The Spanish Armadas

  It removed from England the most obvious danger of a fourth Spanish Armada, but it deprived England for ever of the return of Calais, something dear to the hearts of most sixteenth-century Englishmen; and it marked the re-emergence of a strong and no longer necessarily friendly France. In justice to Henry it must be said that he had made some half-hearted efforts to include his old allies, but Spanish terms for the Dutch provinces were still unacceptable to the Dutch, and England would not desert the Netherlands.

  Nor now would the Netherlands desert England. In the last few years, so rapid had been the expansion, commercially and militarily, of the United Provinces that an Anglo-Dutch alliance, instead of being the greater supporting the weaker, was becoming an association of equals. Within months of the Franco-Spanish peace, the English and the Dutch signed a new treaty whereby the Dutch agreed to repay the Queen by large instalments all the money loaned them and also all the expenses incurred in their defence over the years. If the Spanish fleet were to attack England the Dutch undertook to supply forty warships for its defence, and, if the Spanish landed, five thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry, all at Holland’s own expense. Moreover, if the Queen wished to send another expedition against Spain the Netherlands promised to contribute an equal number of ships and men. It was a striking proclamation of the growth of Dutch power, which in the next century was to make Holland one of the most prosperous countries in the world and was to see the founding of the Dutch East India Company and the establishment of the great empire in the Netherlands Indies.

  On the 4th August Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s oldest and most trusted counsellor, died at the age of seventy-eight. Her Spirit, she had always called him; and at the last, trying to rally him, she fed him with her own hand. With old adversaries and old friends dying about her, the Queen must have felt more than ever her lonely eminence. It was not now just a regal eminence but one which comes to all who live beyond their generation. So many had gone from around her: her beloved Robert Leicester, embittering the triumph of the Armada year; then Walsingham and Warwick, Frobisher and Drake and Hawkins, Hatton and Shrewsbury and the elder Hunsdon. Now Burghley. All about her were younger people, eager, thrusting, loyal, but younger, belonging inevitably to another world, without her memories. Who but she could remember her father, his later wives, her brother, her sister? There was none she could talk to in the old way, except Lady Warwick and old Lady Nottingham, the Lord Admiral’s wife. Before this sort of loneliness even the disaster of war loses its importance.

  Yet the responsibilities of kingship must go on, so long as life lasted, and she was giving up none of them. In her grief she found time to write James of Scotland a stinging letter rebuking him for having had the impertinence to send envoys to Europe asserting his reversionary rights. Let him beware, or the English crown could still be snatched from his feeble grasp. Then, only ten days after Burghley’s death, news reached the English court of a great defeat in Ireland, one of the gravest ever suffered. Sir Henry Bagnal, marching with four thousand men to the relief of a besieged fort on the Blackwater, had been utterly defeated by Tyrone in a pitched battle, with the resulting death of Bagnal himself, thirteen other officers and about fifteen hundred men. With this victory resounding through Ireland a rebellion at once broke out, and, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, within seventeen days ‘there was not an Anglo-Saxon left alive in all the Desmond domains’.

  It was a situation which must be redeemed as quickly as possible by the dispatch of fresh troops; for such open rebellion as now existed was the perfect opportunity for Spanish intervention. (Just as Elizabeth had intervened in the Netherlands in 1585.)

  Philip did in fact send a hearty message of congratulation to the triumphant Tyrone; even the Pope sent a crown of peacock’s feathers; but unfortunately for the Irish earl Philip II was at last dying.

  He had spent the winter in Madrid, still, with the help of his few intimates, holding tight to the reins of his great empire. He had had the Adelantado before him to make a full report on the failure of the Third Armada and to receive instructions for the preparation of a fourth, to sail in the coming summer. But when spring came he was so ill that his doctors would not allow him to return to the Escorial. At the end of June he defied them and announced his intention of going there to die, ‘to lay my bones in my own house’.

