The Spanish Armada (40 page)

The truths of English naval supremacy or the omnipotence of the Protestant God were undeniable. ‘The Spaniards did never take or sink any English ship or boat or break any
mast or took any one man prisoner’, which amazed the Spanish prisoners in London who exclaimed that ‘in all these fights, Christ showed himself a Lutheran’.

Medina Sidonia attracted special vilification: he spent much of his time ‘lodged in the bottom of his ship for his safety’. The propaganda tract concluded with this scornful and
contemptuous phrase: ‘So ends this account of the misfortunes of the Spanish Armada which they used to call INVINCIBLE .’
⁸⁰

But the most lasting propaganda image of the Armada’s misfortunes is a giant picture painted with oils on a wooden panel now at
Woburn Abbey. The ‘Armada
Portrait’ of Elizabeth, measuring 52.4 by 41.3 inches (133 by 105 cm) shows her in a gown covered with suns, with a large pearl, symbolising chastity, suspended from her bodice. Her right
hand rests upon a globe with her fingers pointing to the New World; her left elbow is alongside an imperial crown on a table. In the background, English fireships threaten the Spanish fleet on the
left, and on the opposite side enemy ships are being driven ashore by God’s Own Breath. The figure of a mermaid is carved on the arm of her chair, representing the power of feminine wiles
luring unwary sailors to their death.
⁸¹

Elizabeth finally celebrated her victory over Spain at another service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s on Sunday 24 November. She was drawn from Somerset House in the Strand in a chariot with
a canopy topped by a crown with two pillars in front bearing the figures of a lion and dragon, supporters of the heraldic arms of England at that time.
⁸²

The campaign to defend her realm had cost her exchequer around£167,000 (£463,000,000 in 2013 spending power). Of this only £180 had been spent on government ‘rewards to
the injured’.

The queen was closely guarded. Not only were there continuing fears that she may be endangered by an assassin’s attack, there was also concern that the large number of discharged and
disgruntled soldiers and sailors in London might attempt some kind of angry protest.
⁸³
They had good reason for discontent. Not only were they
unpaid, but more than half of those who had fought the Armada were now dead from disease and starvation.

Many did not know it, but these surviving veterans were soon to face their old enemy once again in combat.

But this time the fighting would be on Spanish soil.

THE ENGLISH ARMADA

A
fter the Armada’s humiliating retreat, Queen Elizabeth was haunted by two worrying and pressing issues. Firstly, the Spanish fleet was far
from vanquished. Her spies suggested it could return to threaten England’s shores once again, with Parma’s undefeated veterans in Flanders still available as a formidable invading army.
Next time, assuming the Spanish high command could learn from their disastrous mistakes, the land and naval forces might link up successfully. Secondly, Elizabeth’s exchequer was uncommonly
and uncomfortably bare. Her continuing paucity of cash threatened to jeopardise not only the defence of her realm but also her continued payments to the Dutch for the war against the Spanish in the
Netherlands and to Spain’s enemies in France. Lord Treasurer Burghley had been driven to distraction to find the money to confront the Armada and was forced to borrow at exorbitant, if not
punitive, interest rates, including arranging a £30,000 loan from the City of London in July 1588. There was a real danger that the sweet savour of victory could soon be transformed into the
sour taste of defeat in all the queen had striven for at home and overseas.

The queen’s regular annual income amounted to £250,000 and Parliamentary subsidies had brought in £215,000 in 1585–8. Additional contingency funding totalling
£245,000 had been drawn from the exchequer’s £300,000 reserves – her ‘chested treasure’
– accumulated through Burghley’s
far-sighted management of her budget over the previous decade. This money had disappeared at an alarming rate. Elizabeth’s financial support to the Dutch rebels had totalled more than
£400,000 over the last three years, despite cynical attempts to economise by only part-paying her seven thousand troops based in the Low Countries. After deducting the £167,000 cost of
defence against the Spanish threat, by early October 1588 there was just £55,000 left in the exchequer. Even at peacetime rates of spending, this would barely last eight months.
²

