The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  With the departing soldiers went a number of the wealthier townsfolk – the ‘persons of better sort’ – clutching their possessions. As always, the poorer citizens were left to take their chances. Their last sight of their betters was the tail-end of a convoy of creaking wagons disappearing up the steep hill towards Cork.

  One man who stayed was the unnamed mayor or Sovereign of Kinsale, who went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the newcomers. Carrying his ceremonial rod, he ushered them into his town and allocated their sleeping quarters. His collaboration left the English outraged. ‘The Sovereign of Kinsale, with his white rod in his hand, [went] to billet and cess them in several houses, more ready than if they had been the Queen’s forces,’ sniffed Thomas Stafford.

  Águila and his entourage occupied the best quarters – the Desmond Castle, a squat stone ‘keep’ built a hundred years earlier. Located just a short but exhausting walk up a steep hill from the quayside, it commanded a clear view of the harbour and could easily be transformed into a redoubt for a final stand if the outer walls were breached. These assets outweighed its disadvantages – it was stone-cold, it was damp from seeping hill-water, and the erratic layout of its rooms reflected its original site on a rocky outcrop.

  A contemporary Irish chronicler named Philip O’Sullivan recorded that the inhabitants gave the invaders a rapturous welcome. ‘The townsmen, expelling the English garrison, conducted the Spanish general and his army of 2,500 foot into the town with great enthusiasm and open arms,’ he reported. An English official, Sir Charles Wilmot, reported bitterly that the Spanish ‘bewitch them with promises of ancient liberty, freedom of conscience and religion, and sugar them all they can’.

  The helpful mayor was allowed to remain nominally in charge. ‘The Sovereign still exercises his place as he did before,’ Wilmot reported, ‘and the people here are pleased at this.’ However, the real power rested with the invaders. ‘On their arrival,’ wrote the Irish annalist in the Annals of the Four Masters, ‘they took to themselves the fortifications, shelter, defence and maintenance of the town from the inhabitants.’

  The locals’ enthusiasm began to wane when their homes were given over to the officers. ‘[The Spanish] quartered their gentlemen, captains and auxiliaries throughout the habitations of wood and stone which were in the town,’ the annalist added.

  Despite all its many disadvantages, Kinsale had one huge asset – it was a wine-importing town. The most experienced officers chose to move into houses with deep stone cellars. They wanted to be safe in readymade shelters when the cannonballs started flying.

  With the town under control, Águila’s first task was to secure the harbour entrance. He had realised immediately that the defence of Kinsale depended upon the twin fortresses – Rincorran and Castle Park – that commanded the approach from the open sea. ‘[Kinsale] overhangs a large and excellent harbour facing to the south,’ the Irish writer Philip O’Sullivan explained. ‘Also overhanging the harbour are two forts, one on either side, and if these were fortified with cannon, access to the harbour could not easily be gained.’

  Rincorran, which commanded the entire haven and entrance, was particularly important. ‘Truly,’ wrote one English military expert, ‘without this fortification there can be no surety made of the town and haven of Kinsale.’

  Águila moved right away to station a company of veterans – ‘some of their [most] distinguished men’, according to another Irish chronicler – at this vital fortress.

  Águila’s next priority was to link up with the insurgent Irish in the region. He was highly sceptical about promises that local warlords would march to his banner with 20,000 cheering soldiers and 1,600 prancing stallions. But he was counting on Irish support in the form of manpower, fresh meat and (above all) horses for his cavalry officers. His hopes rested on the two southern insurgent leaders, Florence MacCarthy and James FitzThomas FitzGerald, the Earl of Desmond.

  The Spanish commander summoned the Sovereign to his headquarters in the castle. As a go-between, he used one of the Irish expatriates who’d sailed with him from Spain. Many of these were members of the southern Irish MacCarthy clan. They included Dermot MacCarthy, known to the Spanish as Don Dermutio; and a seasoned veteran named Cormac (Don Carlos) MacCarthy, who had fought in France with Águila.

