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Born to conquer kingdoms
A hostile ambassador
Mendoza was patrician, haughty, and zealously Catholic, and he devoted himself to the subversion of Elizabeth's regime. When Drake came home with the Spanish treasure, Mendoza asked to come and protest, and Elizabeth refused to see him. He sent back a blunt warning that a war is easily begun, but not so soon ended.
Elizabeth held him off by demanding a full account of the Spanish invasion of Ireland, and Mendoza never apologized. Meanwhile he threw his weight behind the Duke of Guise's plan to invade England, alongside the Pope.
The expulsion
After Francis Throckmorton confessed, the Privy Council summoned him on January 19, 1584. Walsingham, in fluent Italian, listed six charges of conspiracy against him and told him he was to be expelled. Mendoza denied the charges angrily and menacingly, and declared that Don Bernardino Mendoza was born to conquer kingdoms. Then he packed his bags.
How did Mendoza keep plotting after he was expelled?
Mendoza went to Paris and served as Spain's ambassador to France. There he worked with the Catholic League, the movement led by the Duke of Guise. In December 1584 Spain and the Guise family signed the Treaty of Joinville, which pledged Spanish money for the League's war against Protestantism in France.
Why did Spain wait years before sailing the Armada?
The Spanish Armada sailed in 1588, four years after Mendoza's expulsion. Philip II had to build a fleet and gather an invasion army in the Netherlands under the Duke of Parma. In 1587 Drake raided Cádiz and destroyed dozens of Spanish ships and stores, which delayed the plan by about a year.
Why were ambassadors expelled rather than arrested?
By the sixteenth century, custom protected ambassadors from arrest, since they represented their sovereign. The common penalty for an ambassador caught plotting was to send him home and break off relations. Permanent resident embassies had only spread across Europe from the Italian city-states in the fifteenth century. Expulsion was a formal diplomatic act that avoided a direct insult to the king.
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