The Spanish Armadas

by Winston Graham

  So presently English and Spanish officers were dining amicably together, and even Captain Robert Harvey, who was sent to Castlehaven to accept its surrender under the terms of the general agreement, was greeted and entertained to dinner by Pedro Lopez de Soto. Indeed de Soto, arch apostle all his life of the war against England, as he became friendly with Harvey during the next weeks, allowed it to be seen that his mind was changing. Why could there not be peace between England and Spain? he asked. Who was benefiting from this dreary and bloodthirsty war?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Last Skirmishes

  Aguila, do Soto, del Campo and three thousand six hundred Spanish officers and men were duly repatriated to Spain, without ransoms, without massacre. This was of course contained in the terms of the agreement, but all the same it speaks a new spirit.

  For the failure to exploit the last Armada, the Spaniards blamed the Irish, the Irish blamed the Spaniards. Feeling was very bitter. Aguila said that when Satan showed Christ all the kingdoms of the earth he withheld Ireland as being fit only for himself.

  The Spanish had a lot to complain of, for they had landed as promised with a large contingent of troops, had subsisted there for nearly three months without any help at all, when they had been promised assistance ‘within days’. Then when the Irish army did eventually come it had ‘ been broken by a handful of men and blown asunder’. They had done their share and been abysmally let down.

  This was true enough; but considerable lack of judgment, or lack of local knowledge, had been shown by the places at which they landed. Munster was peaceful: no chief or earl raised his standard of rebellion there. If the Spanish had sailed to Sligo it would have been different. As it was, the two great northern earls had had to make a trek of more than two hundred miles across wild and mountainous country, with all the difficulties of ordnance and supply that that entailed. To help a rebellion in Lisbon, would you land troops in Coruña?

  The man who came out of it with an enormously heightened reputation was of course Mountjoy. Throughout the whole emergency he had contrived to do the right thing at the right time. Always with inadequate forces and poor supplies, he had deployed his resources notably and had achieved one of the outstanding tactical victories of the sixteenth century.

  Almost as important as his defeat of the Irish armies was his creation of conditions around Kinsale such as to induce Aguila to parley. It had been very much the intention of the Spanish to retain Kinsale permanently and to use it as a forward base against England. A considerable fleet could lie at anchor there. It could be a place from which it was possible to harry enemy shipping with far greater impunity than Spinola could employ from Sluys. Whatever the initial failure to rouse them, it would gradually have become a focal point for the rebellious Irish, who would be sure of sanctuary there. And as Spanish-Irish power grew, it could spread along the coast and take a firmer grip inland. It would lock up or preoccupy a sizable proportion of Elizabeth’s army and navy.

  Don Martin de Bertendona had been about to sail with more troops and supplies when news reached Madrid of Aguila’s surrender. When Aguila reached Spain he was placed under house arrest; but before he could answer the charges against him he was taken ill and died. One of his last acts was to send off a crate of wine and oranges and lemons to his late captor, Sir George Carew.

  So the long war was petering out at last – partly from exhaustion, partly from a growing mutual respect.

  Of course there were still some flickers of the flame. The Spaniards, keeping to their terms of surrender, gave up Dunboy Castle too, but it was at once seized by O’Sullivan Bere who owned the castle, who claimed descent from the Spanish and who now proposed to hold it in the name of King Philip III. It was a difficult place for the English to tackle, and so it remained as a thorn in the English flesh. O’Donnell of Tirconnell after his defeat went to Spain and there was received at court with every honour; so Dunboy would prove to be a most useful harbour if Bertendona came out with his fleet, as he seemed disposed to do.

  At the same time the active Frederico Spinola had been back in Madrid pressing the young King for reinforcements to improve on his recent successes. His brother, the Marquis of Spinola, was willing to raise five thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry in Italy if Philip would match it with eight more galleys and two thousand Spanish veterans. Then they would sail back to Dunkirk and have a force there ready to disrupt Channel shipping and even seize an English port. Young Philip, beset by failure elsewhere, readily agreed.