  Still clutching his white rod, the mayor scurried obediently into the room where Águila stood, his eyes worriedly scanning the bay for the naval attack he knew would soon come.

  The Irish expatriate stepped forward to interpret.

  —It is vitally important that we make contact with Florence MacCarthy and James FitzThomas FitzGerald, he said to the mayor, using the Irish language. Where are they?

  The Sovereign was surprised that the invaders were so far behind with the news.

  —I thought you knew, he blurted out. They’re both locked up in the Tower of London.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I WILL NEVER SEE MY HOMELAND AGAIN’

  September 1601

  Somewhere on the Atlantic

  MEANWHILE, Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur was still out there, battling through shrieking winds and mountainous seas. Zubiaur’s four ships had been scattered to the four winds – swept far out into the Atlantic by the same storm which blew the others towards the Cork coast. The armada’s vice-admiral had made several attempts to join his comrades before giving up. Eventually he took advantage of a northbound wind and made a spirited attempt to reach the rebel chiefs in Donegal. He reached about halfway up the western coastline before the wind shifted in the opposite direction and undid all his efforts. Doggedly, Zubiaur tried a second time before an indomitable southbound gale picked up his small flotilla and hurled it right back towards Spain.

  As he limped miserably into the northwestern port of El Ferrol, near La Coruña, he knew that he would have a lot of questions to answer. Why had he allowed himself to be separated from Brochero and Águila? What on earth was he doing, back home in Spain with his galleon, the San Felipe, and three smaller ships, carrying nearly seven hundred of the best troops and some of the most urgently needed supplies?

  ‘When the King heard [of his return] he was much distasted with Zubiaur,’ the seventeenth-century naval historian William Monson wrote, ‘and commanded him upon his allegiance to hasten with all speed to Ireland as he was formerly directed.’

  It wasn’t quite that simple. Zubiaur’s ships had been so badly battered that they would need lengthy repairs. The entire episode was a lesson in humility – an example of how the grandiose plans of kings can be shattered by the overwhelming forces of nature. Yet it’s easy to overlook this when we debate the controversy over the destination port. Those who argue that the 1601 armada should have sailed to the north of Ireland instead of to the south are forgetting that the San Felipe actually tried to do this and failed. Judging by Zubiaur’s bruising encounter with the Atlantic storms, the Spanish couldn’t have gone to the north even if they’d wanted to.

  When Águila heard that his most important southern allies had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, he could not hide his shock. A Venetian spy reported that ‘he seemed molto turbato – greatly upset and disturbed’.

  The Sovereign explained the background. General George Carew, the President of the province of Munster, had carried out a pre-emptive strike and incarcerated the two men. Carew had earlier planted a spy at the chieftains’ meeting where the destination was agreed. He had received a full, almost verbatim, account of the discussions. This intelligence was confirmed when he intercepted a letter from the Irish expatriate leader Dermot MacCarthy in Spain, warning that the Spaniards intended to ‘surprise’ Cork.

  Carew immediately (and illegally) seized the chieftain Florence MacCarthy, despite having promised him protection. In May, the fugitive Earl James FitzThomas FitzGerald was found hiding in a cave ‘many fathoms underground’. Both men were safely quarantined in London. Their war was over.

  Now, in Kinsale, the news threw Águila’s plans into disarr
ay. ‘The man was much deceived,’ wrote one English historian, ‘for Sir George Carew … had prevented all his designs.’

  Dermot MacCarthy agreed: ‘Since James FitzThomas and Florence Mac-Carthy had been apprehended, his hopes of assistance failed him,’ he said. ‘He thought his state desperate unless he were relieved.’

  The well-informed Venetians, who seem to have had spies in Águila’s ranks, also reckoned he was in big trouble: ‘[Águila] finds himself quite shut-in and deprived of all the assistance on which he reckoned – and is therefore in serious difficulty.’

