The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  These officers looked at Águila, and they thought ‘Tomaso Praxède’.

  They looked at Kinsale, and they thought ‘El Leon’.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HELL AT SPANIARDS’ POINT

  EL LEON was a vivid example of the bloodbath that Kinsale could become. Águila had built the Fort of the Lion on the shores of a rocky promontory in Brittany seven years beforehand. Nearly four hundred Spaniards had died in a heroic attempt to defend it. But when the triumphant English and French attackers examined their ‘victory’ they found it had cost them even more lives – half as many again. And after all the bloodletting, the fort had been demolished, leaving a windblown sea-crag occupied only by cormorants and seagulls.

  The carnage had broken Queen Elizabeth’s heart. Shocked at the thousand lives that had been squandered over a desolate chunk of Atlantic rock, she admonished her commander: ‘The blood of man is not to be used prodigally.’

  Blount knew all about El Leon – and he wasn’t about to go down the same gory road if he could help it.

  It is worth telling the story of El Leon, because it gives valuable insight into Águila’s character, corrects some misinformation about him, and explains why both the English and Spanish commanders acted the way they did in Kinsale.

  Eleven years earlier, in 1590, Juan del Águila had been sent to Brittany with five thousand Spanish troops, ostensibly to aid the Breton Catholic League in its revolt against the French King. However, the Spaniards had their own agenda. They wanted to build a string of impregnable naval bases on France’s Atlantic coast, just a short hop from England. The Breton insurgents, under the ambitious Duke of Mercoeur, realised King Felipe II’s true goal and from the start, the Spanish-rebel alliance was blighted by suspicion and mistrust.

  When Águila set up his first base at Blavet – modern-day Port Louis, near Lorient – the English didn’t rate him highly. One official referred to ‘this new come-hither Águila’. But they had to think again when he created a superb fortress. With its four spear-shaped bastions, it jutted out into the sea in a symbol of its commander’s stony resolve. Even today, the remains of this fort still bear his name – Fort de l’Aigle, a French translation of Fuerte del Águila. Troops were ferried into the new base by an up-and-coming young admiral named Diego de Brochero.

  Soon the region was engulfed in flames as French troops, supported by their English allies, rushed to oust the dangerous new arrivals. Throughout the conflict, no one could predict how the ‘cold commander’ Águila would behave. For instance, when he seized the city of Hennebont after a gruelling forty-day siege in December 1590, he ‘gave the garrison twenty crowns apiece and let them go’. However, after taking Craon he showed no quarter to the English defenders in retaliation for the slaughter of the Armada survivors in Ireland.

  The simmering feud between the Breton insurgents and the Spanish reached boiling point at Morlaix, in the summer of 1594. The rebel leader Mercoeur wanted Águila’s Spaniards to rush the well-fortified city and take it in one glorious charge. Águila, who mistrusted him, said he would prefer to entrench for a longer siege. He asked Mercoeur if he had a proper battle plan.

  ‘We go in on foot with three hundred good men, pikes in hand,’ Mercoeur said dismissively. ‘We charge headlong in. You can follow.’

  The reply was classic Águila. ‘My men never go in anywhere headlong,’ he said. ‘We keep our heads screwed on, we take our time and we do it right.’ And with that, he wheeled away and led his troops back to camp.

  Mercoeur never forgave the Spaniard – and he later savoured his cold revenge at the siege of El Leon.

  Águila had wider ambitions. Earlier, in March 1594, he had set up a second, more northerly base near Brest, at an isolated promontory of the Crozon Peninsula which is still known as Spaniards’ Point. This was a far more dangerous threat to Elizabeth than Blavet.

  The fort of El Leon at Crozon was a masterpiece of military engineering. Perched on a natural rock, it seemed virtually impregnable. Águila installed four hundred seasoned fighters under a trusted veteran commander, Tomaso Praxède, and issued an unambiguous order: they must defend it to the death.

  The English and French royalist armies moved in to besiege the fort. Outnumbering the defenders by around fourteen to one, they battered the fort with intensive fire. But Praxède’s Spaniards fought back like cornered wildcats. In one courageous sally, they killed more than two hundred of the besiegers.

