The Spanish Armadas

  Even then there was a hesitation before sailing, for the weather was poor and the winds threatening, and they awaited a flyboat from the Azores confirming the position of the English fleet. This arrived on the same day as a further message from Philip, now completely recovered. He promised that Arumburu and his Andalusian squadron would follow the Armada within a few days, but that in the meantime the Adelantado must brook no further delay, and any captain who created difficulties was to be hanged at once from his own yard-arm.

  Man proposes, but in the days of sail even a threatened admiral could not defy the winds, and that night a gale blew up that pinned the fleet within Betanzos Bay for six more days, and it was the 9th October before at last the weather set fair and they were able to get away.

  And at last the Adelantado was permitted to open his sealed orders.

  He was to proceed to Falmouth and land his troops there. It was perhaps the best kept secret of the sixteenth century, and only perhaps four men apart from Philip had known what was in the sealed letter before it was opened. Once he had gained possession of Falmouth and left eight thousand troops in occupation of the peninsula, Padilla was to return to the Scillies and catch the English fleet on its way home, since he was enormously more powerful than they. But he was given freedom of action in this, depending on weather conditions, the success of the landing at Falmouth and what naval opposition, if any, he encountered in the Channel.

  The fleet went on its way now with high hopes and in fine favourable weather. The first squadron was led by Don Martin de Padilla himself flying his green cleft pennant; the second by his vice-admiral, Don Diego Brochero in the San Pedro, of one thousand tons, with a yellow flag; the third by Don Martin de Bertendona, with a red flag, in the new San Mateo, of twelve hundred tons, just launched from the shipyards of Renteria to replace the one taken by the English at Cadiz. Orders were given that at sunset all ships of the fleet were to pass by the admiral’s ship and to shout three times and sound their trumpets. Each ship as it passed was to ask the watchword for the night and what course to steer, and then to drop astern into its allotted position. The evening hymn to Our Lady, with her image held high, was to be followed by all lights out except those in the cabins of gentlemen, who had had their lamps trimmed with water covered with oil to combat the lurching of the ship; but no candles were permitted for fear of fire. At the stern of the San Pablo a cresset with flaming combustibles was to burn so that everyone knew the Adelantado’s ship and could follow. When the wind was too strong for the cresset, a large lantern with four lamps in it was to be used instead. Each sunrise there was a fanfare of trumpets, and the ships came up to salute again, the San Pablo keeping under easy sail until this was done. Then a Missa Sicca (dry Mass without consecration) was celebrated before the Armada proceeded on its way.

  Fine weather and favourable winds took the fleet quickly to Blavet, where Captain Zubiaur was waiting with his seven galleys, his extra supply ships and his two thousand picked infantry. In easterly winds the fleet then made for the Scillies, and after assembling there and a final council-of-war, Don Diego Brochero led his squadron as the advance guard against Falmouth. With him was the eager Captain de Soto in command of the Espiritu Santo, one of the new galleyzabras of three hundred and fifty tons, three other galleons, three of the Zubiaur galleys, twelve flyboats and a half dozen supply ships.

  At this stage nobody in England knew anything about a possible Spanish Armada being out and almost on their coasts. The Lord Admiral Howard was about to be made Earl of Nottingham in reward for his distinguished services against the First Armada of 1588 and Cadiz last year. Parliament was meeting in leisurely session, and one of the subjects up for discussion was defence measures to be taken in the event of a Spanish attack the following year.

  The security of that autumn in England is in the strangest contrast with the almost constant qui vive in which the country had lived for more than a decade. As will be remembered, only the year before there had been partial mobilization and a recommissioning of the fleet against the Second Armada. Almost all through 1598 there was acute apprehension; and in 1599 came the famous and most complete mobilization of all, when, as it turned out, no fleet sailed against England at all. On every other occasion throughout the long war Spanish preparations had been carefully observed and prepared against. Spies had brought news, fly-boats had scurried home. Drake was waiting on the Hoe playing his immortal game of bowls. The fine ships built by Hawkins were waiting to warp out into the Channel to attack the oncoming enemy.

