The Last Armada

by Des Ekin

  It was an extraordinary situation, as a nineteenth-century historian would later comment: ‘It is sad to think … that it was possible, in such a crisis, for [the Queen’s] second in command to cast suspicion on the loyalty of her first officer in a letter to her chief adviser at home.’

  The Queen did nothing to stop this relentless sabotage. When Blount complained that he was treated like a house servant, Elizabeth thought it was hilarious. She labelled Blount as ‘Mistress Kitchenmaid’ and teased him with this nickname until her death.

  The most serious bid to undermine Blount’s authority came in February 1602, when Cecil effectively ordered Carew to wreck the Blount-Águila peace deal on a pretext if he had the chance. But all through 1602, Carew continued sniping. In April he sent Cecil new information about Blount’s disappearance to Portsmouth with Essex in 1599 – ‘an ill tale’ – and added: ‘How to deal with these slanderous causes I know not.’

  However, during his entire time as Ireland commander, Blount never gave them the satisfaction of the slightest lapse in loyalty. Eventually, Carew admitted grudgingly to Cecil that ‘the emulation [presumably of Essex] you feared, and myself was doubtful of, is, I think, wholly removed’.

  In fact, during Blount’s command, the only ‘disloyalty’ shown by anyone in the army top brass was the blatant disloyalty shown by Carew to his commanding officer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  A DEAD JUAN WALKING

  [Children], you will be glad to hear that when [Águila] reached home, King Philip, in great anger, degraded him, and kept him in prison, and there he died of a broken heart. – Irish schoolbook, 1904

  ÁGUILA HAD a pleasant passage home, arriving at La Coruña on 21 March – Palm Sunday for the Spanish. He knew better than to expect flags and bunting, but he probably didn’t expect the chilliness he encountered at the Galician port. His vessel was about as welcome as a plague ship.

  The old warrior was arguably in more danger in Spain than he had ever been in Kinsale. O’Donnell had spent the previous two months thoroughly poisoning the air against him. His story of Águila’s supposed incompetence, cowardice and traitorous agreement was about to be given further credence by the furiously indignant Mateo de Oviedo.

  Águila stepped ashore to find the thunder-faced O’Donnell standing on the quay, flanked by Pedro de Zubiaur and some twenty Irish exiles. Both commanders had just returned from pleading their case before the King.

  Águila assumed a buoyant, positive tone.

  —Be of good comfort, he told O’Donnell. We will have one more turn at Ireland.

  O’Donnell’s reply was not recorded.

  All Spain was buzzing with the Águila scandal. In Valladolid, the diarist Luis Córdoba recorded in his journal for 20 April that the expedition had returned ‘helpless’ with six hundred fewer men than it had taken. ‘Most of them died from disease, others are sick, others suffering from mistreatment from the work they have endured without having achieved anything worthy of consideration,’ he wrote.

  Some observers believed Águila was already a dead man walking. One merchant claimed: ‘[The] general report given out [is] that so soon as he comes, he shall be executed.’ The Venetian ambassadors agreed that he was doomed. ‘[The Spanish authorities] now insist that Águila made a mistake in coming to terms with the English and surrendering to them three places which he held,’ they said. ‘Some prophesy ill for him, declaring that he has escaped an honourable death in Ireland to meet with a shameful one in Spain.’

  The Irish, in particular, were ‘calling out loudly’ against Águila. And one English informant wrote: ‘Don Juan is mightily railed at for deceiving the King.’ He had turned Felipe’s investment ‘into dross’. O’Donnell, on the other hand, was ‘in great credit’.

  Carew was picking up the same intelligence. O’Donnell’s reputation was ‘great in Spain’ and there was widespread ‘dislike held of Don Juan’.

  Águila had more immediate concerns. His men were still dying in large numbers. He set up an emergency hospital, but the men continued to sicken. It was soon reported that they were ‘almost all’ dead. One tally estimated 1,500 able men and seven hundred sick. When the authorities eventually transferred Águila’s force to other duties, they found that only eight hundred of the 2,600 to 2,800 men who’d left Ireland were alive and fit for duty.

