The most famous Elizabethan maritime venture, and a striking illustration of advances in English seamanship, was Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1577–80. Only one ship had achieved this feat before, that of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1519–22, and he himself had been killed during the voyage. When Drake’s flagship, the Golden Hind, dropped anchor back at Plymouth it contained a fortune in Spanish booty. The queen’s share alone amounted to £300,000, which was more than the crown’s entire annual income. The implications of Drake’s voyage for the security of Spain’s empire greatly alarmed Philip II and, for that reason, some of Elizabeth’s councillors as well. They refused to accept Drake’s presents, and tried to persuade Elizabeth to have his treasure returned to the Spanish. But she could not resist such a huge windfall. And nor could she resist flaunting her victory over Philip – knighting Drake in 1581, for example, and wearing plundered Spanish jewellery in full view of Philip’s ambassador.
An obvious strategy for challenging the power of Spain in the New World and in Europe was to copy the example of the Conquistadores. English buccaneers, like their Huguenot role models, dreamed of founding colonies that might vie with Spain for the wealth of the Indies. It was the king of Spain’s ‘Indian Golde’, warned Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘that indaungereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels, and setteth bound loyalty at libertie, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe’.45 Until the English themselves embarked upon colonial enterprises, thought Ralegh, the Spanish colossus could not be checked.
In fact, the English state was too weak before the 1640s – and the Spanish too strong – to maintain any considerable military presence in the Caribbean for very long. The penny-pinching Elizabeth was certainly not interested in such a scheme, even supposing she could afford one. She did not want open war with Philip in the New World any more than in the Old. It was left to private enterprise to plant England’s first settlement in North America: Ralegh’s would-be privateering base on Roanoke Island, in modern-day North Carolina, close to Spanish shipping lanes from the Caribbean. Two expeditions – one in 1585, the other in 1587 – deposited a small number of colonists there, but fighting the Spanish closer to home hampered preparations to supply the colony, and when a ship finally returned to the island, in 1590, the colonists had vanished without trace.
The Elizabethan age would end with an empire nowhere. The privateering war that ruined the Spanish merchant fleet for centuries to come would increase the range and scale of English overseas commerce beyond all recognition. But though it also produced a cadre of ocean-going explorers and would-be colonisers, the only evidence of their activities by 1600 was a scattering of bones and deserted outposts along the western Atlantic seaboard.
The world is not enough
‘Assuredlie, there was never heard or knowen of so greate preparac[i]on as the kinge of Spaigne hathe & dailie maketh readie for the invasyon of Englande.’46 So wrote a triumphant Drake after he had plundered and burned over two dozen ships in the Spanish naval base of Cadiz in April 1587. The recipient of Drake’s letter, William Cecil (now Lord Burghley), probably thought this warning a bit rich coming from a man whose repeated attacks upon Spain and its colonies were largely responsible for these ominous preparations in the first place. Despite the confidence of Drake that he and his fellow seadogs were more than a match for the Spanish, the fact that Philip II even contemplated the Empresa de Inglaterra – ‘the enterprise of England’ – was a foreign-relations catastrophe for the Elizabethan government. How was it that the English, with still painful memories of the hardships and dangers they had faced in fighting the French in the 1540s, were again under threat of invasion from a continental superpower?
As we have seen, relations between England and Spain had often been strained since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, but they deteriorated markedly during the 1560s. Fear of France, the force that had pushed the two countries together since medieval times, had subsided after 1562 as French Catholics and Protestants had fallen to killing each other rather than annoying their neighbours. English piracy in the Channel, and Spanish embargoes on English trade with Antwerp, had weakened the two countries’ common commercial interests. But tension between them would increase dramatically from 1567 with the arrival in the Low Countries of Philip II’s ruthless military commander the duke of Alba at the head of ten thousand veteran troops – reinforced by 30,000 German and Italian levies – with orders to crush the rebellion there by whatever means necessary. It was hardly in Protestant England’s interest to have a Catholic army stationed just across the Narrow Seas, less than 200 miles from London, or to stand idly by while it destroyed Protestantism in the Low Countries. The Catholic threat was magnified by reports of anti-Protestant atrocities on the Continent, and particularly the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Catholic mobs in Paris and other French cities butchered thousands of Huguenot men, women and children. The queen’s conservative political instincts recoiled at the idea of assisting Calvinist rebels against their rightful prince, but even she could see the necessity of sending money and troops to support the Protestant rebellions in the Netherlands and France, although she did so grudgingly and as covertly as possible. She also tried to forge alliances with the Protestant princes of northern Germany and Scandinavia.
It was in this context of war for Protestant survival and Spanish hegemony on the Continent that Elizabeth gave tacit protection to Huguenot privateers and rebels from the Low Countries, and that Philip, in turn, began giving surreptitious aid to Catholic conspiracies against her throne and life. By 1570 a state of cold war could be said to have existed between England and Spain. It was always likely that Philip’s devout Catholicism and the equally zealous Protestantism of some of Elizabeth’s councillors would strain Anglo-Spanish relations. Paradoxically, however, it was the weakness of English Protestantism rather than its strength that made open war more likely.
The power and unity of the Catholic world were greatly magnified in the minds of English Protestants by their own sense of insecurity. The godly were surrounded and outnumbered by ‘cold statute Protestants’ and ‘church papists’ – that is, men and women who attended parish church services, as law required, but had no positive commitment to the new religion. It was not until the 1570s and 1580s, with a rise in the number of university graduates entering the ministry, and sustained effort by Whitehall to remove Catholics from local government and the Church, that Protestantism began to make a decisive impact upon popular piety, at least in lowland England. And even then, much of the old religious sensibility, of fondness for ceremony and communal rites, lingered on and re-formed in attachment to the Book of Common Prayer. Catholicism as an organised religion, which acknowledged the pope as its spiritual head on Earth, had shrunk in most counties into a tiny, gentrified sect by 1600. Among the Protestant majority, however, hatred of popery now vied and overlapped with hatred of foreigners as the English people’s defining characteristic. Yet no matter how hard godly ministers tried, they could not persuade most of their parishioners to abandon the pre-Reformation belief in salvation through good neighbourliness, and to accept distinctively Protestant doctrines.
Elizabeth would have calmed Protestant nerves had she heeded the pleas of her councillors and Parliaments and married and produced a son. But Elizabeth did not relish the role of a brood mare. Nor did she want a husband trying to relieve her of the burden of government, as Philip II had very gallantly offered to do at the start of her reign. ‘I will have here but one mistress,’ she told a would-be consort, ‘and no master.’47 When she did toy with the idea of marriage she invariably scared her Protestant subjects rather than reassured them. In 1561, for example, she had informed Philip that she would consider restoring links with Rome if he would back her marriage to her favourite, Robert Dudley (1532/3–88), created earl of Leicester in 1564. Nothing came of this proposal. But then in her mid-forties she apparently gave serious consideration to marrying the duke of Anjou, who was the younger brother of the French king Henri III (1551–89), and was possibly the inspiration for the English folk