by Neil Hanson
The fireships at either end of the line were successfully intercepted and diverted harmlessly onto the shore, but as the next reached the screen, its guns began to explode in the searing heat and “flared up with such fierceness and great noise as were frightful.” Shot blasted in all directions and flaming fragments were scattered among the pinnaces and small boats. The defensive screen disintegrated in panic as the crews of each boat fought to save themselves. As they did so, the remaining fireships swept past them on the tide, closing at terrible speed on the great ships of the Armada. The fireships were now engulfed in flame from the waterline to the very tips of their masts and there were deafening explosions as their guns detonated, “spurting fire and their ordnance shooting,” blasting out fresh hails of shot and burning fragments, and adding to the terror that greeted them, “a horror to see in the night.” Sparks and embers lodged in the rigging and sails of Spanish ships and drifted to the decks, and panic-stricken men scrambled to extinguish each one before fire could take hold. The signal gun from the flagship was superfluous: the ships of the Armada were already under way, manoeuvring to find space and searoom to escape the perilous confines of the bay for the open sea, or simply cutting and running north-east before the wind and tide.
However, the elation of the watching Englishmen must soon have given way to something close to despair, for, as the blazing fireships swept on through the close-packed Armada, there were no answering flames. Somehow each one contrived to burn its way through the heart of the Armada without igniting a single Spanish vessel, and one by one they came to a halt on the Calais shore, where they continued to burn, casting a hellish light over the sea. Outlined against the glow of the fires, more and more of the Spanish ships could be seen putting out to sea and disappearing into the darkness of the night. It was impossible to tell if they had left in confusion or in disciplined order; that would be discernible only in the light of dawn. The Englishmen must have gone to their brief night’s rest uncertain whether the chance to destroy the Armada had slipped from their grasp but in fact, unseen in the darkness, many of the Armada commanders had come close to panic as the fireships bore down upon them. Petrified by fear that hell-burners were loose among them, “that forest of ships and vast galleons, tumultuously cutting their cables, ran away in a shameful confusion” and, instead of slipping and buoying them, “left their anchors in the sea.” Even the King’s own representative, Diego Flores de Valdes, had shouted orders to cut the arm-thick cables, and on ship after ship seamen with axes hacked at them. Already taut as bow-strings from the pull of the tide, they snapped with the sound of gunshots, causing the loss “by report of some of them that were afterwards taken, of 100 or 120 anchors and cables.” Even that seems a considerable underestimate; since almost all the Armada ships had at least two anchors out to hold them in the shifting sands against the pull of the currents, as many as 200 may still lie rusting in the mud beneath the Calais cliffs.4
The crews worked with desperate haste to save their ships. They had all been lying head to wind, and they had to scramble aloft, set sails to bring the bows around, then endure what must have seemed an eternity as they slowly swung first broadside on to the tide and the onrushing fireships, and finally came around enough to put the wind astern. The crewmen once more leaped to the task of resetting the sails, as the helmsmen searched for a course clear of the mêlée of ships around them. As more and more ships shook out their sails and gathered speed downwind, fleeing into the night, Medina-Sidonia dispatched the Prince of Ascoli in a fast pinnace after them, to urge them to reform in the open water and await their Captain General. It was a near-impossibility without anchors, but in any event few heeded him; most minds were filled only with the thought of escape. By daylight Ascoli found himself abandoned and as the English fleet bore down he was forced to flee into Calais for safety, never to rejoin the Armada.
