A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  Howard said: ‘In what direction were the Spaniards moving?’

  ‘None, my lord. Their sails were struck, and they seemed to be waiting for others to catch them up.’

  One of the attendant noblemen, Lord Parminter, said: ‘Now, my man, are you sure of the numbers?’

  ‘We did not get close, for fear we might get captured and be unable to bring you the news.’

  Lord Howard said: ‘Quite right, Fleming.’

  Barney reckoned the Scilly Isles were a hundred miles from Plymouth. But Fleming had covered the distance in less than a day. The armada could not make the same speed, but they might get here before nightfall, he calculated anxiously, especially if they left behind their slower supply ships.

  Parminter was thinking along the same lines. ‘We must set sail at once!’ he said. ‘The armada must be confronted head-on before it can make landfall.’

  Parminter was no sailor. Barney knew that a head-on battle was the last thing the English wanted.

  Lord Howard explained with courteous patience. ‘The tide is coming in, and the wind is in the south-west. It is very difficult for a ship to get out of the harbour against both wind and tide – impossible for an entire fleet. But the tide will turn at ten o’clock this evening. That will be the time to put out to sea.’

  ‘The Spaniards could be here by then!’

  ‘They could. What a good thing their commander seems to have decided to wait and regroup.’

  Drake spoke for the first time. ‘I wouldn’t have waited,’ he said. He was never slow to boast. ‘He who hesitates is lost.’

  Howard smiled. Drake was a braggart, but a good man to have alongside you in a fight. ‘The Spanish have hesitated, but they are not yet lost, unfortunately,’ he said.

  Drake said: ‘All the same, we’re in a bad position. The armada is upwind of us. That gives them the advantage.’

  Barney nodded grimly. In his experience, the wind was everything in a sea battle.

  Howard said: ‘Is it possible for us to get upwind of them?’

  Barney knew how difficult it was to sail into the wind. When a ship was side-on to the wind with its sails at an angle, it could travel briskly in a direction ninety degrees to the direction of the wind. So, with a north wind, the ship could easily go east or west as well as south. A well-built ship with an experienced crew could do better than this, and travel north-east or north-west with sails trimmed in tightly, or ‘close-hauled’. This was called sailing close to the wind – a challenge, because a slight error of judgement would take the ship into the no-go zone where it would slow down and stop. Now, if the English fleet wanted to head south-west into a south-westerly head wind, it would have to sail first south and then west in a zig-zag, a slow and tiresome process known as tacking.

  Drake looked dubious. ‘Not only would we have to tack into the wind, we’d also have to stay out of the enemy’s sight, otherwise they’d change course to intercept us.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you if it would be difficult. I asked if it’s possible.’

  Drake grinned. He liked this kind of talk. ‘It’s possible,’ he said.

  Barney felt heartened by Drake’s bravado. It was all they had.

  Lord Howard said: ‘Then let’s do it.’

  *

  FOR MUCH OF Saturday, Rollo stood at the port rail of the San Martin as it sailed before a favourable wind along the English Channel towards Portsmouth. The armada formed a wide column, with the best fighting ships at the front and back, and the supply ships in the protected middle.

  As he watched the rocky shores of Cornwall pass, Rollo was swamped by conflicting feelings of exultation and guilt. This was his country, and he was attacking it. He knew he was doing God’s will, but a feeling at the back of his mind said that this might not bring honour to him and his family. He did not really care about the men who would die in the battle: he had never worried about that sort of thing – men died all the time, it was the way of the world. But he could not shake the fear that if the invasion failed he would go down in history as a traitor, and that troubled him profoundly.

  This was the moment that English lookouts had been waiting for, and beacons burst into flame on the distant hilltops one after another, sending a fiery alarm along the coast faster than ships could travel. Rollo feared that the English navy, duly warned, might sail out of Plymouth harbour and head east to avoid getting trapped. Medina Sidonia’s cautious delay had lost him an opportunity.

