The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  It’s worth digressing briefly to examine this thorny topic. In April the previous year, the Franciscan cleric Mateo de Oviedo had sailed secretly into Donegal Bay as an official envoy of Felipe III. Accompanying him was a Spanish captain named Martin de la Cerda. As a demonstration of their seriousness, they donated a thousand arquebuses to the Irish insurgents.

  They found the two leaders of the Irish insurgency waiting for them at a nearby friary. Short and wiry, Hugh O’Neill (50) was the overall commander of the rebel confederacy. Although born in County Tyrone, he had been raised in English ways and had devoted much of his early life to quelling Irish rebels on behalf of the Queen before switching loyalties and leading the uprising in the north. He was a genius at rural guerrilla fighting, but had recently built up a modernised army which was capable of challenging the English in conventional warfare. He was astute, patient and utterly ruthless.

  His son-in-law Hugh O’Donnell (28) was the polar opposite. He had ‘drooping branched locks’ of fiery red hair and a temperament to match. Impetuous and emotional, he had harboured a burning hatred for the English ever since they abducted him and threw him into a dungeon in Dublin Castle at age seventeen. (He escaped, but lost both big toes from frostbite during his trek to freedom across the snowbound hills.) Unlike O’Neill, who could work with anyone if it suited his interests, Red Hugh had only one ambition. And a Spanish conquest of Ireland was exactly what Oviedo and Cerda were here to discuss.

  When the envoys asked where the invaders should land, O’Neill was forensically precise.

  —If the force is large, O’Neill said, and I mean 6,000 men or more, it should head for the province of Munster in the south.

  He explained that the south offered easier terrain, better provisioning and higher-profile targets. And with 6,000 men, the Spanish could easily hold their own until he joined them. Within Munster, O’Neill believed Cork harbour was the best option. It lay between two friendly territories, one owned by a secretly sympathetic southern chieftain named Florence Mac-Carthy (in County Cork Florence is traditionally a man’s name) and the other by the openly insurgent Earl of Desmond, James FitzThomas FitzGerald. Both had agreed to support the invaders.

  If the Spanish sent fewer than 2,000 men, O’Neill believed they should go north to O’Donnell’s heartland of Donegal, where such a meagre force could be protected by the Irish. A medium-sized force of 3,000 to 4,000 should head for Limerick, further south on the west coast.

  Today, this ‘numbers formula’ is often regarded as a clear and conclusive instruction from O’Neill, but it wasn’t nearly that simple. Later, in November 1600, O’Neill’s agent Richard Owen told the Spanish that they should invade Carlingford, Galway or Sligo. The following year Oviedo – who was essentially O’Neill’s voice at the court of Felipe III – produced an entirely new numerical formula involving Cork, Waterford and Limerick.

  To confuse things further, there was another Irish summit in which five other chieftains joined O’Neill and O’Donnell. Held in an atmosphere of high religious solemnity, the conference was more like a church service than a military strategy meeting. A full Mass was celebrated by sixteen priests before a word was spoken. This conference agreed that Munster should be the target. They leaned towards Limerick as a preferred destination, but Florence MacCarthy insisted on Cork city. The ensuing arguments were hot and heavy, but eventully they concluded (regardless of numbers) ‘to lead the Spanish army in the river of Cork’. Oviedo seconded the motion.

  The situation was complicated by deep divisions among the expatriate Irish insurgents in Spain. ‘There is a difference of opinion as to the destination of the expedition among the Irish themselves,’ one Spanish report noted.

  Some still argued that it should go to the north of Ireland ‘where most of our friends are’ but others argued for a shorter voyage to Cork or Waterford, and a third faction suggested Drogheda to the east. ‘The forces are ready, and only await the final decision,’ the report concluded pointedly.

  The land and sea commanders were at odds. Admiral Diego de Brochero advised against the entire enterprise. Juan del Águila preferred either Donegal Bay or some east-coast port facing England. Brochero vetoed the east for naval reasons. The south was more convenient for his ships, but he could tolerate Donegal. However, Oviedo and Cerda flatly refused to go north to Donegal. They insisted that Cork had been the chieftains’ clear choice.

