The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  (It recalls the reaction of British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling as he flew home from his first visit to Northern Ireland in the 1970s: ‘For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’)

  The conversation took a serious turn, with Águila suggesting that they both lobby for a general peace between their nations. Blount remained noncommittal.

  However, this air of camaraderie didn’t stop the English playing dirty. Carew heard that a Spanish ship had secretly arrived with despatches for Águila. They were to be carried by hand across the county and delivered to him.

  —Would you like to know the contents before he does? Carew asked Blount.

  Blount didn’t hesitate. They could be orders countermanding the peace deal.

  —Intercept them, he said, if you can handsomely do it.

  Carew knew exactly what ‘handsomely’ meant. He called in a dirty-tricks specialist named Captain William Nuce. Nuce enlisted a few soldiers who dressed like road brigands. As the messenger came close to Cork, the ‘robbers’ swooped and snatched his letters. Leaving him tied up, Nuce headed straight back to his boss. It was mealtime and the unsuspecting Águila was being hosted to dinner at George Carew’s home in Cork. Carew excused himself and brought the letters to Blount at his temporary lodgings in the bishop’s house.

  Eventually the messenger managed to free himself. He made his way to Águila, who immediately smelled a rat. He stormed across to Blount’s quarters.

  —My messenger was robbed by your soldiers, the furious Águila complained.

  —They were probably just country thieves, Blount told him. If they were soldiers, they were renegades.

  Águila was far from satisfied.

  —I suspect that this was President Carew’s doing, he stormed.

  Blount was earnest in his reply.

  —I can swear upon my faith that he does not have your letters, he said truthfully.

  The letters, which Águila received only while leaving Ireland, were from King Felipe, Lerma and War Secretary Ibarra. They ordered him to hang on, but gave no solid assurances that any sizeable reinforcements would arrive any time soon. Perhaps Águila was later secretly relieved that he hadn’t seen them.

  Meanwhile, other relationships were being formed between the English officers and the temporary guests they labelled ‘Don Diegos’. They found they had much in common, and this curious meeting of minds among influential officers on the far fringes of Europe was a key element in creating the future peace.

  Fynes Moryson became fascinated with the family roots of his namesake, the Spanish hero Pedro Morejón, and quizzed him about his English background. Ocampo gave his captor John Pikeman a jewelled gold chain. In Baltimore, Captain Roger Harvey had a long chat with the expedition’s quartermaster general, Pedro Lopez de Soto. Lopez de Soto confided that the expedition was not about religious freedom. It was revenge for Elizabeth’s aid to the Dutch rebels. ‘Did you ever think otherwise?’ Lopez de Soto asked.

  The quartermaster expressed contempt for Ireland, ‘a barbarous nation for which, I think, Christ never died’.

  Were the Spanish sincere in these racist rantings? Secretary Robert Cecil doubted it. He believed it was all a red herring – ‘howsoever Don Juan did flatter you all at his departure with seeming to detest the country’.

  As he said farewell, Águila presented George Carew with a gift – a military handbook on how to erect and destroy fortifications.

  When the Spanish garrison finally quit Kinsale, they marched out with colours flying. The musketeers shouldered their firearms and almost certainly carried their bullets in their mouths – an important symbol, since that was how soldiers carried them in battle. It showed they had not surrendered.

  It was 20 February before the first batch was shipped home. There were nearly 1,400 of them – twenty captains and 1,374 soldiers. Águila joined the second batch on 8 March, but the wind shifted and he spent eight days at anchor before finally setting sail on 16 March. He had with him ‘1,200 able men’, but there were also ‘boys and women’, testifying to the fact that many of the Spanish settler families had survived the entire ordeal.

  A separate tally puts the first consignment at 1,880 soldiers, including 400 prisoners and deserters, and the second batch at 1,000 soldiers and 300 civilians.

  Águila was returning with 60-70 percent of his original force, which was quite an achievement considering the energy of his sallies and the losses suffered by Blount and O’Neill. O’Neill lost 1,000 to 1,200 in the battle. Águila must have lost at least 1,000 in the mission. More were dying daily of sickness. In the entire siege, the English came off worst. Philip O’Sullivan reckons they lost 8,000 overall, although one eminent historian later estimated it at 10,000. Carew was more conservative. ‘I do verily believe,’ he wrote, ‘that at that siege and after the sickness we got, we lost about 6,000 men that died.’

