Armada Reason

It Started At Fotheringhay

And Was Blessed With Papal Finance

This Naval History continues on from: "Armada Going Home"

Towards the upper end of the hall they had set up a platform like a minature stage for travelling actors, jutting twelve feet into the hall, eight or nine feet wide and less than three feet high, at one side a pair of stairs led up to it.

The fresh wood of the scaffolding had been covered in black velvet. On the platform in line with the stairs stood a single high backed chair, also draped in black velvet, three or four feet in front of it a black cushion.

Next to the cushion and rising above it something like a low bench showed where the velvet imperfectly concealed an ordinary chopping block.

The stage managers were satisfied, the sheriffs men trying to look soldierly, standing stifly in their places, and the chosen audience, two hundred or more knights and gentlemen summoned for that early hour, had filed into the lower end of the hall.

In almost thirty years since she had wedded a future King of France, she had failed to learn the more important lessons of politics, but she had learned how to dominate a scene.

Armada Going Home

She entered through a little door at the side

Before they saw her she was already in the great hall, walking towards the dais, with six of her own people two by her sides and two behind her. Walking quietly as if going to her prayers.

Only for a moment, did she seem to need a supporting arm, and if her hands trembled before she locked them in her lap no one saw. Then, as if acknowledging the multitude, she turned for the first time to face her audience, and smiled.

Against the black velvet of the chair and dais her figure, clad in black velvet was almost lost. The grey winter daylight dulled the gleem of her white hands, there was a glint of gold in her kerchief and the red gold shined in the piled masses of auburn hair.

The audience could see clearly the delicate frill of white lace at her throat, and the face with its great dark eyes and tiny wistful mouth.

This is she who represents all those who had died, a thousand nameless men on the moors and the gallows of the north. This was she whose legend had hung over England like a sword ever since she had hastened across its borders with her subjects in pursuit.

This was the last captive princess of romance, she was Queen of France, the exiled Queen of Scotland, the heir to the English throne, at this very moment, if she had her rights; England's lawful queen.

This was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

For a moment she held all their eyes, then she sank back into the darkness of her chair and turned her grave inattention to her judges. She was satisfied that her audience would look at no one else.

The earls of Kent and Shrewsbury who had entered with her, almost unobserved, had seated themselves opposite, and Mr Beale was standing clearing his throat and crackling the parchment of the warrant he had to read.

"Stubborn disobedience...incitement to insurrection...against the life and person of her sacred Majesty...high treason...death."

Nothing in those phrases could have mattered to Mary Stuart or to any person in the hall. Everyone knew that this was not the sentence for a crime. This was another stroke in a political duel which had been going on for as long as most of them could remember, which had begun, before either of the enemy Queens were born.

Elizabeth Tudor against Mary stuart

The prisoner on the scaffold. Whatever Elizabeth had done, Mary Stuart had, sought by every means in her power to destroy her cousin and bring her low. In a duel to the death like theirs there were no foul strokes.

When the arms of strength had fallen from her hands she had used whatever weapons weakness could grasp: lies, tears, evasions, threats and pleadings, and the hands and lives of whatever men her crowns, her beauty or faith could win to her cause.

They had proved two-edged weapons at last; but if they cut her now she had dealt wounds with them, and kept her cousin's realm in greater turmoil from her English prison than she had been able to do from her Scottish throne.

And she meant to strike one more blow. She turned a bored chin on Mr Beal's concluding phrases. The Dean of Peterborough was even more nervous than Mr Beal. Before he could get going she cut him contemptuously short.

"Mr Dean, I shall die as I have lived, in the true and holy Catholic faith. All you can say to me on that score is but vain, and all your prayers, I think, can avail me but little."

No neutrals within Heretics or Christendom

Her faith, she was sure, was the one weapon which would not turn in her hand. The north was Catholic, they said, and the west; and even here in the heretic's own strongholds, even in the Midlands, even in London, more and more turned daily to the ancient faith of Rome.

Mary Stuart believed, on news of her death, those thousands that had been quiet, would rise in their wrath to sweep away all this injustice. And there were Catholic King's beyond the seas who would be more eager to avenge the Queen of Scots dead than ever they had been, than when she was alive.

That Mary herself was a devout Catholic is one of the few things about her not open to dispute, but it was not enough simply to die in her faith. The Duel would go on. All men must know that she had died not only in her faith but for it.

Now the glittering sweep of the axe would cut for ever the burden of old mistakes, silence the whispered slanders, and her blood would cry out for vengence on her enemies more unmistakably than her living voice could ever have done. For years she had favoured an ambiguous motto:

"My end is my beginning"

Martyrdom might make good both the promise and the threat. She had only to play her last scene well. She held her crucifix high, visible all down the long hall.

