The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Body armour was out of favour. It was mainly designed to withstand arrows, but it had been sixteen years since the longbow had been seriously used in battle. A skilled archer could still fire faster than a good musketeer, but any idiot could be trained to use a gun. Many soldiers had discarded their cumbersome armour, although those in the front lines still opted for steel breastplates, backplates, and shoulder- and thigh-padding.

  Many foot soldiers wore red, and not just because it matched the St George flag – one contemporary said the colour was chosen for soldiers ‘that they might not be discouraged by the sight of blood from their wounds’.

  Depending upon the greed of their superiors, the troops could either be warmly equipped or shivering in rags. One Irish-bound unit mustered at Chester that year was so smartly dressed that the sight provoked a near-riot among others who had ‘no apparel’. According to Fynes Moryson, many of the troops that arrived at Kinsale from other Irish bases late in October were ‘very deficient in number, having been long worn out in skirmishes, journeys and sicknesses’.

  Yet it seems that morale was high as they settled in. They were excited by reports that the Spanish had nine chests overflowing with gold. One official said: ‘Our soldiers are very anxious to fight and make booty of their treasure.’

  By 26 October, Blount’s military experts had chosen a spot for a permanent siege camp. One location ticked all their boxes. It was Spital Hill, ‘somewhat more than a musket shot from town’. Today that hill is known as Camphill – recalling Blount’s encampment – although an adjacent townland called Spital keeps the old name alive. Lying almost directly north of Kinsale, it also sat astride what was then the main road from Cork. As part of the long and arcing Ardmartin Ridge, it also commanded the heights. It was less than a kilometre from the highest navigable point of the Oysterhaven. It was pretty much perfect.

  Next night, the English scored an audacious coup. A cavalry officer named Captain William Taffe led a strike force fourteen kilometres through enemy territory to penetrate the Spanish-held promontory of Castle Park and steal hundreds of their cattle. There was ‘a hot skirmish’, according to Fynes Moryson, but Taffe managed to escape with all but twenty of the animals.

  Soon ships from Dublin were regularly towing and warping to the head of the Oysterhaven. Their arrival was a godsend for Blount: at last, he could get his hands on heavy artillery and entrenching equipment.

  It was time to begin the massive task of digging trenches and erecting fortifications. For that specialist job, they needed the best military engineer in the country. Fortunately for Blount, he had exactly the right man.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DIGGING FOR VICTORY

  NEXT morning, a military specialist named Josiah Bodley stepped out at Spital Hill with a sense of purpose. His moment had come. His half-century of life on this planet had been leading up to this point.

  Bodley was the country’s leading expert on the construction of siege fortifications. Known as a ‘trenchmaster’ – an early military engineer – he was entrusted with the task of transforming Spital camp into an impregnable fortress. It would be the greatest siege engineering construction built in Ireland up until that point. It had to be big enough to hold thousands of soldiers. Its walls had to be at least twice as high as a tall man. It had to be built while bullets and cannonballs flew all around the workers. Then it had to be rebuilt each morning as sallying Spaniards tore it down by night. It had to be built by a deadline of yesterday. As for materials, he could utilise only whatever grew on trees and whatever lay under his feet.

  And no better man to do it than Josiah Bodley.

  Josiah was the youngest of five sons, and was slightly less famous than the eldest brother, Thomas. Josiah admired what Thomas Bodley did with cataloguing old books, but that academic life wasn’t for him. He preferred to be out in the open, in all weathers, pacing with his quadrant, keeping an eye on the enemy guns as he directed the trench diggers. Let Thomas stay in his dusty library at Oxford – the one that would one day bear his surname as the Bodleian Library. Whatever alchemy Thomas worked with books, Josiah would work with soil and clay.

  Josiah was Devon-born and well travelled. He had learned his trade in the dirty wars of the Netherlands. Two years ago, at forty-nine, he had been transferred to Ireland, where a single incident earned him a legendary status.

