The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Even loyal Englishmen were well aware that Elizabeth’s troops “were of no such force to encounter an Army like . . . the Prince of Parma should have landed in England,” and it was greatly feared “what the puissance and force of a gross army of trained soldiers can do against a number of raw men, unexperienced.” There was no standing army except for the Yeomen of the Guard and a garrison at Berwick, and the only battle-hardened troops Elizabeth possessed were of questionable loyalty. The 4,000 men recalled from the Netherlands campaign to defend the capital included many Catholics, and many of them were of Irish origin. The English garrison of Aalst in The Netherlands had laid down their arms to Parma in return for 45,000 ducats, and the treachery of Sir William Stanley and Rowland York at Deventer and Zutphen was still fresh in English minds. Even the indomitable warrior Sir Roger Williams had fought for Parma for several years during the 1570s.1

  Mercenaries had been widely used throughout the rest of Europe since the fifteenth century, but while Elizabeth had hired German troops to fight in The Netherlands and France, she had relied for her own defence, at least in part, on the creaking feudal system of summoning the nobles and gentlemen of each county with forces recruited from their retainers and tenants. The English militias had had some training during the 1560s and the scare of the Rising of the North in 1569 had prompted further efforts to create a defence force. In 1573 Elizabeth authorized training for some of the men at least notionally capable of taking arms. These “Trained Bands” were formed out of 182,929 men registered in musters held throughout England in 1575. In all, 2,835 cavalry and 11,881 foot soldiers received training, weapons and equipment, while a further 62,462 received equipment but no training. All London citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty were compelled to enrol in the Trained Bands and be ready to defend the Crown and the City, but musters there and elsewhere in the country were often patchily attended, despite payment for attendance and the carousing that often accompanied them. The training was also of questionable value. Sir George Carey in the Isle of Wight complained of “a band of men termed trained, who I find rather so in name than in deed.” Efficiency was further impaired by the difficulty of persuading gentlemen to accept orders from those of higher military rank but equal or lesser social standing, and by the tendency of the commanders of greater nobility or status to accumulate the largest forces.

  There were not enough weapons. Although English troops had first used cannon at the battle of Crécy in 1346, the great English victories, including Crécy, Agincourt in 1415 and Flodden Field in 1513, had been won primarily with the longbow, and it remained the preferred anti-personnel weapon well into the sixteenth century—the Mary Rose was carrying 250 bows and 4,000 armour-piercing arrows when it sank in 1545. Longbows had a pull of around 100 pounds, and archers, selected, nurtured and trained from an early age, developed a stature and upper-body strength far in excess of that of most of their peers. They formed a professional elite, hiring themselves out in bands as guards and garrisons in time of peace, and in combat they could maintain a rate of fire of six arrows a minute at a killing range of upwards of 200 yards.

  Firearms such as the arquebus, musket and pistol were introduced in the early sixteenth century, but were treated with great suspicion. They were expensive and forced England to depend on supplies of gunpowder from overseas, rather than the yew and ash trees growing in every parish, and at first it was by no means proven that they were better weapons than longbows. The first experiments of the London Trained Bands with muskets in the reign of Mary Tudor led many to “brake their pieces,” while others were wounded or suffered powder burns and the remainder were understandably inaccurate when firing them. “In times past the chief force of England consisted in their longbows. But now we have in manner generally given over that kind of artillery . . . the Frenchmen deriding our new archery . . . turn up their tails and cry ‘Shoot English!’ and all because our strong shooting is decayed and laid in bed.” Reloading muskets and arquebuses was a slow process, causing their rate of fire to remain slower than longbows, and they could not be used in wet weather because damp black powder would not ignite, but they had twice the range, a more lethal impact, and the thunder and flame of their discharge had a powerful psychological effect on the enemy. Musketeers and arquebusiers also required far less training than archers, and their weapons soon became more reliable and accurate and, by adopting a co-ordinated firing sequence like the rolling broadside of a ship, a continuous fire could be maintained.

