The Spanish Armadas

  Don Antonio, as well as being illegitimate, was also half Jewish, and this did not endear him to some of the great Portuguese families; but he had always claimed that the general population would immediately rise at his name. In Lisbon the Portuguese, intimidated and decimated by the Archduke’s ruthlessness, could hardly have done more than wait and see. But in the countryside the response to the arrival of their ‘rightful king’ was dismally negative. Only about two hundred joined the English army, and those, according to Sir Roger Williams, were ‘ the greatest cowards that I ever saw’. Considering what they put at stake by joining at all, it seems an unfair description.

  There was at first no fighting, for the Spanish withdrew before the advancing army, who by the 25th May were in the suburbs of Lisbon. Here, after firing the storehouses to prevent their falling into English hands, the Spanish launched a powerful counter-attack; but it was repulsed with heavy casualties and they then retreated within the walls of the city.

  For three days Norris lay encamped outside the city, expecting Drake. Of his force of about nine thousand men more than three thousand were now too ill to be anything but a liability. He was running short of ammunition and he had no siege-guns. In this situation he could only wait for the Portuguese to rise, while in their situation the Portuguese could only wait for him to take the city. Had Drake come up the Tagus it might have turned the scales, but he, like Norris, was expecting the Portuguese revolt that did not come. One cannot imagine him being intimidated by the forty cannon of Fort St Julian which guarded the narrow entrance, though he claims this was a deterrent. Probably he was already turning his eyes on the third objective of the expedition, the treasure ships likely to be coming in from the Azores.

  On the 28th Norris gave Don Antonio one more day in which to rally his supporters. When they did not come he struck camp and marched with his whole army to Cascaes. Because they had the Portuguese Prince with them, looting in the suburbs of Lisbon had been rigorously forbidden, otherwise, wrote Captain Richard Wingfield regretfully, ‘we had been the richest army that ever went out of England’. Before they left Lisbon Essex, tall and splendid in his full armour, walked up alone to one of the gates of the city and thrust his sword into the wood, crying in a carrying voice if any ‘Spaniard mewed therein durst adventure forth in favour of my mistress to break a lance’. No Spaniard adventured forth.

  When the army reached Cascaes, siege was already being laid to the castle there by Drake’s men, and the arrival of the army settled the issue. But now there were repeated councils-of-war and mutual recriminations. Norris was not an easy man to get along with at the best of times, and here, justifiably, he had cause for complaint.

  While they were so in angry conference the only piece of luck of the whole expedition befell them. A big fleet of Hanseatic ships sailed into the Tagus unsuspecting and, apart from a few escorting ships which made their escape, all were captured. The Hanseatic League, which was composed of the Baltic and north German cities, did not approve of the English blockade of their trade with Spain, and this fleet, carrying grain and valuable war commodities, had dodged both Sir Martin Frobisher’s and Sir George Beeston’s patrolling squadrons by sailing all round the north of Scotland, like the retreating Armada of the year before. Some of the ships were newly built and intended for Spanish use, and all were seized. It added sixty sail to the English fleet and new hope to their flagging spirits. At this stage the squadron of Dutch flyboats was given permission to return home.

  Now supplies arrived from England – with that sulphurous letter from the Queen which hastened the departure of my Lord of Essex – and with news that Drake’s vice-admiral and Ralegh’s friend, Captain Robert Crosse, was off Cadiz with another squadron of supply ships. So the troops were re-embarked and the fleet abandoned Lisbon and sailed south. One spares a moment of sympathy for the broken hopes of Don Antonio, who had seen so much begun and then it all fail from the use of half measures.

