The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  Blount closes in for the kill. Tyrrell’s mercenaries watch their comrades fleeing for their lives and decide – understandably enough – that their contract is null and void. They, too, begin to melt away. ‘They made a stand a little while,’ says William Farmer, ‘but at the last, Tyrrell and his Irish soldiers quitted the Spaniards and left them alone.’

  Now completely abandoned, Alonso Ocampo and his brave two hundred are the only ones left on the field. They make a valiant stand on that hill, courageously defending the honour of Spain and protecting the royal flags. The painting shows them grouped together in a desperate huddle, their steel helmets gleaming, their pikes thrusting out at every angle. But they are surrounded, and the outcome is inevitable. One by one, the Burgundy flags are torn away from the grip of the fallen defenders. ‘The Spaniards, like amazed men (cursing the day they ever they came to Ireland) made a stand,’ says one English witness. ‘Many of them were killed.’ Farmer agrees: ‘The most part of them were slain.’

  According to Bustamante, ‘three of His Majesty’s colours were lost in fighting, and up to seventy Spanish were taken prisoner.’ Quartermaster Lopez de Soto reckons that 140 were either killed or captured.

  One English officer, a Captain John Pikeman, spots Ocampo in the midst of the fray and hacks his way across to take the honour of capturing him. On the way he sustains three wounds, but he makes it across to the Spanish field commander and takes him prisoner. At the precise moment when Ocampo yields up his sword, the Battle of Kinsale is over. It has lasted only two to three hours.

  Amid the chaos, Bustamante and some sixty other Spaniards manage to escape. Although stunned by the rout, and exhausted after several nights without sleep, Bustamante suddenly has a moment of blinding insight.

  Águila had clearly instructed the two insurgent chieftains to bring digging tools to entrench Ardmartin Hill. They didn’t bring so much as a shovel. He also ordered them to bring all their baggage forward and south to their new front line at the ridge. They didn’t. Instead, they sent their baggage even further back – a full 15km to the northwest of the camp at Coolcarron.

  At that point, the Spaniard finds himself wondering if O’Neill and O’Donnell were ever really serious about doing battle with the English at Kinsale. As Bustamante put it: ‘Did they really want to fight – or what?’

  Inside the rubble-strewn town of Kinsale, Águila’s Spanish soldiers still wait for O’Neill to keep his appointment on the hilltop. (Unbeknownst to them, O’Neill has already appeared there briefly, shrouded by the dawn gloom, before retreating back into the mists of the valley.) Águila himself is standing in full armour at the gate. Watchmen are posted at the highest points. All ears are craned for the sound of an army approach, or for some sort of signal, but amid the relentlessly driving rain and the rolling thunder it is impossible to tell which noises are real and which are illusions induced by sleeplessness and wishful thinking.

  At one stage, Fr Archer thinks he has heard the sound of ‘artillery’ – impossible, since cannon will never feature on the battlefield – and demands that Águila open his gates and sally out to the attack.

  —All we need to do is make a show of our troops, he insists, and we will certainly triumph!

  But Águila is too old and shrewd a fox to rush into a fight without knowing the facts. He orders his scouts to slip out to the front line to confirm. They report back that there is still no sign of the Irish army on the ridge. If there was gunfire, it was probably a subterfuge by the English.

  By this stage the troops are restless, jumpy and anxious for action. Águila makes a proclamation to calm everyone down.

  —There will be no attack at this point, he instructs firmly. The gunfire was a trick to lure us out into a trap.

  The two clerics are livid at the decision. But Águila is adamant. If the Spanish were to sally out prematurely with O’Neill still on his way, then all would be lost. Waiting is all they can do.

  The minutes drag by, agonisingly slowly, until the weak midwinter sun reaches its pathetic apex. Then: a furious explosion of noise. Hundreds of muskets and arquebuses are blasting out. There are shouts, yells, a deafening commotion … all the sounds of a full-blown battle.

  The Spanish glance at each other and then at Águila. He nods and orders the sally-ports flung open. Yelling warcries, the veteran troops pour out into the open …

  … only to be confronted by the sight of flags fluttering on the English side of the trenches. The red crosses of Burgundy. The beloved colours of King Felipe of Spain. Seven of them.

