The Spanish Armada (33 page)
Read The Spanish Armada Online
Authors: Robert Hutchinson
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval, #General
But while she was dining with Leicester, ‘there came a post [which] brought intelligence that the duke [of Parma] with all his forces was embarked for England and that he
would be here with as much speed as possibly he could’.
The news was published throughout the camp, to what end I know not, but no preparation is made for the sending of more men, which makes us think the news
untrue.
70
Leicester urged her to return to St James’ Palace for her safety but the queen was enjoying her taste of martial glory and refused to leave: she ‘would not think of
deserting her army at a time of danger’. Another memorable quotation for posterity! It was only when night
had fallen that Elizabeth was graciously pleased to quit the
Tilbury fortifications.
The next day her troops kept a public fast for victory.
Fortified by the Armada’s flight, the queen found time to reply to James VI of Scotland’s kind offer of assistance:
Now may appear, my dear brother, how malice joined with might strives to make a shameful end of a villainous beginning.
For by God’s singular favour, having this fleet well beaten in our narrow seas and press with all violence to achieve some watering place to continue their pretended invasions, the
wind has carried them to your coasts where, I doubt not, they shall receive small succour and less welcome . . .
You may assure yourself that I doubt [not] but all this tyrannical proud and brainsick attempt will be the beginning, though not the end, of the ruin of that king [Philip] . . .
He had procured my greatest glory that meant my furthest wrack and has dimmed the light of his sunshine.
71
With the cost of her forces in Essex and Kent amounting to £783 14s 8d per day, the queen ordered an immediate demobilisation.
72
As the Armada rounded the north of Scotland, an Italian friend of Lippomano’s, serving in a Spanish ship, wrote him a letter brimming with despair. ‘Our route outside Scotland is
long – pray God we come safe home. I am very hungry and thirsty for no one has more than half a pint of wine and a whole one of water each day. The water you cannot drink for it smells worse
than musk; it is more than ten days since I drank any. They say we are to go straight to Corunna.’
73
Many hundreds of Spanish sailors and soldiers would never see their homes again, their dreams of return blown away by Atlantic storms.
9
–
SHIPWRECKED UPON AN ALIEN SHORE
I numbered on one strand
[of Sligo]
of less than five miles in length, above 1,100 dead corpses of men which the sea had driven upon the shore . . . and as the
country people told me, the like was in other places, though not of like number.
Geoffrey Fenton, secretary of the Irish Council, to Lord Burghley, Dublin, 28 October 1588.
1
U
nwittingly, Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to the Armada for its voyage, via Cape Finisterre, to its home ports of Corunna or Ferrol,
became darkly prophetic. His laconic instructions, written on a quarter of a sheet of paper, were distributed on 13 August as the fleet laboured through a bewildering mix of weather –
squalls, rain, fog and heavy seas – in the northern reaches of the North Sea. His directions warned his captains ‘to take great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland, for fear
of the harm that may happen unto you upon that coast’.
2
The battle damage sustained by the Armada at Gravelines was still taking its toll on progress and two days later, despite Recalde’s voluble protests, the captain-general ordered the fleet
to put on full sail. Coldly rational, he had decided that those ships whose damage slowed them down would be left to make shift for themselves, as he had with the
Rosario
at the start of
the long fight up the English Channel. After the dank drizzle cleared to reveal the grey horizon on the morning of 19 August, Don Diego Enriquez Tellez’s Levanter
San Juan de
Sicilia
, with barely serviceable sails, was missing. That night, thirteen slower vessels also disappeared from sight, reducing Medina Sidonia’s fleet to only 110 ships. One, the 600-ton
hulk
Santiago
(the so-called ‘ship of the women’), was wrecked on the Norwegian coast and thirty-two survivors, soldiers and their wives, ended up in
Hamburg. A second ship may also have been lost on the same shore.
