The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Similar reports reached Mendoza from various different ports and cities and it is easy to see how the arrival of handfuls of English ships driven before the north-easterly wind that had brought them into port from Harwich to Margate around 18 August could have fed these rumours, particularly when the crews were then confined to their ships and refused permission to go ashore. Mendoza’s informants went on to claim that the Duke of Medina-Sidonia had taken a Scottish harbour “in the territory of the Earl of Huntly and as most of the people are Catholics, it may be concluded that they will give all they have to Your Majesty’s Armada.” The Armada was refitting and taking on supplies while awaiting a north-easterly wind to carry it back to a triumphant rendezvous with Parma. The English Court was said to be in a state of panic. Talking or writing about the fate of the fleet was forbidden: “under pain of loss of life and property, no person is to write news to any part,” and “a woman had been flogged for talking about it.” The Queen had placed herself under the protection of her army and “the people of London were in such fear that though the officers of the law ordered them to open their shops, they refused to do so.”

  The version of events that Mendoza reported to Philip and then publicly announced in Paris as a torch was at last put to the great bonfire in the courtyard of his embassy was that Drake had been taken in the act of boarding the San Martin and was now a prisoner of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. “Drake is captured. As yet the story wants confirmation from the Duke himself but it is widely believed and seems highly probable.” It was certainly believed by the Count of Orgaz, who ordered Medina-Sidonia’s administrator to organize a victory celebration. He lit torches and placed them in the galleries and windows of Medina-Sidonia’s house and hired musicians to play for revellers dancing in the streets outside throughout the night. Mendoza’s claim was circulated to every court in Europe and broadsides were produced in Madrid and Seville, embellishing and embroidering the stories. The legendary El Draque always featured prominently in them, sometimes wounded, sometimes fleeing, sometimes captured, sometimes killed, but still no official celebration was prepared. Spanish congregations were urged to continue offering prayers for the success of the Armada, and in one of the two poems he wrote about the Armada Cervantes referred to “the confused murmur of bad news” that was also filtering back to Spain.3

  Brooding in the Escorial, Philip remained cautious, awaiting confirmation from Medina-Sidonia’s own hand, but the Spanish ambassador in Prague, Don Guillen de San Clemente, was more easily convinced and ordered a Te Deum in St. Wenceslaus’ Cathedral. Count Olivares returned to the Pope with Mendoza’s further reports, urging a Te Deum in St. Peter’s and in churches throughout Rome, the issuing of Legatine Bulls to the Cardinal of England, and the payment of the promised one million gold ducats, but Sixtus remained immovable. He heard Olivares out “without interruption, though he writhed about a good deal with inward impatience; but when I finished, his anger leapt out and he replied that he told me now, as he had told me before, that he would more than fulfil all he had promised, but I was not to worry him any more about the matter until positive news of the Armada was received.”

  Sixtus’s own agents were offering contrary reports, and although on 17 August the Doge of Venice and his Senate had voted to instruct their ambassadors in Spanish provinces to convey their congratulations on the Armada’s victory, Venetian informants were now hearing a very different version of events. Parma had swift evidence of the rapid change in European perceptions. He had to borrow yet more money in Philip’s name to pay the Army of Flanders and interest rates climbed to extortionate levels as rumours strengthened about the Armada’s fate; Genoese bankers insisted on charging him 25 per cent interest on a four-month loan of “a million of gold.”

  The first substantial reports on the true course of events came when the Papal Nuncio, Morosini, obtained a copy of an English document, “Journal of all that passed between the armies of Spain and England . . . according to news from divers places.” He at once forwarded it to the Pope. The document, closely resembling the “Abstract of Accidents Between the Two Fleets” that formed Lord Howard’s report to the Privy Council in London, told a very different story from that promoted by Mendoza. If it grossly exaggerated the number of English soldiers under arms and the number of English Catholics flocking to support the Queen, its account of the battles in the Channel was relatively dispassionate.

