The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  In order to fade into the background, we will wear the clothes of a common English soldier – a cassock, a doublet, leather shoes, and the trousers of Kentish cloth known as ‘Venetians’. This is basic gear, but we are among the lucky few who have kept it intact. According to Fynes Moryson, many of the impoverished soldiers swap their coats for extra money. ‘In a hard winter siege, as at Kinsale … they died for cold in great numbers … upon a small cold taken, or a prick of the finger.’

  First, let’s walk through Blount’s main camp. To enter it from any direction, you will have to slip and slither through a muck-filled trench. These are twice as deep as a standing man, so you must negotiate a rickety wooden ladder. When you reach the bottom, you exclaim in disgust as you splash into cold, stinking floodwater right up to your knees – at least, let’s hope it is nothing but water. The relentless rain makes it impossible to drain the dugouts, so they are ‘continually filled’.

  You flounder to the next inward-facing ladder, nodding a greeting to the sentries who stand on elevated mounts, their heads protruding over earthen banks. Each man’s face glows eerily from the dull light of his gun’s match, a coiled cord of fuse whose end will smoulder slowly until the musketeer is ready to touch it to the powder. One sentry does not reply. You touch him and discover that he is a corpse – frozen in position, still standing at his post.

  The surgeon William Farmer will later recall: ‘The winter now began to grow cold and stormy with winds and bitter frosts, and snows, so that some of the soldiers were starved to death with cold standing upon their sentinels, and many had their feet and toes mortified and rot off with standing and lying on the cold ground.’ Blount confirms this: ‘Some are found dead, standing sentinel [who] when they went hither were very well and lusty,’ he writes.

  You climb the slippery ladder to the surface, and after negotiating your way past cannon emplacements and gabion baskets, you find yourself in the main camp. Originally it was laid out with military symmetry, with thirty-six tents in four squares of nine, one in each corner, with room for overflow in the fields to the north. Now, however, it is a scene of unimaginable squalor. Ever since O’Neill arrived, everything has been moved into the central camp – even the cattle, the warhorses and the dray mares, which are sickening and dying for lack of fodder. ‘The Irish reduced the English to great straits,’ writes the Irish annalist, ‘for they did not permit hay, corn, or water, straw or fuel, to be taken into [the] camp.’

  ‘Our horses and the new men fall sick and perish rapidly,’ says George Carew, with an interesting choice of priority. So bad is the fodder shortage that the War Council is considering sending the horses away altogether. It is becoming a choice between ‘sent away or starved’.

  Ludhaigh O’Cleary vividly sums up the filth and stench of the place. ‘The fear they had of the Irish did not allow them to send their mares or horses to the pastures,’ he writes, ‘… so that many of these and numbers of the soldiers also died owing to cold and hunger … They were not able to bury outside the walls the corpses of the soldiers who died … the entrails of the horses and the corpses of the dead men lay among the living … there arose an intolerable stench in consequence of the great blasts of air … from the filth and dirt.’

  The smell turns your stomach. But at least you are fortunate enough to be still breathing.

  As you squelch miserably up the slope, you pass the exhausted off-duty soldiers who are trying to sleep in rows on the wet hillside. ‘Our force grows weak rapidly,’ writes one English official, ‘being forced to lie in the field and watch these long tempestuous nights.’

  Many are moaning and feverish. ‘A great part of our companies [are] extreme sick, through the exceeding misery of this winter’s siege,’ writes Blount. He reckons that only a third of the remaining 7,000-strong force is able for duty.

  According to George Carew, there are only 1,500 able-bodied men left out of one batch of 6,000 new recruits. Overall, he estimates each company of around a hundred men has thirty or forty men sick and unfit for duty. ‘Of these, few recover,’ he says grimly. ‘A more miserable siege has not been seen, or so great a mortality without a plague.’

  Another witness, Peter Bowlton, reverses the ratio, with forty men healthy and sixty sick in each company. The recent recruits, especially, ‘do die and drop away through cold and extreme foul weather’.

