The Spanish Armadas

  Was it really like that at the time? Which is nearer the truth?

  One tries to push the mists back another half millennium and wonder what would have happened if Harold had not had to fight Hardrada at Stamford Bridge and had come fresh to meet William at Hastings. If William had been defeated, as he probably would have been, there is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers would have hailed this as a victory for faith and English bravery and God. But it is not impossible to imagine later historians pointing out that from the beginning William’s invasion plans were ill-organized and hopelessly optimistic and that from the beginning he hadn’t stood a dog’s chance.

  A bastard Duke of Normandy with a tenuous claim to the English throne tries to enlist the help of his barons in making a piratical landing on the Sussex coast. At the great council of Lillebonne they turn his proposition down flat and he has to persuade them individually with bribes and threats. After his mass of tiny ships, laboriously built through the summer, have been held back for more than a month by contrary winds and storms, and many of them wrecked, there is sickness in his camp and many desertions among those of his troops who see that the hand of God is against them. Eventually he sails with his heterogeneous collection of fellow Normans, together with drop-outs and adventurers from Maine and Brittany, from Flanders, from Burgundy, from Aquitaine, from Piedmont, and from the Rhine: the idle, the unsuccessful, the unscrupulous, the dissipated, all looking for land and loot and easy plunder.

  He sails thus, knowing that a large and active English fleet has been patrolling the Channel all through the summer waiting for just such an opportunity to attack him, and that all through the summer Harold has maintained a standing army in Sussex and Kent under his personal leadership, ready to do him battle. When he lands, if he lands, he is faced by a population comprehensively hostile, and united under a popular king.

  No wonder he came to grief, the historians would say. For the enterprise was the dream of a desperate gambler, unaware of the strength of the forces that he challenged, an adventure badly thought out and clumsily executed. Even the blessing of the Pope could not help him.…

  There were not people lacking with access to Philip who could urge him that his enterprise would be much more surely organized, with a far greater certainty of success than any of his predecessors had had. Among them the English Jesuit, Father Parsons, listed the times England had been invaded in the history of the island. The number was sixteen, of which all but two had been successful. It was a country with many good landfalls, with bays and harbours, and rivers easy of access, capable of taking large ships into the heart of the land. Most of Philip’s advisers believed also that two-thirds of the English were still Catholic at heart (and perhaps they were not far wrong: you do not change a whole nation’s religious beliefs in a few generations). The English had long had peace in their land, the castles were in decay, their swords and pikes rusty, their indiscipline a by-word.

  No doubt someone also drew his attention to the fact that almost exactly one hundred years earlier the founder of the new Tudor dynasty, an exile and a fugitive for most of his life, a man described by Commines as ‘without money, without power, without reputation and without right’, had landed with a few supporters at Milford Haven, together with a band of three thousand Normans lent him by the King of France, and had marched to Bosworth and gained a crown. No seer was able to foretell to Philip that exactly one hundred years after the Armada another man, a Dutchman, was to land at Torbay and proceed without battle to London to turn the last of the Stuarts off the throne. But there were enough precedents without this.

  For some time the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Spain’s great veteran admiral, had been pressing his King to allow him to sail with his navy to invade England. Philip asked Santa Cruz for an estimate of what he would need.

  When the estimate came it was a monumental one. The admiral said he would want five hundred and fifty-six ships of which one hundred and eighty were to be front-line galleons, with a total naval personnel of thirty thousand, and an army of sixty-five thousand men. There was also to be included two hundred flat-bottomed boats, to be carried in the larger ships, and a wealth of other provisions calculated to last eight months, which would cost in all nearly four million ducats. This equalled all the income Philip could expect to receive from his treasure house of the New World for about three and a half years. The King read it carefully and made his precise notations in the margins. It was an impossible demand. He filed the estimates away alongside Don John’s plan to invade England across the Channel from the Low Countries, and various other ideas which had been put to him from time to time. Then early in 1586 a detailed scheme was submitted to him by the Duke of Parma, elaborating and yet simplifying Don John’s plan. Parma’s proposal was that he should launch his veteran army swiftly across the Channel in flat-bottomed boats in a single night. With the element of surprise and a screen of twenty-five warships, an army of thirty thousand men with five hundred cavalry could be thrown ashore in Kent or Essex, and the first crossings could be effected in eight or ten hours.