  So he was carried on a litter in great pain, it taking six days to cover the thirty-one miles. He now had four suppurating sores on the fingers of his right hand, another on his foot and an abscess on his right knee, from which could be pressed great quantities of foul smelling matter ‘as thick as plaster of Paris’. He could not sleep or eat and his stomach was distended with dropsy. In this condition he remained for fifty-three days. After a while it became impossible to change the bed-clothes or his night-robe, and, following the purges given by his doctors, he lay for the last days in his own excrement, surrounded by swarms of flies and overrun with vermin, his eyes fixed on the high altar in the great church, thanking God for the pain and the humiliations. ‘Look at me,’ he said to his son. ‘This is what the world and all kingdoms amount to in the end.’ Dr Affaro who attended him, and the thirty-year-old Infanta, about to marry the Archduke Albert, were both taken ill from the insufferable stench in the sick-room. He died, holding a crucifix firmly in his hands, exactly at dawn on the 13th September 1598.

  So died the first of the two great monarchs who had confronted each other across a war-torn Europe for exactly forty years, and who for the last ten had themselves been in open conflict. It is almost impossible to summarize the character of Philip. To the Protestant world he was a monster of evil, cold-blooded, vengeful, cruel, spinning his intolerable webs, a symbol of the Inquisition and the Auto-da-Fé, the ‘Spanish fury’ and the iron hand of oppression. In the Catholic world outside his own country he had always been unpopular, representing the slow-moving but irresistible colossus, the enemy of small freedoms as well as large, the military dictator, the religious bigot who yet used religion for the aggrandizement of his own state.

  Nevertheless in Spain itself he was esteemed and popular and held in warm affection by his subjects. He represented so much that the Spanish people revered and prized, and under his rule they remained a united nation proud of their eminence as the masters of Europe. Yet even in his own country his reign was riddled with contradictions. When he came to the throne his father was already heavily in debt, so he put up titles for sale at five thousand ducats a head and in this way added a thousand petty new noblemen to the many who had already existed. The building of the Escorial cost three million five hundred thousand ducats over two decades; in it he assembled one of the finest libraries and one of the greatest art collections in the world. Under him poetry, literature, music and art flourished, and the golden age of Spanish painting began. Yet, although he commissioned Titian to paint a series of religious masterpieces for the Escorial, Titian complained to the end of his long life that he had not been fully paid for them. And when Titian’s favourite pupil, the Cretan Domenicos Theotocopoulos, moved to Spain and settled in Toledo, there to become known simply as The Greek, or El Greco, Philip first commissioned him to paint exclusively for the Escorial, and then, not liking the first two paintings, cold-shouldered him and gave the work to a relative nonentity.

  Philip converted Madrid, an old fortified town standing on a spur of rising ground at the foot of the Guadarrama Mountains high above the sea, into his new capital city, and largely rebuilt it. He fought an interminable war, lost his battles against the Protestants, unified the Iberian peninsula, saved the Mediterranean countries from the Turk. He gave his name to the Philippine Islands, where the Spanish conquest and rule was unusually mild and beneficient. He devotedly loved his children; yet when his eldest son began to show signs of the family insanity, he had him shut up in a room from which the young man never emerged alive.

  Personally fastidious, quiet and modest, by turns kindly and cruel, forgiving and revengeful, he would not
allow anyone to write his biography because he thought this an evidence of worldly vanity. Yet in the midst of all his war expenditure, when Spain was twice bankrupt, it never occurred to him to cut down on the vast cost of his own household, which absorbed over seven per cent of the total income of the nation and comprised more than fifteen hundred persons. Under his paternal rule for forty-three years Spain suffered no serious invasion, no rebellions – except one Moorish one – within its own frontiers, no religious schisms. Yet everyone in the country groaned under taxes or the results of taxes; men went overseas to fight or for conquest and the fields they left behind grew rank and untended. The King planted twenty thousand trees, but they were intended only for timber for his galleons. During his reign the population fell from ten million to eight million. The condition of the countryside is not exaggerated in Don Quixote. Although the monasteries and convents prospered, the inns were in ruin, so that travellers could hardly find a bed to rest in; roads, such as there had been, became rutted tracks, rivers were silted up.

