by Neil Hanson
Within five years of the Armada, John Hawkins’s son Richard— “the compleat seaman,” who also designed a warm “gown” that seamen could wear over their other clothes in cold and wet conditions—was writing that “most fruitful for this sickness is sour oranges and lemons . . . a certain remedy for this infirmity,” but even when they could be supplied, fruits and “roots” (vegetables) were considered very inferior foodstuffs. The standard diet of the poor was heavily dependent on black bread, made from barley, wheat, rye or oats, and in times of shortage or poor harvests they ate bread made from “horse-corn” (beans, lentils and even acorns), but rich and poor alike believed that the only proper food for man was meat. English seamen were “so besotted in their beef and pork that they had rather adventure all the calentures [fevers] and scurvies in the world than to be weaned from their customary diet.” Coupled with the complacency, indifference and incompetence of the officers and administrators of the navy, this attitude ensured that the disease continued to claim lives for a further 250 years. Richard Hawkins also devised a “water still” capable of distilling potable water from seawater but, like the observation made by a merchant captain in 1572 that mosquito bites and malaria were connected, his discovery was ignored for centuries. Seamen continued to suffer and die from disease in far greater numbers than ever fell prey to enemy guns. Some 750 men, including some of Drake’s best captains, died of scurvy, yellow fever, dysentery and typhus on the voyage to the Spanish Main in 1585.
Malnutrition and even starvation were also frequent. The conditions on board ship, bad enough when at sea, were actually worse when men were confined to the ships in port. While beer in cask, often sour and fetid, was preferred when available—and large quantities of fluids were required with a diet of dry biscuit and salt-meat—water for drinking and all other purposes was often drawn from the harbour, polluted with all the filth and excrement garnered by the rivers that emptied into it and the towns that surrounded it. Voyages lasting months, or even years in the case of Drake’s circumnavigation, required seaworthy ships with powerful armaments, but they also had to be capable of sustaining their crews in good enough health to sail them. The narrow construction of the ships that made them fast and weatherly meant that they had little room for stores. Each man at sea was supposed to receive “for one flesh day [one of the four days per week when salt meat rather than fish was served], Biscuit 1 lb., Beer 1 gallon, Beef 2 lb. . . . On the fish day: Biscuit 1 lb., Beer 1 gallon, Butter ⁄ lb., Cheese ⁄ lb., Stockfish ⁄ fish,” but on every long voyage the men were routinely put on short rations to conserve supplies, six sharing the food of four.
Soldiers were able to plunder what they could “on the country” to augment their diet, but sailors remained on short rations or starved until fresh provisions were supplied. Despite being reprovisioned from the stores of captured ships and by food seized when ashore, seamen of one of the ships of Drake’s 1587 raid on Cadiz complained of “weak victualling and filthy drink . . . what is a piece of beef of half a pound among four men . . . or half a dry stockfish [and] a little beverage worse than the pump water?” The few victualling yards, breweries and naval stores that existed in England were incapable of producing huge quantities of supplies at short notice and, allied to the familiar combination of Crown parsimony and unpreparedness, it ensured that even the limited hold space in the English galleons remained unfilled. Elizabeth’s penny-pinching extended to the most trivial of items; “no oakum [the soft hemp fibres, like modern cotton waste, that had a multitude of uses aboard ships: cleaning, staunching leaks, protecting ropes from wear, etc.] is to be had but at the hands of such as [make] it of rotten ropes.” 21
If the quantities of provisions were inadequate, the quality was even worse. Elizabeth’s officials had forced down the price in real terms paid to contractors. A daily allowance of 4½d per man in harbour and 5d a day at sea in 1565 had been increased only to 6½d and 7d by the Armada year, during which time rampant inflation throughout Europe had caused the price of victuals to rise steeply. Beer and salt-beef had gone up by 50 per cent in a decade and stockfish had almost doubled in price. Even the new allowances were to be maintained only “until it shall please Almighty God to send such plenty as the high prices and rates of victual shall be diminished.” Contractors responded by salting the very cheapest cuts of meat, not necessarily beef, and including pieces of offal, bone and hoof, or meat that was already rotting before it was put into the cask. As the beer went sour, the biscuit became worm-eaten and the beef, fish and cheese rancid, food poisoning and dysentery joined ship’s fever in reaping a continual harvest of seamen. When even this food ran out, the men were reduced to eating rats, gnawing pieces of leather from belts and jerkins, or boiling straw in seawater for whatever nutrients it might contain.
The shorter supply lines of the English fleet when fighting in home waters should have conferred a considerable advantage, but, to save money, provisions were only issued a month at a time, greatly heightening the risk that commanders confronting the Armada might be forced to choose between starvation for their men and flight in the face of the enemy. Even worse, the orders for supplies of provisions were never issued more than one month ahead of time, even though it could take two months to assemble the victuals and then deliver them to the waiting ships. In April 1588, the Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, had warned “how necessary it is to have a better proportion of victual than for one month, considering the time and the service that is likely to fall out; and what danger it might breed if our want of victual should be at the time of service. We shall now be victualled, beginning the 20th of this April unto the 18th May . . . the likeliest time for the coming out of the Spanish forces is the midst of May, being the 15th, then we have three days victual. If it be fit to be so, it passes my reason.” The situation was not remedied, with the result that the fleet was again effectively immobilized from 26 June to 2 July and from 24 to 29 July. Had the Spaniards arrived off Plymouth during those periods, the English fleet would have been unable to pursue them for lack of provisions.
