The wreck of the fleet
On the thirtieth day the wind drove the shattered fleet into the North Sea. The English chased it as far as the Firth of Forth and then turned back, short of food and ammunition. According to the book, they had lost only sixty men and not a single ship. The Armada had no friendly harbor nearer than Spain itself: Scotland was hostile and Ireland's ports were held by the English. Damaged ships and hungry men tried desperately to sail round the British Isles in rough seas and high winds. Masts broke, sails tore, and every day some ships sank or were abandoned. Seventeen ships were wrecked on Ireland's rugged coast, and at Sligo alone the sea threw ashore a thousand drowned Spaniards. Some who landed begged for food and water, were refused, and hundreds who had no strength left to fight were killed by hostile locals. Of 130 ships that left Spain, the book says, only fifty-four came home, and of 27,000 men about 10,000, sick and wounded. Philip shut himself in a room of the Escorial after hearing the news, and no one dared speak to him. Pope Sixtus V, arguing that no invasion had actually taken place, did not pay a penny to bankrupt Spain.
A miserly queen
Elizabeth was as tight-fisted as the pope. Weary of spending on the navy, she demanded an account of every shilling spent before, during and after the campaign, and Howard and Hawkins paid from their own pockets for any shortfall they could not explain. Expecting a long war, she had held down the pay and food of her sailors. Now a terrible disease like typhus broke out among the returning men, and on some ships half the crews died or fell ill. Hawkins wondered what would have become of England had the plague struck before the enemy arrived.
The war goes on
The naval war lasted until Philip's death in 1598. In 1589 Drake sailed with several ships and, according to the book, fifteen thousand soldiers to help the Portuguese rebelling against Spain, but the Portuguese hated Protestants more than Spaniards, the English drank the wine they captured, and the expedition ended in failure and disgrace. In 1591 Lord Thomas Howard went to the Azores to take a Spanish treasure ship, but Philip's new fleet scattered his ships. Only the Revenge stayed behind and, until overpowered, fought fifteen enemy ships. Hawkins and Drake raided the West Indies again in 1595, quarreled, and died on the voyage. In 1596 Elizabeth sent another fleet against Spanish ports. At Cadiz it met nineteen warships and thirty-six merchantmen, but while Essex was busy plundering the town they slipped away. Even so, the expedition confirmed English command of the Atlantic.
What the defeat changed
The Armada's fall touched almost every side of modern Europe. Naval warfare changed decisively: grappling and boarding gave way to broadside gunnery. A weaker Spain let the Dutch regain their independence, Henry IV take the French throne, and North America become an English colony. Protestantism was preserved and strengthened, Catholicism in England declined, and James VI of Scotland gave up favoring the pope. Had the Armada been better built and led, the book suggests, Catholicism might have returned to England, the Guise family might have risen in France and Holland might have surrendered. The wave of pride and energy that carried Shakespeare and Bacon forward might never have come, and the English would have faced the Spanish Inquisition. War, in short, decides the course of theology and philosophy, and the power to kill and destroy is the license to live and to build.
The queen at sixty
Cecil and Walsingham, Drake and Hawkins had done much, but it was the queen who embodied victorious England, and at sixty she stood at the summit of fame. Her face was somewhat wrinkled, her hair hard to arrange and some of her teeth gone, yet in lace, ruff, slashed sleeves and wide jeweled skirts she looked every inch a proud queen. Parliament complained of her royal ways but obeyed. Leicester and Walsingham died naturally, while Drake and Hawkins fell prey to the sea they had set out to conquer. Cecil, the 'Atlas of this commonwealth' in Bacon's words, was old and gouty, and Elizabeth nursed him in his last illness, even feeding him with her own hand. She suffered from growing loneliness but would not let it dim her progresses or her lively court.
New faces shone around her. Christopher Hatton, so handsome that she made him her Lord Chancellor in 1587, was one. She waited nine years before accepting Burghley's recommendation of his clever, hunchbacked son Robert Cecil as secretary of state. Yet she preferred the elegant looks and swaggering sword of Walter Raleigh and ignored his doubts in religion, since she shared a few of them herself.
Raleigh: the complete Elizabethan
Raleigh was almost the perfect Elizabethan: nobleman, soldier, sailor, adventurer, poet, philosopher, orator, historian and idealist, a full Renaissance man whose genius served every task, though no single trait outweighed the others. Born in 1552 in Devon, he entered Oxford in 1568 but ran off to join volunteers fighting for the French Protestants. After returning in 1575 he studied law, then in 1578 went to help the Dutch against Spain. Two years later he served as a captain against the Desmond rebellion in Ireland and was in the grim action at Smerwick. Elizabeth rewarded him with twelve thousand acres in Ireland and a post at court. She liked his looks, his attentiveness and his wit (tradition says he spread his cloak over a muddy patch for her), and she listened without her usual skepticism to his plans for colonies in America, granting him a charter. In 1584 he sent the first colonists to a land named Virginia in honor of the Virgin Queen. The venture and its sequels failed, but the name remains.
Marriage, disgrace and El Dorado
Raleigh then fell in love with Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the queen's maids, and married her secretly in 1593. No court member could marry without permission, so the ardent couple spent an unexpected honeymoon in the Tower. Raleigh won release with a letter to Burghley praising the queen as a compound of every human perfection, but was banished from court. He retired to his estate at Sherborne, planned voyages, dabbled in skeptical thought and wrote verse. Two quiet years exhausted his patience. With help from Admiral Howard and Robert Cecil he fitted out five ships and sailed for South America in search of El Dorado, a legendary land of golden palaces and rivers of gold. He ascended the Orinoco for about a hundred miles and found neither gold nor warrior women. Blocked by rapids and falls, he came home empty-handed, told people the natives had marveled at the queen's portrait, and soon returned to court. His book on the vast and wealthy empire of Guiana urged that America's riches be taken from the Spaniards, and he put the principle of sea power memorably: whoever commands the sea commands trade, whoever commands the trade of the world commands its riches, and in the end the world itself.