  All of Águila’s worst fears had come true. He had been promised an enthusiastic reception from the Irish – with all the food, soldiers and horses that he needed. Instead, he was on his own. And to make things worse, his soldiers were already falling ill. ‘Many of their soldiers were weak at their first landing,’ said one English report, ‘and many are still sick … their provisions are scant.’

  The English commander, Charles Blount, was grimly satisfied. The Spaniards were ‘in their means scant and miserable; in their persons weak and sickly; and in their hopes dismayed and amazed’, he wrote.

  Alone in his quarters, Águila wrote a furious despatch to the King.

  —I have been deceived by those who persuaded me to undertake this expedition. The facts are very different to the reports, he wrote angrily.

  He urged that, in addition to sending reinforcements, the monarch should punish those in Spain who had promised a general rising in Ireland.

  —Not a man has come to my support, he pointed out.

  Águila’s letter ended on a bleak note that reflected his sense of isolation and betrayal.

  —I will never see my homeland again, he wrote. Although this does not grieve me on my own account … but for the sake of all the young men who are with me.

  When Águila talked of being deceived by reports, he had one man to the forefront of his mind – Mateo de Oviedo. It was the Franciscan cleric who had persuaded Felipe to launch the invasion, who had told him exactly where to go, and who had reassured him his troops would receive such a warm welcome that they needn’t even bring horses or fresh meat.

  The fifty-four-year-old cleric seemed convinced that the religious nature of the invasion would overcome all its practical problems. The armada had embarked on ‘a great service to God’ and ‘a holy enterprise’. An intense and emotional preacher, Oviedo would declaim that La Inglesa, the hated Englishwoman Elizabeth, was the enemy of the Faith. She was imposing ‘a tyranny’ on her ‘miserable slaves’.

  He had a uniquely bombastic style. ‘O, immortal God!’ he would thunder at the English in a typical outburst. ‘Who is there that is not astounded at your bitter and indescribable cruelty? … Look upon your work and be ashamed.’

  He could not understand why Spain was standing idly by while the Irish Catholics suffered. He demanded money and guns for the insurgents. For one gunrunning trip to Donegal, he demanded five chains of gold – one for each of the insurgent leaders. ‘Money [lies at] the heart of all actions, especially war,’ he once reminded Felipe III.

  On the face of it, Oviedo seemed an unlikely candidate for Spain’s Irish version of Lawrence of Arabia. Born in Segovia in 1547, he briefly studied law before joining the Franciscans. By his mid-twenties he was teaching theology in a convent. As he developed closer contacts with Spain’s sizeable Irish community, his interest in the Irish Catholics developed into a burning passion. He vigorously advocated on their behalf to the Vatican and to the royal court, pushing for the despatch of armed forces to Ireland.

  While in his early thirties, Oviedo was recruited to what might be described as His Holiness’s Secret Service: he became an international agent for the Counter-Reformation movement. In 1579 and again in 1580 he sailed to Ireland on ill-fated ‘Bay of Pigs’ style invasions, tacitly supported by Spain but deniable. Both were ill-judged and both were disasters. The second, at Smerwick, had ended in a cold-blooded English massacre of the invading troops.

  It was on this expedition that Oviedo had developed his distinctive approach, a challengingly combative style which did not endear him to the military men. When a commander made a decision, Oviedo would demand an alternative approach that was sometimes the exact opposite. Using his formidable powers of persuasion, he would stir dissent among the officers, undermining the commander’s authority. It was a fatal pattern that was destined to repeat itself in Kinsale.

  However, Oviedo was also a man of immense courage. He was well aware of the grisly torture and execution that would await any foreign priest who was caught assisting the insurgents in Ireland.

  When full-scale rebellion erupted in Ireland in the 1590s, Oviedo made more trips to the war-torn north to offer Spanish aid to the insurgent leaders. However, he became more ambitious. He wanted a title. He had been appointed as head of a convent in Zamora, but introducing himself as the custodian of a Spanish sisterhood didn’t really cut it in the war zones. ‘I don’t have much clout with them with only the title of friar,’ he wrote to the King in 1599.