  The longbow remained important during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign—football was banned because it distracted her subjects from archery practice, and as late as 1586 any able-bodied man in Somerset who could not produce a bow and four arrows ready for military use was liable to a fine—but it was steadily superseded. The “company of bowmen” that the Earl of Leicester took to The Netherlands in 1585 was the last to be deployed overseas, and levies raised to defend Ireland were ordered to surrender their bows and arrows and were issued with muskets instead. By 1590 Sir Roger Williams was writing, “God forbid we should try our bows with their muskets and calivers [a standardized form of the arquebus] . . . 500 musketeers are more serviceable than 1500 bowmen.” The tradition founded at Crécy and Agincourt had ended with the Armada.2

  However, the acceptance of firearms did not mean that they were universally available, and many militiamen continued to be issued with bows and arrows for want of any other weapons to give them. Out of 1,800 men mustered in Surrey, 300 were armed only with bows. The Kent militia of less than 1,700 men also included almost 600 archers, and only 400 of the 1,000 men sent from the county for the defence of London had any arms at all. Other counties were even worse provided. Cornwall was a poor county and could supply only 1,500 bows and 2,000 bills or halberds to arm its militia. The rest marched with only axes, hayforks or reaping hooks as weapons against Spanish muskets and cannon, and in one area of the county only eight of the 575 men had any weapon other than a reaping hook or a bow. The authorities in Lancashire and Cheshire went so far as to cheat the system by calling their practice musters at different times and lending each other all their weapons and armour, so that both could “pass muster” without buying any more equipment. Devon was particularly vulnerable to attack since Drake’s Western Fleet was based at Plymouth, and its militias were reasonably well armed, but as soon as the immediate crisis was past Plymouth recouped some of its expenses by selling its arms again; Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris “bought of the town calivers, muskets and pikes from the Island” (of St. Nicholas, now known as Drake’s Island). Those militiamen who did have muskets or arquebuses often lacked the “powder, match, lead” to use them, and by a piece of cheese-paring accounting that was bizarre even by Elizabethan standards, troops in combat were charged for the powder they used: the more they fired their weapons, the greater the deductions from their pay.

  The gunpowder weapons of the new age called for a matching revolution in logistics. In past times armies had marched to the wars carrying their swords, pikes, bows and arrows and foraging for food along the way, but now carts, heavy horses and oxen were needed to carry the guns, powder, shot and heavy equipment. Inventories were taken of every warlike supply in every county: powder and shot, pigeon cotes for saltpetre, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, cannons, muskets, pikes, swords and armour. The numbers of carts and beasts of burden and the names of blacksmiths and wheelwrights were also recorded, but there were few enough of them. On her royal progresses Elizabeth was often followed by a train of 400 six-horse wagons carrying the beds and furniture needed for herself and her retinue, but they moved at a snail’s pace, making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day, and there were few other wheeled vehicles anywhere. Men travelled on foot or on horseback, women and children in horse-litters, and packhorses or packmules were the principal means of carrying goods, save for a few carters’ wagons around London. The ability to move troops, guns, equipment and supplies to confront an invader was therefore ve
ry limited. The marshal of the Somerset militia complained that his men carried their armour in sacks or piled it in carts, “very hurtful to the armour by bruising or breaking thereof,” and when they arrived at their destination there was often such a rush to put on the armour that “little men do put on great or tall men’s armour and leave little men’s armour unfit for great men to put on.” In any event, armour offered no real protection against firearms, though it continued to be worn for psychological reasons. 3

  The equipment that the Trained Bands did possess was also constantly being depleted. Every time levies were raised to join the English forces in The Netherlands, the arsenals of the Trained Bands were raided to equip them, but shortages were caused as much by the venality of the officers and their men as by the poverty and stinginess of the Crown. They took every opportunity to enrich themselves, not only by the traditional false accounting and pocketing of others’ pay, but also by selling equipment on the thriving black market. The scarcity was duly noted by Spanish agents. “One of the greatest peers of Spain did solemnly utter in no obscure place that it should be an easy matter in short time to conquer England because it wanted armour [i.e., arms].”