  It was an exciting proposal, coming as it did from Europe’s greatest soldier, and it would not be ruinously expensive, since the army was already in being. Philip reasoned, however, and noted so in the margin, that an element of surprise was not possible where the mustering of thirty thousand men was concerned, and only surprise could see them across without inviting weighty counter-attack at sea. Santa Cruz’s plan, on the other hand, was entirely feasible, but there was not, and there never would be, the material or the financial resources to launch it.

  Could not the two be combined? A naval force from Spain large enough to drive off or defeat the English warships. A military force under Parma ferried across the narrow waters and covered by the Spanish fleet. It was an idea with a good deal to commend it, since it integrated the suggestions of his two most brilliant captains. As the crisis deepened and the need for some military action became more imperative, Philip can hardly be blamed for seeing this combined offensive as a likely solution. It was to be an Enterprise, an Empresa. The Enterprise England, it would be called.

  He directed Santa Cruz accordingly. And he directed Parma accordingly.

  Whatever naval force Santa Cruz would be able eventually to assemble, Parma’s army was already the most formidable in Europe. Indeed nothing like it had tramped across Europe since the Roman legions of the time of Christ.

  It was a purely professional army, comprising men who had taken up soldiering as their career and expected to live as soldiers and die as veterans. They garrisoned frontier towns or fought where they were told to fight, seeing their enemy where they were instructed to see him. Their discipline in defence was only equalled by their élan in attack. The infantry regiments, which comprised a thousand to fifteen hundred men, were known as tercios from their custom of forming up into three ranks to do battle. In Spain, to become a military man was considered a thoroughly honourable vocation. Even the hidalgos and lesser nobility were proud to serve in the infantry – a very different matter from any form of manual labour or despicable trading. It matched their sense of heroism and their sense of dignity. The fields and vineyards of Spain went untended while the men who owned them fought in Brabant or in Brittany, in Lombardy or Peru.

  But of course the Spanish army was a polyglot one, as befitted the army of a widespread empire. In April 1588 Parma’s army of sixty thousand men was roughly divided in the proportion of 34 per cent German, 31 per cent Walloon, 18 per cent Spanish, 12 per cent Italian and 5 per cent of other nationalities. It also enjoyed a local autonomy, and at times its very discipline, as when turning to thoughts of mutiny for lack of pay, made it the harder to control. The ‘ Spanish Fury’ of 1576, in which eight thousand men, women and children were savagely slaughtered in Antwerp and a thousand buildings burned – a blow from which the city never recovered – was not an act of policy like other, and lesser, massacres, it was an uncontrollable revolt, a mutinous outburst by an army shut
up too long in its fortresses, unpaid and neglected. There had been other mutinies before and since, and at the taking of any city at any time the soldiers usually got out of hand; but under Parma the authority of the commanding officers had been restored, malcontents weeded out, and some of the back pay made up. Troops, particularly professional troops, will always give of their best for a brilliant and personally fearless general; they are quick to recognize the master touch.

  If a force of thirty thousand such infantry could be landed in England, there was virtually nothing to stop them. A few miscellaneous, hastily gathered forces of militiamen, town trained bands and farmers who had been drilling once a week on coastal defence; these were the best that could be thrown up behind the dyke of forty miles of sea. The towns were undefended and ripe for the sacking. How many more Spanish Furies might there be?