  For an instant, it must seem like a dream come true – as though their Spanish reinforcements have burst through and taken the English positions. But those flags are all in the hands of their enemies. Enemies who are mocking them as they flaunt the flags, drag them in the dirt, and point to their captive comrades, the Castlehaven Spaniards. It is a dreadful moment, a stomach-twisting and sick realisation.

  Those noises were not the sounds of battle. They were the sounds of a victory celebration.

  Águila’s Spanish are not the only ones taken in. George Carew too hears the noise and advances from the main camp ready for a full-scale fight. When he hears that it is just Donough O’Brien’s men firing in celebration, he does the same. His men ‘spared no powder and did make their pieces [guns] pronounce their joy’.

  One English officer is delighted to have fooled Águila: ‘The Spaniards, hearing of the terrible noise and hot skirmish (to their thinking) did assure themselves that Tyrone and our forces were in fight,’ he crows.

  For honour’s sake, Águila’s Spaniards press ahead with their attack. But they are ‘quickly beaten back’ and the gates of Kinsale are firmly closed once more.

  Before he leaves the corpse-strewn battlefield, Blount has one more duty to do. He calls over the young Richard de Burgh, who has personally killed twenty insurgents in the fray, and signals him to kneel on the turf.

  —You carried yourself worthily on the battlefield, Blount tells the Galwayman. Not only in your words, which encouraged others to fight, but also in your deeds and actions. No man did bloody his sword more than you. Here on this plain, even among the dead bodies, I dub you a knight. From this moment on, you will have the honourary name of the battlefield. Arise, Sir Richard Kinsale.

  This honour, the only one to be granted that day, makes an enormous impact on the officers. Thomas Gainsford will later tell de Burgh: ‘When I saw you knighted on the field (and none but yourself), yea, in the dirty fields before Kinsale, my heart leaped for joy … When death has undertaken to obliterate our memories, yet shall after-ages demand, who this Earl of Clanrickard was.’

  His words seem ironic in hindsight, since Richard de Burgh, Earl of Clanrickard, has been almost totally forgotten by history. But at that moment, he is the acknowledged hero of the English. In fact, two seventeenth-century histories will later credit de Burgh with the entire victory. One says the Irish were ‘disordered and routed by the Earl of Clanrickard’. Hugh O’Donnell will later tell Felipe III that de Burgh’s actions at Kinsale did ‘great harm’ to Spain.

  The dramatic bestowal of the knighthood is a shrewd move by Blount, since de Burgh is also an insider in the Essex circle. To rehabilitate de Burgh is to rehabilitate himself.

  We know from other sources that many members of the English military establishment are jealous of de Burgh’s success. It will not be lost on them that the man who turned the tide of the battle against the Catholic Irish forces of Hugh O’Neill is not only a native Irishman, but also a proud and uncompromising Catholic.

  Now all that remains is the grisly count of the bodies which lie, not just on the plain beside the ford, but spread out over three kilometres northwards.

  On the Irish side, the death toll is either 500, 800, 1,000 or 1,200, depending on which source you accept. O’Neill reported 500 deaths to King Felipe. Henry Power says 800 lay dead at the scene. Blount first assesses the total at 1,000 dead and 700–800 injured, but Carew claims 1,200
dead with 800 injuries. Later Blount’s official report refers to 1,200 bodies, and Fynes Moryson and IE concur with that higher figure.

  However, the Irish themselves downplay the figures. The Irish annalist dismisses the deaths as ‘trifling’ and ‘not so great’. Philip O’Sullivan claims O’Neill lost two hundred infantry. Only O’Cleary concedes that ‘many’ were slaughtered.

  The figures reported by individual Irish combatants are more realistic. One chieftain named O’Hagan has died alongside 480 of his 500-strong company. Of the remaining twenty, seven die later of injures. Another company of 100 has been obliterated. Yet another company of 300 is reduced by nine-tenths to thirty-one. Among the worst affected are the MacDonnells – the Scots and Antrim mercenaries known as ‘redshanks’. Two companies of 100 are wiped out and another originally numbering 300 is now down to a mere thirty.