  In England Elizabeth’s veto on large overseas expeditions still remained, but the sore memories of 1597 were now five years old. Leveson, though elevated in the first place through marriage and not merit, had now established himself as one of the outstanding admirals of the day; and he was permitted to take a fleet of eight galleons on a tour of the Spanish coast to see what mischief they could wreak. He took with him, apart from a few auxiliaries, the Repulse, Warspite, Defiance, Nonpareil, Mary Rose, Dreadnought, Garland and Adventure; and as his vice-admiral he was given the thirty-three-year-old Sir William Monson, who as a young lieutenant of seventeen had fought against the first Armada in the frigate Charles, had commanded the Repulse at the taking of Cadiz and been knighted in the general euphoria following that event. He had made three voyages with the Earl of Cumberland, and in 1591 had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards while manning a recaptured prize and had served some time as a galley slave, so he had old scores to settle.

  It was a fleet big enough to disrupt trade but not big enough to try conclusions with a Spanish fleet, as Leveson found to his cost when, sailing some days ahead of Monson with four of his ships, he intercepted the Spanish treasure-fleet – the failed dream of so many of his distinguished predecessors. He took one prize and then found his small squadron surrounded by thirty-eight Spanish ships-of-war. He could have died like Grenville but he preferred to live like Leveson, and, abandoning his prize, he found a gap in the closing fleet just in time.

  Thereafter, joined by Monson, he cruised up and down the Spanish coast for several weeks with nothing to report but the usual decay of his crews. Then in early June, off Lisbon, he learned that one of the great Portuguese carracks, laden as always with the treasure of the Indies, was sheltering just inside the mouth of the Tagus under the guns of Cezimbra castle. She had been two years on the voyage, her crew of six hundred reduced to thirty by sickness and privation, and she had just made the shelter of the river at her last gasp.

  Already help for her was on its way from Lisbon. The governor had sent out four hundred men to supplement the exhausted crew, and Spinola, just ready with his eight new galleys and one thousand trained soldiers to begin his dash north, was diverted to protect the carrack. Three other galleys under the new Marquis of Santa Cruz kept him company. By the time Leveson looked in it was a formidable sight, for he faced the guns of the fort, the big forward-firing guns of the galleys, and cannon and infantry camped on the hillsides. Riding at anchor towered the great carrack with her seven decks, being rapidly unloaded. Leveson and Monson had five warships with them, but the captains of all the ships protested that to go in meant suicide, and it took the two commanders all their persuasion and authority to force them to attack.

  Thereafter followed five hours of battle during which in spite of their choice of stations the galleys suffered the more. Indeed Santa Cruz and his three Lisbon galleys had had enough by noon and would have fled, but Spinola held his ground and the others would not be shamed into admitting defeat before he did. However by two p.m. Santa Cruz had been seriously wounded and his crews decimated and Spinola’s fine new galleys were all badly damaged. Monson wrote later of ‘watching the slaves forsaking them and everything in confusion amongst them’. Two galleys surrendered – one, to Monson’s understandable glee, the galley in which he had been chained – and in the end even Spinola had to make off to save what was left of his fleet.

  Then, after long parleying, the carrack itself surrendered, the Portuguese
captain and officers were entertained to dinner and music aboard the Garland before being set ashore, and next morning the English sailed away with their monstrous capture while thousands of Spanish and Portuguese soldiers watched helplessly from the shore.

  It was an epic worthy of Drake and deserves more honour than it has received in English naval annals.

  The indefatigable Spinola was not yet beaten. With his usual consuming energy he set about repairing his battered flotilla, and within two months was ready for sea again. He sailed direct for Santander with fifteen hundred slaves as motive power and one thousand troops. His own galley had five slaves to an oar instead of the usual four, to give him extra speed when necessary. Monson, who was on the prowl again, this time with flag command, missed him altogether; but the Dutch were able to send a warning, so by mid-September all possible dispositions had been made to welcome Spinola in the Channel.

