The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  However, the attack was the final straw for the sergeant. Half his tiny force lay dead, and the survivors were wounded and exhausted after four days without sleep. The fort would inevitably fall that day, and he felt it pointless to sacrifice sixteen brave men to a lost cause. He hung out a sign for parlay. Unlike the haughty Bartholomew de Clavijo at Rincorran, his terms were realistic.

  —We will yield ourselves and the castle, he offered, on the promise of our lives only.

  Blount agreed.

  History does not reveal whether there was applause, or even a respectful silence, from the English forces as the sixteen pale and bloodied defenders filed out of the castle to join the other prisoners of war in Cork. Only the commanding sergeant was kept aside. He joined Ensign Clavijo of Rincorran and Wingfield’s valiant captive, the legendary sergeant major Juan de Contreras, as the English officers’ guests of honour.

  The seventeen Spaniards who died at Castle Park were interred in alien earth – in soil that was granite-hard with frost. Buried beside them, in their unmarked grave, was the boy.

  Winter had set in with a vengeance, and it dealt out death to both sides without fear or favour. The lashing rains and ice-cold winds were joined by a bitter frost that clamped down over the countryside at nightfall and chilled the soldiers to the bone. Each evening the frost stole silently in, and each morning, more stiff corpses were taken out. The ground itself became yet another hazard – hills were turned into treacherous ice-slopes, and even the churned-up mud froze into ridges as sharp as steel blades. Sentries died at their posts, and those who survived became more wraithlike each day, their eyes hollow from lack of sleep and their beards white with hoarfrost.

  Just a few days beforehand, Blount’s war council had decided to use the Irish weather as a weapon against the Spanish. By blowing the roofs off their houses with artillery, they believed they would ‘expose them to the same extremities of cold and rain as we were exposed to in the camp’.

  Yet it was the besiegers who were suffering most from the weather. Their hillside camp could not have been more exposed to the elements. Hypothermia was killing more English soldiers than Águila could ever manage – one observer calculated that they were dying from exposure at the rate of forty a day. ‘The difficulties of a winter’s siege … will soon waste a greater army than ours,’ Blount wrote to Cecil in mid-November. ‘For the weather is so extreme, that many times we bring our sentinels dead from the stations.’

  His men were fading away to the point where they looked like ghosts: ‘I protest, even our chief commanders … do many of them look like spirits with toil and watching.’

  The Irish soldiers in Blount’s army were expert at improvising shelters from earth-sods and branches. At the most basic level, their heavy cloaks could be transformed into makeshift tents. They were natural survivalists. Blount’s conscripts, on the other hand, were usually townsfolk who had never camped in woodland or trekked across mountains after cattle herds. Blount complained that they would rather die than build huts for themselves.

  Sometimes the Irish built shelters for their English comrades, but often they would be left to sleep in the open, or to huddle in the flooded trenches. ‘Our approaches this winter were so difficult, that the very trenches we made were continually filled with water,’ Blount wrote, ‘and the decay of our men was so great, by continual labour, sickness, sword and bullet.’

  The weather also took its toll on Blount, who was getting as little sleep as his men. ‘It groweth now about four o’clock in the morning,’ he wrote to Secretary Cecil, ‘at which time I nightly choose to visit our guards myself … in a morning as cold as stone, and as dark as pitch. I pray, Sir, think whether this is a life that I take much delight in.’

  He confessed that he missed his life in England and missed being in the company of the Queen. However, Robert Cecil knew better. He knew that when Blount finally fell asleep in his ‘house of turf’ he would not be dreaming about a sixty-eight-year-old monarch with dyed hair and ghoulishly white skin. More likely, he would be dreaming of a younger woman with golden hair and eyes as black as the night. He would dream that he was back in the warm, scented arms of Lady Penelope Rich.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  STELLA AND THE CENTAUR

  THERE had been another reason why Blount wanted to capture Castle Park fortress on Coronation Day – a reason he could never have admitted to the Queen.

