The Story of Britain Read online

  As he spoke, he grew more and more angry, his eyes burning and his beard shaking. Mary tried not to let anyone see how frightened she was, and whether they liked her or not, everyone agreed she was brave to argue with John Knox. In fact, she might have become popular in Scotland, if she hadn’t spoiled everything by falling in love.

  She fell in love with her cousin, a handsome Scottish nobleman called Lord Darnley. She looked after him when he was sick, married him, and they had a baby son together. Unfortunately, although Darnley was good-looking, he turned out to be stupid, vain and bad-tempered, and poor Mary was miserable.

  “I hate Scotland,” she whispered, “and I hate Darnley.”

  To comfort herself, she spent evenings with her secretary, an Italian called David Rizzio. Rizzio reminded her of the happy days in France by singing songs and playing the guitar. But Darnley soon grew jealous.

  “I’m sure she’s having an affair with that greasy foreigner!” he shouted.

  One day, while Mary was having supper with Rizzio, Darnley and his friends burst into the room brandishing pistols and knives. Rizzio screamed, begged for mercy, and tried to cling to Mary’s skirt, but Darnley’s friends dragged him from the room and stabbed him to death.

  Darnley tried to take over the government, so Mary had to turn to someone else for help. She chose a rough, fearless soldier called the earl of Bothwell, who decided to make the queen fall in love with him and marry her himself.

  One winter night, while the city of Edinburgh slept, some men in black cloaks slipped through the alleyways as silently as they could, heading towards Kirk o’ Field, where Darnley was staying. Edinburgh was quiet at night. The only sounds were the footsteps of nightwatchmen, and the creak of frost on the church roofs. But suddenly an enormous explosion tore through the darkness from the direction of Kirk o’ Field. When rescuers hurried to the scene, they found the building blown to rubble by gunpowder, and Darnley’s body lying in the garden.

  Everyone knew Bothwell had arranged it, but by now Mary had fallen in love with him. When Bothwell was arrested for murder, she let him off, then announced she was going to marry him.

  “I told you she was evil!” screamed John Knox in triumph. “She’s had her husband killed, and married the murderer!”

  The Scots rebelled against Mary, her army was defeated, and she escaped to England to beg her cousin Queen Elizabeth for help. Elizabeth couldn’t decide what to do. If she protected Mary, people would accuse her of helping a murderess. If she punished her, they would blame her for harming her cousin. To make matters worse, English Catholics began plotting to make Mary queen of England.

  When Mary was tried and found guilty, Elizabeth had to decide whether to execute her or not. For eighteen years she dithered. It didn’t help that she had always been jealous of Mary, who was younger and prettier than her, and who knew what it was like to love and get married. When Elizabeth gazed in the mirror, she saw an old lady plastered in make-up who looked more like a statue than a living person.

  One day, Elizabeth’s spies told her of a new plot to kill her and make Mary queen. Afterwards most people thought the spies had made the plot up, but Elizabeth decided Mary should be executed.

  Dressed in black, Mary looked as beautiful as ever when her jailer at Fotheringhay Castle led her to the platform where she was to be beheaded. As Mary kneeled, one thought comforted her. Her little son, James, had been made king of Scotland, and since Elizabeth had no children, he would one day inherit the throne of England too.

  Mary, Queen of Scots, faced death, but her son would unite England and Scotland at last.

  The Spanish Armada

  ELIZABETH always felt guilty about executing Mary, Queen of Scots. She worried about not marrying or having children, and about whether people really respected her. But she finally had her chance to show how good a queen she was when the king of Spain attacked England.

  Spain was the most powerful country in the world. Gold and silver from South America filled the king’s treasury, and Spanish soldiers seemed unbeatable. King Philip, who had once been married to Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, decided to attack Elizabeth, conquer England and make it Catholic again.