  You notice an imposing figure, exhausted by overwork, walking through the rows of men, stooping and singling out the worst cases for treatment. This is Dr Hippocrates D’Otthen, the most eminent physician in England and a field surgeon extraordinaire. He is supposed to be Blount’s personal doctor, but he has been freed to supervise the military hospital. Born into a distinguished family from Lower Saxony, D’Otthen comes from an impeccable medical background – he is the son of the Holy Roman Emperor’s personal physician. After a long service in war zones, he had hoped to retire to peaceful private practice when Blount ‘commanded’ him to come to Ireland.

  The Kinsale field surgeon William Farmer is warm in his praise of the physician – ‘an excellent man’. As he puts it: ‘A soldier was no sooner fallen sick or hurt in the camp, but [D’Otthen] did very carefully look into all sick persons, sending some of them to the hospital at Cork, and keeping some of them in the camp … that there was not any one hurt or sick man that was left unprovided of relief.’ A whip-round among the officers paid for the medication and treatment.

  You see some of the infirm queuing for a soup kitchen. Blount’s concern for his men is quite advanced for his time. According to William Farmer, he ‘ordained a common kitchen where hot meats and broths were dressed from day to day and given to the hurt and weak soldiers’. In his opinion this has saved a large number ‘which otherwise would have perished’.

  However, Fynes Moryson has a different story. ‘They died by dozens on a heap,’ he recalls, ‘for want of a little cherishing with hot meat and warm lodging.’

  You walk on. In a corner you see the latest batch of rookies doing firearms training. Their incompetence is embarrassing. ‘Not ten [of them] can shoot a gun,’ complains George Carew, who is worried because they are using up his precious gunpowder.

  Higher up the hillside you spot a ‘house of turf’ guarded by sentries. Dense clouds of tobacco smoke issuing from the doorway testify to the fact that Charles Blount, eighth Lord of Mountjoy, is at home.

  As always, Blount is happiest when surrounded by his close friends, many of them members of the former ‘Essex Circle’. There is Essex’s protégé, Richard de Burgh, the Earl of Clanrickard. There is the twenty-eight-year-old Sir Henry Danvers – he is the brother of Charles Danvers, a close friend of Blount, who was executed for his part in the coup and whose testimony implicated Blount so damningly. Like Carew, Henry Danvers is a murderer in a civilian sense – he was outlawed for several years for shooting dead a neighbour in a family feud. There is Sir William Godolphin, a Cornishman and another Essex protégé, who has already played a major role in the Kinsale skirmishes. And, of course, there is George Carew, who styles himself as Blount’s friend while quietly and consistently undermining him to Secretary Cecil.

  You sidle close to the house and eavesdrop on their conversation. If their talk echoes their written reports, it might go something like this.

  ‘The weather has been such that we have had difficulty keeping our men alive,’ Blount complains.

  ‘It seems to me remarkable that any of them are living,’ responds Carew, complaining that it is the veterans who most ‘decay by sword and sickness’. He adds with feeling: ‘There has never been a more miserable siege than this, in which many die, many more are too sick to serve, and others run away from faintness of heart.’

  Carew has touched on a sensitive problem, for deserters have been fleeing the English camp for weeks now. Pathetic runaways are daily sneaking off to ports like Waterford, desperately hoping for a safe passage home. As they whisper their negotiations with sailors in the taverns, the Government’s spies
are listening. Usually, the only journey they will make is a short one to the end of a rope.

  Both Carew and Blount are agreed that deserters need to be ‘severely punished’. However Blount is understanding, if not sympathetic: ‘The misery they endure is such as justly deserveth some compassion.’

  The Irish writer Philip O’Sullivan claims – contentiously – that Blount’s pro-Queen Irish forces have already promised Hugh O’Donnell they will switch sides to join him. ‘They had commenced to fulfil their promise, deserting the English in twos, threes and tens. Now, if the desertion of all had been waited for, it would have been all up with the English.’ Equally contentiously, O’Sullivan maintains that Blount is about to abandon his siege and retreat to Cork city. Ludhaigh O’Cleary, too, sees the English as being ‘in intolerable straits and difficulties’.