It would take time to collect any new income voted to her by Parliament and her ministers were increasingly worried by mounting popular resistance to new taxation. Burghley had warned Walsingham
in July of ‘a general murmur of the people and malcontented people will increase . . . the comfort of the enemy’.
³
Notwithstanding these
fears, the counties were instructed to impose an enforced loan on the gentry totalling about £50,000 in December, and in February 1589 the merchant adventurer William Milward was sent to
Germany to arrange a huge credit of £100,000. He was ordered to disguise the identity of the debtor (lest the lenders be tempted to demand exorbitant interest rates) and, under no
circumstances, to agree to anything higher than 10 per cent. But his mission proved fruitless: no one would advance him a penny, not even the Fuggers, who had lent money so willingly to the
queen’s father, Henry VIII, almost five decades before.
⁴
Elizabeth was therefore forced to adopt what she called the ‘vicious
policy’ of selling off her properties – an anathema to a Tudor monarch, forever rapacious for wealth and always conscious of status.

Throughout those worrying days, Burghley may have reminded her how Henry had bankrupted England by his runaway expenditure on wars with France and Scotland in the 1540s, leaving himself with no
option but to debase the coinage, generating rampant inflation and wreaking havoc with the economy of the realm for more than a decade afterwards. That fiscal policy could not be repeated.

Given all these bleak financial realities, it is unsurprising that Elizabeth was enthused by a new strategy that could resolve both her monetary and defence quandaries at a stroke. Sir John
Hawkins and Walsingham had long been its advocates, and even the cautious Burghley was now an eager supporter. It was simple, relatively safe
and, with its successful
conclusion, the queen could enjoy the satisfaction of revenge on Philip of Spain.

By attacking Philip’s annual convoy carrying silver bullion from the New World colonies to Cadiz, Elizabeth stood to reap several million pounds’ worth of plundered ingots, which
would fall like ripe plums into her welcoming and thankful exchequer. Moreover, this sequestering of the king’s revenues would leave him unable to meet the cost of a new Armada, fund his
armies in Flanders and subsidise the Catholic League in France. Who knows? The threat, real or implied, of repeated interdiction of his treasure fleets, or the loss of even part of one shipment,
might coerce Philip to sue for peace so that Elizabeth’s cripplingly expensive war could at last be ended.

There was just one snag, as there always is with any simple plan offering alluring benefits.

The queen’s ships, after being at sea on active service for up to eight months, required refurbishment, a process that would take many weeks to complete. When the time required to sail to
the Azores to intercept the treasure fleet was factored into the operational planning, it became obvious the English vessels would arrive on station too late to seize the ponderous Spanish ships.
Quite literally, Elizabeth had missed the boat. And her financial and defence imperatives dictated that she did not have the luxury of waiting until the 1589 bullion convoy crossed the Atlantic
from Havana in Cuba.

All was not lost, though. On 19 September, Sir John Norris proposed a modified plan with three objectives. First, English ships should attack any Armada vessels under repair in the northern
Spanish ports. Second, an English army, supported by the queen’s ships, should capture Lisbon and set Dom Antonio, the Portuguese pretender, on the throne. Third, the fleet and its troops
should sail on to the Azores and capture the islands, which would allow plenty of time before the Spanish treasure fleet was due to arrive there.

Sir Francis Drake was a fervent supporter of Norris’s strategy and both men – these ‘warriors of the Lord’ – were comforted by the corporate opinion of a group of
London Puritan ministers, who after protracted and tedious disputation, decided that there was no incongruity in restoring a Catholic pretender to the Portuguese throne if it would grievously
damage God’s greater enemy, Philip II of Spain.
⁵

