The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Yet again – as so often in this saga – the gods of weather had other ideas. The same Siberian frost that had gripped Kinsale hit Slievefelim with a vengeance, freezing the quagmires into concrete and transforming the squelching goat-tracks into serviceable pathways.

  Red Hugh saw his chance and didn’t waste a moment. Assembling his troops in the dead of night, he silently stole out of the woods and into the mountains. It was in these circumstances that the tough Irish rural guerrillas showed their superiority over the English. They slogged uphill without a pause, jettisoning heavy baggage if it threatened to slow them down. Eager hands coaxed and pushed the beasts of burden up impossible slopes, through the freezing peaks and down the other side to safety. ‘He marched on due west … [and then] south-eastwards, day and night, without stop or halt,’ reported O’Cleary.

  By 11am on 22 November, Red Hugh’s force was nearly seventy kilometres away, at Croom in Limerick – an astonishing march for infantry alone, but an almost unbelievable achievement for a column burdened down with equipment.

  Carew was dismayed. For once, his intelligence had let him down. He force-marched his men forty kilometres to intercept the Irish at a likely point, only to find that Red Hugh had already passed and was more than twenty kilometres further on. Highly embarrassed, he had no choice but to praise his enemy’s achievement. It was ‘the greatest march with carriage … that hath been heard of’, he said in grudging admiration. ‘This long march is incredible, but upon my reputation … it is true.’

  Red Hugh allowed his men just one night’s sleep before resuming his march. As he waited for O’Neill to join him, he headed southwest to friendly territory to recuperate and gather support. Meanwhile, Carew’s weary troops began their sad footslog back to Kinsale. On the way, however, they met a man whose irrepressible energy and enthusiasm could only boost their spirits. He was a remarkable soldier-poet who was destined to play a decisive role in the battle to come.

  His name was Richard de Burgh.

  ‘Gaillimh abú!’

  The rolling Irish warcry greeted Carew’s despondent troops as they trudged back across the border into County Cork. Carew’s men must have gripped their pikes and firearms, convinced that they were about to be attacked by O’Neill’s insurgents.

  Every fighting clan in Ireland had its warcry – it usually consisted of the name or area followed by the word ‘abú’ or ‘victory’. It was howled not in unison but in a rolling, shuddering Mexican wave of sound. This unearthly human baying would always spook the English troops – and ‘abú’ was turned into a new English word for clamour: ‘hubbub’.

  But for now, Carew’s men could relax. The Galwaymen who faced them on the road to Kinsale were pro-Queen Irish, led by the twenty-eight-year-old Richard de Burgh, the new Earl of Clanrickard.

  De Burgh thundered up on his stallion and saluted Carew. He explained that he was en route from Galway to Kinsale with fifty cavalry and 150 infantry in response to Blount’s summons.

  The clichéd description ‘dashing young cavalry officer’ could have been coined especially for Richard de Burgh. Fearless and impulsive, he was one of the rising stars of the Queen’s forces in Ireland. He was good-looking, personally charming, and a popular figure at the London court, where he had already become a firm favourite of Elizabeth. In both looks and attitude, he reminded the ageing monarch of a younger – but more biddable – version of her beloved Earl of Essex.

  The resemblance had also been noticed by another woman – Frances Walsingham, the beautiful daughter of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. As the widow of poet Philip Sidney, she had married the roving Earl of Essex but had recently taken Richard de Burgh as her secret lover. Now that Essex had been executed, they could finally marry.

  The new Earl was a true renaissance man in the spirit of the age. He had matriculated at Oxford at the age of twelve, and had become a talented poet. His writing, tense and spare, resembles the works of John Donne. ‘My love doth fly with wings of fear,’ went one verse, ‘And doth a flame of fire resemble / Which mounting high and burning clear / Yet ever more doth move and tremble.’

  But what made Richard de Burgh’s success truly remarkable – even astonishing – was his national and religious identity. He was not some English colonist, but an Irishman from County Galway whose true-green credentials were impeccable. More than that, he was a proud Catholic recusant who continued to practise his preferred religion with a daring defiance. That was a dangerous attitude with people like George Carew around – and even more so when you consider Richard’s volatile family background. The de Burghs – or Bourkes, or Burkes – had been hard-core rebels for many years.