  He concluded: ‘Kinsale was bought at so dear a rate, that while I live, I will protest against a winter siege.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  DOSSIER OF TREASON

  BLOUNT may have scored a major victory on the battlefield of Kinsale – but he still did not feel secure.

  For months, he had been under suspicion after having been implicated in the Earl of Essex’s plot. Only the Queen’s irrational favour had kept him from being arrested and interrogated. Now he felt that his controversial peace agreement with Águila, not to mention their cosy dinner chats, would give his enemies enough rope to hang him. The peace deal could unravel, for any number of reasons. Only two years before, Essex had organised an unauthorised truce with Hugh O’Neill. It had destroyed his military career.

  Throughout December, Blount had come under increasing pressure for failing to capture Kinsale. It was Admiral Richard Leveson who was hero-worshipped in London. ‘Sir Richard Leveson played the man when all men’s hearts failed,’ the influential courtier Dudley Carleton wrote pointedly in a letter of late December, before hearing of the Christmas Eve victory. ‘[Blount] is blamed for delay in this desperate state of our affairs. He was expected long ere this to assault the town.’ Carleton dismissed Blount’s reasons for holding back as ‘his excuse’.

  On 24 December, the Lords of the Privy Council in England wrote coldly and critically to Blount complaining of his ‘long and unexpected silence’. The only positive thing the lords could say was that ‘you have done as much as you could’.

  The new peace agreement added fuel to their paranoia. Even Secretary Robert Cecil was suggesting that Águila had played Blount for a fool – or worse – and that the Spanish would rip up the agreement in a heartbeat.

  There was also controversy over Blount’s decision to enter into peace talks with O’Neill after the Ulsterman’s request to be ‘received into Her Majesty’s mercy’. On 4 February, Blount sent a trusted negotiator to O’Neill with a list of conditions for pardon. (The resultant exchanges were to drag on for weeks, with O’Neill professing himself to be ‘heartily sorry’ and ‘grieved’ for his actions in the war. But the talks were doomed to failure. Negotiations would rapidly collapse and the two sides would be back at war by summer.)

  By 15 February, Blount was deeply depressed and ready to quit. He bared his soul in a bitter cri de coeur to Secretary Cecil: ‘I protest I was never more accompanied with more unquiet thoughts [than now],’ he confessed, ‘…seeing no end of my labours … [and] fearing that they are valued of so little merit.’

  Referring to his enemies at court, he said: ‘I never deserved any ill of them by deed … nor by word … so I do as much scorn their malice, as the barking of so many whelps … but when I think that their false evidence doth sway the opinion of my supreme judge [ie the Queen] … I cannot but fear.’ He said he now hated ‘this unhappy profession’ and longed to retire ‘in quietness’. There was no mistaking it – Charles Blount had reached the end of his tether.

  But only a few months beforehand, he had been very, very lucky not to have found himself
at the end of a gallows rope.

  It all began in the summer of 1599, when all England was racked with fears for the future. The childless Queen Elizabeth was in her final years but refused to hear any talk of a successor. The Essex circle favoured the Protestant King James VI of Scotland and believed that Secretary Robert Cecil controlled a powerful secret cabal in support of the rival Spanish Catholic candidate, Felipe’s half-sister the Infanta Isabella. They felt Cecil’s motives were purely selfish, because he had every reason to fear that James would exact revenge on the Cecil family over their involvement in the execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Essex and his followers were utterly convinced that Cecil was selling England out to the Spanish in order to ensure his own survival. They decided that Elizabeth must be forced, in the national interest, to nominate James as successor and clear up the uncertainty once and for all.

  The highly politicised Penelope Rich, Essex’s sister and Blount’s lover, was at the centre of this movement. She had been secretly corresponding with King James for more than a decade, declaring that her brother Essex was living ‘in thrall’ and longed for a change of regime. Some of her letters were so ‘dark’ that they left even James baffled.