  (It’s ironic that for many decades, historians wrongly blamed Águila for the decision to go south. ‘His selection of a point of debarkation gave early indication of his want of judgement,’ declared one influential writer in the 1800s. ‘Instead of making for some port in the west or northwest of the island, where the heads of all the great native families were in arms … he landed at Kinsale.’ In fact, the truth was exactly the opposite: it was Águila who wanted to go north, and the clerics and Irish expatriates who insisted on going south.)

  With time trickling away, the Spanish sent another envoy, Pedro de Sandoval, back to Ireland in mid-July 1601. Red Hugh told Sandoval that the situation had dramatically changed and that the fleet should stay clear of Cork. ‘The armada should make for Limerick estuary or Galway,’ he said. However, if it were torn apart by storms, it should head north to any point between Limerick and Lough Foyle, in the extreme north.

  Meanwhile, the Spanish authorities had been vacillating. First they decided that Brochero and Águila should choose the destination. Then, under pressure from Oviedo, they did a U-turn and said Oviedo and Cerda should decide. Águila objected strongly, but the order stood. By this stage, he and Oviedo had become irresistible forces on a furious collision course. The experienced commander – who had been placed in the ludicrous position of debating military tactics with a Franciscan friar – pointed out that Cork was a strongly defended base and could not be taken without much bloodshed. Oviedo believed the city was weakly defended. Águila argued that if it had to be the Cork region, Kinsale would be a better option. Oviedo accepted the possibility of Kinsale, but stuck with Cork as his first choice. This dual option was formalised in writing just before the fleet sailed.

  The captive John Edie actually witnessed the order being issued. ‘The admiral [Brochero] assembled the fleet after leaving port,’ he recalled, ‘and told them that they must go to Ireland … if any of them were separated, they should make for Kinsale.’

  Another English witness, Anthony Wells, agreed. When the fleet left Lisbon, he said, ‘it was directed by the Admiral to Kinsale’.

  Unfortunately, the Spanish commanders were not aware that O’Donnell had changed his mind – the emissary Sandoval did not make it back to Spain until after the armada had departed.

  It is frustrating to think that the ships must have passed at some stage – the invasion fleet heading north towards the Cork-Kinsale region, and Sandoval’s vessel heading south with updated instructions to avoid the area.

  It was the most important message of Águila’s career – and he never received it.

  As the armada approached Ireland, Admiral Brochero scanned the thunderous horizon and realised that a storm was brewing. Yet the question of a destination was still under debate. Brochero reckoned they had better nail it down once and for all, before the storm hit. His subsequent report, written in his own defence, was an exercise in self-justification: ‘Thirty leagues off the Irish coast, I told Don Juan del Águila to identify his chosen port, because I was merely in charge of the fleet,’ he wrote humbly.

  A summit meeting was held on board the San Andres, with a queasy Oviedo rising from his sick-bed to participate. As the rolling waves heaved and the sheets groaned overhead, the shouted arguments were heard on deck.

  ‘[They] did not know where to land,’ recalled one eyewitness, an expatriate Irish insurgent named Dermot MacCarthy. ‘Some advised Connaught or Ulster, but the priests … urged a landing in Munster … [they said] all Munster would be theirs … they were sure that Florence MacCarthy with all his power and friends would join th
em.’

  Águila believed this was all hearsay and that going south would be a big mistake. As for the northern option, Oviedo painted a grim and inaccurate picture of Donegal as a bleak arctic tundra. ‘It is nonsensical to say the Spaniards should have gone to [the north],’ he said later, ‘where you couldn’t find a house to store supplies or ammunition within sixty miles … where it is so desolate that the troops would die from starvation and cold … we would not have had a single man left alive.’

  Eventually an unhappy consensus was reached, and, like most decisions by committee, it left nobody satisfied. ‘With everyone in agreement, I issued written orders to each naval captain to follow me to Kinsale,’ wrote Brochero. He named the port of Castlehaven, southeast of Skibbereen and some 70km west of Kinsale, as an emergency option.

  The die had been cast. The navigators rolled out their charts and set course for the harbour that the Spanish knew as Quinsale.

