The Spanish Armada (36 page)

As Fitzwilliam told Burghley on 26 September: ‘God has fought by shipwrecks, savages and famine for her majesty against these proud Spaniards.’
⁷²
He did not think it relevant to mention the English massacre of the survivors.

Unfortunately, the Armada had not yet suffered its last ship losses.

On 4 October, the 600-ton Neapolitan galleass
Zúñiga
was driven by gales into the French port of Le Havre and her purser, Pedro de Igueldo, told
Mendoza in Paris that she had to be re-masted, careened and her seams re-caulked with pitch to make her hull seaworthy. Rations were at meagre levels and it is unsurprising therefore that, almost
immediately, sixteen Frenchmen and twelve Italians and Spanish deserted. ‘It is the greatest trouble in the world to guard them on board and none is allowed on shore,’ said Igueldo.

The three-hundred-strong crew were marooned in France for almost a year until
Zúñiga
’s repairs were completed and paid for. She became the last Armada ship to return
home.

The 550-ton hospital ship
San Pedro el Mayor
was lost when, having successfully skirted the dangers of the Irish west coast, on 6 November she ended up stranded on Bolt Tail, a rugged
headland in South Devon. Her one hundred and sixty-eight survivors were eventually sent to France; together with the three hundred from the Biscayan
Santa Ana
which lost her mainmast on 27
July and sought refuge in the French port of Le Havre; they were back in Spain by the end of the year.

Parma finally abandoned his plans for an invasion on 31 August, standing down his fleet and dispersing his army for attacks on Dutch objectives.

On 3 September the first hints of the disaster that had befallen the ‘Enterprise of England’ reached the Escorial Palace via a dispatch from France that reported the defeat off
Gravelines and the Armada’s flight northwards to Scotland.

After some delay, Philip’s private secretary Mateo Vázquez chose to break the news obliquely to his master by passing on to the king
a letter from another
official, Pedro Nuñez, written late the previous day. Among its courtly phrases came a hard-edged sentence that warned of imminent grim news by citing ‘the case of Louis IX of France,
who was a saint and was engaged in a saintly enterprise
⁷⁴
and yet saw his army die of plague, with himself defeated and captured’. It added
pointedly: ‘We certainly cannot fail to fear greatly for the success of our Armada.’ Vázquez suggested in a separate note that further prayers should be offered up for the safety
of the mighty Spanish fleet. Philip, taken aback, scribbled in the margin: ‘I hope that God has not permitted so much evil for everything has been done for His service.’
⁷⁵

Medina Sidonia arrived in Santander on the north Spanish coast on 21 September. It was not a joyous homecoming.

He anchored off Point Enoja ‘as the tide was against us [in our] intention of entering the harbour by the morning tide’. The captain-general was very ill after twenty-five days of
fever and dysentery ‘which have grievously weakened me’ and described himself as ‘almost at my last gasp’. He was lowered into a pilot boat to come ashore, leaving the
San Martin
to be towed in by pinnaces.

But the weather that afflicted him so sorely throughout the ‘Enterprise of England’ still had the last word. A south-westerly wind was blowing so strongly that the flagship had to
run for Laredo, where she was anchored with the galleass
Napolitana.
Three hawsers were wrapped around her hull, because her sprung seams were letting in so much seawater.

‘Eight ships have entered this port and five or six others have run for the Biscay coast,’ the captain-general reported to Philip.

‘God be praised for all He has ordained,’ the captain-general added, without any trace of irony or bitterness. He then returned to his sick bed ‘unable to attend anything,
however much I might wish to do so’.
⁷⁶

Miguel de Oquendo brought five of his ships back to Guipúzcoa. Almost immediately, his flagship was ravaged by fire after a magazine blew up, killing one hundred of her crew. Oquendo,
whose wife and children lived in Santander, refused to see them. He turned his face to the wall and died, probably from typhus.

In Rome, the cardinals supporting Spain’s cause complained that the promised money had not been paid – ‘for it is not the king’s fault if no landing was effected. If
things have not gone well,’ they added with masterly understatement, ‘that is a reason for consoling, not for further harassing of his majesty.’
⁷⁷

Before he died, Recalde sent Philip his journal of the Armada campaign. ‘I have read it all,’ the king noted in his aide-memoire, ‘although I would rather not have done,
because it hurts so much.’

‘GOD BE PRAISED FOR ALL HIS WORKS’

S
hip by ship, the battered survivors of the
Grande y Felicisíma Armada
, the ‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’, limped
gratefully into ports along Spain’s northern coast that September and October. The depleted roll call of the returning vessels and their dreadful condition was an eloquent testimony to the
nightmare conditions of their voyage home. Of the 129 ships that finally departed Corunna on 21 July, a minimum of fifty (or 39 per cent) did not come back. Other estimates suggest that as many as
sixty-four vessels were lost, including a number of the smaller and more vulnerable
patache
s and
zabra
s.
²
Only thirty-four great
galleons returned, some so badly damaged that they were condemned as unseaworthy. These Armada losses represented ‘the greatest disaster to strike Spain in over six hundred
years’
³
as Friar José de Sigüenza, a monk at the Escorial Palace, acknowledged miserably shortly afterwards.