  Total: ‘Captains slain, fourteen. Soldiers slain, 1995.’

  That final figure probably includes further losses on the long journey home. As a rough figure, we can put the Irish deaths on the battlefield at around a thousand.

  In contrast, the English have lost a mere handful of men – one, two, three or seven, depending upon your source. William Farmer says: ‘There was but one of the Queen’s soldiers slain that day … John Taylor, that was cornet to Captain Richard Graeme.’ However, Philip O’Sullivan claims they lost ‘three nobles’ and the English physician Dr Hippocrates D’Otthen agrees with that number. An English officer named Captain Dutton says they lost ‘only two men’ but the seventeenth-century historian Richard Cox makes it seven: ‘one cornet and five or six soldiers.’

  These low figures are doubted, even in England. The contemporary courtier Francis Bacon will say that the loss of only one man was ‘scarce credible’.

  It hardly matters. The fact remains that during the battle itself, the English have inflicted wholesale carnage on the Irish at little loss to themselves. The bloodletting is so great that the river will be renamed ‘the Ford of the Slaughter’ because for a time it literally runs red.

  And now, Blount must deal with the captives. He follows his usual policy of treating the Spanish as prisoners of war. However, some are pushed into Kinsale town to tell their full horrific story.

  The Irish insurgents he views differently – he sees them as traitorous subjects of the Queen. Some of the richer Irish prisoners ‘offer great ransoms’, but there are very few exceptions – only 160 of them are spared. The rest are strung up on the spot. And to ensure maximum propaganda effect, the gallows are erected close to the town, so that the sight of their allies twisting and kicking in their prolonged death-throes will forever haunt the nightmares of Águila’s defenders on the ramparts of Kinsale.

  Afterwards Blount, ‘with sound of trumpet, called the whole army together and concluded this, his glorious victory, with prayers, praise and thanksgiving to God who is the giver of all victory’.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  WONDERING WHY

  THE LORD giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And as the Irish survivors limped miserably back to their first base camp at Innishannon, thirteen kilometres away, they must truly have felt as though they had been punished by God. There could be no other reason for such an unexpected and humiliating defeat. ‘God did not will it [a victory] and he chastised us for our sin, for there is no other reason,’ Oviedo wrote. ‘Our sins snatched victory from our hands.’

  There was plenty more in the same vein. ‘Divine vengeance’ says Philip O’Sullivan. ‘Manifest was the displeasure of God,’ says the Irish annalist. ‘For our sins, the enemy broke up the weakest squadron,’ writes Zubiaur. ‘It was not the will of God to give victory,’ says O’Cleary.

  However, modern analysts don’t have things quite so easy. There are many complex factors to be untangled. Why did it all go so horribly wrong for the Irish? For centuries, the debate has raged even more fiercely than the battle itself. Before resuming the narrative, let’s hold a brief post-mortem. Having combed through most of the accounts and analyses, I have compiled the principal theories:

  THE ‘COWARDLY IRISH’ THEORY

  The standard English explanation for the victory. As Carew put it: ‘God cast in their hearts a needless fear’ as they faced a charge. The terrified Irish abandoned all discipline and bolted. This explanation suited the English because it reinforced the image of a superior race subduing barbarians. The contemporary writer Francis Bacon even joked about it: ‘There appeared no difference between the valour of the Irish rebels and the Spaniards, but that the one ran away before they were charged, and the other straight after.’

  But that wasn’t true. Before the rout, O’Neill’s musketeers had fought fiercely in a bid to hold the second river crossing, and their tercio had withstood the shock of an all-out charge by Wingfield’s cavalry with steely discipline before they made the fatal error of parting ranks to admit their own retreating horsemen.

  In disarray, they broke up under an English charge and ran. But, remember, a tactical runaway was standard practice for the Irish in this asymmetric war. It had served them well in the past. ‘They think it no shame to fly or run off from fighting, as they advantage,’ wrote Fynes Moryson.