  Whatever about the finer detail, the general outlook seems bleak for Blount’s army. ‘So here was the case,’ the English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote soon afterwards, ‘an army of English, of some 6,000, wasted and tired with a long winter’s siege, engaged in the middle between an army of greater numbers than themselves, fresh and in vigour, on the one side; and a town strong in fortification, and strong in men, on the other.’

  You have seen enough of this circle of hell. Let us switch sides, discreetly change uniforms, and cross no-man’s-land to see what life is like within the blasted battleground that was once the prosperous port of Kinsale.

  To our modern eyes, the centre of Kinsale resembles a World War II blitz zone, its streets and buildings almost levelled by heavy munitions. To Elizabethan eyes, its destruction is almost unprecedented. George Carew describes ‘houses so torn with our artillery, as I think the like hath been seldom seen’. But luckily for the Spanish, this is a wine-importing town. Carew confesses that it is ‘hard to make any great slaughter of men by reason of the vaulted cellars in which they lodge securely’.

  The Spaniards risk their lives every time they scurry across a road. The town walls no longer offer any protection – they are so flattened that even the feet of any man in the street are clearly visible to the English gunners. As Águila will later testify: ‘The enemy have battered [my] defences so they could walk straight in, but they dare not.’ The surgeon William Farmer observes that the Spaniards are so ‘cooped in, that they durst not well peep out of the gates of the town, but to their loss’.

  One Spanish officer reckons that Águila has lost 1,000 of his 3,400 men from injuries and sickness, since the siege began. Of the remaining 2,400, more than a third is ill. ‘[Águila] has now with him 1,800 men capable of bearing arms [and] 900 sick,’ says a Spanish report.

  Those still ambulant walk around in a daze, shell-shocked, bruised and half-deafened by the bombardment. The dandies of the officer class have had their finery reduced to tatters; the ordinary troops are shoeless and virtually unclad. A depleted force means fewer people to share guard duty. According to another Spanish report, more and more sentries are dying daily from sheer exhaustion. ‘The soldiers laboured all through the day and night,’ says the Spaniard Alférez Bustamante, ‘working on defences … digging earthworks and binding fascines.’

  Like their enemies, they are thin and haggard from malnourishment. As Carew puts it, the Spanish ‘endure infinite miseries, grown weak and faint with their spare diet, being no other than water and rusk. Dogs, cats and garrons [small workhorses] is a feast when they can get it.’ Admiral Leveson agrees: ‘Their best victuals … is horses, dogs and cats.’ However, Bustamante says they have long since trapped and eaten all the domestic animals. ‘The troops have been suffering very badly,’ he wrote. ‘[They were] unshod, unclad, and unfed except for bread and some horses we took from the enemy at great peril. All the cats and dogs in the village had been used up.’

  Oviedo’s hospital, already overflowing, can’t cope with the numbers of sick. ‘We did not have doctors or surgeons,’ says Bustamante, ‘and because of this many suffered.’ An official Spanish report says Águila was ‘in want of fish, medicines and delicacies for the sick’.

  There are conflicting reports about food reserves. According to Zubiaur, Kinsale has enough provisions to last until mid-March. However, Águila will later report that his staple diet of biscuit could last only until the English New Year. ‘The Spaniards were in great straits and helplessness,’ writes Ludhaigh O’Cleary, adding that Águila’s men would rather die on the battlefield than slowly from starvation: ‘They preferred to be killed immediately.’

  Desertion is a serious problem here, too. ‘About a hundred men left and went over to the enemy,’ Bustamante estimates. Blount doesn’t need spies, he says bitterly, because these runaways provide a constant stream of intelligence.

  Mateo de Oviedo confirms the desertions, but ascribes it to low self-esteem and blames it on Águila. However, many of the absconders are driven by nothing more than hunger. ‘Don Juan’s miseries [are] incredible,’ George Carew writes, pointing out that the latest runaways ‘deserted for want of food’.