  Most people didn’t give England a chance against mighty Spain, but English sailors, who were famous for their skill and bravery, attacked Spanish ships and ports, and even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to raid Caribbean islands like Jamaica that belonged to Spain. The most famous English captain of all, Sir Francis Drake, actually sailed into the Spanish harbour of Cadiz and sank Philip’s fleet.

  “I’ve singed the king of Spain’s beard,” he boasted, and everyone laughed.

  So Philip ordered his admirals to prepare a great fleet – called an armada in Spanish – to invade England. It was the biggest fleet the world had ever seen. Its galleons bristled with guns, and at each end they had fortified towers that looked like miniature castles. Every ship was crammed with armour, horses and ammunition.

  But the English fleet was almost as large, and its sailors were more skilful. They were used to the dangerous waters of the English Channel, where storms and tides pushed unwary ships onto the rocks. Francis Drake, one of the commanders, was at Plymouth when news came that the Armada was approaching. There is a story that he was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the messenger arrived, out of breath, with his eyes starting out of his head in terror.

  “The Spanish are in sight!” he shouted. “The sea is covered with their sails!”

  Drake saw some of the captains glance nervously at one another. He knew the most important thing was not to let them panic. So he calmly picked up his bowling ball.

  “There is plenty of time to win this game, and to thrash the Spaniards too,” he remarked, and played the game to the end before leading the captains down to the port.

  Out at sea, the Armada was a frightening sight. Its ships spread out in a huge crescent, and to start with the English couldn’t get close enough to fight. The Spanish plan was to sail up the Channel and pick up soldiers who were waiting for them in Belgium. But when the Spanish anchored off the town of Gravelines, Drake saw that the wind was blowing straight into the bay, and ordered fireships – old ships packed full of wood and gunpowder – to be prepared. He gave his instructions carefully.

  “Sail as close as you can before setting fire to the wood,” he told the captains.

  The Spanish had lookouts on their ships, but they didn’t think the English would dare attack by night. Suddenly one of the lookouts saw a spark of flame in the darkness. Before he could say anything, the fire spread, shooting up the rigging until the outline of a blazing ship could be seen drifting down the bay.

  “Fire!” he shrieked.

  Other fireships burst into flame. Look-outs screamed warnings, bells rang, and sailors ran up on deck.

  “Cut the anchor ropes!” the Spanish captains shouted. “Make sail as quickly as you can!”

  All the ships escaped, but their crescent formation was broken, and when the sun came up they were scattered far and wide. Then, at last, the English ships could come among them and batter them with their cannon. All the Spanish could do was sail out into the North Sea. Their invasion plans were ruined.

  The English attacked until they ran out of ammunition. Then the weather became stormy. The Spanish couldn’t sail back down the Channel, so they decided to go all the way round Britain, and back past the west coast of Scotland and Ireland. It was autumn by then, and the storms grew worse. The Spanish didn’t have any charts of Ireland and soon got lost. Ship after ship was wrecked. Irish villagers ran down to the shore to see mighty galleons crashing onto the rocks. Scottish fishermen rowed out to wrecked ships to pick up golden crosses and Spanish coins. The Armada was defeated and few of King Philip’s ships ever reached home.

  All through the crisis Queen Elizabeth led and encouraged her people bravely. At Tilbury, just outside London, she made a famous speech to the sailors who were setting off to join their ships:

  I kno
w I have the body of a weak, and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too.

  War in Ireland

  AFTER that, Elizabeth sent soldiers abroad to fight the Spanish wherever they could. The Dutch rebelled against Spanish rule, so Elizabeth sent an army to help win their freedom. And she also sent an army to Ireland.

  By now, it was four hundred years since King Henry II had conquered Ireland. But in those days, when there were no telephones and it wasn’t easy to send messages, it was difficult for the kings of England to govern Ireland, so the king’s authority quickly shrank to an area around Dublin called the Pale. In the rest of Ireland, Henry’s Norman followers built huge estates, got used to living alongside Irish chiefs, and stopped obeying the king. During the Reformation, when England, Wales and Scotland became Protestant, the Irish stayed Catholic, and so did the old Norman families who lived among them.

