695. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Shadow War (Part 5)

20:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, she doesn't want his star to shine too brightly, does she?

20:48Tom Holland:No, no. But then he goes off to Prague where he meets Rudolf II, the great enthusiast for the occult. And also in Prague, he meets with Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, who we talked about in episode two of this series, who comes to England and ends up being kind of very brutally martyred. On his return from Prague, he is debriefed in person by William Cecil, Lord Burley, effectively Elizabeth's prime minister. He runs short of money. You know, he's a young gentleman at court. That's what young gentlemen at court do. They're always short of cash. And so he borrows money from Sir Christopher Hatton, the guy who'd funded Francis Drake's circumnavigation around the world.

21:29Tom Holland:He is the patron of one of the great Elizabethan poets, Edmund Spencer, who dedicates a poem to him, hails him as the precedent of all chivalry. So Sydney is very much part of the kind of the literary circles of this Elizabethan golden age. We talked about Giordano Bruno, the Neapolitan friar turned kind of free thinking sceptic who will end up being burnt in Rome and who may have been a spy at the French embassy in London. Anyway, Sidney met up with him, thought he was great, went to Oxford with Bruno, where Bruno gave a lecture on Copernicus on the idea that the earth moves around the sun. And he has also met John Dee, the great necromancer.

22:15Tom Holland:Again, we did an episode on him and he had accompanied Elizabeth on a barge down the Thames to Mortlake where Dee had his house. So basically, anything famous that happens in the 1570s, the 1580s, Sidney pops up. He's there. He is the man on the scene. And then, of course, there is the greatest celebrity of the age, perhaps the most famous man in all of Europe, Sidney's great mates with Sir Francis Drake.

22:45Dominic Sandbrook:Right. So what's Sir Francis Drake, what's he been up to since we last saw him? So he got knighted. He was knighted on the ship, on the Golden Hind. The French ambassador very much in attendance, a very prominent figure, was a sort of sign, wasn't it, to the Spanish, a sort of a little gesture of England's rapprochement. A V sign, one might almost say. Exactly. So what's he been up to? He hasn't been back being a sea dog, has he? He's been on land.

23:12Tom Holland:No, he's been having a very quiet time of it. So he's been investing in property. He's bought four houses, all very fancy.

23:20Dominic Sandbrook:Okay.

23:20Tom Holland:He's been serving as an MP. He's been elected mayor of Plymouth and he's been legislating to regulate the pilchard trade, which is obviously very important. But not I mean, it's not really Drake's vibe regulating the pilchard trade. And I think this is why he gets on so well with Sydney, because both of them are basically bored and itching for a decent war. They want to have a crack at the don. And Drake is a bit like Churchill in the 1930s. He is sure that a great life or death struggle is approaching for England. And again, like Churchill in the 1930s, he is obsessed with the need for England to beef up her defences.

24:05Tom Holland:And this is how he comes into contact with Sydney, because Sydney, since 1583, has been the master of ordinance, which means that he is charged with preparing England against attack. And so both men, I think, are very much singing from the same hymn sheet. I mean, actually, probably literally, because their form of kind of fiery Protestantism is very similar. And by 1585, definitely, it's becoming clear that both Drake and Sidney are right to be warning that war with Spain is approaching. And I think by this point, even Elizabeth very reluctantly is having to acknowledge that Philip II in Spain is indeed preparing for war.

24:46Dominic Sandbrook:Now, why is that? Because surely he would be A, anxious about the French and B, he's too busy fighting the Dutch. Or is he?

24:54Tom Holland:Well, the French basically have been removed as a factor in his calculations because people who listened to our previous episode may remember there are these three Henri, three Henrys doing this delicate minuet around each other. But by 1585, all three men are starting to go to war with each other. So you've got the Huguenots under Henry of Navarre, who I think was going to be played by Pedro Pascal in our film of this story. You've got the Catholic League under Henry of Guise. Mads Mikkelsen. Mads Mikkelsen. He's got a great scar across his face. Passionate Catholic. And you've got the Royalists who are loyal to the King, Henry III, so Andrew Scott.

