The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Archer would sail into Ireland incognito and live undercover for months at a time. His religious role was to promote the faith, but he affected a military air and sometimes crossed the line between pastor and soldier.

  He could slip into any identity with ease. He sometimes posed as ‘a courtier, and other times like a farmer’, wrote his exasperated pursuers. Often he would sleep in ditches and cattle sheds, at other times in grand castles. He was present for the Irish insurgents’ victory at the Yellow Ford, where he wrote: ‘The English Government hates me very much … [and has] set a price on my head. This forces me to live in the woods and in hiding places … there are spies in every port on the lookout for me.’

  His narrow escapes were so incredible – once he even escaped from under lock and key in a London jail – that his hunters felt he must have used witchcraft. ‘They believed him able to walk dry-footed over the sea; to fly through the air; and to possess other superhuman power,’ wrote the Irish historian Philip O’Sullivan.

  All nonsense, obviously. What Archer did possess was a sharp intelligence, limitless energy, and access to the Jesuits’ network of highly placed secret sympathisers. He was also – like his great rival Juan del Águila – a man born without fear.

  Let’s picture Archer in Kinsale on Sunday, 15 November – a tall, soldierly man in black, striding quickly and purposefully through the rubble-strewn mediaeval streets. Perhaps he is dressed as an English sketch artist depicted him. If so, he cuts a dashing figure in a long black cloak which swirls around his hurrying frame. His collar is a ring of fur, and his unruly hair is half-hidden by a tall white hat which he clutches against the wind and rain. His eyes are large, dark and watchful, his face grim.

  He is rushing to Águila’s house to put forward another plan. Fr James Archer is never short of plans – but, since they usually involve the transfer of military power to Fr James Archer, the Spanish commander usually gives him short shrift.

  Today, the town is abuzz with news. Six Irish clan leaders have ridden into town, offering to support the rebellion. Archer is convinced his moment has come. He confronts Águila in his new quarters, a private house formerly occupied by a Kinsale man named Philip Roche.

  —If I join these men and travel throughout the countryside, Archer says eagerly, I can convince the entire nation to join our cause.

  He might even meet Hugh O’Neill and persuade him to hurry to Kinsale.

  Águila must have sighed inwardly. He remembered the last time a disenchanted cleric left a beleaguered fort to travel up-country to enlist help from a nearby insurgent army. Instead, the cleric convinced the insurgents that the commander was incompetent and that they should stay well away. The outcome was massacre. The cleric in that case was Mateo de Oviedo. The fort was Smerwick.

  So once again, Águila refused permission. And once again, Fr Archer fumed silently and scribbled in his journal, waiting for his day of retribution.

  If truth be told, Águila was rapidly losing patience with Hugh O’Neill after fifty days. He had sent several messengers to the northern insurgent chieftain, but to no avail.

  Águila still didn’t know whom he could trust. A few days earlier there had been a stir in Kinsale when a man crept to the town walls on his hands and knees. He claimed to be a priest with a letter from O’Neill. He was escorted to Águila, who read O’Neill’s prevarications and lost patience. His reply to the northern leader took a tough line.

  —You must come immediately with all the forces you can gather, he told O’Neill. If you delay any longer, I will withdraw my forces.

  The priest nodded and conveyed the reply … not to O’Neill, but to Charles Blount. He was a genuine messenger from O’Neill, but he had been turned and was now Blount’s double agent.

  The English officers took some black humour out of the Spaniards’ threat to withdraw.

  —I believe them, one officer laughed. They would withdraw in a heartbeat … if they only could.

  Dealing with Águila always left Fr Archer furious. But then, anger was not a feeling that was unfamiliar to him. As an evangelist, he had always worked at the rough end of muscular Christianity. He deliberately chose the toughest targets to convert – Protestant sea-merchants at the Galician docks, or stubborn Scotsmen in the north of Ireland. Once he had tried to convince a soldier to stop his ‘evil-doing’. When words weren’t enough, Archer flew into a rage and used blows – unfortunately in this case the priestly attacker came off worst and was badly beaten up.