  Whenever the armada sailed closer to the shore, Rollo saw crowds on the cliffs, staring, still and silent as if awestruck: in the history of the world no one had ever seen so many sailing ships together.

  Towards evening, the Spanish sailors observed the shoal water and menacing black rocks of the dangerous reef called Eddystone, and veered away to avoid it. The famous hazard was due south of Plymouth. Soon afterwards, a few distant sails in the east, reflecting back the evening sun, gave Rollo his first heart-rending sight of the English fleet.

  Medina Sidonia ordered the armada to anchor, to ensure that his ships remained to windward of the English. There would surely be battle tomorrow, and he did not want to give the enemy an advantage.

  Few men slept aboard the San Martin that night. They sharpened their weapons, checked and re-checked their pistols and powder flasks, and polished their armour. The gunners stacked balls in lockers and tightened the ropes that lashed the cannons in place, then filled barrels with seawater for putting out fires. Obstacles were moved from the sides of the ships so that the carpenters could more quickly reach holes in the hull to repair them.

  The moon rose at two a.m. Rollo was on deck, and he stared into the distance, looking for the English navy, but saw only vague shapes that might have been mist. He said prayers for the armada and for himself, so that he might survive tomorrow’s battle and live long enough to become bishop of Kingsbridge.

  The summer dawn came early, and confirmed that there were five English ships ahead. But as daylight brightened, Rollo looked back and suffered a frightening shock. The English navy was behind the armada. How the devil had that happened?

  The five ships in front must have been decoys. The main body had somehow tacked around the armada, defying the wind, and now stood in the position of advantage, ready to do battle.

  The Spanish sailors were astonished. No one had realized that the lower, narrower new design of English ships made such a difference to their manoeuvrability. Rollo was disheartened. What a setback – and so early in the battle!

  To the north, he could see the last of the English fleet making its way along the coast to join the rest, with painfully short tacks to the south and north in the narrow passage available. To Rollo’s astonishment, when the leading vessel reached the southernmost point of its zigzag, it opened fire on the northern flank of the armada. It emptied its cannons then quickly tacked north again. None of the Spanish ships was hit, so the English had wasted their ammunition; but the Spanish were doubly amazed, first by the seamanship then by the audacity of the English captain.

  And the first shots of the battle had been fired.

  Medina Sidonia commanded the gun-and-flag combination signal for the armada to come into battle order.

  *

  IT WAS THE TURN of the English to be astonished. The Spanish ships, heading east away from Howard’s fleet, moved into defensive formation with a precision that no English navy had ever achieved. As if guided by a divine hand, they formed a perfect curve several miles across, like a crescent moon with its horns pointed menacingly back at the English.

  Ned Willard watched from the deck of the Ark Royal. Ned was Walsingham’s man on the flagship. The Ark was a four-masted galleon a little over a hundred feet long. The explorer Sir Walter Raleigh had built it, then sold it to Queen Elizabeth, though the parsimonious queen had not paid him but instead had deducted five thousand pounds from the money she said he owed her. The ship was heavily armed, with thirty-two cannons ranged on two gun decks and a forecastle. Ned did not ha
ve a cabin to himself, but he did have the luxury of a bunk in a room with four other men. The sailors slept on the decks, and the crew of three hundred plus more than a hundred soldiers struggled to find places on a ship only thirty-seven feet across at its widest point.

  Watching the near-magical Spanish manoeuvre, Ned observed that the supply ships were in the middle and the fighting galleons either front-and-centre or at the tips. He saw at once that the English could only strike at the horns of the crescent, for any vessel entering within the curve would be vulnerable to attack from behind, with the wind taken from its sails. Every vessel but the last was guarded by the one behind. It was a carefully thought-out formation.

  The Spanish armada unnerved Ned in other ways. The ships gleamed with paint in bright colours, and even from a distance he could see that the men on deck were all in their best finery, doublets and hose in crimson, royal blue, purple and gold. Even the slaves at the oars of the galleasses wore bright red jackets. What kind of people dressed for war as if they were going to a party? On the English ships, only the noblemen wore fancy clothes. Even commanders such as Drake and Hawkins had drab workaday woollen hose and leather jerkins.