  A lover of flowers and music and dancing, Philip lived much of his life in a gloomy austerity that could hardly have failed to satisfy the most convinced Calvinist. A personal renunciation of the world within his palace doors went hand in hand with a rigid, fanatical determination to continue to control every aspect of the world outside. In his later years in particular, he lived in absolute piety, and once, it is said, spent three consecutive days making his confession. He died full of self-contrition for his sins against God but without a trace of self-doubt about any sin against man. It was a source of genuine remorse to him that he had frequently not carried out God’s will with sufficient fervour. It did not occur to him ever to wonder if sometimes he might be confusing God’s will with his own.

  The war did not end with Philip. Elizabeth said of his son: ‘I am not afraid of a King of Spain who has been up to the age of twelve learning his alphabet’, but, after an initial period of paralysis, reports began to come in of a new vigour being injected into Spain’s military and naval plans by Philip III’s advisers. Indeed, the Adelantado, who had suffered a great deal of both frustration and intimidation from the old king, remarked that the world would now see what Spaniards could do when they were no longer subject to a ruler who thought he knew everything and treated everyone else as a blockhead.

  In England strenuous efforts were being made to retrieve the situation in Ireland. By the end of March 1599 Essex, chosen after much ill-tempered discussion and intrigue to lead the relief troops, was in Dublin with the largest expeditionary force ever to leave England in Elizabeth’s lifetime: seventeen thousand infantry and thirteen hundred cavalry. Part of the fleet, ten of its largest ships, were commissioned to protect the transportation of so important an army; but it was not used, for the Dutch informed Elizabeth that they were sending a separate fleet of seventy ships against Spain to attack Coruña. This was partly provoked by new measures in Spain putting an end to the commercial trade between Spain and the Netherlands which Philip II had wisely tolerated; but the fact that Holland could now mount such a naval offensive was a mark of her rapid emergence as a power in her own right. The attack on Coruña was a failure, but the English rightly reasoned that with the Dutch fleet at sea Spain would be too busy to launch another armada against England.

  So Essex transported his troops in safety and misused them so badly that by September he was back in England, to be cast into prison in the penultimate act of his life’s tragedy. And his friend Mountjoy took his place and was as startlingly successful as Essex – and many others before him – had been a failure.

  By July 1599 the Adelantado under his new master had concentrated once again a force of ships and armoury at Coruña. Thirty-eight galleons and great ships, fifty supply vessels, eight thousand troops, twenty-three galleys, again commanded by the seasoned admirals of the ’96 and ’97 Armadas; Brochero, Zubiaur, Bertendona, Villaviciosa and Oliste. News of these intensive preparations reached England at the same time as word of the complete failure of the Dutch fleet to damage the port, and in the middle of the month Captain George Fenner, perhaps the most distinguished seaman England had left, sailing in the Dreadnought, with Captain Matthew Bredgate in the Swiftsure, returned to Plymouth from a cruise in Biscayan waters with the news that the Adelantado was about to sail. His numbers were exaggerated to one hundred warships, seventy galleys and fifteen thousand troops.

  The English council ordered instant mobilization, and for a while panic ran through the country. By the first week in August much of the English fleet was ready for sea and troops were pouring into the old Armada camp at Tilbury. On the rumour that the Spanish had already landed, chains were strung across the streets in London and coast towns, men barricaded their houses, levies rushed to their stations. Ralegh and Howard, Carew and Greville worked night and day to bring the country to a state of preparedness, and thirty thousand troops were concentrated on London; the whole of the south of England was on its feet. It was said that Philip II had himself sailed with his Armada and that he had vowed that he would ‘make his finger heavier for England than his father’s whole body’.

