The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  The shrewd old King had anticipated this problem and had recruited a group of reliable advisors to guide him. But it was too late. Felipe junior was already putty in the hands of the ambitious and deeply corrupt Don Francisco de Sandoval, a member of one of Spain’s most prominent families. Sandoval – better known as the Duke of Lerma – had groomed the youngster for years. As soon as the courtiers brought him his first papers to sign, the new King gave a bored wave of the hand that signified that they should all be passed over to Lerma.

  The simple gesture heralded a seismic shift in Spanish politics. For the next two decades, Lerma would hold undisputed sway as the real monarch of Spain. Felipe didn’t mind. ‘[He] has helped me sustain the weight of state affairs,’ Felipe wrote to the once powerful Council of State. ‘I order that you obey the Duke in all matters.’

  The Council of State was no longer allowed to approach the King directly – everything had to be filtered through Lerma. Although he loved reading and approving the paperwork, Felipe was happy to let the Duke take the decisions. This allowed the new King to devote himself to his favourite pastime: spending money.

  He was very, very good at it. Within a few months he had granted more knighthoods than Felipe II had dispensed in a decade. For his own wedding to Margaret, he had embarked upon an outrageously expensive grand tour throughout Europe. Freed from the boring business of actual kingly rule, Felipe’s life was enjoyably devoted to hunting, travelling and holding lavish parties. Yet he was also extremely devout. He would spend hours in prayer and ritual, and agonised over the fate of his fellow Catholics in Northern Europe. Pious and yet hedonistic, Felipe was half priest, half party animal.

  As his confidence increased, Felipe began to change personality. He assumed an air of brusque arrogance. Observers in England worried that he was becoming dangerously ‘headstrong’. However, attitude meant nothing without action. Felipe feared that he was still regarded as a weak and ineffective king, a shadow of his powerful father. He needed a grand gesture, a major success to show the world that he should be taken seriously.

  And as he scanned the international horizon for a suitable setting, his eye settled inexorably upon Ireland.

  It was not a new idea. The concept of using Ireland as ‘the King of Spain’s bridge into England’ had been around for a long time. A famous prophesy predicted that ‘he that England will win, through Ireland must come in’. Even the Great Armada of 1588 had been originally due to attack Ireland, before the plans were changed.

  The old King had been keen on the idea, in theory. Irish expatriates and clerical zealots like the Franciscan Mateo de Oviedo had convinced Felipe II that he had a realistic chance of ousting the English from their first colony. Oviedo, a fifty-four-year-old theologian from Segovia, was regarded as an expert on Ireland’s confusing politics. He had made several trips there and had forged close contacts with the insurgent leaders. However, his enthusiasm for their cause often blinded him to the complex realities of a dirty war, and his impatient attitude – and his belief that God would solve all practical problems – often created serious friction between him and the military commanders.

  The problem for the Irish was that they weren’t the only faction lobbying for Spanish intervention. The Scots Catholics were pushing for an invasion of Scotland. And many English Catholics wanted to place Felipe II’s daughter, the Infanta Isabella, on the throne when Elizabeth died.

  By 1596 the Spanish navy had been rebuilt to its former glory. When the English Earl of Essex made a pre-emptive strike on the Spanish port of Cadiz, Felipe II responded by sending two more armadas north in 1596 and 1597. The first, bound for Ireland, was smashed apart by storms with the loss of three thousand men. The second, featuring Don Juan del Águila as land commander, was driven home by relentless headwinds.

  A year later, the old king, Felipe II, was on his deathbed when he heard news which lent his pain-racked face a fleeting smile of satisfaction. Irish insurgent forces had defeated the English at the Yellow Ford in Armagh. The Irish – for so long dismissed as opportunistic woodland raiders – had shown that they could defeat their ancient enemy on equal terms. With Spanish help, anything was now possible.

  By the turn of the century, Spain had assembled an awe-inspiring fleet of 35 galleons, 70 other ships and 25,000 men. A new king was on the throne, and the Spanish were back in the game.

