by Neil Hanson
Whoever was leading the attack, the English ships succeeded at once in isolating and pounding one of the royal galleons of Portugal, the San Mateo. It was too small and lightly armed to sustain the assault for long and, though the San Francisco manoeuvred to protect it, the whole seaward wing of the Armada was being battered and driven back. “After wonderful sharp conflict, the Spaniards were forced to give way and to flock together like sheep” around the San Martin. “There was never seen a more terrible value of great shot, nor more hot fight than this was.” “The shot continued so thick together that it might rather have been judged a skirmish with small shot on land than a fight with great shot on sea.” The relentless attack on the seaward wing, augmented by the continuing assaults from the squadrons of Howard and Frobisher, was compressing the Armada’s defensive formation to the point of collapse and pushing it into dangerous waters. Past Bembridge Foreland the Armada ships were now met by the ebb tide flowing out from St. Helen’s Roads, and wind and tide were combining to drive them away from their objective and closer to the perilous rocks and shallows of the Owers Bank, stretching miles out to sea off Selsey Bill.
The English fleet had tried the same manoeuvre against the French in 1545 and only a change in the wind had saved the French from catastrophe. Now the quick reactions of his pilots rescued Medina-Sidonia. The shoal water was clearly visible and the jagged tips of black rocks broke the surface like shark fins. If the battle had been sustained for a few more minutes the Armada might have been driven onto them, but, apprised by his pilots of the danger, Medina-Sidonia fired a signal gun to break off hostilities, then put on sail and headed south-south-east, with the rest of his fleet in pursuit. One eyewitness remarked that after seeing victory snatched from him by a hair’s breadth when the Triumph slipped the noose being drawn around it, Medina-Sidonia had saved the Armada from disaster by no greater margin. “If the Duke had not gone about with his flagship, instead of conquerors that we were, we should have come out vanquished that day.” 6
However, by steering clear of the danger of the shoals, he was also sailing away from his last possible refuge on the English coast. He would find no safe anchorage at all among the shallows and sea cliffs of the Sussex and Kent coasts stretching away into the haze. The English attacks had forced him to abandon the plan agreed with his commanders “to proceed as far as the Isle of Wight and no further” until word had been received that Parma’s invasion troops were assembled and ready. The Armada was now left on the open seas, at the mercy of the elements and the English fleet, lacking a base, a bridgehead or even a haven, its water, provisions and munitions dwindling, and with no certainty that when it reached its destination Parma’s forces would be ready to embark.
There must have been cheers from the English troops and spectators lining the cliffs of the Isle of Wight and Selsey Bill as they saw the immediate danger receding and the Armada sailing on out of sight of shore. One of the militiamen watching at Selsey had even taken time to get married that day “in sight of the Armada,” departing from his troop just before the service and returning immediately afterwards. The church bells were said to be still sounding as the Spaniards were sighted off the Brill Point.
As the Armada passed from his sight, Sir George Carey at once ordered the camp at Carisbrooke to be struck and the men stood down, while beacons flared further up the coast to summon the militias of Sussex to their mustering points. Meanwhile the English ships again took up their dogged pursuit but made no effort to re-engage the Armada, for they had now expended “a great part of our powder and shot, so as it was not thought good to deal with them any more till that was relieved.” Elizabeth’s continuing parsimony had ensured that Howard’s desperate appeals for supplies of munitions were answered only in part, if at all, and Walsingham complained that “for want of powder and shot, he [Howard] shall be forced to forbear to assail and to stand upon his guard until he shall be furnished.” The scarcity in the nation’s chief arsenal, the Tower, was so severe at one point that there was “but five last of powder, and if I shall take out (as I must of force) so much as I have sent unto my Lord Admiral, there would none be left.” Elizabeth’s ministers were now instructed to make belated enquiries about obtaining additional supplies of powder from overseas, and Edward Burnham, one of Walsingham’s agents in The Netherlands, reported to his master that “there is no great quantity [of powder] to be had here, but the greatest store . . . is in Amsterdam. By some of our merchants I do understand that there is good quantity at Hamburg and Stade and better cheap than in these parts,” but if any was purchased, none reached the fleet in time.7
The garrisons and towns of the South Coast did their best to fill the gap—“men, powder, ships and victuals” issued from every port. “All this day and Saturday . . . the Spaniards were always before the English army like sheep, during which time the justices of peace near the sea coast, the Earl of Sussex, Sir George Carey, and the captains of the forts and castles along the coast, sent us men, powder, shot, victuals and ships to aid and assist us.” “John Holford of Heeth from the town of Southampton” supplied sixteen barrels of powder and “twenty hundredweight of shot and one hundred of match.” Two shillings were spent by the mayor “for carrying down to the quay of the powder and shot,” and Holford was paid £3 19s 2d by the mayor “for his boat, himself & his men with their victuals and charges in going to my Lord Admiral at two several times.” When the Earl of Sussex, the Governor of Portsmouth, received Howard’s plea for powder and shot at six the next morning, he at once sent off his entire supply, earning himself a reprimand from the Queen and several months of disgrace at Court for his profligacy—but with the exception of the stores kept in the shore batteries guarding the harbours, there were precious few cannonballs to be had.