  The English Channel Guard at this time consisted of three ships only under Sir Robert Mansell, the Hope, the Adventure and the Answer, but it was supplemented by four Dutch warships under Admiral Cant; and of course there were the two usual Dutch blockading squadrons outside Dunkirk and Sluys, making it almost impossible to enter or leave the ports. Spinola decided this time he would change his tactics and hug the English coast instead of the French; but Anglo-Dutch reasoning had anticipated this, and Spinola and his galleys were first spotted by two Dutch fly-boats as he was running before a stiff south-westerly breeze off Dungeness. They gave chase.

  He kept his distance well throughout the night, but at dawn he found he was being carefully headed towards the English flagship, which lay waiting for him. It was not his purpose at present to try conclusions with a warship of the size of the Hope, so he struck sail and took to the oars, heading back athwart the wind. So began, during most of a fine September day, a battle of manoeuvre between three sailing-ships and six depending on sail and oar. Not once during it did the Anglo-Dutch squadron come within firing distance of the galleys, and the day’s end saw the galleys slip through a gap their brilliant navigation had created and make off up Channel with their opponents crowding on sail to try to keep them in sight.

  But Mansell was not done yet, for the north-easterly course the Spaniards were taking would bring them close by the South Foreland and almost into the waiting arms of the rest of his squadron headed by Admiral Jan Cant in the Moon. Mansell therefore veered east-north-east, away from Spinola in anticipation that, when the Italian saw his way blocked by Cant, he would swing his squadron south-east and make directly for Dunkirk: then Mansell would be between him and his home ports.

  It happened as Mansell foresaw. So close did Spinola come to the coast that people ran along the cliff watching him, and Dover Castle sounded an alarm gun. The sight of the white cliffs was too much for three English slaves and they jumped overboard and swam ashore at St Margaret’s Bay.

  Carefully Mansell kept the galleys just in sight, but well to the south of them, shepherding them towards the Goodwins. Then just as dusk fell the leading galleys saw three warships in their path. It was the Moon, the Sampson and the Answer, completely blocking the way ahead. Behind Spinola were the two Dutch frigates, and on his starboard quarter but on the seaward side of the Goodwins, Mansell waited in the Hope. It looked like a fair capture.

  Spinola, of course, had chosen a moonless night, but now fortunately for him cloud came up too, blotting out the stars, and for an hour after dusk the wind dropped. So it was a game of blind man’s buff with only the galleys capable of movement and the dangerous Goodwins never far away. Spinola had turned about as soon as darkness fell and had made for the southern end of the Goodwins; but as he reached them the breeze sprang up again, this time from the north-west.

  Mansell for the second time had guessed right and suddenly loomed up among the galleys. There was an explosion of broadsides and sixty-pounders. In a violent ten minutes of blind fighting one of the galleys was severely damaged, and then Mansell himself hauled away in the freshening breeze. With galleys all around him he was enormously outnumbered and might have been boarded and quickly overrun. So Spinola once more continued on his way, with apparently only the Dutch blockading squadron now between himself and safety.

  But he was still pursued by the six Anglo-Dutch vessels he had eluded, and his rowers after twelve hours of stroke and counter-stroke were near the end of their endurance. Also one of his galleys was partly disabled and Spinola would not desert her. So as the wind freshened on that last thirty endless miles from the Goodwins to Gravelines the sailing warships began to catch up.

  Mansell, at last guessing wrong, made for Sluys and took Captain Bredgate in the Answer and Captain Jonas in the Advantage with him. The Dutch held on for Dunkirk, and it was they who began to overhaul the galleys in the dark of the night. First the damaged galley was caught and raked with broadsides until she was a wreck; then Captain Sael in the Sampson rammed another and bombarded her until she sank, forty only of a complement of four hundred and fifty being picked up. Then Vice-Admiral Cant overran a third in the dark and shot her to pieces, so that eventually she drifted upon Calais beach and was wrecked.