  Felipe III had sworn to honour his father’s promises to help the Irish earls, and Hugh O’Neill had promised to yield up the crown of Ireland in exchange for his support. Encouraged by Oviedo, and eager to demonstrate his strength, the new king began to demand action. In the summer of 1600 he ordered the immediate assembly of a strong army and a substantial fleet to invade Ireland. His Council of State agreed, but asked where bankrupt Spain would find the money. Felipe, however, was determined to establish his reputation. ‘This is the first great enterprise the King has undertaken since his coming to the Crown,’ George Carew would remark later. ‘He feels himself bound in honour to see the enterprise through.’

  Felipe dismissed any objection. ‘As the expedition is so entirely for the glory of God,’ he wrote, ‘all difficulties must be overcome … I will sacrifice what I need for my own person so that it may go this year.’

  But the royal cutbacks never happened, the money never materialised and it was to be another thirteen months before Felipe’s command was obeyed.

  At the dining table, Queen Margaret returned her husband’s gaze with genuine fondness. Despite their arranged marriage, the couple had developed a true affection for each other. Yet she was increasingly finding that a third person was coming between them.

  The Duke of Lerma saw Margaret’s ability to influence the King as a direct challenge to his own power. He had good reason to worry. Margaret was young, but she was astute and resolute. ‘She is capable of great things,’ reported the Venetians. ‘She would govern in a different manner to the King if she could.’

  Margaret represented the interests of the powerful Austrian branch of the Habsburg family (Felipe was also a Habsburg) and was backed by two redoubtable female relatives. One was Margaret’s beloved aunt, the elderly Empress Maria, who was also the aunt (and grandmother) of Felipe III. The other was Maria’s daughter, a cloistered nun called Margaret of the Cross. This formidable female troika worked ingeniously to undermine Lerma’s control of the King. Margaret talked politics to him in the marital bedroom, and the other two pleaded their cases during Felipe’s frequent religious visits to their convent in Madrid. In effect, the convent had become an alternative royal court.

  While Lerma pushed the King in one direction, the three women deftly steered him in the other. One major difference in opinion was the plight of the Catholics in England, Ireland and the Netherlands. Lerma was a realist: his instincts were to disengage. If Spain’s interests lay in making peace, religion would take second place. The women, all zealots, saw their mission as a holy crusade. The devout Felipe was not hard to persuade.

  Lerma hit back, and hit back hard. At one stage he took Queen Margaret aside.

  —You are forbidden to talk to the King about matters of state, he instructed. Especially in the bedroom, when you are alone.

  Margaret had bristled. She was a royal Habsburg, not used to being ordered around by a mere Sandoval.

  —And if I disobey?

  —You will find that urgent duties will take the King away from you for increasingly lengthy periods of time.

  He sacked Margaret’s Austrian servants and replaced them with his spies. Then he persuaded Felipe to move the royal court from Madrid to faraway Valladolid. The pretext was the unhealthy air – the real reason was the unhealthy political atmosphere in the convent.

  This made the Queen even more determined. Pale and ascetic, Margaret would spend hours in prayer. One of her most fervent prayers was that the suffering Catholic subjects of the English Jezebel should be saved from persecution. She had to persuade Felipe to send them help. She owed it to them – and to Go
d.

  The Duke of Lerma stared thoughtfully at the report on his desk. It was just a despatch on the logistics of troop movements to the Netherlands, but to Lerma it was more than that. Much more.

  It was August 1601 and everything had just changed. By sheer serendipity, a mere stroke of chance, the Spanish invasion of Ireland had become possible. It might be the way to keep the female troika happy and to satisfy his own aims at the same time. The cold war at court could finally be brought to an end.

  Lerma stared at the despatch, but what he was really looking at was a redrawn map of Europe as it might appear a decade from now.

  Spain was mired in a horrendously expensive religious conflict in the Low Countries – a war it could never win. All Lerma’s instincts told him to get out. Spain had quite enough on its plate protecting its interests in the Atlantic, America and the Mediterranean. Peace with England would pave the way to peace in the Netherlands; it would also end the relentless privateering raids that were disrupting the Spanish bullion fleets.

