The Elizabethans (45 page)

What was noticeable about the quatercentenary of the Armada in 1988 was how radically all this had changed. True, there was a splendid exhibition at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, with contemporary maps, portraits, gold medals – as well as haunting recoveries from the wrecks of Armada ships: shoes, buckles, beads, a boatswain’s pipe, spoons, beakers, talismans, pendants, a brazil nut. We could find, among this multiplicity of detail, an empathy with the men and boys on their fighting ships, but the bigger picture was something that, if we saw it at all, embarrassed us. Four hundred years rolled away and allowed us to imagine the young hands, clutching the daggers, swords, pikes and halberds on display. But for many visiting the exhibition, the thought of the conflict in which the warriors were engaged will have only accentuated a modern sense of the futility of war. Most Christian opinion of the modern age would emphasise the closeness of Catholics and Protestants, rather than their fundamental opposition. As for the secularists who dominate academic discussion in modern Britain and Europe, there could be but small interest in a quarrel between two sides of an outworn creed. If the Armada’s religious aspect made it arcane in 1988, its political importance seemed to have been swept away by history. Great Britain and Spain were not enemies, and had not been enemies for hundreds of years. They were now part of the European Union, which might one day transmogrify into a collection of federalist states. This was scarcely the moment to be banging the drum and celebrating the isolation of England from Europe, the successful defeat of a great European power by a small island race.

Perhaps the
ne plus ultra
of Armada revisionism in 1988 was achieved by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588
did not merely tell the story from the Spanish point of view. It attempted to belittle the incident altogether. Had it not been for the bad weather blowing the Armada off-course, Fernández-Armesto provocatively maintained, it would not have been seen as a ‘defeat’ at all. ‘While the two hostile fleets confronted each other, the balance of success was evenly poised between them.’ What survives, he claimed, is ‘the shared experience of the muddle and misery of war that was common to the antagonists of both sides. The Armada, seen in this light, is less ‘important’ than our ancestors supposed.
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Though one assumes that Fernández-Armesto wrote his book partly as a tease – and he remains a wonderful historian – his book now reads, more than twenty years on, as a joke that slightly misfires, as an example of the difficulty felt by modern people in confronting the Elizabethan phenomenon. Yes, there must seem to us something grotesque about a question of narrow theology being settled by a great sea battle. Equally, we can not easily empathise either with the imperialism of Spain or with the chauvinism of the Little Englanders who resisted Spain. But distaste for Habsburg autocracy or Little Englandism, and bafflement at fighting a war over the Eucharist, is in danger of blinding us to the facts. This
was
a stupendous enterprise. Those who took part in it had no doubts about that. And, however unfashionable Protestantism and nationalism might have become, the defeat of the Spanish Armada was an event of supreme historical consequence. It was also, with the possible exception of the summer of 1940, one of the most exciting summers in English history.

Philip II had every reason to believe, when the enterprise was set in hand, that a display of gigantic naval strength by Spain would finally put a stop to the religious and political menace (as he saw it) of Protestantism both in Britain and in the Netherlands. We know precisely how he regarded himself vis-à-vis his sister-in-law’s kingdom. One of the siege guns raised from the wreck of the
Trinidad Valencera
in Glenagivney Bay, County Donegal, in 1971 is a splendid cannon, cast by Rémy de Halut in 1556. It is emblazoned with his royal arms, the upper and lower quarters dexter of the coat being the arms of England. The legend –
Philippus Rex
– spoke of him as King of England, which (in his own eyes and that of his wife) he had been, and would be again. In his monkish apartments in the Escurial a frescoed mural depicted the huge Spanish fleet, commanded by Don Álvaro de Bazán, 1st Marquis of Santa Cruz, in his mighty victory of Terceira in 1582. Though greatly outnumbered, Santa Cruz beat a combined force of French, English and Portuguese ships and annexed the Azores for the Spanish Empire. It was a mid-Atlantic triumph to match Don John of Austria’s Mediterranean victory in Lepanto in 1571. Don John, Philip II’s illegitimate younger brother, overcame the Turkish fleet and checked the westward advancement of Islam for generations. (Santa Cruz commanded the reserve fleet at Lepanto – 100 ships, eighty of them galleys, and 21,000 fighting men.)