  As the crippling siege continued, Praxède begged the Duke of Mercoeur for assistance. But the Duke also had his own agenda. As the seventeenth-century writer Henrico Davila explains: ‘[Mercoeur] was not displeased that the fort should be taken, knowing that the Spanish aimed to possess themselves of all that coast … [and so] he deferred the relief.’

  Back in Blavet, more than 150km away from El Leon, Águila faced a terrible choice. He had already staked his own reputation on his second fort holding out for at least four months. But Praxède was vastly outnumbered. Should he, Águila, leave Blavet and try to relieve El Leon? If he stayed, he could hold Blavet. If he left, his enemies would rush to attack it. And there was no guarantee he could save the second base at El Leon, either.

  Stay: risk losing one fort. Leave: risk losing two.

  Yet, says Davila, ‘it seemed to him a very great fault to let his own countrymen be destroyed without assistance.’

  Águila made his decision. Ignoring the warning voice of his internal ‘cold commander’, he opted to head north. He left Blavet with four thousand foot soldiers and two cannon. His was a naval mission with no warhorses, so he had to march ‘warily [and] very slowly’, taking a circuitous route to avoid enemy cavalry. He made it all the way to Plomodiern, at the neck of the Crozon Peninsula, before being blocked by royalist forces. He was just 37km from Spaniards’ Point, but he had arrived exactly one day too late.

  Learning of his approach, the attackers at El Leon had launched a massive push to end the standoff. They managed to create a breach, and had poured wave after wave of fresh troops into the gap. At the end of that day, Praxède and nearly all his four hundred defenders lay dead or dying on the bloodstained rock of El Leon.

  ‘Being overcome more by their own weariness than the valour of their enemies,’ reported Davila, ‘[they] were all cut in pieces without stirring one foot from the defence of the rampart.’

  News of the defeat rapidly reached Águila, who had been close enough to hear the last of the fighting. Yet for the attackers, it was not a victory to celebrate. The assault cost six hundred of their best men – including the famous English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher.

  It was recognised by writers of that era that Águila’s relief force had arrived just too late to save the Spanish garrison. Davila’s near-contemporary account, which is quite sympathetic, makes it clear that he had moved heaven and earth in a bid to reach El Leon. However, endless trouble was caused by Davila’s next remark. He speculated that if Águila had marched on to El Leon, ‘perchance’ he might have inflicted a great defeat and won back his fort. But Davila did not suggest that he could have saved the Spanish defenders – they were already dead.

  Later generations of Irish historians were to use this throwaway comment as a basis for their claim that Águila was a coward who had deliberately abandoned El Leon’s defenders while he was close enough to have helped them – and who was quite capable of similarly betraying the Irish at Kinsale. The truth, according to another contemporary source, was that the besiegers had ‘layed the fort [of El Leon] level with the ground, the same day Águila was ready to bring them aid’.

  Not all the Spanish at El Leon had been killed. Thirteen survivors were later found shivering in the rocks nearby. The French royalist commander, impressed by the tenacity of the Spanish, released them to rejoin Águila.

  But as we know by now, Águila was not the sort of person to welcome them home with a hug. He watched the thirteen bedraggled refugees as they lined up in front of him.

  �
��Where have you come from, misérables?’ he asked.

  ‘We have come from among the dead,’ they replied.

  ‘That was the reason I put you there,’ Águila replied. ‘To die.’

  A cold commander, indeed.

  Within a few months, Águila had avenged Praxède and his heroic defenders by launching an audacious commando raid on England. We’ll return to this dramatic episode later because, as we’ll see, it was highly personal to one of the English officers who would be instrumental in ending the Kinsale siege.

  Águila hung grimly on to his base at Blavet for the duration of the war, but funds dried up and his men went hungry. In his letters home, he complained that they were ‘all naked … and six payments behind in their pay’.