  Taking the long view, Lerma understood that the bad blood between Spain and England was a temporary phenomenon. For centuries, the two countries had been intuitive allies, regularly cementing their friendship with royal marriages. Just a generation earlier, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary Tudor, then Queen of England, had married Felipe II, father of Spain’s current monarch. Spain’s fingerprints were all over modern England. Felipe II, as consort King of England, had built up Henry VIII’s decaying navy – which, ironically, had later gone on to defeat his own Great Armada. And how many people in Ireland realised that King’s County – which the Irish called Offaly – had been named for the Spaniard Felipe II rather than after an English monarch?

  Lerma had already put out some feelers towards peace, but the English terms had been too high. A Spanish presence in Ireland would mean that Lerma could negotiate from a position of greater strength. Crucially, it would also enable Spain to act swiftly to establish a Catholic successor when Elizabeth died. It would also divert English troops from the Netherlands, and the cost would force Elizabeth closer to bankruptcy. And finally it could all be depicted (as so many invasions are) as a humanitarian intervention to protect a persecuted underclass.

  Lerma turned his attention back to his report. Yes, a new window of opportunity had opened. A shift in the ever-changing allegiances in mainland Europe had meant that a fleet of ships waiting in Lisbon to carry soldiers to the Netherlands were no longer needed. The vessels were now free for other use. At last the time was ripe. Through good fortune, the stars were now lined up: Lerma, the King, the Queen, the Irish earls, and churchmen like Oviedo would all get exactly what they wanted.

  The new armada would soon sail out of Lisbon … and into history.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SAILING TO GOD OR THE DEVIL

  Lisbon, August 1601

  One month before the invasion

  AT AROUND the same time, fortune smiled on an English galley slave named John Edie. The Cornish seaman had been captured by the Spanish in 1601 and forced into service at the oars. Smarting under the overseer’s whip, Edie had seemed destined to a short and brutish life on the hell ships. But fate had other ideas.

  You are in luck, Ingleze, his Spanish overseers had told him as they struck off his chains. We are short of good seamen. You are going to the Azores.

  At the Spanish-owned island of Terceira in the mid-Atlantic, Edie’s new transport ship collected a thousand veteran soldiers. This was his first inkling that major troop movements were under way.

  As they entered the busy seaport of Santa Maria del Belém, at the mouth of the River Tagus near Lisbon, John Edie’s eyes must have widened as he realised the scale of the operation. Several gigantic galleons were being fitted out for war. Cannon were being hoisted aboard, barrels of powder carried along gangways, stocks of salt and ship’s biscuit stowed in holds. This was no minor expedition. This was an invasion fleet.

  At the epicentre of this frantic storm of preparation – the hammering and caulking and shouting – was the fleet’s flagship, a mighty galleon of 900 tons named the San Andres. It was commanded by the fleet admiral Don Diego de Brochero, a veteran naval officer. Like Edie, he was a former galley slave – he was once captured by the Turks and had spent five years chained to the oars. The 960-ton San Felipe would carry the Vice-Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur. A floating leviathan, the 1,300-ton San Pedro, completed the trinity. Their Biblical names emphasised the religious nature of the expedition.

  There were three other Spanish vessels displacing 500 tons. Backing them up was an assortment of smaller warships and commandeered merchant vessels. Of the thirty-three ships in the fleet, only twenty were state vessels. As was common practice, the armada consisted of a nucleus of naval fighters augmented by whatever commercial vessels were around at the time. One witness reported ‘two ships of Drogheda, one from Wexford, one Limerick’ as well as vessels from France, Scotland and the Low Countries.

  A typical victim was the merchantman St Michael, which had carried a cargo of salted hides and timber from Galway to Lisbon. On arrival, Galway merchant Andrew Lynch was told abruptly that his cargo was being requisitioned ‘for the King’s use’ and the vessel’s owner, John Clark, was informed that he would be giving his ship over to the cause. The two men were put onto separate naval vessels, and the St Michael carried twenty-five Spanish soldiers and a woman passenger to Ireland as part of the invasion fleet.