  Not so this time. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was in command at Plymouth, but he had no warships at all to send out to battle. Those that were not laid up in Chatham were, apart from the small squadron patrolling off North Foreland, far out with Essex in the Atlantic returning from the Azores after yet one more unsuccessful attempt on the treasure-flota.

  But after all the Protestant winds came just in time to save the country. The weather steadily worsened during the last day of the Armada’s advance from the Scillies, and, when only twenty miles off the Lizard, a violent north-easterly storm broke in the Channel and the flagship of the advance guard, the San Pedro, was so badly damaged that she had to drop out of station and run before the wind. This at once robbed the enterprise of its most aggressive admiral; though Brochero, as soon as his ship was in a Biscay port, put to sea again in a flyboat to try to rejoin the Armada. At the same time the Adelantado, half a day behind with the main fleet, tried to ride out the storm. But the storm would not relent. It blew unabated from the worst possible quarter for three days, and one by one the Spanish galleons however hard they fought were broken and had to give up the unequal struggle. The Adelantado hung on and refused to give way until of all his great fleet only four other ships remained with him; then he had no recourse but to return to Spain empty-handed, as he had the year before, defeated not by the enemy but by the autumnal storms.

  A few of the advance squadron, however, rendezvoused off Falmouth, as they had been instructed to do if scattered, and the appearance of these ships was the first notification the English had of the peril in which they stood. At least two of the contemporary foreign accounts say that the Spanish landed seven hundred soldiers near Falmouth, and these threw up defences, held them for a day or so; then when the rest of their fleet did not come they withdrew again. No English account mentions this, and it seems very improbable that there would not be some record of it if it had occurred. It is possible that some Spanish troops may have briefly landed at Helford, that ‘haven of corsairs and robbers’, as the Spanish pilot calls it. There are also stories of a landing on the north Devon coast.

  Whatever the case, panic prevailed in England. Parliament was prorogued, all English troops in France were recalled, mobilization of the western countries was decreed and the Lord Chamberlain, the second Lord Hunsdon, posted down to organize the levies there; the big warships in Chatham were ordered into commission. Sir Robert Crosse rushed to take command of the Channel squadron. It was a tremendous shock, a tremendous blow to confidence, that this emergency should occur when the whole of the commissioned English fleet was at sea and England daily expecting news of some great and glorious exploit off the Azores. It was exactly what Elizabeth had feared when listening to Drake’s ‘forward’ policy in 1587 and 1588.

  It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if, instead of the bitter and seemingly endless gale, there had been a couple of weeks of golden autumnal weather to aid the Adelantado in his plans. Certainly he would have landed at Falmouth and thrown ashore six or eight thousand troops with minimal or no loss. The captain of Pendennis Castle at the time, John Killigrew, though of a staunchly Protestant family, had lived a rake’s progress for twelve years, getting even deeper in debt than his father, similarly bent, had left him. As the Salisbury MS. puts it:

  Having brought himself into desperate case, he lived chiefly by oppressing his tenants, being a landlord in name only, by robbery of strangers in harbour there, by cosening his
friends and neighbours, by selling her Majesty’s provision of the Castle, by receiving of stolen goods, by consorting with pirates and abuse of his place and command.

  The same MS. accuses him of treacherously conniving with the Spanish, a charge which, not unnaturally, he strenuously denies. In an MS. written some years after his death he is referred to as the man ‘who sold his castle to the King of Spain’. Certainly the Spaniards looked on him as a friend; but, since his loyalty was never put to the final test, there is no proof of what his ultimate choice would have been. No charge was preferred against him in England, but as soon as the emergency was over he was called to London and imprisoned for the rest of his life, ostensibly for debt. In May 1598 he was writing that he had now been three months in the Gatehouse ‘without knowing my offence’.