25:37Tom Holland:And all these three factions are turning on each other. And the resulting war is going to rage for four years and it will come to be known inevitably as the War of the Three Henrys. And for as long as it's raging, France effectively is paralysed. And for as long as France is paralysed, Philip of Spain has a free hand. He doesn't need to worry about what the French will do.

26:00Dominic Sandbrook:So that's the French. What about what's going on in the low countries? Because that really has been the cockpit of Europe's wars of religion for the last few years.

26:08Tom Holland:Well, what's happened there is that the most dynamic and significant leader of the Dutch rebels has been eliminated, William of Orange, William the Silent. And he had been assassinated the previous summer on the 10th of July, 1584. He'd been shot on a staircase in his kind of very modest quarters in Delft. William of Orange had once been one of the richest men in Europe, but he has spent all his money on keeping the Dutch revolt afloat. So he's now basically bankrupt. And the assassin had been inspired to murder the Prince of Orange by two factors. Firstly, his own devout Catholicism, but secondly, by a bounty that Philip had placed on William's head in 1580.

26:55Tom Holland:And as William dies, his last thoughts are of his fellow rebels in Holland and the northern provinces. And he cries out, my God, have mercy on me and on my poor people. But has God been listening to this prayer in the wake of William's assassination? It seems not. Because in the months that follow William's assassination, the rebel provinces in the low countries are brought almost to the point of collapse. And in part, I think this is due to the loss of William's leadership, but it is also due to the brilliance of the captain they were facing on the battlefield. Remember, we said the Spanish in the Low Countries are led by the greatest general of the age.

27:39Tom Holland:And this is a guy called Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma, and he is a completely terrifying adversary.

27:48Dominic Sandbrook:So he's an Italian, isn't he? Or Italian born. He's the son of the Duke of Parma. But the key thing is that his mother, who'd been born in Flanders. Yeah. And she has, I mean, we love to do these when we do in the First World War. We like to draw attention to the moustaches of the leading generals. And I mean, we're not going to be talking about Alexander Farnese, the Prince of Parma's moustache. I mean, he has a good moustache. He has a good moustache, but it's not as striking as his mother's moustache. Is that fair or is that ungallant?

28:17Tom Holland:It's a bit ungallant, but I think fair. She is well known for her moustache. She is Philip II's half-sister, and Philip had appointed her to serve as the governor of the Low Countries in the 1560s. And it's her period running the Low Countries that had resulted in the revolt breaking out. So she doesn't have a great track record. But Palmer is, as we've said, an incredibly formidable man. And he's been serving as both the governor general of the Netherlands and the captain general of the army of Flanders since 1578. So he combines both the civil and the military responsibilities in his single person.

28:57Tom Holland:And he's been doing an amazing job. So just to give the summary of Geoffrey Parker, the great historian of the Dutch revolt and Spain more generally in the 16th century, Palmer was able and resourceful, rich and cultivated, subtle and shrewd. He excelled in both diplomacy and war. And the measure of his achievement is that back in 1578, when he'd first been appointed, the Spanish cause in the Low Countries had seemed on the verge of complete collapse. But by 1584, when William the Silent is assassinated, he has pulled things back dramatically from the brink. And he's done that by kind of employing a mix of the carrot and the stick.

29:37Tom Holland:So he's essentially brought the southern reaches of the low countries, the portion that is in the long run going to become Belgium. He's brought them back under Spanish control. Most of the south, which had been in a state of rebellion, has submitted to Palmer's armies. Many of their key cities have surrendered and others, among them Brussels. so the capital of the eu now and ghent a very favorite holiday destination for people going on long weekends from britain incredibly beautiful city both of these are under siege and are clearly on the verge of surrender and the murder of william the silent in 1584 essentially everything starts collapsing once the news of his death reaches the rebels in the south so in september just two months after William had been assassinated, Ghent finally falls.