In contrast, the English lost just the eight vessels employed as fireships off Calais and lost a total of perhaps 150 killed in action.

Despite the triumphant claims by Elizabeth’s government, this was not a crushing defeat inflicted by the queen’s ships through overwhelming naval tactics or much vaunted racial
superiority. Apart from the four ships destroyed in the Battle of Gravelines, all the
Spanish casualties were lost in accidents or in the fierce storms that raged after the
Armada had sailed north to Scotland. Philip, recognising that most lethal of enemies, complained: ‘I sent my fleet against men, not against the wind and the waves.’

The Armada’s run of appalling bad luck did not end with its ignominious and inglorious homecoming. After de Oquendo’s mighty 1,200-ton
Santa Ana
blew up in Santander
harbour, another ship ran aground at Laredo simply because it had too few men left to lower the sails or drop the anchor. A third, awash with seawater from the leaking seams in her hull, sank
beneath the waves after safely mooring.

Its losses in manpower were just as horrendous as those in its order of battle. The Armada returned with fewer than 4,000 from its complement of 7,707 sailors and only 9,500 of its 18,703
soldiers, a casualty rate of just over 49 per cent. These totals do not include the fatalities amongst the wretched slaves in the Neapolitan squadron or the Portuguese galleys whose losses were
thought to be not worth counting by Spanish bureaucrats. Again, enemy action – even those cruel massacres and executions on the Irish west coast – accounted for only a small percentage.
The majority of deaths were brought about by a scandalous litany of causes: the putrid food and contaminated water; inadequate medical care of the wounded; the ravages of disease; the unaccustomed
cold of the North Atlantic; all compounded by poor navigation and pilotage. Many casualties were thus wholly avoidable. Indeed, ‘a great mortality’ from typhus, scurvy and influenza
continued to rage amongst the hapless survivors on their return home.

Soon after the first ships arrived, Garcia de Villejo informed the secretary for war, Andres de Prada, in Madrid that there were ‘over one thousand sick and if the men be all disembarked
at once, the hospital would be overcrowded . . . It is impossible to attend to so many sick and the men are bound to fall ill if they sleep in the ships full of stench and wretchedness.’

With an accountant’s stern eye, Villejo warned of a ‘great deal of rotten foodstuffs [still] in the ships and I beg you to order that it be thrown overboard. If this is not done,
someone will be sure to buy it to grind it up to mix it with the new biscuit, which will be enough to poison all the armadas afloat.’
⁴
The
sick list soon grew to
well over four thousand. Other survivors, already thin and wasted from reduced rations, finally died from starvation in port as the Spanish
commissariat, overwhelmed by demand, could not provide sufficient provisions to feed them. What the English had signally failed to achieve, Spanish incompetence accomplished instead. The collapse
of Medina Sidonia’s much-vaunted administrative arrangements, Philip’s impatience to sail as soon as possible and his flawed campaign strategy, fatally combined to destroy Spain’s
invincible Armada.

Officials in Guipúzcoa estimated that 502 men from their province had died in the Spanish fleet – 128 from the port of San Sebastián alone. Just over a hundred of them had
died in Ireland, but 221 had succumbed to disease in Lisbon before the Armada had even made its abortive first departure on 30 May. Only twenty-three Guipúzcoans were killed in
action.
⁵
This appalling death toll was mirrored in other areas of northern Spain: ‘The like lamentation was never in any country as in Biscay
and Asturia,’ reported one traveller.
⁶

The impact on thousands of families, both rich and poor, was too dreadful to bear. For some, entire male lines had been wiped out: for example, nine cousins of Martin de Aranda, the
fleet’s judge advocate general (who drowned at Streedagh Strand) did not return home.
⁷
The new papal nuncio to Spain, Annibale de Grassi, who
arrived in November, met so many people wearing mourning that (rather unfeelingly) he inquired the reason and was told they were related to those killed in the Armada.
⁸
If the stress and pain of bereavement was immense, the inconsolable agony of not knowing what had happened to a father, brother or son was even more insupportable. Three
months later, families were still desperately trailing along Spain’s northern coast, trying to establish the fate of their missing menfolk, their fading hopes regularly and cruelly raised by
sightings of each new ship that straggled back over the horizon.

In late October, Philip wrote to the Archbishop of Toledo, presenting a brave public face to the catastrophe.

But the time for supplication was over: ‘I consider that the prayers and public orations have done their work for the present and may now cease,’ he
ordered.
⁹

The shock of the Armada’s defeat was all the more devastating because hopes of its success had been raised by false rumours. One of Walsingham’s secret informants, Edward Palmer, an
English Catholic priest in Spain, related how news reached San Sebastián of Howard and Drake being captured; Plymouth and the Isle of Wight taken; and that Parma’s army was expected in
London within a few days. ‘Upon the news, the towns made great feasts all that day, running the streets on horseback [in] rich apparel and crying out that the great dog Drake was a prisoner
in chains and fetters. At night, [they] made bonfires and reviled her majesty and broke all my windows with stones.’ But after the Armada returned, ‘they all hang down their heads like
cur-dogs and are ashamed of all they did. The king keeps in the Escorial and no one dares speak to him for all the world laughs [at] him in scorn.’
¹⁰