The panic and the impossibility of manoeuvring so many ships in such a confined space in a darkness broken only by the red glare of the burning fireships also “caused the Spaniards . . . confusedly to drive one upon another, whereby they were not only put from their road-stead and place where they meant to attend the coming of the Duke of Parma, but did much hurt one to another.” In the general confusion, the San Lorenzo, the flagship of the galleasses, “came entangled with the San Juan de Sicilia, ” fouled its rudder and mainmast, “and so damaged herself that she had to remain near the shore.” Drifting helpless, the rudder damaged beyond repair, the San Lorenzo was pushed by the tide and the ever-strengthening wind towards the cliffs. The majority of the Armada ships were swept clear of the straits and driven north-east towards the shoals and sandbanks of the coast of Flanders, but their flagship and a handful of galleons were not among them. The San Martin beat out to sea a short way but then sailed back almost at once, dropping a sheet anchor within a mile of the original anchorage. The San Juan, the San Marcos, the San Felipe and the San Mateo were alongside her but, as dawn broke, these five were the only Armada ships visible in the whole vast sweep of ocean, apart from the crippled San Lorenzo, still drifting closer and closer to the Calais cliffs. The foreshore was littered with the smouldering remnants of the fireships— “the fire continued until the hulls were reduced to embers.” Although they had burned no Spanish ships, it was now evident that the eight fireships had done what the entire English fleet had previously been unable to achieve, for the once immaculate formation of the Armada had been scattered to the winds.5
As soon as there was light, Lord Howard ordered a signal gun fired and trumpets sounded across the water. As one, the English fleet hauled in anchors and piled on sail, 150 ships in hot pursuit of a suddenly vulnerable enemy, but with notable self-effacement—or calculation—Lord Howard ceded to Sir Francis Drake the honour of leading the attack. It had been “resolved the day before my Lord Admiral should give the first charge, Sir Francis Drake the next and myself [Seymour] the third; it fell out that the galleass distressed, altered my Lord’s former determination, as I suppose, by prosecuting the destruction of her,” and instead of pursuing the Armada, Howard led a handful of ships in an assault on the rudderless San Lorenzo. Don Hugo de Moncada was at last to get his wish; he was to fight the English Admiral. The galleass made desperate attempts to reach the harbour but, struggling through heavy surf against an ebbing tide, she was driven aground under the ramparts of Calais Castle. The galley slaves screamed for help, pounding impotently at their chains and manacles as the ship heeled over under the assaults of the surf, burying her starboard cannons in the mud and drowning some of the slaves at their oars, while the guns on the port side pointed uselessly at the sky.
The galleass had a much shallower draught than the English galleons and they could not get within cannon range for fear of grounding themselves. Indeed, the Margaret and John “approached so near that we came on ground also, but afterwards came safely off again with the flood, being damaged by nothing but by the town of Calais, who off the bulwarks [of the castle], shot very much at us and shot our ship twice through.” Howard sent his longboat to the attack, captained by his lieutenant, Amyas Preston, “with 50 or 60 men, amongst whom were many gentlemen as valiant in courage as gentle in birth” and eager for a taste of action. They were joined by a pinnace from the grounded Margaret and John and a number of other small boats, but they were met with a hail of small-arms fire from the decks of the stricken galleass. The Englishmen were in a perilous position, “they being ensconced within their ship and very high over us, we in our open pinnaces and far under them, having nothing to shroud and cover us; they being 300 soldiers besides 450 slaves and we not at the instant 100 persons,” though one anonymous Spanish agent reported that so many of the crew jumped overboard and fled that “not more than fifty men stood by the captain to defend the ship.” Several of Howard’s men “were slain and my lieutenant sore hurt” and the firing continued until Moncada was “killed by a small shot of a musket that pierced both his eyes.” At this, his men began to break and run. The su
rviving galley slaves also made frantic attempts to escape as the English seamen swarmed aboard, clambering up the ship’s sides and entering through the gunports. “Many [Spaniards] were there slain by the sword,” the remainder “leaped overboard by heaps on the other side and fled with the shore, swimming and wading. Some escaped with being wet, some, and that were many, were drowned,” “but some were saved by swimming into the haven of Calais.”6
Over the next two hours the victorious Englishmen set to work to strip the ship of everything of value, including the pay chests of gold and silver bullion. “Then was everything movable taken away, and such part of the King’s treasure as was therein,” “each man seeking his benefit of pillage,” while awaiting the turn of the tide to retrieve the ship and its cannon as well. They made a rich haul—a total of 22,000 ducats in coin as well as 14 chests of other valuables. The inhabitants of Calais watched from the shore, making no attempt to intervene until Gourdan sent two noblemen in a boat to negotiate. His message, relayed to Richard Tomson, the lieutenant of the Margaret and John and one of the leaders of the boarding party, was that “our prowess and manhood showed . . . we had well deserved the spoil and pillage of the galleass,” but the San Lorenzo had gone aground on French soil and by the rules of war both the ship and its cannon were now Gourdan’s.