  After the juncture with Crosse they proceeded to try to accomplish the third object of their mission, or at least, in Drake’s words, ‘to find some comfortable little dew of Heaven’, which would increase the profit of the venture. But now Heaven, or at any rate the weather, turned foul on them and they were beaten back to the Bayona Islands near Vigo. Here they again landed, one party led by Sir Roger Williams, the other by Drake in person, and captured and burned Vigo and laid waste the settlements and villages around. Here Rear-Admiral William Fenner, commanding the sixth Queen’s ship, the Aid, died of wounds. By now there were scarcely two thousand fit men who could be mustered, and a number of the ships had been badly used by the storm, so it was clearly futile to attempt anything against the Azores in this condition. Drake therefore took the pick of the men and ships that were left – twenty ships in all – while Norris turned for home with the sick and the wounded.

  But for once Drake’s uncanny ability to conjure victory out of defeat, his knack of being in the right place to seize at least one rich prize, this time failed him. His luck would not turn for him, perhaps because for once he had hesitated to trust to it. A violent storm struck his ships and scattered them before they could reach the Azores, and the Revenge sprang a dangerous leak that could not be repaired at sea. Robert Crosse and Thomas Fenner with a few other ships did in fact reach Madeira and landed at Puerto Santa and captured and plundered the port. But they entirely missed the treasure fleet.

  And Drake led the remnants of his own fleet home. The Revenge, nearly foundering, reached Plymouth just in time. The only prizes of substantial value gained out of the expedition were the sixty Hanseatic vessels and their contents seized in the Tagus, which later were sold for £30,000. Apart from this, like Norris, he only had excuses with which to attempt to placate Elizabeth.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Loss of the Revenge

  A comparison of the expedition of 1589 with the Spanish Armada of the previous year is hardly valid. The Lisbon expedition was never an all-out effort, and if every ship had sunk it would not have crippled the Queen’s navy. In fact no ship was sunk. Yet, while no really reliable estimates exist as to the number of men who came home, it seems probable that about half of those who sailed were lost – a couple of thousand perhaps by enemy action, the rest victims of that other and more deadly and more thoroughly impartial enemy: General Disease. Ralegh, whose estimate is likely to be better than most, reckoned the total loss at eight thousand men.

  By less demanding standards than those expected of it, the expedition could have been considered a modest success. It had landed in both Spain and Portugal and had marched with impunity about the countryside. It had diverted regiments intended for the Netherlands and caused the Spanish to recruit new ones. It had destroyed the granaries round Lisbon and had captured a whole fleet of grain and supply ships arriving to help the Spanish food and naval shortage. It had delayed the treasure ships, and a revolt in the Netherlands army in the following August for back pay can be traced to their late arrival. As Norris said: ‘If the enemy had done so much upon us, his party would have made bonfires in most parts of Christendom.’

  The narrowness of the margin by which they missed taking Lisbon is emphasized by historians who, unlike the commanders of the time, have the advantage of hindsight. But neither Norris nor Drake could have known by how much their attack on Lisbon, although long heralded, was a complete surprise when it occurred, by what a thin and to some extent disaffected garrison the city was held, and by what terrorist measures the Archduke Albert just prevented any sign of an uprising.

  What reflects worst on the expedition is that they had no naval opposition to overcome. The Armada had to face a fleet as numerous if not as heavy as itself, much more mobile and fighting in home waters. One wonders what Medina Sidonia would have achieved if there had been no English fleet. Drake and Norris in 1589 sailed where they would and landed where they pleased, and made little enough of it.

  Elizabeth, of course, with her usual grasp of essentials, knew exactly w
hat had gone wrong, and she never forgave Drake. Pushed inch by reluctant inch and year by year into an outright war with Spain which Philip at last had made unavoidable, she was well aware of the temporary advantage she held after the defeat of the Armada, and, having come to war, she was willing to wage war. Even as early as August 1588, while reports of the full extent of the Spanish disaster were by no means complete, she had personally initiated discussions on how best to capitalize on the victory. Never as enamoured as Drake and others were of Don Antonio’s chances of raising a full-scale revolt in Portugal, she had kept always before her the primary purpose for which an expedition must be launched: the destruction of what was left of the Spanish fleet.