  This was a strange vocation for a man who had been born into a staid establishment family of Kilkenny lawyers. According to one source he was ‘altogether Englished’. He once wrote that the Irish were ‘an uncultivated and barbarous people’.

  After attending a Continental seminary, he became a Jesuit novice. The Jesuits were extremely good at reading character. They observed that at times Archer would be ‘melancholic’ and at other times ‘choleric’ – hot tempered and irascible. Today, these opposing traits might prompt a psychologist to think of two other words: bipolar disorder.

  The low cycle of this disorder is marked by a debilitating depression – the Jesuits’ ‘melancholia’. But far from enjoying untroubled good cheer in the high cycle, sufferers often become impatient, irritable and irascible. They can develop what leading psychiatrist and author Kay Jamison describes as ‘an inflated self-esteem, as well as a certainty of conviction about the correctness and importance of their ideas’. Sufferers sometimes believe they are messiah figures. Tellingly, Archer compared himself to a Biblical patriarch who would lead his people out of bondage. During his sermons, he was ‘calling the Queen King Pharaoh, the rebels the afflicted Israelites, and to himself arrogates the name of Moses’.

  But, of course, in relation to Fr Archer the bipolar theory is pure speculation. As a military chaplain, Fr Archer was undeniably a brave and resourceful man who chose to work undercover in Ireland knowing full well the horrific torture he would face if captured.

  However, his zeal sometimes put his own flock in danger. Officially, Jesuits were not supposed to become involved in politics. When radical priests like Fr Archer worked to overturn the regime, it stoked up Protestant paranoia and resulted in an increase in persecution. Ordinary worshippers asked Archer to stay away from their areas – even his suspected presence gave them a hard time. Less radical Jesuit priests complained: ‘[He has] made us all be called seditious men.’

  The manhunt for Archer was intensive, but somehow the English could never manage to run this ‘detestable enemy’ to ground.

  Until now. Now they had him pinned down within the besieged town of Kinsale.

  It was only a matter of time before James Archer fell into their hands. And George Carew, for one, just could not wait.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THERE WILL BE NO RETREAT

  EARLY in November Águila posted a notice on every gate in Kinsale: No soldier shall leave his allotted position unless he is ordered to do so by an officer. Even if that soldier’s firearm is broken and he is left with only his sword, he will remain in place and defend his position.

  The proud Spanish troops muttered bitterly at the new hardline policy, with its implicit accusation of weakness. However, there had been a series of damaging routs. The latest had left twenty-one Spaniards dead.

  The English army had been weakened by the temporary departure north of some two thousand troops. Seizing his opportunity, Águila had mustered hundreds of his best men for an attack. A decoy unit of sixty troops marched to Spital Hill to draw out the English troops. If that ruse succeeded, seven hundred hidden Spaniards would emerge from the trenches to crush them. However, Blount had anticipated the stratagem. He sent a small force to fight the decoys, but posted his main force to the side, towards Rincorran, where they could fire directly into the Spanish trenches.

  Caught in withering flanking fire, the main force scrambled out of the trenches and retreated into the town. The decoys were left isolated. They retreated towards t
he expected safety of the trenches, only to find them occupied by English troops. Fierce fighting left a score of Spanish dead before the decoy unit made it back into Kinsale, pursued right to the walls by the English. ‘We beat them from one trench to another,’ Blount later recalled, ‘’til I had much ado to make our soldiers come off.’

  Águila was incensed. He singled out the trench commanding officer and threatened to behead him. Then he delivered a blistering address to his men.

  —Shame upon your cowardice! he shouted. The only valour I saw today was displayed by the English. In my time, the Spanish army was the terror of all nations. You have tossed that reputation away.

  He turned on his heel and stalked off. The next day, the ‘no retreat’ order was posted.

  Every single one of these encounters was reducing Águila’s force. He had lost 108 men in the battle for Rincorran. Now he had lost another twenty-one, including one of his most popular captains. He could not sustain that haemorrhage for much longer. Morale, too, was suffering. The death of the captain had sent his men into despair. From the English camp, Fynes Moryson could hear the ‘very great moan’ of the grieving Spanish.

