by Susan Ronald
By March, the plan had been pieced together. On March 27, 1587, Drake set sail with a total of forty-two vessels for his secret mission to “singe the beard of the King of Spain.” Drake’s secret plan was to use Dom Antonio, the dethroned Portuguese king, as a decoy for his mission to destroy as much of the fleet at Cádiz as time would allow. Drake met with Walsingham to agree on the spread of disinformation. Traitors to England and Philip’s various English spies were well known to Walsingham by now but had been left in place for this very purpose. Most prominent among these was Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris. Philip’s own machinery of espionage was left to do the rest. Stafford’s acceptance of 8,000 crowns from Philip as a pension only weeks earlier had been known to Walsingham and Elizabeth on the very day it occurred.
Before Drake set sail from London, Stafford passed the intelligence to Mendoza. “The Queen of England’s secretary writes to the new confidant [Stafford] telling him,” Mendoza scrawled to Philip urgently, “to be careful what reports he sends from here … The Queen had not decided anything about sending out the fleet, as the intelligence sent by the ambassador here had cooled her.”4 Ten days later the “true advices from England” were in Mendoza’s hands. It was too late. Drake, the feared El Draco, had set sail two weeks earlier. Aside from a storm off Finisterre where one ship was lost, the voyage had gone swiftly. Within eighteen days of sailing, Drake stood in the roads off Cádiz.
* * *
Philip had been crippled by gout and self-doubt for the previous six months. Nonetheless, orders for his ships to finally set sail went out. As ever well informed, Philip fulminated while envying the swift and intrepid English navy. Raleigh and his inconvenient Virginia colony had been troubling his planned conquest of North America. That mariner Davis had already attempted two voyages to discover the Northwest Passage to Cathay (China) and would soon be making a third. Now another captain, called Thomas Cavendish, had set sail for Peru in his ship Desire.
Though the Spanish king toured his gardens at Aranjuez—his oasis of calm—he found no peace from the English. They always had at least two hundred ships at sea plundering his empire. Even the English Admiralty took a share of the registered plunder. While Philip shambled through his perfumed gardens in the sunny April afternoons of 1587, he was said to muse repeatedly about Elizabeth, “Clearly God must be allowing her waywardness on account of her sins and unfaithfulness.” Even the pope’s offer of a million ducats toward the Armada had only been conditional on the successful invasion of England, with the stipulation that Philip “would not maintain the throne” for himself. When Sixtus V’s spies reported back to Rome that this was precisely the king of Spain’s goal, Sixtus thundered threats of divine vengeance aloud unless Philip “repented of his great sin, and obeyed the Vicar of Christ.”5 When an urgent dispatch arrived from Mendoza while Philip reflected on the sorry state of his affairs, he ignored it, turning one last time to shuffle as best he could through those gardenia-scented gardens he so adored. The message, of course, carried momentous news regarding Drake’s intentions.
Unbeknown to Philip, Drake had already seized the port of Cádiz while the townspeople celebrated a local fair in the central town square. Cries of “El Draco!” rang out. As the people of Cádiz fled toward the castle for protection, the castle gates were shut behind the first wave of the panicked crowd. In the next seconds, there were shrieks and screams from the far side of the closed gates. Twenty-five people were trampled before the guard had the wit to reopen them.
There were sixty-eight ships in harbor, but Drake only sank twenty-four before he was forced to weigh anchor as the Spanish soldiers opened fire. As Drake’s fleet sailed west he learned from his prisoners that Juan Martínez de Recalde, Spain’s most respected naval officer after the Marquis of Santa Cruz, was somewhere off Cape St. Vincent with a squadron half the size of Drake’s carrying gold from the Indies. After their ten days in an orgy of plunder in and around Cádiz, Drake’s fleet set sail toward Recalde. What Drake had perhaps not realized was the devastating impact this skirmish in Cádiz had on the Spanish. The losses were not great, in Philip’s own words, “but the daring of the attempt was very great indeed.”6
Of course, neither Cape St. Vincent nor Recalde was on the agreed strategic map Elizabeth had approved. Still, Drake was conscious that another strategic objective of his mission was to make it “pay for itself.” So far, he had failed to inflict a death blow to the Spanish fleet or capture adequate plunder. While Drake missed Recalde, the English fleet did destroy a squadron of coasters and fishing boats bringing barrel staves for the Armada’s water barrels.