  Henry VIII was the first of the Tudors to try to win Ireland back. In the years that followed, Protestant settlers were sent from England and Scotland to take over Irish land, but the Irish fought them off, burned down the settlers’ farmhouses and set fire to their crops. Soldiers arrived to help the settlers, until eventually Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, decided to free Ireland from English rule once and for all. He began a rebellion in the northern province of Ulster, defeated the English at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, and offered the throne of Ireland to Philip, king of Spain.

  Queen Elizabeth sent Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, with a huge army to beat Tyrone and win Ireland back. Unfortunately the earl of Essex was weak, cowardly and knew little about fighting. When he got to Ireland he made a truce with Tyrone, then returned to London, leaving his army behind. Elizabeth was furious. Essex had always been a favourite of hers. He was charming and handsome, and made her laugh at his jokes, blush when he flattered her and gasp at his boastful stories. Now she realized she had been fooled. She sent him to the Tower, and when he escaped, recaptured him and put him to death.

  To take Essex’s place she sent a new general to Ireland, Lord Mountjoy, who defeated Tyrone. In the years that followed, Tyrone and Tyrconnel, the leaders of the rebellion, fled abroad, and the governments of England and Scotland gave Ulster to Protestant settlers. The city of Derry was given to the Corporation of London and renamed Londonderry. Protestant settlers burned Irish villages, and drove their inhabitants away as if they were wild animals, not people. They seized Irish farms and, in their place, laid out plantations where they planted their own crops and set the Irish to work.

  The hurt and anger which the English and Scottish caused in Ulster endures today. Catholics and Protestants still quarrel there, even though they live in peace elsewhere. And the people of Ulster are still divided, with Protestants wanting it to be British, and Catholics, Irish.

  Ireland’s story shows how the world we live in now is created by what happened in the past. Wise decisions can bring lasting peace, but bad ones lead to centuries of bitterness.

  Elizabeth’s Explorers

  THE defeat of the Spanish Armada showed how skilful British sailors were. After all, Britain and Ireland are islands, and have always been home to sailors. Now they had ships able to sail the deepest oceans, British sailors longed to go exploring, just as Columbus had done, and see what other lands they could find at the furthest ends of the world.

  Captain Martin Frobisher thought he could reach the Pacific Ocean by going between the North Pole and the top of America. So he sailed north until ice cracked around his ship, and icicles a yard long hung from the rigging. At night the sailors could hear the hull creak as the ice gripped it, and they saw polar bears and walruses. No one from Europe had ever sailed so far north. Frobisher didn’t find the North-West Passage, but he was the first European to meet the Inuit people, who lived on the ice, fishing and catching seals.

  Captain John Hawkins sailed south along the coast of Africa. Europeans knew about black Africans from traders, and a few black people had even travelled to northern Europe, but no English ship had sailed that far south before. Hawkins was the first Englishman to see the heat haze hanging over the African coast. In river towns where he landed, he met African merchants, and was shown the tusk of an elephant.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, one of Elizabeth’s courtiers, tried to start a colony on the coast of North America. He called it Virginia, after his Virgin Queen. His colony failed so he led an expedition to South America to search for the fabled city of El Dorado. Raleigh didn’t find it, but came back with breathtaking stories of the city of gold.

  But the most famous of all Elizabeth’s sailors was Francis Drake, who decided to sail all the way round the world.

  Most people knew the world was round, like a ball. In theory that meant you ought to be able to sail right round it and arrive home in the opposite direction from which you started. But only one ship had ever done that. It belonged to a Portuguese captain called Ferdinand Magellan, and sailed round the world in three years although Magellan died on the way. In those days sailing round the world was a bit like flying to the moon. There was no one to help sailors if they got into trouble. They had no charts, and their small ships were easily sunk by ocean storms.