30:32And I think when you go to Ghent

30:34Tom Holland:today, its vibe is so Catholic that it's really odd to think that there was a time when it was the cockpit of an incredibly radical Protestant regime, which had seized control there in 1577. It had instituted a kind of full-blown militant republic. It had broken images. It had persecuted Catholics. It had smashed up rude screens, all that kind of stuff. They have to surrender. Palmer, as is his custom, offers very merciful terms. So he supplied the stick. Now he's dangling the carrot. But it does mean that Catholicism is reinstated as the official religion of the city. And most of the Protestants in Ghent are not prepared to put up with that.

31:16Tom Holland:Palmer has said, if you don't like this, I'm not going to slaughter you. I'm not going to persecute you. You can just go. You can just leave the city. And probably about 15 ,000 Protestants, so that's maybe a third of the population, end up leaving Ghent and heading to Holland. And Holland is the overwhelming Protestant state in the northern Netherlands that by now is the beating heart of the revolt. So remember, it is screened from the south by those great rivers. So it is more readily defensible against the Spanish than the kind of the southern sweep, the sweep that's going to become Belgium.

31:49Dominic Sandbrook:If we fast forward to the summer of 1585, I mean, you mentioned the rivers, but things are looking pretty bleak for the Protestant rebels in the north, aren't they? Because Brussels has finally fallen, that becomes the capital of Belgium in the long run. And the focus has moved to, so it's not quite midway between Brussels and Amsterdam, but it's kind of, let's say, a quarter of the way, and that is Antwerp. So Antwerp, it's the biggest city in the Low Countries in this period. It is by far the richest. It is the city that has been bankrolling the rebellion. I mean, crucially, it controls this estuary, which is the estuary of the Scheldt, which kind of leads out towards the English Channel and to the North Sea.

32:33Dominic Sandbrook:So the Scheldt is the kind of, it's the absolutely vital connection. It's the key artery, really. Yeah. Yeah, between the rich Flemish cloth town, so that is Ghent and Bruges, and these incredibly handsome places that people go to on city breaks today, between them and the sea and trade with England and so on and so forth. And people had thought, hadn't they, that Antwerp was impregnable because it's got these massive fortifications. Yeah.

32:59Tom Holland:But this bloke Palmer, he likes a challenge. He likes to crack a hard nut, yeah. And he knows that Antwerp is the greatest price of all because, as you said, it's probably the richest city, certainly, in Europe, I mean, maybe in the world. And it is the key Protestant stronghold. This is where Protestantism is strongest. And if he can take Antwerp, then he's probably thinking that is the end of the revolt. So he had embarked on the siege of Antwerp in June 1584, and he constructed an immense network of forts to cut off Antwerp's access to the interior of the southern low countries. But the key requirement is to stop supplies and men from the rebel held north reaching the city down the Shelt, this kind of great estuary which leads out into the North Sea.

33:48Tom Holland:And Palmer achieves this by building a massive pontoon bridge, which his admirers are very proud of saying was twice the length of the bridge built by Julius Caesar over the Rhine. So it's almost half a mile in length. And the rebels are so desperate to destroy it that they send in fire ships, hell burners, they're called, loaded with explosives to blow it up. And actually, one of these fire ships does blow up and it incinerates an entire section of the bridge, killing 800 Spanish soldiers. But Palmer is able to have it repaired before the Dutch rebels can come down and force their way through the gap that they've opened up.

34:25Tom Holland:And so in late May, the rebels try again, but this time their fleet makes a complete hash of things. The tide turns and sweeps them back towards their own lines, which is not a thing you want to see. A load of fire ships loaded with explosives coming towards you on a tide. And again, Palmer is able to repel the attack and to maintain the integrity of the pontoon bridge across the Scheldt. And this means that Antwerp is now completely invested. And so starvation starts to grip the city and the rebels grow increasingly desperate. And they are looking around for allies. They need overseas support, but where are they going to get this support from?

35:06Tom Holland:So in the previous episode, we talked about how the rebels had tried to get French backing in the form of Anjou, the duke who had been hoping to marry Elizabeth. But he had hashed things up. His mercenaries had run amok in Antwerp. He'd left in disgrace and now he's dead. And so the rebels have tried to get his brother, Henry III of France, to take over the sovereignty of the low countries and come in against Spain. But as we've said, Henry III is the king of a country that is now collapsing into civil war. So he doesn't have time to intervene in foreign squabbles. And this really leaves the rebels with just the one port of call.

