Henry’s fear of plunging his country back into yet another round of civil war if he failed to produce a male heir. And it was a process concluded in fear: the fear of standing alone and vulnerable against the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. The God who won the Armada could not be a Protestant God, at least not in the way Protestantism was understood throughout the rest of Europe. That God had demonstrably failed to help the Calvinists in the Low Countries; to protect the Huguenots of France from the St Bartholomew massacre of 1572; to save William of Orange from assassination in 1584. Neither could He be a Catholic. Not when the Armada carried at its head a consecrated standard bearing the rallying cry ‘Arise, oh Lord, and avenge thy cause’. Not when each ship had been provided with its own priest and each member of the expedition had received absolution in advance for the blood he would shed.* Therefore, He could only be an Anglican God, that compromise and most English of Gods, who continued to frustrate both Catholics and Protestants in almost equal measure.† So the subtle propaganda ran. In a Europe ravaged by wars of religion, only the English had chosen correctly.17
And how lucky it was that God should be an Anglican, an Englishman, for no one believed for a moment that England’s conflict with Catholic Spain was over. Indeed, at the beginning of November the Venetian ambassador to Spain reported home to the Doge that ‘In spite of everything, His Majesty shows himself determined to carry on the war.’ So though the coach that bore Elizabeth to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘was open in front and on both sides’ so that she might better be seen by crowds of cheering Londoners, yet her Government was taking no risks. An order had been given ‘that in every household along the route no one should be allowed to look out from the windows while she was passing, unless the householder was prepared to stake his life and entire fortune on his trustworthiness.’ This was an England gripped in the jaws of fear and suspicion.18
On Friday, 28 October 1588 a sailing ship beat its way slowly up the Norfolk coast. On board, its passengers scanned the shoreline for a suitable landing place. Having spotted what looked like a safe point between Happisburgh and Bacton, some miles to the south of Cromer, they ordered the crew to drop anchor until nightfall. As darkness fell the ship’s boat was launched and headed into shore. When it returned to the ship, it left standing on the beach two young Englishmen of whom the English Government had every reason to feel fearful and suspicious. The pair were Catholic priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, and their intention was to succeed where the Spanish Armada had failed: to return England to the Catholic Church. If the Armada was the latest in a progression of Franco-Spanish ‘Enterprises’ sanctioned by the Pope and designed to restore English Catholicism through force of arms, then these two young men represented Rome’s second line of spiritual attack: force of argument.* 19
Argument had always been the Christian Church’s best weapon against heresy, chiefly because most heretical behaviour was thought to be a consequence of ignorance, poor judgement, or an imperfect understanding of the teachings of Christ.† Such heretics were not sinful therefore, merely misguided, and required little more than clear reasoning to make them see the error of their ways. Of course there were other heretics who wilfully rejected Christ’s doctrines—out of pride, or a lust for power perhaps. They were sinners and merited the full weight of the Church’s wrath, which, ever since the eleventh century, had usually meant burning at the stake. There was a further subset of heresy still: schism, the rejection of papal supremacy. For the rebellious schismatic (who might uphold all Christ’s other teachings but this one) as for the misguided heretic, argument was deemed the best form of correction. So while Rome supported the invasion of England and the deposition of Elizabeth—her wilful heresy had imperilled the souls of her countrymen and God would forgive the use of force against her—it also dispatched its army of arguers. It was belief in the divine purpose of their argument that filled the two Englishmen now standing in the dark of a Norfolk beach, straining to hear above the noise of the waves on the shingle any sound to suggest their