3
In the absence of any sea charts of Scotland and Ireland, both chief purser Calderón and his French pilot urged Medina Sidonia to ‘give a wide berth to the coast of Ireland’
but the naval adviser Diego Flores opposed this view and his fateful advice was adopted.
4
One of the consequential navigation errors proved
particularly lethal: confusion between Cape Clear on Ireland’s southern coast and numerous headlands on its western seaboard, such as Erris Head.
The captain-general wrote to Philip on 21 August in an anxious attempt to explain the failure of his mission:
The Armada was so completely crippled and scattered that my first duty to your majesty seemed to [be to] save it, even at the risk which we are running in undertaking this
voyage which is so long and in such high latitudes.
Ammunition and the best of our vessels were lacking and experience had shown how little we could depend upon the ships that remained, the queen’s fleet being so superior to ours in
this sort of fighting, in consequence of the strength of their artillery and the fast sailing of their ships.
What followed in his letter was surprising: ‘Your majesty’s ships depended entirely on harquebuses and musketry which were of little service unless we could come to close
quarters.’
With the concurrence of the officers . . . appointed as counsellors, and the generals, we have adopted the course we are now following . . . rendered necessary by the
weather, the wind having continued to blow from the south and south-west.
We have therefore run through the Norwegian Channel and between the Scottish islands [Orkney and Shetland] so as to make the voyage as short as possible.
Our provisions are so scanty that in order to make them and the water last a month the rations of every person, without exception, have been reduced.
5
Your majesty may well imagine what suffering this entails . . . we
have consequently over three thousand sick, without counting the wounded (who are numerous) in the
fleet.
God send us fair weather, so that we may soon reach port, for upon that depends the salvation of this army and navy.
Somewhat lamely, Medina Sidonia expressed his fervent hope that ‘during your majesty’s time [I may] yet see your holy plans completed successfully to the greater
glory of almighty God’.
6
He gave the letter to one of his staff, Don Balthazar de Zúñiga, before landing him at Scalloway, on the
Atlantic coast of ‘mainland’ Shetland,
7
with orders to sail to Spain and to arrange for provisions to await the Armada’s return to
Galicia.
8
Fish and fresh water were also seized from Scottish and Dutch fishing boats to augment the fleet’s ever-declining stocks and pilots
engaged ‘to carry them for the coast of Ireland and so into Spain’.
9
From 24 August to 4 September, the Spanish fleet struggled around the north of Scotland, beset by fogs, storms and squalls.
10
Given the difficult
weather conditions and the poor repair of the ships, contact was unavoidably lost with a number of vessels. Calderón’s hulk,
San Salvador
, last saw the Armada on the
twenty-fourth and found herself alone near a large island on Ireland’s west coast.
The sea [was] running strongly towards the land, to the great danger of the [ship]. The purser ordered her to tack to the north-west which took her thirty leagues (166.68
km) distant and it is believed that the rest of the Armada would have done the same. If not, they would certainly have lost some of the ships, as the coast is rough, the sea heavy and the winds
strong from seaward.
11
His forebodings were wholly warranted. At least twenty-seven Spanish ships came to be wrecked in what became the graveyard of the Armada (and Philip’s grandiose military
ambitions) off the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland.
12
The transport squadron’s flagship, the 650-ton
El Gran Grifón
; her sister hulks
Barca de Amberg
and
Castillo Negro
and Don Alonso de Luzón’s
1,100-ton Levanter
La Trinidad Valencera
were four which became separated from the Armada. They sailed south-west in company for almost two weeks before the
Barca
began to founder
on 1 September. Her surviving crew, numbering 256, were transferred to
the
Valencera
and
Grifón
before the
Barca
disappeared beneath the
waves.
