LITMIR.BIZ

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      Yet, notwithstanding the admirable wish of that unidentified adviser, arrest, confinement, interrogation, torture, and sometimes the gallows constituted the fate of many expatriates on their return. Walsingham deployed a platoon of spies on both sides of the Channel, so the missionaries were wise to travel disguised. Their secrecy and that of their hosts, of course, made their mission seem more sinister to Calvinists. And captured missionaries contributed, to that end, by insisting, during interrogations, that popes possessed power “generally to discharge any Christian prince’s subjects” of their duty to obey their sovereigns. Calvinists’ antagonism and fears only increased on hearing the Jesuits’ various, ostensibly evasive replies to interviewers’ standard question, as when Christopher Southworthe, under arrest in 1579, “answereth that he cannot tell what he shoulde or woulde do” in the event of an invasion.⁸⁹ Edmund Campion, in 1581, could not promise to “take the queen’s parte.” He could only say that he would pray that Catholicism prevailed.⁹⁰

      Religiously reformed pamphleteers worried that the expatriate missionaries’ disaffection could go viral. They worried as well that the missionaries’ “false face of holiness” would incline less zealous and less insightful Calvinists to overlook their “underminings of our good subjects.” Expatriate Catholic “seminarie men,” returning from the Continent and journeying from shire to shire, “train” the laity “to treason.”⁹¹ Caught encouraging the trainers and trainees, Mary Stuart was unrepentant. Walsingham tried to persuade his queen to make her cousin pay the ultimate price for her conspiring with the Catholic subversives, but Elizabeth did not wish to learn how Europe’s princes might “stand affected” if she and England resorted to regicide: “Shall their pittie be extended to the guilty”?⁹²

      Yet Mary’s complicity in what proved to be her last bid to be rid of Elizabeth sealed her fate. By 1586, her stature was significantly diminished. Her son had come of age and, as King James VI of Scotland, had “demoted” his mother. Mary was no longer Queen of Scots; she was queen mother. And James’s signature on a treaty with Elizabeth, John Guy says, made his mother “disposable.” More desperate—and hence more explicitly than in earlier correspondence—Mary consented when approached by would-be assassins. Walsingham, who may have cooked up the conspiracy to incriminate her, at the very least let it develop to a point. Elizabeth was briefed and, in 1587, reluctantly acquiesced to having her cousin executed. Mary died, ready, she proclaimed, to make the supreme sacrifice “for the restoration of the Catholic church.”⁹³

      It is still difficult to tell how many of Elizabeth’s subjects yearned for that “restoration” in the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was settling in London. Thirty or so years earlier, Catholic resurgence might not have required colossal effort; the established English reformed church had only a tenuous hold over the imaginations of influential and affluent laymen. But three decades of reformed preaching and polemics seem to have taken a toll on Catholic sentiment. Calculating that toll with precision, however, is impossible. It may well be, as James McDermott thinks, that those years of reformation, counter-reformation, and conspiracy merely made “most Englishmen believe it was better to have a single religion, and that someone else should decide which one.”⁹⁴

      “OURS WERE BUT FISHER-BOATS”

      King Philip II of Spain did not bother to hide his desire to become that “someone else.” He offered himself as husband to Elizabeth soon after Mary Tudor’s death left him a widower, but his unpopularity in England made acceptance of that offer unlikely. So, when Mary Stuart fled from Scotland and settled to its south in the late 1560s, Philip appeared content to support her candidacy. English sources reported that his endorsement of Mary Stuart’s schemes for the “deprivation, death, and destruction” of her cousin was unfaltering.⁹⁵ England retaliated, as we learned, by encouraging and subsidizing rebellious Dutch subjects and by turning a blind eye as English privateers pilfered Spanish cargoes in the Atlantic. The undeclared war on Spanish trade incensed Philip, yet, as long as the Queen of Scots lived, he was patient, trusting that his problem with Elizabeth’s regime would be solved without direct Hapsburg intervention. But his patience died with Mary. He ordered his admirals to assemble an armada and asked his Guiscard allies in France to secure ports on their side of the Channel and to prepare to reprovision his fleet. And he told his commander and regent in the Low Countries, the Duke of Parma, to have troops ready to be ferried to England.