35:44Tom Holland:And this, of course, is a queen who is, as we've said, instinctively cautious, hates spending money on wars, hates wars full stop, very much disapproves of revolts against anointed monarchs. And this, of course, is Elizabeth of England. And so unsurprisingly, when the Dutch rebels go to London and offer her sovereignty over the low countries, she turns them down. However, she and her government do appreciate that they can't really just leave the rebels to the fate. It is existential for England as well as for the Dutch. And in particular, the impending fall of Antwerp is a nightmare for English strategists.

36:30Tom Holland:First of all, it risks the collapse of the entire Dutch revolt. And if the Dutch revolt collapses, then, as we've said, that means that Palmer and his terrifying army will be free to cross the sea and land in England. More broadly, it's a nightmare for the entire cause of Protestantism in Europe. And for Leicester, for Walsingham, for Sydney, definitely, this is probably the major consideration. You know, this is the future of what God wants for Christendom is at stake as they see it.

37:07Dominic Sandbrook:And what about the economics of it? Because you mentioned how wealthy the Flemish cloth towns are, how important that trade link is between the low countries and England in particular. I mean, surely if Antwerp was lost, if the low countries were lost, wouldn't that be disastrous for England's economy?

37:23Tom Holland:Yeah, a complete disaster. I mean, there have been blockades going on and off throughout this period. But the thought of losing Antwerp, the kind of Straits of Hormuz cubed, basically, for the English. I mean, it's a massive, massive disaster. They cannot afford to have Antwerp under the control of a hostile power. And it is clear to them by now that Philip II is indeed an overtly hostile power who is looking to throttle the entire English economy. because back in May 1585, he'd imposed an embargo on English vessels landing in Spanish and Portuguese ports. And this is a patent act of economic warfare.

38:02Tom Holland:And so the prospect that he might end up in a position to impose a similar embargo on all the ports in the low countries. I mean, that that is a complete nightmare. And it's the kind of nightmare that Elizabeth, who's always counting the pennies, that she can actually understand. You know, she's less interested in glory than she is in making money. and this is enough to make her think well probably we should do something about this and so by early august 1585 it's clear that antwerp isn't going to hold out much longer you know they're thinking in terms of weeks maybe days before the spanish enter the city and that means that elizabeth who given the choice will always delay and prevaricate it It means that she has to arrive at a decision about what to do.

38:51Tom Holland:And of course, much is going to depend on that decision, the course of the Dutch revolt, the prospects of open war between England and Spain and the future of Sir Philip Sidney.

39:04Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, that's exciting. Come back after the break to find out what happens next.

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42:56Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. We return with bombshell news from Antwerp because it's the 17th of August, 1585. And after a siege of 13 months, the richest city in this part of Europe, perhaps in all Europe, has finally surrendered to the Prince of Parma. Actually, the end of the siege is not quite as bloody and gory as you might expect. So the Spanish are very well behaved, aren't they, in victory? and the terms you said in the first half, Tom, that the terms that Palmer offers his defeated adversaries are often pretty generous. And they are in this case, aren't they?

43:38Tom Holland:Yes. So Antwerp, which had been the great stronghold of Protestantism in the Low Countries, is formally restored to Catholicism. But as with Ghent, so in Antwerp, Protestants are allowed to leave the city if they want and huge numbers do so. So probably around 60 ,000 people out of a total population of 100 ,000, so more than half. And this is actually a disaster for Antwerp because most of the people who are leaving, lots of them are bankers, merchants, the cutting edge of capitalism. And most of them head northwards to Holland, which is still the great nerve center of the Dutch revolt. And there they settle, lots of them, in a kind of new upstart hotspot for business.

44:24Tom Holland:And this is a city called Amsterdam. And so the arrival of these exiles from Antwerp is really the making of Amsterdam as the great city of 17th century capitalism.