The converted Venetian grain ship
Valencera
carried siege guns – weighing two and a half tonnes apiece and firing 40-pound (18.14 kg) roundshot as cargo – in addition to her
own battery of forty-two guns. She had sailed from Corunna with 335 soldiers and 75 crew, but sickness and enemy action had depleted their numbers. Though some battle damage had been patched up,
her pumps could not cope with the leaks in her hull. With his water and food stocks being consumed by the additional men from the
Barca
and with one hundred sick on board, Don Alonso de
Luzón decided to head for land to seek fresh sustenance. On 16 September,
Valencera
suddenly grounded on a reef a short distance off the shingle beach at the western end of Kinnagoe
Bay, Co. Donegal, between Malin Head and Lough Foyle.
Luzón and four officers landed and were confronted by more than twenty ‘savage people’. Alarmed, they drew their rapiers in self-defence but were surprised to be courteously
helped out of their boat. A larger crowd forcibly stripped them of their weapons, gold buttons, clothing and around 7,300 gold ducats in cash.
13
Eventually, after some haggling, the local Irish magnate Sir John O’Docherty supplied boats in exchange for 200 ducats, and the ship’s complement began to be ferried ashore. Over the
next two days more than four hundred Spaniards, Greeks and Italians were rescued, despite one boat sinking and the Irish being distracted by their enthusiastic plundering of the wreck. The Spanish
purchased horsemeat and butter to provide the first fresh meal they had eaten in weeks. The
Valencera
eventually broke in two, drowning forty-five sick and wounded before they could be
taken off.
14
More than thirty Irish looters were also lost as the wreck disappeared beneath the waves.
Luzón and his men were now stranded in a hostile country.
They decided to march the 20 miles (32.19 km) south across the boggy Inishowen peninsula to Illagh Castle, home of Connor O’Devenny, Bishop of Down and Connor,
15
en route to the west coast where Luzón hoped to find ships to take them to Spain. However, they were surprised by Major John Kelly with a force of Irish
mercenaries in English service based at Castle Burt, comprising two
hundred cavalry and three companies of ‘footmen, harquebusiers and bowmen’. After some
perfunctory skirmishing to satisfy both sides’ honour, Luzón agreed to surrender and be taken to Dublin.
The forty-seven Spanish officers, thought likely to draw sizeable ransoms, were separated from their men and surrounded by a menacing square of soldiers. The ‘other ranks’ were led
into a nearby field and, after being stripped naked, were cut down by volleys fired by the harquebusiers. Others were speared by the lances of the cavalry as they tried to flee. Juan Lázaro,
the ship’s helmsman, described how they were forced to sit on the ground and two horsemen, with long white beards,
16
signalled to the soldiers
to open fire.
17
About three hundred were killed and a further one hundred injured were left to die on the bloodstained turf.
The walking wounded managed to struggle across a peat bog to Illagh Castle. Some were robbed by Irish peasants, but other locals treated the fugitives well, providing food and accommodation
along the way.
18
Most survivors escaped to Scotland with the help of the charmingly named Irish chieftain Sorley Boy McDonnell of Dunluce, who
ignored threats from Dublin ‘not to ship any more on pain of death and confiscation of all his property’.
19
McDonnell pledged that he
would ‘rather lose his life and goods and those of his wife and children than barter Christian blood. He had dedicated his sword to the defence of the Catholic faith and despite the governor,
the queen and all England he would embark the rest of the Spaniards.’
20
The captured officers and gentlemen were taken on a forced march to Drogheda, 30 miles (48.28 km) north of Dublin, but only Luzón and Don Rodrigo Lasso survived the terrible privations of
the journey. Both were later taken to London before being repatriated in an exchange of prisoners in March 1591.
21
Further south, off Valentia Island, south Kerry, the Castilian galleon
La Trinidad
, 872 tons, disappeared on 12 September, having kept station with
San Juan Bautista
since 27
August. The large
zabra
, or two-masted pinnace,
Nuestra Señora de Castro
, 75 tons, anchored in Tralee Bay off the little town of Fenit on 15 September, her hull leaking
badly, eighteen days after last seeing the flagship
San Martin
. Three of the twenty-four crew on board swam to shore and surrendered themselves to Lady Margaret Denny, the dour wife of Sir
Edward Denny, at Tralee Castle.