  The difference at Kinsale was that they had been suckered into fighting in open countryside. Blount showed his military genius in ensuring that it was ‘a fair champaign’ before committing himself. Moryson again: ‘At Kinsale, when they were drawn by the Spaniards to stand in firm body on the plain, they were easily defeated.’

  The tragedy for the Irish was not that they ran. It was that they had nowhere to run … and nowhere to hide.

  THE ‘COWARDLY SPANISH’ THEORY (1)

  In the 1800s, a new wave of nationalist Irish writers revived Kinsale as a touchstone of doomed heroism. In this revisionist version, the gallant Irish chieftains stormed southwards across icebound rivers to help the incompetent, timorous and geographically challenged Juan del Águila, who cowered safely in town while the Irish did all the fighting. Spanish inaction was the main reason for the defeat, helped along by treachery (the whiskey), by incompetent guides and by O’Donnell’s brave impetuosity.

  But as we have seen, Águila was far from inactive, the chieftains took their time about joining him, the whiskey betrayal didn’t make any real difference, and the final two reasons are open to doubt.

  THE ‘COWARDLY SPANISH’ THEORY (2)

  The idea that a spineless Juan del Águila caused the Irish defeat was given fresh impetus in the mid-1900s when researchers unearthed some little-known letters of his fiercest critics, Archer and Oviedo. Archer’s view that Águila was ‘cowardly and timorous’ seemed to be supported by his claim that Águila had heard the noise of the battle but ignored it as an English ruse. The officers were keen to fight but he overruled them.

  However, the commander’s reputation was rescued by another historian, Henry Mangan, who pointed out that Águila was relying on front-line information from scouts. Oviedo and Archer had no better information. The historian said this was just one of the many instances where the opinionated clerics had undermined the military campaign. Later, military-history expert Gerard Hayes-McCoy supported this verdict. The churchmen’s enthusiasm was far beyond their military knowledge, he wrote, adding that nobody in Kinsale knew anything about the battle until the English returned victorious.

  Which poses the question: Why didn’t Águila hear anything?

  In my opinion, there are several reasons. The battle was fought on a low plain several kilometres beyond an eighty-metre high hill. No big guns were used. The weather remained ‘extreme foul’ with an initial thunderstorm followed by rain that could easily have drowned out the muffled pops of muskets. Meanwhile, at Kinsale, the English troops were noisily manoeuvring.

  Interestingly, Águila was vindicated on this count by unlikely champions – his enemies. I have found an obscure passage in a near contemporary English history (1620s) which says Blount was lucky because ‘the wind blew from such a quarter t
hat the discharging of the small shot [at the battlefield] … was not heard in the town’.

  THE MULTIPLE ERROR THEORY

  As every air crash investigator knows, disasters are usually caused not by one huge error but by a build-up of minor ones.

  Admiral Zubiaur was highly critical of the organisation on the battlefield. He complained that, instead of creating a formidable fighting unit using the best captains and soldiers, O’Neill scattered the troops all over the place, ‘divided into different parts, where they fought and lost spirit’.

  Military history expert Gerard Hayes-McCoy has identified several tactical errors on the Irish side. Their divisions were too far apart and made little attempt to support each other. O’Neill had no secure line of retreat, and the mostly inactive Irish horsemen allowed the English cavalry to dominate the field. Tyrrell bared his flank to a potential English attack and suffered the consequences. O’Neill had shown a fatal caution when decisive action was needed.

  The reason for the defeat, the writer concluded, was that the Irish had affected to be a disciplined tercio-style fighting unit when they had not the experience nor the iron will to hold ranks under pressure.

  It is difficult to dispute any of Hayes-McCoy’s points, except to restate that the Irish tercio did successfully resist the shock of the first English charge. In fact, it was their own cavalry that broke their infantry ranks, not the enemy’s.

  THE STIRRUPS THEORY

  Recently, historians have also highlighted the archaic nature of the Irish cavalry. Hiram Morgan points out that the local horses were much smaller than the English warhorses, and because O’Neill’s horsemen disdained the use of stirrups they could not withstand the sort of collision that was inevitable between cavalry. The Irish cavalry did not lack courage, just the right horses and equipment.