Elizabeth, in her fiscally embarrassed state, could not fund the
expedition and was anyway distracted by the expense of having to hastily organise the defences of Ireland
to round up the Spanish shipwreck survivors. So it was decided to follow the example of Drake’s financially successful raid on Cadiz and make it a private enterprise operation, with the queen
providing only £20,000 towards the costs. Backers in the City of London and other ‘adventurers’ would provide funding of £43,000 and pay the operating costs of six
‘second-class’ queen’s ships (
Revenge, Nonpareil, Dreadnought, Swiftsure, Foresight, Aid
) and two pinnaces (
Advice
and
Merlin
), as well as providing
armed merchantmen. Her commissioners would raise eight thousand troops and one thousand pioneers for the army. Half the soldiers would be volunteers and the rest would be armed only with swords and
daggers to save money. Elizabeth would supply two captured Spanish prizes, ten siege cannon and six field guns, together with twenty lasts of gunpowder and tools for the pioneers. The Dutch rebels
would be asked to contribute four thousand harquebusiers and to provide the weapons for the troops: a thousand halberds, three thousand muskets, four thousand calivers, two thousand breastplates,
six siege guns and forty lasts of powder. Food and other provisions, enough for four months, would also be supplied from Holland. The Dutch contribution would amount to £10,000 in kind. It
looked, initially at least, a cut-price invasion.

The queen did not demur even when Norris asked for £5,000 in advance, promising that they would not ask for the remainder until the full £43,000 of private cash was
raised.
⁶
On 11 October at Westminster, she issued a commission to Drake and Norris, granting them authority for the ‘whole charge and
direction’ of the enterprise; allowing them to choose their officers and levy troops ‘to invade and destroy the powers and forces of all such persons as have this last year, with their
hostile powers and armadas, sought and attempted the invasion of the realm of England’.
⁷
They also obtained royal permission for any person to
volunteer for the expedition.

It had taken just over three weeks for the plan to be formulated, discussed and approved – an astonishing achievement, given Elizabeth’s habitual procrastination and havering. Was
she being uncharacteristically bold – or was she desperate to find some solution to her worries?

In Paris, Mendoza was quick to pick up rumours of the expedition.
One of his spies in London, Manuel de Andrada, codenamed ‘David’, was a handily placed member
of Dom Antonio’s household. His reports led the ambassador to believe there were plans ‘of sending forty or fifty sail’ to assist the pretender, ‘but no preparations to that
effect are visible’.
⁸
Two weeks later, Mendoza was convinced that the pretender would sail for Portugal, but considered this merely a
diversionary tactic, as the real target was the Azores: ‘Fifty ships [are] being fitted out [and] are now being hurried forward furiously. A great number of bullocks have been slaughtered to
provision them. Most of them are being fitted out by private persons in the hope of gain, as they see that the many ships that go out to pillage come back laden with booty.’
⁹
In early November, he reported Elizabeth’s tart riposte when she heard that the Spanish king was repairing and reinforcing his fleet: ‘I will give
Philip plenty to do before he can repair damages or turn round [the ships].’

Parma had begun to besiege Bergen-op-Zoom on 12 September and on 20 October. Norris, who had taken across an extra 1,500 English troops to help relieve the town, laid the plans before the rebel
Dutch Council of States.
¹⁰
Two months later, they agreed to most of the English requests for the expedition. They would provide ten warships for
five months, plus 1,500 infantry, and Norris would be allowed to purchase weapons, armour, ammunition and provisions free of any tax or customs duty.

The paramount need for the expedition was underlined by intelligence that around forty Armada ships remained at Santander and another twelve at San Sebastián. There were few sailors to
man these warships and repairs were proceeding slowly because of a shortage of dockyard workers. The soldiers were in winter quarters 20 miles (32.19 km) inland.
¹¹
Walsingham warned Stafford in Paris that Elizabeth was determined ‘to use advantage of the late victory . . . by keeping the King of Spain unable to redress and set up
[again] the like forces to the disquiet of his neighbours’. Therefore Stafford should urge Henri III to ban all exports of cereals and naval stores from France.
¹²
The German
Hansa
merchants were also warned that their ships would be stopped on the high seas and if their cargoes were found to be provisions or munitions
destined for Spain, these would be seized.
¹³