Mary prayed with a high clear voice, English prayers, she was praying for the people of England and for the soul of her royal cousin Elizabeth; she was forgiving all her enemies.

Then for a moment her ladies were busy about her. The black velet gown fell on the floor revealing underbodice and pettycoat of crimson silk, she stepped forward suddenly, shockingly, in the colour of martyrdom, blood red from head to toe.

Quietly she knelt and bowed herself low over the little chopping- block. "In manus tuas, domine..." and then they heard twice the dull chunk of the axe.

There was one more ceremony to accomplish

The executioner must exhibit the head for all to see and speak the customary words.

The tall masked black figure stooped and rose, crying-out in a loud voice: "Long live the Queen!"

But all he held in his hand that had belonged to the rival Queen was an elaborate auburn wig. Rolled nearer the edge of the platform, a shrunken and withered and grey, with spase silver stubble on the small shiny skull was the head of the martyr.

Mary Stuart had always known how to embarrass her enemies.

News of the beheading spread

In the early morning hours of February 1587, at the Spanish embassy in Paris the first news that ten days before at Fotheringhay, the Catholic Queen of Scots had been beheaded.

Within a short while all Paris knew of her fate.

From the beginning preachers had found the persecution of Catholics in England one of their surest themes, one to which the King's government could not possibly object. For this kind of propogander the execution of the Queen of Scots was made to order.

Now that Mary Stuart had been taken from the board, instead of waiting until the last possible moment, the Enterprise of England should soon be launched, would it be six months off? A year? Two years?. Whatsoever, it had simplified one aspect of a complicated game.

Bernardino de Mendoza

Spanish Ambassador For France

Ever since, plans for the great Enterprise which would mean his personal vengeance and the triumph of his faith. Mendoza had been one of the undertaking's chief advocates, assuring King Philip II of Spain, of the Catholic party in England and in Scotland, and of the contemptible weakness of the raw English militia.

He wrote: 'Therefore, I pray that Your Majesty will hasten the Enterprise of England to the earliest possible date, for it would seem to be God's obvious design to bestow upon Your Majesty the crowns of these two kingdoms. (England and Scotland)

More than two years before, his embassy to England had ended in expulsion. Mendoza and his staff had been unceremoniously set aboard a ship and returned to France, because his plots disturbed the realms of England.

King Philip II of Spain

Nobody since the beginning of history had ever ruled so much of the earth's surface as Philip II of Spain. Nobody had ever owned so many titles of kingdoms, dukedoms, countries, principalities and lordships of all sorts. And nobody, had ever had so many documents to read.

Firebrands had been urging the Enterprise on Philip for nearly twenty-years, He himself had been seriously considering it for about four. The Enterprise of Englad was now becoming a definate plan. The acquisition of Portugal meant a great increase in Spanish strength in the Atlantic. The Portuguese had been the pioneers of the Ocean.

Many things about the Enterprise repelled Philip. For one thing, its cost. All the silver of Mexico and Peru had not kept him from sinking into debt every year, mortgaging every year another slice of his revenues, and paying higher and higher rates of interest.

Even worse that the expense was uncertainty. Any war was risky, to a prudent man. Philip liked to think that he had never sought war, never fought except in defence, never used his strength to rob or oppress his neighbours. He feared war as a burned child dreads fire.

He feared war with England especially

He knew something of the country of which he had been king, enough to know that his plan, or any plan for the Enterprise, involved a desperate gamble.

In the days when he had been Mary Tudor's husband he had once written: "The Kingdom of England is and must always remain strong at sea, since on this the safety of the realm depends."

Strong at sea so his most experienced captains told him, England had remained, she was a strength not to be challenged.

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Pope Sixtus V made the Armada's

Invasion of England the Church's Business

No one in Europe took an acuter interest in the Enterprise of England than His Holiness Pope Sixtus V. He had been urging it on Philip since the first of his papacy, and for almost as long Philip had been trying to borrow money from him against it.

But His Holiness had been far from sure that Philip meant to invade England at all. He refused to lend anything on supposition.

Instead he swore with a great oath that on the day the first Spanish soldier set foot on English soil he would not lend but give the King of Spain a million golden ducats.

Naturally, now that Sixtus was at least convinced that Philip did mean to launch the Enterprise, he had a special interest in its chances of success. To satisfy his curiosity he not only alerted his ambassador at Madrid but sent a special envoy to Lisbon, on church business.

The continuation of this Naval History will be: "Calendar Ships Guns"

Armada Reason Calendar Ships Guns

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