The Spanish Armada Read online

  — THE —

  SPANISH ARMADA

  ROBERT HUTCHINSON

  Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  LONDON

  To Alicia and the young ones:

  Marcel, Julian and Giselle,

  Alison and Sylvia

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  List of illustrations

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 The Enemy Within

  2 Rumours of War

  3 Ramparts of Earth and Manure

  4 The Great and Most Fortunate Navy

  5 First Sighting

  6 Action This Day

  7 Firestorm

  8 Fleeing for Home

  9 Shipwrecked upon an Alien Shore

  10 ‘God Be Praised for all His Works’

  11 The English Armada

  Epilogue

  Appendix I: Order of Battle of English Fleet

  Appendix II: Order of Battle of Spanish Fleet

  Chronology

  Dramatis Personæ

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Also by Robert Hutchinson

  Copyright

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Princess Elizabeth as a young teenager (attributed to William Scrots, c.1546) (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II 2013).

  Mary I painted by Hans Eworth in 1554 (Society of Antiquaries of London/Bridgeman).

  Mary Queen of Scots by François Clouet, c.1558-60 (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013).

  Philip II of Spain, painted by an unknown artist, after 1580 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

  Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, the reluctant commander of the Armada, sixteenth-century engraving (The Granger Collection, New York).

  Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, Hispano-Dutch school, c.1585 (Philip Mould Ltd/Bridgeman).

  Pope Sixtus V. Italian school, sixteenth century (Chateau de Versailles/Giraudon/Bridgeman).

  Elizabeth’s new ‘race built’ warships (from Fragments of Ancient Shipwrightery by Matthew Baker. © The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge).

  Howard’s flagship Ark Royal (Bridgeman).

  Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state and spymaster. John Critz the Elder, c.1585 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

  Dorset warning beacons, showing their construction (© The British Library Board, Cotton Augustus I/i).

  Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s lord treasurer (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

  Charles Howard, Second Baron Effingham (His Grace the Duke of Norfolk/Bridgeman).

  Sir Francis Drake, unknown artist, c.1580 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

  The action off Plymouth on 31 July 1588. Howard’s pinnace Disdain is shown firing her ‘defiance’ at the middle of the Armada’s lunula, or crescent formation, off Dodman Point, Cornwall (Bridgeman).

  Fighting off Portland and the Isle of Wight on 2 August 1588. Detail showing the Spanish galleasses attacking Frobisher’s squadron off Portland Bill (© The Royal Geographical Society/Bridgeman).

  Howard sends eight fireships in an attack on the anchored Armada off Calais. 7 August 1588 (© The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London).

  The Battle of Gravelines, 8 August 1588 (Worshipful Society of Apothecaries/Bridgeman).

  An English chart by Augustin Ryther, 1588, showing the course home taken by the Spanish Armada (Private collection/Bridgeman).

  Map of Northern Ireland, 1589, with the positions of four Armada wrecks marked (© His Grace, the Marquis of Salisbury, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, CPM Supp. II).

  ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I, showing behind her the attack of her fireships on the Armada and Spanish ships being wrecked by the ‘Protestant Wind’ (Reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates).

  Left-hand panel of a triptych in St Faith’s Church, Gaywood, Norfolk, showing Elizabeth’s arrival at Tilbury (St Faith’s Church/Bridgeman).

  Licence to William Browne, gunner in the barque Hazard of Faversham, Kent, allowing him to beg in all churches for one year (© The British Library, Lansdowne 144).

  The Somerset House conference, 19 August 1604 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London).

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 changed the course of European history. If the Spanish captain-general Medina Sidonia had managed to successfully escort the Duke of Parma’s invasion force across the narrow seas from Flanders, the future of Elizabeth I’s government and Protestant England would have looked very black indeed.

  It is one of history’s greatest ‘what ifs’.

  If those experienced and battle-hardened Spanish troops had landed near Margate on the Kent coast, it is likely that they would have been in the poorly defended streets of London within a week and the queen and her ministers apprehended. England would have reverted to the Catholic faith and there may have not been a British Empire to come.

  Of course, despite his very best efforts, Medina Sidonia failed utterly in his mission – and experienced one of the most signal catastrophes in naval annals.

  Much has been written about this myth-ridden campaign. This book indeed provides a blow-by-blow account of the naval skirmishes up the English Channel, culminating in the fireship attack off Calais, the Battle of Gravelines and the Armada’s subsequent terrible destruction on the west coast of Ireland.

  But what is not so well-known is the fact that Elizabeth faced opposition within her own realm to her efforts to defend her crown against the Spanish. There were many who were less than enthusiastic about the coming fight. Some were reluctant to pay for it, or voted with their feet like the gentry shifting their families and moveable wealth away from the coast, rather than standing and fighting. Her ill-trained and ill-armed militia mutinied in the frontline on the Channel coast. The Dorset troops were thought more likely to fight each other than the Spaniards. Patriotism, despite the Tudor propaganda, was not as pervasive as popular perception suggests.