  The Spanish authorities held an emergency council meeting to discuss the terms of Águila’s peace agreement. Meanwhile, they called off the relief expedition they’d planned. ‘Some few ships that lay ready to have come for Ireland were straight unfurnished,’ reported one witness.

  And, although there would be much posturing over the next few months, that’s where this particular naval campaign came to an end. The Spaniards would never send an armada to Ireland again.

  Two months beforehand, in January, O’Donnell had made a dramatic entrance to the royal court. Kneeling before the King, he had sworn not to rise until his three requests were granted.

  —The first is that you send a Spanish army with me to Ireland, he said. The second is that, once you rule Ireland, I will be the most powerful Irish noble there. The third is that you protect the rights of the O’Donnells forever.

  King Felipe agreed and told him to rise.

  O’Donnell remained at court for two weeks, during which he detailed his case to anyone who would listen. It seems that the royal court rapidly tired of hearing the chieftain’s grievances. Felipe genuinely wanted to help him, but at the same time he didn’t want him anywhere near him. He granted O’Donnell a generous pension, but ordered him to go to La Coruña, 450 kilometres away, to supervise the naval preparations.

  During his time at court, O’Donnell also worked with Oviedo to assemble a damning case against Águila. In order to persuade Felipe to mount another Irish expedition, he had to establish that it was Águila, and not the Irish, who had caused the Kinsale debacle.

  The Council of State took four hours to pore over O’Donnell’s submissions. ‘His zeal and loyalty should be highly praised,’ they wrote. ‘… He should be assured that His Majesty regards the Irish Catholics as his subjects.’

  (Note, once again, that the Irish insurgents were not regarded as equal allies from a potentially independent nation. It was clear that Felipe planned to rule Ireland as a Spanish colony.)

  Reading the rumours that flew around Spain during this period, it appears that Felipe’s officials were telling O’Donnell anything he wanted to hear. There were wild claims that 5,000, 10,000, even 13,000 troops were being assembled for Ireland. But the action was always supposedly happening at some other port. English Secretary Robert Cecil knew better. ‘Of all the great army whereof they speak, no man ever saw 4,000 together,’ he scoffed. The well-informed Secretary kept a cool head as nearly everyone else predicted an imminent Spanish invasion. There would be no armada that year, he stated with certainty.

  Cecil was right. O’Donnell did not know it, but an event in France that summer had just put paid to any chance of another Spanish invasion. A French general, the Duc de Biron, was executed for plotting with the Spanish to overthrow his own King. The delicate peace between the two giants of Europe was hanging by a thread. The risk of a provocative Spanish invasion had been reduced by ‘Biron’s conspiracy, in which Spain has given the French King occasion of offence,’ Cecil wrote.

  Back in Spain, O’Donnell was being fobbed off with bureaucratic waffle. His advisor later summed up the frustration of the Irish exiles: ‘Another report had to be submitted to Your Majesty, and another the following week, and still another a month after that … seven months have passed … [we are] utterly tired out and desperate.’

  O’Donnell’s mental turmoil intensified, with ‘anguish of heart and sickness of mind’. According to O’Cleary, ‘He was in this condition until he prepared to go into the King’s presence again to learn the cause of the delay.’

  Although effectively barred from the court, O’Donnell set out for Valladolid. He got as
close as Simancas, just thirteen kilometres away, before falling ill with an unidentified malaise. After sixteen days of suffering, he died. It was 10 September on the Spanish calendar. He had yet to reach his thirtieth birthday.

  There were rumours that he had been poisoned by a turncoat insurgent, James Blake from Galway. Blake had extracted himself from a sticky situation with the English by promising to kill O’Donnell in Spain. Although there is no evidence that Blake was even sincere, never mind successful, in his plan, Carew still claimed credit for the supposed contract killing. It is arguable that the youthful O’Donnell actually died from a cancerous tumour. Just one month later, English agents were reporting from Spain that ‘a kind of snake or serpent was found within him’, which may have been a crude description of a malignant growth.

