by Neil Hanson
As the Spanish crews fought to free their ships, hacking at spars and rigging with axes, the English ships kept up a barrage of fire. Shot pierced the San Martin “enough to shatter a rock.” “So tremendous was the fire that over 200 balls struck the sails and hull of the flagship on the starboard side, killing and wounding many men, disabling and dismounting three guns, and destroying much rigging. The holes made in the hull between wind and water caused so great a leakage that two divers, working all day, had as much as they could do to stop them with tow and lead plates. The galleon San Felipe of Portugal was also surrounded by 17 of the enemy’s ships, which directed against her heavy fire on both sides and on her stern. The enemy approached so close that the muskets and the arquebuses of the galleon were brought into service, killing a large number of men on the enemy ships. They did not dare, however, to come to close quarters [boarding range] but kept up a hot artillery fire from a distance, disabling the rudder, breaking the foremast and killing over 200 men in the galleon. This being noticed by the captain of the San Mateo, he brought his galleon to the wind and bravely went to the rescue. Then some of the enemy’s ships attacked him and inflicted much damage upon him. One of the enemy’s ships came alongside the galleon and an Englishman jumped on board, but our men cut him to bits instantly.” So completely had the old tactics of grapple and board been superseded that, excluding ships that had grounded or surrendered, the foolhardy Englishman was the only man on either side to board an enemy vessel during the entire campaign.
Each battle of the campaign had been described in turn as the greatest ever seen. “Some Spaniards that we have taken, that were in the fight at Lepanto, do say that the worst of our four fights . . . did exceed far the fight they had there . . . at some of our fights we had twenty times as much great shot there plied as they had there.” But this battle far surpassed all the others together. Nothing had ever been seen or heard that approached this weight and intensity of fire. The relentless cannonade was accompanied by a barrage of noise that left many soldiers and seamen battle-shocked and was heard on every coast and for many miles inland. The sulphurous smell of gunpowder was thick in the air and the smoke from the guns, pierced by the brilliant flashes of cannon fire, cloaked the water like a shroud and reduced the ships to dark shadows looming and disappearing in the fogs of smoke.10
The English and Spanish ships could often be distinguished from each other only by the rhythm of their gunfire—the irregular, staccato explosions of the Armada guns against the metronomic booming of the English cannon. They fired not in unison but in rapid, rhythmic succession as each gun came to bear, a drumroll along the length of the ship. The Revenge was “letting fly every way from both her broadsides, so that she seemed to repeat the fire as rapidly as any arquebusier,” and so swiftly did the English gunners reload and the seamen perform their tasks that barely had the echoes of the last gun on the starboard side died away than the ship had come about and begun a fresh broadside from its port flank. By the time that broadside, too, had ended, the starboard guns had been hauled in, reloaded, pushed out and readied to fire once more as the next target came into view.
English helmsmen and gunners co-ordinated the firing of their cannons and culverins so that they were discharged as the Spanish ships heeled over before the wind, exposing the timbers below the waterline. As the heavier guns blasted the hulls “between wind and water,” the lighter weapons kept up a withering fire on the upperworks, reducing them to matchwood and causing terrible carnage among the Spanish crewmen and marines. Slaves in the galleasses perished in hundreds at their oars and crewmen on the gundecks were mown down as shot smashed through the lower decks. The fighting troops in the waists, stern- and forecastles were cut apart by “murthering shot”—cube-shot, hail-shot, dice-shot and chain-shot, and the fragments of scrap iron fired when all other munitions had been exhausted—and the nobles perished alongside their men. Don Pedro Enriquez “had a hand shot away” and “Don Felipe de Cordoba, son of Don Diego, His Majesty’s Master of Horse, had his head shot off.”