  The English couldn’t shift Hugh O’Neill’s insurgents from a remote island stronghold where they had stashed huge stores of gunpowder. Bodley prepared thirty arrows tipped with ‘wild fire’, an incendiary substance famous for its rapid spread. As musketeers pinned down the Irish, his skilled archers fired the blazing arrows into the island dwellings. They were soon raging infernos. The insurgents abandoned the island and swam to shore.

  That incident faded into insignificance compared to his task in Kinsale, although, later, Fynes Moryson would nonchalantly dismiss Bodley’s work in one sentence: ‘The camp was round about entrenched, and all those works perfected.’ To most people, a trench is just a linear dugout. But at the risk of sounding Tolkienish, this was much more than a hole in the ground. The trenches at Spital were a tribute to human ingenuity – a testimony to what people can achieve under pressure with nothing more than earth, clay, a few branches, and lots and lots of sweat. Josiah Bodley dug holes like Michelangelo painted ceilings.

  Nothing remains of Bodley’s creation but its new name, Camphill, and some sketches on a map. But those show it to be quite remarkable. The most striking thing is its sheer size. This was a small town, perhaps two-thirds the size of Kinsale itself. Angular bastions protruded from the rectangular walls (the ‘curtain’) and from each corner to give musketeers a clear line of fire in every direction. It was perfectly symmetrical, and from each corner fluttered the red cross of St George.

  How did Bodley’s men construct such a sophisticated structure from scratch?

  It all began with a sap, or a preliminary trench, dug by specialist workers. These men were known as sappers or pioneers and had one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the army. They were well paid: one group of troops was given fourpence extra for every day they worked on the fortifi-cations. (Bodley himself was paid ten shillings a day, more than a company captain.) The pay varied according to the danger they faced and the number of men left alive in their unit. ‘If there are any killed,’ explains an early trenchmaster named John Muller, ‘the survivors of the Brigade receive their pay… [in some cases] one or two men have received the pay of twenty-four.’

  The key to keeping them alive in the killing fields of no-man’s-land was the gabion, an open-ended cylindrical basket woven from willow branches. The most basic version, about as tall as a man, was ‘stuffed quite full with all kinds of small wood, or branches’, says Muller. Laid flat and rolled, this stuffed gabion was enough to absorb most musket balls at a distance. The workers ‘roll [the baskets] before them as they advance’, Muller explains.

  The pioneers also carried empty gabion baskets. As the first worker began digging, protected by the wood-filled gabion, he would shovel the displaced soil into the empty basket. ‘He fills it with earth, giving it every now and again a blow with the spade or mallet to settle the earth,’ Muller writes. ‘And when this gabion is filled, he advances the stuffed gabion to make room for another … when this gabion is filled, he places another, and so on; then the second sapper fills the interval between the gabions with sandbags.’

  These earth-filled baskets were given extra height using rolls of compressed sticks called fascines. (The word shares its origin with fascist, which derives from the fasces or rods carried by Roman magistrates. Personally, I find this connection fascine-ating.)

  Fast workers could throw up a solid protective barrier within an hour. Then they could begin digging in earnest. They worked in units of eight, with four digging while the rest fetched tools. The first pioneer would dig a shallow trench about 45cm deep and wide. The man following him made it 15cm deeper and wider. The third a
nd fourth did likewise until the four diggers had created a trench 90cm deep and wide. The four men could keep this up at high speed for two or three hours before swapping roles.

  As they dug, they piled the soil into a solid earthbank on the surface, effectively doubling the height of their sanctuary. Other teams worked towards them until their trenches met and connected. ‘Work [should] be continued with all possible speed, and without interruption,’ dictates Muller.

  The finished trench was impressive in its scale. Describing a typical siege-trench twenty-five years later, another military expert named Robert Ward writes that the surface earthwork was ‘near ten foot high and fifteen foot thick at the bottom … there were two footbanks for the musketeers to step upon, to give fire over the breastwork. This breastwork was … five foot high … This trench contained in circuit 16,000 paces.’ In combination, the dugout and rampart could be two and a half times the height of a tall man, and the floor of the trench wide enough to take a tent.