  Blount was deeply imbedded in the Essex group, but respected Cecil’s elite status and was trying to keep friendly with him as well. However, his equivocation had isolated him from the centre of power and he was kept firmly outside the influential Privy Council.

  He, too, was deeply worried about his nation’s future. ‘[We] that are not of the Council do see no hope to keep long together this State from assured ruin,’ he wrote to Essex at one point. ‘I pray God, the Queen may with all prosperity outlive their negligence.’

  Halfway through 1599, Blount was spurred into action. He secretly wrote to James assuring him that Essex and other like-minded nobles would back him as successor if the Scottish King gave the signal.

  Fast forward to late autumn, 1599. Essex had been commanding the Queen’s troops in Ireland, but had deserted his post after making his unauthorised truce with O’Neill. On his return to London, he stormed into the Queen’s bedchamber while she was still undressed. During the resulting row Essex and Blount vanished in a ‘discontented’ state to Portsmouth, where the pair ignored several royal orders to come back to London. On his return, Essex was disgraced and put under house arrest.

  Blount – who was preparing to take command of the troops in Ireland – intervened to help his friend by planning what amounted to a treasonous military uprising. He held a secret meeting where, to salve his conscience, he first insisted that his fellow plotters pledged loyalty to the Queen. (Contrarily, he felt he was acting in her best interests, whether she appreciated that or not.) Then he revealed that he planned to take four to five thousand English troops from Ireland to Scotland, where their threatening presence across the border would force Elizabeth to nominate King James as her successor. Whether Blount intended to put on a mere show of strength or launch a full-scale invasion of England was never made clear, because the Scottish King replied that he was ‘not ready to enter into that attempt … and so that business ended’.

  The next scene in the drama came in December 1599. Lady Penelope Rich, in her late-thirties and mother to Blount’s five children, descended on Elizabeth’s court like an avenging angel, dressed in dramatic black. Head held high, she swept into the Queen’s presence and demanded better treatment for her brother. Did Her Majesty not realise that Essex was ill and at the point of death?

  There was no love lost between the two women. The Queen disliked her ‘for violating her husband’s bed’. They were rivals for Blount’s affections, although Elizabeth had to be content with fanciful love letters while Penelope shared his embraces. Lady Rich stated her case, left gifts of expensive jewellery, and sashayed out. The Queen noted with irritation that her entranced courtiers were all fawning over her.

  A month passed. It was January 1600, and Elizabeth had still not released Essex. Penelope, seething with indignation, decided like any modern whistle-blower to unleash the power of the press. She wrote a sarcastic letter to the Queen and watched with satisfaction as printed copies were circulated. ‘Early did I hope this morning to have mine eyes blessed with Your Majesty’s beauty,’ she wrote tongue in cheek. But the ‘divine oracle’ had given her ‘a doubtful answer’. She claimed Essex’s enemies were motivated by revenge: ‘[If] your fair hands do not check the courses of their unbridled hate, [it] will be his last breath.’

  This stuff was dynamite, and circulating it was effectively a clarion call to London’s citizens to support their hero Essex against the Queen. As anxious courtiers snapped up all available copies, Elizabeth ordered Penelope’s arrest over this ‘impertinent letter’, claiming that she was showing ‘a plain contempt’. The Attorney General denounced her as ‘insolent’ and ‘saucy’.

  However, Lady Rich pleaded her case to the sixty-four-year-old Lord Treasurer, who was persuaded to let her go – much to the Queen’s annoyance. She believed Penelope had wrapped him around her little finger.

  The quiet-natured Blount was undoubtedly embarrassed by his feisty lover. He sailed for Ireland, still quite prepared to use his troops for dissident political ends. But as he immersed himself in the war, his priorities shifted.

  Campaigning in Ulster in the spring of 1600, Blount received a visit from another Essex conspirator, the Earl of Southampton. Henry Wriothesley cut an unusual figure – he was a colourfully foppish bisexual who was also renowned as a courageous and effective soldier. Wriothesley – often identified as the ‘fair youth’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets – told Blount it was time for action. He must lead the five thousand troops to England to challenge Elizabeth. This time Blount drew the line. He ‘utterly rejected’ the plan, according to Wriothesley’s later testimony.

