All day he made north-east for the Darty Mountains and finally came on a lake, Lough Glenade, where he found thirty huts, all of which were empty except for three naked men who, after the initial alarm, embraced him as another shipwrecked Spaniard. For supper they ate blackberries and watercress and then bedded down together in the straw, burying themselves in it to keep out the cold.
In the dawn however the ‘heretic savages’ returned to work in the fields about the huts, and the four Spaniards lay hidden in the straw all day, unable to stir, while men came in and out of the hut. At nightfall, as the moon rose, they wrapped themselves in the straw and slipped away, and after another long trek during which they were at their ‘ last gasp for thirst and hunger and pain’, they found a village belonging to Senor de Ruerque (Sir Brian O’Rourke) where they were given shelter at last. O’Rourke was away fighting the English, but Cuellar was given ‘ a rotten old blanket swarming with lice, and I covered myself with it and somewhat relieved my plight’. There were in fact already seventy Spaniards in the village, many wounded and all semi-naked, so it is not to be wondered at that supplies of clothing ran short.
News reached the village next day that a Spanish ship lay offshore and she was waiting to pick up fugitives; so Cuellar and twenty others set off to join her. But Cuellar’s leg, once injured and once wounded, let him down and he lagged behind, and when he got to the shore the other nineteen men had embarked and the ship, fearful of attack from the land, had sailed. Cuellar’s utter despair later turned to thanksgiving when he learned that the ship had been wrecked further along the coast and those not drowned in her had been slaughtered by the English.
A chance meeting with a monk directed him to a village and castle belonging to a native chieftain, one M’Glannagh, eighteen miles distant. There at last he was well treated – ‘the womenfolk wept to see me so ill used’ – and there he stayed three months, living as one of them.
It is the custom of these savages to live like wild beasts in the mountains. They live in huts made of straw; they … eat only once a day and that at nightfall, their usual food being oaten bread and butter. They drink sour milk for lack of anything else; water they do not drink, though theirs is the best in the world. On feast days it is their custom to eat some half-cooked meat without bread or salt. The men dress in tight hose and short coats of coarse goat’s hair; over this they wear a blanket, and their hair falls low over their eyes … Their great desire is to be thieves and plunder one another, so that hardly a day passes without a call to arms among them, for as soon as the men of one village discover that there are cattle or anything else in another village they come armed by night and attack and kill each other. The English garrisons get to know who has rounded up and stolen most cattle and at once fall upon them and take away their spoils … They sleep on the ground on freshly cut rushes, full of water and ice. Most of the women are very beautiful but poorly dressed; they wear nothing but a smock covered with a blanket, and a linen kerchief folded tightly round their heads and fastened in front … These savages liked us Spaniards well … indeed if they had not taken as much care of us as they did of themselves not one of us would still be alive. We were grateful to them for this, although they had been the first to rob and strip naked any man cast alive upon their shores, from whom these savages gained great wealth in jewels and money.
After Cuellar had been living in the town for three months, news reached M’Glannagh that a force of English infantry was advancing on them, and the Irish chief decided to evacuate the castle and take to the mountains where he and his family and his people and their cattle could hide until the English had retired again; but Captain Cuellar and eight other Spaniards refused to leave and said they were prepared to defend the place with their lives. The keep was in fact in an extremely defensible position, being on an island in the middle of a deep lake about two miles across and ten long, with an outlet to the sea. The Irish chief agreed to their remaining, and they were left with six muskets, six arquebuses and enough food to last them for a prolonged siege.
When the English arrived they sacked the village and encamped before the castle for seventeen days but could not take it; then December storms and a heavy fall of snow decided them to return to winter quarters. The Irish reappeared and M’Glannagh in his gratitude offered Cuellar one of his sisters in marriage. Cuellar tactfully refused, but asked instead for a guide to take him and his compatriots across the mountains to some port where he could take sail for Scotland. M’Glannagh returned an evasive answer, having by now decided that his Spanish allies were too valuable to release.
So once again it meant a secret departure, stealing away at dead of night in company with the only four of his compatriots who would accompany him, and putting as big a distance as they could behind them before their escape was discovered. They left shortly after Christmas Day 1588–9 and for twenty days fought their way across the savage mountains of Tyrone and Londonderry to reach one of the tiny villages at the extreme north-east of Ireland, from which it is only a matter of twenty-five miles to the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland.
Missing one boat by a day, and losing his companions, who could walk faster, Cuellar was befriended first by some ‘exceedingly beautiful girls’, who hid him in the huts of their families for a month and a half, and then by a bishop, who, living in disguise, was sheltering twelve other Spaniards. Through him at last a boat was found, probably something like a ship’s longboat, and eighteen people embarked in it. First they were blown to Shetland, their boat waterlogged and their sail torn, and then venturing again they reached Scotland after three more days. ‘Blessed be God who delivered us from so many and such sore trials.’