  In 1597 the force at Blavet had had enough. They mutinied and took over the base. Águila and his officers were locked up by their own men. Some later commentators have assumed from this evidence that Águila was an especially harsh and unpopular commander. But contemporary records make it clear that ‘the reason is want of pay’. And in fairness, it would be hard to find a Spanish commander in 1590s Northern Europe who didn’t face some sort of a mutiny. A wave of troop revolts was fuelled by sheer poverty as niggardly paymasters held back the troops’ pay to stop them deserting. One historian has counted forty-five mutinies between 1573 and 1607 in Spanish armies in Flanders alone. So it was nothing personal or specific to Águila.

  Eventually, Spain made peace with France, and the fort at Blavet was peacefully relinquished under treaty. Águila was able to sail home, proud and undefeated, to a homeland that did not appreciate his achievement.

  Back in Kinsale, Charles Blount was merciless when he heard that Águila had spurned his offer of terms. He cranked up his cannon and made them thunder out with a ferocity that the Spaniards had never known before. The naval guns were ordered to batter Kinsale until ‘no man shall dare to look over the walls’.

  The cannonballs ploughed up so much soil that Águila’s front-line soldiers were literally buried in churned-up earth. By nightfall on Saturday, 28 November, the town’s east gate had been practically demolished. The terrified townsfolk crouched in cellars and under tables. Some Spanish defenders tried to escape the onslaught by sheltering in the western trenches, but they found Christopher St Lawrence’s Dublin troops waiting for them.

  The battering continued all weekend until ‘a great part’ of the eastern wall collapsed. By night, the Spaniards worked like demons to repair the damage, but each morning the English brutally tore open the stitched wound. At long last, the English had opened up their breach.

  Elated, Blount ordered a full-scale assault. Later, the English would try to downplay this attack, claiming they had merely put on a ‘bravado’ or show of strength. In fact, it was one of the greatest English offensives of the campaign. Two thousand men were hurled into the gap, but they encountered an unexpected level of resistance from the defenders.

  The English grudgingly admitted that the Spaniards fought heroically. Guarding the gap in the wall, a captain named Pedro Morejón restored his men’s morale with a display of contemptuous courage that evoked the classic spirit of the Spanish tercios. He stood upright in full view amid a blistering gale of English gunfire. He ‘walked across the breach, animating his men’, recalled Fynes Moryson.

  The English army marshal Richard Wingfield ordered all his musketeers to aim directly for the Spanish captain.

  —I will personally give £20 to anyone who hits that man, he shouted in frustration.

  But as Fynes Moryson reported, with obvious pleasure, his namesake walked through the fire unharmed. ‘Brave soldiers … are by some secret influence preserved,’ he marvelled. ‘Many great shot did beat the dirt in his face, and stones about his ears, yet … he continued walking in this brave manner.’

  After an hour of heavy fighting, the English gave up. Later, Carew – sounding like some sort of building inspector – reported that they had studied the breach and ‘found it not to be assaultable’. It was a neat euphemism for having been firmly beaten and repelled.

  Captain Morejón’s example had given an injection of confidence to the beleaguered Spanish. They were no longer the underdogs. They’d heard of Hugh O’Donnell’s nifty side-step and of Carew’s embarrassment. They knew that Red Hugh was marching towards Bandon, just twenty kilometres to the west. And they were aware that the main Irish insurgent force under Hugh O’Neill was heading southward at last.

  However, the most heartening development of all was still unknown to them. On 27 November, Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur had sailed out of La Coruña with nine ships, their prows pointed north towards Kinsale. He was carrying guns and munitions and food. And he had eight hundred of the men who were supposed to have landed in Kinsale back in September. They were not so much reinforcements as latecomers, but, together with the other developments, their arrival would change the game beyond recognition.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘LET US SETTLE THIS IN SINGLE COMBAT’

  ON 27 November, Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur had left La Coruña on the midnight tide. He had nine ships carrying between eight hundred and a thousand troops. His fleet was like an early version of the United Nations: his own ship was Dutch, with forty Dutchmen aboard; his vice-admiral’s ship was Flemish; and the other seven included French merchantmen and Scottish luggers.

