Much of the credit for holding off the Spanish belonged to the private interests that had helped to push Elizabeth into war in the first place – to the pirate grandees and their lordly Calvinist patrons at court – rather than to the crown or to the royal navy. In fact, there was no royal navy as we might understand the term. The ‘Navy Royal’ was not a national institution but the personal property of the monarch. The bulk of the national fleet was controlled by private shipowners and merchants, who were often able to commandeer the royal ships in their midst for their own privateering ventures. Yet even though Elizabeth’s impressive military record against the forces of popery owed much to private initiative, it still became the standard by which her Stuart successors, and their policies, would be judged by the English public. Elizabeth’s carefully crafted but fictitious image as a Protestant heroine made her an almost impossible act to follow.
The long struggle against Spain was remarkable on several counts. It had been fought not for territorial gain or dynastic ambition but for national survival and the defence of Protestantism, and on a global scale that would not be rivalled for another century. The stories and debates surrounding the war and its related horrors in France and the Low Countries became the principal stuff of Elizabethan news pamphlets. England’s engagement with these various theatres of war gripped readers like almost no other issue. The war also exposed a curious reversal that had occurred in the English psyche in the hundred years since Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth. In 1485 the English had still fancied themselves as conquerors with one foot planted firmly in northern France, even though they had been weakened by civil war and were in fact a prey to their neighbours rather than vice versa. A century later, however, and their self-image was much more that of an island race, alone and menaced by mighty enemies, and yet England, on its day, could be a formidable power itself, as the Armada campaign showed. The English would wrestle with this paradox of ‘lyttel England[’s] great discovered strength’ well into the seventeenth century.59
Fighting Spain on several fronts and for so many years imposed a terrible strain on the Elizabethan state. The expeditionary force to the Netherlands had cost one and a half million pounds by 1603, perhaps six years’ ordinary royal revenue. Defeating Tyrone had drained another two million pounds from the exchequer. And over 100,000 English and Welsh men had been raised for service on the Continent and in Ireland, or about 20 per cent of the available manpower. To meet these huge expenses, the government resumed the sale of crown lands – starving the goose that laid the golden eggs – and used the royal prerogative to sanction oppressive financial expedients, of which the most hated were royal patents granting exclusive commercial rights over trade in a specified commodity. The sale of these monopolies to courtiers and crown creditors certainly put money in the queen’s coffers, but the restrictive practices of the patentees – these ‘bloodsuckers of the commonwealth’ as one MP called them – removed it from the pockets of her subjects.60 The Commons’ debates over monopolies in 1597 and 1601 were among the most acrimonious of any Parliament during the entire Tudor period. At least Elizabeth managed to avoid bankruptcy – Philip II suffered four during the course of his reign – but being equally adept at avoiding difficult issues she also ignored the opportunity the war afforded to develop new sources of revenue and new credit mechanisms. At the very least the crown should have increased customs rates and the value of the main form of parliamentary taxation, the subsidy, in line with inflation. The queen’s failure to address the crown’s financial weakness, and to end the war with Spain before her death, meant that James VI of Scotland would succeed to a realm in which money and, in consequence, political good will were in short supply.
Commonwealth courses
The pitiful demise from disease and neglect of thousands of English sailors after their heroics in defeating the Armada was symbolic of the fate of Elizabethan England in the fifteen years that followed. The threat of Spanish encirclement and invasion was resisted – if sometimes more by luck than bravery – and all of Ireland was conquered. But although no direct blow was landed upon England itself, the economic impact of prolonged war, combined with the bad harvests and dearth that marked the 1590s, would inflict almost as much hardship upon the lower orders as they had suffered in similar circumstances during the 1540s and 1550s. Local resistance to the government’s heavy wartime demands would coincide with, and heighten, an authoritarian reaction among the queen’s advisers against Puritanism and other perceived challenges to her ‘imperial’ authority. At court, too, the war’s poisonous influence upon an increasingly sclerotic regime would foment the ‘inward broils’ of factionalism and aristocratic conspiracy. The very people whose duty it was to stand by the queen in time of war and unrest, her great noblemen, would (as one of them put it) ‘repyne that the state value them not at that rate thay prise themselves worthy of’.61 And some peers would do more than just repine; they would turn upon Elizabeth in violent fashion.
The climate at court by the 1590s was not altogether hospitable for those who fancied themselves the ‘ancient nobility’ – two or three generations among the peerage usually sufficed in this regard. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil – the foremost royal councillors of their generation – were not simply the products of Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s belief that ‘new men’ made more reliable servants than did great noblemen, for the rise of these administrative masterminds also pointed to the growing complexity of royal government, and of the need for expert bureaucrats and men of letters to make it function effectively. Elizabeth’s peers tried, with varying degrees of success, to adapt themselves to the requirement at court for men schooled in the politic arts of government. But the traditional view that what truly defined a nobleman was honour in arms and chivalric glory continued to be widely held. Most peers aspired not only to high office at court but also to command of their county’s or the kingdom’s armed forces.
Yet if honourable military service for prince and country remained the mark of the true nobleman, it was an increasingly hard-won commodity by the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan peers who sought high command must balance the often conflicting requirements of building a serviceable military following from among their gentry supporters and tenantry, and maintaining the favour of a monarch who, like her father and grandfather, distrusted noblemen with the landed power to retain what were, in effect, their own private armies. Even with the Armada anchored in the English Channel in July 1588, the queen declined the offer of the great territorial magnate the 2nd earl of Pembroke to attend her ‘with 300 horse and 500 foote at the leaste of my followers, armed at myne oune coste and with myne oune store’.62 The growing sophistication of warfare from the 1540s was another disincentive to would-be ‘fighting lords’. The profession of arms was becoming just that: a full-time career that demanded expert knowledge. Few noblemen had the application or inclination to master the latest techniques in deploying pikemen and musketeers, and it is no surprise that some of the positions in Elizabeth’s armies that would once have been graced by peers or their younger sons were occupied by relatively low-born professional soldiers. Then there was the problem of adapting to the new age of religious warfare. During the second half of the sixteenth century the ideals of chivalry and military service in the Protestant cause would fuse in England, rendering futile any hopes that Catholic peers might entertain of command in the queen’s armies.
The squeeze on lordly preferment and military ambition grew particularly tight during the 1590s. Not only did Elizabeth make very few new creations to the peerage – which numbered about sixty during the 1590s – she also largely ignored the ancient nobility in appointments to high office. By 1597 her privy council had contracted in size to a mere eleven men, not one of whom was a territorial magnate. ‘The nobility are unsatisfied that places of honor are not given them,’ complained one peer, ‘that ofices of trust are not laid in there handes to manage as thay were wont; that her maiestie is percimonius and sloe to reliefe there wants …’63 Although there was no shortage of soldiering to be had during the 1590s, the queen rarely favoured the kind of ambitious military operations that would satisfy her peers’ craving for honour in arms. Her caution, as we have seen, was entirely justified. Royal finances would not sustain warfare on the profligate scale