  And those who had lost the argument left the meeting with their faces as thunderous as those angry black clouds that were, even now, heavily bearing down upon their fragile armada.

  The storm swiped them like a giant fist, scattering the individual ships across the ocean surface like dice hurled across a table.

  Águila and Brochero, in the San Andres, managed to battle northeast towards the Cork-Kinsale region, accompanied by the bulk of the fleet and carrying some 1,700 men. Vice-Admiral Zubiaur became hopelessly lost with his galleon, the San Felipe, and three other ships. Unfortunately for the invaders, they were carrying nearly seven hundred of the best troops and most of the stores and munitions.

  The English, who had been awaiting the fleet, were grimly satisfied as they watched the ferocious wind whipping the waves into spume off the southwest coast of Ireland. ‘If they are at sea in such weather as this,’ mused one official, ‘I hope most of them are with God or the Devil by now. To which of those two places I care not, [so long as] they come not hither.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE INVASION

  Kinsale, Tuesday, 22 September 1601

  Invasion Day

  KINSALE, on a grey, squally morning in late September. Dark rainclouds rolled in from the Atlantic, and the tail-end of a devastating storm whipped the sea into an angry, rolling boil.

  Inside the town, the atmosphere was as electric as the thunder in the turbulent skies. When dawn lit up the eastern sky, the apprehensive townsfolk, red-eyed from a sleepless night, could distinguish the dim outlines of the Spanish warships, anchored more than a mile out to sea. A flotilla of small craft was battling its way through the heaving waves to the shore. Eventually, the leading boat beached on the shingle and the first Spanish soldier set foot on Irish soil.

  The invasion had begun.

  More boats arrived, and the air was loud with shouted commands in Spanish and Italian as hundreds of soldiers fell into ranks and formed companies. The watery sun climbed higher to reveal a quayside transformed into a parade ground, alive with colour and exotic spectacle. Twenty-five brightly decorated regimental flags rolled and snapped in the brisk, skittish wind. Aristocratic officers, resplendent in colourful doublets and puffed-out hose, barked orders to the assembled ranks of 1,700 troops. Diagonal red crosses of Burgundy declared their allegiance to the King of Spain. Swords forged from Toledo steel flashed in the weak autumn sunlight. Pikemen moved into formation, their long, spear-like weapons bristling from the ranks. Musketeers and arquebusiers fell into rank, their guns at the ready.

  Inside the walls of Kinsale, the townsfolk waited in anguished uncertainty. Would the invaders demolish their walls with artillery fire? Would they choose to lob missiles over the ramparts, raining down death and carnage from the air? Or would the Spanish simply wait patiently, until starvation and plague won the war for them?

  No shots rang out in anger. The two squadrons of Spanish troops began to march … but not towards the gates. Instead, they wheeled to the side and marched around the walls. Past each gate they walked in grim silence: the Cork Gate, the Friars’ Gate, the Blind Gate, the World’s End.

  The Spanish were not mounting an attack. They were putting on a parade.

  Eventually the soldiers came to a halt and a grizzled old warrior stepped forward. His voice, rich with the cultured accent of his native Castile, shattered the tense silence and echoed around the old walls. Speaking in English, he said he had come not to harm them, but ‘to banish fear, and win their love’. He pledged that anyone who wanted to leave could do so with no danger to themselves or their property. Even the English troops could depart in safety. Equally, those who wished to stay could rest assured that they would not be harmed.

  Then, referring to himself in the third person, he gave a solemn undertaking. ‘Don Juan del Águila, general to the army of Philip, King of Spain … do promise that all the inhabitants of the town of Kinsale shall receive no injury by any of our retinue, but rather shall be used as our brethren and friends.’

  It was quite a remarkable offer. By the harsh standards of the era, it would have been no surprise if Águila had killed everyone in reprisal for the Smerwick massacre – or, indeed, for the English slaughter and the Irish robbery of the shipwrecked Spanish survivors from the Great Armada. However, it was also a shrewd and sensible offer. Águila had nothing to gain from alienating the Irish, whose support was vital. And if his approach succeeded, he stood to gain control of a key port without wasting a single shot.

