The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Admiral Zubiaur looked around him, impressed. Tucked into a pleasant cove to the east of Baltimore, Castlehaven was indeed a serviceable port. ‘Ships may come to anchor in twelve fathoms,’ read one contemporary report. ‘[The haven is] of reasonable bigness, and very clear and clean.’ Zubiaur warily accepted the O’Driscolls’ offer and disembarked his sea-weary army. His commander of land forces, Captain Alonso de Ocampo – who was later to play a major role in the Battle of Kinsale – mustered the men and gave him the bad news. Ocampo was scathing about the quality of the troops, whom he dismissed as ‘naked bisonos’ or rookies.

  —We left La Coruña with a thousand men, he told Zubiaur. Now we have only 750.

  Zubiaur had lost a quarter of his force before a single shot had been fired.

  Back in Kinsale, tempers were becoming frayed. The two overstressed commanders – who had previously communicated with a formal, almost mediaeval courtesy – were now snarling at each other like fishwives. Relations between Blount and Águila had soured a few weeks earlier, while the English were setting up their heavy artillery. Just before the first bombardments, Blount had sent a message asking if Águila wanted to send the ‘ladies and women’ of Kinsale out to safety. But according to Blount, Águila interpreted the request for women in the worst possible light.

  —I’m not here to be your pimp, he shot back.

  Did Águila really say that? Or was it just English black propaganda? Perhaps his true reply was lost in translation. Whatever the truth of the matter, relations deteriorated rapidly. On 4 December Blount despatched another messenger to ask Águila if he wanted to bury his fallen soldiers. Águila responded with characteristic politeness.

  —I pray you to bury them, he replied, and I promise to do the same for any of your men who fall in my territory.

  But this was just a pretext for an English complaint.

  —We treat all your injured prisoners with respect, Blount protested, but you killed one of ours.

  —I have no knowledge of that, Águila replied indignantly. If it is true, I will punish it severely.

  Blount was far from happy with that response. After that, the messengers trekked back and forth, conveying allegations and perceived insults like weary lawyers for a divorcing couple. It was a bad case of martial break-up.

  Blount claimed that when his envoy recently called for negotiations, some of Águila’s Italian soldiers had called the English meschini or lowlifes. Águila blamed it on poor translation. Blount fired back that, in his day, honourable enemies showed each other an honourable respect.

  —I will be ever true to my own honour, he sniffed, whatever others may be to theirs.

  Águila supposedly reacted ‘with a Spanish shrug of the shoulder’. The surreal squabble – remember, this was amid a battlefield littered with corpses – reached its climax in an episode reminiscent of Don Quixote. Astonishingly, Águila offered to settle the entire siege standoff in the traditional mediaeval manner.

  —Let us settle this in single combat, he told the stunned English commander. Whoever wins this trial by combat wins not just the town of Kinsale, but the entire war.

  Was he serious? Nobody doubted it. Not for a minute.

  In Castlehaven, Zubiaur unloaded his cargo without any interruption. His war materials included 200 arquebuses with powder, wicks and bullets, 1,000 pikes … and 4,000 horse-shoes. The Spanish authorities, who had earlier sent 1,600 saddles with Águila, still didn’t seem to have grasped that it was the horses themselves that were in short supply. He also had shiploads of the food supplies – biscuit, wheat, rye, wine and oil – that Águila so desperately needed.

  Zubiaur’s original orders had been simple. He was to land at Kinsale and hand over his ships to Águila. He was not to take them away, as Brochero had done in September. Then Águila was to ‘make such arrangements as he thinks desirable’. (It’s worth noting that the Spanish warlords still had full confidence in Águila, and apparently realised they had made a mistake over Brochero’s orders.)

  What was Zubiaur to do now? Luckily, two new opportunities opened up to him.

  His arrival at Castlehaven, combined with Hugh O’Donnell’s entrance into West Cork, had proved a tipping point in the campaign. For the first time, it seemed possible that the Irish-Spanish axis could actually succeed. Many Irish chieftains in Cork looked at the way things were shaping up and decided they wanted to be part of it after all. They were probably swayed by the disinformation deliberately put out by Zubiaur that he had a relief force of 3,000. In nearby Baltimore, the steadfastly pro-Queen chieftain Fineen O’Driscoll shifted his allegiance to the Spanish, under the influence of his headstrong son Conor. Others followed. The lord of Bearhaven, Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, openly declared for King Felipe. ‘Of my own free unrestrained will,’ he wrote, ‘I place [my castle] in the keeping of General Zubiaur.’

