The Spanish Armada (12 page)

Then the English ships sailed off westwards, leaving behind them confusion (today we would call it ‘shock and awe’) and a welter of panic-stricken messages dispatched post haste
around Spain and Portugal warning of the danger that Drake still posed. Medina Sidonia also sent a ship to the West Indies ordering the treasure fleet to stay in Havana, Cuba, until he was known to
be safely back in England.
⁷⁴

Where would
El Draque
– the Dragon – as the Spanish called Drake – now strike? He searched in vain for a squadron of seven Biscayan ships and five pinnaces commanded
by the redoubtable Juan Martinez de Recalde, but orders retrieved from a captured dispatch boat indicated that the enemy vessels had run for shelter at Lisbon. Drake therefore cast around for other
targets of opportunity. His deputy, William Borough, wrote him an angry letter on 7 May, during a gale off Cape St Vincent, strongly advising against landing on Spanish soil.

In front of his personal chaplain and flag captain, Drake charged Borough with insubordination and seeking to dictate his duty. Captain John Marchant was ordered to take command
of the
Golden Lion
and Borough, despite offering to destroy his letter, was locked in his cabin in his own ship. He was also clapped in irons to ensure
there was no
chance of further mischief.
⁷⁶
There he stayed ‘ever in doubt of my life and expecting daily when the admiral would have executed upon me his
bloodthirsty desire’.
⁷⁷

Ignoring such faint hearts, on 14 May Drake landed eleven hundred men on a sandy beach near Lagos and they marched inland through the cornfields and vineyards for five miles until they came to
the town. It was better defended than they had been told and its three-thousand-strong garrison opened fire with cannon, wounding some of the English soldiers. Drake’s men retreated to their
ships and they sailed on to Cape Sagres in search of easier pickings. The admiral personally led eight hundred men in an attack on the Avelera fort, perched seemingly unassailable on a high rock.
Timber, pitch and bundles of firewood were piled against its wooden gates, protected by four towers, under cover of small-arms fire. But before the blaze could permit a forced entry, the fort
surrendered under flag of truce. The same day, the English captured Valliera castle at Cape St Vincent and a nearby fortified monastery. All three fortresses were set ablaze and local churches
ransacked.

The English fleet moved on to anchor audaciously off Cascaes, north of Lisbon. Santa Cruz commanded the castle of St Julian and Drake sneered at his impotence in not coming out to fight:
‘The marqués of Santa Cruz was with his galleys, seeing us chase his ships ashore . . . and was content to suffer us there quietly to tarry and never charged us with one cannon
shot.’
⁷⁸
Although Santa Cruz sent a message assuring him, as a gentleman, that the King of Spain was not ready to send the Armada ‘this
year’, letters were found on a Portuguese prisoner repeating a Spanish proclamation that promised that Philip would invade England in 1587 ‘and would not leave one alive of mankind
above the age of seven years’.
⁷⁹

Enemy shipping continued to be attacked along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts as Drake imposed a virtual blockade. His dispatch to Walsingham on 27 May was jubilant.

His triumph was tinged with foreboding about the scale of the Spanish invasion plans:

Drake was undoubtedly receiving some intelligence about shipping movements, probably from disgruntled Portuguese. One piece of information must have made his eyes glint: the
carrack
San Felipe
was shortly to arrive from the East Indies after wintering in Mozambique. The ship, laden with expensive exotic spices, was of especial concern to Philip, who suspected
that the English admiral had spies ashore.
⁸¹
Drake therefore headed out into the Atlantic on a south-westerly course, hoping to intercept the
Portuguese ship. After sending home some of his sick crewmen, the depleted fleet hit bad weather with a three-day gale almost sinking the
Elizabeth Bonaventure.
The crew of the
Golden
Lion
had suffered enough: short of water and rations, they wanted to return home rather than continue with Drake’s adventurers. Marchant, their captain, returned to the flagship in the
pinnace
Spy
and informed his admiral of his crew’s disobedience. Drake was incandescent with anger and summoned a court martial to try the mutineers
.
He sentenced Borough
and the officers of the ship to death
in absentia
as the
Golden Lion
disappeared below the horizon.
⁸²

But the prospect of loot and profit soon brought the smile back to Drake’s face. On 18 June he sighted the
San Felipe
loaded with gold, precious stones, silks and spices (pepper,
cinnamon, cloves, mace) worth £108,049 13s 11d in today’s money – a handsome return for his investors.

Elizabeth, her doubts now happily evaporated, told the French ambassador Châteauneuf that she had heard on 13 May that Drake had ‘burnt the ships at Cadiz and had sacked the
country’. The envoy
was astonished and disbelieving, but she told him bluntly: ‘Then you do not believe what is possible.’

One of Walsingham’s agents reported the fear and trepidation that Drake’s incursion engendered among the Spanish. His exploits ‘make them all to tremble’ and his sack of
Cadiz and the damage caused had cost ‘more than a million crowns’.
⁸³

The English squadron arrived back with the
San Felipe
in Plymouth on 26 June 1587 to an outburst of national hero-worship for ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’, as
government propaganda had it. Drake had destroyed well over 10,000 tons of Spanish shipping, much of the Armada’s provisions, and delayed its sailing for at least twelve months. There were
also the rich pickings from the Portuguese carrack to savour.