  The victory, had it happened, would have been his secret anniversary gift to Penelope. All couples have their special days, and 17 November belonged to Charles Blount and Penelope Rich. It was the date when he had first publicly declared his love for her. He had done it in chivalrous style, like some Lancelot pledging his troth to the married Guinevere. Neither of them would ever forget the moment eleven years ago when he had galloped out into the jousting arena, visor lowered, lance levelled, boldly carrying the colours of a lady who belonged to another man.

  The date: 17 November 1590. The royal court had been in full festival mood to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession. Charles Blount was now aged twenty-seven. He had overcome his early gaucheness and had matured into a self-assured courtier. Coronation Day featured a mediaeval jousting competition, a colourful Arthurian extravaganza in which courtly knights championed a lady and carried her colours as they tilted lances against an opponent. Everyone watched eagerly to see whose colours would be carried by the single and highly eligible Sir Charles Blount.

  Blount was an adept jouster. ‘As centaurs were … so he seemed on the horse,’ remarked one observer. As he donned the armour bearing his family crest – a sun containing a watchful eye – he scanned the ranks of ladies in the arena and viewing-rooms, looking for one particular face. Her golden hair and jet-black eyes would be unmistakeable.

  When his charger thundered into the daylight to the jousting beam, a collective frisson swept through the ladies in the crowd: He is carrying the colours of my Lady Rich, they whispered in scandalised delight.

  It was true. Blount’s colours of blue and gold proclaimed his love for Lady Penelope Rich, the twenty-seven-year-old trophy wife of one of the wealthiest barons in England.

  One fashionable poet was beside himself with excitement. He punned that Blount was ‘Rich in his colours, richer in his thoughts/ Rich in his fortune, honour, arms and art.’ It was not the first time that a poet had used the same wordplay on Penelope’s married surname. The chivalrous soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, who was once equally besotted with Lady Rich, had penned a sonnet praising a nymph who was ‘rich in all beauties’ but who ‘hath no misfortune but that Rich she is’.

  This remarkable woman, who had enthralled so many men, was born as Penelope Devereux, eldest daughter of Walter, Earl of Essex, sometime around 1563. She is better known to history by her married name, but in the world of literature she had already been immortalised as ‘Stella’.

  As the great muse of Philip Sidney’s life, she inspired his long sonnet cycle ‘Astrophil and Stella’, a thinly disguised account of his doomed and painful passion for her. No one knows whether their relationship was ever consummated, but to the heartbroken Sidney it seems to have taken a disturbingly masochistic twist. He wrote the poem, he says, in order ‘that the dear She might take some pleasure from my pain’. Penelope was ‘most fair’ but also ‘most cold’. Trying to win her heart was like storming a citadel, ‘so fortified with wit, stored with disdain, that to win it is all the skill and pain’.

  (Curiously, another poet was later to use much the same words about Penelope Rich. Dedicating a poem to her in 1594, the eccentric poet Richard Barnfield described her as a woman ‘whose speech is able to enchant the wise, converting joy to pain, and pain to pleasure’, which, it must be said, are extremely odd words to use in a dedication.)

  Penelope had first met Philip Sidney when she was in her early teens and he was twenty-two. They were engaged to be married. Sidney was lukewarm at first, but as Penelope grew into adulthood he fell hopelessly in
love with the stunning beauty whose coal-black eyes were set in a skin white as ‘alabaster pure’.

  It was too late. Her father had died, and her guardian nominated the wealthy landlord Robert Rich instead.

  Rich appears to have been a dour and antisocial individual, and the gregarious Penelope objected strenuously. Blount was later to claim that she interrupted the actual wedding ceremony with a loud declaration of protest.

  There is no evidence that she retained Sidney as a lover, but if his poem reflects real life, she definitely kept him hanging on. Resisting his advances, the married Stella assures her suitor that only ‘tyrant honour’ stops her from succumbing. Eventually the poet gave up. He later married Frances Walsingham, daughter of the famous spymaster, Francis.

  Sidney had been wasting his time with Lady Rich (at least romantically, if not poetically). Penelope had already found the true love of her life in Charles Blount. As a close friend of Penelope’s brother Robert (the new Earl of Essex), Blount was a regular visitor to her family home.