  These had been her instructions. If they had been followed, the loss of men could hardly have been greater than in the half-measure landings which were undertaken, and forty or fifty of Spain’s remaining galleons lying in varying stages of repair and disrepair would have been destroyed – all those ships which had so narrowly got home from the disaster, all those ships which otherwise could be repaired to form the nucleus of a new fleet, all those ships which as soon as repaired would be at sea again to guard the treasure fleets. ‘ If,’ wrote a correspondent from nearby St Jean de Luz, ‘Sir Francis had gone to Santander as he went to the Groyne he had done such a service as never subject had done before, for with 12 ships he might have destroyed all the forces which the Spaniards had there, which was the whole strength of the country by sea. There they did ride all unrigged and their ordnance on the shore and some 20 men to a ship only to keep them.’

  So Elizabeth’s explicit instructions had been disobeyed, and perhaps more clearly than anyone at that time, unless it was Burghley, she saw that the one chance of ending the war quickly was lost. Of course she was only the principal shareholder in a joint stock company which was not this time declaring a dividend. She made no public complaint about the outcome of the expedition; formally if icily she thanked her captains and men, as befitted a sovereign served loyally but inefficiently. Privately Drake and Norris were called upon to answer articles charging them with disobeying their instructions and other matters.

  In the meantime England’s correspondent in St Jean de Luz reported that in addition to the fifty-odd ships of the old Armada being repaired in the northern ports, nine new galleons were being built in Portugal, and twelve others designed on the English model – later to be known as the Twelve Apostles – had been laid down in various Biscayan ports. The hour of danger for Spain was passing.

  A month after the return of Drake and Norris the face of Europe was convulsed by another event. A monk called Jacques Clément, encouraged by the Duchess of Montpensier, sister of the recently murdered Duc de Guise, gained an audience of Henry III and, while the king was reading his petition, drew a dagger and stabbed him in the belly. So, less than eight months after the assassination of Guise, and only seven after the death of the woman who had schemed and contrived all her life for the preservation and perpetuation of her line, the last of her sons passed from the scene. He was also the last of the house of Valois which had given thirteen kings to France in the space of two and a half centuries.

  It seems improbable that Elizabeth, whose great-greatgrandmother was a Valois, shed any tears at the passing of the house.

  The King did not die immediately, and to the many people crowding into his chamber in his last hours he left no doubt as to his will – that his cousin and brother-in-law and most recent ally, Henry of Navarre, should succeed to the throne of France. Thus the paradox emerged that the fanatic Clément had murdered a Catholic in order that he should be succeeded by a Huguenot.

  But it was a murder as much of revenge as of religion. All the Guises went frantic with joy, and Catholic Paris set up tables in the streets and held midday banquets and midnight bonfires. Clément, who had been immediately killed by the King’s attendants, was ‘honoured in the pulpits, sung in the streets, invoked as a saint’. Pope Sixtus proclaimed him a new martyr.

  The position of the new King, Henry of Navarre, was precarious in the extreme. Not only was the whole of the Spanish-dominated Catholic League against him, but half the supporters of the previous king were riven with religious scruples as to whether they could continue to serve a Protestant. Some continued to do so because they preferred a French King on the throne to a Spanish Infanta; and the Venetian Republic infuriated its co-religionists by immediately – and for the same reason – recognizing Henry. The Pope by his own famous Bull of Deprivation of September 1585 had declared Henry of Navarre forfeit of all his rights to the throne of France, so now, though as anxious as anyone that France should retain her independence, he could do no more than privately urge Henry to change his religion. Under much pressure from his French friends too, Henry could only reply that he had been born a Catholic, reared as a Calvinist by his mother, become converted to Catholicism to save his life at the St Bartholomew massacre and reverted to Protestantism as soon as he was free again. ‘You require a change in me which would argue no sincerity either in one faith or the other.’