Tomson told the men that they would have to negotiate with Lord Howard, “who was here in person nearby, from whom they should have an honourable and friendly answer,” but as they departed, “some of our rude men who make no account of friend or foe, fell to spoiling the Frenchmen, taking away their rings and jewels as from enemies, whereupon going ashore and complaining, all the bulwarks and ports were bent against us and shot so vehemently that we received sundry shot very dangerously through us . . . and made us relinquish the galleass . . . which we had gotten with bloody heads.” The ship was left “without value, which our men would have burnt, if the governor of Calais had not prevented them,” but they did at least ensure that it was so badly holed that it would never float again, and it rotted where it lay on the mud below the castle walls. The greatest and most powerful galleass of all had been lost to the Armada but the looting and destruction had kept the English flagship and its squadron out of the battle for several crucial hours. Like Drake in the early hours of the previous Monday, Howard had also put the chance of plunder above the strategic interests of his sovereign’s fleet, and more Englishmen had died in this single engagement than in all the rest of the fighting during the Armada campaign, including around twenty drowned “on account of the hurry in which they regained their boats,” as they abandoned the San Lorenzo.7
Howard’s squadron now piled on sail and raced to join the main battle, but while the Admiral and his men had been filling their pockets—or losing their lives—his Vice-Admiral, “seizing the occasion by the forelock,” had led the assault on the scattered Armada. Medina-Sidonia and his group of ships had sailed downwind after his errant vessels, hoping that the tide, now running in the opposite direction, would help to bring the fleet back together, while Drake’s Revenge, driven by the still strengthening south-westerly, was already leading the English squadrons to the attack. They sped through the straits into the North Sea, “coming on under a press of sail” to assail the San Martin and the other great ships about seven miles off Gravelines. With the prospect before them of a glorious victory and plunder for all, the English captains were now prepared to risk engaging the enemy at a range where they could inflict—or suffer—serious damage. Medina-Sidonia, “who was in the rear, seeing that if he bare room with his fleet [sailed away from the English downwind], it would be to their destruction, for that it was already very near the banks of Dunkirk . . . chose rather to save it by abiding the enemy’s fleet.”