Damage and casualties among the English fleet were remarkably light and even some of the few recorded incidents have the ring, not of truth, but of sailors’ yarns much embellished in the telling. A gentleman adventurer aboard Drake’s ship was supposed to have had his bed shot from beneath him by a cannonball as he took his ease, and the dinner of the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Charles Blount was then interrupted by a cannonball smashing through the hull, “grazing their feet, but taking off the toes of one who was there with them.” It is hard to imagine why the gentleman would be reclining belowdecks or the earl and his guest dining in their cabin when the great battle they had come to witness was raging over their heads.
As the fighting continued, more great guns of the Spanish ships fell silent, either damaged or impossible to reload because of the ferocity of the fighting and the severity of the sea conditions, but the musket and arquebus fire seemed to go on undiminished even though the death toll among the soldiers was steadily mounting. The firing was so intense that even now some English captains were reluctant to close to the most devastating range for their own guns. The Santa Maria de Begona and the San Juan de Sicilia “came near to boarding the enemy, yet could they not grapple with them, they fighting with their great ordnance and our men defending themselves with arquebus-fire and musketry, the distance being very small,” but great shot was now regularly piercing the tough oak flanks of the Spanish galleons and galleasses. All of them were damaged and leaking, their sails and rigging in tatters, their decks torn, splintered and littered with the bodies of the dead and dying.11
They “sustained the assault of the enemy as stoutly as was possible, so as all these ships were very much spoiled, and almost unable to make further resistance, and the greater part of them without shot for their ordnance,” yet still the Spanish spirit remained strong and their courage rarely failed them. These were men whose ships had been repeatedly hammered by English gunfire and who now knew beyond any doubt that they would continue to be pounded without any compensating hope of boarding, destroying or even damaging any English ship. Yet still they returned again and again to the fight, in acts of futile but monumental courage. The crew of one of the hulks saw a great carrack, de Bertendona’s Regazona, still sailing to the rescue of a sister ship even though its guns had been silenced and the blood of its men was cascading in torrents from its scuppers as it heeled before the wind. The Regazona’s musketeers continued to fire, and again and again the ship took its place in the fighting line.
“Lord Henry Seymour in the Rainbow and Sir William Wynter in the Vanguard . . . did so batter two of the greatest armados,” the San Mateo and the San Felipe, that they were close to sinking. More than half the crew and marines of Don Diego Pimentel’s San Mateo were dead or disabled, her guns silent and she wallowed low in the waves. “She was a thing of pity to see, riddled with shot like a sieve . . . all her sails and rigging were torn and sorely destroyed; of her sailors many perished, and of her soldiers few were left.” The remaining crew threw broken masts, guns, gratings and even the bodies of their dead comrades overboard—anything that would reduce the weight and keep the battered ship afloat.
The clouds of gunsmoke were now so dense that the San Martin ’s lookouts were “unable to see from the top . . . except that two of our ships were surrounded by the enemy.” Even Medina-Sidonia climbed the mast in an attempt to penetrate the fogs of battle and, although the flagship itself was “sorely distressed by great shot between wind and water, so as by no means could the leak be stopped,” and “her rigging was almost cut to shreds,” he ordered his boats to make for the crippled San Mateo and take off the officers and men. Don Diego de Pimentel, Captain General of the Forces of Sicily, refused to abandon ship, and at his request Medina-Sidonia sent him a pilot and a diver to inspect the damage, even though the San Martin was “in great risk without him” since her own leaks and shot-holes were so bad. The diver reported that nothing could be done to s
ave the San Mateo and, wallowing deeper in the rising seas, she was carried beyond the reach of the other Spanish ships. Medina-Sidonia’s final sight of her was “seeing her afar off, going towards Zeeland.” 12
Don Francisco de Toledo’s San Felipe was also doomed, bludgeoned by English gunfire beyond hope of salvation. Five of the starboard guns had been dismounted, one of the great guns spiked, “his upper deck was destroyed, both his pumps broken, his rigging in shreds and his ship almost a wreck.” Seymour’s Rainbow came to within hailing distance and an officer stood in the bow calling out, “Good soldiers that you are, surrender to the fair terms we offer you. But the only answer he got was a gun, which brought him down in the sight of everyone.” As more volleys of musket and arquebus shot rang out, the Rainbow pulled away, while the San Felipe’s crew jeered them, calling them “cowards” and “Lutheran hens.” It was their last defiance. The hulk Doncella came alongside and took off the crew of 300, but de Toledo and the San Felipe’s captain, Juan Poza de Santiso, hearing a shout that the hulk was now sinking, “replied that if that were the case, they had better be drowned in the galleon than in the hulk, and they both went back to her.” The San Felipe then drifted helpless away from the Armada towards the Dunkirk shore. Just like the Rosario and the San Salvador, two more Spanish great ships had been abandoned and left to their fate. It was an affront to Spanish honour and a further blow to the Armada’s already crumbling morale. The authority of Medina-Sidonia and Diego Flores de Valdes was now fatally undermined, and de Oquendo refused even to attend the council of war held after the battle, such was his contempt for their failings.