With a fighting force of this kind, Philip II had every reason to be optimistic that, to add to the triumphs of Lepanto and Terceira, he could achieve a victory in the English Channel, moor a Spanish fleet in the Thames and bring the Elizabethan Age to an ignominious conclusion.

But he did not have a fighting force of this kind. First, Philip himself, now aged sixty-one, was an
old
sixty-one. One of the more vivid exhibits in the Armada exhibition of 1988 – though actually it was a ‘repro’ from the Patrimonio Nacional, the Escurial museum – was an invalid chair in which the gout-ridden, prayer-obsessed Philip spent much of each day.
²
Santa Cruz was a year older than the King. For years he had been obsessed with schemes for invading England. He and his king spent more and more time planning. Santa Cruz wanted a navy of 556 ships, and 200 flat-lsted barges for transporting soldiers – a total, when he had added in all the vessels, of 796; he wanted around 65,000 soldiers and 30,000 sailors. He calculated for a long haul (six to eight months at sea, with all the victuals carried on transport ships): 373,337 hundredweight of biscuits, 22,800 hundredweight of bacon, 46,800 pipes of wine, and so on. While Santa Cruz took charge of the operation at sea, the land troops would be commanded by the young Duke of Parma, who had proved himself to be such a successful strategist against the combined Dutch and English forces in the Netherlands.

As Parma, Santa Cruz and the King discussed the plan through 1587 and early 1588, it changed in its details, but the fundamental aim was clear. The Armada of fighting ships would keep the English navy at bay and escort Parma’s army of 30,000 men across the Channel (probably from Dunkirk) in their barges. An advance party of ships and troops would, if possible, have secured Kent and London. A flying column of soldiers would have captured and killed the Queen and her council of ministers.

By the end of January 1588, Santa Cruz’s plans were going badly. He had by then decided that fifty galleons were needed to beat the English. He had mustered only thirteen – some of the ships came from Spain and Portugal, some from the shipyards of Dubrovnik (known as Ragusa in those days). Many of the ships he had commandeered were in poor shape, and nearly all were armed merchant ships rather than purpose-built war ships. Philip was by now harrying Santa Cruz and insisting that the Armada set out from Lisbon harbour on 15 February, even if the fleet was much smaller than intended. Santa Cruz failed to meet the deadline. In fact, he died on 9 February at Lisbon.

This was a disaster for Spain. Santa Cruz had been a seaman all his life, and he would have been a match even for Drake, Hawkins and Howard, had he been in command of the fleet when it entered the English Channel. Philip’s instinct, in the face of this calamity, was to turn to the next generation. The Duke of Medina Sidonia (Alonso Pérez de Guzmán) was one of the grandest, and richest, aristocrats in Spain. Had Philip appointed a commander from among the Spanish naval ‘top brass’ he might have excited the envy of rivals. Any Spaniard would serve under Medina Sidonia, but for the duke himself it was an unwelcome assignment. He was not a sailor, and he wrote to the King attempting to wriggle out of it: ‘But, Sir, I have not health for the sea, for I know by the small experience that I have had afloat that I will soon become seasick and have many humours.’ As for the Armada as a whole, ‘I do not understand it, know nothing about it, have no health for the sea, and no money to spend upon it.’
³

The last point was not really true. What the letter really meant was that Medina Sidonia did have money – one of the King’s reasons for appointing him – but did not wish to waste it on a scheme that his native intelligence told him would be difficult, if not impossible. Yet in obedience to his royal master, and three months later than planned, the Armada sailed from Lisbon harbour on 9 May. It was a bright, choppy day, ideal sailing weather for the ships, which in the end numbered a mere 134: four quadroons of merchantmen, twenty-three freighters or supply ships. Four galleys – oared slave-ships that had seen action at Lepanto, seventeen years before – and then a motley fleet of
fregates
and
zabras
(small frigates). They must have made not only a splendid sight, but also a beautiful noise.