  On to February 1601. In London, Essex had been released but impoverished – Elizabeth had removed his source of income. His creditors were at the door, and he was banned from court. One courtier suspected he was going insane.

  On Sunday, 8 February, he organised a revolution. He led three hundred men along the Strand to the City, shouting: ‘The Crown has been sold to the Spanish Infanta!’

  Silence. No one joined him. His great rebellion fizzled out in a fiasco.

  Bizarrely, Essex took a break for lunch, then ‘stood for a while with his halberd in his hand, and a napkin about his neck’. Breaking into a visible sweat, he fought his way home past a military patrol. He fortified his house, which was soon under heavy siege. Both sides agreed to release the women inside, who included Penelope and Essex’s wife, Frances.

  After a standoff, Essex capitulated and was hauled off to the Tower. It was all over within twelve hours.

  The interrogations of the prime suspects revealed some damning information about Blount and Penelope Rich. Penelope was clearly one of the prime movers in the revolt. She had dined with the ringleaders on Saturday night as they finalised the plan, and on Sunday morning had driven out to persuade a vacillating nobleman to join the rising. Under questioning, Essex blamed his sister for humiliating him into action: ‘[She told] me how all my friends and followers thought me a coward.’ Penelope responded humbly that she was ‘more like a slave than a sister’.

  Before his execution – it took three strokes of the axe – Essex also implicated his close friend Charles Blount as an ‘accessory to his design’. Blount’s name was mentioned again and again when the conspirators were interrogated. The most damning parts were suppressed, but Cecil and Carew knew all about his scheming.

  On 22 February 1601 Blount’s friends on the Irish campaign noticed he had become suddenly silent and anxious. It all began when he received a letter informing him of Essex’s failed coup. Blount demanded his private papers from Moryson and destroyed all the evidence. ‘[He] had good cause to be wary,’ wrote Moryson, ‘… since by some confessions in England, himself was tainted with privity to the Earl’s practices.’

  By coincidence, jus
t a few days before the revolt Blount had written home asking permission to take a break in London. In hindsight, this looked bad.

  Blount waited daily for the summons to London. Had it arrived, he was determined to flee to France in a ship that was already waiting at port.

  —I will not put my neck under the blade, he admitted privately.

  But amazingly, the summons never came. The Queen, who wouldn’t hear a word against her favourite, had ‘dissembled and concealed’ the scandal. Blount was considered to be too valuable an asset in Ireland. And one of the conspirators had pleaded on the gallows that ‘Lord Mountjoy [Blount] be cleared as ignorant of the matter’, an assertion which was certainly true in relation to the actual rising.

  Blount wrote to Cecil in a bid to clear the air. ‘I am confident in my own conscience,’ he declared, assuring the Secretary that ‘the army was free from the infection of this conspiracy’.

  And Penelope? Astonishingly, she was able to talk her way out of this crisis, too. In ‘custody’ she had her own private cook and insisted that her long-suffering husband, Lord Rich, supplied her with beddings and wall hangings suitable to her station in life. Fortunately, her interrogator was Lord Nottingham, who was Blount’s commander in the battle against the Great Armada of 1588 and who was very well disposed to him. He reassured Blount: ‘She used herself with modesty and wisdom … [and was] set at liberty.’

  In response to Blount’s request to return to London, Lord Nottingham wrote playfully that the Queen would be glad ‘to look upon your black eyes [if] she were sure you would not look [on] other black eyes’.

  By March, Blount had received a positive letter from the Queen saying she was pleased to pardon those who had been ‘seduced and blindly led’ by Essex. He began mending fences with Cecil, but although the Secretary made all the right noises, deep down he was still uncertain about Blount’s good faith. Throughout the Spanish invasion and beyond, Cecil continued to conspire and collude with his friend George Carew as though Blount were the enemy. Using coded language, Cecil made what one historian describes as ‘dark allusions’ about Blount’s links with ‘unworthy friends’. Amid the scare of the initial invasion, Carew made his sinister assertion to Cecil that Blount ‘is [either] a noble gentleman, and all yours, or else he is a devil.’