Read The Spanish Armada Online
Authors: Robert Hutchinson
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval, #General
The Spanish Armada (39 page)
A total of £80 was finally paid out to the wounded sailors from the exchequer, and if that seems parsimonious, consider the total of £5 that was shared among the hundred seamen who
manned the fireships off Calais.
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Howard resorted to issuing printed licences authorising his maimed sailors to beg for sustenance. One signed by him and addressed to vice-admirals, justices of the peace, sheriffs, bailiffs,
constables and churchwardens, authorised William Browne ‘of London, gunner’ to beg in all churches for the space of one year. He had ‘lately served in her majesty’s service
against the Spaniards in the barque [
Hazard
] of Faversham’ who ‘in that service was shot through his body and grievously wounded in sundry places and by means of the same
maimed for ever’.
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Far from the stench of death in the ports and the misery of the sick sailors, the English also struck a number of Armada victory medals, dated 1588, with arrogant words redolent of the
achievement of a crushing triumph over their enemies. On the obverse of a one-inch (25 mm) diameter medal is the year, a family of four praying and the words:
HOMO
·
PROPONIT
·
DEVS
·
DISPONIT
– ‘Man proposes, God disposes’. On the obverse is the image of a
sailing ship breaking up, with the inscription: +
HISPANI
·
FVGIV’T
·
ET
·
PEREV’T
·
NEMINE
·
SEQVETE
– ‘The Spaniards are put to flight and perish with no man in
pursuit’.
Another, designed by the Dutchman Gerard van Bijlaer, is a pointed attack on England’s enemies. The reverse shows a cabal of Sixtus V, a collection of Catholic
bishops, Philip II of Spain, Henri III of France and the Duke of Guise seated in a room plotting against Elizabeth. They are blindfolded and the floor beneath them is studded with pointed spikes.
The inscription reads:
DVREM EST CONTRA STIMVLOS CALCITRARE
or ‘It is hard to kick against the pricks’ taken from the Biblical Acts of the Apostles 9:5,
‘And [Saul, later St Paul] said: “Who art thou Lord?” And the Lord said: “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the
pricks.”’
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The medal’s reverse shows the Armada driven on to rocks with sailors being hurled into the sea with the legend,
taken from Psalm 86, v.10: ‘
T V DEVS MAGNVS ET MAGNA FACIS TV SOLVS DEVS
’ – ‘Thou God art great and doest wondrous things; thou art God
alone’.
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The Privy Council went to St Paul’s Cathedral on 20 August to give thanks for the English victory and Dr Alexander Nowell, the dean of the cathedral, delivered a sermon of thanksgiving at
the preaching cross in the churchyard. The queen was supposed to attend but at the last moment declined to go. Six days later a celebratory review of troops was held by Leicester, watched by
Elizabeth and her general from the windows of a nearby house. The Genovese Marco Antonia Messia, who was spying for Spain, saw a parade by a company of sixty musketeers, the same number of
harquebusiers and two hundred light horse, smartly dressed in orange uniforms with facings of white silk. The dragoons bore a proud ensign with the word ‘Hazard’
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embroidered upon it and the light cavalry carried one of red damask, ‘with a veil worked with gold on top, which, no doubt, was a lady’s
favour’. There was jousting and a mock cavalry skirmish, pitting ‘one squadron against the other, lowering their swords as they approached, so as not to wound’.
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The next day, fifty-five-year-old Leicester, who had been suffering poor health, departed for the restorative spa at Buxton in Derbyshire, making the journey in easy stages, stopping first at
Rycote, near Reading. There he wrote to Elizabeth asking after her health and ‘what ease of her late pains she finds, being the chiefest thing in the world I do pray for, for her to have good
health and a long life’. The queen had given him some medicine, which he found ‘amend much
better than any other thing that has been given to me’. Leicester
ended: ‘With the continuance of my wonted prayer for our majesty’s preservation, I humbly kiss your foot’ and added the postscript: ‘I received your majesty’s token
from young Tracey’ (a messenger).
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He stopped again at a ‘gentleman’s house’ at Cornbury, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Messia reported that he ‘supped heavily and being troubled with a distress in the
stomach during the night, he forced himself to vomit’. Leicester then went down with malaria and died at ten o’clock on the morning of 4 September,
65
leaving debts of ‘£20,000 more than his goods and chattels are worth’ and still owing £3,169 to the crown for exceeding his allowance as lieutenant
general of English forces in the Netherlands.
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Elizabeth was grief-stricken at the loss of her long-time favourite (whom she nicknamed ‘Eyes’), shutting herself up in her chamber for some days to mourn alone ‘until the
treasurer and other councillors had the doors broken open and entered to see her’.
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Until the end of her life she kept his note from Rycote
in the personal treasure box by her bed, inscribing upon it the words: ‘HIS LAST LETTER’. Her anguish was only momentarily lifted by news of the Armada wrecks in Ireland, which she
received ‘with tears of joy in her eyes, as if it were the final liberation from this [Spanish] attack’.
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Another service of thanksgiving was held at St Paul’s on 8 September, when the captured Spanish battle standards were proudly displayed, including one pennant ‘wherein was an image
of Our Lady, with her son in her arms which was held in a man’s hand over the pulpit’. The following day, the banners were hung in Cheapside and at the Southwark end of London
Bridge.
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The Privy Council wrote to the bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln, passing on Elizabeth’s desire that ‘certain sermons should
be made of thanksgiving to God for the late victory it has pleased Him to give her . . . against the forces of the Spanish king’.
