by Neil Hanson
Leicester had personally knighted Stanley during the campaign, and replied to the violent protests of the Dutch by saying that he would stake his life on the loyalty of his officers. The value of that pledge was demonstrated on 28 January 1587, when Stanley opened the gates of Deventer and defected to the Spaniards with 1,200 soldiers under his command, and York surrendered the Sconce of Zutphen. Both men had succumbed to Spanish bribes, though Stanley claimed to have acted only for the sake of his religion and his conscience: “Before I served the Devil, now I serve God.” Parma wrote in triumph to Philip that Zutphen and Deventer “are thus Your Majesty’s at a trifling cost, but what is better, the effect of this treason must be to sow great suspicion between the English and the rebels so that hereafter no-one will know whom to trust.” When York died the following year, the Lord High Admiral Charles Howard commented, “Rowland York is dead of the smallpox. I would Stanley were with him.”
Parma was willing enough to contemplate the invasion of England but the notion that he had once entertained, of a sudden attack across the Channel by troops carried in barges and operating under cover of darkness, was no longer remotely feasible. There was no possibility of surprise, and the Dutch were masters of the inshore coastal waters and the English of the Channel. Only with the protection of the Armada could a safe crossing be made, and unless Flushing or Brill could be conquered there was no deep-water port in which it could shelter. Many in Spain urged Philip to conquer England as the means of retaking The Netherlands, but Parma was of the opposite view. His preference was still to settle with England, for purely strategic reasons. With English financial and military support for the rebels removed and Spanish resources and troops concentrated on The Netherlands, he was confident that he could subjugate the Dutch rebels, using only a modest proportion of the money and materiel that Philip was raising for the Enterprise of England. With the deep-water ports of The Netherlands and the Dutch fleet added to the already formidable Armada, the conquest of England would be a formality.
After the fall of Deventer and Zutphen, he might have been expected to press on to the east, taking Utrecht and threatening Holland, but, realizing that his sovereign was implacably set on the Enterprise of England, Parma issued orders in March 1587 redirecting his troops away from the north-east and towards the western ports of Ostend and Sluys (Sluis)—ample proof, if any was needed, that England and not the Dutch rebels was now to be the principal target. At the same time he carried on the peace negotiations with Elizabeth, but in case he still had any lingering doubts he was given unequivocal orders by Philip: no peace was to be made on any terms whatsoever. The negotiations would continue to keep Elizabeth off her guard, but they had no other purpose. “By the common judgement of the world the same was done but to abuse Her Majesty and to win time whilst his preparations might be made complete.” Parma followed his instructions to the letter. After the arrival in Ostend of the five commissioners sent by Elizabeth, weeks were spent in a morass of discussions about alternative venues for the peace conference, what items should be on the agenda and what powers they and Parma’s representatives would have to treat and reach conclusions. The commissioners were still talking, lured ever onwards by hints that if just one or two more points could be resolved the Spaniards would be ready to conclude an agreement, when the Armada entered the Channel.12
Moving with characteristic speed and decisiveness, Parma had concentrated an army of almost 20,000 men in Bruges by early June 1587, in preparation for an attack on either Ostend or Sluys. Ostend was partly garrisoned by English troops, Sluys defended by its own militia, strengthened by Walloons and Flemings exiled from their own cities. Both garrisons had made sniping, harassing raids against the Spanish troops around Bruges but neither appeared strong enough to withstand a siege. Seeing the danger, their commanders appealed for help and reinforcements to the Dutch States General and to England. Lord Buckhurst, the Queen’s representative at the Hague, sent reinforcements and provisions to the garrison at Ostend and Sir William Russell, Governor of Flushing, sent enough supplies to Sluys, he believed, to enable the town to hold out under a siege of two or three months’ duration. Parma had other ideas. He first staged a diversionary attack on Ostend and then surrounded Sluys. It was not itself a deep-water port, but its conquest would open the way to Flushing, providing Parma with the anchorage that he required. Russell responded by sending Sir Roger Williams and four companies of English foot soldiers to reinforce the garrison. They managed to fight their way through the Spanish lines but Parma then blockaded Sluys from the sea and brought up his siege guns to pound the defences.