The towns sent what they could, even down to plough-chains and broken pieces of scrap iron. Fired from a cannon at point-blank range, this improvised ammunition could cause carnage among a ship’s crew, but to operate at such close range was an invitation to boarding, the one thing the English were determined to avoid. Meanwhile, in the absence of adequate supplies of provisions and munitions, Elizabeth, like Philip, sought divine support. In early August, the Privy Council ordered bishops and pastors to say “public prayers to Almighty God, the giver of victories, to assist us against the malice of our enemies,” and lest this was ignored, the Council also required the Archbishop of Canterbury “to order Parsons to get people to pray against the Spaniards” and to preach on the need for the nation to unite against the invaders. “Every man’s particular state is in the highest degree to be touched, in respect of country, liberty, wife, children, lands, life and (that which is to be especially regarded) for the profession of the true and sincere religion.” Church sermons were the prime means of communication with the population as a whole, and to ensure her message was heard by everyone Elizabeth issued orders that the laws requiring every citizen to attend church were to be rigidly enforced.8
Despite another apparently inconclusive battle, Howard was in jubilant mood, hailing the day’s action as a great victory. His good humour would only have been improved by the news brought out of Le Havre by the captain of a French ship. The greatest English fear had been that France might be persuaded to join the Catholic crusade against England, but the captain assured his interrogators that the French fleet showed no sign of being readied for sea. As night fell, thunder rolled around the sky and flashes of lightning lit up the darkness. If it was an ill omen, the Spaniards had much greater cause for concern.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Resolved There to Live and Die
The following morning, 5 August, as the wind again dropped, becalming the fleet, Howard knighted John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, the remarkable George Beeston—commanding the Dreadnought at the age of eighty-nine—and several of his own relatives, including Lord Thomas Howard and Lord Sheffield, on the deck of the Ark, “in reward for their good services in these former fights.” It has often been suggested that this
can only have been for public show, boosting the morale of his men before the great battle to come, rather than a realistic reflection of his mood, but that is to overlook the success of the strategy the English commanders had adopted. Their primary aim was to prevent Medina-Sidonia from securing a base or an anchorage on the English coast. They had dogged the Armada eastwards, merely tracking it past coastlines that were unsuitable for a landing but ready to launch attacks on the approaches to each potential haven—Plymouth, Torbay, Portland and the Isle of Wight. The Armada had now been driven beyond its last possible refuge. Most of the Spanish ships could not sail into the wind, and would not dare to attempt it with the English fleet holding the weather gauge, so that only an east wind, a great rarity in the Channel in summer, would now allow the Armada to return and threaten the South Coast. Howard still faced the problem of preventing the conjunction of the Armada with Parma’s forces, but he would be strengthened in that battle by Seymour’s Squadron of the Narrow Seas, giving him the advantage of numbers. He and his commanders were right to celebrate their success, but it was by no means the decisive point in the war and his private thoughts must have remained at least a little troubled. His fleet had now fought three major battles, each one more sustained in terms of powder and shot expended than any before them in the history of naval warfare, but still the Armada remained apparently impregnable.
Although many of the Englishmen had privateering experience on the Spanish coast and the Spanish Main, it had not fully prepared them for this kind of sustained sea battle, using tactics that were completely novel, and if their guns were more powerful and quick-firing, they were still struggling to achieve sufficient accuracy and impact. William Thomas, a master gunner of Flushing, argued that even the trained gunners were far from masters of their craft. If “Her Majesty’s ships had been manned with a full supply of good gunners when the Spanish fleet came through the Narrow Seas . . . it would have been the woe-fullest time or enterprise that ever the Spaniard took in hand, and not otherwise to be thought or doubted of but that the most noblest victory by the sea that ever was heard of would have fallen to Her Majesty. What can be said but our sins was the cause that so much powder and shot spent and so long time in fight, and in comparison thereof, so little harm.” There was no point, Thomas argued, “furnishing of them plentifully with great and forcible ordnance” if the gunners firing it were the product of “blind exercise and unskilful teaching.” However, his criticisms would carry more weight had he not been promoting his claims to be employed as a gunnery instructor to the Queen’s navy at the time.
The English had so far either been too afraid of the Spanish guns or had overestimated the power and impact of their own weapons. At the range of between 200 yards and half a mile at which much of the fighting had taken place, few guns could pierce the massive oak walls of a galleon or an armed merchantman, and the damage that did occur was quickly repaired by ship’s divers and carpenters staunching the holes with timbers, ox hides, lead sheets, sailcloth, oakum, pitch and “tallow and coals mixed together, and in some cases (when the leak is very great) pieces of raw beef, oatmeal bags and the like stuff.” The example of the attack on the Gran Grifon demonstrated the obvious solution: to close the range still more, to the point where the great shot of the English cannons, and particularly the lighter but much higher velocity shot from the culverins, would be able to batter and pierce the Spanish hulls beyond the ability of any diver or carpenter to repair them. The equally obvious risk of suffering equivalent damage to their own ships would now have to be taken if a final defeat was to be inflicted upon the Armada.1
Medina-Sidonia’s state of mind must have been much less happy than that of Howard. There was now no harbour available to him without turning back to the west, into the prevailing wind, a situation painfully familiar to one of his commanders, Martin de Bertendona, who had led a fleet bringing troops and supplies to The Netherlands in 1572, only to find that the Dutch Sea Beggars had seized Flushing, leaving no deep-water port available to him. The harbours held by Parma in Flanders were too shallow for the Armada to enter and the governors of the French Channel ports were unlikely to risk the wrath of their king by making their harbours available to the ships of his arch-enemy.