  Still the confusion persisted, and even in September, reports were still coming in of a Spanish victory. On the 4th the Governor of Calais relayed a fisherman’s report that “Drake’s death is confirmed from Holland,” but as the days and weeks passed, the balance of reports shifted still more. “Certain Advertisements out of Ireland” recorded the shipwreck of many Armada ships and the massacre of their crews; news that was celebrated in every Protestant city. Another document, “A Pack of Spanish Lies,” a detailed rebuttal of the broadsides published in Spain, was translated into every European language. By then confirmation of the real course of events was widespread. The Dutch published the interrogations of Don Diego de Pimentel and other Spanish captives from the San Felipe and San Mateo, and captured Spanish banners were hanging in St. Paul’s Cathedral on 18 September. “There was openly showed eleven ensigns, being the banners taken in the Spanish navy, and particularly one streamer wherein was an image of Our Lady with her Son in her arms, which was held in a man’s hand over the pulpit. The same banners the next day were hanged on London Bridge towards Southwark.”4

  In his darker moments Mendoza must have come to suspect the truth, and he was increasingly ridiculed on the streets of Paris by sarcastic requests for grants of the conquered English lands, but he still clung to his outward belief that the Armada had triumphed, hard though it was to reconcile with the reports that he also forwarded to Philip, warning that the English ships were regrouping and might launch a reprisal raid against the Spanish coast. The King took the warning sufficiently seriously to send out orders that any returning ships were not to disembark their men but remain at battle readiness to repel an English attack. However, Mendoza’s optimism was once more to the fore as he sent a further report that the Armada had now completed refitting and reprovisioning in the Scottish islands and was making its way southwards, bringing with it a dozen captured English men-of-war. But on 24 September the dispatch that Medina-Sidonia had sent ahead of the fleet at last reached Philip’s Court and the King received his Captain General’s own report on the fate of the Armada. Even as a messenger was riding hard for the Escorial with Mendoza’s dispatch, a further report reached Philip that the first battered remnants of his fleet had made harbour in Santander. When Mendoza’s letter was delivered to him, Philip wrote in the margin, “Nothing of this is true. It will be well to tell him so,” and on 13 October he commanded that prayers for the Armada should come to an end with a final solemn Mass.

  Philip and his men had no desire to broadcast the true fate of the Armada, but news continued to spread, circulated by Venetian and Vatican agents and the triumphant Dutch and English. The final confirmation came from Ireland. All shipping had been embargoed in Irish ports from the moment when news of the sighting of the Armada off the Lizard had been received, but towards the end of October the Dutch, French and Baltic ships were allowed to leave on sureties that they would not trade with Spain, and they carried details of the catastrophe that had befallen the Armada on the Irish coast to every European port. The news was spread through Lisbon by a street cry:

  Which ships got home?

  The ones the English missed.

  And where are the rest?

  The waves will tell you.

  What happened to them?

  It is said they are lost.

  Do we know their names?

  They know them in London.

  Those Portuguese street vendors must have recited the litany of Spanish catastrophe with particular relish.

  Pope Sixtus found consolations for the failure of the holy crusade in the one mi
llion ducats he had been spared from paying Philip and in the humiliation of a king who was as much a rival as an ally. One can imagine the malevolent spark in his eye as he made his widely reported remark that it was “curious that the emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who was queen of half an island.” He had also avoided sending a Papal Legate to “openly avow the share he had in the enterprise,” and when Count de Olivares pointed out how much he would have regretted not sending the legate if the Armada had been successful, “he replied that if the enterprise was ordained to succeed, the Legate would have been sent. He said this with great profundity and although I replied that it would have required a very prophetic soul to guess it, he only cast his eyes up to heaven and said no more.”5

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  God Will Tire of Working Miracles

  Riddled with fever and dysentery and weighed down with black depression, Medina-Sidonia had lain in his bunk ever since he had set course for home and he was too weak and dispirited to sit upright when his battered, listing flagship at last reached Santander on the morning of 21 September. As the current carried the San Martin towards the shore, her remaining powder was expended in a barrage of shots signalling her distress. Fishing boats at once put out from the port to take her in tow. A pathetic sight greeted them. The immaculate flagship of the Armada that had set sail four months earlier, her gilding and paintwork gleaming in the sunlight, banners, ensigns and pennants fluttering at the mastheads and the crimson cross of the Crusades emblazoned on her pristine cream sails, was now a wreck, weather-beaten, stained and befouled, the sails patched and torn, the rigging in tatters and the hull and upperworks pierced and splintered by shot.

