The Elizabethans (46 page)

It had been Drake’s idea that spring to attack the Armada when it still lay in Lisbon harbour. Excitedly, incoherently, ungrammatically, he had written to the Queen:

Your Majesty shall stand assured, if the fleet come out of Lisbon, as long as we have victual to live upon that coast, with God’s assistance, they shall be fought with . . . The advantage of time and place in all martial actions is half a victory, which being lost is irrecoverable . . . Wherefore, if your Majesty will command me away with those ships which are here already and the rest to follow with all possible expedition, I hold it, in my poor opinion, the sweet and best course.

Even had the weather made such an Elizabethan ‘Pearl Harbor’ possible, it was never logically feasible. As the Spanish had already discovered, the victualling of a vast navy – in those days before refrigeration, before aircraft-carriers, before credit banking – was a formidable challenge. The cheese-paring queen, before, during and after the Armada crisis, was extremely unwilling to supply her navy with adequate funds for ship-building, and the additional costs of wages and victuals were a constant pain to her. When Walsingham’s intelligence suggested that Santa Cruz might be prepared to sail back from Lisbon at Christmas 1587, Elizabeth had grudgingly mobilised an army, but after the Spanish admiral’s death she speedily demobilised it. She reduced the navy to a reserve fleet, well into the spring of 1588. Four galleons and a small number of pinnaces were all that were required to patrol the coast of Flanders, and she and Burghley gleefully contemplated that they were saving £2,433 18s. 4d. per month by keeping the navy confined to dock.

She did, however, allow land defences to be prepared. Burghley, by instinct rather than as a result of detailed secret intelligence, was exactly of Philip II’s mind – that the key to the whole campaign lay in the Armada’s ability to reach the mouth of the Thames. Philip imagined them reaching Margate and thereby holding the English fleet at bay or dividing it, as Parma’s barges, with their thousands of Spanish boats, sailed up the Thames into London. Burghley had precisely the fear that the Spaniards would capture London and said he was unable to sleep for worry about the Thames defences. £1,470 was spent on a boom across the river, which collapsed under its own weight. It was the brainchild of an Italian engineer, Federigo Giambelli. Though his Thames barrier did not work, his mere presence on the English side was a major propaganda coup, rightly calculated to put terror into the Spanish. For Giambelli’s most-celebrated contribution to the history of warfare were the ‘hell-burners’ of Antwerp, fire-ships that were in effect huge floating bombs, which would be used with deadly effect as the Armada crisis deepened.

But – at first – as Drake and Howard of Effingham and the others (whether or not playing bowls) looked out from the Devon coast, both sides remained in ignorance about the other’s precise intentions. Would the Spanish ships try to put into an English harbour? At Plymouth? At Weymouth? Would they plan to engage, by grappling with the English ships at close hand, or pound them with heavy guns? Would the English fleet – this was one of the Queen’s dreads – sail out to fight the Spanish and, deflected by wind or mist, sail past them, leaving the seas defenceless? The whole of southern England was on alert. Trenches were dug across fields. Forts were repaired. Beacons were constructed at strategic points all down the coast from the Lizard to Kent, and up from hillside to hillside throughout the island, to the Midlands, to Nottingham, to Durham, to York. On that night, 29 July, the fires were lit:

From Eddystone to Berwick Bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay, That time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day; For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flames spread – High on St Michael’s Mount it shone, it shone on Beachy Head. Far on the deep the Spaniards saw, along each southern shire, Cape beyond cape in endless range, those twinkling points of fire.
⁷

But although the fires alerted the English to the Armada’s arrival, and although as the fires blazed and the church bells rang, the English land army mustered at rallying points, led in each county by the Lord Lieutenant, there followed nearly a fortnight of absolute suspense. It was impossible for those on land – for the English who embraced themselves for invasion, or the Duke of Parma encamped in Dunkirk, or the Pope in Rome, or the Queen immured in St James’s Palace – to know what was happening at sea. For eleven days the fate of the Elizabethans lay in the hands of Poseidon, god of the sea, though human beings had some part in reacting to his caprice. Notable among the heroes of the drama must be named John Hawkins.