The battle had raged for nine hours, while the wind backed steadily into the north-west, increasing the English advantage and the peril of the Armada. It was now all but overwhelmed, its formation broken, its great ships besieged on all sides by cannon fire and able to offer little in reply beyond musket and arquebus shot. The blood of noblemen, soldiers and common seamen alike mingled on the shattered decks, and the surface of the sea surrounding the warring fleets was littered with fragments of broken wood, torn canvas and the other debris of battle. One witness saw “some ships broken into bits, others without masts or sails, from which they were throwing overboard artillery, trunks and many other things, whilst men were trying to save themselves by escaping in boats.” Still the five English squadrons pressed the attack, pounding the Spanish ships and driving them inexorably towards the fifty-mile stretch of sands and shoals known as the Banks of Zeeland. 13
Most of the English pilots and commanders knew these treacherous waters—so shallow that at low tide shrimp fishermen worked the offshore sandbanks from horseback. In the years of peace before the gathering storm, English ships had continually crossed and recrossed these seas with cargoes of woollen cloth for the great market at Antwerp. Sir Francis Drake had been apprenticed as a boy of eleven to a coaster sailing out of Gillingham Reach on the Medway, and, like his peers, had learned to navigate the sandbanks and the meandering muddy channels of the Scheldt, and find his course in sudden storms, fogs and sea frets, against the shifting winds and relentless, surging tides. Now the Englishmen used their knowledge to harry the Armada ships, like dogs round a flock of sheep, pushing them closer and closer to the sandbanks that would spell their doom.
The Armada as a whole could not sail any closer to the wind than at right angles to it. With the wind now northerly, it was impossible for even the most capable ships to pull clear of the shallows. They could not anchor, for few ships had any anchors; they could not even sail parallel to the coast, for its line runs north or north-east as far as the island of Terschelling some two hundred miles away. By four o’clock in the afternoon, with the tide again running onshore, the Armada’s position appeared hopeless. The leadsman in the San Martin was reporting a depth of only eight fathoms, leaving a bare fifteen feet of water between the ship’s keel and the sandbanks, and the depth was decreasing with every passing minute. Those ships not already crippled or sunk by English gunfire would be driven aground to be captured and looted or left to the doubtful mercies of the vengeful Dutch Sea Beggars. “We saw ourselves lost or taken by the enemy, or the whole Armada drowned upon the banks. It was the most fearful day in the world, for the whole company had lost all hope of success and looked only for death.”
Then, out of nowhere, a violent south-westerly squall hit the two fleets and a curtain of rain swept across the sea, so intense that visibility shrank to a few yards. On both sides, all hands that were able were at once at work trimming the sails, while their officers were fully occupied in steering clear of collisions in the mêlée of ships around them. The squalls and rain continued for almost half an hour and by the time they passed and the skies cleared, the Armada ships could be seen crowding on sail and making away to the north, already out of cannon range. As the English captains watched in disbelief, the battered Armada once more resumed the familiar, hated formation. Led by Medina-Sidonia, they even shortened sail, inviting the English to resume the battle.