The battle commenced around nine in the morning. As the Revenge closed on the San Martin, both held their fire until they were no further than “half-musket shot” “or even arquebus shot” apart— well under a hundred yards and perhaps as close as fifty. At last the Revenge fired her bow guns and then her broadsides, and took the San Martin’s broadside in return, being “pierced through with cannonballs of all sizes which were flying everywhere between the two fleets, and was riddled with every kind of shot,” but her own fire had wreaked far greater damage on her foe. The lighter weapons on the deck and upper gundeck pulverized the upperworks of the San Martin, chain- and bar-shot shredding rigging, sails, spars and yards, while dice- and hail-shot wreaked terrible havoc among the close-packed soldiers lining the rails to discharge their small arms. Meanwhile the heavier cannon on the Revenge ’s lower gundeck, close to the waterline, battered the San Martin’s hull. Even its four-inch oak planking and close-packed timbers could not withstand such an onslaught from 30- and 60-pound shot, fired at a range so close that smouldering powder residue and spent wadding drifted over the enemy decks like snow. Already weakened by the previous battles, the hull was pierced by shot still glowing and smoking from the furnace of the cannon. Smashing through the planking, each ball unleashed a blizzard of arrow-sharp splinters and shards of oak, filling the air like a swarm of murderous hornets, ripping, stabbing, blinding, maiming and shredding flesh from bone, and driven with such force that some jagged shards embedded themselves in the planking of the opposite hull, quivering like thrown knives.8
The Nonpareil, commanded by Sena, came next and then in turn the remainder of Drake’s squadron, each ship loosing its broadside into the San Martin and being answered by the increasingly ragged replies from the Spanish flagship. According to Captain Alonso Vanegas, 300 rounds were fired from the flagship’s 48 guns during the course of the nine-hour battle, but even allowing for the time spent out of gun range of the enemy, that barely amounted to one round per gun per hour. In reply the English ships poured in fire at three, four and five times that rate. Having delivered his broadsides, Drake led his squadron north-east in pursuit of the other galleons of the Armada as they struggled to break clear of the coast and reform. Martin Frobisher, in the van of his squadron as it attacked the Spanish flagship and still smarting over the division of spoils from Drake’s earlier prize, saw a different motive for his tactics. “Sir Francis Drake reports that no man has done any good service but he; but he shall well understand that others have done as good a service as he and better. He came bragging up at the first, indeed, and gave them his prow and his broadside; and then kept his luff and was glad that he was gone again, like a cowardly knave or traitor—I rest doubtful but the one I will swear.”
Drake was many things, not all of them pleasant, but a coward he was not. The incident at San Juan de Ulua in 1568 was the only other occasion on which his courage had ever been called into question and his exploits over the twenty years since then had given the lie to any suggestion that he would fly in the face of danger. A coward would not have led a tiny force against Nombre de Dios and Cartagena, nor have sailed straight into one of the enemy’s principal harbours at Cadiz, leaving the rest of his fleet to follow him in as best they could. Frobisher’s criticism of his actions at Gravelines was an obscene denigration of Drake. He gave the San Martin a broadside at a range close enough to inflict heavy damage on the Spanish flagship, and in so doing laid his own ship open to the risk of destruction by the return fire, but he did so knowing from his observation of the previous battles that the San Martin would not be able to reload its great guns for some considerable time, if at all, and would meanwhile lie open and poorly defended against the assaults of the ships following behind his own.
Whatever his prejudices towards Drake, there was no doubting the choleric Frobisher’s courage either, and he brought the Triumph to the attack, laying up at close range and pounding the San Martin with his great guns while the rest of his squadron riddled her bow, stern and landward flank. They pulled away only to allow Hawkins in the Victory to lead his squadron in for another attack. Meanwhile Lord Henry Seymour with “the Vanguard, Antelope and others, charged upon the tail, being somewhat broken, and distressed three
of their great ships, among which, my ship shot one of them through six times, being within less than musket shot.” Sir William Wynter in the Vanguard also chose to refrain from “shooting of any ordnance until we came within six score [paces] of them.” “In the continued assaults which we gave on them without entering [boarding] we made them to feel our ordnance, and if any ship was beaten out of their fleet, she was surrounded and suddenly separated from the rest.”9
More and more Armada ships now rallied to the defence of the flagship and somehow by remarkable seamanship amidst the heat of battle, the gale and the rough seas, they once more adopted their characteristic defensive formation. They “went into the proportion of a half moon, their Admiral and Vice-Admiral were in the midst and the greatest number of them, and there were on each side in the wings the galleasses, armadoes of Portugal and other good ships. In the whole to the number of sixteen in a wing which did seem to be of their principal shipping.” All took a savage pounding from the English guns. Wynter’s group attacked the starboard wing of the formation and “making haste to run into the body of their fleet, four of them did entangle themselves one aboard the other.” It was a cruel irony; the grappling hooks at the ends of the yardarms that they had hoped in vain to use against the English fleet were now ensnaring their own vessels.