It was through the mechanisms of Burghley that Hawkins, in 1577, had become Treasurer of the navy. It was an inspired choice. Hawkins had spent his young manhood as a privateer. He had a long, and sometimes painful, experience of life at sea. He was not alone in pioneering new designs of fighting ships for the Queen’s navy,
⁸
but he was a pivotal figure. If Sir William Winter had streamlined ships, replacing demi-cannon with more accurate long-range culverin; if royal shipwrights Peter Pett, Matthew Baker and Richard Chapman
⁹
are now credited with the design of some of the new ships, it was Hawkins – the sailor, the entrepreneur, the navigator, the money-lover and the millionaire – who saw through the reform of the Elizabethan navy. He, who had left behind the cumbrous old
Jesus of Lübeck
in the Caribbean in 1569, had learned the hard way that the majestic old wooden castles, useful in close fighting, were cumbrous and slow when there was a need to pursue the enemy or escape his fire-power. By 1588 two-thirds of Elizabeth’s navy comprised streamlined galleons, with greatly improved sail plans. It was this navy that was able to confront the Armada. Technology alone did not win the war, but it was a vital ingredient in the victory. Thanks to Hawkins, the English navy had made a fundamental psychological adjustment. It saw ships as gun-carriers, whereas the cumbrous old ships accumulated by Medina Sidonia were seen as troop-carriers. Victory, if the Spanish achieved it, was to be achieved by boarding tactics, which the new English vessels – with their speed of escape, longer-range fire-power and lower height – made all the less easy.

Nevertheless, when both fleets confronted one another, in the dawn of 30 July, they saw a formidable sight. The English saw that Medina Sidonia had drawn up his ships in the crescent battle-formation that had made the Spanish navy such an unbeatable force at Lepanto and Terceira. No one on the English side knew (as was obvious to the Spanish captains) that many of their ships would be useless in battle. It must have been the sheer size of the Spanish fleet, this huge crescent stretching across the sea from the Cornish coast, that sent a tremor into the hearts of the English sailors.

The first engagement took place off the Eddystone rock, with Howard’s
Ark Royal
crossing the stern of the rearmost Spanish ship, de Leiva’s
Rata Coronada
, and Drake in the
Revenge
, Hawkins in the
Victory
and Frobisher in the
Triumph
assailing the other side of the formation. The English did not come out of the exchange very well, and they had failed to check the stately advance of the Spaniards along the Channel. The English sailors were still uncertain of Spanish intentions. The two concerns uppermost in their minds were the possibility of the Spanish landing (they were beyond Plymouth now – but in Weymouth?) and the uncertainty of engagement at sea (when would the Spanish ships attack?). Sidonia’s prime concern – as we know – was to reach Calais or Dunkirk and meet up with the forces of Parma.

By the time they had all reached Portland Bill the weather had turned squally and we must assume visibility was poor. Drake made an extraordinary blunder, detaching himself from the main fleet and challenging an innocent German merchant ship, which loomed up out of the mist. By the time he had realised his mistake and rejoined the Lord Admiral, they found themselves a cable-length away from the
Rosario
, Don Pedro de Valdés’s flagship, which had been captured during the night by Captain John Fisher. The
Rosario
had already suffered damage by colliding with another Spanish ship. Although Drake had behaved foolishly during the night, Don Pedro apparently considered it something of an honour to surrender to the celebrated vice admiral. He himself enjoyed some hero-worship – among both sides – when he was imprisoned in England.

Just south of the Needles on 2 August, following a council of war, Howard divided the English navy into four squadrons, commanded respectively by Howard himself, Drake, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher. In what was now a calm sea, Hawkins’s squadron, followed by Howard’s, attacked the Spanish ships. The battle intensified as they drew near the Solent, whose eastern entrance had been recommended by King Philip as a good place for emergency anchorage, a place possibly to await Parma’s invasion force. Drake and Hawkins tried to push the Spanish ships towards the treacherous rocks called the Owers off Selsey Bill, but Sidonia was too quick for them. By dodging the rocks, however, the Spanish admiral narrowly missed capturing Frobisher in the
Triumph
, which would have done much for the morale of his squadron.

The Royal Navy, during this first week, had not achieved any notable victory, but it regarded the non-landing of the Spanish as an English achievement. For this reason, as if a victory had already been achieved, Howard knighted Hawkins and Frobisher on the deck of the
Ark Royal
. Hawkins’s streamlining of English ships had ensured that they had always eluded the big, lumbering Spanish castles and evaded the grappling, boarding and hand-to-hand fighting, which they might well have lost. Frobisher had not been captured. Men have been given knighthoods for lesser achievements. Yet English victory – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Spanish defeat – was still very far from being accomplished. In fact, there had been some heroism on both sides, some blunders and some unavoidable setbacks.