44:35Dominic Sandbrook:Our Dutch listeners will be pleased to be reminded that they basically owe their prominence and prosperity to the Belgians. So Antwerp has fallen. And in England, great gloom and foreboding, right? Absolutely.

44:48Tom Holland:I mean, this is terrible, terrible news. And so three days later, after the fall of Antwerp on the 20th of August, a treaty is signed between Elizabeth I and the Dutch rebels at a palace built by Henry VIII at a place called Nonsuch in Surrey. And this is the first ever treaty signed by what will become the Dutch Republic with a foreign power. And by its terms, Elizabeth agrees to send an expeditionary force to the Low Countries to support Holland and the other rebel provinces. And this is to consist of 6 ,350 infantry and 1 ,000 cavalry. And amazingly, Elizabeth says, I will subsidize the cost of this.

45:33Tom Holland:I mean, must have caused her agony to do that. And she chooses as the commander of this expeditionary force, her old favourite, the Earl of Leicester. And because she doesn't entirely trust the Dutch, she obliges them to hand over three key ports to English garrisons to serve the English as what are described as cautionary towns. So basically, these towns are kind of hostages. and they are the town of Brill which commanded the mouth of the great river Mars or the Meurs if you're speaking in French and Flushing and Ramekin which are ports on an island just beyond the Scheldt estuary and the reason for choosing these ports is that between them it enables the English to control what goes in and goes out of the Scheldt estuary down towards Antwerp so in other words to throttle the ability of the spanish to move by sea from antwerp round the northern coast towards the rebel heartlands in holland and zealand and the guy who's going to be uh in charge

46:39Dominic Sandbrook:of one of these flushing is the star of today's episode he's finally got his chance he's finally got his opportunity to have a crack at the spanish and write his name into the history books and that

46:50Tom Holland:is our friend sir philip sydney yeah so hooray for sir philip sydney and i think he owes this appointment to various factors. Favoritism, obviously. He's the nephew of Leicester, who has been appointed to the command of this expedition. He's put in a lot of hard work preparing the Treaty of Nonsuch. Basically, he'd spent all summer at the palace oiling the wheels. And the Dutch envoys had absolutely loved him. So they had saluted his wisdom, kindness, and his other gifts. So it's all looking good for Sydney. But then in classic Elizabeth I style, she starts to wobble. First of all, she hesitates over whether she actually wants Leicester as governor general.

47:31Tom Holland:Does she really want him going to the low countries? And then to Sydney's absolute fury, she tells him, I don't want you going to Flushing after all. She's changed her mind. And so he has the most massive strop. He storms off, he gets on his horse and he gallops off to Plymouth. And the reason he goes to Plymouth is because Sydney knows that the Low Countries aren't the only place where there might be a chance for him to win glory for himself. There are other opportunities for would-be dashing young adventurers because all summer, when he wasn't negotiating with Dutch diplomats, Sydney had been helping Sir Francis Drake prepare for a massive expedition to the Indies.

48:13Tom Holland:And when I say massive, I mean, it is the largest English fleet that has been raised for over a century. So some 20 ships, two of them provided by Elizabeth herself, including Drake's flagship, the Elizabeth Bonaventura. And the plan which has been drawn up by Drake, by the Privy Council, by Elizabeth herself, is for Drake to plunder as much gold and silver from the Spanish as he possibly can, and then use the proceeds to help fund the Dutch. So just as Philip has been targeting the English economy, the plan is that Drake will target the infrastructure that sustains Philip's supply of treasure.

48:52Tom Holland:And Lord Burley, who previously had been a bit of a Drake skeptic, I mean, he's right behind this. He thinks this is a brilliant plan. And so he'd written to Walsingham about Philip, Philip II. Whilst his riches of the Indies continue, he thinketh he will be able with them to weary out all other princes. Those taken away himself will quickly fall. And I know by good means that he more feareth this action of Sir Francis than he ever did anything that hath been attempted against him. So really interesting illustration of the sensitivity of people in the 16th century to the opportunities provided by economic warfare.