  Despite all the danger, Drake decided to sail round the world, so he gathered six ships and looked for a crew.

  “We’ll be gone for years,” he warned them. “We may never come back.”

  One after another, though, men joined the crew until at last Drake was ready to set off. First he sailed south across the Atlantic. He reached the equator, and the ships’ decks cracked in the burning sun. But so many of Drake’s men fell sick that he didn’t have enough for all six ships. So he sank two of them and sailed on. He reached the bottom tip of South America, where the Atlantic Ocean touches the Pacific. There Drake discovered one of his ships was rotten, so he burned it and sailed on.

  He reached the Pacific Ocean, but one of his ships was sunk in a storm, and another so badly damaged that it had to return to England. Then Drake had to sail on in the last ship he had left, the Golden Hind.

  The Golden Hind headed up the coast of South America, where Drake captured a Spanish treasure ship full of gold. He sailed north, further than the Spanish had ever gone, and reached California, where he landed and said prayers for Queen Elizabeth. It grew cold as the Golden Hind sailed north, and when Drake reached Alaska he had to stop because the sea was blocked with ice.

  Instead, he turned west across the Pacific, reached Indonesia and crossed the Indian Ocean. He sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa, and at last, after three years, the Golden Hind sailed back into Plymouth.

  Queen Elizabeth knighted Drake on the deck of the Golden Hind, making him Sir Francis Drake. Everyone passed on stories of what he had seen on his voyage round the world. And for the first time, they realized how huge the world was, and how wide the oceans in which their islands lay. But they also realized that those oceans could be crossed. Their ships could go anywhere in the world.

  Merchants

  IF ships could travel the world to explore, they could travel the world to buy and sell things too. Merchants already sent ships far across the seas to sell wool. And as explorers like Francis Drake sailed further, they went further as well. They sailed to India, where they found towns that smelled of spices; and China, whose warehouses were piled high with silk, a cloth so rare in England that only the richest nobles owned it. At home people ate from rough clay plates and drank from heavy tankards, but in China merchants found cups so delicate they hardly dared touch them, porcelain so white they could almost see through it, and plates patterned with beautiful pictures. They were so much better than anything in Europe that we still call plates and cups “china”.

  Queen Elizabeth started an East India Company to trade with India and China. Its captains came back with stories of richly spiced food and painted palaces, and descriptions of “brown” people and “yellow” people who spoke languages no one in Europe ha
d ever heard.

  “They drink hot water flavoured with leaves!” they said when they got home. “They call it tea!”

  It took months for ships to reach China. It was worth it, though, for when they got there, merchants could fill them with china and silk they could sell in London for a fortune. They brought back tea as well, and casks of precious spices. Soon nutmeg and cinnamon could be smelled in the streets of London. Meanwhile, from America they brought back new vegetables like potatoes and tomatoes, and a leaf you put in a pipe to smoke: tobacco. When Walter Raleigh’s servants first saw him smoking, they poured a bucket of water over him because they thought his head was on fire.

  With so many merchant ships sailing to and from London, there were fortunes to be made not only for merchants but for shipbuilders, rope-makers and sailmakers. The city grew rich, and, hearing of the wealth they could make, people flocked there from all over the country. More houses were built; the streets became more crowded. London was dirty, but it was exciting as well. People of all sorts were crammed together there: ladies carried through the streets in litters; craftsmen working by candlelight in tiny workshops; courtiers in brilliant clothes and lawyers in black coats; beggars, countrymen, thieves and peasants; foreigners bewildered by the constant din.

  In London it really felt as if a new world was coming alive.

  “All the World’s a Stage”

  NOWHERE in London was noisier than Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. People went there to gamble and drink in huge taverns, and there was always something going on – a pig running loose in the streets, a thief being whipped as he was dragged behind a cart, a group of children pelting someone with mud. Most of all, the streets echoed to the noise of sawing and hammering as new buildings were put up. And one summer, a particular building site attracted crowds every day.