  Lord Howard stood on the poop deck of the Ark, an elevated position behind the mainmast from which he could see most of his ships and the enemy too. Ned stood close to him. Behind them the English fleet formed an unimpressively ragged line.

  Ned noticed a sailor spreading sawdust on the main deck, and it took him a moment to figure out that this was to prevent the wood becoming slippery with blood.

  Howard barked a command, and the Ark led the fleet into battle.

  Howard headed for the northern horn of the crescent. Far to the south, Drake’s ship Revenge chased the opposite tip.

  The Ark came up behind the rearmost Spanish ship, a mighty galleon that Howard thought must be the Rata Coronada. As the Ark began to cross the stern of the Rata, the Spanish captain turned so that the two vessels passed broadside to broadside. They fired all their guns as they did so.

  The boom of the cannons at close quarters was like a blow, Ned found, and the smoke from all that gunpowder was worse than fog; but, when the wind cleared the view, he saw that neither ship had scored any hits. Howard knew that the Spanish wanted nothing more than to get close enough to board, and in taking care to avoid this disaster he had kept too great a distance to do any damage. The Spanish fire, from heavier, shorter-range guns, was equally harmless.

  Ned had experienced his first skirmish at sea, and nothing had happened.

  The ships following behind the Ark now attacked the Rata and three or four galleons close to it, but with little effect. Some of the English fire damaged the rigging of enemy ships, but no serious harm was done on either side.

  Looking south, Ned could see that Drake’s attack on the southern horn was having a similar result.

  The battle moved eastward until the Spanish had lost all opportunity of attacking Plymouth, and with this objective achieved, the English withdrew.

  However, it was a small gain, Ned thought gloomily. The armada was proceeding, more or less undamaged, towards its rendezvous with the Spanish army of the Netherlands at Dunkirk. The danger to England was undiminished.

  *

  ROLLO FELT MORE optimistic every day that week.

  The armada sailed majestically eastwards, chased and harried by the English navy, but it was not stopped nor seriously delayed. A dog snapping at the feet of a carthorse can be a nuisance, but sooner or later it will get kicked in the head. The Spanish lost two ships in accidents and Drake, to no one’s surprise, deserted his post long enough to capture one of them, a valuable galleon, the Rosario. But the armada was unstoppable.

  On Saturday 6 August, Rollo looked ahead over the bowsprit of the San Martin and saw the familiar outline of the French port of Calais.

  Medina Sidonia decided to stop here. The armada was still twenty-four miles from Dunkirk, where the duke of Parma was expected to be waiting with his army and flotilla of boats ready to join the invasion; but there was a problem. East of Calais, shoals and sandbars reached as far out as fifteen miles offshore, lethal for any navigator not intimately familiar with them, and there was a danger that the armada could be forced too far in that direction by westerly winds and spring tides. The cautious Medina Sidonia decided again that he did not need to take risks.

  At a signal gun from the San Martin the ships of the great fleet all dropped their sails simultaneously and came to a choreographed halt, then dropped anchor.

  The English came to a less impressive stop half a mile behind.

  Sailing along the Channel, Rollo had watched enviously as small vessels appeared from the English coast bringing supplies to their fleet, barrels of gunpowder and sides of bacon being manhandled onto the ships. The Spanish had not been resupplied since Corunna: the French were under orders not to do business with the armada, because their king wanted to remain neutral in this war. However, Rollo had passed through Calais many times on his travels, and he knew that the people of Calais hated the English. The governor of the town had lost a leg thirty years ago in the battle to win Calais back from its English occupiers. Now Rollo advised Medina Sidonia to send a little delegation ashore, with greetings and gifts, and, sure enough, the armada was given permission to buy whatever it needed. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near sufficient: there was not enough gunpowder in all Calais to replace a tenth of what the armada had expended in the past week.