  A couple of days later, Águila scored some revenge when his master gunner came close to killing Blount … a second time.

  The English commander was in chipper form. He was suddenly awash with reinforcements. At the harbour mouth, a fleet of warships had appeared. They were led by The Warspite, under Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, and The Garland, under his deputy, Sir Amias Preston. The ships were carrying two thousand fresh troops from Rochester, together with guns, ammunition and skilled workers.

  The Spanish were in big trouble, and Blount wanted to rub their noses in it. Amid ‘thundering peals’ of cannon, he mounted his charger and led his reinforcements close to Kinsale ‘for the greater terror of the Spaniards’.

  The terror, however, was all Blount’s. Águila’s expert gunner lined him up in his sights as he rode past. Rapidly calculating the vivo to ensure a precise aim, he let fly. It was an almost perfect shot. Blount’s charger reared as the ball landed right beside him, scattering him with dirt. ‘[The shot] grazed so near him,’ reported Fynes Moryson, ‘that it did beat the earth in his face.’

  Águila’s minor triumph was short-lived. The 2,000 fresh English troops were soon joined by another 1,000 foot soldiers and 140 cavalry. Then, on 16 November, another 1,100 troops arrived under the command of a pro-queen Irish general named Donough O’Brien.

  Donough O’Brien, the Earl of Thomond, was living testimony to the fact that this was not simply a war of English against Irish. The cliché that a civil war sets brother against brother was literally true in O’Brien’s case. His own brother had joined the insurgents. Another brother had been held prisoner by Hugh O’Donnell. But while O’Brien detested Hugh O’Donnell, he bore a particular grudge against Fr James Archer. He still carried a scar on his back – the legacy of a deep pike wound for which he held the priest directly responsible.

  O’Brien and Carew had met a supposedly neutral Irish clan leader for a parlay when Archer had appeared without warning, shrouded in a long, black cloak. An argument erupted and Archer raised his stick. Taking this as a signal, the Irish troops moved in to attack. The two English generals managed to escape, but a pike gouged five centimetres of flesh out of O’Brien’s back. ‘This treachery,’ he maintained, ‘was contrived by that villain Archer.’

  O’Brien should have arrived in Kinsale weeks ago, but he had been held back by contrary winds. Then, when the wind shifted, it blew him right past Kinsale and further west. By that stage, his troops were in terrible shape. Blount took one look at the emaciated and wraithlike figures, and realised that they wouldn’t last for an hour on the wind-blasted hillside of Spital. ‘Most of them would have died before they could have made cabins,’ he reported.

  Blount sent most of them away to recuperate. Even so, ‘they began to die in great numbers that night’.

  Overall, though, Blount was in much better shape with around 9,700 infantry and 575 cavalry at his disposal. He immediately organised a 1000-strong flying column under an officer named Sir Henry Power. His men were excused all guard duty and kept on the alert for emergencies.

  Now, Blount’s next challenge was to capture the second fortress at Castle Park. ‘God be thanked, we had plucked 150 Spaniards by the ears out of Rincorran,’ he wrote with satisfaction.

  And when he found out how small a force Águila had left to guard Castle Park, he almost laughed aloud. Compared to Rincorran, this job should be, almost literally, a walk in the park.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  COLD AS STONE, DARK AS PITCH

  THIRTY-three men and a boy. That was the total force charged with the defence of Castle Park. It seemed a pushover for Blount with his new guns and his thousands of fresh troops; so much so that he decided to postpone the attack until 17 November, Coronation Day, and present his victory, neatly wrapped, as a gift to Her Majesty on her anniversary.

  It was a rare misjudgement for a man who had served on the Continent, and who already knew how doggedly the Spanish could fight when their backs were to the wall. But then, no one could have foreseen the determination and sheer heroism that spurred less than three dozen defenders to keep Blount’s 10,000-strong army at bay for four full days, against near-impossible odds.