  Zubiaur had failed to gain Kinsale, but three other key fortresses – Castlehaven, Baltimore and Bearhaven – had been handed to him on a plate. ‘The lords of [these] places submitted to His Majesty,’ the Spanish recorded. ‘Spanish garrisons were put in all of them by the consent of their owners.’

  All three ports had their advantages. Bearhaven’s appeal was its sheer remoteness. Castlehaven, although nearer to Kinsale, was assaultable only from sea. From land, it was ‘inaccessible either for horse or for great artillery’. But it was Baltimore that most appealed to Zubiaur. It had the best harbour in Ireland, he reckoned. He earmarked two castles – Dún na Séad and Dún na Long – as forts suitable for modernisation. Conor O’Driscoll, the chieftain’s son, was happy to give them over in exchange for weapons that would allow his men to fight the hated Sasanach.

  —Single combat?

  —Yes, your Lordship. He says that ‘the question between England and Spain should be tried by combat’ between you two.

  We’re not privy to Blount’s reaction when the messenger conveyed Águila’s challenge to a duel. Blount himself was no wuss – he’d defeated the Earl of Essex in single combat in his younger days – but he wasn’t stupid enough to wager England’s crown on a two-man scrap.

  As a veteran of the Brittany campaign, Blount probably remembered an occasion when the positions were exactly reversed. Águila, as Spanish commander in France, had surrounded an English general named John Norreys. The Englishman – displaying a blue scarf he had been given as a champion of some lady – stalked up and challenged Águila to settle the battle by single combat. The Spaniard briefly considered the offer and said he would pass.

  So Blount didn’t feel too embarrassed about declining.

  —Your message is more quarrelsome than honourable, he replied. Otherwise I would be most willing to accept. But thank you for the noble offer.

  Zubiaur’s landing caught the English completely on the hop. The Spanish had been safely ensconced in Castlehaven for more than twenty-four hours before the first report reached Blount. He immediately summoned Admiral Leveson.

  —Seek out the Spanish fleet at Castlehaven, Blount ordered. Capture them if you can. If not, cause them trouble.

  It was easier said than done. With a ferocious wind blowing in exactly the wrong direction, it would take Leveson several days just to clear the harbour mouth. However, the news that a relief force had landed provided a huge psychological boost to Kinsale’s defenders. Moryson wrote that the Spanish ‘took heart again, when they were otherwise ready to yield’.

  And so, on 2 December, two thousand of Águila’s troops burst out of Kinsale in a furious and determined effort to prise Blount’s fingers from their throats once and for all. The epic clash has virtually been forgotten by history – but it was much more of a ‘battle’ than the later, anti-climactic Battle of Kinsale which has eclipsed it in fame. With thousands of troops engaged and hundreds killed, the battle of 2 December was probably the largest single military engagement of Spanish troops on Irish or British soil. Although it did not achieve Águila’s objective of severing the tightening garrotte of
English siegeworks, it was at least a partial victory. It silenced the English guns for a while; it made Blount abandon any attempt to storm through a breach; and it may have helped to persuade some local Irish lords to join the insurgents.

  It all began an hour after sunset on a dark and rain-lashed night. Peering through the sinister black mist that enshrouded the town, Águila discerned human silhouettes swinging pickaxes. He realised that the English were using the fog and the late moonrise as cover to dig a circle of trenches all around his walls. ‘Seeing the great destruction that the enemy’s guns were causing,’ reported the Spanish officer Alférez Bustamante, ‘Don Juan instructed us to sally out.’

  The Spanish commander mustered two thousand men – virtually his entire force – and by eight o’clock they burst out ‘with exceeding fury’ carrying tools to tear down the wicker gabions, spikes to destroy the cannon touchholes, and stones to block the barrels. They seized the new trenches to the west before swinging around to attack the eastern gun emplacements. Their sheer rage and energy took the English by surprise, and as fierce hand-to-hand fighting erupted in the trenches, it looked as though the Spanish would force their tormentors to retreat.