  With plenty of manpower, an ordinary field would be transformed into a labyrinthine earthen fortress in a couple of weeks. And during the three-month siege of Kinsale, several such networks were excavated.

  ‘[The English] pitched their camp and entrenched themselves,’ wrote the field surgeon William Farmer. ‘They also builded a sconce [a detached outpost] and planted their great ordnance for battery.’

  The result mightily impressed the Spanish and Irish in Kinsale. Spanish witnesses said that Bodley’s trenches were as high as lances (presumably four metres plus) and ladders were needed to scramble out. When Hugh O’Neill saw the English camp, several weeks later, he was daunted by ‘the great strength of the firm, impregnable walls’.

  Bodley had done his bit. Now it was time for the gunners to take over.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE TAKING OF RINJORA CASTLE

  A cannonball doth never range in a right line, except it be shot out of a piece right up towards heaven, or right down towards the centre of the world.

  – Niccolo Tartaglia, A Treatise of Shooting in Guns,1537

  IN ANY other circumstances, Ensign Bartholomew Paez Clavijo would probably have enjoyed his posting in the little fortress the Spanish knew as Rinjora. Rincorran’s setting was idyllic, halfway along a wild headland with an arrestingly beautiful view over the tide-ripped, wind-scudded waters of the harbour entrance. To the left lay the open sea, and to the right, around two kilometres away, the chaotic jumble of streets, rooftops and towers that made up the town of Kinsale. Across the narrow water, Clavijo could see his comrades guarding the twin fortress of Castle Park.

  But this was no time to admire the scenery. Behind Clavijo, English supply ships were warping up the Oysterhaven with massive guns and crates of cannonballs. In front, along the main harbour entrance, an English pinnace called The Moon was preparing to bombard Clavijo’s fortress from sea. On the peninsula itself, halfway between Rincorran and the Oysterhaven, two large English cannon were being awkwardly manoeuvred into position. The ensign immediately recognised them as culverins.

  Just as the saker cannon was named after a hawk, the culverin was named after a snake – probably because of its ability to strike lethally from a distance. Its long barrel could propel an 18-pound ball accurately over 2,000 paces. The culverin’s secret was that it could handle a pound weight of powder for every pound of ball. But this required thickly reinforced metal, which made it exceptionally heavy. Twelve yoked oxen would strain to drag it into position as its wheels sank into the winter mud. Once mounted, however, it was devastatingly effective. By repeatedly striking on a small area of wall, it could quickly open up a breach.

  The Norman stronghold of Rincorran was a diamond-shaped stone structure with towers at each corner and three tower-houses inside. Both English and Spanish regarded its possession as vital. As one English official reported in the 1580s, its fate dictated the fate of the entire town. Águila ordered Clavijo to hold it against all attack. He could spare only 150 men, but he had promised to support them from the main town.

  Fate had thrust Clavijo into the role of Rincorran’s commanding officer when his captain, Pedro de Suazo, fractured his leg. Clavijo was a proud man as well as a brave man, and he intended to do his duty. He just wasn’t sure whether everyone else in Rincorran felt quite the same way …

  Don Pedro de Heredia, a sergeant in Clavijo’s company, was also watching the developments with concern. As a veteran of the war in Flanders, he knew that the number of soldiers in Rincorran – the 150 Spanish augmented by perhaps thirty Irish – was not nearly enough to hold the fort. If Águila were to relieve them, he would have to do it by sea – and that meant running the gauntlet of the English ships.

  Dermot MacCarthy, the Irish expatriate the Spanish knew as Don Dermutio, had even more reason to worry. He had spent the past fifteen years abroad working as an agent for the Irish insurgents. Whereas the Spanish defenders could ultimately negotiate terms with the English, the Irish would automatically face execution as traitors. He could not afford to allow himself to be captured.

  Rincorran also contained ‘a great multitude’ of local women, children and menial labourers known as churls. The fate of these innocents could only be guessed.