  As the militias went through their rudimentary training, hasty repairs were begun to coastal fortifications. Beaches and other potential landing sites in England and Ireland, where the coast of Galway was surveyed in preparation for the construction of earthworks, were embanked and lined with sharpened stakes. Trenches were dug and earth banks thrown up as crude defenceworks—those on the Isle of Wight were eight feet wide and four feet high and were to be manned by musketeers to “give some terror to the enemy on landing.” Gun platforms were also constructed, though not all could afford guns to mount on them. The Mayor of Weymouth complained, “to our very great charge we have built a platform for some defence of this town and country, at this instance not furnished with needful ordnance by reason of our poverty,” and Sir George Carey, governor of the vital defences of the Isle of Wight, one of the most likely sites for a landing by the Armada, had just four mounted guns, no firing platform and only one day’s gunpowder.

  There were no guns to spare even though the foundries of the Weald of Kent and Sussex and the Forest of Dean were casting cannon and shot without cease, belching out columns of black smoke day and night and burning charcoal so fast that the once-dense forests around them were “marvellously wasted and decayed; and . . . will in short time be utterly consumed.” Every cannon was reportedly taken out of the Tower of London, “even the pieces which were mounted on the White Tower,” to equip the fleet or the coastal fortifications, and some were even bought or borrowed from private citizens. Richard Hawkins supplied Plymouth with “four demi-culverins and three sakers” and, after the Armada crisis was over, John Capelin of Southampton reclaimed from “Mr. Mayor and his brethren one piece of brass ordnance, which I lent . . . at such time the Spaniards were upon the coast.” 4

  Preparations were made to demolish bridges and flood sections of road, and some of those not recruited into the militia were organized to drive off pack animals, cattle and other livestock, remove carts and waggons that might be used by the Spaniards, and destroy crops “that rather the corn may be burnt and spoiled than left to their use,” “so as no victuals remain to them but such as they shall carry on their backs, which will be small.” Detailed instructions were issued to each county commander specifying the strongpoints to be held, the bridges to be destroyed, the places where provisions were to be stored and livestock held, and what local landmarks would serve as rendezvous points for retreating English troops.

  The old chains of beacons were re-established so that when the Armada was sighted, the news could be passed along the coast and far inland. The Romans had used line-of-sight signalling to communicate between their military headquarters at York and their forts on Hadrian’s Wall, and beacons had long been constructed on the same vantage points to warn of the approach of border raiders from Scotland. A chain of thirty-one beacons had been used to protect the Isle of Wight since 1324, and Henry VIII’s men had lit beacon fires to summon loyal troops to assist the crushing of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. The same network of beacons—Devon alone had fifty—was now brought back into use once more. Braziers were erected on every prominent hill and crag, from Carn Brae within sight of Penzance to Berwick on the Scottish border, and each was supplied with stockpiles of brushwood, pitch, flint and match to light them, and paid watchers to man them. While men stalked the sea cliffs of Cornwall, seeking the first sight of the Armada, other watchers stood on Beachy Head, Dungeness, the chalk cliffs of Dover, the South and North Forelands and the wooded hills above the Medway, scanning the horizon for any sign that might herald an invasion fleet from Flanders. The Thames approaches were patrolled by coast watchers on land and by watermen threading their boats through the mudbanks and low grassy islands flanking the shores. The French ambassador reported that “no foreign vessel can show itself without the whole country being roused.” 5