From Sagres on the Portuguese coast, Drake weighed anchor, and ships carrying his dispatches and the disabled turned to the north, homeward bound. Drake had had news that the king’s own carrack, the massive San Felipe, was bound for Seville with its annual treasure of spices, jewels, and other luxury goods from the East. It was a treasure too great to let pass by. Drake spied the San Felipe at São Miguel in the Azores and engaged the carrack, easily seizing her. The value of the booty was £114,000, not to mention the ship itself worth 3 million reals and the blow to Philip’s pride.
Yet it was the sinking of the small fleet carrying barrel staves that would prove the most profitable to England. This unplanned and seemingly petty rout, from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, delayed the Spanish Armada for over a year. Without the barrel staves, the fleet would have no fresh water. More staves would need to be forged, and the Armada would have to wait.7 The other real benefit to the delay could not have been foreseen by anyone at that point. The long-suffering Marquis of Santa Cruz died unexpectedly, only to be replaced by the soldier and hero of Cádiz, the Duke of Medina Sidonia.
* * *
By the time the Spanish Armada finally left the Iberian Peninsula in July 1588, it was doomed to fail. It did not comprise the 510 ships that Santa Cruz had wanted. It had not taken into consideration Parma’s plan. Instead, Philip II, an armchair general, merged the Armada plan with Parma’s. The fleet, he ordered, would rendezvous with the Spaniards in the Netherlands and be shepherded to England’s shores in the Narrow Seas. Even by today’s standards, it was a tricky feat to complete successfully. Then there was the matter of money. Sixtus hadn’t given his million ducats, and the Indian fleet had been ordered not to sail for fear of capture. Philip’s coffers were completely empty.
* * *
Elizabeth, too, had her problems, mostly in assuaging bruised egos. Raleigh, who considered himself a maritime genius, was relegated to the Admiralty of the West Country, while Drake was vice admiral of the entire fleet under Lord Admiral Howard. William Burroughs, Burghley’s man in Drake’s Cádiz raid of 1587 who had mutinied, had been passed over. Henry Knollys resented the upstart Drake’s prominence. Leicester, to his credit, backed Admiral Howard in his choice of Drake as his vice admiral. He knew how the mere mention of Drake’s name threw the Spaniards into paroxysms of fear.
Elizabeth, despite repeated criticism by strategists and historians for her intrusive and contradictory orders to her fleet, allowed her admirals to do what they did best: fight. While the fleets prepared for invasion, all England was made ready in its own way. Villagers developed strategies in case the Spaniards made landfall; barricades were erected and roads readied to be blocked or ambushed. Across the entire south coast of England, bonfires had been erected on all the high peaks leading from Land’s End to London.
As the vast crescent-shaped formation of the Spanish Armada lumbered into view off the Cornwall coast at the Lizard at 4:00 P.M. on the afternoon of July 29, 1588, the first beacons were lit. By 4:15 P.M., Elizabeth and all London knew that the Armada had come. Much of what followed is hazy and contradictory, typical of the fog of war.
* * *
The Armada of 132 Spanish ships made a formidable sight. The fleet stretched two miles in breadth. With their huge fore- and aftercastles, the ships towered like giants over the faster, sleeker English ships. The Engl
ish fleet of some 182 ships and 15 victualing ships was far lighter than the Spanish, but it outgunned the Armada and had no disgruntled convict rowers powering it as the Spaniards had.
In the first battle, at Eddystone, the heavy fighting was frustrating for both sides. The English had run rings around the Spanish defensive crescent formation but hadn’t been able to penetrate it. The English long-range bombardment had merely annoyed the Spanish. Whenever Recalde took an action, Drake seemed to anticipate him and canceled it out. When Drake took the offensive, Recalde read his mind. The day’s fight could only be called a stalemate. “The duke,” so the official log reads, “collected the fleet, but found he could do nothing more.”
