With great difficulty a little breach was made [in the walls] and at another, a mine which threw [down] a round tower near adjoining.
An assault was attempted but the gentlemen and leaders, very suddenly and valiantly mounting on top of the breach, some walls . . . overthrew those that went upon it and [the] fall buried such as were at the foot of it.
[This] unfortunate and unlooked for accident was the cause the town has not been entered and taken.31
Conveniently forgetting the target of Santander, they determined to sail onwards to Lisbon, but this decision may have been influenced by their inability to stop the galleys re-supplying the garrison and the news that twelve more were on their way with substantial enemy reinforcements.
Although they failed to capture the citadel of Corunna, English raiding parties had been able to roam with impunity in the surrounding countryside, happily pillaging and looting. ‘Black Jack’ Norris defeated a hastily gathered 8,500-strong Spanish force of raw levies at Puente de Burgos, killing up to 1,500 of them before they fled. Returning in triumph with a captured Spanish royal standard as a trophy, he urged Burghley to persuade Elizabeth to send out more artillery, powder and munitions and thirty companies of trained soldiers from the Low Countries, ‘which would serve to continue this war here all this year which was a more safe and profitable course than to attend an enemy at home’.32
Drake may have committed a cardinal tactical error in quitting Corunna so soon. The Spanish feared that, if he held the port, he could be reinforced and provisioned from England, enabling much more damaging punitive operations both inland and along the coast. The Venetian envoy observed:
The naval forces of Spain are not such as to allow them to face the enemy on the open sea.
Owing to the want of ships and men, they are extremely weak . . . From want of soldiers they have adopted a plan which may prove more hurtful than helpful. They have enrolled Portuguese and have so armed the very people whom they have cause to fear.33
In London, the queen was greatly angered by the disobedience of the expedition commanders. After receiving news of the inconclusive action at Corunna – ‘a place of no importance and very hazardous in the attempt’ – she insisted they ‘had not performed that which they promised . . . They had two places where they should have done greater service in taking and burning the ships.’ When Thomas Windebank, one of the clerks of the signet, suggested that Drake and Norris would never do anything but ‘the best service for her majesty and her realm’, Elizabeth observed acerbically that ‘they went to places more for profit than for service’. She ordered them to attack the Armada shipping at Santander, which should be accomplished ‘before your return . . . you have [not] given us cause to be satisfied with you’.34
It would be many days before Drake and Norris could taste the queen’s indignation, so the fleet sailed on for Lisbon, apparently in the mistaken, if not disingenuous, belief that the ‘better part of the king’s fleet’ was within that city’s harbour. The fleet, now joined by Essex in Swiftsure, landed a vanguard of two thousand troops at Peniche, 45 miles (74.4 km) north of Lisbon, on 26 May, beneath the walls of the castle.35 True to form, the earl was the first ashore, splashing through the surf, before he killed a Spaniard in hand-to-hand fighting – one of a force of five thousand stationed to oppose the landing on the cliffs above. An English soldier, Ralph Lane, described the skirmish that followed on a sandy plateau overlooking the beach:
The Earl of Essex and the colonel general [Sir Roger Williams] took their first landing . . . and made fight with the enemy almost two hours before the general could make land by reason of the huge billows and most dangerous rocks that split diverse of our boats and [cast] many of our men away in landing.
Very brave charges the enemy made and made two retreats and in the third were clean repulsed and quitted the field . . .
The earl lost a brave captain, a man of his own, Captain Pew, was slain by a push of the pike and some others of meaner account.
But the Spaniard did abide it even to the very pike.36
Two days later Norris, with Essex in tow, marched off towards Lisbon at the head of six thousand men (the force heavily depleted by disease), arriving in the city’s western suburbs on 2 June. The siege was ineffectual. Norris had no artillery, little gunpowder and only small quantities of match, used for firing the infantry’s shoulder arms. Dom Antonio’s promises of a popular uprising in his support came to nothing. After desultory skirmishing and more casualties, the English broke away on 4 June, but only after Essex vented his frustration by sticking his pike into the city’s wooden gates and challenging all comers to personal combat to defend the honour of Elizabeth’s name. None of the defenders, observing this martial tantrum from the city walls above, decided to take up his kind offer.
Dom Antonio was scathing about the attempted invasion:
We disembarked at Peniche where the strong wines of the country increased the sickness of the men. When we arrived before Lisbon, there were not enough fit men to attack a boat and our host [army] was far more fit to die than to fight.
But he had nothing but praise for Drake and Norris or the fighting qualities of the English soldier – when he was not drunk or sick: ‘This I can assure you, that four thousand Englishmen are equal to eight thousand Spaniards and whenever I can embark with them I shall gladly do so, especially if Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake be amongst them for, by my faith, they are gallant gentlemen.’37
Meanwhile, instead of supporting the English army by sailing up the River Tagus, Drake was amusing himself capturing sixty Hansa merchantmen which were heading into Lisbon with supplies for Spain.