  He asked to be made Spanish ambassador. Unsuccessful, Oviedo tried the Church route instead. He wanted to be Papal Nuncio, but the Pope gave that job to an Italian. The post of Archbishop of Dublin lay vacant – it was just an empty title under Protestant rule, but if the Spanish won, it would become a position of real authority.

  His Irish contacts lobbied ceaselessly on his behalf until finally, in early 1600, the Vatican gave him the position. There was only one problem – until he actually took possession of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Oviedo would remain merely an ‘Archbishop Elect’. In the ensuing years, he was stung by English descriptions of him as ‘the Spaniard who called himself Archbishop of Dublin’ but, technically, they were correct. The prize was almost in his grasp, but just out of reach, and this frustration may partly explain his impatience for a complete Spanish takeover of Ireland – not just the possession of a bridgehead in the south.

  Emboldened by a new sense of power, Oviedo became arrogant and almost insulting in his dealings with the Spanish authorities. He griped that he wasn’t given enough money to act as the envoy of a rich and important monarch. Addressing the Duke of Lerma, he complained that the Spanish had promised the Irish a fleet of ships but ‘did not send so much as a miserable sailboat’. The delay was making Spain look ridiculous, he said. They were ‘the laughing stock of our enemies’.

  His sheer confidence convinced the authorities that he was an expert on the subject. So when this curious warship-and-worship expedition landed in Kinsale, it essentially had two land commanders – Juan del Águila representing the King, and Mateo de Oviedo representing God.

  You might think that was a recipe for trouble. And you would be absolutely right.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TRUST IN GOD AND KEEP YOUR POWDER WET

  Kinsale, late September, 1601

  A few days after the invasion

  SO this is Quinsale.

  Juan del Águila paced around the steep, meandering streets of the ancient town, critically surveying its defences. He concluded that the walls, less than a metre wide, were not fit to withstand a concentrated attack from enemy artillery. The town itself was situated in a hollow beneath a hill. Águila dismissed it as ‘a hole’. He was speaking geologically, but the Spanish term reflected his deep disquiet. He decided he would be safer fighting in the open, free from falling masonry and flying stone fragments. ‘Kinsale is in a side of a river, environed with hills, and without any kind of defence,’ he reported back to Spain. ‘[It is] open in so many parts, and so weak, that it is needful to have half the troops on guard at least.’

  This meant that any attempt to launch an offensive against a besieging enemy must leave some part of the town walls unguarded.

  The Irish writer Philip O’Sullivan agreed that the surrounding hills – and one hill in particular – posed a defensive problem. Whoever placed artillery there ‘might easily either assail or defend the town’, he p
ointed out.

  An English military expert pointed out that Kinsale’s harsh terrain made it difficult for the invaders to dig in. ‘It is an old walled town, and standeth upon rocky ground, so that they cannot entrench or make any defence for themselves out of the earth,’ he said.

  Águila was also concerned about the shortage of fresh water and firewood for cooking. Although Kinsale was ‘almost an island’ he believed it wasn’t self-sufficient in water, and he didn’t have enough small craft to cross the estuary to fetch more.

  For all these reasons, the Spanish commander was keen to quit Quinsale as soon as his fleet was reunited and reinforcements arrived. According to Philip O’Sullivan, Águila thought he ‘would not be long here’. It was this sense of impermanence that caused Águila to make a series of crucial decisions which – with the benefit of hindsight – turned out to be terrible mistakes.

  Admiral Diego de Brochero was even more keen to move on. And at least he had the perfect excuse. He reminded Águila that he had official orders to sail home after disembarkation. His own food supplies were running low, he complained, and the storms could mean a long journey back. Besides, his seamen were so fractious that he had to remain anchored more than a mile out from land. Águila pointed out that it would be extremely difficult for him to fight off an assault from landward without warships to guard his back against a naval attack. Brochero played his trump card – or, more correctly, a royal flush. He said disingenuously that he’d be prepared to stay if Águila compelled him – in other words, if Águila countermanded the King’s clear order.