  They were an old and venerable family – according to Debrett’s Peerage, the de Burghs ‘rank amongst the most ancient in the united kingdoms’ – who came over with the Normans and later adopted the Irish language, customs and dress. Another thing the de Burghs enthusiastically adopted was the Irish hostility towards English authority. In 1576, the de Burghs torched the pro-English town of Athenry and put everyone to the sword ‘out of a barbarous hatred against the inhabitants’. The rebel family went on the run, to be hunted across the countryside ‘from bush to bush and from hill to hill’ by the exasperated authorities.

  However, young Richard went to England at an early age and fell under the spell of Essex and his entourage. Among his mentors were Essex and his wife Frances, the bewitching Penelope Rich, and of course, Charles Blount.

  During the 1590s, Richard de Burgh supported the English against Hugh O’Neill. Blount relied upon him to hold Connaught against the insurgents. According to Fynes Moryson, he ‘served the Queen … nobly, valiantly and faithfully’. But many true-blue English officers fiercely resented the Irishman’s rise to power.

  Like Blount, Richard de Burgh was now in bad odour for his association with the Essex circle. Protesting his own ‘innocency’, de Burgh wrote to Secretary Cecil swearing that just ‘as I unfainedly loved him [Essex] whom I esteemed her Majesty’s most dutiful and worthy servant’, he was now offering the same devotion to Cecil.

  Fortunately for de Burgh, he shared another advantage with Blount – the favour of the Queen. She refused to believe the ‘many scandalous rumours’ that surrounded him, and she ordered the reluctant Carew to advance his career. Carew had no option but to obey. But as the enlarged convoy marched back to Kinsale, de Burgh must have wondered which enemy he needed to fear most – the Spaniards ahead of him, or George Carew at his back.

  When Juan del Águila heard how an overnight frost had facilitated O’Donnell’s miraculous escape, he must have experienced a sense of déjà vu. Because sixteen years before, in the Low Countries, he and his men had been saved from slaughter by exactly the same phenomenon.

  It was in the winter of 1585 – a dreadful, pitiless winter just like this one. Juan del Águila had been leading a Spanish tercio regiment against the Dutch Protestant insurgents in an area of reclaimed marshland near Empel, south of Amsterdam. The Dutch had pinned down his force. They threw open the river dams, flooding the entire region and leaving Águila’s men stranded on an island of high ground. The Dutch sent a naval fleet into the flooded zone. It surrounded the island. There was no escape.

  The rain poured down relentlessly, raising the water level even higher. Stuck for five days on a bare islet, drenched and chilled, with no food supplies, Águila and his troops seemed doomed to annihilation. Yet Águila never gave up. He kept the Dutch ships at bay, buying time.

  But buying time for what? Everyone agreed his situation was hopeless.

  Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Empel, there was an eerie coincidence. A Spanish sapper unearthed a buried image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. It was the eve of the same feast-day, 8 December. The Spaniards were in no doubt – this was a sign from God. They installed the image in a church.

  December 8 dawned to reveal a dramatic change in the weather. The rains had ceased and the region had been blast-frozen by an arc
tic wind. The flood surface turned to solid ice. The encircling ships were forced to retreat before they were crushed. Astonishingly, unbelievably, Águila’s troops simply strolled off their island prison to freedom.

  ‘God turned into a Spaniard,’ a Dutch leader declared with stunned incredulity.

  The freak incident marked a turning point in Águila’s career. He went on to capture a string of townships and to establish his reputation as the man born without fear.

  Ever since 1585, the feast of 8 December has been a special day for Spain’s military forces. Parades and celebrations are held to mark the escape of Águila and his fellow officers in the ‘Miracle at Empel’.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A DIRECT HIT ON DON JUAN

  WHEN Juan del Águila summoned a Friday-night council of war on 20 November, he knew it was going to be an explosive session. He just didn’t realise how explosive.