  The cannonade had attracted a swarm of blockaders, who, having already been forewarned, were out in extra strength, and the three remaining galleys could not avoid running into them. In the ensuing fight two of the galleys were badly damaged and captured, the third with Spinola on board and its extra turn of speed, reached the shoals of Dunkirk beach. Here, pursued only by boats of the shallowest draught, he had everything possible flung overboard to lighten his craft, and promised the galley slaves freedom if they made the harbour. Somehow he avoided taking the ground and entered Dunkirk with his own ship and his treasure intact.

  One would have thought that the lessons of Lisbon and the Channel would have convinced even the bravest of men. Or the most obstinate. Spinola continued undeterred, and throughout the winter his galley and those he commanded were a continuing menace to shipping in the vicinity of Dunkirk. But like Grenville and others in that strange heroic century, he seemed to have a death wish, or at least a wish to triumph over quite insuperable odds. By May 1603 there were dissensions among the Archduke and the officers he commanded, and Spinola had angry exchanges with the Governor of Sluys who he thought was impeding him at every turn. Gathering his eight remaining galleys and four frigates, he sailed out of the harbour to attack the island of Walcheren, and so deliberately challenged the blockading squadron of four ships under Vice-Admiral Joost de Moor. The battle began at daybreak and went on all through the morning until Spinola had his right arm blown off by gunfire. He died an hour later, and the galleys, damaged and outgunned, retreated into Sluys harbour, never to emerge again.

  Spinola was twenty-eight, and had he lived might have matched his elder brother’s later military fame with an even greater renown at sea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Setting of the Sun

  In the last year of her life Queen Elizabeth finished her translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry. She entranced the Commons with two of the finest speeches from the throne to be heard even in her reign. She welcomed the Venetian Envoy in fluent Italian and told him it was a pity the Republic had waited forty-five years before venturing to appoint a full diplomatic representative. She made another of her ‘progresses’, and once or twice rode horseback to the chase and to the other field-sports. Sometimes the palace at Westminster still rang with her hearty laughter.

  But these were flickers of a flame that otherwise burned low. Luckier than her Spanish brother-in-law, she did not suffer from diabetic gangrene – nor indeed from any other apparently incurable complaint. It was just age bearing her down: old age, fatigue, loneliness and a sad heart. Most old people not weeded out by one of the killer diseases suffer the same way, and it is as much a matter of mental stamina as of physical how long they survive.

  Elizabeth’s stamina was notorious, but seventy was a great age in the sixteenth century, and she never had the same spir
its after Essex had gone to the block. ‘She disregardeth every costly dish that cometh to the table,’ Harrington wrote, ‘and taketh little but manchet and succory pottage. Every new message from the City doth disturb her, and she frowns on all the ladies.’ When he tried to entertain her by reading her some of his witty verses she said: ‘When thou dost feel creeping age at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less.’ Harington thought her ‘in a most pitiable state’.

  She had made a new favourite of the young Earl of Clanricarde, but sometimes his marked resemblance to Essex distressed her as much as it pleased her. She told the new French Ambassador, Count Harlay de Beaumont, that she ‘was tired of life, for nothing new contenteth my spirit or giveth me any enjoyment’. Her days became as substantially peopled by ghosts as by the faces and figures of the middle-aged courtiers around her who had not been born when she came to the throne. Even her old friend Lady Nottingham had just passed away and so had moved over the far side of the arras where lurked the whispering faces and forms of all the other dead.

  Just after Christmas the Queen was well enough to attend several state banquets, but at one of these she caught cold, and so shortly moved to Richmond, where the air was less dank from river mists. There she began to fail more rapidly, and she sat for long hours in silence ‘ with the dulness and frowardness familiar to old age’. She had always had a distaste for the ministrations of her doctors, a fact which had contributed materially to the length of her life; but now she would not let them even come near her; nor after a while would she eat or drink. Feeling the end approaching, she rose from her chair and stood beside it, refusing now even to sit lest she should never rise again. So she stood for fifteen hours while her court watched from the shadows and waited in awe for the end.