There was one friendly haven that could have accommodated the Armada: the Scheldt river, below Antwerp, but to reach it the Spaniards would have needed Flemish pilots—the channel to the Scheldt, the Wielingen, was narrow and difficult and extended miles out to sea, between sprawling sandbanks—and they would also have had to run the gauntlet of the English and Dutch blockade and the guns of the garrison at Flushing. They might have done so without serious losses, though they would have had to enter in single or double file and the Dutch flyboats would have had free rein to attack the hulks and other vulnerable ships and then retreat out of gun range over the sandbanks where no Armada ships, perhaps not even the galleasses, could have followed. But once inside the Scheldt they would have been trapped, unable to emerge again without being picked off one by one by the waiting English and Dutch fleets. It is even arguable that if the English fleet had been defeated by the Armada, the Dutch on their own would still have been powerful enough to prevent Parma’s invasion force from ever emerging from harbour. Had they done so, the Dutch would have cut them to pieces in the shallows, while the Armada waited impotently in the deep water miles offshore. However, one other intriguing possibility remains. Had the Armada made a feint towards England and then entered the Scheldt to reinforce Parma’s troops, the Dutch land forces, without the support of the 3,000 English troops withdrawn to defend England, might well have been defeated. With The Netherlands subdued, the Sea Beggars would have had to surrender or disperse and the Enterprise of England could then have been relaunched from the Scheldt.
Medina-Sidonia had been guilty of exaggerating to his commanders—and perhaps to himself—the extent of the damage inflicted on the opposing fleet, but he must have known the truth in his heart. The Spanish guns and the men who operated them were far inferior to their English counterparts. Few Spanish gunners were trained to fight at sea, and their personal defects were matched by those of their equipment; poorly cast weapons, variably sized charges and cannonballs and poorly designed gun-carriages made both their accuracy and their rate of fire abysmal. Medina-Sidonia remained unable to close with and board the English ships, he had no safe haven, his manpower, powder, shot, food and water were sorely depleted and, unlike the English, he had no friendly coast from which he could obtain fresh supplies.
His only hope of succour was now Parma, and that night and again the following morning he sent messages to Dunkirk with Captain Pedro de Leon and the pilot Domingo Ochoa, urging Parma to be ready to join forces with him, and appealing for cannonballs of all sizes but especially four-, six- and ten-pound shot for the lighter guns that were capable of being reloaded under battle conditions. He also begged Parma to send him “40 flyboats to join with this Armada, so that we might be able to close with the enemy, because our ships being very heavy in comparison with the lightness of those of the enemy, it was impossible to come to hand-stroke with them.” It was a bizarre reversal; the great Armada that was supposed to sweep the Channel clear of the English fleet and protect the invasion force as it made the crossing was now appealing to Parma for protection. Medina-Sidonia can have had little realistic hope that supplies would arrive in time; Don Rodrigo Tello had not returned, and no word of any sort had been received from Parma during the entire voyage up the Channel. He now had no option but to transfer supplies from the hulks to the fighting ships, refilling at least some of the stores of powder and shot, and “proceed cautiously” towards the rendezvous, but if the invasion force was not embarked and ready to sail when he arrived, the Armada would be in great peril.
At sunset on the Friday, “the wind rose, whereupon our Armada pursued its course,” past Cap Gris-Nez, reaching Calais Roads late on the afternoon of the following day, Saturday 6 August. Medina-Sidonia’s local pilots argued v
ery strongly against sailing any closer to Dunkirk, for fear that the flood tide and freshening wind would sweep the fleet through the straits and into the North Sea, putting it in peril of the shallows and shoals that littered the coast. Calais Roads was far from an ideal anchorage but it was the best now available, and it was no more than seven leagues—twenty-one miles—from Dunkirk and the rendezvous with Parma. Some of Medina-Sidonia’s officers had already decided that the Armada had failed and they urged him to set sail for Spain, taking the long route around Scotland and Ireland, but he dismissed such defeatism out of hand. “The two fleets were very near to each other, though without firing,” and when Medina-Sidonia’s signal gun thundered the entire Armada “came all upon a sudden to anchor,” “purposing that our [English] ships, with the flood, should be driven to leeward of them,” losing the weather gauge, but the response of the English commanders was immediate. They also struck sail and dropped anchor with commendable speed and discipline, and the two fleets rode the swell together “against Scales Cliffs” within long gun range of each other.2
