by Des Ekin
Officers typically strove to outdo each other with their brightly plumed steel helmets, flamboyantly coloured topcoats, and padded doublets. In contrast, the ordinary troops wore doublets and stuffed knee-length breeches. But often they were shamefully under-clothed as well as under-equipped. ‘I have 2,500 effectives,’ Águila complained of his troops at Kinsale, ‘so untrained and so naked that it is a piteous thing to see.’
Drills like this were essential. Throughout Europe, the Spanish were renowned for their disciplined troops and their tight, block-like battlefield formation. Known to the English as ‘the Spanish Square’, this was a rectangle made up of 1,000 to 3,000 pikemen, musketeers and arquebusiers. It was effectively a moveable human fortress for use in an open field. The pikemen’s array of long, razor-sharp spikes would skewer any approaching cavalry as the mobile shooters at each corner unleashed murderous fire. Ideally, the overall force would form into three squares – hence the name ‘tercio’ or third.
Troops in a Spanish square could inflict almost unbelievable defeats upon a superior but less disciplined army. For instance, in two separate battles against the Dutch, the Spanish lost ten men and their enemies lost 5,000 and 7,000.
Meanwhile, back in Spain, Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur was having a tough time trying to get help for Águila’s stranded invasion force. The bureaucrats agreed in principle, but things were moving painfully slowly. Zubiaur’s main galleon, the San Felipe, had been seriously damaged in the Atlantic storms and would not be going anywhere before spring. Another of his missing ships had finally limped into El Ferrol in equally bad shape. By mid-October, Diego de Brochero – the admiral who had landed at Kinsale with Águila – had also returned to Spain. His ships, too, were in poor condition.
Zubiaur was anxious to rejoin his comrades in Ireland, but he was low on food supplies. In the meantime, his seven hundred troops were kicking their heels. He confessed he was so disenchanted that he was ready to quit after more than a quarter century of service.
Felipe III wrote to him personally, urging him to have another try. The ships should be re-fitted and ten infantry companies should be mustered as reinforcements.
—Speed is of the essence, he told Zubiaur.
But he added, contrarily, that Zubiaur should not spend too much because there wasn’t enough money in the royal purse to pay the troops.
Noting the lack of enthusiasm, the ever-perceptive Venetian diplomats were even more convinced that the only aim of the invasion was to have troops on the ready for the Queen’s death. ‘They are content to keep Kinsale alone,’ they wrote, ‘as a card in their hands when they want it.’
By this stage Águila’s position was difficult, but not a cause for despair. With the two harbour forts under his control and around a dozen ships remaining, he still commanded the sea entrance. His 3,000 to 3,500 men compared well to Blount’s initial force. He had every reason to expect thousands of reinforcements from Spain, and if Hugh O’Neill honoured his promise to join him within fourteen days, he could soon have thousands more.
But there was no sign of help from O’Neill. From Águila’s standpoint, the Irish chieftain’s failure to promise a relief force was baffling. The two northern earls had been demanding Spanish help for years. They would have heard of the landing within a fortnight, and Águila had since sent several envoys to press home the point. ‘[The] Spaniards have lately sent three special messengers to [O’Neill] to labour his coming into Munster,’ one English official reported.
At first O’Neill tried to persuade the Spaniards to come north, but the three messengers left him in no doubt that Águila wanted him to go to Kinsale.
—They are far away, the road is dangerous, and I have no horses, Águila mused aloud.
In Munster itself, the eerie silence from the Irish clans left the Spaniards worried. ‘Nobody worth a garron [a cheap workhorse] has as yet adhered to them,’ General Carew exulted. ‘There is no appearance of war in the province, except at the walls of Kinsale.’
Another English official wrote: ‘The Irish were never so mild … they hang their heads like hens who have been in the rain.’
No one on the Spanish side had expected a long wait and nobody had prepared for a shortage of food. They had brought large quantities of salt, expecting meat from the Irish. Águila boasted to locals that he had enough bread, rice, pulses and wine to last eighteen months, but he was probably putting on a brave face. ‘What they have consists of bread and suet,’ Carew wrote. ‘Their greatest relief is the townsmen’s provisions in Kinsale. They have no wine – except the officers. The soldier drinks only water.’