The English fleet chased the Armada past Plymouth to Start Point. Yet the Armada maintained its majestic, defensive formation. Howard and Drake were worried. They had to prevent the rendezvous with Parma at any cost. That night the Lord Admiral wrote to Walsingham: “We gave them fight [from nine o’clock until one and] notwithstanding we durst not adventure to put in among them, their fleet being so strong.”8
At Portland Bill on August 2, neither side understood its weaknesses and strengths as yet. Two battles raged all day, with the Spaniards repeatedly attempting to draw the English in close to grapple and board. The English, while defending the coastline, tried to weather the Armada’s seaward wing. Each side failed to disable the other. Nonetheless, it was a furious action with the roar of cannon thundering constantly while the men were nearly blinded by smoke and flames. It looked as though the second day of fighting would end in a stalemate, too, until the San Salvador, carrying the bulk of the Spanish powder and shot, exploded. It was a critical loss to the Spanish.
At dawn on Wednesday, August 3, disaster struck the Spaniards. The Gran Grifon, the flagship of the tublike urca supply ships, was straggling and listing badly. An English squadron broke off to attack, and before the Spaniards could maneuver to its defense, the Gran Grifon was beset on all sides, riddled with cannon and musket shot. Yet despite listing heavily, the urca somehow managed to rejoin Recalde’s column. By afternoon, the wind had dropped altogether, and the two fleets drifted barely a mile apart, unable to move. The dead calm continued through the night. For the first time, heavy casualties were reported by the Spanish, with sixty men killed and another seventy wounded; most on the stricken Gran Grifon.
By the morning of August 4, the wind had picked up again, and the fleets engaged each other at the Isle of Wight. By now, the English recognized that they would need to move in closer. As the smoke cleared from the early battle, Drake spied Martin Frobisher in the largest English ship of the line, cornered by the Spaniards. The Triumph raced to his rescue. Frobisher was saved.
That night, Howard called another council of war. It seemed to him that no matter how they changed tactic, they looked unable to sink ships decisively. Somehow they must stop the Armada before it reached Parma in the Netherlands. He needn’t have feared. Though the Armada was anchored a mere two leagues off Calais, within spitting distance of Parma, Spain’s great general never gave the order to “join hands” with Medina Sidonia. The only explanation that Drake could imagine for Parma’s standing down was that the winds had picked up again to a moderate gale, and they must have only had Dutch flat barges for moving cattle to join the Armada. It was the wind that gave Drake his brainstorm—fireships.
Drake laid his plan before Howard and his council of war. He volunteered to be the first to set fire to his own ship. Five other commanders followed, and that night they sailed into the tightly formed Spanish ships at anchor. The six fireships entered the anchored Armada, ramming the Spanish. The cracking of wooden hulls, screams from the wounded, and fire and smoke punctuated the night sky. In the chaos, Medina Sidonia slipped his cables and stood out to sea. This time, the Armada fleet couldn’t follow. The fireships—nicknamed hellburners—swept through the crowded anchorage. By the morning of August 7, what remained of the Armada had scattered and the English were once more in pursuit.
The last fight between the fleets off Gravelines was never fully recorded by either side, making the usual fog of war impenetrable. The English drew in nearer to the Spaniards but not near enough. The Spaniards fought back, struggling desperately to board the English ships, while the English ducked and weaved between them. Toward the end of the battle, Medina Sidonia saw that although he had called his ships back into their crescent-shaped defensive formation, they were too badly disabled to maintain it. His ships were being drawn inexorably onto the Flanders shore and doom. Neither the English nor the Spaniards had understood that a new age of naval battle had dawned in which speed and cannon could outweigh strength and grappling.
Just as it seemed that it might only be an hour or so before the entire Spanish fleet foundered, a violent squall with blinding rain and swirling winds blew up. The English had to maneuver quickly to keep from crashing into each other. By the time they had regrouped, standing away northward, they saw the lumbering Spanish fleet out of range once again, reforming slowly into their crescent formation.
The English instinctively knew that the battle was over, won for them by a “great wind.” The Armada fleet lumbered on northward, around the north of Scotland, then due south hugging the western coast of Ireland. Of the thirty thousand soldiers and crew, over twenty thousand lost their lives, most to starvation and disease. Contrary to the fairy tales, many were executed as they tried to seek refuge in Ireland, killed for whatever plunder could be had, by locals or by English soldiers.