Captain Cuellar was disappointed in the reception he received in the ‘neutral’ country. He lived in Scotland for six months, destitute and begging for food and shelter. ‘The King of Scotland is of no account, nor has he the authority or dignity of a king, and he takes no step nor eats a single mouthful except by order of the Queen.’ However, eventually contact was made with the Duke of Parma, who had offered to pay a Scottish merchant five ducats per head to ship Spanish refugees to Flanders. A large party of Spaniards sailed in four separate ships, which had apparently received a safe conduct from the English, for the ships called at English ports and left unmolested.
But whether by a deliberate act of perfidy on the part of the English, as Cuellar thought, or whether Parma could make no such bargain with his more hated enemies, the Dutch fly-boats were patrolling off Dunkirk and instantly attacked the four Scottish ships. Two ran aground, and Cuellar again found himself clinging to a spar in the pounding surf and being washed up on a beach while the Dutch guns cannonaded the fugitives and all who tried to rescue them.
Almost in front of our eyes the Dutch were cutting to pieces two hundred and seventy Spaniards arriving in the boat which had brought us to Dunkirk, and leaving no more than three alive. This deed they are now paying for, as more than four hundred Dutchmen taken prisoner since then have been beheaded. I desire to write to you concerning these things.
From the city of Antwerp, 4th October, 1589
Chapter Ten
Attack on Portugal
An English spy called Anthony Copley wrote an account of what happened when Philip was told of his total defeat.
When news of the disgrace of the King’s late Armada was brought unto him, being at Mass at that very time in his Chapel, he sware (after Mass was done) a great Oath, that he would waste and consume his Crown, even to the value of a [last] Candlestick (which he pointed to standing upon the Altar) but either he would utterly ruin her Majesty and England, or else himself and all Spain become Tributary to her. Whereby it was most evident that his Desire for Revenge was extreme and implacable towards England.
This account is at variance with other reports which describe Philip as accepting the disaster calmly and sadly and ascribing it all to the will of God. Yet Copley’s version does seem to accord better with later events.
It must ha
ve been an excessive humiliation for Philip, more especially because for a month and more after the sailing of the Armada all Europe echoed with reports of its victories. The Queen was deposed. Drake was captured while trying to board Medina Sidonia’s flagship. Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, had publicly announced this and lit bonfires to celebrate the victory. The Ambassador in Prague ordered a Te Deum Mass to be held at the cathedral in celebration. The Ambassador in Rome went to see the Pope and requested a similar Mass in St Peter’s, together with the first part of the million gold ducats Sixtus had promised to pay Spain as soon as Spanish troops landed in England. The Pope, according to the Ambassador, ‘heard me out without interruption, although he writhed about a good deal with inward impatience; but when I finished his anger leapt out, and he replied that he told me now, as he had told me before, that he would more than fulfil all he had promised, but I was not to worry him any more about the matter until positive news of the Armada was received.’ But all the sad English exiles in Rome, led by Cardinal Allen and Father Parsons, accepted the tidings as true and prepared joyfully to return.
By now, however, the English had already held their own first thanksgiving service in St Paul’s – this was in September, not the big November one – and twelve captured flags and banners had been paraded through the streets. There were circumstantial reports from Holland and from England about the prisoners held. And Medina Sidonia’s emissary had reached the King. Then came the battered fleet, drifting in all along the west Spanish coast like ghost ships, full of sick and dying men.
For weeks the people of Spain could hardly accept the reality and the extent of the defeat. They had been accustomed for so long to war in the form of religious crusades which they had almost invariably won. It was a blow to national pride, to religious belief, to historical precedent and to reason.
The actual losses sustained by Spain in the first Armada are difficult to estimate. Something like fifty-five ships never returned, but of the eighty which did come home many were in such a condition that they were past repair. Of the thirty thousand men who sailed about ten thousand survived. Of the twenty thousand lost, possibly half were killed in battle or were drowned, the other half died from typhus, dysentery, scurvy or sheer privation.
It was a stunning loss, but Philip refused to be stunned. When the starving, dying men drifted in at every port, where there were no medical supplies to deal with them, the King assumed full responsibility for all relief work. He had no word of rebuke for Medina Sidonia, or for anyone except Diego Flores. When the Duke came to see him to explain the disaster, the King said: ‘I sent you to fight against men, not against God.’ He issued orders that there was to be no mourning ‘for heroes who had died gloriously in the defence of religion’. Quietly he docketed the fact that the Duke of Parma had let him down, and resolved only to make use of him so long as he could find no substitute in the Netherlands. Quietly he absorbed the lessons of the defeat. Because of his sins and the sins of the nation, God had not been on their side. But Philip, as well as being deeply religious, was also essentially practical. God might have been more favourably disposed had there been a Spanish-controlled deep-sea port – such as Calais – available for his fleet. God would certainly have been better pleased with him if his ships had been built on the lines of the English.
There was only one way to remedy these defects – not by acquiescing in a position where the heretics ruled all the seas, but by striving more vigorously than ever to redeem the situation and by coming to a bitter, dedicated resolve that next time would be different. By the end of the year timber as far afield as the Adriatic was being felled for the construction of new galleons in the shipyards of Lisbon, Cadiz, Santander and San Sebastian.