  Richard Boyle, the man who would later make the marathon ride to London, witnessed it all. ‘The Spaniards made a sortie last night in great number,’ he wrote. ‘They divided themselves into three parts, intending to force our quarters, and came up very gallantly for a time, beating out men from the [western trenches] which they possessed for nearly two hours.’

  With a rare candour, one captain named Peter Bowlton reported that the English companies guarding the trenches had fled ‘very shamefully’.

  Blount’s marshal Richard Wingfield threw hundreds more men into the battle zone, and the bloody fighting continued until the muddy wasteland was littered with bodies. Wave after wave of assaults by the English failed to shift the Spanish from the trenches until Richard de Burgh and thirty of his Galwaymen arrived to save the day. They bulldozed into the main body of Águila’s army, ‘broke them, and did execution upon them towards the town’. Wheeling westward, de Burgh then charged the new trenchworks and forced the occupiers out ‘at the push of a pike’. His small band doggedly held the trench until daybreak before relief arrived.

  De Burgh’s courage that night ‘got him much honour’ according to one contemporary. And it was a turning point in the battle, if not the siege itself. ‘[The Spanish], having slain great numbers … would have slain more, were it not for the Earl of Clanrickard [de Burgh],’ wrote the Irish annalist, ‘for it was he … who compelled the Spaniards to return to Kinsale.’

  Cormac (Don Carlos) MacCarthy, the captain of the Irish company in Kinsale, was right in the thick of the fighting. By dawn’s light, his body was found lying in the mud alongside scores of others. According to Philip O’Sullivan, he ‘fell fighting bravely … having first slain two English captains and spiked a cannon’. So it was a significant quirk of history that in this epic clash of Spanish against English, the greatest heroism was displayed by two Irish officers – Richard de Burgh on the English side, and Carlos MacCarthy on the Spanish.

  Next day’s bleak dawn revealed a grisly sight. Many of the dead Spanish were found draped across the barrels of the cannon, their hands still clutching spikes and hammers. ‘There was a very lusty Spaniard … [who] drave a spike into a culverin,’ reported the surgeon William Farmer. ‘He was slain sitting astride upon the piece.’ English troops had killed another Spaniard by hammering his own spike into his back.

  Fynes Moryson recorded: ‘The trenches in some places were filled with their dead bodies.’ The English troops took morbid interest in the fact that many Spanish carried ‘spells, characters and hallowed medals’ and that many others had signs of sexually transmitted diseases. There were horrific scenes in the English trenches, too: corpses were found frozen in positions of defence, as though awaiting another attack.

  Richard Boyle claimed that the Spaniards had ‘at least two hundred men killed, and almost as many dangerously wounded’ while the English escaped with twenty-seven deaths. However, another English witness maintained Blount lost forty men, and a third estimated it at a hundred. The Spanish officer Alférez Bustamante reckoned English losses at five hundred, and Philip O’Sullivan claimed that ‘more English than Spanish were killed’. It’s also difficult to believe English claims that all their damaged guns were back in action by next morning.

  The revival in the Spaniards’ fortunes forced Blount into a radical rethink. Until now, his focus had been on storming the town. Now he had to think defensively, blockading the approach routes while ensuring that Kinsale itself was encircled in case ‘they both at one time should give upon us’. He held a council of war, which decided to ‘leave off battering’ Kinsale and to save their ammunition for use against the Spanish-Irish relief force.

  Blount shifted the big guns to Spital to defend his main camp from attack from the north. He dug deeper trenches to protect his rear. To the west, the new camp commanded by Donough O’Brien, the Earl of Thomond, was shifted forward to the old ringfort at Rathbeg, much closer to the town. Two minor forts were thrown up between that camp and the river to the southwest.

  Josiah Bodley’s ‘foxes’ excavated a complex network of new trenchworks connecting Blount’s camp, O’Brien’s camp, and the two new forts. Their zig-zag design ensured that no trench could be exposed to flanking fire. By the time Bodley had finished, Kinsale had been completely sealed off.

