The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

—Who is that young man? the Queen asked in a stage whisper as Charles joined the royal party at dinner.

  The whispers went around the table, loud enough for the embarrassed Blount to hear, until at last someone reported back that he was the second son of the late Lord Mountjoy. Throughout all of this, Elizabeth fixed a rigid, unnerving stare on Blount – something which, according to her amused courtiers, ‘she was wont to do’.

  The young graduate flushed bright scarlet, which was exactly the reaction the Queen had wanted: she may have been born in the same year as Blount’s father, but she hadn’t lost it – her mere gaze could still make a young man blush. Blount’s involuntary reaction was the best career move he ever made. She called him to the head of the table and gave him the royal hand to kiss.

  —I knew there was noble blood in him, she remarked loudly. The lords and ladies tittered, conscious that she was referring to Blount’s rush of blood to the head.

  She kept him trapped in her stare.

  —What was your name again? she asked at length.

  He told her. Noticing his extreme discomfiture, Elizabeth softened her tone. ‘Fail you not to come to court,’ she offered, ‘and I will bethink myself, how to do you good.’

  Soon the gossips were hinting at an intimate relationship between Blount and the fifty-something monarch. ‘I hear she hath now entertained one Blount,’ wrote one scandalmonger, ‘a young gentleman whose grandmother she may be.’

  Robert Devereux, the fiery young Earl of Essex, didn’t take kindly to the new challenger at court – especially when Blount proved to be an expert jouster. After one celebrated jousting victory, Elizabeth presented Blount with a golden chesspiece Queen. The message could not have been clearer.

  The gift left Essex seething with quiet fury. Matters came to a head next day when Blount walked through the court ostentatiously wearing the chess token on his cloak. ‘Now I perceive,’ Essex hissed to the entire room, ‘that every fool must have a favour.’ It was one of those pivotal moments. Blount could not hope to retain respect if he let the insult pass.

  —I challenge you to a duel, he shot back.

  —And I accept, Essex replied.

  News of the drama raced around the court. Elizabeth could have stopped the duel with a single word, but the prospect of two young stags locking antlers over her favour probably came as something of a thrill.

  The two men met in a tense standoff in Marylebone Park, then a rural area on the outskirts of London. The woods echoed with the sound of clashing steel and sliding blades, but soon it was all over. Blood flowed from Essex’s thigh. Blount, the victor, took the Earl’s sword and walked away. Honour had been satisfied.

  The Queen was delighted that Essex had been humbled. ‘By God’s death,’ she said, ‘it was fit that someone or other should take him down and teach him better manners.’

  Far from making an enemy of Essex, Blount had earned his admiration. The Queen insisted on a reconciliation, and from that point on, the two angry duellers became close friends. Essex’s thirst for power, combined with Blount’s burgeoning military skills, ensured that theirs would become a politically volatile partnership. But it was not the most troublesome relationship Blount would have with that family. Worse would come later when he first looked into the striking black eyes of Essex’s sister, Penelope, and, like so many men before him, fell hopelessly under the spell of England’s most beautiful and dangerous woman.

  But more of that later.

  By 4 October – the same day as the Queen was writing her letter from Richmond – Charles Blount had arrived in Cork city, just 27km from the Spanish-occupied town of Kinsale. The war was about to begin, and Blount was under no illusions about the real objective. If the Spanish had really intended to aid the Irish rebellion, he reckoned, they had chosen the worst location; but if they aimed ‘to lay a sudden foundation for the war in England, the best’.

  Blount had received confirmation of the landing on 24 September, when he was travelling through the heartland of Ireland with only his personal guards. He faced a dilemma. Should he return to Dublin to build up his army? Or travel southward to Kinsale immediately? His colleague, George Carew, the English President of Munster, was in no doubt.

  —You must go to Kinsale, Carew told Blount, even if you bring only your pageboy with you.

  When Carew told Blount that he had enough food to supply his army for up to three months, the delighted commander sprang to his feet and gave him a spontaneous hug.