The captive Irish mariners testified that the Spanish had ‘neither rice, oil, fish or flesh’, only ‘coarse bread, full of worms, and very little wine’.
Beef wasn’t entirely absent from the menu. Before the English sealed off the surrounding countryside, Águila had built up a sizeable herd of cattle near Castle Park. However, these turned out to be easy prey for the English.
By day twenty, as Alférez Bustamante noted in his journal, it was ‘hard work’ to obtain any meat at all.
Inside the town, there was growing dissatisfaction among the wealthier townsfolk who wanted to take up Águila’s early offer and leave with their possessions, but who also wanted to negotiate a pardon from the English. Eventually Águila lost patience and informed them they had to forfeit their goods and stay. However, he could not seal the town completely. ‘Some English, Frenchmen and Scots have run from them,’ read one report, ‘and some Spaniards, Portuguese and other [deserters].’
The Cornish seaman John Edie had an especially good reason for wanting to escape. Even if the Spanish were to win, he could look forward only to a return to the galley oars. When an opportunity arose, he secretly slipped away on the road north to Cork, leaving Kinsale behind him forever.
As the two sides dug in like foxes, there was a bizarre twist to the conflict. The first serious battle of the campaign took place not on ground level, and not on the subterranean level … but on the heavenly plane.
In this strange war where power and empire-building were inextricably entangled with religion, it was not enough to win the hearts and minds of the public. It was also vital to win their souls. And the Spanish clerics had a super-weapon that was, in its way, far more powerful than anything in the English armoury. It was called excommunication.
Up until now, most priests in Ireland had instructed their Catholic flock to remain loyal to the Queen and to obey all her laws except those on religion. Philip O’Sullivan, a historian of Catholicism in Ireland, recorded that ‘at this time there was no persecution of priests’. Most clerics preached that ‘it was not only lawful to assist the Queen, but even to resist the Irish party and to draw the sword upon it’.
Blount’s fear was that the newcomers would change all that by offering indulgences to the insurgents and damnation to those who opposed them. Anxious to pre-empt that, he issued a proclamation warning that Queen Elizabeth had been ‘truly anointed’ by God. Anyone who opposed her would defy the divine will.
Mateo de Oviedo hit back with his own proclamation, issued in the name of Águila but clearly written in his own distinctively bombastic style. ‘We endeavour not to persuade anybody [to] deny due obedience … to his prince,’ he said. However, he claimed, the heretic Elizabeth had been stripped of her crown by the Vatican – and therefore wasn’t queen at all. In the words of one seventeenth-century writer, the proclamation announced that she had been ‘deprived of her kingdoms, and her subjects absolved and freed from their oaths of allegiance’. The Spanish would ‘deliver them out of the devil’s claws and English tyranny’.
What he said next drew gasps of astonishment throughout Europe. ‘The Pope, Christ’s Vicar upon earth, doth command you to take up arms for the defence of the Faith,’ Oviedo declared. ‘[Whoever] shall attempt to do otherwise, and remain in obedience to the English, we will persecute him as an heretic and a hateful enemy of the holy Church.’ The Spanish cler
ic was unleashing the ultimate deterrent. And this was something he had no right to do.
Oviedo, desperate for Irish support, and impatient to reach his cathedral in Dublin, had unwittingly stumbled into a diplomatic minefield. There had been earlier Papal Bulls – official edicts – excommunicating Catholics who supported Elizabeth. But they had never applied in Ireland, and the backlash against the English Catholics had been so severe that the current Pope, Clement VIII, had quietly let them gather dust. Clement’s main aim was stability in Europe. He had spent years enticing the Protestant King of France back into the Church and establishing peace between the great rivals France and Spain.
Oviedo’s proclamation could be interpreted – and was interpreted – as meaning that the Vatican was upsetting this delicate balance of power by encouraging Spanish expansion against France’s interests. In Venice, it was important breaking news. ‘Don Juan del Águila … has announced that His Holiness has renewed the Bull against the Queen of England, absolving her subjects from their allegiance,’ ambassador Marin Cavalli reported from Paris.