  The Spaniards’ only hope is that the authorities back home will sympathise with their plight and send relief – troops by the thousand, food by the shipload, gunpowder by the barrelful.

  They may dream. But it’s not going to happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A MEETING IN THE FASTNESS OF WOOD AND WATER

  ON MONDAY, 21 December, Águila lost patience with O’Neill and O’Donnell. His letters were either being intercepted by the English or ignored by the Irish. And sometimes, he suspected, both.

  He had drawn up a new strategy which he felt the chieftains could accept. But it was so sensitive that he couldn’t put it in writing. He needed a trusted messenger – someone who, in the words of another Spanish report, would be ‘so trustworthy that he will allow himself to be cut to pieces before he divulges his mission to the enemy’. He knew just the man for the job.

  We know little about Alférez Bustamante except that he was an army ensign – something like a second lieutenant – and that he was clearly an educated man with an analytical mind and a keen sense of observation. He was obviously experienced in covert operations. And he must have been a man of remarkable courage, stamina and resourcefulness.

  Bustamante was based inside Kinsale. O’Neill and O’Donnell were about six kilometres north on Coolcarron Hill, far beyond the English cordon. In order to avoid their sentries, the ensign would have had to sneak out far to the west, and then double back through the valley beyond Ardmartin Ridge before finally climbing the hillside to Coolcarron. There was a spectacular storm that night, with ‘continual flashings of lightning’ and ‘terrible thunder’, so Bustamante’s journey was all the more dramatic for the deafening thunderclaps and the blinding electrical flashes that would have exposed him vividly to the enemy’s view. His trek took a gruelling three hours, but eventually he found himself in what Carew colourfully described as O’Neill’s ‘fastness of wood and water’.

  The genius of the Irish rural guerrilla tactic was that there was no single central camp. Instead, the men spread out over large areas of forest. Once in place, each unit would seal all entrance pathways with ‘plashings’ of tightly interlaced branches. When Bustamante arrived at the camp, he would have been greeted by scenes that were every bit as alien to Spanish eyes as any Inca settlement in Peru. There were thousands of fighters of every description, from aristocratic lords in their English-style finery to barefoot woodkern wearing little but long linen shirts and woollen mantle cloaks. There were the fearsome Scottish gallowglasses, giant close-contact bruisers with their razor-sharp battleaxes. There were the elite cavalrymen and their humble horseboys, all settling down for the night. Many used their thick cloaks as tents, for according to Moryson, ‘mantles are as a cabin for an outlaw in the woods, [and] a bed for a rebel’.

  —My lords, all Christendom is watching you, Bustamante told the Irish chieftains as he devoured some badly needed sustenance. They all have a stake in this war. You are serving Our L
ord and His Majesty the King, who has been generous in funding you from his own pocket. But think about this: it is you who will receive the glory and the rewards after the Conquest.

  Was that a promise or a threat? O’Neill listened silently, waiting for Bustamante to come to the point.

  —Don Juan del Águila wants you to do one thing, and one thing only, the messenger continued.

  The two chieftains tensed. Everything hinged on a credible battle plan.

  Bustamante asked them if they were familiar with a particular hill that overlooked the English encampments. They nodded. They had already identified Ardmartin Hill as a strategic point on the terrain.

  —Your only task is to hold that height, Bustamante instructed. There is a wood just behind the hill: bring up all your baggage and store it there. Then take trenching tools and create a new base on the hilltop. Create a strong redoubt. And hold it. That’s all.

  Bustamante went on to spell out Águila’s orders in unmistakeable terms.

  —We must be clear, he said. Whatever happens, you should not attack the English trenches yourselves. If you are attacked, then defend. Just do enough to hold that hill.

  It was not an ideal strategy, but it was probably the best battle plan in the circumstances. Águila was acutely conscious of the Irish chieftains’ weakness in the open field. His tactic was to feign an imminent Irish attack. With his enemy distracted, Águila’s men would emerge in force and smash the English up against this unyielding defensive phalanx.