  Castle Park fortress had just surrendered, and the clerics were baying for his blood. Their criticisms were later reflected in a report to the Pope, which could be paraphrased like this:

  —You could have gone to Cork, where we would have had plenty of space behind strong walls. But since you did choose to stay here, you should have fortified the two castles to keep the harbour entrance open for reinforcements. Instead, what did you put in Castle Park? Sixteen soldiers! And even they were badly equipped!

  The furious Fr James Archer let fly with personal insults: Águila was afraid to fight. He was a quaking coward.

  But Águila had more on his mind than raking over the ashes of past decisions. He needed to counter Blount’s latest challenge. Earlier that day, the English commander had moved forward to establish a new gun emplacement, closer to town but further to the west, at a prehistoric ringfort. From here he could rain gunfire into the very heart of Kinsale. Despite the frost, the sappers had already dug deeply enough to accommodate a demi-cannon. By dawn, that gun could be spitting fire into the very area where Águila sat.

  Night was falling. But Blount was still smarting with humiliation from that day, earlier in November, when a Spanish cannonball struck the earth near his horse, spattering him with muck in front of his newly arrived troops. He needed an artillery spectacular. He aimed the cannon before the light faded. And thanks to the information from Spanish deserters, his gunners knew exactly where to aim.

  At Águila’s new headquarters in Philip Roche’s house.

  Águila’s war council didn’t know what hit it. With the very first shot, the English cannon scored a direct strike on the roof of Roche’s house. Broken tiles, chunks of masonry and splinters of wood showered down on the startled officers.

  ‘[We delivered] Don Juan the good night,’ crowed one English eyewitness, Patrick Strange. ‘[In] the night, when Don Juan expected no such matter, the cannon lighted upon the house where … his council [were] in consultation.’ A Spanish sentry confirmed the direct hit. ‘The first piece shot off went through the house where Don Juan lay, and otherwise did great hurt.’

  (I like to think that Águila would have stayed calm, and perhaps even remained seated, amid the chaos that ensued. Coolness under pressure was a prized quality of a tercio commander. Águila would have been familiar with the story of the Duke of Parma, who was once enjoying an al fresco lunch with his officers when a lucky shot from the enemy hit one diner on the head. A splinter of his skull took a second officer’s eye out. With the table covered in blood and brain, the Duke remained seated, coolly ordered a clean tablecloth, and resumed the meal.)

  This was just the beginning of a concentrated barrage of fire. Blount’s selection of the ringfort had proved to be inspired. ‘The second [shot] lighted at that instant on one of their storehouses of munition,’ recalled Patrick Strange. ‘The third battered through the parapet of the wall … [the Spanish] lost many men, and are now enforced to stand in their cellars, for they cannot go well in the streets.’

  Throughout all this mayhem, what was life like for the Irish in Kinsale? There were two groups of Irish in the besieged town. The first comprised the expatriate insurgents from Spain, who had been organised into a military company under their charismatic leader ‘Don Carlos’ – Cormac Mac-Carthy. Secondly, there were the indigenous townsfolk. Some had left, some had died, some had escaped, but the remnants included a significant number of women and children who were still living through the hellish bombardment. One of them, a James Grace, kept a scanty journal. His log is brief and incomplete, but it is the nearest thing we have to a diary kept by an Irish source inside Kinsale.

  Grace had watched and carefully taken note as the Spaniards placed their four big guns. He noted that one resident – a Mr James Meaghe – had his garden requisitioned as a gun emplacement for two cannon. A third gun had been mounted in the churchyard, but ‘the other, biggest of all, is at the Water Gate to play upon the shipping’.

  Grace had kept his eyes and ears open as he wandered around the town. ‘They have nothing but rusk and water,’ he noted as he passed the food kitchens. And as he lingered near Oviedo’s sick-bay: ‘There are two hundred sick and hurt in the hospitals.’