  Even the new English army now operating in the Netherlands had met with indifferent success. Although when they fought they did so with their customary obstinacy and refusal to retreat – a characteristic which resulted in Parma always ascertaining from his spies the proportion of English among the troops in any fort or strong point before he attacked it – Leicester himself had quarrelled with everyone, even with ‘Black’ Norris, England’s ablest soldier, who had been in the Netherlands on and off for ten years and had forgotten far more than Leicester would ever know of war. The States General, from first greeting him as a saviour and a future sovereign, now saw him as a meddler, an incompetent and even, eventually, as a betrayer of their cause.

  This last with some reason, for when returning to England in November, he left, in spite of the protests of his allies, two of the most important outposts in the hands of Catholic-English commanders. These were Sir William Stanley, in charge of the city of Deventer, which had recently been captured from Spain; and Rowland York, commanding the fort of Zutphen, overlooking the town of that name. Hardly was his back turned than both went over to the Spanish, Stanley taking twelve hundred Irish troops with him. Later the Scotsman, Pallot, did the same in Gelderland. The French historian Mariéjol says that Stanley was a former soldier of the Duke of Alva, and that, although he had three times sworn fidelity to Elizabeth, he was secretly under engagement to the King of Spain in the Low Countries. Whatever the truth of this, he was far too sincere a man to turn his coat for gain. He did so to serve God, as he understood it.

  This, in January 1587, must have been a great encouragement to Philip to believe that there were many others of like mind and heart in England who were only waiting the opportunity to declare themselves. Let the Catholic standard once be raised …

  And now the English Lutherans shocked the civilized world by bringing Catholic Mary of Scotland at last to the block. The plot which finally resulted in her execution was led, if not engineered, by a wealthy young Derbyshire nobleman called Sir Anthony Babington, who had known and served Mary when he was a page to Lord Shrewsbury in the 1570s. It was coldly designed to accomplish the assassination of Elizabeth by six young Catholic friends of Babington, while Babington himself and a hundred others freed Mary and raised the standard of the new queen at Chartley.

  In two decades of imprisonment Mary had outlived the obloquy of Darnley’s murder and the Bothwell marriage and had become a heroine to many English and foreign Catholics, a romantic princess locked away in a tower. Certainly she was still this to Babington and his friends, though in fact she was now forty-five and her notable good looks had faded. An eyewitness at the time of her trial – possibly an unfriendly one – writes: ‘She is of stature tall, of body corpulent, round shouldered, her face fat and broad, double chinned, with hazel eyes and borrowed hair.’ When the Babington plot was uncovered she was so obviously incriminated that there was little chance for her this time. Indeed Burghley and Walsingham and others of the Council for their own sakes simply had to see Mary go to the block, for if Elizabeth died and Mary succeeded, their own heads would be the first to fall.

  Mary was moved to Fotheringhay Castle in September 1586, and in October was brought to trial before thirty-six noblemen, privy councillors and judges of both religions. At first she refused to recognize the validity of the court, but later, encouraged by a curt note from Elizabeth holding out a bare hint of clemency, she appeared before her judges and defended herself ably for two days, until the trial was adjourned. When it was resumed at the Star Chamber, Westminster, two weeks later, Mary was not present, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Yet the signature of Elizabeth to the death warrant had still to be obtained. While she struggled with her agony of indecision Mary wrote – and was allowed to send – letters appealing for help to Pope Sixtus v, to the Duc de Guise, to Mendoza in Paris, to the Archbishop of Glasgow and others. She also wrote a dignified and touching letter to Elizabeth which made Elizabeth cry and no doubt added to her hesitations. The French and the Scots sent emissaries to the English court to appeal for clemency. Yet behind Elizabeth all the time was her formidable Council presenting to her the inescapable truth – which she herself fully recognized – that only Mary’s death would now suffice.

  There is no question that at this juncture Elizabeth would have been glad of four knights such as Henry II had had at court waiting to misunderstand his words and ride off to murder Thomas à Becket. Indeed, she more than hinted as much to Mary’s jailers; but they were upright men as well as Protestants and gave her no help. So at last, four months after the trial and two after the verdict, she signed the warrant and later, in a tormented struggle to placate her own conscience and to evade responsibility in the eyes of the world, she tried to throw the final blame on one of her secretaries for having borne the document away without her permission.