Walsingham, ever the man for action, urged that Drake should return to the Azores to attack the lumbering wide-bellied treasure ships bringing back bullion from the Spanish empire in the
Americas. The best way ‘to bridle their malice is the interruption of the Indian fleets’, he told Burghley on 16 July.
⁸⁴

Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth, desperately hoping for an elusive peace, rejected the idea.

But the days of peace were running out. As Leicester, embattled in the Low Countries, warned the queen that November:

RAMPARTS OF EARTH AND MANURE

E
lizabeth had no standing army of fully armed and trained soldiers to fight against the Spanish invaders, other than the small permanent garrisons
in Berwick on the Scottish border, and in Dover Castle on the English Channel coast. Her fortifications were broken down and decayed, her exchequer impecunious and her nation divided by religious
dissent. Outwardly, only her small but powerful navy and the skill and determination of her sea captains stood between her and the threatened all-conquering might of the Spanish Armada.

The more superstitious amongst her increasingly apprehensive subjects considered the two eclipses of the moon predicted for March and August 1588 as alarming portents of catastrophe.
Additionally, in the noisy alehouses and around the bustling market stalls, many talked of the fifteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Regiomontanus of Königsburg
²
who had prophesied grimly that the same year the world would ‘suffer upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great
lamentation’.
³

Overseas there were equally ominous omens of dark days to come for England. On 4 August 1587, the battle-weary survivors of the English garrison of the port of Sluis in the Low Countries
surrendered to Parma’s forces after a brutal siege of fifty-three days, having expended all their gunpowder. The Spanish butcher’s bill may have
been almost seven
hundred killed and many more wounded, but Parma now held a deep-water port in Flanders, seemingly a convenient base from which to invade England.

France was an object lesson in the likely fate of a nation riven by widespread and violent religious discord which King Henri I I I seemed powerless to resolve. Elizabeth’s neighbour had
been wracked by a series of bloody civil wars between the Protestant Huguenots and Catholics since 1562. As far as the queen was concerned, the stakes in France were high: a victory for the
Catholic League and a pro-Spanish regime in Paris could well gift the Armada a vital strategic prize: the use of its harbours up and down the English Channel.

In April 1587, three towns in Picardy (on the then Netherlands border), were seized by French Catholic troops but they failed in their primary objective of capturing the port of Boulogne. The
end of that summer’s campaigning saw Huguenot forces under Henri of Navarre crush the Catholic army at the Battle of Coutras in Aquitaine on 20 October. Little quarter was offered by the
victors and more than three thousand Catholic soldiers were slaughtered, including three hundred of noble blood. Protestant celebrations were short-lived. Six days later the Huguenots’ German
and Swiss mercenary allies (who were liberally subsidised by Elizabeth) were roundly defeated at the Battle of Vimory, in Loiret, central France. The
reiters
retreated in good order to the
walled town of Auneau, ten miles (16.1 km) east of Chartres in Eure-et-Loire, but were routed on 24 November. Catholic Paris was ready to take to the streets in support of their hero, Henri Guise,
Third Duke of Guise, and to topple the king. As Mendoza jubilantly told King Philip: ‘Events here could hardly have gone more happily for your majesty’s affairs. The people of Paris can
be relied on at any time. They are more deeply than ever in obedience of the Duke of Guise.’

Elizabeth had written to James V I of Scotland after the execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, protesting her innocence in the matter and describing the ‘extreme dolour that
overwhelms my mind for that miserable
accident
which, far contrary to my feeling’ had befallen the exiled queen. She assured him that no one would ‘watch more carefully to
preserve you and your estate’ than her.
⁴
Those soft words might have mollified the young king, but reports of widespread pro-Spanish sentiment
in Scotland so troubled the queen that
in September 1587 she hurriedly sent 6,500 speedily-recruited troops to secure her northern border.
⁵
Despite this prudent deployment, the situation worsened with John, Seventh Lord Maxwell, launching an abortive Catholic insurrection in Dumfries and Galloway in south-west
Scotland in the spring of 1588, with the aim of providing the Spanish with a northern base.
⁶

Compounding all Elizabeth’s other troubles, attempts on her life remained an ever-present threat. In March 1586, information was received of a plot by ‘certain Jesuits against the
queen’s majesty, one having come to England to do a desperate enterprise upon her . . . even as was done upon the Prince of Orange’. Concurrently, there was a conspiracy to kill the
Earl of Leicester ‘either by poison or other violent means’.
⁷
Danger could also lurk close to home. Walsingham heard in April that Peter
Wilcox, purveyor of the queen’s buttery, ‘was a great dealer with priests and papists’.
⁸
The spymaster sent one of his agents,
Stephen Paul, to Venice early the following year to pick up news in the city state. In November, he reported that Michael Giraldi, from Bergamo in Lombardy, had left for England, disguised as a
merchant:

And in May 1588, one of the prisoners interrogated in the Tower of London was ‘Andrew van Metico, a Dutchman, suspected [of] being sent over to poison the
queen’.
¹⁰