  He was worried about the gunpowder, which the Spanish had kept at the Castle but were now moving to a cellar for safety. And he was fascinated by the fabled hoard of treasure which John Edie had described and which the English troops lusted after: ‘It lies at the house where Captain Bostock lay.’ Grace saw how the once-hallowed Friary to the west of the town walls had been filled with compacted earth and turned into a Spanish gun emplacement. He’d been nearby when the English scored their direct strike on Águila’s house, and he saw how that event affected the locals. ‘The townsmen will stay no longer there, for fear of the shot,’ he wrote.

  Grace also recorded a rare admission from the proud Spanish commander that the mission was now in big trouble. ‘Don Juan says privately that the Lord Deputy [Blount] was born in a happy hour,’ Grace recorded, ‘for he will have the town, unless they be relieved from the North.’

  The morning after the direct hit, Águila saw the English mount a second cannon at the ringfort and decided that the Irish women and children could no longer remain in the town. With Blount’s agreement, they were allowed to evacuate, rest briefly in the English camp, and then leave to seek out friends or relatives in the countryside.

  It was fortunate timing. Soon afterwards, the English set up four more cannons at the ringfort, fired directly into the busy marketplace, and killed four people.

  Meanwhile, Blount was setting up another camp at Ardmartin Ridge, the belt of high ground that girdles the town to the north. Donough O’Brien, the Earl of Thomond, was given command of this second major camp. He took command of the forces of George Carew – who had just returned from his unsuccessful trek north – together with those of Richard de Burgh and Christopher St Lawrence. In an effort to save face, Carew volunteered to lead a death-or-glory charge into Kinsale. Blount demurred.

  The English weren’t having things all their own way. The Spanish blasted back at the naval ships in the harbour and scored three direct hits. Admiral Leveson returned fire. The Spaniards’ chief gunner – the man who had twice come within an ace of killing Blount – was badly injured and his fearsome cannon was silenced.

  As November drew to a close, the English began to feel complacent. They believed Águila could not hold out much longer against such concentrated bombardment. An illogical end-of-war fever swept through the English force. Patrick Strange was so confident that he told his hometown ‘to prepare for a celebration of a victory’. Admiral Richard Leveson wrote snidely to Secretary Cecil that Blount was ‘a very fortunate man’ facing such ‘a weak and distressed enemy’.

  Blount was more circumspect, but his intelligence reports convinced him that Águila was willing to make a deal. He himself was weary of the siege. ‘[It] may please God to bring it to pass sooner than we think of,’ he wrote.

  As 28 November dawned with high winds and torrential rain, Blount decided to give Águila a
n opportunity to leave with honour. He despatched a trumpeter to approach the town gate with an offer: surrender Kinsale, and we will allow you to return home.

  Águila must have been tempted to accept. He was outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded. Could anyone blame him for taking the sensible option?

  But Blount had made a serious misjudgement in his timing. He could not have picked a worse day to ask his enemy to compromise. For the English, it may have been 28 November. But in the Spanish calendar it was 8 December – the anniversary of Águila’s escape across the ice in the ‘Miracle at Empel’. It was the day that symbolised the no-surrender spirit of the elite Spanish regiments to which he had devoted his life.

  The Spanish commander didn’t even let the trumpeter darken his door. He answered him at the gate, clearly and defiantly. ‘We hold this town first for Christ, and next for the King of Spain,’ he said. ‘We will defend it contra tutti inimici.’ Against all enemies.

  That caught the English by surprise. The intoxication of victory was replaced by the hangover of the realisation that this could be a long and bloody campaign which only a minority of them would survive. ‘I had hoped to be able to send you news of the happy conclusion of this business,’ Blount wrote despondently to Cecil, admitting that his expectations would now have to be deferred.

  The younger English officers were bemused: we have greater numbers, they must have thought, why can’t we storm the town and get this over with? However, the veterans of the French war knew better. They had fought through the hell that was Brittany. They knew that the Spanish commander meant what he said. And the unspoken message was even clearer.

  I am a proud general of the Spanish tercio, Águila was saying. I will make you battle every inch of the way. You will have to fight us street by street and house by house. You will pay dearly in lives for every brick and every cobblestone. Eventually, you will win a heap of rubble that was once a town, and you will fly a victor’s flag over a mountain of your own dead.