It was a bluff, for the Spaniards now had little but small-arms fire to offer in combat, “nearly all the best ships being spoiled and unable to resist longer, as well from the damage they had received as from not having shot for their ordnance.” But for the moment Howard’s men too had little stomach for the fight. Their shot-lockers were almost empty and their stores of powder gone. Even the Squadron of the Narrow Seas had fired off almost its entire hoarded supplies in that one savage engagement. Wynter claimed that “out of my ship there was shot 500 shot of demi-cannon, culverin and demi-culverin, and when I was furthest off in distance I was not out of the shot of the arquebus and most times within speech of one another . . . No doubt the slaughter and hurt they received was great, as time will discover it; and when every man was weary with labour and our cartridges spent and munitions wasted—I think in some altogether—we ceased and followed the enemy.”14
The English were content to track the Armada, knowing that it was still not free of the danger from the menacing Zeeland banks and that each mile took it further from the hoped-for rendezvous with Parma. Meanwhile the first rations and beer since before daybreak were issued to the crews, while carpenters, sailmakers and riggers carried out emergency repairs, the surgeons went about their bloody tasks, and ships’ chaplains gave what comfort they could to those already beyond even that crude help. The gundecks were swabbed clear of blood and debris and the guncrews on those few ships that still had powder and shot brought the last of their supplies to their weapons, ready for whatever further hostilities the next day might bring.
PART III
Aftermath
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Wonderful Fear
Englishmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards and Frenchmen, straining to catch sight or sound of the day’s battle from the shores of Kent, Zeeland, Flanders and Calais, had heard the distant bass rumble of the guns fall silent at last: “the cannonade was heard with the same fury the whole of that day, until at last it died away in the distance.” As evening approached, they crowded the harbours and quaysides, waiting for the first returning boats to bring news of the battle. As ships tied up, word was passed among the crowds on the quays and shouted to those leaning out of windows or lining the cliffs above them. None of those aboard the fishing boats and coasters that had been bystanders at the battle had seen more than brief glimpses of the action through the dense, swirling palls of gunsmoke and the mist, rain and cloud wind-driven over the water, but imagination, speculation and hearsay filled the gaps in knowledge.
More reliable information arrived in England with the pinnaces bearing dispatches from the fleet, and one thing on which all Englishmen, at least, were agreed was that their fleet had carried the day and the Armada was in retreat. The next day, news of its flight from Gravelines was brought to the Queen while she was out hunting in Epping Forest, and it was claimed that she was so overjoyed that she rode her horse up the steps of a hunting lodge. Her jubilation was understandable, if a trifle premat
ure. If the English fleet could renew its stores and ammunition, it might yet have a further opportunity to complete the destruction of the Armada, but the commanders’ satisfaction was tinged with disappointment that further rich prizes had eluded them, and fears that the battered Armada might even yet retain the strength to return to the attack. “God has given us so good a day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward and I hope to God that the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Medina-Sidonia shall not shake hands this few days,” Drake wrote that night, “and whensoever they shall meet I believe neither of them will greatly rejoice at this day’s service.” But he added a rider. “There must be great care taken to send us munition and victual whithersoever the enemy goes.”
In a letter to Walsingham that night, Lord Howard also renewed his pleas for fresh supplies of foodstuffs, water and munitions, and bemoaned the prevarication of Elizabeth and her Council; something that she took care to blame on her closest advisers, though the fault was hers alone. “All irresolution and lacks are thrown upon us two in all her speeches to everybody,” Burghley complained to Walsingham. “The wrong is intolerable.” Howard was also infuriated by the bureaucratic insistence that he produce an itemized list of the supplies he required. “I have received your letter wherein you desire a proportion of powder and shot to be set down by me and sent to you which, by the uncertainty of the service, no man can do. Therefore I pray you to send me with all speed as much as you can.” He also expressed his own cautious confidence in the outcome of the day’s battle. “We have chased them in fight until this evening late and distressed them much, but their fleet consists of mighty ships and great strength . . . their force is wonderful great and strong and yet we pluck their feathers little and little.”1