The crucial days were yet to come: 6 and 7 August, as the Spanish ships reached Calais. The weather was worsening all the time and there was a danger that the Armada would be driven on to the Flanders shoals or, worse, tossed into the North Sea, out of reach of the Duke of Parma.

The Duke of Parma, an accomplished soldier with no experience of naval warfare, was resolved not to imperil his invasion force of thousands of men. He was also hampered by scepticism. He never really believed that the Armada would beat the British navy or arrive in time to provide his troops with a safe passage across the English Channel. Parma had been understandably impressed by the ‘flyboats’, fast, shallow-draught little ships-o’-war, which had been pioneered in the early days of the Netherlands revolt by the Dutch admiral, Justin of Nassau. Parma convinced himself that it would not be safe to cross the Channel until the Spanish had constructed a fleet of such ships in the yards of Dunkirk. At Dunkirk and Nieuport he had assembled a huge ‘fleet’ of canal boats – flat-lsted open-ended barges, which, far from risking on the open sea, he would not even venture on a coast-hugging voyage the thirty miles or so to Calais.

On Sunday morning, Don Rodrigo Tello de Guzmán came aboard the
San Martin
in Calais harbour to break catastrophic news to Sidonia. Tello had been to Dunkirk and found no waiting Spanish army, merely a flotilla of unseaworthy canal barges. Parma was skulking in his headquarters at Bruges, forty miles away.

There was nothing for Sidonia to do but wait, but time was not, as it happened, on their side. Having successfully driven the Armada into a French harbour – this was how it seemed to Howard – they were now in a position to use Federigo Giambelli’s deadly weapon of fire-ships. They had not been especially constructed. Drake gave one of his ships, the
Thomas of Plymouth
, of 200 tons. Hawkins gave a ship. They had eventually assembled eight big ships (150–200 tons each), which they loaded with explosives. At midnight on Sunday, 7 August these great infernal, blazing ships drifted destructively across the water of Calais Roads. They maintained a perfect straight line, as if manned by some unseen force; they were very close together. With phenomenal skill the Spanish used two pinnaces to swing round two of the fire-ships and drag them towards the shore in the choppy waters, but by now the six remaining fire-ships had borne down into the heart of the Armada. Their double-shotted guns were white-hot and were spraying shot at random. Exploding guns, a fountain of sparks, a roar of noise and fire broke upon the anchored Spanish ships, and there was panic. The
San Martin
raised anchor and sailed out to sea for a mile, but most of the Spanish captains lacked Sidonia’s
sangfroid
. Many cut their cables. The fire-ships had not managed to set a single Spanish ship ablaze, but they had broken the order of battle that Sidonia had maintained unflinchingly all the way up the Channel. Without their primary anchors, these ships were going to suffer dearly in the weeks ahead. Many were now rudderless.

The Spanish ships were in disarray in choppy seas on that Monday morning, 8 August, in unknown seas, when they confronted the whole naval force of England, 150 sails. At Gravelines the disheartened and bedraggled Spanish fleet took a pounding. Ammunition on both sides was now low after ten days of Channel fighting, but the English had the advantage. For the first time since the Armada had been sighted off the Lizard, there was close-range fighting. The ships were about fifty yards apart, and the superiority of the English artillery began to tell. English rates of fire were of the order of one or one-and-a-half rounds
an hour
per gun; the Spanish about the same
per day
. At least one Spanish ship was sunk, but the exact progress of the battle is impossible to reconstruct. The Spanish evidently managed, in spite of English fire and bad weather, to restore a fighting formation. They avoided being driven into the Zealand Banks, which would have exposed them to wreckage on the shoals and to being taken by the Dutch, who were waiting for them. But they chose between Scylla and Charybdis. The only way to avoid this fate was to head northwards, into the North Sea. No Spanish pilot was familiar with these waters, and not one chart of the North Sea was possessed by any ship in the Armada.
¹⁰
It had never been part of any Spanish plan to enter this turbulent and unknown area. With Howard’s ships chasing behind them, they lurched into the heaving northern waves. Where were they heading? The English sailors feared they would attempt a northern landing. Or perhaps they were going to Hamburg, or to Norway? In any event, the worst of the danger was now over. And the worst English nightmare was over: that the Duke of Parma, with all his military expertise and his thousands of troops, might be landed on English soil. Drake wrote to Walsingham, ‘God hath given us so good a day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward as I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Medina Sidonia shall not shake hands this few days; and whensoever they meet, I believe neither of them will greatly rejoice of this day’s service.’