Norris was forced to retreat along the estuary to Cascaes, troubled by intermittent cannon fire from Spanish galleys that ‘struck off a gentleman’s leg and killed the sergeant-major’s mule’ from under him as they passed the town of St Julian. In spite of the reverse at Lisbon, Sir Roger Williams still believed that Spain and Portugal were soft targets, bragging to Walsingham that with ‘12,000 footmen and 1,000 lancers, her majesty might march’ through the two countries ‘and dictate terms of peace’. He added contemptuously: ‘The Portuguese are the greatest cowards ever seen.’38
A friar then reported that the enemy had followed them as far as St Julian and were boasting they had driven the English from the gates of Lisbon. Affronted by this slight on his honour, Norris immediately formally offered battle, under flag of truce and trumpet. Essex, not to be outdone in the chivalry stakes, offered to fight the best man the Spanish could offer, or, he could test their mettle, six against six, or ten to ten, or any other number they cared to name.39 The earl declared that he would be in the front rank of the English vanguard and could be easily identified, wearing a large plume of feathers in his morion and a red scarf on his left arm.
The next morning, there was only a deserted camp: the Spanish had gone.
It was the end of any military adventure for Essex. A few days later, a letter arrived from Elizabeth which left Drake and Norris in no doubt about what would happen if the earl was not returned to the safety of England immediately:
If Essex be now come into [your company], you will cause him to be safely sent hither forthwith. If you do not, you shall look to answer for the same to your smart, for these be no childish actions, nor matters wherein you are to deal by cunning devices to seek evasions as the custom of lawyers is. Therefore, consider well your doings.40
Ashley, in his report home, adroitly observed that the landing at Corunna was ‘judged to have been the special hindrance of good success here, the enemy upon knowledge thereof having in the meanwhile assembled great strength for the city and defeated Dom Antonio by all possible means of any favour or aid in these parts’.41
The English troops re-embarked and the fleet sailed out, intending at least to fulfil the expedition’s final objective: the occupation of the Azores. This now looked impossible, given the poor condition of the troops and their reduced numbers. Perhaps Drake
hoped to snatch glory out of ignominy by repeating the success of his Cadiz raid and capture a face-saving Spanish ship or two. But after burning the city of Vigo on 29 June, his plans were stymied by a fierce storm. Revenge sprang a serious leak so he was forced to sail home, arriving on 10 July with ‘twenty or thirty ships’.
The expedition was a disaster. By 1 September, one hundred and two ships had returned, but of the 23,000 who had sailed with the fleet, only 3,722 were fit and well. The rest had been cut down by disease, and between 8,000 and 11,000 had died.42 In one ship, only 114 were left out of a crew of 300, and just eight were in a fit state to work the ship as she approached Plymouth.
After spending at least £100,000, none of the three objectives of the expedition was achieved. Parallels with the Armada’s fate were both ironic and mortifying. Beyond private loot, the plunder was limited to one hundred and fifty brass cannon captured at Corunna and £30,000 prize money for the cargoes in the Hansa ships captured by Drake. The German vessels had to be returned to their owners.
The Spanish spy codenamed ‘David’ reported that ‘Dom Antonio and his people arrived in Plymouth in a wretched state’ and that the Portuguese were now more unpopular in England than the Spaniards. ‘The English hold Dom Antonio in no respect whatever and the only name they can find for him and his people is “dog”. They openly insult [him] to his face without being punished.’43
On 4 or 5 July, Essex arrived at Plymouth with seven ships and cravenly sent his brother Walter ahead to the queen to abjectly seek her pardon for his absconding.
Once again, an English army was discharged, largely without pay.
At the end of the month, ‘certain mariners and other lewd fellows’ gathered ‘in mutinous sort’ outside the Royal Exchange in the City of London, trying to sell illegally their weapons and armour. The lord mayor was ordered to apprehend them and ‘lay by the heels’ any that ‘persisted in any such tumultuous sort’. In this he failed signally, and ‘all the mariners and soldiers remained about the city in contemptuous behaviour’. On 16 August the Privy Council wrote to Lord Cobham about the ‘great disorders’ committed by soldiers from Sir Edward Norris’s and Anthony Wingfield’s companies in Maidstone, Kent, demanding that the miscreants be captured and gaoled.44 Night watches were set up to prevent soldiers from gathering because ‘some of late have offered violence to persons they met on the highway and have taken money by force’. In the end, these hard-done-by heroes were treated like vagrants and posted back to their home counties.45
It was not only ordinary soldiers who suffered. In October, twenty-five army captains ‘having acquainted the [Privy Council] with their great charges in raising their companies and maintaining their offices before the voyage and since coming home, without any consideration [recompense], pray their lordships they may be employed in her majesty’s service’.46
Elizabeth was also fearful about the diseases the unemployed rude soldiery might be spreading on their return to England. A proclamation of 22 July banned anyone who had served with the fleet to come ‘within the Court’s gates’ on pain of arrest by the queen’s knight marshal and committal to the Marshalsea prison without bail.47
The private backers were also out of pocket. Thomas Cordell, one of the London merchants who invested in the enterprise, found, like his colleagues, ‘upon the sudden return of the generals and the army’ with a surfeit of provisions on their hands ‘to their great loss’. A sympathetic Privy Council wrote to Burghley seeking a licence for him and his partners to export 1,200 quarters (15,240.71 kg) of corn and 50 fothers48 of lead to Greece without customs charges as a reward for the ‘good disposition and forwardness they did show in making them provision at their own charges which, if the voyage had gone forward, might have served to good purpose’.49
Despite the queen’s public admiration for Drake’s and Norris’s ‘valour and good conduct’, once the scale of the losses in men and money became apparent, the two men faced a court of inquiry into the expedition in October 1589. The queen declared that if Drake had ‘gone to Santander as he went to The Groyne, he [would have] done such service as never subject had done’.
