Mary had left him her claims to the English throne, and he
might, now that she was out of his path, hope to treat England
like Portugal. Drake’s “singeing of Philip’s beard” in Cadiz
harbour in 1587 delayed the expedition for a year, and a storm
again postponed it in the early summer of 1588. At length the
armada sailed in July under the incompetent duke of Medina
Sidonia; its object was to secure command of the narrow seas
and facilitate the transport of Parma’s army from the Netherlands
to England. But Philip after his twenty years’ experience
in the Netherlands can hardly have hoped to conquer a bigger
and richer country with scantier means and forces. He relied
The Great Armada, 1588.
in fact upon a domestic explosion, and the armada
was only to be the torch. This miscalculation made
it a hopeless enterprise from the first. Scarcely an
English Catholic would have raised a finger in Philip’s
favour; and when he could not subdue the two provinces of
Holland and Zeeland, it is absurd to suppose that he could have
simultaneously subdued them and England as well. English
armies were not perhaps very efficient, but they were as good
as the material with which William of Orange began his
task. Philip, however, was never given the opportunity.
His armada was severely handled in a week’s fighting on its
way up the Channel, and was driven off the English ports
into the German Ocean; there a south-west gale drove it
far from its rendezvous, and completed the havoc which the
English ships had begun. A miserable remnant alone escaped
destruction in its perilous flight round the north and west of
Scotland.
The defeat of the armada was the beginning and not the end of the war; and there were moments between 1588 and 1603 when England was more seriously alarmed than in 1588. The Spaniards seized Calais in 1596; at another time they threatened England from Brest, and the “invisible” armada of 1599 created a greater panic than the “invincible” armada of 1588. It was not till the very end of the reign that what was in some ways the most dangerous of Spanish aggressions was foiled at Kinsale. Nor were the English counter-attacks very happy; the attempt on Portugal in 1589 under Drake and Norris proved a complete failure. The raid on Cadiz under Essex and Raleigh in 1596 was attended with better results, but the “Islands” voyage to the Azores in 1597 was a very partial success. Still it was now a war upon more or less equal terms, and there was little more likelihood that it would end with England’s than with Spain’s loss of national independence. The subjection of the Netherlands was now almost out of the question, and although Elizabeth’s help had not enabled the Protestant cause to win in France, Henry IV. built up a national monarchy which would be quite as effectual a bar to the ambitions of Spain.
Elizabeth had in fact safely piloted England through the
struggle to assert its national independence in religion and
politics and its claim to a share in the new inheritance
which had been opened up for the nations of Europe;
and the passionate loyalty which had supported her as
Last
years of Elizabeth.
the embodiment of England’s aspirations somewhat
cooled in her declining years. She herself grew more cautious
and conservative than ever, and was regarded as an obstacle
by the hotheads in war and religion. She sided with the
“scribes,” Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, against the men of
war, Essex and Raleigh; and she abetted Whitgift’s rigorous
persecution of the Puritans whose discontent with her via media
was rancorously expressed in the Martin Marprelate tracts.
Essex’s folly and failure to crush Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion (1599),
the most serious effort made in the reign to throw off the English
yoke in Ireland, involved him in treason and brought him to
the block. Parliament was beginning to quarrel with the royal
prerogative, particularly when expressed in the grant of monopolies,
and even Mountjoy’s success in Ireland (1602–1603)
failed to revive popular enthusiasm for the dying queen. Strange
as it may seem, the accession of James I. was hailed as heralding
a new and gladder age by Shakespeare, and minor writers
(March 24, 1603). (A. F. P.)
VIII. The Stuart Monarchy, the Great Rebellion and the Restoration (1603–1689)
The defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588 had been the final victory gained on behalf of the independence of the English church and state. The fifteen years which followed had been years of successful war; but they had been also years during which the nation had been preparing James I. 1603–1625. itself to conform its institutions to the new circumstances in which it found itself in consequence of the great victory. When James arrived from Scotland to occupy the throne of Elizabeth he found a general desire for change. Especially there was a feeling that there might be some relaxation in the ecclesiastical arrangements. Roman Catholics and Puritans alike wished for a modification of the laws which bore hardly on them. James at first relaxed the penalties under which the Roman Catholics suffered, then he grew frightened by the increase of their numbers and reimposed the penalties. The gunpowder plot (1605) was the result, followed by a sharper persecution than ever (see Gunpowder Plot).
The Puritans were invited to a conference with the king at Hampton Court (1604). They no longer asked, as many of them had asked in the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, to substitute the presbyterian discipline for the episcopal government. All they demanded was to be allowed permission, whilst remaining as ministers in the church, to omit the usage of certain ceremonies to which they objected. It was the opinion of Bacon that it would be wise to grant their request. James thought otherwise, and attempted to carry out the Elizabethan conformity more strictly than it had been carried out in his predecessor’s reign.
In 1604 the Commons agreed with Bacon. They declared that
they were no Puritans themselves, but that, with such a dearth
of able ministers, it was not well to lose the services
of any one who was capable of preaching the gospel.
By his refusal to entertain their views James placedJames I.
and the Commons.
himself in opposition to the Commons in a matter
which touched their deeper feelings. As a necessary consequence
every dispute on questions of smaller weight assumed an exaggerated
importance. The king had received a scanty revenue
with his crown, and he spent freely what little he had. As the
Commons offered grudging supplies, the necessity under which
he was of filling up the annual deficit led him to an action by
which a grave constitutional question was raised.
From the time of Richard II. to the reign of Mary no attempt had been made to raise duties on exports and imports without consent of parliament. But Mary had, under a specious pretext, recommenced to a slight extent the evil practice, and Elizabeth had gone a little further in the same direction. In 1606 a merchant named John Bates (q.v.) resisted the payment of an imposition—as duties levied by the sole authority of the crown were then called. The case was argued in the court of exchequer, and was there decided in favour of the crown. Shortly afterwards new impositions were set to the amount of £70,000 a year. When parliament met in 1610 the whole subject was discussed, and it was conclusively shown that, if the barons of the exchequer had been right in any sense, it was only in that narrow technical sense which is of no value at all. A compromise attempted broke down, and the difficulty was left to plague the next generation. The king was always able to assert that the judges were on his side, and it was as yet an acknowledged principle of the constitution that parliament could not change the law without the express consent of the crown, even if, which was not the case in this matter, the Lords had sided with the Commons. James’s attempt to obtain further supplies from the Commons by opening a bargain for the surrender of some of his old feudal prerogatives, such as wardship and marriage, which had no longer any real meaning except as a means of obtaining money in an oppressive way, broke down, and early in 1611 he dissolved his first parliament in anger. A second parliament, summoned in 1614, met with the same fate after a session of a few weeks.
The dissolution of this second parliament was followed by a