  One of the most courageous and remarkable Irishmen on board was a Jesuit brother named Dominic Collins (since beatified as The Blessed Dominic Collins). Born in Youghal, Collins had enjoyed a chequered career as an innkeeper’s servant and an army captain in Brittany, before joining the Jesuits and becoming a military chaplain.

  Also in the fleet was a press-ganged Scottish skipper named David High, whose vessel, The Unicorn, had been forced into La Coruña with a leaking hull. The ship was instantly requisitioned. Where was he going? Bordeaux. No. You were going to Bordeaux. Now you’re taking us to Kinsale.

  Eighty armed Spanish soldiers had piled on board, accompanied for some reason by half a dozen women. High’s cargo was replaced with twenty-five tons of bread and six barrels of wine. While in port, High had overheard the Spanish talking about the Irish campaign. They were remarkably upbeat.

  —Ireland is already won, a soldier said. After Ireland, we take England. Then Scotland.

  However, Admiral Zubiaur must have been full of misgivings as he stood on the forecastle of the flagship and set his prow northward. He had wanted warships, but he had been given crocks. Even his admiral’s and vice-admiral’s ships were little better than ‘hulks’ and the other craft were ‘small barks’ or basic merchantmen. He had asked for fighting men, but he had been given untrained convicts who were ‘very poor’ and ‘naked’. To save money, King Felipe had emptied the prisons. A sixth of his force was made up of sullen jailbirds. It made no sense to Zubiaur to mount a key expedition and then to ruin it all by ‘raising companies of lowlifes from the jails … and sending them to a strange kingdom, naked and lacking swords or shirts or shoes. I’ve seen this with my own eyes.’

  But there was a more immediate problem. As they passed the coast of northern France, a tempest slammed into his fleet. One ship was smashed against the pitiless rocks of the Brittany coast. Another was hurled directly back to Galicia, and a third went missing. Meanwhile, the same fierce wind sent Zubiaur and the remaining vessels scudding northwards at an astonishing speed. As November drew to a close, they were already within sight of Ireland. Relief was imminent for Águila and his beleaguered defenders at Kinsale.

  There are conflicting reports of what happened next. One account says the storms prevented Zubiaur from reaching Kinsale. This was a blessing in disguise, because he would have sailed straight into the hands of the English navy. ‘It was the mercy of God,’ concluded one Spanish report. However, a later Spanish account says the ships sailed into the mouth of Kinsale thinking it was full of Spanish warships. When they discovered they were actually English ships, they turned tail and sough
t out another port.

  Either way, Zubiaur was lucky to escape capture. But not so lucky as the Scotsman David High, who managed to win his freedom amid the confusion. According to one report, High and his Scottish crew had earlier persuaded the Spanish soldiers to huddle below decks as the gale raged.

  —We can ply our tackle better if you stay out of the way, they shouted above the storm.

  Then they quietly fastened the hatches, trapping the Spaniards below as they sailed into Kinsale.

  Whatever the circumstances, as soon as his ship entered port, David High slipped overboard, seized a small boat, and rowed hell for leather towards an English naval vessel.

  —That ship is filled with Spanish soldiers, he shouted breathlessly to Vice-Admiral Amias Preston.

  Preston armed his men and approached the Scottish vessel warily. But the eighty Spaniards, who were probably reluctant warriors in the first place, surrendered peacefully.

  Meanwhile, Zubiaur was sailing westward with his six remaining ships. By 1 December, he had reached the next available port – the harbour of Castlehaven.

  —A warm welcome to you! My port and castle are yours!

  Sitting in his rowboat at the entrance to Castlehaven harbour, Dermot O’Driscoll beamed genially up at the new arrivals in their tall ships.

  —But if you continue on this course, O’Driscoll went on, you will founder on the hidden rocks. Follow me. I will guide you safely in.

  Zubiaur’s first encounter with the native Irish could not have been more different to Águila’s. The leader of the Castlehaven O’Driscolls was ‘a Catholic and an adherent of His Majesty’, as the Spanish recorded later.