Elizabeth was apprised of the threat to Sluys and, ignoring his previous failures, she ordered Leicester to return to The Netherlands to relieve the town. On 2 July Leicester and 5,000 troops were convoyed to Flushing. Lookouts on the walls of Sluys could see the banners and pennants of the fleet and greeted the sight with a storm of fire at the Spanish forces surrounding them, confident that the raising of the siege would not now be long delayed. Their confidence was wholly misplaced. Leicester’s first attempt to relieve the town came when he landed near Ostend at the head of 4,000 infantry and 400 cavalry, but with an incompetence or cowardice that surprised no one on the Dutch side, when he saw the Spanish forces massing to repel the attack, he lost his nerve, re-embarked his troops and sailed back down the coast. Two weeks of such futile sorties, manoeuvres and landings left the English forces no nearer to reaching the embattled and desperate defenders of Sluys. One of them, Sir Roger Williams, had spent a large part of the previous fifteen years fighting in The Netherlands. He was a professional soldier, a Welshman who wore on his morion the tallest plume of feathers in either army, “so that his friends and his foes might know where he was.” He now wrote to the Queen, “We doubt not Your Majesty will succour us for our honest mind and plain dealing towards your Royal Person and dear country . . . Our ground is great and our men not so many, but we must trust in God and our valour to defend it . . . We mean to let out every acre for a thousand of their lives besides our own.”
As the Spaniards resumed the attack, the defenders once more showed their valour. “Since I followed the wars I never saw valianter captains or willinger soldiers . . . at eleven o’clock the enemy entered the ditch of our fort with trenches upon wheels [carts covered in shields, proof against musket-fire]. We sallied out, recovered their trenches . . . repulsed them into their artillery, kept the ditch until yester night and will recover it with God’s help this night, or else pay dearly for it.” That night Williams wrote to Leicester urging him to enter the Channel of Sluys. “If your mariners will do a quarter of their duty . . . the Spanish cannot stop them. Before you enter the Channel, we will come out with our boats and fight with the enemy and show there is no such great danger. You may assure the world that here are [no traitors] but valiant captains and valiant soldiers such as had rather been buried in the place than be disgraced in any point that belongs to men of war.”
Ten days passed without any sign of an attack and Williams again wrote to Leicester, in terms that came close to accusing him of cowardice. “You must consider that no wars may be made without danger. What you mean to do we beseech you to do with expedition.” After another ten days, the last three of which saw the rescuing fleet motionless off Sluys, he wrote a final dispatch to Leicester. “We are slain and spoiled ten captains, six lieutenants, eighteen sergeants, of soldiers in all almost six hundred. Never were brave soldiers thus lost for want of easy succours . . . We have not now powder for three skirmishes. For myself I wish myself dead for [leading] so many brave men to their ruin. The old saying is true: wit is never good until it be dearly bought but I and the rest of my companions are like to pay too dear for it.” The town held out for another eight days, losing another two hundred dead in the process. During that time Leicester’s men at last attempted to force the channel, using the spring tide and a following north-westerly wind, while the Dutch launched a fireship to burn the floating bridge across th
e river, but Parma’s forces held their nerve. Sections of the floating bridge were swung apart, allowing the fireship to pass through and burn out harmlessly on the shore, and the gap was closed again before Leicester’s ships, following too far behind, could force the gap. As the tide slackened, Leicester once more withdrew.
Following that failure, the Commandant of Sluys, Groenenbelt, asked Parma for a parley and negotiated the terms of his surrender. In order to conclude the siege before fresh reinforcements could be sent from England, Parma granted unusually lenient terms, and on 5 August the remnants of the garrison—700 out of the original 1,700 men, most of them maimed or wounded—were allowed to march out with their arms and baggage and the full honours of war. Parma offered Sir Roger Williams, wounded in the arm, the chance of a command where he assured him he would never have to fight against his coreligionists or his fellow countrymen, but the fiercely Protestant Williams answered that if he ever served anyone other than his Queen it would be in the army of Henri of Navarre. Returning to England so poor that he could not even afford a horse, he said he was so “weary of the wars, if I can devise how to live, I will quit and follow my Lady Walsingham’s counsel to marry a merchant’s widow.”