  Whatever John Killigrew’s choice, it could not have affected more than temporarily the Spanish landing, and, although the local population would no doubt have resisted where they could, there was no force in the west remotely capable of withstanding veteran troops skilfully deployed. In the meantime the English fleet was returning from the Azores with, apart from a brilliant feat of arms by Ralegh in capturing Fayal, nothing to show for its long and arduous voyage. The commanders were by now at bitter odds with each other; the ships were making for home anyhow, as best they could, in ones and twos and in haphazard groups; sickness was rampant among the crews after so long at sea, and many ships were short-handed. Most of the battleships had stowed away their big guns in the hold to ease the strained timbers after all the storms. Certainly the straggling, disorderly squadrons were in no condition to fight a fleet action.

  That English command of the narrow seas would have been quite soon re-established there seems no doubt. With the Channel squadron reinforced by the great ships hastily recommissioning at Chatham, and a Dutch squadron to assist, the Spanish fleet could hardly have maintained its temporary supremacy. But how soon the Spanish in Cornwall could have been dislodged is an open question. It would have been no more difficult to supply the forces in Cornwall by sea than it was those in the Low Countries; and the Genoese, Frederico Spinola, was to demonstrate in 1599 how that could be achieved by his masterly use of that outdated warship, the galley.

  Conceivably the Spanish would have been content with a short occupation of a piece of England in retaliation for the seizure of Cadiz. Conceivably they would have attempted to hold it permanently as a forward base for the harassment of English trade. Or they might have used it as a bargaining counter to force an English withdrawal from the Continent. At the best they were still hoping, of course, for a Catholic rising which would put all England in their hands. But most English Catholics had made their choice in 1588, and the militant Romanists – those who would actually have taken up arms to fight for a foreign power – were probably few. In fact England in the last two decades had become rapidly more Protestant in thought and sympathy. Those with Heaven to gain combined with those with property to lose, and the union had been fused in the heat and peril of the Spanish war.

  But the value to England of the storms which wrote off so many of the already defeated Armada of 1588 was as nothing compared to the great north-easterly gale of October 1597, which in fact sank only one galleon, the San Bartolomeo, but which alone protected the West Country from suffering the horrors of a full-scale Spanish invasion.

  The returning English fleet came back by instalments at the height of the scare. They had entirely missed contact with the Spanish in the wild waters of the Channel. Mountjoy was the first to come in at Plymouth on a change of wind with four of the Queen’s galleons. They were all hardly used and the crews in a poor way, but their appearance caused an acute alarm. Soldiers rushed to the fortifications, people began to barricade their houses and prepared to fight as the Spanish had done at Cadiz. Not even the English flags fluttering at the mastheads could at first reassure them. On hearing of the emergency Mountjoy ordered the four ships to turn about and ride in the Hamoaze, to be able to put to sea again at once to meet the Adelantado if he came in. Essex, arriving the following day, sailed incautiously right up the Catwater, so was caught and could not get out again. Ralegh with part of his squadron put in at St Ives on the opposite coast; and on hearing of the emergency he landed and galloped overland to take charge of the defences of Cornwall. Lord Thomas Howard arrived at Plymouth, and other ships of the returning fleet were blown in at various south coast ports. Here and there a Spanish ship appeared, giving fight to small English coasters or themselves surrendering.

  Essex was in his usual fever of impatience to be at the enemy’s throat, and wrote an emotional letter to the Queen in which he offered to eat ropes’ ends and drink nothing but rainwater until they were at sea again and able to destroy the entire Armada that threatened them. The Queen was not assuaged. Indeed she was bitterly angry, for all that she had so often feared had happened – she had been right and her blundering war-advisers had been wrong. The English fleet had cost an enormous amount to fit out, and it had achieved nothing, nothing. What was infinitely worse, its absence had deeply imperilled the kingdom. She swore to old Burghley that she would never again let a fleet out of home waters, and she did not.