  Even so, the episode still reflects credit on Águila. As one nineteenth-century historian later observed: ‘Non-combatants and private property were never so [humanely] treated in Ireland before. Don Juan was the first military commander who ever waged war in Ireland according to the rules of modern civilised warfare.’

  Standing in the ranks of officers that day was Alférez Bustamante, an ensign who specialised in deep infiltration behind enemy lines. ‘[We] marched around the town of Kinsale,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘When they saw us with two regiments lined up outside, they capitulated without resistance.’

  General George Carew’s secretary, Thomas Stafford, who was present for most of the Kinsale siege, agreed with the Spaniard’s account. ‘Upon their approach, the townsmen, not being able to make resistance [even] if they had been willing, set open their gates and permitted them, without impeachment or contradiction, to enter the town,’ he wrote.

  However, another English account suggests that the townsfolk were initially defiant. ‘The Spaniards, on asking admission to Kinsale town, asked for it as friends, saying they were come “for the supportation of the Roman Catholic religion”,’ this eyewitness report read. ‘But the town rejected them and stood on their guard, on which they departed.’

  Shortly after – according to the same report – Águila sent an ultimatum to the Sovereign, or mayor, of Kinsale. ‘[He warned that] if they gave up the town, they would be favourably dealt with, but that, if it had to be taken by force, they would all be put to the sword.’

  In this version of events, Águila granted safe conduct to two town officials to inspect the troops aboard the warships. The invaders showed they had provisions for a lengthy siege. They claimed to be 11,000 strong, although the Kinsale men doubted this and estimated the true number of invaders at 6,000. (This figure seems to have stuck in the minds of the English, even though it was itself a grossly inflated estimate. In fact, only around 1,700 of the 4,464 soldiers who’d set sail from Lisbon arrived on that fateful St Matthew’s Day. Later, as more latecomers limped ship by ship into the harbour, the number would swell to around 3,400.)

  Whichever version of events was true, the end result was the same. At some stage on Tuesday, 22 September, the ancient gates of Kinsale swung open to admit the occupying forces of King Felipe of Spain.

  Once the town had been secured and Spanish guards posted on the main gates, a bizarre mixture of soldiers, civilians and animals poured from the boats onto the beaches and quays of Kinsale. Along with the cows, goats and chickens that every seafaring expedition c
arried to supply fresh food, the Spanish ships contained a number of lowing bulls, whose job was to haul the heavy guns around the uneven terrain. ‘They have twelve cannon, besides field pieces with oxen for their carriages,’ reported the Scots mariner Silvester Steene.

  The former galley slave John Edie gives us a rare hint at the colour and chaos of the landing as the civilians poured ashore. ‘They have 200 or 300 women and children with them,’ he wrote. ‘Many priests and friars are on board, also three Bishops, and one [James] Archer, a priest … They have also brought nuns.’

  In a particularly nasty assessment written shortly after the invasion, a Dublin clergyman named John Rider wrote that there were ‘4,000 poor seabeaten Spaniards, 50 friars, 12 nuns, 100 priests [and] 200 whores’. He said there was ‘a chanterie of priests to pray for the dead and a most damnable pestiferous stews [ie, brothel] of nuns and whores, for both their recreations’.

  Ignoring such slurs, it was true that the invasion was oddly family-friendly. The Spaniards’ chief pilot – one Lambert Gould – had even brought his wife and children along for the trip. John Meade, the mayor of Cork, reported: ‘They have many women and children.’

  The decision to send so many mothers and youngsters to a battle zone seems insane – and it was. But it illustrated the Spaniards’ lack of proper intelligence from Ireland. They genuinely believed that their troops would be so welcome that they could establish their own colony of settlers right away.

  Shouldering their way through this mélange of families, clerics, nuns and farmyard animals, Águila and his senior officers marched through the main gate and into the narrow, twisting streets. History doesn’t record whether there was a formal changeover between Águila and the English commander, William Saxey. (One source says Saxey’s men left ‘before the surprise’.) Either way, the English troops left peacefully, in accordance with their orders. Saxey’s superiors had considered Kinsale ‘not worth preserving’.