* * *
Of the ten thousand Spanish survivors, many more died of their wounds or privation once they returned to Spain. It was commonly murmured there that every noble family had lost a son in the Spanish Armada. Mendoza’s prediction to Philip that it had been “God’s obvious design” to bestow upon him the crown of England had been proven utterly false.
PART IV
A House Divided, 1591–1603
TWENTY-THREE
The Norfolk Landing
… this young scholar, that hath been long studying at Rheims, as cunning in Greek, Latin, and other languages, as the other in music and mathematics … Pray, accept his service.
—The Taming of the Shrew, II.i.76–80
On August 9, 1588, Elizabeth rode out to Tilbury, flanked by Leicester, to deliver her Armada Speech to the army, gathered to fight the invasion that never came. Bedecked in shining armor, brandishing her sword, England’s queen was more reminiscent of a young Boudicca than a fifty-five-year-old, beleaguered monarch. The lines “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too” resound in history classes and beyond through the ages. The second part of that sentence is less known: “and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”1 Whether Elizabeth realized it or not by August 9, the danger from the Grand Armada had passed.
* * *
However, other perils were brewing. In early November 1588, long after the Armada celebrations had abated, Fathers John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne secretly landed on the marshy and desolate Norfolk coast. They had come to join the cheerful and scholarly thirty-three-year-old Father Henry Garnet, who had been thrust forward as the superior of the English Jesuits in July 1586, only weeks after he had returned home to England from Rome. Garnet’s companion on the road back to England was Robert (or rather St. Robert since 1970) Southwell. Though Gerard and Oldcorne had been expected since the spring of that Armada year at Garnet’s Finsbury cottage, the English headquarters of the Jesuit mission to England, it had been unsafe for them to land and make their way to London.
Garnet had witnessed the roundups of suspected foreign Catholics and potential troublemakers before the Armada came. All had been incarcerated as enemies of the state. Before that, he had been studiously informed about the Parliament of 1586–87 where the Puritan radical and turbulent baiter of Anglican bishops, Dr. Peter Turner, MP, followed up his statement
from the 1584 session that “no Papist can be a good subject” with a call for Catholics to “by some token be known.” Turner attempted to pass into law the principle that Catholics should be obliged to wear a badge for all to see. Turner’s friend Richard Topcliffe, MP, had further stirred the house with stories of “weapons and all massing trumpery, with books papistical … in the very next house joining the Cloth of Estate by the Parliament House,” where he found “prayers for King Philip.” Topcliffe had demanded a search of “certain houses in Westminster suspected of receiving and harbouring Jesuits, seminaries, or of seditious and Popish books and trumperies of superstition.”2 Garnet’s Finsbury home, complete with its hiding place for six or seven men, was never searched, as it had long been assumed to be vacant.
Though Turner and Topcliffe had failed in 1587, the earlier Parliament of 1584–85 had prevailed. Legislation had been passed to transform the collection of recusancy fines into an efficient tax collection system for the exchequer. The theory behind the law was to stop the steady overcrowding and overwork in England’s courts. Recusants would continue to be convicted in absentia on the sole evidence of informers. Few, if any, judges troubled themselves to discover if the informers were relatives or disgruntled neighbors or former friends of the defendants.3 Indeed, as many were to learn, their nearest family were often their worst enemies, especially when a juicy inheritance was the prize.
That same Parliament passed a new Treason Act, specifically aimed at Jesuit priests and those who harbored them, providing that any layman who “shall wittingly and willingly receive, relieve, comfort, aid, or maintain any such Jesuit, seminary priest … shall … for such offence be adjudged a felon.” The penalty was, naturally, death. The reaction among the Catholic gentry was immediate. A secret and urgent meeting was called at Hoxton, to the west of the City of London, where the leading Catholic gentry including Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir William Catesby, and Lord Vaux were assembled. After much heated discussion, they agreed that “the priests shall shift for themselves abroad, as in inns or such like places, and not visit any Papists … except they be sent for.” Lord Vaux agreed to pay a relief for priests who remained in the country of “one hundred marks” apiece.4 Little did they know that Walsingham’s most highly skilled spy, Nicholas Berden, was also present, taking copious notes.