Leicester was recalled in November, almost his last act in The Netherlands having been to submit a claim for £24,000 in undocumented expenses. He and his thousands of troops had achieved virtually nothing save to empty Elizabeth’s treasury of money that would have been far better spent in strengthening and supplying her fleet. And Parma had taken Sluys, albeit at a terrible cost of dead and wounded. “Never since I came to The Netherlands has any operation given me such trouble and anxiety as this siege of Sluys.” The next obvious step for Parma was to take the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, cutting off the deep-water port of Flushing on the poorly defended island of Walcheren. If he could expel the English garrison, the Armada would have a safe haven in which to embark the invasion force. But Philip was too impatient to wait: the capture of Flushing would have to follow, not precede the Enterprise of England. At Philip’s orders, Parma was now to devote all his energies to preparing for the invasion, and operations in Flanders were to be restricted to feints to distract the English and Dutch, while he mustered “the bulk of the army intended for the main business [the invasion of England] on the pretence of attacking Ostend.”13
Parma’s engineers at once began widening and deepening the existing drainage canals to enable barges to reach Dunkirk without facing the Dutch inshore fleet. If he still lacked a deep-water port in which the Armada could take refuge, he at least now had a base from where the invasion force could embark in its barges. However, the prevarications and delays in launching the Armada soon began to have a negative effect. A strong contingent of reinforcements arrived from Italy in September 1587, Parma’s armouries were full of powder and shot, and he had 30,000 troops fit and ready to take the field against the enemy but, ordered to avoid any offensive manoeuvres that might have alarmed the English, he was forced to leave his troops idle in winter quarters. As disease and desertions took their toll, the strength of his great army was steadily depleted. By 21 December “the number of men of all nationalities has fallen so much through death, disease and desertion that one third of those we were to take are gone.” The few replacements he now received were ill-trained and in poor physical condition. Raw recruits were normally garrisoned in Milan, Naples or the Spanish enclaves in North Africa while they received basic military training, but with Philip urging ever-greater haste, recruits were now sent straight to the fleet in Lisbon or to Parma in Flanders. A force of Castilians recruited specifically for the invasion of England arrived much depleted by deaths and desertions during the route march along “the Spanish Road.”
On 31 January 1588, Parma complained to Philip about “both men and money having been delayed beyond the time your Majesty indicated and particularly the Spanish troops, who are the sinews of the whole business, the numbers moreover being less than those agreed upon. They have arrived after all, so dilapidated and maltreated that they do not look in the least fit for effectual service for some time. The Italians and Germans have dwindled very much in consequence of having marched so quickly in such bad weather; and in order to keep them near the points of embarkation, they are so badly housed that very many are missing.” Three weeks later he again wrote to the King. “The munitions are on board, the transport boats are collected at Dunkirk and Sluys and the men are concentrated near the ports ready for embarkation,” but the Armada did not appear. By March, “of the 28,000 or 30,000 I hoped to ship, in truth I cannot find now more than 17,000”—8,000 Germans and Walloons, 4,000 Spaniards, 3,000 Italians, 1,000 English exiles and 1,000 Burgundians. Even with the 6,000 reinforcements from the Armada, he warned that “I shall still have too few troops as the men here are dwindling daily.” He levied more Flemings, Walloons and Germans, but the new recruits barely kept pace with the losses to disease and desertion and the situation had improved little, if any, by the time the Armada finally arrived. With heavy sarcasm, Parma berated the endless delays—“Since God has been pleased to defer for so long the sailing of the Armada from Lisbon, we are bound to conclude that it is for His greater glory”—and the lack of secrecy that had led even the common soldiery in The Netherlands to talk of the coming invasion of England as if it was as certain as the march of the seasons. “The enemy have been forewarned and acquainted with our plans and have made all preparations for their defence, so that it is manifest that the enterprise, which at one time was so easy and safe, can only now be carried out with infinitely greater difficulty and at a much larger expenditure of blood and trouble.”14