  The stench of death and corruption hung over the entire ship. Bodies in their hundreds had been thrown overboard during the long voyage home, but others still lay between the decks for want of men to move them, and those who remained alive were like living dead, gaunt, skeletal and fever-racked. Few could stand, let alone work the ship, and most were huddled in the reeking gloom belowdecks. The stench was so foul and the risk of infection so great that few of their rescuers could be persuaded to go down there, and such was his haste to be gone from the scene of his humiliation that Medina-Sidonia did not wait to see his men brought ashore. Even before the San Martin had been towed into harbour, he had clambered into a small boat and been rowed to the quayside. Head bowed, cloak drawn around him, he hurried away to find refuge without a backward glance.

  Out at sea, the hulk San Salvador was in an even more parlous state. “There was not one drop of [drinking] water in the hulk and though both pumps had to be kept going day and night, they were unable to gain upon the leaks.” Yet when four merchant ships were sighted, the San Salvador ’s officers were unable to bear the exposure of their humiliation and “wished to avoid them,” letting them pass without signalling their distress. Twenty-four hours later they themselves sighted a dismasted ship, “one of the best ships of the Armada, with three captains of infantry aboard,” which fired a gun to signal for aid, but the men of the San Salvador maintained their course and passed by, unable to help themselves, let alone another ship. When they eventually made port in Santander, the holds were awash and the few survivors were more dead than alive.

  Just eight ships had followed the flagship into Santander. Miguel de Oquendo landed at Guipuzcoa with five others and Diego Flores de Valdes had 22 ships with him when he reached Laredo. All were in a parlous state. Many had no anchors after abandoning them off Calais, and some had so few able-bodied crewmen that they could no longer be sailed. One of de Valdes’s flotilla ran aground because there were not enough men to lower the sails, another grounded for want of the men to bring her to berth, and another capsized and sank in the harbour. The San Pedro el Menor ran aground and sank, and after anchoring safely, Miguel de Oquendo’s flagship caught fire and blew up, killing 100 crew. Some of the great fighting ships, including the San Marcos and the San Francisco, were so badly damaged that they never put to sea again. Their guns and usable timber were salvaged and the rest was left to rot on the foreshore. Captain Bartoli, the commander of the San Francisco, died the day after the ship made port. The senior soldier aboard, Captain Gaspar da Sousa, stated that no ship in the Armada had done better service or been more frequently in the thick of the fighting and Medina-Sidonia confirmed as much in a letter to the ambassador of Florence. It was small consolation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany for the loss of his handsome galleon, once the pride of his navy.

  Two dozen other ships of the Armada limped into port over the following days, weeks and months. Of the rest, over half the original fleet, there was no sign and no word. As time passed, news began to filter through to Spain of the fate of some of the missing ships. Some had “headed for Germany, others were driven onto the islands of Holland and Zeeland into the enemy’s hands; others went up to Shetland; others to Scotland where they were lost and burned,” and two of the Armada ships even reached Norway. But most of the missing ships had wrecked upon the west coast of Ireland. No fewer than 26 Armada ships were lost there, one on the English coast, two each on the coasts of Scotland, The Netherlands, France and Norway, two were taken as prizes by the English and an unknown number foundered or sank at sea. No precise figure for the total losses has ever been established, but a minimum of 40 never returned to Spain, and many of those that did were beyond repair and were broken up or left to rot. It is safe to say that, at the very least, half the Armada’s 130 ships had been put beyond use by one means or another. English losses in the same campaign were nil.1

  The losses of crewmen and soldiers were equally severe—“half the number of people do not return that came out in this army”—and thousands more must have died in the months following their return. “The like lamentation was never heard in Biscay and Asturia,” and for months families of missing seamen and soldiers wandered from port to port along the northern coast, seeking any word of their whereabouts. Many families had lost every child, and some villages almost every one of their sons. In the end as many as two-thirds of the Armada’s original complement of 30,000 men may have died, and for every one killed in battle or perishing later of their wounds, another six or eight died by execution, drowning, sepsis, disease, starvation or thirst.