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A
specially written prayer thanked God for ‘turning our enemies from us and that dreadful execution which they intended towards us, into a fatherly and most merciful admonition of us . . . and
to execute justice upon our cruel enemies, turning the destruction that they intended against us upon their own heads’. It pledged perpetual memory in England for ‘thy merciful
protection and deliverance of us from the malice, force, fraud and cruelty of our enemies’.
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Elsewhere there was similar jubilation at the defeat of the Armada. The parishioners of the church of St Faith’s at Gaywood, near King’s Lynn, Norfolk,
patriotically commissioned an oil painting on a diptych panel for the wall of the south aisle showing Elizabeth arriving at Tilbury and the Spanish fleet in flames. Its inscription proclaimed:
‘Blessed by the great God of my salvation’.
Others celebrated more noisily and exuberantly: churchwardens’ accounts detail expenditure for bell-ringing or firing guns on 19 November, appointed as the national day of thanksgiving for
deliverance from the Spanish. At All Saints church, Hastings, in the former front-line county of Sussex, 2s 2d was paid out for ‘meat and drink at the ringing day for the
Spaniards’
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and at Lewes two barrels of gunpowder were expended ‘by the whole consent of the fellowship in shooting of the great
pieces in the castle at the rejoicing day for the overthrow of the Spanish navy’.
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An allegorical play about the defeat of the Armada,
The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London,
cast the villainous Spaniards as Pride, Shame, Ambition, Treachery, Tyranny and Terror, and ended with their being routed by a bunch of English
schoolboys.
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Pamphleteers had a field day, prompting Burghley to comment: ‘Friends and enemies on either side, according to their own humours, do feed the world with diversity of reports agreeable to
their own affections and passions . . . yet there is only one truth whereby the reports ought to be ruled and reformed.’
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This is a
passable definition of propaganda, which was a talent in which Tudor governments throughout the sixteenth century excelled.
The author of a pamphlet with the rather prolix title
A Skeltonical Salutation or condigne gratulation and just vexation of the Spanish Nation
devoted ten pages of doggerel verse in
blackletter type to such matters as whether the fish that ate the flesh of drowned Spaniards would become infected by their venereal diseases, inquiring whether this year
it were not best to forebear
On such fish to feed
Which our coast doth breed
Because they are fed
With carcase dead
Here and there in the rocks
That were full of the pox . . .
[As] our Cods and Conger
Have filled their hunger
With the heads and feet
Of the Spanish fleet
Which to them were as sweet
As a goose to a fox
And seeing the pox
Possessed each carcase
From the slave to the marquis
No man can avoid
But he may be annoyed.
But god-fearing fish-eating Englishmen need not fear, for all would be well if the fish were ‘well dressed’ . . .
And your stomachs not oppressed
You need them not detest
Howsoever they are fed
Or where so ever they are bred
Be no more afraid
Of sea fish to feed
If them thou love or need.
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The polemicist Thomas Deloney, whom we met at Tilbury, penned a trenchant ballad celebrating the capture of Pedro de Valdés’ ship
Nuestra Señora del
Rosario
, sung to the French tune
Almain
. Its title,
A Joyful new Ballad
, is something of a misnomer, as it makes grim reading. The loss of Moncada’s flagship
San
Lorenzo
at Calais saw many Spanish drown: ‘There might you see / the salt and foaming flood / Dyed and stained like scarlet red / with store of Spanish blood.’ Working himself up
into a patriotic fervour, Deloney’s next verses leave no stone unturned to describe Spanish perfidy:
They do intend by deadly war,
to make both poor and bare,
Our towns and cities,
to rack and sack likewise
To kill and murder man and wife
As malice doth arise
And to deflower
our virgins in our sight;
And in the cradle cruelly
the tender babe to smite
GOD’S HOLY TRUTH
they mean to cast down
And to deprive our noble Queen
Both of her life and crown.
Our wealth and riches,
which we enjoyed long;
They do appoint their prey and spoil
by cruelty and wrong
To set our houses
a fire on our heads
And cursedly to cut our throats
As we lie in our beds
Our children’s brains
to dash against the ground
And from the earth our memory
for ever to confound.
Then he raised the horrid spectre of the Armada’s consignment of those infamous Spanish scourges:
One sort of whips they had for men,
so smarting, fierce and fell
As like could never be devised
by any devil in hell:
The strings whereof with wiry knots,
like rowels
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they did frame.
That every stroke might tear the flesh,
they laid on with the same.
Women were not to be spared:
And for our silly women,
their hearts with grief to clog;
They made such whips, wherewith no man
would seem to strike a dog.
So strengthened with brazen tags
and filed so rough and thin
That they would force at every lash,
the blood abroad to spin.
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A long tract, written at Burghley’s behest, was more measured but the message was just as powerful.
The Copy of a Letter to Don Bernardin
[o]
Mendoza
was
said to have been found ‘in the chamber of one Richard Leigh,
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a seminary priest who was lately executed for high treason’, whose
identity was conveniently stolen for propaganda purposes. The pamphlet claimed that after the defeat of the army, many English Catholics were appalled by this forcible attempt to return England to
Rome’s authority:
I do find that many good and wise men, which of long time have secretly continued in most earnest devotion to the Pope’s authority, begin now to stagger in their minds
. . . and to conceive that this way of Reformation intended by the Pope’s Holiness is not allowable in the sight of God . . . to put [the temporal sword] into a monarch’s hand to
invade this realm with force and arms, yes, to destroy the queen . . . and all her people addicted to her, which are in very truth now seen, by great proof this year, to be in a sort infinite
and invincible so as some begin to say that this purpose by violence, by blood, by slaughter, by conquest, agrees not with Christ’s doctrine.