  Blount explained his decision to Secretary Robert Cecil. ‘My resolution is this,’ he wrote, ‘to bend myself as suddenly as I can against these foreign forces. If we beat them … [they will] all return presently with halters about their necks.’

  It was never difficult to find Charles Blount, but it was sometimes hard to see him. The eighth Lord Mountjoy was almost perpetually enshrouded in dense clouds of tobacco smoke. He was plagued by debilitating headaches, and believed that smoking helped to blunt the pain.

  Now aged thirty-eight, he had matured into a refined and cultured figure. With his academic bearing, his large, expressive eyes, receding chin and cropped shock of curly hair, Blount looked more like a university lecturer than a warrior. The word generally used to describe his character was ‘bookish’ – a critical term implying that he preferred academic study to the gritty reality of practical warfare.

  In his lifestyle, Blount did little to dispel that notion. He kept a fine table, with ‘the choicest meats with the best wines, which he drunk plentifully, but never in great excess’. This civilised lifestyle was a welcome perk for his secretary and constant shadow, a thirty-six-year-old Lincolnshire man named Fynes Moryson. In previous incarnations Moryson had been a civil lawyer and a university bursar. But he was also (long before the terms were invented) a backpacker, a thrillseeker and a war groupie. After four years of travelling throughout Europe and the Middle East, Moryson asked Blount if he could travel alongside him to write a journal of the Irish war. Blount agreed, making Moryson one of the country’s first war correspondents.

  The news that Moryson received immediately upon his arrival in Ireland might have deterred a lesser man.

  —My chief secretary was killed in action today, Blount told him. Do you want the job?

  Moryson soon found himself in the thick of conflict, which was exactly what he wanted. He narrowly escaped death when a bullet passed by close enough to graze his leg.

  Blount didn’t believe in regular hours. Night-time would often be broken by marches or inspections or briefings. He would nap in the afternoons ‘and that long, and upon his bed’, Moryson testified.

  This combination of fastidiousness and eccentricity often led Blount’s enemies towards a fatal error: they underestimated him. Hugh O’Neill, the Irish insurgent commander, was one example.

  —By the time Blount gets dressed and has his breakfast, the war will be over, he jibed.

  He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Blount’s velvet cloak concealed a backbone of steel. He slept in the afternoons only to catch up with the sleep he lost each night when he visited front-line troops to boost their morale. ‘About 4am,’ he wrote once, ‘I nightly choose to visit our guards myself.’

  In battle he enjoyed getting into the heat of action. According to one historian he was ‘eminent in courage and learning’. Moryson praised Blount’s ‘extraordinary forwardness to put himself into danger’, a policy that resulted in quite a few casualties to his immediate entourage, both human and animal. ‘My Lord himself had his horse shot under him,’ Moryson wrote. ‘Yea, his Lordship’s very greyhound, [who used to] wait at his stirrup, was shot through the body.’

  One attendant soldier had his helmet grazed by a flying bullet; a chaplain and a secretary were killed; ‘and I myself had my thigh bruised with a shot I received in my saddle’.

  Clearly, it was a dangerous business to stand too close to Blount. But while his hands-on policy heartened his men, it was as a military tactician that Blount really shone. As
a master of the theory of warfare, he rapidly identified the mistakes made by previous English commanders in Ireland. His predecessors had campaigned only in summer, allowing the part-timers among the Irish insurgents to return home in winter to tend their cattle and prepare next year’s crop. Blount decided to campaign all year round, depriving the part-time farmers of this vital break and leaving the full-time insurgents exposed in the leafless deciduous forests. ‘Their cattle [giving the farmers no milk in winter] were also wasted by driving to and fro,’ Moryson explained.

  According to his secretary, Blount survived the winter campaigns by wearing ‘three waistcoats in cold weather’ as well as a jerkin, a velvet-lined cloak, a white beaver hat, and a red scarf folded three times around his neck. Underneath he wore ‘two, yea, sometimes three, pairs of silk stockings’ under a pair of woollen socks, and ‘a pair of high linen boot hose’. Moryson marvelled: ‘I never observed any [man] of his age and strength to keep his body so warm.’