  She wrote to Essex: ‘Seeing already by your late leaving the coast upon an uncertain probability that no army would come forth from Ferrol until March, you have given the enemy leisure and courage to attempt us.’ She then charged him not to leave the coasts again on any pretext, ‘whereby our own kingdom may lie open to serious dangers; but that you do proceed in this great affair according to the rules of advised deliberation as well as affection of zeal and diligence. For treasure, for victual, and what may be fit for us to send, you shall find that you serve a prince neither void of care nor judgment what to do that is fit in cases of this consequence.’

  It was a dignified letter worthy of a great Queen, and when Essex posted up to court to explain his actions and to enumerate his needs he was greeted with an icy disapproval, which upset him deeply. After the emergency was seen to be fully past, he withdrew to nurse his injured dignity at Wanstead. It was the beginning of another break between them; each one cut deeper than the last and left a more memorable scar. Essex was growing out of the brilliant and impulsive boy, handsome, charmingly wayward, ineffably brave and gallant, the idol of the unthinking crowd; middle age was turning his impulsiveness into obstinacy, his high spirits into arrogance; his popularity with the crowd gave him delusions of greatness beyond even his attainment. The Queen was as astute as ever beneath her feminine fads, as clear-sighted as she had been when she came to the throne; but in her last years there were hints of that sombre unpredictability of mood with which her father had made his courtiers tremble for their lives half a century ago. Less than ever now was she a woman to be trifled with, and in Essex’s underestimation of her – as he underestimated everybody but himself – lay the seeds of his eventual downfall.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Fourth Armada

  In February 1598 Martin de Bertendona, the most successful of all the Spanish admirals in their war against England, sailed up the Channel with twenty-eight ships of varying size and power and a complement of four thousand troops. They were destined for Calais, and they reached there unchallenged and for most of the voyage as unannounced as the Adelantado’s great Armada of the previous October. When news of this fleet reached England there was another emergency. Essex and Ralegh went hurriedly down to the south coast. The Earl of Cumberland, who was just off on a privateering raid with a small but sturdy squadron, was ordered to reinforce the Channel Guard.

  But a landing was not attempted. The troops were intended as a reinforcement not only of the Calais garrison but of the bargaining power of Philip in his new negotiations with Henry of France – a show of the iron hand still available if Henry were not amenable to the velvet glove. And, like the escape of the German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, into Turkish waters in 1914, the success of the stroke served to upset the whole delica
te balance of power. France was half seduced, half intimidated into signing a peace treaty with her old enemy. Cecil, who had been about to sail to bolster up the weakening resolves of Henry with more promises of English and Dutch support, and was delayed by the advent of Bertendona, arrived in Paris too late to prevent the collapse of the old alliance. The Peace of Vervins was signed in late April.

  When Elizabeth heard of it she called Henry, whom she had supported for so many years, ‘ the Antichrist of Ingratitude’.

  But at Vervins in 1598 Henry gained almost as much by changing friends as in 1593 he had gained by changing religions. Both were primarily political moves to gain great objectives – they would have been betrayals of principle only in a more principled man. In 1596 Henry wrote; ‘I have hardly a horse on which I can fight. My doublets have holes at the elbows and my pot is often empty.’ A contemporary estimated that in the twenty years up to 1598 nearly a million French had died in wars and massacres; nine cities had been completely destroyed, two hundred and fifty villages burned, one hundred and fifty thousand houses reduced to rubble. It was a situation which Henry was determined to redeem or perish. By the Edict of Nantes he had already granted a large measure of tolerance and freedom to both religions in France, thereby reducing the likelihood of a return to the bloody civil wars. Now by the Treaty of Vervins the Spanish agreed to evacuate Picardy and Calais, to leave Brittany, to give up Blavet, to recognize Henry as legitimate King of France; and received in return only a recognition of their own rights in Burgundy, which, however, they promised not to assert by force of arms. For Spain it was a great strategic withdrawal, partly balanced by a diplomatic success. For France it was a major victory on all counts.