  In Castlehaven, Zubiaur was rapidly succumbing to the charm of West Cork. He said the land, although mountainous and treeless, was excellent for farming cattle and grain, and free of petty crime – at least until his own jailbird troops arrived. ‘I have forged a great friendship with these chieftains,’ he wrote warmly. ‘They are very fond of me.’ His enthusiasm shines through the pages of his letters home. He compares the Irish to young stags, prancing impatiently, eager to fight. ‘They are courageous and ready for action in the war of faith … this kingdom has many good people, fearless people.’ If only his own troops were as pure, he mused. ‘From Lisbon they sent us robbers and brigands – useless among these impoverished people who are so Catholic, so welcoming and who love Your Majesty.’ His sailors were no better: they took their pay and then scarpered. ‘They’re afraid of neither God nor Your Majesty,’ Zubiaur complained.

  Over dinner in their Great Hall, the Castlehaven O’Driscolls emphasised Águila’s plight. Speaking in Latin, Dermot warned Zubiaur that Kinsale was besieged by 11,000 to 12,000 troops, about half of them pro-Queen Irish. It was only a matter of time before Blount would despatch warships to attack Castlehaven.

  —My advice, said Dermot, is to ask for help from Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare.

  This was the western chieftain whose early offer of aid had been rejected by a sceptical Águila. Zubiaur had no such qualms. He sent a messenger to Donal Cam that very night. Then he ordered five of his ships’ cannon to be hauled ashore in preparation for the battle to come. His lookouts began scanning the horizon, preparing for the inevitable naval onslaught.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE BATTLE OF CASTLEHAVEN

  TRANQUIL and untroubled, the little cove of Castlehaven seems a highly unlikely backdrop for one of the greatest naval contests ever to take place between Queen Elizabeth’s fleet and a hostile Spanish armada intent on invading England.

  It is one of those impossibly serene havens that seem to have remained at peace since the beginning of time. It is difficult to imagine that on the morning of 6 December, its silence was shattered by the roar of guns, the scream of red-hot cannonballs, the splinter of ships’ timbers, and the cries of the hundreds of men who died.

  The Battle of Castlehaven was one of those ambiguous clashes that both sides claimed as a victory. Here’s one contemporary English account:

  ‘Sir Richard Leveson valiantly entered the harbour, drew near their fortifications, and fought the enemy for the space of one whole day, his ship
being an hundred times shot through, and yet but eight men slain. God so blessed him, that he prevailed in his enterprise, destroyed their whole shipping, and made [Zubiaur] fly by land to another harbour.’

  But here’s the Spanish take on the same battle:

  ‘Thanks to the support of the castle and the artillery they landed, [the Spaniards] drove the enemy away from the port.’ The Spanish added that they ‘sank the Queen’s flagship and greatly damaged the others. Two of our ships were sunk, but the men on board saved as well as their cargoes. We lost twenty men killed, and some wounded. The English then departed.’

  Meanwhile, here’s how the Irish perceived it:

  ‘In this battle, 575 English fell … One Spaniard, a kinsman of Zubiaur’s, was killed, and two were wounded.’

  And Zubiaur himself? He marked it down as ‘a victory’ for the Spanish … even as the English were toasting their great win.

  So what are the facts?

  Leveson arrived in Castlehaven at 10am on 6 December, determined to drive the Spaniards out. In his fleet were the fighting ships Warspite, Defiance, Swiftsure and Merlin. He entered the habour mouth with all guns blazing. However, Zubiaur’s Spaniards had been expecting him. ‘[Leveson] found eight pieces of artillery planted upon the shore attending his coming,’ wrote Vice-Admiral Preston. The hidden cannon blasted back at the English ships, reinforced by small-arms fire from six hundred musketeers ‘very near and thick on the shore’.

  The roar of gunfire was so loud that its thunder could easily be heard in Kinsale. In Castlehaven itself, the noise must have been deafening. One English witness, Thomas Gainsford, claimed some Spanish thought the end of the world had come. Leveson ‘battered the walls so forcibly from his ships … that the enemy thought their Lady of Heaven was willing to affect us on earth’.