  Blount eliminated the need for long, straggling marches by building a string of fortified garrisons. He also made secrecy a key policy, eliminating the leaks that forewarned the enemy of his intentions.

  Blount had also identified his enemies’ Achilles’ heel – they always needed a safe route of retreat. Many of O’Neill’s troops were better armed and disciplined than the English and quite capable of facing them in open battle. If they looked as though they were winning on the open field, O’Neill would ramp up the fighting and press home their advantage. But if it seemed they were losing, they would fade away into the woods. To the frustrated English, it must have felt like fighting a ghost. Even when the Irish lost, they still won.

  Blount knew that O’Neill’s tactics could not continue forever. Sooner or later, the Irish commander would be caught out in the open, with nowhere to run. O’Neill had spent much of his life avoiding this situation. Blount had spent most of the past nineteen months trying to make it happen.

  The previous Tuesday, 29 September, Blount had ridden out to inspect the captured town. ‘This town of Kinsale hath a good wall, and many strong castles in it,’ he reported. The Spanish still controlled the sea entrance – although only a dozen of the ships remained in harbour – but they had no cavalry. ‘Our greatest strength and advantage consisted in our horses,’ he reported. So it was imperative, he told London, to send large stores of fodder.

  In order to attack Kinsale, Blount needed cannon. Frustratingly, there were already big guns in Munster and in Dublin, but the nearest ones lay ‘unmounted on the ground’ and the ones in Dublin could not be moved on shipboard without specialist equipment.

  Towards mid-October, the weather turned nasty, with bitter cold and driving rain. Blount was stuck in Cork for three days. Together with Carew, he used the time to formulate a battle plan, and to establish a front-line hospital for future casualties. William Farmer, an army surgeon, recalled: ‘[To this] place should be sent all the sick and hurt soldiers that should happen in the time of siege … there was provided for them fire, lodging, meat and drink.’

  Eventually the storms calmed enough for Blount to lead his troops out to the fringe of Kinsale. He camped overnight at Owenboy, around eight kilometres from the town, before moving to a closer camp under Knockrobin Hill, just eight hundred metres north of the fortress walls. Although he couldn’t dig in yet – he had no entrenching tools – he felt it was important to register a presence. It was a risky move. He had no artillery, and ‘scarce so much powder as would serve for a good day’s fight’.

  Conditions were grim. With no trenches to shelter them, many of the soldiers had to sleep out in the open and the officers lodged in hastily erected ‘cabins’ of sticks, mud and turf which provided only a little more protection. ‘It rained upon us in our beds, and when we changed our shirts,’ Fynes Moryson later recalled.

  The camp sat astride the main road from Cork (now a minor road through Brownsmills) and consisted of thirteen large tents and around forty of the little cabins. It lay on the northern side of the Oysterhaven estuary, just before its only crossable point at a building then called the New Mill.

  Sitting in his mud hut, amid dense clouds of smoke from his pipe, Charles Blount surveyed Felipe III’s latest possession through the drenching rain. He knew that this was to be the ultimate test of will: between two monarchs, between two nations, and between two seasoned campaigners whose skills were to be tested to the limits.

  ‘Iacta est alea,’ he wrote to Secretary Cecil, quoting Julius Caesar’s famous phrase. ‘The die is cast between England and Spain.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  CURSES LIKE THUNDERBOLTS

  There are only three ways in which fortified towns may be gained. The first is by stratagem … the second is by entrenchments and batteries to prepare a breach and to make the assault … the third is by entrenching an Army about a fort, whereby all passages are barricaded up; so that relief cannot possibly come to enter the town, so that by mere hunger they are constrained to yield.

  – Robert Ward, Animadversions of War, 1639

  AS CHARLES Blount cursed the rain and waited for his troops, Juan del Águila studied his favourite manual on fortifications and considered his next move. The veteran fighter had been in similar situations many times before, both as attacker and defender, and knew exactly what to expect.