In this, as in many other matters, he expressed the sentiments of the Spanish nation. The cities voted immediate extra money for his military and naval use: Castile eight million ducats, Toledo one hundred thousand; even Milan a quarter of a million. Too often it is implied that Philip, the absolute monarch, made his own decisions as it were in a vacuum and the Spanish people suffered for them. His popularity in Spain – which survived even this defeat – shows that he acted more often than not as his people wanted. In this case they united behind him in a determination not to accept defeat.
The Spanish downfall was greeted with an enormous wave of relief in the Protestant countries of Europe. The collapse of the Huguenots in France, and Parma’s victories in the Netherlands, followed by and following the assassination of William of Orange, had dismayed dissenters everywhere; Drake’s West Indian and Spanish victories had been a single sharp flame of defiance in a dark world. But the defeat of the whole might of the Spanish fleet was an achievement which altered men’s thinking overnight. Men saw that God was not necessarily on the side of the powerful and the mighty; indeed in a religious age it proved to many that God was a Protestant too. The victory put new heart into the hard-tried defenders of the Netherlands, into the war-torn French Protestants, into the Danes and the Germans and the Swiss; and it raised Elizabeth’s prestige to dizzy heights. It was the apogee of her reign – a triumph blighted for her only by the sudden death of Leicester, the one man in her life who was quite irreplaceable. Bereaved and sad at heart, she gathered the plaudits of the world and of her people; but at their best they were comforting embers at which to warm her hands and keep away the sudden chill of age. Essex was young and dashing and handsome and temporarily made one forget the passing of the years; but he was headstrong, conceited and frequently – almost invariably – took too much on himself. Ralegh was by turns brilliant and sombre; but as Aubrey says, ‘he had that awfulness and ascendancy in his Aspect over other mortals’, which perhaps was what prevented the growth of true warmth between himself and the Queen. Others about her grew old and grey in her service; trusted men, dedicated men; but she had loved none of them.
Even some of the Catholic countries took Spain’s defeat philosophically. Elizabeth’s religion was deeply offensive to Pope Sixtus, but he admired her courage and intellect. Philip II was his brother in religion, but a personal antipathy existed between the two men that a common cause could not bridge. The failure saved the Papacy a million ducats, shook Spanish hegemony in Europe and a general wish on Spain’s part to dictate Catholic thought and policy from Madrid.
In Italy generally, and especially in the Venetian republic, which had always been too civilized to become deeply involved in religious wars, it looked like a welcome shift in the balance of power; and possibly, it was reasoned, this in the end would lead to a return to the older and more subtle political power diplomacy which all Italians understood.
In France a profound change took place. Henry III had recently made Henry of Guise his Lieutenant-General and had been forced to declare all Protestants incapable of trust, office or employment; but as news of the defeat of the Spanish fleet came in he began to reassert himself. This was of course a struggle between two Catholics, but Guise was subsidized by Spain, while Henry III, though a weakling, strove for national independence and a united France. In October he dismissed all his ministers and threw off finally the influence of his too oppressive mother, who had come to favour Henry of Guise more than she did her own son. In December, still struggling to free himself from the dominance of a man so much stronger than himself, the King arranged for and superintended the assassination in his own bed-chamber of his great rival. Then in January 1589 Catherine de’ Medici died, leaving the King apparent master of France. But the murder of Guise, who was widely popular throughout France, left Henry III even less master of the realm than he had been before. As James Stephen has said: ‘Heaven and earth rose against the murder of Blois.’ Just as sixteen years before the massacre of the Huguenots virtually left his brother a prisoner of the Spanish-dominated Catholic League, so Henry found himself now forced into the hands of the Huguenots, who alone could help him to preserve a part of his violently erupting kingdom. It paved the way for friendship with Elizabeth and for the succ
ession of the Protestant Henry of Navarre.
There are various reports about Philip’s health at this time. Some say that the last blond streaks disappeared from his beard and hair, that this beard grew untidy, that he was ill from the shock of all the bad news. Yet he does not seem to have suffered from anything worse than a return attack of gout in his right hand. His fourth wife had been dead eight years, and all the children of their marriage had died except young Philip, the heir to the throne. Catherine, the younger of Philip’s two daughters of whom he was so fond, was married and gone, so he was much alone except for his confessor and his secretaries. When he went to Aranjuez early in 1589 one of his doctors asked him why he insisted on going there. ‘For companionship,’ was the reply. It was the companionship of memories. He drove around the ponds in a small carriage, did a little shooting, sniffed the orange blossom and the spring flowers. Back in Madrid he spent a while adding to his vast collection of paintings, visited the Academy of Architecture which he had founded six years earlier, attended a concert given by the choir of picked singers he had recruited from the Netherlands, inspected the illuminated manuscripts created for him by the monks for the new church of San Felipe el Real in the Puerta del Sol. At the Escorial for Easter, he washed and kissed the feet of twelve beggars on Maundy Thursday, and afterwards waited on them at table.
After Easter he returned more fully to considering preparations necessary to meet the expected English invasion of Portugal that summer. Mendoza in Paris had written as early as the previous November to warn him that it was coming.