  Sir Charles Blount would have cut a dashing figure at this stage. As an army captain, he had been wounded in the Low Countries. He had been present when Sidney died from an infected wound near Zutphen. When the Great Armada threatened England, Blount had been in the centre of action aboard the fighting ship Rainbow at Gravelines. Well-read, well-travelled, well-dressed and well-connected, Blount was in every way the opposite of Penelope’s boorish husband, Robert Rich.

  No one knows how early their love affair began. If it pre-dated her marriage, they must both have been very young at the time. One seventeenth-century writer recorded that the ‘gallant’ Blount fell headlong for Penelope’s ‘graces of beauty, wit and sweetness of behaviour, which might render her the absolute mistress of all eyes and hearts’. The source claimed the couple became secretly betrothed before the forced marriage wrecked their plans. Or at least delayed them for a while.

  As the same writer reported: ‘Long had she not lived in the bed of Rich, than the old flames of her affection unto Blount again began to kindle in her.’ He said that their secret meetings soon became dishonourably ‘familiar’. The dalliance became a full-scale love affair by, at the latest, 1591, when their first daughter, Penelope, was conceived. Five other children – four of whom survived infancy – were to follow in this ‘parallel family’. Meanwhile, in her other maternal role, the busy Penelope had borne five children with her husband, Robert Rich. One died as an infant. In total she was to give birth to eleven babies, raising five surviving children by Blount and four by Rich.

  Shortly after her first child with Blount, Penelope had a crisis of conscience. She secretly met an undercover Jesuit priest and announced she wished to end her ‘life of frivolity’ by converting to Catholicism. The priest was preparing her for her first Confession when Blount ‘rushed down to see her and began to talk her out of her resolve’. Blount was an expert in theology and a convert from Catholicism, but of course he had another agenda. As the priest said: ‘[He] loved her with a deep and enduring love.’

  Love won, and the priest lost his convert.

  Blount became the new Lord Mountjoy after the death of his elder brother. The Queen lavished him with lucrative positions, partly because she wanted to keep him close to her at court. However, Blount was born to be a soldier. He quietly disobeyed, slipping away from London to fight in Brittany, where Juan del Águila and his Spaniards were causing such a headache to the English. Elizabeth testily summoned him back home, saying she didn’t want him to end up dead like Sidney. ‘You shall go where I send you,’ she commanded. ‘Lodge in court where you may follow your books, read, and discourse of war.’

  That had been the Queen’s plan for Blount. But as Penelope and Charles knew all too well, life does not always work out the way you plan it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THAT WONDROUS WINTER MARCH

  NO, life doesn’t always go as you planned, as George Carew was discovering. Marching on tortuous mud tracks through impenetrable forests as he tried to track an elusive and unseen enemy, the English general must have felt he was truly entering the heart of darkness.

  At every hamlet, suspicious and hostile eyes stared out at him from behind long flops of hair – the traditional Gaelic fashion that hid the face in a discomfitingly similar way to a mask. Each sight of a hooded figure in some dank, dripping woodland track could make a man clutch his sword for fear of an ambush. Those old women grinding corn and muttering to each other – were they villagers conversing in Irish, or hags casting some witch-like spell?

  Carew did not enjoy this sort of war – the long, wearying march through ambiguous territories, trying to pin down an enemy who was as hard to capture as a will-o’-the-wisp. He would have been quite happy to have stayed in the camp, supervising artillery by day and dictating his memoirs by night over a cordial glass of claret. He was most at home in the murky world of espionage and dirty tricks. He had left his comfort zone a long way behind as he trekked north into the deep, unfathomable heartland of middle Ireland.

  Maybe that was why Blount had sent him on this mission.

  In early November, a council of war at Kinsale camp had decided to despatch Carew with around 2,500 men to intercept the Irish insurgent army. Blount believed that Hugh O’Neill was already on the march south and that he would reach Kinsale within a few days. (In reality, when Carew set off on 7 November, O’Neill was still at home.)