Gunpowder was also in desperately short supply, so scarce that musketeers for the militia were trained with “false fires” in which only the priming pan of the weapon was filled with powder; there would be a flash as it was ignited but the weapon would not fire. Attempts were made to reduce the naval custom of firing guns in salute of forts and other galleons and Elizabeth even criticized Drake for allowing his seamen to “waste” powder and shot in target practice, and cut back his supplies still further, leaving him with no more than enough for a day and a half’s fighting. “Powder and shot for our great ordnance in Her Majesty’s ships is but for one day and a half’s service . . . and but five lasts of powder [equivalent to six tons; one last was 2,400 pounds] for 24 sail of the merchant ships which will scant be sufficient for one day’s service . . . I beseech you to consider deeply of this, for it imports but the loss of all . . . such powder and munition as are delivered unto us for this great service, [are] just a third part of that which is needful; for if we should want it when we shall have most need thereof, it will be too late to send to the Tower for it.” Given that each cartridge for a cannon contained over twenty pounds of powder, it is easy to see why Drake was so concerned. In any event, the arsenal in the Tower had little powder available as its stocks had been allowed to deplete as yet another of Elizabeth’s cost-cutting measures.22
Throughout the winter Elizabeth’s commanders had urged her to order them to sea to strike another preventive blow against the Armada, just as Drake had done at Cadiz the previous summer. She did not respond, though in her defence it must be said that such an attack was not certain to succeed and the damage done to her ships and crews by storms, poor provisions and disease might have outweighed any advantage gained by a swift strike against the enemy. There was also the terrible fear that the Armada might already be at sea and could slip past her fleet unseen to arrive off the coast of an undefended England. However, on the strength of her delusi
on that peace might yet be at hand, Elizabeth ordered her fleet to be laid up at Chatham and the crews to be discharged.
Howard’s horrified warnings to her of the potential consequences grew less and less guarded as his frustration mounted. “I do warrant you our state is well enough known to them in Flanders, and as we were a terror to them at first coming out, so do they now make little reckoning of us; for they know that we are like bears tied to stakes, and they may come as dogs to offend us and we cannot go to hurt them. I have a good company here with me, so that if the Queen’s Majesty will not spare her purse, they will not spare their lives.” “Before these ships can have their full number of men again it will be a month to gather them, do what we can. And I pray to God we shall have them when we shall need.” “If the forces of Spain do come before the midst of April, there will be as much ado to have men to furnish us, as ever was; but men we must have or else the ships will do no good.” Howard’s complaints fell on deaf ears and some of Elizabeth’s finest ships continued to lie idle, uncanvassed and unsupplied. The cost of keeping a Queen’s galleon at sea was under £400 per month; a fleet of half a dozen galleons and their attendant pinnaces could therefore be kept at sea for less than £3,000 a month, but despite warnings that “the King of Spain does not keep any ship at home . . . sparing and war have no affinity together,” the Queen’s ships “shall be to keep Chatham Church [kept in reserve], when they should serve their turn abroad.” 23
CHAPTER NINE
The Advantage of Time and Place
With varying degrees of foreboding—for even Catholic governments had no appetite for further Spanish aggrandizement, and there were those in Prague, Venice and the Vatican praying that Philip might fail—Europe waited for the inevitable battle and the seemingly inevitable Spanish victory. And England was only the first link in the chain. If Elizabeth fell, the English fleet could then be used to blockade the Channel and North Sea approaches to The Netherlands, starving the Dutch rebels into submission. Encircled, Henri III of France would either have to submit entirely to Philip’s will or be crushed, and with the whole of western Europe under his control there would then be nothing to stop Philip’s forces moving eastwards and northwards, rolling up the Protestant princedoms, palatinates and cantons of Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia one by one.
Yet a moment’s rational thought should have shown that the idea of a successful Spanish conquest of England was a chimera. For thirty years Philip had been trying and failing to subdue a revolt in The Netherlands. How then, when even his fabulous wealth was already so mortgaged and over-committed, could he ever hope to subdue a country that if no more populous, was far larger, more powerful and, away from the South East, of far more difficult terrain? The Army of Flanders might fulfil the expectations of Catholic Europe and sweep into London, and Elizabeth might be deposed and her Council captured and killed, but much of England would remain unconquered, new leaders would emerge, and as summer faded into winter Spain would inevitably find itself mired in another protracted and probably unwinnable campaign.