49:29Tom Holland:I think people are kind of becoming more and more alert to this.

49:32Dominic Sandbrook:So Sydney must be terribly excited about this. I mean, this really is a tremendous chance to win the kind of glory that he's been after. And when Drake's fleet sails out of Plymouth on the 14th of September, Drake is on the flagship and Sydney is there with him. I mean, it's sort of it's potentially one of the great double acts in English history.

49:52Tom Holland:Yeah, one of the great kind of buddy acts. But it doesn't happen because just as they're pulling out of Plymouth Sound in the Bonaventura, a rowing boat comes up the side of the boat with a message from the Queen and she's changed her mind. And actually, she does want Sydney to go to Flushing. And so Sydney gets off the boat, gets into the rowing boat and goes back to London and ultimately to Flushing. And obviously, Elizabeth is furious with Sydney. I mean, she doesn't like people rushing off without telling her. but she can't come down too hard on him because I think she has realised in his absence that actually much to her annoyance she does need him so Leicester who she has by this point reappointed as governor general of the low countries he's busy recruiting troops around England and Wales and so won't be able to leave for the low countries until December meanwhile Parma isn't waiting he's advancing on all fronts and the Dutch desperately need English support and everyone the Dutch, the English alike are agreed.

50:54Tom Holland:There is only the one man for the job. It has to be Sir Philip Sidney. And so Sidney goes to the Low Countries, which, as you said, Dominic, means that he misses his chance to go on an expedition to the New World, which he had, as you said, been very, very excited about. And so just to give a quick resume of the excitements he misses before we come to what Sidney gets up to in the Low Countries. I mean, Drake heads southwards and he has the most lovely time. So he turns up in Spain and he extorts supplies out of a town in Galicia in northern Spain called Vigo. And he stays there for two weeks.

51:30Tom Holland:And it's seen by Philip, I think quite correctly, as an absolutely massive humiliation that this English pirate has turned up and kind of replenished his supplies from Spanish stocks. Then Drake sweeps across the Atlantic, capturing and plundering Spanish strongholds as he goes. And when Drake captures Santo Domingo in what is now the Dominican Republic, he's waiting for the ransom. And to force the Spanish to hurry up, he starts literally disassembling the city brick by brick until they've brought the gold. And then he's got the ransom and then it's on to Cartagena in Colombia, which he also captures again.

52:06Tom Holland:He extorts a massive ransom. And this isn't a long expedition. He's back in Plymouth by the 22nd of July, 1586. And actually, it's not quite as lucrative as Drake had been hoping. He doesn't manage to capture any treasure ships. But strategically, it is hugely significant because as he'd done before, he's able to highlight the pretty precarious nature of Spain's American empire. And the result of this in Europe is to undermine Philip's credit with his bankers. And so the Pope and the Dukes of Florence and Savoy all refuse him alone when the news of Drake's expedition reaches them. And the Bank of Seville actually goes bust.

52:48Tom Holland:And Burley is kind of cackling and rubbing his hands at this and says, truly, Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain, which I think

52:57Dominic Sandbrook:he is so well drake's been off sacking cartagena and whatnot what has sir philip sydney doing because he's been in the slightly more unglamorous uh surroundings of flushing on the uh yeah an

53:10Tom Holland:island off of uh the shelt estuary yeah so he's arrived there in mid-november which is never really a great time to turn up to an island in the north sea um it's completely miserable and when he lands he has to walk three miles through mud before he can reach the port itself and he wrote to Leicester as dirty a walk as ever. Poor governor entered his charge with all. Leicester himself arrives in Flushing three weeks later, and he's greeted there by Sydney, by the two sons of William the Silent, and by bonfires made, and I quote, after the Dutch manor, which is to fix great pitch barrels on the tops of high poles and then to fire them.