  He appealed to Elizabeth for help, and Elizabeth, fearing once again for the safety of the Channel ports, was compelled to give it him. She was now drawn more and more into a military struggle in Europe, to the consequent neglect of her navy. As the years progressed, she found herself with troops dotted along the Channel coast or in adjacent regions supporting the Dutch and the French everywhere against the common enemy.

  In March 1590 with a mixed army of French, English, Germans and Swiss, some of them quite unable to understand each other’s languages, Henry IV comprehensively defeated the Catholic Leaguers under the Duc de Mayenne. This was at Ivry, now known as Ivry-la-Bataille, between Mantes and Dreux. It followed up his other two successes at Coutras and Arques, and had been confidently forecast by the incorrigible Pope Sixtus, who remarked that Henry of Navarre spent less time in bed than his opponents did at their food. The succession of victories marked Henry as a soldier of eminence, and there was a noticeable shift in general public opinion towards him. He had also that other gift of leadership, an ability for uttering the memorable sentence at the most suitable moment. It endeared him to his new subjects as much as Elizabeth’s did to the English.

  In May 1590 Henry laid siege to Paris, which remained recalcitrantly opposed to a Protestant King. It was a strange siege, for Henry had thirteen thousand soldiers in all and the city a quarter of a million inhabitants. But the young governor, the Duke of Nemours, was overawed by the successes Henry had achieved in the field and he did not trust the fifty thousand amateurs that he could command, so the city suffered all the horrors of a three-month siege. In the first month alone thirteen thousand died of hunger and about thirty thousand of fever. Hideous practices were resorted to within the city in order to keep starvation at bay.

  What was Philip to do? The unification of France under a strong Huguenot king, the conquest of the pro-Spanish Catholics, the complete collapse of his influence in the country and the virtual isolation of his forces in the Netherlands: could these be tolerated? Better to seize all France. And more tempting. He still had far the most powerful army in Europe. He wrote to Parma, instructing him to march to the relief of Paris. Parma vehemently protested. Slowly, inexorably, he was advancing again to squeeze the United Provinces into surrender. To take off the pressure now might undo all the dearly won victories of the last two years. The Armada had failed but not Spanish military power. With the forces that he now possessed, the Dutch, even with Elizabeth’s aid, must soon find their backs to the sea. Philip’s reply was peremptory: ‘If Flanders is lost,’ he wrote, ‘it is mine to lose.’ Parma must relieve Paris.

  Parma was slow in moving, but this time he could not be blamed for the delay. The English raid on Lisbon and the Azores which had delayed the silver fleet from the Indies had deprived Parma of the money to pay his long-deprived troops, and there was a mutiny. He put it down as only he could, but had to pledge his own jewellery as surety for his pr
omises.

  In Paris by August, with people dying in their tens of thousands, there was great pressure within the city to surrender. This was chiefly resisted by the Archbishop of Lyons and by Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador. ‘I am here serving you as best I can,’ old Mendoza wrote racily to Philip, ‘but wherever I am there is sure to be a storm, and I am running under close-reefed topsails fore and aft.’ When emissaries of surrender were just about to leave the capital, news came that Parma had joined the Duc de Mayenne at Meaux, only twenty-five miles east of Paris. Henry raised the siege and faced the relieving army, but Parma out-manoeuvred and out-flanked him, and the inconclusive clashes which occurred could not hide the fact that Parma with an apparently inadequate army of veterans was still master of the field wherever he chose to fight. Henry was driven from Paris, the city relieved and the pro-Spanish faction encouraged.

  By the autumn a Spanish army three thousand strong, under Don Juan de Aguila, had landed on the coast of Brittany, to support the League there and to secure a base at the western end of the Channel. This gravely alarmed England, and the council sent Norris off with three thousand troops, half of them veterans, to oppose the landing. Henry contributed a small local force but nothing else, since Parma’s presence was a menace to his whole kingdom. The situation in France at this stage posed as many dangers for England as those of the Armada year, because only Henry and his supporters stood between them and a Spanish occupation of the Channel coastline. Had France fallen then, it is unlikely that the Netherlands could have held out.