  The Armada was the climax to a war of religion, the Catholic Church versus the fledgling Protestant state of England, and Elizabeth’s Ministers feared that the Catholic majority amongst her subjects would immediately rise up in support of the invaders. There were also English Catholics on board the Spanish ships who hated the English queen as a cruel oppressor of their faith and were sailing joyfully to depose her.

  Philip II of Spain, having early on been rudely shunned as a prospective husband by Elizabeth, was spurred to spend enormous sums of money in what he saw as a holy crusade against heretic England. But he also had a more prosaic motivation: despite his protestations, Philip was very conscious of his claim on the crown of England. Thus, the Anglo-Spanish war of the 1580s was a very personal conflict between two monarchs who reviled each other but were frustratingly strapped for cash. The surprising maverick in all this was Pope Sixtus V, who cared ‘more for ducats than devotion’, and often expressed an embarrassingly public admiration for the English queen.

  The Armada campaign was the first modern conflict as we would understand it. A largely unexplored aspect has been the intense intelligence war fought by both sides, employing many of the espionage techniques familiar today. Black propaganda was also used to vilify each other and sap the morale of their adversaries, in publications that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s ‘Information Minister’ almost four centuries later, would have been proud to write and distribute.

  Because of the state of Elizabeth
’s exchequer and her natural parsimony, the English ships were starved of gunpowder and ammunition and failed to land the killer blow on the ‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’.

  England’s own Protestant God was thought responsible for His divine hand in stopping the Armada. We now suspect it was probably climate change that blew apart Philip’s flawed plans for the conquest of England.

  Much of the source material for this book has been drawn from contemporary documents, where possible employing the written or reported spoken words used by those living at the time.

  Throughout, the dates are expressed in the ‘New Style’ or Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and used by most of Western Europe from 1587. England naturally refused to conform and did so for more than another century; their old Julian calendar running ten days behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the tireless and enthusiastic support of my dear wife Sally who, appropriately as the daughter of a sea captain, has helped me with the complexities of naval warfare in the sixteenth-century as well as the mysteries and dilemmas of both the English and Spanish orders of battle in the campaign.

  A great number of friends and colleagues have very kindly given invaluable support and help in tracking down manuscripts and rare books in Britain and in Europe. As always my particular thanks go to Robin Harcourt Williams for his generous help with the Cecil Papers held in the archives of the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House. I am also very grateful to Heather Rowland, head of library and collections, and Adrian James, assistant librarian, at the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House, London; Kay Walters and her team at the incomparable library at The Athenæum in Pall Mall; the ever-willing staff at the University of Sussex library at Falmer, Sussex and the always helpful teams at The National Archives at Kew and in the Rare Books, Manuscripts and Humanities reading rooms of the British Library at St Pancras.

  At Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Alan Samson has, as ever, been very encouraging and helpful, as has Lucinda McNeile, and I would like to record my grateful thanks to my editor Anne O’Brien and Douglas Matthews for compiling a complex index. I am also grateful to my agent Andrew Lownie.

  As always, any errors or omissions are entirely my own responsibility.

  Robert Hutchinson

  West Sussex 2013

  PROLOGUE

  The law of nature moves me to sorrow for my sister. The burden that is fallen upon me makes me amazed and yet . . . ordained to obey His appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have the assistance of His Grace to be the minister of His heavenly will in this office now committed to me.

  Elizabeth I, on hearing of her accession to the throne of England. Hatfield, 17 November 1558.1

  Elizabeth Tudor’s long years of torment, anxiety and fear finally ended just before noon on 17 November 1558, reputedly beneath the spreading branches of a gnarled old oak tree in the verdant grounds of Hatfield Palace, in Hertfordshire, 20 miles (32.2 km) north of London.

  Six senior members of Queen Mary I’s Privy Council, accompanied by Sir William Cordell, speaker of the House of Commons,2 had cantered breathlessly across the greensward to bring her the news she had long dreamt of receiving – but in her dark days of despair, feared would never come.

  After hastily dismounting, they knelt on the grass before the princess, who had been walking outside in the chill November air, and solemnly informed her of her half-sister’s death.

  Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old red-headed daughter of Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII, had succeeded at last as Queen of England.