Parma warned Philip that, “saving the favour of God, success mainly depends upon expenditure of money,” and that unless more was found to pay his forces, “we shall be face to face with a mutiny of the men and irreparable disorders, since the troops are of many nationalities. It may be that God desires to punish us for our sins by some heavy disaster.” By early June he was “almost in despair for want of money . . . without money we shall be ruined,” after Philip used the 670,000 ducats previously earmarked for Parma to meet the ever-rising costs of the Armada. On 20 July, with the Armada preparing to sail from Corunna, Parma again wrote begging for money. “We are on the eve of the execution of the task and yet at the last moment we may have to break up from sheer necessity . . . I beseech your Majesty not to think that there is any exaggeration in this, for it is simply the naked truth.” But the year’s revenues had already been spent and Philip had no more money to send him until the treasure fleet arrived, for Sixtus’s million ducats still remained out of reach. “His Holiness is firm in his determination not to disburse a crown until the news [of a successful landing] arrives.” “Cardinal Carrafa addressed him in terms that would have moved any other heart, but the Pope only shrugged his shoulders, for when it comes to getting money out of him it is like squeezing his life-blood.”15
Despite his money troubles, Parma had taken steps to secure Spain’s flanks in Flanders during the invasion of England. Land campaigns against the Dutch rebels had severed or threatened the river routes by which they launched raids into the interior, and the Meuse and much of the Ijssel valley were now under his control. However, German Protestant troops led by Casimir of the Palatinate offered a potential threat to Parma’s supply lines and the province of Brabant in the south of Flanders. The city of Bonn, in the Electorate of Cologne, no more than fifty miles from the frontier of Flanders, had been captured by Casimir’s troops the previous winter, and Philip ordered Parma to commit part of his forces to prevent the Catholic Elector of Cologne from being deposed and to protect the Rhine crossings from any Protestant advance. Parma launched a campaign against Neuss (near modern Düsseldorf), dominating the Rhine and controlling access to Cologne a few miles upriver. Neuss was duly taken amid terrible slaughter and the Rhine and Brabant secured. Franche-Comté, the Habsburg territory bordering the Alps in south-east France, was also vulnerable to attack by for
ces loyal to Henri III, cutting Parma’s lifeline from Italy and Spain. Yet more of Philip’s gold was expended in paying retainers to a force of German mercenaries who were on standby to fight, if needed, to protect Franche-Comté against a French attack.
Parma had now taken all the steps he could in this vulnerable region. The Dutch rebels’ raiding routes had been interdicted, fortifications on the French border had been strengthened, Franche-Comté protected and the northern Rhine secured, and even when the invasion force embarked for England, a garrison of 16,000 soldiers would remain in Flanders, supported by a mobile force of 10,000 foot and 1,000 cavalry, to guard against surprise attacks from any quarter. All he could do now was await the arrival of the Armada.
PART II
The Wall of England
CHAPTER EIGHT
Like Bears Tied to Stakes
Well before the end of 1587, the unprecedented scale of the huge fleet gathering in Lisbon had been impossible to conceal. Spanish disinformation hinted that an attack on England would only be a feint before an assault on the rebellious Dutch, but Englishmen such as Lord Henry Seymour, Admiral of the Narrow Seas, were not fooled. “As by the last year’s experience, he [Parma] made show for Ostend, and yet went to Sluys, so likewise now, he would busy our heads sometimes for Scotland, at other times for Ireland, otherwise for Norfolk or Suffolk, the more to blind our eyes by bending our forces those ways.” As fears of the Armada grew, English booksellers found a growing market for titles such as The Art of Shooting and The Most Excellent Method of Curing Wounds.
Philip’s grand stratagem was obvious to every interested observer, and in every capital of Europe there was gossip and conjecture about the Armada and the likely outcome of the impending battle. For all the logistical difficulties and the undoubted power of Elizabeth’s fleet, most dispassionate observers could foresee only an English defeat. The relentless tide of Spanish successes across the globe, the brilliance of Parma as a military commander, the power and savagery of the forces he commanded and the huge fleet of ships that Spain had assembled would surely be too much for England’s pirate navy and its semi-trained militia, commanded by an incompetent royal favourite. If Parma’s armies with their siege train could only be landed in England, they would encounter—or so it was widely believed—no forces capable of obstructing their march on the capital.