53:46Tom Holland:Wow. So Leicester has a better arrival than Sydney had done, and the pair of them then head off in triumphal manner via Delft to the Hague, where Leicester then leaves Sydney to finalise the precise details of his role and status in the Low Countries. And Sydney's very ambitious for his uncle, and he goes well beyond the governor's rebut, and he secures a post for Leicester, which implies that Elizabeth is in fact sovereign over the Low Countries, which is exactly what Elizabeth had not wanted him to do. And I think the reason that Sydney does this is that he's aware that Leicester needs to seem as prestigious to the Dutch rebels and indeed to the Spanish as possible if he's going to be able to play an effective role in the coming war.

54:30Tom Holland:But obviously when Elizabeth gets the news, she is furious and they have a massive row. And I think for the Dutch, it's a bit like watching mummy and daddy have a kind of quarrel. It's very awkward for all concerned. And from this point on, essentially everything goes downhill hill for Leicester because it turns out that his qualities, amazingly, he's a very arrogant aristocrat, turn out not to be those of a natural diplomat. So he's very, very dogmatic about religious matters. He's a hardcore Puritan. This means that he gets on very well with the hardcore Calvinists, Puritans in Holland, but it alienates the mass of the people in the kind of the rebel cause in the Low Countries, who aren't hardcore Calvinists.

55:16Tom Holland:They're what are called politique people who are essentially happy to live and let live to a degree. This isn't what Leicester's about at all. Then in June 1586, he executes a Dutch commander who'd surrendered a fortress to the Spanish. And again, this is not the kind of thing that the Dutch do. They think it's a terrible thing for Leicester to have done. And even while he's executing Dutch commanders for surrendering fortresses to the Spanish, Leicester himself is kind of sitting on his hands, refusing to go on the offensive. And even Sydney is starting to despair by the summer of 1586. And he writes to Leicester saying, the enemy stirs of every side and your side must not be idle.

55:55Tom Holland:For if it be, it quickly loses reputation. And of course, in the background, there is Elizabeth who is, you know, she's back to her old penny pinching ways. She's refusing to send money to Sydney so that he can pay his garrison in Flushing. And again, Sydney's in despair. If the queen pay not her soldiers, she must lose her garrisons. There is no doubt thereof. And so in short, everyone is incredibly annoyed with everyone else. Elizabeth is quarrelling with Leicester. The English are quarrelling with the Dutch. Sydney's quarrelling with pretty much everyone else. He makes sure that people appreciate none of it is his fault.

56:31Tom Holland:So he writes, no man living shall be able to say the fault is in me i mean i think you can perhaps see why elizabeth finds him a bit annoying yeah

56:40Dominic Sandbrook:but the thing is this is all a surprise to me because i've always thought of sir philip sydney um as this tremendous hero you know schools are named after him yeah his name is written into the kind of annals of english patriotic legend if they're just all squabbling with each other and

56:54Tom Holland:behaving badly why is he so admired because i think as with byron um as with che Guevara he's going to die young and he's going to serve as a martyr for his cause okay and that essentially is why sydney becomes a kind of superstar to protestant europe and so how does this happen so in september 1586 leicester finally goes on the attack and he besieges and captures a spanish held town called doysburg on the eastern flank of rebel held territory and if you're a fan of Dutch geography. It's in the province of Gelderland, which is to the southeast of the Zyder Sea. And Sydney rides out with Leicester.

57:38Tom Holland:Hooray, brilliant. He's got kind of feathers in his helmet. He's got beautiful armour. He's having a brilliant time. War at last. It seems to be going well. And Leicester is buoyed by the sense that things are going his way. And so he moves on to his next target, which is a town called Zutphen, so the South Fen. And Parma is very anxious to relieve this town. And so he sends a force of 5 ,000 men to its rescue on the 22nd of September. There's a big battle. There are lots of kind of heroic cavalry charges. The English equip themselves very well. However, they are unable to stop the Spanish from entering Zutphen.

58:19Tom Holland:And that basically is, that's the end of that. So it's a battle that I think no one would remember had Sir Philip Sidney not sustained a very serious wound in the course of it. And I said that there are these kind of dramatic cavalry charges. Sidney'd written in all of them. There are three in all. So the first time he'd, you know, drawn his sword, charged, hurrah, gone through the Spanish lines and then returned. The second time his horse had been shot from under him. He got another horse again, very gallant, very heroic. The third time, again, he'd ridden through the enemy lines. But then when he's turning to ride back to the English positions, he gets hit above his left knee by a musket ball.

