The World полностью

Raleigh himself was appointed captain of Elizabeth’s bodyguard just as Philip ordered her assassination. His threats were not to be taken lightly. He had offered a bounty for anyone who killed his other Protestant enemy, William of Orange.^* Philip hoped to enthrone Mary, the Scottish queen, a calamitous bungler of impulsive stupidity and unwise passion. In 1567, after the death of her French husband François II, she returned to rule an increasingly Protestant Scotland inspired by the firebrand John Knox who, authoring The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, openly attacked Mary in person until she exiled him. Her second marriage to a dashing Catholic cousin, the eighteen-year-old Henry Stuart, earl of Darnley, six foot tall and known as the Long Lad, successfully delivered a son, James, but provoked Protestant rebellion. Long Lad murdered her Italian confidant, at which Mary most likely acquiesced in his own assassination, organized by a ruffian earl who then kidnapped and married her. Their homicidal alliance sparked such outrage that the Protestants enthroned the baby James and Mary fled to England, where Elizabeth granted her asylum, which she repaid by plotting with Philip. ‘Alas the poor fool will never cease until she loses her head,’ commented Charles IX of France. ‘They’ll put her to death. It’s her own fault and folly.’

Now in February 1587, when Mary’s plots were exposed, Elizabeth had her beheaded, provoking Philip to invade England on a scale only a world empire could muster.

TWO ARMADAS: PHILIP AND HIDEYOSHI

Philip’s strategy was correct: it was impossible to defend every port of his world empire; only a focused offensive against the base of his enemy could succeed. This was not the deluded folly of a Catholic fanatic. Plenty of seaborne invasions of England – from Forkbeard to Henry Tudor – had succeeded but God is in the detail: a simple plan and clement weather were essential.

Yet Philip knew better than the experts: his ‘masterplan’ envisaged a fleet sailing from Cadiz, fighting off English attacks, rendezvousing off Flanders with an army under his nephew Parma that had to board the fleet and then invade England – a welter of precise timings afloat on a tide of unpredictable contingencies. While shipyards built his fleet to carry 55,000 infantry and 1,600 cavalry, Philip, now sixty, chose as the Armada’s commander a grandee, Alonso de Guzmán, duke of Medina Sidonia, who had neither combat experience nor imposing personality. As Drake raided Cadiz, destroying many ships, and Philip became sick with stress, both Medina Sidonia and Parma criticized the plan. ‘I’ve dedicated this enterprise to God,’ Philip told Medina Sidonia. ‘Pull yourself together and do your part.’

In July 1588, the duke sailed with 130 ships manned by 8,000 sailors and carrying 18,000 soldiers as Philip prayed in the Escorial chapel. Surviving English attacks in the Channel commanded by vice-admirals Drake and Hawkins, hardly the victories portrayed in English histories, the duke and his intact fleet waited off Calais for Parma’s army of 30,000. When these troops tardily discovered that the fleet had arrived, they marched towards their ships. But the English sent in fireships that drove the Armada out into a storm, scattering it. Some ships were wrecked, others embarked on a 3,000-mile voyage around Scotland and Ireland. Fifteen thousand sailors perished.

At the same time, across the world, another megalomaniacal visionary, this time a self-made peasant’s son, Hideyoshi, the Japanese imperial regent, was launching his own fleet for an invasion that Philip had himself considered: China.

In May 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered 158,800 men on 700 troopships accompanied by 300 warships to land in Korea and invade China, the culmination of an extraordinary career. He planned to go on and conquer India. Japan had been nominally ruled for over a millennium by an emperor or tenno of the divine Sun family, but real power had been wielded by a regent, most gloriously under Fujiwara Michinaga, as described by Lady Murasaki. But recently the regents had lost power to regional daimyo, somewhat akin to feudal lords.

During the 1560s, the daimyo Oda Nobunaga, head of a powerful clan, started to impose himself on the other warlords, spurred by the slogan ‘Rule the Realm by Force’. Oda was so eccentric he was known as the Idiot until he succeeded his father and started winning battles. He celebrated victory at a feast where platters held the lacquered, gilded heads of his enemies.

At the start of this rise, he had recruited a poor boy, Hideyoshi, who began as his sandal-bearer and rose to become his general. In 1581, Oda reviewed his troops in Kyoto with the emperor, but when he was assassinated his avenger and successor was the indefatigable, flamboyant and manic Hideyoshi, who went on to complete the unification of Japan.