  Many of the able-bodied survivors took the first opportunity to desert their ships and flee for their homes, but the majority were too debilitated or diseased to follow their example. Still racked with fever and so weak that his spidery signature was almost illegible, Medina-Sidonia sent appeals for food, clothing, bedding and medicines to all the surrounding towns and wrote a series of letters to the King, the Governor and the Archbishop of Santiago, begging for help for his starving men who were continuing to die in droves from ship’s fever, scurvy and dysentery. “The troubles and miseries we have suffered . . . have been greater than have ever been seen in any voyage before, and on board some of the ships . . . there was not one single drop of water to drink for a fortnight.” Many remained on board, unable to go ashore because there was nowhere for them to be housed and no money to pay them, and some ships were so destitute of supplies that men died of starvation even as they rode at anchor in their home ports. One had been without water for twelve days and its men were reduced to squeezing rainwater from their sodden clothes to ease their raging thirst. On Medina-Sidonia’s own flagship, in addition to the hundreds killed or wounded during the battles, 180 men died of disease before the ship had even made port, and many more died as it lay at anchor. His servants “who once numbered 60, have died and sickened so fast that I have only two left.” He ended his letter with a comment that from another hand could only have been blackly ironic: “God be praised for all He has ordained.”2

  In stark contrast to Elizabeth in England, Philip made every effort to ensure that the surviving seamen and soldiers from the Armada were well looked after. On learning that some were being discharged without full payment of their wages, he sent a furious letter warning that this was “contrar
y to Christian charity and also very much alien to my will . . . Those who have served, and are serving me, should not only be paid what they are owed, but rewarded as far as our resources permit.” His envoy, Garcia de Villejo, was dispatched to Santander at once to supervise the provision of pay, lodging and clothing for the able-bodied survivors, medical care for the sick, and pensions for maimed soldiers and sailors, and for the widows and orphans of those who had not returned. Two ships laden with supplies were sent out to search for other ships of the Armada that might yet be struggling home.

  The King’s generosity was helped by the arrival of the flota in November, with a cargo worth one and a half million ducats in gold, but that barely began to repay the debts that the Enterprise of England had accumulated, and it is to Philip’s lasting credit that he did not begrudge the cost of feeding, clothing and housing those who had served him. He and the survivors were also fortunate that the man deputed to help them, Villejo, was not only efficient but profoundly honest and decent too. His reports show the miasma of corruption, graft and double-dealing that surrounded government contracting in Spain as in England, and his determination that the men should not suffer by it. The King also ordered several of the provisioning officers of the Armada to be executed as punishment for their corruption and their failings; the main supplier of ship’s biscuit to the fleet, who was found guilty of adulterating the flour with lime, was hanged in Lisbon the following spring.

  As soon as he had landed in Spain, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, whose hair had reportedly gone grey during his time at sea, sent a plea to the King to be relieved of his command, so that he could return home to his orange groves at San Lucar. “Truly I have come back almost at my last gasp . . . I neither understand anything, nor want to.” He also sent a plea to Secretary Idiaquez: “in his [Philip’s] spirit of clemency, I hope that he will want only to be done with me . . . Insofar as naval matters go, for no reason and in no manner will I ever take them up [again], though it cost me my head.” As Medina-Sidonia had hoped, Philip had no wish to be given further reminders of the humiliating failure of his great crusade by interviewing its commander—“I have read it all, although I would rather not have done, because it hurts so much”—and readily acceded to the request, even excusing Medina-Sidonia from the duty of appearing at Court to kiss hands.3