  Rumour and counter-rumour flew, and Howard put to sea with twelve of the Queen’s largest warships, fourteen of the new smaller vessels called ‘crompsters’, and a dozen armed merchantmen. In the Downs he was joined by the Channel squadron under Sir Richard Leveson and by a Dutch squadron of twelve ships with a promise of sixteen more under Justin of Nassau. It was nevertheless a puny force to pit against the reported fleet which had set out from Spain.

  But the Armada never came; nor did it ever approach the Channel. Six Spanish galleys only appeared; but more probably it was the returning Dutch fleet – worn out with months at sea and decimated by disease – which, seen through the Channel mists, gave rise to the rumour that the Spanish had already arrived. In fact the Dutch, although they had failed at Coruña, had succeeded in diverting the Spaniards by sailing on to the Canaries and capturing Las Palmas. From there it was likely that they would attempt the Azores and the treasure-fleets, so the Adelantado, ready to sail for England, at the last moment had his orders countermanded and was directed to the Azores instead.

  It seems certain that the excessive sensitiveness of the English in 1599 was caused by the near miss of the 1597 Armada – they must never, they knew, be so caught again. It was an enormous expense to counter a false alarm, and people murmured and bitterly complained; but at least it was a full-dress rehearsal if the play were ever to be put on, and it did prove not only to themselves but to Spain and all Europe how vastly the organization of mobilizing England’s strength had improved since 1588.

  The six galleys which had appeared in the Channel were no part of the Adelantado’s fleet at all but were commanded by the young Genoese Frederico Spinola, who had fitted out the galleys at his own expense and during the next few years was to light up the last days of those outdated warships with a startling brilliance. The twenty-eight-year-old Spinola, Duke of Santa Severina, who had served his apprenticeship with his fellow Italian Parma in the Netherlands, had proposed to Philip II shortly before he died that by establishing a squadron of galleys in one of the Spanish-held ports on the North Sea it would be possible to help break the stranglehold on Spanish relief supplies to Flanders and at the same time interrupt the Dutch maritime trade on which they depended for so much of their growing wealth. Philip, now thoroughly disillusioned with the value of galleys as against sailing-ships, especially in northern seas, had given a grudging and qualified approval so long as it cost him nothing; and on this Spinola had acted.

  Now, just as Bertendona had done the year before, the Genoese began to work his way up the coast, from Santander to Conquet near Brest, from Conquet to Le Havre, from Le Havre to Dunkirk. Unfortunately, unlike Bertendona, who had the good fortune to make his passage unobserved, Spinola’s progress was spotted early on, and English and Dutch warships were sent out to destroy him. At each port where he put in officers deserted him, preferring
to face possible charges rather than the certain death he offered. However, by stratagems, using his oars to better the winds, with clever seamanship and great courage, he completely outwitted the warships sent to intercept him. He eventually arrived in Dunkirk, his ships laden with treasure to finance the Archduke Albert’s armies, and full of shipwrights and industrious Italian workers, who proceeded to dig out the harbour so that it was suitable for galleys to use, and built there, right under the noses of the enemy, new galleys and several small warships to harass their shipping. Spinola had only been in harbour a day before he slid out with two galleys and captured a Dutch ship and brought her in as a prize.

  It was an augury of things to come. For three and a half years he maintained his position against the united attempts of both enemies to dislodge him, and continued to menace and raid English and Dutch shipping – indeed to take on their warships when the odds were not too great. So impressive were his successes that both the English and the Dutch were constrained to put the clock back and lay down galleys in an attempt to beat him at his own game – an extraordinary backward step in naval development which should have made Drake turn over in his West Indian sea-grave. Four were actually built by England, two being completed in 1600 and two in 1601. Meanwhile the Dutch built three; the ‘Black Galley’ of Dordrecht, which was to spend most of its time watching for Spinola to come out – ‘a great ship to lie like a bulwark in the channel before Sluys’ – and two lighter galleys for patrol work.