  And then came a message that made Medina Sidonia mad with rage: the duke of Parma was not ready. None of his boats had any supplies, and boarding had not begun. It would take several days for them to prepare and sail to Calais.

  Rollo was not sure that the commander’s fury was justified. Parma could not have been expected to put his army on little boats and have them wait there for an indefinite period. It made much more sense to hold off until he knew that the Spanish had arrived.

  Late that afternoon, Rollo was unpleasantly surprised to see a second English fleet sailing towards Calais from the north-east. This was the other part of Elizabeth’s pathetic navy, he reasoned; those ships that had not been sent to Plymouth to meet the armada. Most of the vessels he could see were not warships but small merchant ships, armed but not heavily, no match for the mighty Spanish galleons.

  The Spanish armada was still much stronger. And the delay was not a disaster. They had already held off the English navy for a week. They just had to wait for Parma. They could manage that. And then victory would be within their grasp.

  *

  THE ENGLISH NAVY had failed, Ned knew. The Spanish armada, almost intact and now resupplied, was on the point of meeting up with the duke of Parma and his Netherlands army. Once they had done that, they were less than a day from the English coast.

  On Sunday morning, Lord Howard called a council of war on the deck of the Ark Royal. This was his last chance to stop the invasion.

  A head-on attack now would be suicide. The armada had more ships and more guns, and the English would not even have their slight advantage of greater manoeuvrability. But at sea, on the move, the crescent shape of the Spanish force seemed invulnerable.

  Was there anything they could do?

  Several men spoke at once, suggesting fireships.

  It was a course of desperation, Ned felt. Costly vessels had to be sacrificed, set on fire and driven towards the enemy. Capricious winds and random currents could easily send them off course, or the enemy ships might be nimble enough to get out of the way, so there was no certainty that fireships would reach their targets and achieve the objective of setting the enemy fleet alight.

  But no one had a better idea.

  Eight elderly vessels were selected to be forfeited, and they were moved to the middle of the English fleet in the hope of masking the preparations.

  The holds of the ships were packed with pitch, rags and old timber, while the masts were painted with tar.

  Ned recalled talking to Carlos about the siege of
Antwerp, at which a similar tactic had been used by the Dutch rebels, and he suggested to Howard that the fireships’ cannons should be loaded. The heat of the fire would ignite the gunpowder and fire the weapons, with luck at the moment when the fireships were in amongst the enemy fleet. Howard liked the idea and gave the order.

  Ned supervised the loading of the guns in the way Carlos had explained, giving each a double charge, a cannonball plus smaller ammunition.

  A small boat was tied to the stern of each fireship, so that the daring skeleton crews sailing towards the enemy could escape at the last minute.

  The attempt to hide this activity failed, to Ned’s dismay. The Spanish were not stupid, and they figured out what was going on. Ned saw several Spanish pinnaces and boats being steered to form a screen between the two navies, and guessed that Medina Sidonia had a plan for protecting his armada. However, Ned could not quite figure out how it was going to work.

  Night fell, the wind freshened, and the tide turned. At midnight, wind and tide were perfect. The skeleton crews hoisted sails and steered the lightless fireships towards the glimmering lamps of the Spanish armada. Ned strained to see, but there was no moon yet, and the ships were dark blurs on a dark sea. The distance between the two fleets was only half a mile, but the wait seemed interminable. Ned’s heart raced. Everything hung on this. He did not often pray, but now he sent a fervent request to heaven.

  Suddenly light flared. One after another the eight ships burst into flame. Against the red conflagration Ned could see the sailors leaping to their escape boats. The eight separate blazes soon seemed to join together and become one inferno. And the wind blew the firebomb inexorably towards the enemy fleet.

  *

  ROLLO WATCHED WITH his heart thudding and his breath coming in gasps. The fireships approached the screen of small vessels that Medina Sidonia had deployed to hamper them. The smoke that filled Rollo’s nostrils smelled of wood and tar. He could even feel the heat of the flames.