  Carew was joined on the way by a contingent of Irish troops from the Dublin area. They were commanded by Sir Christopher St Lawrence, a Howth nobleman from an ancient Norman-Irish family. St Lawrence had been kidnapped as a child by the legendary pirate queen Grace O’Malley. He later served under Essex in Ireland, and was notorious for hot-headedly offering to kill Lord Grey – the butcher of Smerwick – after he offended Essex by riding past him without saluting.

  With these reinforcements, Carew’s intercepting army totalled an impressive 4,500 infantry and 500 cavalry, easily outnumbering any force O’Neill could assemble at the time.

  As he continued his march into the dark core of the heavily forested countryside, Carew became increasingly uneasy. He was spooked by the silent hostility, and convinced that his retreat route could be cut off. He believed – wrongly as it turned out – that he was about to meet an insurgent force of 6,000. Blount constantly had to talk him down. ‘In good faith, my Lord,’ he wrote to Carew on 15 November, ‘… they are not yet above 1,300 fighting men … their whole number will not exceed 3,000.’ He advised Carew that the insurgent force would not meet him in battle, but instead would try ‘to steal by you’.

  In one letter, Carew hinted that he should return to Kinsale, let the insurgents follow, and do the fighting there. Blount refused – Carew’s very presence showed the Irish that they meant business. ‘Therefore, although … I desire your presence, I fear I shall not enjoy it as soon as I covet,’ he wrote. Reading between the lines, you get a feeling that Blount was actually relishing his rival’s discomfiture.

  After a ‘long and weary march’, Carew’s force reached Ardmayle, near Cashel in Tipperary. It was at this point that real life made one of its frustrating departures from the script. Carew discovered that he would not be encountering O’Neill after all. The chieftain he would be meeting – or, more accurately, not meeting – was Red Hugh O’Donnell.

  When he had heard of the Spanish landing, Red Hugh had been ‘full of satisfaction and joy’. According to his seventeenth-century biographer, Lughaidh O’Cleary, he was so confident of the success of the invasion that he had no hesitation in leaving his Donegal homeland to march south. He was certain he could reclaim it later.

  He and his allies assembled their three thousand troops in Ballymote, County Sligo, on 22 October. Marching south, he crossed the Shannon near Athlone, where he was joined by the mercenary forces of Richard Tyrrell, an insurgent captain paid by the Spanish. Tyrrell had been promised that, after victory, he would rule large swathes of the midlands.


  O’Donnell’s march south has become the stuff of legend. In the popular imagination, he storms south from the outset at a cracking pace, crossing ‘many a river bridged with ice’ and ‘past quaking fen and precipice’ to reach his allies. It’s hard to know how this perception arose, since his biographer, O’Cleary, makes it clear that he proceeded ‘by very slow marches’, taking time to plunder Irish-owned territories on the way. One region was ‘plundered and spoiled entirely’ and left under ‘a heavy cloud of fire’. He paused for quite some time in north Tipperary, ‘searching and seeking, plundering and exploring’ throughout mid-November before arriving at Holycross, south of Thurles. It was easy plunder at the time – but his men were later to pay a high price for it on their way home.

  O’Donnell wasn’t fazed when he heard that Carew’s army was blocking his way. ‘Neither fear nor dread nor death-shiver seized him,’ Lughaidh O’Cleary recorded colourfully.

  Red Hugh had encamped only eight kilometres away from the English. He had scattered his troops over a wide range of woodland – some of his camps were seven kilometres apart – and had burrowed deep into the densest thickets. According to Carew, they were camped ‘in a strong fastness of bog and wood’ with all approaches plashed – sealed with interwoven branches. But fortunately for Carew, he did not have to ferret O’Donnell out of his forest bolthole. His job was merely to stop him joining the Spaniards … and Carew’s armies were blocking the only routes southward. ‘He blocked up the passes and narrow roads,’ wrote Philip O’Sullivan. True, there was another route which led west across the boggy Slievefelim mountains to Limerick. However, the torrential rains had turned the mountain pass into a quagmire. Some light-footed troops might be able to flounder through the muck, but the main army with its heavy equipment would become bogged down within minutes. It wasn’t even an option.