  After O’Donnell’s death, and perhaps to assuage their guilt, the Spanish authorities decided to send 10,000 ducats a month to O’Neill, who was now back at war and facing a renewed onslaught from Blount in Ulster. Possibly they had not heard of his offer to defect to the English, because they said it was O’Neill who had ‘kept the spark glowing’. They made further promises of troops, but nothing materialised.

  The Duke of Lerma was in no hurry. He was still playing the long game. He aimed for peace with England, and Kinsale had achieved his aim of strengthening Spain’s hand. True, Queen Elizabeth had inconsiderately refused to die while Águila clung on to his bridgehead: that was too bad. But still, for the price of a thousand Spanish deaths in Ireland, his Irish expedition had cost the Queen 6,000 to 10,000 of her best soldiers, diverted her from the Low Countries, and almost bankrupted her. It had worked out okay. Now it was time to move on.

  Soon the Council of State would recommend a new policy towards the Irish: ‘These people should be undeceived, so that they may be enabled to make the best terms [with the English] they can, bad as the consequences may be.’

  As one prominent count advised the King: ‘[I] would take no heed of Ireland, which is a noisy business and more trouble than advantage to Your Majesty.’

  Slowly the pendulum of opinion began to swing back towards Águila: if not actually in his favour, at least into a neutral position. His returning troops were able to refute some of the more ridiculous claims of his critics – for instance, the allegation of Papal Nuncio Mansoni that the Spanish had fired their guns only on one single day during the entire siege.

  The Spanish had decided in March that, in all fairness, no action should be taken against Águila until he had a chance to defend himself. A full inquiry was ordered and officials from the War Council began taking depositions.

  In April, Águila wrote from La Coruña: ‘To say the truth, I am very glad that I am in Spain.’ It was hardly the remark of a man who had been flung into prison in disgrace, as some histories assert. In reality, he was allowed to go home to prepare his defence, although this was effectively house arrest on remand. ‘Don Juan del Águila is restrained in his lodgings,’ one Waterford man was to report the following March.

  Águila was not out of the woods yet – far from it. He was still ‘in the King’s disfavour’ and he suffered a major setback when Fr James Archer made a dramatic arrival in La Coruña in July. Archer had not trusted Blount’s good faith and had fled from Kinsale into the west, where he continued to stoke up the insurgency. Eventually he had quit the country, trusting himself ‘to the fortune of the sea in a small French ship with one mariner, without compass card, or glass’ and somehow finding the right port. ‘[Archer] spared not to speak liberally in disgrace of Don Juan del Águila,’ wrote the English naval officer Sir William Monson. ‘He went to the court to inveigh against him to the King.’

  The War Council took note of Archer’s numerous criticisms. It continued its painstaking inquiry, which was to last the best part of a year.

  Meanwhile, Águila had taken an enormous risk by renewing contact with Charles Blount and George Carew. And so began the saga of Lemon Diplomacy – one of the strangest and most bizarre exchanges between former enemies in recorded history. It began with the lemons, it ended with a horse, and in between it involved an English spy on a delicate and hazardous mission to Spain.

  Águila had pledged that, on his return to Spain, he would advocate for peace with England and keep Blount informed. Blount was wary, yet felt destiny’s hand on his shoulder. ‘God many times doth work by unlikely, yea, by contrary means,’ he pondered. ‘Out of [our] commission to make war … [we] might prove commissioners for making a peace.’

  Within a few days of arriving home on 21 March, Águila sent a selection of gifts to Blount and Carew. His accompanying letter, addressed to Carew but sent to Blount, was warm with gratitude:

  ‘Muy illustre Señor:

  ‘… I am so much obliged for the honourable and good terms which the Lord Deputy [Blount] and your Lordship used … that I desire some apt occasion to manifest myself to be a good paymaster … And for that, in this country, there is no fruit of more estimation than the wines of Ribadavia, lemons and oranges. These few are sent to make a proof thereof.