  When it was known that Mary’s head had at last fallen, there was rejoicing in the streets of London and in many other parts of the country. To all English Protestants she had been the ever-present danger to their new and prosperous existence, a menace to their Queen’s life, a possible successor of Mary Tudor’s calibre and a threat to the whole future of the Reformed Church. Elizabeth had hesitated so long over the drastic decision that, now it had finally been taken, there was an overwhelming sense of relief in the country. The die was cast, the knot was cut, there was no going back even if the way forward might lead to outright war with Spain. It was what the country wanted and was psychologically prepared for. To her own great surprise, Elizabeth found her personal popularity increased.

  In Scotland there was a brief national outcry in which James as briefly joined. But he had long since let it be secretly known that the execution of his mother would not be allowed to injure his own alliance with England, made in the hope of succeeding to the English throne. The news took several weeks to reach Paris. There the court went into deep mourning and a requiem Mass was held at Notre Dame attended by all the royal family. Henry III had lost a sister-in-law, the aged Catherine a daughter-in-law, the Guises a cousin. It was a dastardly act, but France, as ever, in those days, was in too great a disarray to do more than protest.

  In Rome the shrewd, vigorous, tactless, uneducated Sixtus had just succeeded his old enemy Gregory as Pope. He greeted the news of Mary’s death with lamentation, but added in an aside about Elizabeth ‘What a valiant woman – she braves the two greatest kings by land and sea. A pity we cannot marry, she and I, for our children would have ruled the world!’ To the Spanish Ambassador he repeated his promise to give Philip one million ducats as soon as Spanish soldiers landed on English soil, but would not advance a single one by way of a forward loan.

  From Brussels Parma wrote to his King advising him not to break off peace negotiations with Elizabeth out of anger or shock but to continue them as a cloak for the preparations being made. ‘One cannot help feeling,’ he went on, ‘and I for my part firmly believe, that this cruel act must be the last of many which she of England has performed, and that Our Lord will be served if she receives the punishment which she has deserved for so many years … For the reasons I have so often put before your Majesty
we must be able to achieve our aims if we are called on to undertake any of the many parts which fall to us. Moreover, the aims of your Majesty as a most powerful and Christian king oblige you to try to end this affair as the service of God requires … Above all, I beg your Majesty that neither on this nor on other occasions will you relax in any way in regard to your preparations for the prosecution of this war and the Empresa which was conceived in Your Majesty’s heart.’

  Chapter Five

  Drake at Cadiz

  Many reports had reached England during the last year or so of the preparations going ahead in the Spanish and Portuguese sea towns, and in Naples and Genoa too. Old galleons were being repaired, new ones laid down. Foreign ships were being commandeered, ships belonging to Danes and Germans, Neapolitans and Ragusans, some impounded, some chartered. The King’s agents were out and about fixing up new contracts for cordage and sail, for biscuit and dried fish, for barrels and timber and tar. Galleys were being refurbished. New ships called galleasses, which attempted to make the best of both worlds by using wind and oar together, were being built in Naples. All Europe was being scoured for cannon and ball and shot. For first-quality Dutch guns the Spanish were paying as much as £22 a ton. A substantial quantity of arms was also bought in England and Ralegh complained bitterly of this traffic. The Privy Council did its best, but the prohibitions were constantly evaded. Ralph Hogge, of Buxted in Sussex, who was the first man in England to cast iron and became the Queen’s ‘gonstone maker and gonfounder of yron’, wrote to Walsingham in 1574: ‘There is often complaints coming before your honours about the shipping and selling of ordnance and cast iron to strangers to carry over the seas, they say in such numbers that your enemy is better furnished with them than the ships of our own country are.’ He then explained that no licence was needed for shipping guns from port to port along the English coast, and therefore it was perfectly easy for ships to load supposedly for another English port and then slip over to a foreign one.