When the French King Henry IV heard of the Kinsale proclamation, he was furious. He summoned the Vatican’s representative and gave him an earful. ‘The [invasion] has profoundly impressed the King of France and his Ministers,’ Cavalli said. He warned that the news had put the French on a war footing. If the Spanish were to succeed in Ireland, France would be honour-bound to intervene.
The English were amused at the chaos the proclamation had caused. The Spanish were ‘discharging curses like thunderbolts’, one observer wrote.
Rome was highly embarrassed. For the ambitious Oviedo, it was not a good career move.
Oviedo could have lived with all these problems if his tactic had worked. But most Irish Catholics simply ignored his threat … and for the titular Archbishop of Dublin, that was the greatest snub of all.
By late October, Águila’s soldiers were falling ill with crippling abdominal cramps, fever and chills. When they began excreting blood, the hospital workers immediately recognised ‘the bloody flux’ – dysentery, the same illness that had killed Spain’s arch enemy Sir Francis Drake a few years earlier.
In the crowded surroundings, the disease spread rapidly. Tiny micro organisms travelled from unwashed hands into mouths, and then burrowed deep into the intestines. The Spanish invaders were themselves being invaded – and the microscopic assailants were to kill more Spanish troops at Kinsale than the English could ever manage.
Then, just as his numbers were seriously declining, Águila received a message which many of his subordinates regarded as a chink of light in the darkness. An Irish clan leader on the western fringes of County Cork was offering to provide him with two thousand extra troops.
You can imagine how Águila reacted to this offer. After all, he was stranded in Kinsale with a rapidly depleting force; he didn’t know if the northern earls were ever going to join him; and he could be waiting for weeks for any help from home. Two thousand extra troops?
No thanks, he replied.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LORD OF BEARA AND BANTRY
HE SAID what?
Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare could hardly believe his own ears when his messenger conveyed Juan del Águila’s polite rejection of his offer of two thousand troops. Sitting in his windswept stone castle some 120km from Kinsale, the fifty-year-old Gaelic chieftain had never felt so insulted and so bewildered at the same time.
Donal Cam controlled Beara and Bantry, a remote finger of County Cork pointing across the chilly Atlantic towards the Americas. And with thousands of warriors at his disposal, he had thought he was in a position to end the escalating Kinsale standoff with a game-changing intervention.
O’Sullivan Beare’s sympathies were firmly with the invaders. He may have been born on this far-western salient of Ireland – but there was no doubt about his bloodline and ancestry. With his Don Quixote moustache and goatee, he looked more Spanish than the Spaniards themselves. According to one source: ‘His face of dark olive complexion [was] lighted with large dazzling eyes … and wore a peculiar air of Spanish haughtiness.’ He had been given the nickname ‘Cam’, or ‘crooked’, thought to be as a result of a disfiguring injury to his shoulder. He felt this disability had challenged him and made him stronger by tempering the ‘inward conceit’ he had shown in his youth.
Donal Cam claimed to hate the English oppressors, whom he regarded as ‘these merciless, heretical enemies’. Now he had an opportunity to strike back. As his nephew Philip O’Sullivan later recorded: ‘[He] sent a messenger to Águila to say he and his friends had 1,000 armed men, and as many unarmed men unlisted, and if Águila would only supply arms for them, they would block [Blount’s] road and prevent a siege until O’Neill and O’Donnell came to his assistance.’ All Águila had to do was supply Donal Cam with guns and cash for a thousand men.
But after making a few inquiries among his Irish expatriate supporters in Kinsale, Águila discovered that things were not quite so straightforward. O’Sullivan Beare’s credentials as a rebel were not impressive. He had acquired an English lordship by ferociously lobbying the very Queen he now claimed to despise. In a grovelling submission, he had emphasised how he had helped the English to defeat a previous Irish rising and how he had repudiated the system the Gaels used to elect their chieftains.
