The Armada’s defeat stirred a cocktail of emotions in the English. Some gloated: ‘It came, it saw, it fled’ joked the legend on one commemorative medal.56 But most people mixed righteous jubilation with a profound sense of relief and thankfulness for God’s mercy. Yet in spite of the weakness of England’s coastal defences, and the fact that the county militia which formed the bulk of its land forces were no match for Parma’s tercios, the Armada was never really a close-run thing, simply because Philip’s plan, which he insisted be adhered to rigidly, was so impractical. In the unlikely event of the Armada succeeding then it is hard to see how Protestantism as an organised political force would have survived in the Netherlands, France and Scotland, let alone in England. But what that would have meant in terms of the broader shape of European history is impossible to say.
The Armada was no more than the opening broadside in the war at sea. English naval expeditions struck at Corunna, Cadiz and other Spanish ports in 1589, 1596 and 1597, while Drake and Hawkins returned to plundering Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean, until fatigue and tropical disease claimed both men in 1595–6. Philip II retaliated by sending huge armadas into the Narrow Seas in 1596 and 1597 with the ultimate objective of knocking England out of the war in the Low Countries – only for the ‘Protestant wind’ to rise up on both occasions and drive the Spanish fleets back to port. The immediate cause of the war, the English expeditionary force to the Netherlands, proved equally ineffective, at least in the short term. The queen wanted Leicester merely to hold his ground until a treaty could be negotiated that would preserve the delicate balance between French and Spanish influence in the Low Countries. Leicester, on the other hand, wanted glorious victories for the Protestant cause, for which he had neither the men, money, nor competence as a general.
Like most of Elizabeth’s armies (and in contrast to Henry VIII’s semi-feudal war-hosts) the expeditionary force was chronically underfunded and consisted in part of conscripts from the dregs of English society: ‘our old ragged roggues’ as Leicester called them.57 Underfunded by Elizabeth and cheated by corrupt officers, the English soldiers were forced to borrow and steal from their increasingly hostile Dutch hosts. Conditions deteriorated so much in one English-held garrison that its commanders handed the town over to Parma and took their starving, unpaid troops into Spanish service. Initially, therefore, the first expeditionary army contributed little to the rebel war effort while spurring Philip into launching the Armada. Leicester himself returned home in 1588 an exhausted man, and died shortly afterwards. But from the late 1580s, English troops, operating as part of a reorganised Dutch army, began to make a real difference, helping to retake many of the towns that had fallen to Parma. By the late 1590s the Spanish reconquista had stalled, and the northern Low Countries had emerged as a new independent state, the Dutch republic, which was a confederation of sovereign provinces under the semi-hereditary military leadership of the House of Orange.
Parma’s all-conquering army was repulsed in the Low Countries because much of it had been diverted to France in 1589 to help the Guisards in the struggle against the Huguenots. The Protestant cause had received a tremendous boost that year with the succession of the Huguenot leader Henri de Bourbon as France’s new king, Henri IV (1553–1610). France now replaced the Low Countries as the main battleground in Europe’s wars of religion, and with Parma’s men digging in just across the Channel, Elizabeth again had no choice but to send thousands of English soldiers to help stave off defeat by the pro-Habsburg French. Although Henri’s politically expedient conversion to Catholicism in 1593 infuriated the queen, it eventually enabled him to defeat the Guisards, reunite France (with toleration for its Huguenot minority) and expel the Spanish. Whether they realised it or not, the English had won their first war to maintain the balance of power in western Europe.
Just as it looked as if a Protestant meltdown in north-western Europe had been averted, another rebellion in Ireland revived English fears of Catholic encirclement. There was always an incentive for Irish troublemakers to stir when the English were preoccupied elsewhere, but the rebellion that broke out in Ulster in 1594 was altogether more serious than its predecessors – largely because of the man who came to lead it, Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone (c.1550–1616). With a vast lordship in Ulster yielding perhaps as much as £80,000 a year, Tyrone was probably the wealthiest man in all of Ireland. As it turned out, he was also a master strategist and a fine general. Add to this winning combination the fact that Philip II and his heir – who would succeed him in 1598 as Philip III – were willing to send troops to Tyrone’s assistance, and it looked as if Elizabeth’s policy of trying to control Ireland on the cheap by licensing Protestant profiteers and warlords was finally unravelling.
Tyrone’s rebellion began unremarkably enough as a reaction against attempts by New English officials to extend their authority, and their greed for Irish land, into Ulster. However, to the government’s consternation it found itself facing not the usual lightly armed Gaelic levies but a large and well-drilled army that Tyrone had equipped with muskets and pikes. Early successes against scratch English forces, and assurances from Philip’s agents that Spanish troops were on the way, encouraged Tyrone to take the momentous step in 1596 of hitching his Ulster ‘confederacy’ to a Spanish alliance and Philip’s war against Elizabeth. Indeed, Tyrone seems to have given serious consideration to handing Ireland over to Spanish rule once the English had been expelled. Certainly Ireland’s only hope of enduring as a Catholic state was to help the Spanish topple the Protestant regime in London. Ireland by the mid-1590s had become a second front in the enterprise of England.
To widen support for the rebellion while he waited for Spanish troops, Tyrone appealed to all of Ireland’s Catholics, Old English and Gaels, to join what he portrayed as a struggle for religious and national liberation. In 1598, with the rebellion taking hold in Connacht and Munster, Elizabeth sent over an army of 17,000 men – the largest to leave England during her reign – under the command of her favourite Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex (1565–1601). But though brave to a fault, Essex did not have the stomach for a protracted campaign, and after holding private – and possibly treasonous – talks with Tyrone, he returned to England to confront the queen (more of Essex shortly). He was replaced by the resourceful soldier–courtier Lord Mountjoy.
The rebellion reached crisis-point in 1601 with the landing of 3,400 Spanish veterans at Kinsale on Ireland’s southern coast. Tyrone marched south from Ulster to link up with the Spanish, who had been bottled up in Kinsale by Mountjoy’s army, and on arriving outside the town he decided to risk pitched battle on the understanding that the Spaniards would sally out to support him. Inexplicably, however, the Spanish stayed put, and – as so often in set-piece battles between English and Gaelic forces – the Irish foot were routed by the English heavy cavalry. Even had Tyrone won, it would have needed more Spanish troops to take and hold Ireland against the English. As it was, Mountjoy’s victory at Kinsale effectively broke the rebellion. The Spanish surrendered and sailed home, and Tyrone was offered and accepted very generous peace terms shortly after Elizabeth’s death in March 1603. The Nine Years War (1594–1603), as it would become known, finally brought all of Ireland under Tudor control, and greatly increased the rate at which the English language, customs and systems of law and government – though not Protestantism – penetrated Irish Gaeldom. Nevertheless, victory in 1603 left a bitter legacy of religious and ethnic hatred. The English had prevailed not by the political arts but by the sword, and neither the victors nor the vanquished would forget it.
The Anglo-Spanish war ended quietly, by treaty, in 1604, with both sides financially exhausted. England had survived through luck and because Spain had succumbed to a classic case of imperial overreach. Successfully defying the Spanish had not transformed England into a major European power. It had, however, fixed the idea of English seapower in the national consciousness. No matter that England’s seadogs were every bit as rapacious as their Catholic adversaries, or were in some cases – Hawkins, for example – of doubtful Protestant credentials. They had preserved English liberties and Protestantism against Catholic ‘tyranny’. The crises and triumphs of Elizabeth’s reign also sealed the bond between Protestantism and patriotism. The defeat