  Inside Kinsale, Águila also watched with mounting unease as the two mighty cannon were assembled. He couldn’t afford to lose Rincorran. He resolved to send a seaborne relief force led by a battle-hardened sergeant-major named Juan Hortensio de Contreras. An almost legendary figure, Contreras had led his men to safety through many a tough engagement in Brittany.

  As dusk fell, a hand-picked group of Spanish soldiers silently filed down to the quayside. The lashing rain provided cover as they pushed their boats out into the black River Bandon, aiming their prows across the harbour in an all-out bid to relieve their comrades in Rincorran.

  On the deck of his pinnace The Moon, naval captain Thomas Button was peering into the Stygian blackness. His sailor’s eyes could see in the dark better than most people’s, and he was determined to thwart any attempt to relieve the castle by sea.

  Perhaps it was a simple splash, or a whisper, or a shaft of moonlight that gave the Spanish away. Whatever the clue, Button spotted the relief force halfway across the estuary. His naval musketeers emerged on deck and fired into the night.

  Caught in the murderous hail of fire, the Spaniards had no option but to retreat.

  The English master gunner, who had the singularly inappropriate name of Mr Jolly, was having a bad day. It was Friday, 30 October, the morning after the failed attempt to relieve the fort. His two culverins had been ready to unleash shock and awe at Rincorran. The touch-holes were lit, the barrels belched fire … but almost immediately there was an embarrassing crunch of splintering wood as one of the carriages collapsed. Soon after, the second gun gave up. The red-faced gunners had to withdraw and call in the repair crews.

  Now it was Águila’s turn to fire. The Spanish gunners hauled their prize demi-cannon out from the gates and aimed for Blount’s camp at Spital. With a barrel more than three metres long, a demi-cannon could miss its target dismally if the gunner didn’t take account of the ‘vivo’ – the difference in diameter between the breech and the muzzle. It would be ten years before technology solved the problem. But right now, the Spanish had perfected a painstaking technique they called ‘killing the vivo’. It made their shots unnervingly accurate.

  History doesn’t record the name of the Spanish gunner. But he must have been a genius. He identified Blount’s field headquarters, and hit it almost dead-on. ‘All the shots that were made,’ marvelled Blount’s secretary, Fynes Moryson, ‘fell still in the Lord Deputy’s quarter, near his own tent.’

  Moryson himself narrowly escaped death when a second perfectly aimed lead ball whistled clean through his tent and destroyed the cabin beside it, killing two soldiers. ‘[It] brake a barrel of the paymaster’s money, with two barrels of the Lord Deputy’s beer,’ the secretary recorded.

  By the morning of S
aturday, 31 October the English had repaired the first culverin and mounted two other cannon. Soon all three great guns were blasting the brittle masonry of the old Norman castle. But as the gunners sweated over the powder and lead shot, they noticed a stocky figure marching out from the camp towards them.

  It was General George Carew, coming to tell them that they were doing it all wrong.

  George Carew, President of Munster and effectively Blount’s second-in-command, was a brusque and belligerent figure. He hated Ireland, and he hated the Irish. He was convinced that the country was ‘full of witches’ and that Jesuit priests could conjure up bad weather. Carew longed for the day when he could return to civilisation. As his secretary Thomas Stafford put it, rather breathlessly: ‘There was never … a virgin bride after a lingering and desperate love, more longing for the celebration of her nuptial, than the Lord President was to go for England.’

  The forty-six-year-old Devon man was unusual among the English officers in that he was a murderer in the civilian sense as well as a ruthless wartime killer. Eighteen years before, he had been walking the streets of Dublin when he lunged at another man and stabbed him to death. Carew explained that his elder brother, Peter, had been killed in a battle in County Wicklow and that he thought he had recognised his Dublin victim as the man responsible. In fact, the victim had been in the city under an official promise of safe conduct.

  Carew was shrewd, determined and pitiless. If he felt an Irish leader posed a threat, he ‘drew a draft’ on them – his term for ordering their assassination. He had exhaustive files on every major player in Ireland, friend or foe. His military intelligence was fearsome. It wasn’t for nothing that he acted as the eyes and ears of Secretary Robert Cecil – the two arch-schemers were moulded from the same material.