  Despite its grand title, ‘Castle’ Park was quite a compact building: Carew called it ‘a small fort, well ramped with a stone wall of sixteen foot high’. Roughly square in shape, it had two tall towers with battlements from which defenders could ‘shower the fort’ with gunfire. The outer corners of the fortress had the usual arrow-shaped bastions. Beyond the main fort was an external defensive ring with a gate lodge providing the only entrance.

  The English decided to soften up the defenders with a barrage from sea, but a howling storm blew the cannonballs off course. All the gunners managed to do was clip the tops of the high turrets.

  Blount was determined to have the fort in English hands by nightfall on Coronation Day, so when the storm finally eased he despatched Josiah Bodley with four hundred infantry to hack a breach though the wall with pickaxes. To protect them he employed a curious mediaeval device known as a siege engine. Nicknamed ‘the sow’, this was a portable house designed to protect workmen from attack from above as they slowly chipped their way through a castle wall.

  Picture a sort of hefty caravan, a wooden hut on wheels. Its roof is made of stout beams protected against fire – the main risk – by metal and calfskin. It is ridiculously heavy. It needs to be hauled by oxen, or by men inside using crowbars to crank the wheels around. Once at the wall, a ‘penthouse roof’ jutting forward from the main structure protects the pickaxe men as they undermine the stonework. Combined with the leather cladding, this snout-like projection gives the engine the appearance of a pig – hence the nickname. (It wasn’t the only nickname. Some maintain that ‘humpty dumpty’ was slang for a siege engine, inspiring the famous nursery rhyme.)

  The sergeant commanding Castle Park didn’t panic as the sow lumbered towards the wall. It was an unsophisticated device, and the defence was equally crude – you bombed it with heavy objects. Recently, in Sligo, a clever defender had rigged up a device rather like a modern pile-driver, using a heavy timber pole.

  The Castle Park defenders had already assembled ‘a store of very great stones’. Heaving the giant boulders over the battlements, they heard the satisfying sound of splintering timber and the muffled yells and curses of their enemies. Inside the sow, there was consternation. Slowly and steadily, their defensive roof was being smashed to matchwood. This was not supposed to happen – not on the Queen’s Coronation Day. More boulders fell. More timber splintered. And then, as the roof gave way completely, the rocks were crashing down on human skulls. Two men lay dead before the attackers decided enough was enough.

  They scrambled out of the sow and ran for their lives. To the watching garrison, the exodus resembled a real mother-pig
giving birth to piglets. When exactly the same thing happened at a siege in Scotland, the defenders yelled triumphantly: ‘The English sow has farrowed.’

  The attackers had outnumbered the defenders by around twelve to one – and yet the victory on Coronation Day had gone to the thirty-three men and a boy.

  The defenders of Castle Park did not have time to rest on their laurels after their victory. On 19 November, they watched with trepidation as a new demi-cannon was hauled into position on the opposite shoreline. All that day, the sergeant had his work cut out as the cannon hurled fire and iron, smashing its way through the stonework. As soon as the defenders threw up emergency retirata barricades at one gap, the cannon would shift aim and open up another breach. And even as they toiled to repair one wall, the same masonry would explode in a shower of spearlike splinters. Before the long day was over, several of the defenders lay dead.

  After night fell, Águila made a desperate bid to relieve Castle Park by sea. But it was just Rincorran all over again – the English navy was waiting and the Spanish were easy targets in their open boats.

  The grey, wet dawn of 20 November revealed an even more dispiriting sight for the sergeant and his weary band. During the night, the English had mounted a second cannon. In combination, the two guns unleashed a remorseless assault. The ships in the harbour joined in. From the main gate of Kinsale, the Spanish responded with a hail of fire. The ships wisely withdrew behind a hill.

  The hellish bombardment continued. A breach opened in the wall. But when a hundred English infantry stormed forward to enter the gap (outnumbering the defenders by at least five to one) they found that the sergeant’s men had already sealed it up.