  On the quayside at Belém, 4,464 troops were being mustered into 45 companies and grouped into two tercios or regiments. The seamen – anywhere between 1,000 and 1,500 sailors from Spain’s Basque region – were busy checking the rigging and stowing the ships’ gear. The number of fighting men was far short of the 6,000 men (that is, two normal-sized tercios) that O’Neill had requested and Felipe III had intended to send. The numbers had been reduced by mass desertion, sickness and corruption.

  Edie had no way of knowing it, but he was witnessing a sight that would never be repeated: a full-scale naval force setting out for Ireland, intent on toppling the Queen of England from her throne. The Great Armadas of the Elizabethan era would never sail again.

  At daybreak on Monday, 24 August, the mighty fleet weighed anchor. It took more than three hours for the unwieldy galleons to be towed and warped out to the harbour mouth, until at last the armada began its epic journey at 10am. Once clear of the estuary, the armada would have assumed the classic crescent formation, with the fighting ships in the centre. Although much smaller than the 130-ship Great Armada of 1588, the fleet still presented a formidable sight as it pushed northwards through the Atlantic swell. Its sheer size made it easy to spot, and by early September the English knew that the invaders were on their way.

  The captive seamen noted the contrast between the obvious poverty of the soldiers and the lavish lifestyles of the grandees. ‘Some of them are richly apparelled and furnished,’ recalled the Scots seaman Silvester Steene. ‘Five hundred, at the least, have golden chains.’

  Wild rumours circulated among the captives about a vast hoard of treasure on board. Silvester Steene estimated it at anywhere between half a million and eight million ducats. John Edie said that the San Andres alone held nine chests of treasure, each nearly three metres long. Although these accounts were exaggerated, there was no doubt that the expedition carried a substantial war chest. One source estimates it at around 165,000 escudos, perhaps over 600,000 euro today.

  In contrast, the soldiers and seamen were already malnourished, ill-equipped and shivering with cold. John Edie reported that after only a few days the mariners and troops were put on half rations. He reckoned the expedition had only enough food to last a month. Judging by the amount of preserving salt in the cargo hold, they were obviously banking on receiving large quantities of fresh beef from the Irish as soon as they arrived.

  For the first few days the fleet made good progress, passing the Groyne and safely negotiating Biscay’s notoriously dangerous waters. But the atmosphere
on board was not quite so smooth. Admiral Brochero grumbled about the quality of his crew, which included prisoners of war and press-ganged sailors. Many of them had already fled at Lisbon. (Conditions on Spanish ships were so bad that seamen regularly jumped ship, ‘barefoot and unclothed, begging for alms, many dying on the road’, according to one report.)

  Those who remained were openly hostile and required armed guard. Brochero was apprehensive about the return trip, when he would not have the security of four thousand troops to keep discipline among the sailors.

  Meanwhile, the clerics and some of the captains became locked in bitter disputes. The Galway merchant Andrew Lynch witnessed one of these angry altercations on board one royal warship, El Crucifijo. The overall commander, Juan del Águila, was present at the time. Some officers were furious that the army had been reduced from a promised 6,000 to a mere 4,500. One officer dramatically brandished a muster list.

  ‘And what is that,’ he demanded, ‘to invade a strange country?’

  Another officer tried to calm him down.

  —Don’t worry, he told him. Once we arrive, we will get 6,000 Tuscan and Italian reinforcements. They will arrive by December at the latest.

  The row continued as Lynch moved out of earshot.

  However, Lynch was not privy to the most heated argument of all – the dispute over the fleet’s destination. Astonishingly, the mission had reached a point 150km from the Irish coast without anyone having a firm idea of where they were headed. Would it be Donegal, in the extreme north? Cork or Kinsale, in the extreme south? Galway in the west, or Drogheda in the east? No one had a clue.

  Even today, it remains one of the most hotly contested controversies about the Kinsale invasion.

  Where did the Spanish fleet intend to land? Did they choose Kinsale or did weather conditions force them there? And in going to the extreme south of Ireland, were they ignoring the recommendations of the Irish insurgent leaders? As the old cliché has it, was their intervention ‘too little, too late and to the wrong place’?