  As the threat of the Armada grew, a force was raised from the retainers of the nobility, bishops and privy counsellors to form a personal guard for Elizabeth herself, further depleting the Trained Bands, since many, probably the majority, were summoned from them to serve instead with their lord, but gentleman volunteers bringing with them their tenants and dependants were no longer sufficient to raise armies, and increasingly troops were also recruited through levies and forced conscription. The “tentacles of the press spread ever wider” and vagrants, the unemployed and convicts were swept into the land forces, until their desertion rate and dismal quality forced a rethink. In general the “enthusiasm for military service, never great, diminished in direct proportion to the demands made upon them.” Desertion was frequent, with service in Ireland so dreaded that men would “venture any imprisonment” rather than serve there, but captains rarely recorded desertions, since they continued to draw the pay for those nominally on their muster roll. Many captains also profited from desertions in other ways: some at Tilbury were accused of charging men £5 to allow them to buy themselves out of service and many soldiers were willing accomplices. “They will either be hiring of men in their places or else bribing to get themselves released.” Graft also led to frauds in pay, rations, powder and shot. Soldiers’ nominal pay was around eightpence per day, but even when their captain had not appropriated all or part of it, paydays were erratic and most soldiers were in permanent arrears.

  Apart from the 10,000 or so troops centred on London to protect the Queen, a theoretical total of 2,500 cavalry and 27,000 infantry were available to defend the South Coast. A further 12,500 would assemble at Tilbury in Essex, and smaller contingents from East Anglia and northern England would guard the coasts north of Harwich and stand ready to counter any invasion by the Scots. The actual number and quality of men who would appear when the beacons were lit was another question entirely; there were probably no more than a few thousand under arms at any point of the Armada campaign. A notional total of 6,000 Cornish men stood ready to march to the defence of Arwenack (Falmouth) or Plymouth at the lighting of the beacons, but, according to one observer, they were “the roughest and most mutinous men in England, and during hay-time and harvest in particular, the seasons when the Armada was most likely to appear off the coast, perhaps as many as half might have refused to answer a call to arms.”6

  With typical Elizabethan thrift, the counties were also required to bear the cost of their own defence. For understandable reasons, those counties with a sea coast were quicker to raise funds and forces than those inland. Lord North reported to the Privy Council that for “nice and curious reasons which might have been forborne in this time of special service,” many Cambridgeshire JPs had refused to supply mounted troops and many of the members of the Trained Bands had failed to appear, though whether that was through death, disease or disinclination was not revealed. The old feudal obligations to serve under arms were invoked and at least one Lord Lieutenant, Sir Henry Cromw
ell, uncle of the future Lord Protector, was moved to remind copy-holders in his county that failure to comply would entail forfeiture of their land. Cromwell roused Huntingdonshire by the force of his own example, summoning strong young men “to supply the defects of the former Trained Bands and to take place of those less fit for the service.” Once more, there were few weapons and some had only “rusty bills and bows.” Cromwell at once appealed to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord St. John, to make good the deficiencies in weaponry and ordered all his men to prepare and man the warning beacons, silence and incarcerate all those spreading defeatist rumours, and be ready to march at an hour’s notice.

  Despite these attempts to improve England’s defences, the country appeared to stand ripe for invasion. The key South Coast harbours were defended by castles and gun batteries, though in the case of Portsmouth at least, half the gunners manning them were “by age and impotency by no ways serviceable,” but beyond these questionable strongpoints were hundreds of miles of barely defended coastline in England and Wales, let alone the perennially troublesome Ireland and Scotland. There were many ports, harbours and beaches where an invasion force could disembark, much of the surrounding land was rich and fertile, and in summer troops could forage for their supplies easily enough. Kent in particular was “the key of all England . . . fertility, wood, pasture, cattle, fish, fowl, rivers, havens.” Lanes and hollow ways wound between hay meadows, orchards heavy with fruit and fields of vegetables and ripening corn; pigs rooted for windfall acorns and beechmast in the cool shade of dense woodland, and cows and sheep grazed the downs and the sun-dappled pastures. The roads, often impassable because of mud and standing water in winter, were adequate in summer and although the new fashion of hedgerows to enclose land was beginning to spread, much of England was still open country and easy to traverse. There were few other barriers to an invader. Even supposing the inhabitants of London showed any stomach for a fight, the medieval city walls were crumbling and ruinous, and there were few fortifications, including the Tower, stout enough to repel or even delay a Spanish invasion force. 7