The Duke of Medina Sidonia was a religious man and he was ever mindful of the essentially religious purpose of this act of war. All but the smallest vessels had a priest aboard, but Spanish regulations strictly forbade the saying of Mass on board ship, for fear that a gust of wind could blow away the consecrated Host, or upset the chalice of Christ’s blood. However, the Divine Office would be, and was, sung daily – that is, the recitation of the psalms in the seven monastic hours of the Church – Matins, the night-office, Lauds before and Prime at dawn, the day-offices of Terce, Sext and None, and the evening prayers of Vespers. By Spanish maritime tradition, these services would be sung by the ships’ boys. In addition to the monastic offices, Medina Sidonia specified that they should sing to the Blessed Virgin, the Stella Maris, Star of the Sea: ‘Every morning at daybreak the boys, according to custom, shall sing their Salve at the foot of the mainmast, and at sunset the Ave Maria. On some days, and every Saturday at least, they shall sing the Salve with the Litany’ [of our Lady].
⁴
If we had come alongside the Armada, it would have been like chancing upon a floating cathedral or college choir, the boys’ voices piercing the wind, the flapping ropes and sails, the crashing of waves on the prow, blending with the moan and wail of gulls.

A fair wind took them at a rate of about four knots to Finisterre, but then Medina Sidonia met his first major disaster. The supplies – casks of meat, fish, vegetables and water, some of them packed in February – were now rotten, and dysentery had broken out among the men. Medina Sidonia seriously questioned whether the expedition could continue. They spent a month regrouping in the large harbour at Corunna and revictualling from the rich surrounding farmland of Galicia. Although the duke still warned the King that he should ‘deeply ponder . . . what you are undertaking’, the royal command was absolute. The Armada was to go ahead. At the beginning of July a Spanish pinnace, commanded by Ensign Esquival, came into Corunna harbour having rounded up a dozen English ships off the Scilly Isles. He had taken prisoner some English sailors and two Irish priests. From them he learned that Drake (which for him was a synonym for the Royal Navy) had 180 ships in three squadrons, one in Plymouth and two to the east of Dover. This young Spanish ensign had sailed within sight of the coast of Cornwall and seen Land’s End and St Michael’s Mount. It seemed like a good omen. On 20 July Sidonia had a meeting of all the Spanish pilots. They assured him that the weather was favourable. By daybreak the wind had dropped, and by 26 July, having sailed out of harbour, they were becalmed. It was not a good look-out – after the calm came gales, which raged for two days, but by 29 July a somewhat scattered, seasick and shaken flotilla had assembled off the Scillies. In the
San Martin
, Medina Sidonia’s flagship, the duke ordered a huge banner to be unfurled. It depicted Christ crucified with his Virgin Mother, on one side, and the Magdalen on the other. The banner had been blessed by the Pope itself, who had decreed that the expedition would be deemed a success if, and only if, it effected an invasion of England. There could be no ambiguity. If God wished England to abjure her heresy, this most Catholic of navies would surely succeed in its purpose.

On that Friday, 29 July 1588, Sir Francis Drake was in Plymouth with the High Admiral of the Fleet, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham. The legend, one of the most charming in English history, is that the two men were playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe, with its clear views of the English Channel, when the news reached them. It was brought by Thomas Fleming, captain of the fifty-ton pinnace
Golden Hind
(
not
Drake’s old ship, which sailed around the world, but another). He had sighted the advance squadron commanded by Don Pedro de Valdés. Drake is supposed to have remarked, ‘We have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too.’
⁵

The story first saw print in a pamphlet of 1624 – that is, within living memory of the event. Obviously there is no way of proving the truth of the story. In Victorian times, when it was most popular, it inspired the painting of the event by Seymour Lucas, in which the greatest mariners of the Elizabethan Age were assembled rather like a public-school cricket XI, effortlessly confident of beating Johnny Spaniard. Richard Grenville, Humphrey and Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Howard of Effingham, John and Richard Hawkins, Walter Raleigh and the rest might be wearing sixteenth-century costume, but they could be Flashman and pals about to run up a century for Rugby against Winchester.

But the fact that the story appealed to public-school adventurers of a later age does not necessarily mean that it is substantially false. As Garrett Mattingley remarked in his masterly, and unsurpassed,
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
(1959): ‘The words are like Drake; they have his touch of swagger and his flair for the homely jest to relieve a moment of tension. Also it would be quite like Drake to say the first word, even though his commander-in-chief stood at his elbow. And finally, it would be like Drake, too, to appreciate a second or two before any of the others and be amused by the fact that there was indeed time.’
⁶