58:58Tom Holland:And as Lester wrote in appalled tones later, it was a very dangerous wound, the bone being broken pieces. So Lester is very anxious for his nephew and his heir, of course, puts him in a barge, has him carried down the river to Arnhem, 20 miles south of Zutphen. and in Arnhem surgeons operate on the wound. But unfortunately, their attempt to extract the bullet only makes things worse and gangrene sets in. And to quote, Sir Philip presently gave this severe doom upon himself that it was inward mortification and a welcome messenger of death. And sure enough, on the afternoon of the 17th of October, 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the tender age of 31.

59:45Tom Holland:And it's a wretched, unhappy end, rather like Byron's end was wretched and unhappy. And in his dying hours, Sir Philip Sidney mourned that all things in my former life have been vain, vain, vain. But this is not how his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, sees it. And Leicester may have been irascible, incompetent, arrogant. But one thing he does know is how to create a martyr. And so Leicester ensures that Sydney's funeral cortege is very slow, very sombre, very stately. And it processes from Arnhem to the sea and thence to London. And in London, his coffin is carried to St. Paul's Cathedral by 14 men.

1:00:28Tom Holland:He's accompanied by the Lord Mayor, by 300 Londoners in full armour and by a page riding Sydney's war horse, trailing a broken lance. So shades of perhaps the funeral of JFK. And the streets were so thronged with people that the mourners had scarce room to pass. And so in death, Sydney becomes what he had yearned to be all his life, a hero to every English Protestant and indeed to every Protestant in Christendom.

1:01:00Dominic Sandbrook:And for Elizabeth and her PR team, her propaganda team, this must be a tremendous coup because it happens at precisely the point when it looks as though the storm clouds of war are moving over the English Channel towards their own beloved country. They're about to break. They are about to break, aren't they? Yeah. Because, I mean, all of this has been building and building over the episodes of this series over the last few years. and the storm is, what is it? I mean, is it pouring with rain over the dikes of the low countries? Surely there must be some metaphor you can employ here, Tom.

1:01:37Tom Holland:Yes, the storm is breaking over the dikes of the low countries and the rumbling of thunder can be heard on the south coast of England. I think that's definitely the way to frame it. But of course, even as these war clouds are building, War is brewing as well amid the shadows. And so in our next and final episode, we will be returning to that dimension of shadow, to a world of secrets and of spies and conspiracies. And in particular, we will be tracking someone who has been absolutely central to this series, but who until now has been a largely offstage presence. And Dominic, a personal favourite of yours, one of your great heroines, someone who in all kinds of ways actually was the precise opposite of Sir Philip Sidney.

1:02:35Tom Holland:So she's a woman, not a man, a Catholic, not a Protestant. She's an ageing prisoner, not a youthful, dashing courtier. And we are talking, of course, about Mary, Queen of Scots.

1:02:50Dominic Sandbrook:Mary, Queen of Scots and her appointment with the executioner, all to come in the next episode. Now, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, if you're a member of our own expeditionary force to bring the gospel of history to the low countries, then you'll be able to hear that episode right now. And if you want to join them, if you want to join us in the dykes and whatever they are, the polders of the Netherlands. Love a polder. If you want to join us, then head to therestishistory.com and sign up. And that is, of course, the only way that you'll be able to get this cornucopia of unbelievable benefits.

1:03:24Dominic Sandbrook:The other thing you probably want to do, this is a revelation, I imagine, to a lot of listeners, something I've never heard before, but we have a free newsletter with all kinds of incredible literary treats. So there are interviews and there are articles and there are book extracts and all kinds of fun things that you can't get anywhere else. And again, you go to our website, you sign up and then you get this every week and you will be beside yourself. It's genuinely life-changing. So on that bombshell, we will be back next time with Mary, Queen of Scots. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

1:04:02you