  Although the fateful message from London had been expected almost hourly, its import still stunned her. She too fell to her knees and must have breathed a prayer of profound thanks both for her survival and her safe accession. At length, after ‘a good time of respiration’, exaltation flooded through her body and she spoke her first words as monarch, choosing, in Latin, verse twenty-three from the Old Testament’s Psalm 118: ‘Domino factum est istud, et est miribile in oculis nostris’ – ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes’.3

  Around seven o’clock that morning, Mary had died in St James’ Palace, London, only moments after the sacred Host had been solemnly elevated during a Mass celebrated in her bedchamber. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she died in great pain from the ovarian cysts or uterine cancer that finally killed her. Death was energetically stalking abroad that day. An epidemic of influenza (or more probably the ‘English Sweating Sickness’ a form of viral pneumonia),4 which had carried off up to a fifth of her subjects over the previous two years, still claimed its victims, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, her Archbishop of Canterbury, who succumbed to its fevers within twelve hours of his sovereign’s passing.

  Elizabeth had become the last of Henry’s disparate brood to occupy the throne of England. Many believed it was something of a miracle that she had lived long enough to wear the crown: no wonder those words of praise to God for His infinite mercy were chosen as her first public reaction to her accession. Doubtless the phrases were carefully rehearsed beforehand, with a typical Tudor eye to history’s judgement.

  Her path to the throne had been perilous and strewn with lethal pitfalls.

  Her despotic father’s obsessive infatuation with her feisty mother, driven by his restless longing for a lusty male heir, had been the root cause of a cataclysmic rupture with Rome that created a renegade church in England in the 1530s which was briefly returned to papal authority during Mary’s reign. Henry’s fixation and its aftermath spawned decades of religious discord that brutally cost the lives of hundreds of men and women who remained faithful to their creeds on both sides of the Catholic–Protestant divide.

  Three months after Elizabeth’s birth (on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich Palace) she had been moved to Hatfield with her own household. She was joined there shortly afterwards by seventeen-year-old Mary (the only child of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife Katherine of Aragon), who was now legally bastardised and formally stripped of her royal rank of princess because of the divisive annulment of the king’s marriage with her mother.

  Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk and uncle to Anne Boleyn, mischievously asked her on her arrival if she would like to ‘see and pay court to the princess’. Mary snapped back defiantly that ‘she knew of no other princess in England but herself . . . The daughter of Madame de Pembroke [Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke before she became queen] is no princess at all. This is a title that belongs to me by right and no one else.’ Mary lumped Elizabeth in with Henry’s bastard son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond (by Bessie Blount, one of Katherine’s maids of honour); they were simply her illegitimate brother and sister. Did she have any message for the king? ‘None,’ said Mary, ‘except that the Princess of Wales, his daughter, asks for his blessing.’ Norfolk dared not return to court with such a dangerous message; ‘Then go away and leave me alone,’ Mary ordered imperiously.5

  One of the last times Elizabeth saw her mother was in January 1536, but as a toddler, she probably would not have retained any memory of her visit. News of Katherine of Aragon’s lonely death, exiled in spartan Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, had been received joyously at Henry’s court. Queen Anne rewarded the messenger with ‘a handsome present’ and her father, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, commented sardonically that it was a pity that Mary ‘did not keep company with her [mother]’. The then Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys (never a friend to Elizabeth), reported that the king ‘sent for his Little Bastard and carrying her in his arms, he showed her first to one and then another’.6

  Those happy red-letter days withered on the tortured vine of Henry’s determination to safeguard the Tudor dynasty and his fury at being continually thwarted by his lack of sons. Despite three pregnancies, the queen failed wretchedly in her primary duty: to deliver a healthy prince.

  That year, Anne Boleyn was competently beheade
d by a specially hired French executioner on Tower Green on Friday 19 May for treason, adultery and alleged incest with her brother George. Four days before, Thomas Cranmer, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, had annulled Anne’s marriage with Henry, thus rendering Elizabeth, in her turn, a bastard. A new Act of Succession decreed that as she was illegitimate, she was ‘utterly foreclosed, excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir . . . to [the king] by lineal descent’.7 But nothing was ever certain during the Tudor period: a further Act of 1543 reinstated Elizabeth and Mary to the succession and stipulated that if Edward died childless, the crown would pass to Mary. If she too died without issue, it would then pass on to Elizabeth.8

  Her education was directed by religiously reformist scholars from St John’s College, Cambridge and she later admitted to Mary ‘that she had never been taught the doctrine of the ancient [Catholic] faith’.9 Elizabeth became fluent in French, Italian, Greek and Latin, but she did not begin to study Spanish until her twenties. When Henry died in January 1547, her priggish half-brother Edward, son of Henry’s third queen, Jane Seymour, wrote to her: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do . . . I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’10

  The radical Protestant policies of Edward VI’s short reign swept English and Welsh parish churches and cathedrals clean of popish imagery, opportunely recycling many of these fixtures and fittings into hard cash for the young king’s embarrassingly empty exchequer. Daringly, Mary continued to hear Catholic Masses in her household and when told to cease and desist by Edward’s outraged Privy Council, her reaction was predictably forthright: