by Neil Hanson
They were not the only secret instructions being carried. Philip had entrusted sealed orders to Medina-Sidonia that were to be handed to Parma only “if (which God forbid) the result be not so prosperous as our arms shall be able to settle matters, nor . . . so contrary that the enemy shall be relieved of anxiety on our account (which God surely will not permit).” In the event of outright victory or defeat, the orders were to be returned to Philip unopened. They contained the terms upon which Philip would be willing to settle his differences with Elizabeth: freedom of worship for all English Catholics and the return of the towns in The Netherlands garrisoned by English forces to Spanish control. Parma was also to seek financial compensation “for the injury they have done to me, my dominions and my subjects,” but Philip gave him discretion to waive this requirement in order to win acceptance of the other terms. Philip had only one other, chilling instruction. “If perchance the Duke . . . should be successful in capturing [the Portuguese pretender] Dom Antonio . . . or if [he] should chance to fall into your hands, guard him closely and see that he does not escape, so that his restlessness may no longer be a source of trouble.”
Philip’s reasons for wishing to conceal his orders from Parma are obvious. The terms he was willing to agree were those that Parma had already been urging upon him, in order to avoid “the danger of some disaster, causing you to fail to conquer England whilst losing your hold here [in The Netherlands].” Such was Philip’s stubborn faith in the outcome of actions taken in God’s cause that he preferred to take the gambler’s chance of risking everything on an outright victory, but had Parma known in advance what the King was willing to agree to, he might have taken steps to secure such an agreement on his own initiative. Had he not always argued that, with English support neutralized, the Dutch could readily be defeated? Once that was achieved, Philip could then renounce the treaty with Elizabeth and launch the Enterprise of England not from far-off Lisbon but from Flushing or Antwerp, less than one day’s sailing from the mouth of the Thames.3
Medina-Sidonia’s General Orders to the Armada before its departure from Lisbon had forbidden captains to return to Spain under any circumstances: “any infraction of this shall be punished by death and forfeiture.” If ships became separated from the fleet by storms, they were to proceed to a point to the south of the Scilly Isles and there await the remainder of the Armada. Beyond the Scillies, the next rendezvous was to be Mount’s Bay in Cornwall. Now, faced with this desperate shortage of supplies before they had even left Spanish waters, the Armada commanders agreed without dissent to put in to Corunna (now La Coruña), and take on whatever water and provisions could be found. By the time the leading ships of the fleet had come to anchor in the harbour, guarded by the walled city on its rocky peninsula, the sun was already setting and nearly half the fleet—over fifty ships, including almost all of the hulks, guarded by Recalde’s squadron and the four galleasses—were left out at sea, waiting for daylight. Just after midnight, a south-west gale blew up, so fierce that even in the harbour one ship cast its anchor and a pinnace was driven into a galleon. “So violent a sea and wind, accompanied by fog and tempest have never been seen.” Those ships still at sea had no option but to turn and run before the storm. One of Recalde’s galleons broke its mainmast and one of the galleys “had thrown her rudder overboard as the sea was so heavy.”
By the afternoon of 21 June, the gale had blown itself out and Medina-Sidonia sent out pinnaces to search for his scattered fleet. Word began to come in from up the coast that de Leiva had managed to reach the port of Vivero with ten ships, and two of the galleasses had sheltered in Gijón. On the following day, Juan Martinez de Recalde led another ten ships into harbour, but by 24 June thirty ships, including a Florentine galleon, a Castilian galleon, two galleasses and Recalde’s two best galleons, were still missing. Even those ships that had ridden out the storm in harbour were damaged. Many had lost spars or even masts and dragged their anchors, and many were leaking, “strained, it was said, by the heavy weather, but really from being overmasted.” An alarming number of crew and soldiers were also falling ill with scurvy and dysentery. “I am afraid this trouble may spread and become past remedy . . . God be praised for all he may ordain,” Medina-Sidonia wrote to the King, without apparent irony.4
He couched the rest of his grim tidings in the most tactful terms he could muster. It was scarcely credible, he suggested, that such foul weather should have hit the fleet in the best sailing month of the year. The storm “would be remarkable at the end of June, but being as it is on so great an occasion in the service of Our Lord, it is even more extraordinary, considering how fervently the enterprise has been commended and devoted to Him. We must therefore conclude that what has happened has been for some good and just reason.” He was fearful that at least some of the missing ships might have been sunk or captured by English or French privateers. He listed the ships missing and the damage to those still with him, and described the state of his crews and provisions, and the dismal rate of progress necessitated by the lumbering hulks and ships of the Levant squadron not built for rough Atlantic waters. “To undertake so great a task with equal forces to those of the enemy would be inadvisable, but to do so with an inferior force . . . would be still more unwise . . . I recall the great force Your Majesty collected for the conquest of Portugal, although that country was within our own boundaries and many of the people were in your favour. Well Sire, how do you think we can attack so great a country as England with such a force as ours is now?” He concluded by urging Philip, in the strongest terms possible for a subject writing to his omnipotent sovereign, to consider abandoning the invasion of England for a further year and seeking some form of accommodation with Elizabeth in the meantime. The problems the Armada was facing made it “essential that the enterprise we are engaged in should be given the closest scrutiny.”
On 27 June, as he awaited Philip’s reply, Medina-Sidonia summoned another council of war to seek the support of his commanders for the course he had urged upon their King. Medina-Sidonia asked them whether it was wiser to remain in Corunna and wait for the missing ships to rejoin them, to put to sea to search for them, or to set sail immediately for England without them. Nine of the ten most senior officers supported his preference for remaining in Corunna, taking on fresh supplies and waiting for the missing ships to appear. Only Pedro de Valdes of the Andalusian squadron argued for putting to sea at once and launching a surprise attack on the English fleet with whatever ships the Armada could muster, and even he did so not from any overwhelming desire for immediate action but on the rather more prosaic grounds that there was little opportunity or likelihood of obtaining fresh supplies and to linger in Corunna would merely make their situation worse. Astonishingly, despite the harsh lessons of Cadiz in 1587, there is not the slightest sign that Medina-Sidonia and his commanders made any defensive preparations against the possibility of a raid on Corunna by the English fleet. Had Drake been able to enter the broad bay at the head of a line of galleons, he would have found the Armada disorganized and in little condition to repel an attack.
Philip’s reply to Medina-Sidonia, written on 1 July and received in Corunna five days later, brushed aside all his reservations and recommendations. “From what I know of you, I believe that your bringing all these matters to my attention arises solely from your zeal to serve me and a desire to succeed in your command. The certainty that this is so prompts me to be franker with you than I should be with another . . . I see plainly the truth of what you say, that the Levant ships are less free and staunch in heavy seas than the vessels built here, and that the hulks cannot sail to windward; but it is still the case that Levant ships sail constantly to England, and the hulks hardly go anywhere else but up the Channel. Indeed it is quite an exception for them to leave it to go to other seas. It is true that, if we could have things exactly as we wished, we would rather have other vessels, but under the present circumstances, the expedition must not be abandoned on account of this difficulty.” The En
terprise of England was the only means by which the stubborn English Queen could be forced to negotiate, and by lying at anchor in Corunna they were merely inviting an attack by El Draque and the rest of Elizabeth’s pirates.
Medina-Sidonia was ordered to make what repairs he could and take on what stores were available—“but you must take great care that the stores are really preserved and not allow yourself to be deceived as you were before”—and even if he were obliged to sail with a depleted force, he was to do so at the first opportunity. His orders remained unchanged: to rendezvous with Parma off “the Cape of Margate.” Philip once more invoked the sacred nature of the enterprise on which they were embarked. “If this were an unjust war, the storm might be taken as a sign of God’s will that we should cease from our offence. As, however, it is so just, it is not to be believed that God will withhold His aid, but that He will rather favour that cause even to the utmost of our desires . . . Every great enterprise is beset with difficulties, and the merit lies in overcoming them. I have dedicated this enterprise to God . . . Stir yourself then, to do your duty.” Medina-Sidonia replied like a dutiful subject. “I am consoled to the idea that He who has this expedition in His hand deigns to take this course with it in order to infuse even more zeal in Your Majesty and more care in your officers . . . Your Majesty may rest assured that no efforts of mine shall be spared.”5
However, in case his exhortations were not enough to hold Medina-Sidonia to his purpose, Philip also sent a minister, Andres de Alba, from Madrid to remind him of his duty, and, because it was “important to have near his person others who are highly experienced and skilled both in the art of sailing and that of war,” the King also appointed Diego Flores de Valdes to serve as Medina-Sidonia’s “naval adviser” aboard the San Martin. This only increased the jealousy and suspicion felt by the other commanders for both de Valdes and de Bobadilla, who was also sailing aboard Medina-Sidonia’s flagship. Both men had ready access to the Captain General and powerful influence over him, and there were those who believed that the two were not so much advisers as watchdogs, there to ensure that the untested Medina-Sidonia would not waver from the strategy that Philip himself had laid down.
In a dispatch to Parma on 10 June, Medina-Sidonia had expressed his wish that “the coast [between Calais and Dunkirk] were capable of sheltering so great a fleet as this so that we might take some safe port to have at our backs,” and while the Armada was still labouring up the Portuguese coast he had “consulted the pilots and other experts aboard this fleet who are familiar with the whole coast of England,” seeking their advice on a port that the Armada might seize and use as a base until Parma signalled his readiness to launch the invasion. Informed by Parma of this proposed deviation from his masterplan, Philip at once wrote a further letter to Medina-Sidonia: “The main point was to go on until you could join hands with the Duke.” There was no need of a safe haven on the English coast and, though Elizabeth’s fleet was to be engaged and destroyed if it attempted to hamper the Armada’s progress towards its rendezvous, there were to be no other deviations from the prescribed plan. Medina-Sidonia would arrive in the Narrow Seas with all possible speed and Parma would then emerge with his invasion force. Yet given Philip’s chronic shortage of cash, it was all the stranger that his instructions to Medina-Sidonia should so specifically have excluded the possibility of capturing an English port as a base when Pope Sixtus’s pledge of one million ducats would fall due as soon as the first Spanish boot touched English soil.
His equally strong insistence that Medina-Sidonia should avoid confrontation with the English fleet unless forced to it also made his orders to keep clear of the treacherous “shoals and sandbanks” off the French coast, keeping “more to the English side,” seem curious. In fact, with the exception of the Bay of Boulogne, there are no dangerous shoals and sandbanks off the French coast until the approaches to Dunkirk, and it would have been perfectly possible for the Armada to have kept to that side of the Channel; a later Spanish Armada did precisely that in 1598. Whether such a vast fleet, occupying several square miles of sea, could have remained undetected even if it had been hugging the French shore is a moot point, though again the Armada of 1598 did so, but at the least it would have made the English logistics and communications more difficult and forced them to meet the Armada in waters that were less familiar to them than their own coastlines. Perhaps Philip was misinformed or perhaps he wished the English to be intimidated by the sight of his great Armada defiantly cruising past their shores, but whatever the reason, that was the course he had dictated and Medina-Sidonia would have to obey.6
Another month elapsed before the Armada was deemed ready to put to sea, and by then it was back to its full strength. “God . . . has been pleased to reunite the entire fleet, without the loss of a single ship . . . I hold this to be a great miracle.” Even more remarkable, according to Medina-Sidonia, who hailed it as another “authentic miracle,” was the survival of the Levant ship Trinidad de Scala, which had somehow reached Gijón despite her planks’ having gaped up to four inches apart after her battering from the seas. Two of the later groups of returning ships had even been driven as far as the approaches to the Channel, and had returned, according to Recalde, “smelling of England.” One had caught glimpses of what might have been Drake’s fleet before sailing back on a north wind to Corunna. The other group had cruised the coast between the Scilly Isles and the Lizard, waiting in vain for the rest of the Armada to appear, and had taken a couple of prizes, capturing two Irish priests and a number of sailors. Under interrogation the latter revealed that the English fleet was divided between Plymouth and the Narrow Seas—the Straits of Dover.
The last missing ship had returned to Corunna by 15 July, but several further days elapsed before all were provisioned and ready to set sail. While in port some of Medina-Sidonia’s principal ships of war had been repaired, the seams caulked and the sides tallowed, and one had even had a new mainmast stepped. Some “beef, water, fish, oils and vinegar” had been found and his men had also been able to eat a little fresh food. Morale had been improved by the stay in port and, if not greatly better, the physical condition of Medina-Sidonia’s men was certainly no worse.
Reinforcements had arrived to replace some of the sickest and most injured men, but Medina-Sidonia rejected most of the forced recruits as worse than those he already had; “not a soul of them knows what an arquebus is, or any other weapon, and already they are more dead than alive.” Many were so decrepit or diseased that he gave in to “the lamentation of their wives” and sailed without them. “They will only eat up the victuals and be in the way.” Some men, including a few gentleman adventurers, whose taste of life at sea had already proved more than enough for them, had taken the opportunity afforded by a brief shore leave to abscond, and from then on Medina-Sidonia ensured that “a company of infantry of the country” was permanently stationed on the quay to prevent desertions. His men were landed only in groups, under guard, on the island of San Anton in the middle of the harbour. There, isolated from the normal sinful pleasures of the shore, they were confessed by priests and given a blessing and a pewter medallion of Christ and the Virgin to wear into battle. Medina-Sidonia claimed to find his medallion “such an inestimable treasure, that I esteem it more highly than the most precious jewel I carry on the fleet.” 7
On 19 July Medina-Sidonia again summoned his commanders to a council of war, at which all ten voted to sail for England on the next favourable conjunction of wind and tide, but the following day arguments continued between those advocating making sail immediately and those, including Diego Flores de Valdes, urging a wait for the new moon, in the belief that it would presage a change in the weather. In the end it was agreed that if the wind stood fair, they should sail at dawn the next morning. By that afternoon the last provision boats had returned to shore and the squadrons of Miguel de Oquendo, Diego Flores de Valdes and Pedro de Valdes had already been warped clear of the inner harbour by their ships’ boats. The rest o
f the great ships now followed, waiting at one anchor for the wind. There was little sleep for officers or men that night. At midnight Medina-Sidonia ordered the firing of a gun, the signal to make ready, and as the first light of dawn broke, another gun sounded, ordering the fleet to sea.
It was a true summer’s morning, hot and almost still with only the stirrings of a south-west breeze. The crews clustered at the rails took their last sight of Spain and the sunlight already gilding the summits of the mountains, though the vineyards and pastures cladding the lower slopes and the whitewashed houses clustered around the harbour were still in purple shadow. It must have been a bittersweet moment, familiar to all mariners taking their last sight of their homeland, for all knew that whether the Armada fared well or ill, many of those lining the rails would never see their homes again. The endless procession of ships decked with flags and pennants, their sails emblazoned with blood-red crosses, passed beyond the shelter of the bay and formed up offshore. By mid-afternoon the entire fleet was assembled, but before it had made three leagues out to sea the wind dropped to a flat calm. For the rest of that day they rode the Atlantic swell at anchor, but in the middle of the night watch a land breeze sprang up and the Armada was once more under way, passing out of sight of Spain before the next dawn broke.