  ‘Don Juan del Águila’

  He had sent lemons, oranges and at least five barrels of wine.

  Blount didn’t receive the packages until May. In the meantime, he had suffered a high fever – ‘a likely effect of his watchings and cold taken during a hard winter siege’, wrote Moryson – and had to be conveyed to Dublin in a horse-litter.

  In early June, Carew heard of the gift and wrote asking for his share. Blount sent him a decidedly odd response that suggests it was written after a few glasses of Águila’s fine Ribadavia. ‘The bearer told me they were all sent to me, and although I knew the contrary, yet in plain fraud I was content that they be brought unto me,’ he joked. However, he claimed the fruit had gone off and the wine wasn’t worth sending.

  Carew was not impressed. In a viciously backstabbing letter to Robert Cecil, he informed the Secretary of the gift ‘not wishing to conceal any kindness which may have come from an enemy’. He said Blount was refusing to share the goodies and added waspishly: ‘Much good may the present do him … for I [take no] joy in an enemy’s kindness.’

  However, the two arch-plotters obviously saw potential to groom Águila as a secret ally in Spain, because Carew’s reply to Águila that July took a completely different tone. ‘[I] render your Lordship humble thanks for your favours,’ he wrote to the Spaniard. ‘The wine and fruits came not into my hands … [but I] am as well satisfied with it as if it had come into my own hands, for the love I bear to his Lordship [Blount] is no less than to myself.’

  Meanwhile, Blount was still waiting to learn more from Águila about the peace proposals, but he heard nothing further. ‘By Don Juan’s silence from Spain,’ writes Fynes Moryson, ‘this overture passed as a dream.’

  Carew and Cecil were not giving up so easily. They concocted a scheme whereby an English military agent – one Lieutenant Walter Edney – could gain safe passage to Spain to talk directly to Águila under cover of delivering Carew’s reciprocal gift of a hackney horse. Carew confided to Cecil that the visit was a front ‘that they may not think that he is purposely sent to negotiate the business intended, or to come as a spy’. He promised the Secretary that once Edney returned, ‘your Lordship shall have certain intelligence of Spanish affairs’.

  The plan swung into action on 17 September, when Carew again wrote warmly to Águila, introducing Edney as the bearer of the letter. ‘I have received profit by the book of fortification which Your Lordship left me,’ he wrote, ‘and hold it as a relic in memory of you.’ He said he lacked only a teacher of Águila’s quality, because he considered the Spaniard pre-eminent in the military profession. However, he joked that Águila would find out how much Carew had improved in the subject if he ever returned to Ireland, ‘which I hope in God will be never’.

  Carew’s last words to Águila were: ‘I beseech God to preserve you with many happy years.’

  Edney landed safely, but found La Coruña seething w
ith suspicious Irish exiles. When he asked for Águila, he was told that he ‘was in disgrace, confined to his house’. This was ‘by the accusation of the Irish fugitives’. Edney himself was accused of spying and detained indefinitely in La Coruña. His goods were sold off, his ship sent home, and even the horse seized. He was to remain there until July 1603, when diplomatic relations began to thaw.

  The agent used the opportunity to file secret reports to Carew. He pointed out perceptively that the credibility of the Irish exiles hinged on the outcome of Águila’s trial. But meanwhile, it was Águila’s life that was on the line. ‘Don Juan the 24th of [March 1603] comes to a public trial for his Irish voyage,’ Edney reported back. ‘All captains who were with him are sent for and commanded to attend, on pain of death.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE TRIAL

  IT WAS the trial that all Spain was talking about – the hearing that would dictate whether the famous Don Juan del Águila would be hailed as a hero … or hanged as a traitor.

  On one side stood Águila himself, backed up by some loyal officers. On the side of the accusers stood a heavyweight line-up of Irish expatriates, supported by the disaffected Spanish captains, driven by the cold, cheated fury of Mateo Oviedo, and all backed up by the formidable persuasive skills of the Jesuit priest Fr Archer. In the centre, sitting in judgement, was King Felipe’s powerful Council of War.