The Spanish Armada by Robert Hutchinson

customs officer in the Spanish Netherlands, receiving a pension from Philip. In 1570, he
was lured by English agents on to a ship in Antwerp harbour and was landed at the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth. At his trial in May 1571 he faced charges of high treason for supporting the1569 rebellion and encouraging a Spanish invasion. Story claimed he was now a Spanish subject, citing the Biblical precedent: ‘God commanded Abraham to go forth from the
land and country where he was born, from his friends and kinfolks into another country.’ He had followed the prophet’s example to allay his conscience and ‘so forsake his country
and the laws of this realm . . .’ ‘Every man is born free,’ Story declared, ‘and he has the whole face of the earth before him to dwell and abide in where he likes
best.’ 56 Vengeance was not to be denied. His plea was rejected and he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 June 1571. 57
    Burghley also tried to discourage those considering fleeing the country by introducing legislation to confiscate their property. The Fugitives Act of 1571 declared that any subject who departed
England without licence and did not return within six months would forfeit the profits from their property, as well as losing their goods and chattels. 58 But no legislation can quench the fire of religious faith. By 1575, there was a two-hundred-strong company of exiles, commanded by an English captain, in the Spanish army in
the Netherlands, all of whom had sworn allegiance to Philip. Their ranks were later swelled by Irish and Scottish Catholics. 59
    Another, more single-minded opponent of the Catholic cause in England now began to manipulate events. On 20 December 1573, Sir Francis Walsingham was appointed joint principal secretary of state
with Burghley, who was also lord treasurer. As a devout and radical Protestant he, like around a thousand others, had fled England after Mary’s accession to the throne, fearing persecution.
Elizabeth, whose own Protestant beliefs were insipid by comparison, 60 believed him a ‘rank puritan’ and sometimes unfairly castigated
him for caring more for his fellow evangelicals than he did for England. The queen nicknamed him her ‘dark Moor’ because of his swarthy, brooding appearance.
    She had little grasp of what febrile nightmares haunted him. As English ambassador to the French court, he had been a horrified witness to the terrors of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre
of Huguenots in Paris on Sunday 24 August 1572. More than three thousand Protestants were shot or hacked to death by a Catholic mob and disciplined troops of soldiers in a carefully planned pogrom
that began at dawn. The carnage continued into October with seventythousand killed in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyons, Rouen and Orléans. So many corpses floated in the
Rhône at Lyons that the river water was not drunk for three months.
    Walsingham, together with a number of terrified fugitives, was besieged in his residency in the quai des Bernardins in Faubourg St Germain. 61 The
Huguenot general François de Beauvais was dragged out of the building and lynched by the Parisians. 62 Eventually the ambassador was granted
protection by soldiers sent by the French king Charles IX 63 and he managed to smuggle his wife and four-year-old daughter safely out of the
city.
    In Rome, a new Pope, Gregory XIII, triumphantly called for public rejoicing and had a
Te Deum
sung to celebrate this famous victory over the heretics. He struck a medal to commemorate
the event with an image on its reverse of an avenging angel, armed with a cross and drawn sword, slaying the Huguenots. 64 Giorgio Vasari was
commissioned to paint three frescoes portraying the destruction of the Protestants on the south wall of the Vatican’s Sala Regia state reception room, an antechamber to the Sistine
Chapel. 65
    Given Walsingham’s harrowing experience, it was predictable that after his appointment there would be strenuous