In response the English ousted his uncle, who was the foremost claimant under the Gaelic system, and appointed Donal Cam as ‘The Queen’s O’Sullivan’. At a stroke, he had gained full control over a small but lucrative fiefdom with a castle and several thousand inhabitants.
Now this same man was asking for a thousand guns. But was he a convert to the cause – or a double agent? It was a gamble that Águila was not willing to take. His reply to Donal Cam was diplomatic. His spare guns were with Zubiaur, he said, and he could not enlist any locals until they were vetted and approved by O’Neill and O’Donnell.
The rejection provided Mateo de Oviedo with yet another complaint to record in his little black book. ‘[Many Irish] would have come, as they did at the start, if we had trusted them and given armaments to them,’ he wrote later, ‘but we did nothing of the sort.’
By mid-October, English troops were being diverted to Kinsale from Leinster, Connaught and the north. One commander, Henry Danvers, had made particularly good time – his men marched the 200km from Dublin to Cork in just six days. (This shows that Águila was not being unrealistic in expecting O’Neill to travel from the north within two weeks.) Thousands more were on the way. Secretary Cecil had been busy conscripting troops all over England, and they were gathering at the West Country ports of Barnstaple and Bristol. A few of these were volunteers, but the vast majority had been dragged into the army by force.
The system worked like this. In each region, local authorities would be ordered to raise a quota. Naturally, they chose the misfits they wanted to get rid of: tramps, drifters and lawbreakers. (Sometimes even condemned criminals flatly refused to enlist, saying they preferred the gallows to dying like dogs in Ireland.)
An official known as a ‘conductor’ marched them to a mustering centre. Along the way, their bags were usually ransacked and their clothes stolen. By the time the conscripts reached port, only the dregs were left. Those who had any cash had bribed themselves free, and the fittest had escaped. The system was almost guaranteed to ensure that those who remained were least suited to be soldiers. One group bound for Cork was described as ‘either old, lame, diseased, boys or common rogues. Few of them have any clothes: small, weak, starved bodies.’
The situation was further complicated by the curious system of ‘dead pays’. A dead-pay was a non-existent soldier whose pay went into the captain’s pocket. There could be six phantom soldiers in every company of a hundred, but no one ever knew for sure until they actually lined up for fighting. ‘[Ensure] they deceive you not with dead-pays and turn out to have no companies when the time comes for service,’ one commander was advised.
&n
bsp; Cecil’s pitiful conscripts set sail from Bristol along with the big guns and the skilled workers Blount desperately needed. There was only one problem – the wind was blowing in precisely the wrong direction.
‘God send us an easterly wind,’ Blount prayed as he kicked his heels in his temporary camp.
His prayers were eventually answered. But when the wind did blow from England, it blew so hard that the thirteen ships were propelled right past Kinsale and several miles further to the west, leaving a frustrated Blount praying for a westerly wind instead.
There is a common misconception that Águila’s Spaniards remained safely inside the town during the Siege of Kinsale, while the Irish did all the fighting. This not only flies in the face of all the evidence (in fact, many Spaniards died in fierce fighting outside the walls), but also misunderstands the nature of warfare in the early 1600s. The new technology of warfare had resulted in a shift away from dramatic, set-piece battles towards long, grinding sieges. The last thing a defender like Águila could do was to wait passively inside a fortress as the attackers burrowed their way closer to his walls. As soon as darkness fell each night, the defenders had to be out there, harassing the besiegers, delaying their trench diggers, and spiking their guns. It was more like a modern sabotage mission than a mediaeval battle, although dozens could die in the vicious hand-to-hand combat. Each attack was known as a ‘sally’.
A military expert named John Muller described the process as it was in the early 1600s: ‘The besieged had opportunities to sally out and fall upon the workmen and their guard on every side, drive them out of their works and destroy them … to nail up the guns and batteries, or to surprise a part of the guard in the trenches.’
A successful sally took place under cover of darkness. ‘Sallies are never made in the daytime [except] by a presumptuous enemy, for then they are easily repulsed,’ Muller wrote. The only way to prevent a sally was constant vigilance. The besiegers would post patrols in no-man’s-land. ‘[They must] remain in profound silence till they hear or perceive some motion.’