  Soon the full force of the English army would be hurled against these aged stone walls. The pleasant green countryside would be transformed into a blasted, muddy wilderness of dugouts and earthen ramps as his enemies relentlessly burrowed their way towards him in parallel and zig-zagging trenches. When they reached cannon range, they would mount their heaviest artillery behind barriers of compacted soil. They would establish new advance camps behind these lines, tightening their noose around the town. The great guns would roar. Dense iron cannonballs weighing eight kilo-grams or more would smash into the centuries-old walls. Their concentrated impact would weaken the tall, unstable edificies and, eventually, smash open a breach. No mediaeval stone wall could withstand modern cannon fire. It wasn’t a question of tactics. It was pure physics.

  Over the past century (and Águila had been a soldier for nearly 40 percent of that time) there had been a total revolution in the science of warfare. Once, defenders had felt safe behind high stone walls. But the development of powerful, mobile cannon had changed all that. Repeated impact would quickly destabilise the gangling, top-heavy structures. Heavy masonry would tumble down, burying the defenders. The same friendly stones that had once provided shelter would shatter into flesh-ripping shrapnel. ‘Such is the shock of artillery,’ wrote the Italian military expert Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘that there is no wall, however strong, that cannon fire will not destroy in only a few days.’

  Most modern European fortresses featured lower, wider walls constructed of hardened earth and faced by masonry. They were so bottom-heavy and stable that they rarely collapsed. Cannonballs fired at them would simply bury themselves deep into the earth, dissipating their energy. Viewed from above, modern forts resembled stars or magnified snowflakes, with angular, spear-like projections jutting out at strange angles from the wall. These ‘bastions’ ensured a clear view and a clean line of fire, however devious the enemy’s approach.

  If you added defensive trenches, moats and slopes, you had a fortress that was almost impregnable. Águila could testify to this: he had built a superb example of a star fort in Brittany which had prevailed for years without being taken. But that fortress had been built from scratch. In crowded, mediaeval Kinsale, rebuilding was just not practicable. ‘[Kinsale] is well built and surrounded by walls,’ Águila wrote home, ‘[but] it is not favourable for fortification.’

  He would have to opt for a more quick-and-dirty solution. Outside the walls, he would create a network of defensive trenches fronted by high earthen ramps. Some were oval. Others were ‘ravelins’ – outwardly jutting triangles, rather like bastions. Using these as refuges, his men could sally out and attack the English trench-di
ggers before they could approach within range.

  All over northern Europe, war was being waged in this manner: by digging down into the earth. ‘We make war more like foxes than like lions,’ one military expert, Roger Boyle, was to complain half a century later. (He was actually the son of Richard Boyle.)

  So Águila would dig down too. He ordered his men to excavate a line of trenches ‘upon a hill, [outside] the town’. Trenches and gun emplacements would also be thrown up around the two outlying fortresses, Castle Park and Rincorran. ‘They set about fortifying their camp, and digging trenches, arranging and planting the ordnance [guns],’ reported Hugh O’Donnell’s seventeenth-century biographer Lughaidh O’Cleary.

  According to the Annals of the Four Masters: ‘They planted their great guns, and their other projectile and defensive engines, at every point on which they thought the enemy would approach them.’

  Andrew Lynch, the Galway merchant who sailed with the Spanish fleet, witnessed some of these guns being set up. ‘Three pieces were mounted on carriages and brought into the middle of the town,’ he wrote. Lynch identified them as ‘sakers’, medium-sized guns with three-metre barrels capable of propelling an iron ball of up to 2.7kg for over 2.5 kilometres. Rather than hit a specific target, the missiles were designed to bounce wildly and cause maximum damage.

  Another witness, Scotsman John Clerk, said the town’s churchyard was turned into a gun emplacement.

  Later, Lynch saw Águila march his soldiers – reckoned at just over three thousand men – onto a hill outside the town for drill and mustering.

  Set against the sombre green and dun backdrop of a damp Irish hillside, the muster would have made a colourful spectacle. Spanish army officers were encouraged to express their personality through their clothing, even in wartime. ‘There has never been a regulation for dress and weapons in the Spanish infantry,’ one commentator wrote in 1610, ‘because that would remove the spirit and fire necessary in a soldier.’