      Calvinists in England saw Rome’s hand in the plan. Thomas Rogers fumed that “Spaine loveth this whore,” the Church of Rome.⁹⁶ Historians, however, ordinarily acquit Pope Sixtus V of having prodded King Philip to invade. Indeed, the consensus is that Philip persuaded the pope that Elizabeth’s England was ripe for the picking. Sixtus, of course, supported Spain’s initiatives in 1588, and the English assumed that their Catholic countrymen would do so as well. Local officials were ordered to arrest Catholics whose “obstinacie of errour” would lead them to make common cause with the invaders.⁹⁷ But at least one crew of officials confided that “the more obstinate or less is a thing most hard for us to set down.”⁹⁸ Local authorities, that is, seemed to be groping for standards to measure loyalty in advance of a crisis that could test them. Alexandra Walsham now calculates that for every persistent Catholic recusant—or refusenik—there were three who attended the realm’s reformed churches, awaiting deliverance from heretical preaching in “the embrace of the ecclesiastical establishment.” Walsham calls them “church papists.”⁹⁹ All that the authorities could do about the potential threat posed by these camouflaged Catholics in regions known to have been resistant to religious reform in the past was to alert troops to the danger. Levies in Lancashire could have been so told, because they kept close to home even when the Spanish armada was sighted. Deployment of the local Lancashire militia may have been meant as a disincentive, as a tactic to ensure that enemies within would not start acting out.¹⁰⁰

      Surveys identified likely landing sites, but locals were laggard in fortifying the coastline. England was unprepared for an invasion. There were only two permanent garrisons in the 1580s, at Dover and Berwick. Traditionally, the able-bodied were called to arms when distress dictated, but arrangements for their training and provision were barely adequate in 1588. Celebrating that spectacular year, poets forgot the citizen soldiers’ unpreparedness and planed the rough texture of the ordeals of recruits who thought “themselves thrise happy made” to exchange the creature comforts of their homes for the queen’s service.¹⁰¹ From this distance, it seems fair to speculate that the armed amateurs were happier still presuming that England’s superiority at sea improved the chances of their avoiding contact with the enemy.

      They and their queen counted on trained, energetic mariners, worthy vessels, and excellent ordinance. Spain and Philip counted on Parma, who secured the Scheldt estuary, an excellent staging area for the invasion of England. Fresh troops from Italy joined the Spanish veterans of the Dutch wars. The first challenge for the armada’s admiral was to bring his ships safely to the Scheldt. He was to play defense, passing through the Channel; the objective was not to engage the enemy but to get to Flanders and Parma. But weather ruined the armada’s chances. “The Protestant winds” gave the Spanish ships no option but to turn up the east coast of England and abandon the plan. English mariners harassed their enemy and snagged strays until munitions were exhausted: “Ours were but fisher-boats,” theirs “a monstrous fleet.” But God saved the queen.¹⁰²

      English officials seem to have been taken aback by the unwillingness of resident Catholics to rebel when the armada was sighted. Did deployments of armed loyal subjects discourage them? Were they waiting for Parma’s troops to land? Or did they “love popery well but [were] loath to lose by it,” as a reformist later summarized, and thus waited to see the balance tip before weighing in?¹⁰³ One can also argue that the Jesuit missionaries were to blame. Catholic Christopher Bagshaw’s scorn for the “intermedl[ing]” of expatriates during the 1580s suggests as much. Bagshaw resented the Jesuit vanguard and referred to “seminarie men” as “thornes in [the] sides” of Catholic priests, who never left England. The Jesuits’ contempt for what had survived of the English Catholic ministry, “when they first came hither,” he went on, fed the order’s self-importance. The “attempt of 1588” was prominent on Bagshaw’s

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