Much of the western, eastern and northern fringes of Elizabeth’s realm remained wild and lawless territory. Armies of reavers and moss-troopers raided north and south of the Scottish border with virtual impunity, the moors and mountains of the North, Wales and the South West were populated by people of ferocious independence and tribal cohesion, and in the Fens men of “brutish, uncivilised tempers” still used stilts to traverse their near-impenetrable kingdom of meres and marshes. Such territories were ideal for guerrilla warfare and it is unlikely that Spain could ever have entirely eliminated English resistance. Any attempt to reduce or withdraw the Spanish garrison in England would have invited insurrection, but without reinforcement the massively reduced Army of Flanders would also have come under renewed Dutch assaults. Secure in the certainty of his divine mission, Philip seems never to have considered this catastrophic possibility. Yet neither do there seem to have been any English contingency plans for a strategic withdrawal from London in the event of a successful Spanish invasion. Whether Elizabeth intended to stand or fall with her troops as her later rhetoric at Tilbury claimed, or had a secret plan of staged retreats to redoubts in the Midlands, Wales or the North, or whether the idea of defeat was as inconceivable to her as it was to Philip, will never be known, but the die was now cast and all Europe awaited the outcome.
The year 1588 was already being heralded as a momentous “year of wonders,” as a result of an arcane prophecy based on the numerology of the Revelation of St. John. It identified the years 1588 and 1593 as the 5550th and 5555th since the Creation and claimed that there had been seven great cycles since the time of Christ. The previous cycle, the sixth, had ended in 1518, the year after Martin Luther had begun the great schism with the Catholic Church by nailing his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg. The final cycle was to culminate in 1588, heralded by an eclipse of the sun in February and two eclipses of the moon, one in March and one in August, presaging the opening of the seventh seal, the overthrow of the AntiChrist and the onset of the Last Judgement. Comets, tempests, floods and earthquakes, snow and hailstorms in summer, darkness at noon, monstrous births, even skies raining blood, were all proclaimed as portents of the terrible events to come. Some warned that “an utter and final overthrow, and destruction of the whole world shall ensue.” “If this year, total catastrophe does not befall, if land and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet will the whole world suffer upheavals, empires will dwindle and great lamentations will ensue.”
The prophecy by Cyprianus Leovitius, often incorrectly attributed to the fifteenth-century mathematician Johan Muller, known as Regiomontanus, was greatly feared throughout Europe, and most regarded the impending confrontation between the champions of the Catholic and Protestant religions as the portended conflict. Pope Sixtus received a report from England claiming that an earthquake had struck the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, exposing a marble slab on which the prophecy had been incised. The papal informant took this as proof that the English Crown was the one threatened by the prophecy, but there was no shortage of others willing to believe that the Spanish, French or other thrones could be at risk. In Prague, the Emperor Rudolf II, an obsessive astrologer who claimed lineal descent from the Roman Empire at the time of Christ, felt himself particularly threatened and was so distracted by the prophecy that Venetian spies reported that vital dispatches lay unread for weeks on his table and even Philip’s ambassador could not gain access to him. It was also reported that recruiting in the Basque region of Spain was becoming impossible “because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured,” and belief in the prophecy persisted despite denunciations of astrology and other superstitions from the pulpits of Spanish churches. As 1588 approached, desertions from the Armada fleet in Lisbon increased dramatically.1
In the Protestant countries too, particularly the rebel provinces of The Netherlands, the prophecy was reprinted and endlessly discussed. Some felt it portended doom for the “papist antichrist,” and the Protestant mystic James Lea saw a vision of the destruction of a giant born of a union between the devil and its mother, Pope Sixtus. The body was a swarm of priests, monks and Jesuits, the tail a rabble seeking spoil. “His arms thoroughly imbued with blood, his sword dyed red in the same, as though he had lately come from the slaughter of an infinite number of seely lambs and sheep . . . in the latter end of the year 1588, I found him dismembered, wounded, and humbled.”
Others were less sanguine, fearing that their own Protestant state and religion was the most threatened. Only in England were the almanacs relatively silent about the fateful prophecies. Elizabeth’s horoscope had been cast by the celebrated astrologer Dr. Dee, who discovered that the second of the year’s eclipses of the moon coincided with her ruling sign in the ascendant and came just twelve days before her birthday. The implications of such a portentous conjunction were obvious, but almanac writers were well aware that any attempt to suggest, even by the most indirect m
eans, that the Queen herself or her throne was in peril was high treason punishable by death. Even so, the prophecies were the common currency of tavern conversations, and every strange occurrence, from “a vast number of fleas collected together” on a window of the Queen’s Presence Chamber to “30 great fish commonly called porpoises” swimming up the Thames to the watergate of the Queen’s palace, was scrutinized for its significance. One of Mendoza’s English spies wrote to tell him that in the eastern counties there was talk that an old prophecy about soldiers conquering England with snow on their helmets would soon be fulfilled. In August 1587, rumours of a Spanish fleet of two hundred ships off the coast had sent people fleeing in droves and many of the rich decamped to London to escape the immediate danger. Elizabeth issued a proclamation compelling them to return to their country homes, but a further rumour in December that the Spanish fleet was already in the Channel again sent many of the inhabitants of coastal towns scurrying for safety inland, to her undisguised fury. 2