With twelve sail of his ships he might have destroyed all the forces which the Spaniards had there, which was the whole strength of the country by sea.
There they did ride all unrigged and their ordnance on the shore and some twenty men only in a ship to keep them.
It was far overseen that he had not gone thither first.50
Both commanders fell from Elizabeth’s good grace. Norris was not granted another military command for two years, while Drake remained out of favour until 1595. Greed had undone him. England’s naval talisman had lost some of his magic.
Philip pressed ahead with rebuilding his Armada, with twelve million in gold to spend. The Spanish boasted that, a year hence, they would have a ‘fleet and an army to sack England and take a just and accumulated vengeance on their enemies’.51
EPILOGUE
The war with England is beginning now and the end must be either that the King of Spain becomes King of England too, or that the Queen of England becomes Queen of Spain. Peace we shall never make and she has not one shore only to defend . . . we have learned that her armada is not invincible.
Bernardo Mendoza, Spanish ambassador to France, November, 1588.1
For all the assignment of blame and frenetic finger-pointing in Madrid after Medina Sidonia’s return with the tattered remains of the Armada, one single factor stands out as a significant influence on the outcome of the 1588 campaign: the storms.
A weather cycle, characterised by very wet summers, began in north-west Europe in the late third century and continued for almost fifteen hundred years, with a brief interlude of drier conditions in the fourteenth century. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the pattern had reverted to soggy, unsettled summers, stormy autumns and colder winters – the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’. We have anecdotal evidence to support this contention. The River Thames was not infrequently frozen over in London, indicated by accounts of fairs sometimes staged on the ice. A Venetian diplomat complained in the early sixteenth century that in England, the ‘rain falls almost every day during the months of June, July and August. They never have any spring here.’2 Then we have the oft-repeated refrain ‘For the rain it raineth every day’ in the fool’s song from act five, scene one of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written in 1601 and known to have been performed at a lawyers’ feast in the Middle Temple, London, the following February. The line resonated so much with Shakespeare’s audience that he used it again in King Lear, act three, scene two, written between 1603 and 1606. Doubtless it resonates still among the bedraggled British today.
On top of this high rainfall, the shift to unsettled summers and stormy autumns occurred during the lifetimes of those who fought in the ships of the English fleet, but the change evolved so subtly that it had not yet become part of the canon of seafarer’s weather lore. Walsingham, however, may have been aware of it when his uncannily prophetic black propaganda predicting disaster for the Armada was compiled. The prolonged period of very stormy weather in August–September 1588 was probably caused by the cold air of the Atlantic Polar Front drifting southerly to an almost permanent position very close to Ireland and Scotland. The subsequent series of intense depressions, 310–620 miles (500–1000 km) wide, may have been deepened by warm and moist air from across the Atlantic, possibly exacerbated yet more by a decaying tropical cyclone moving northwards. All this would not have been understood or foreseen by the Spanish, who were unfamiliar with such changes in weather patterns in the more northerly latitudes.3
The Spaniards’ first taste of their unfortunate fate came on 26–27 July when the Armada ran into a full north-westerly gale, with wind speeds gusting above forty knots, as a number of depressions passed over their route as they were leaving the Bay of Biscay and entering the south-west approaches. On 6 August, an anticyclone with light winds that had dominated the weather during th
e fighting up the English Channel moved south-east into France, permitting another batch of depressions to push in from the Atlantic. These brought the strong north-westerlies that swept the Armada so close to the sandbanks off Zeeland on 8 August, but the arrival of a ridge of high pressure caused the wind to suddenly veer through ninety degrees, allowing the Spanish to narrowly escape shipwreck and pass into the North Sea. By the time the Armada had sailed around Scotland and down into the North Atlantic, a succession of vigorous depressions swept in, bringing gales on 12–13 and 15–16 September. One deepened dramatically, triggering storm-force north-westerly winds that ravaged the west coast of Ireland five days later. This storm of 21 September took the heaviest toll of the Armada ships, followed by strong south-easterly winds on 25 September.4
On the evidence of this forensic reconstruction of the weather patterns during those crucial ten weeks by the UK Meteorological Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia,5 it seems very plausible that it was climate change that defeated the unlucky Armada rather than the popular misconception that the triumph was brought about by Drake’s derring-do or the plucky ‘little’ ships of the English fleet.
The Spanish Armada Page 31
