Then the English ships sailed off westwards, leaving behind them confusion (today we would call it ‘shock and awe’) and a welter of panic-stricken messages dispatched post haste around Spain and Portugal warning of the danger that Drake still posed. Medina Sidonia also sent a ship to the West Indies ordering the treasure fleet to stay in Havana, Cuba, until he was known to be safely back in England.74
Where would El Draque – the Dragon – as the Spanish called Drake – now strike? He searched in vain for a squadron of seven Biscayan ships and five pinnaces commanded by the redoubtable Juan Martinez de Recalde, but orders retrieved from a captured dispatch boat indicated that the enemy vessels had run for shelter at Lisbon. Drake therefore cast around for other targets of opportunity. His deputy, William Borough, wrote him an angry letter on 7 May, during a gale off Cape St Vincent, strongly advising against landing on Spanish soil.
Her Majesty’s pleasure is . . . that you, with these ships now under your charge, should come hither . . . upon this coast and seek by all the best means you can to impeach their purpose and stop their meeting at Lisbon, whereof the manner how is referred to your discretion . . .
I do not find by your instructions an advice to land but I remember a special caveat and advice given you to the contrary by the Lord High Admiral.75
In front of his personal chaplain and flag captain, Drake charged Borough with insubordination and seeking to dictate his duty. Captain John Marchant was ordered to take command of the Golden Lion and Borough, despite offering to destroy his letter, was locked in his cabin in his own ship. He was also clapped in irons to ensure there was no chance of further mischief.76 There he stayed ‘ever in doubt of my life and expecting daily when the admiral would have executed upon me his bloodthirsty desire’.77
Ignoring such faint hearts, on 14 May Drake landed eleven hundred men on a sandy beach near Lagos and they marched inland through the cornfields and vineyards for five miles until they came to the town. It was better defended than they had been told and its three-thousand-strong garrison opened fire with cannon, wounding some of the English soldiers. Drake’s men retreated to their ships and they sailed on to Cape Sagres in search of easier pickings. The admiral personally led eight hundred men in an attack on the Avelera fort, perched seemingly unassailable on a high rock. Timber, pitch and bundles of firewood were piled against its wooden gates, protected by four towers, under cover of small-arms fire. But before the blaze could permit a forced entry, the fort surrendered under flag of truce. The same day, the English captured Valliera castle at Cape St Vincent and a nearby fortified monastery. All three fortresses were set ablaze and local churches ransacked.
The English fleet moved on to anchor audaciously off Cascaes, north of Lisbon. Santa Cruz commanded the castle of St Julian and Drake sneered at his impotence in not coming out to fight: ‘The marqués of Santa Cruz was with his galleys, seeing us chase his ships ashore . . . and was content to suffer us there quietly to tarry and never charged us with one cannon shot.’78 Although Santa Cruz sent a message assuring him, as a gentleman, that the King of Spain was not ready to send the Armada ‘this year’, letters were found on a Portuguese prisoner repeating a Spanish proclamation that promised that Philip would invade England in 1587 ‘and would not leave one alive of mankind above the age of seven years’.79
Enemy shipping continued to be attacked along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts as Drake imposed a virtual blockade. His dispatch to Walsingham on 27 May was jubilant.
It has pleased God that we have taken forts, barques, caravels and divers other vessels more than a hundred, most laden, some with oars for galleys, planks and timber for ships and pinnaces, hoops and pipe-staves for casks with many other provisions for this great army . . .
All I commanded to be consumed into smoke and ashes by fire which will be to the king no small waste of his provisions, besides the want of his barques.
His triumph was tinged with foreboding about the scale of the Spanish invasion plans:
I dare not almost write unto your honour of the great forces we hear the King of Spain has out in the Straits.
Prepare in England strongly and most by sea.
Stop him now and stop him ever.
Look well to the coast of Sussex.80
Drake was undoubtedly receiving some intelligence about shipping movements, probably from disgruntled Portuguese. One piece of information must have made his eyes glint: the carrack San Felipe was shortly to arrive from the East Indies after wintering in Mozambique. The ship, laden with expensive exotic spices, was of especial concern to Philip, who suspected that the English admiral had spies ashore.81 Drake therefore headed out into the Atlantic on a south-westerly course, hoping to intercept the Portuguese ship. After sending home some of his sick crewmen, the depleted fleet hit bad weather with a three-day gale almost sinking the Elizabeth Bonaventure. The crew of the Golden Lion had suffered enough: short of water and rations, they wanted to return home rather than continue with Drake’s adventurers. Marchant, their captain, returned to the flagship in the pinnace Spy and informed his admiral of his crew’s disobedience. Drake was incandescent with anger and summoned a court martial to try the mutineers. He sentenced Borough and the officers of the ship to death in absentia as the Golden Lion disappeared below the horizon.82
But the prospect of loot and profit soon brought the smile back to Drake’s face. On 18 June he sighted the San Felipe loaded with gold, precious stones, silks and spices (pepper, cinnamon, cloves, mace) worth £108,049 13s 11d in today’s money – a handsome return for his investors.
Elizabeth, her doubts now happily evaporated, told the French ambassador Châteauneuf that she had heard on 13 May that Drake had ‘burnt the ships at Cadiz and had sacked the country’. The envoy was astonished and disbelieving, but she told him bluntly: ‘Then you do not believe what is possible.’
One of Walsingham’s agents reported the fear and trepidation that Drake’s incursion engendered among the Spanish. His exploits ‘make them all to tremble’ and his sack of Cadiz and the damage caused had cost ‘more than a million crowns’.83
The English squadron arrived back with the San Felipe in Plymouth on 26 June 1587 to an outburst of national hero-worship for ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’, as government propaganda had it. Drake had destroyed well over 10,000 tons of Spanish shipping, much of the Armada’s provisions, and delayed its sailing for at least twelve months. There were also the rich pickings from the Portuguese carrack to savour.
Walsingham, ever the man for action, urged that Drake should return to the Azores to attack the lumbering wide-bellied treasure ships bringing back bullion from the Spanish empire in the Americas. The best way ‘to bridle their malice is the interruption of the Indian fleets’, he told Burghley on 16 July.84
Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth, desperately hoping for an elusive peace, rejected the idea.
But the days of peace were running out. As Leicester, embattled in the Low Countries, warned the queen that November:
The world was never so dangerous, nor never so full of treasons and treacheries as at this day. God, for his mercy’s sake, preserve and keep you from them all.85
– 3 –
RAMPARTS OF EARTH AND MANURE
Many of the justices refuse to furnish petronels [cavalry pistols] using, for their defence, some nice and curious reason which might have been forborne in this time of special service.
Lord North to Sir Francis Walsingham, Kirtling, Cambridgeshire, 20 May 1588.1
Elizabeth had no standing army of fully armed and trained soldiers to fight against the Spanish invaders, other than the small permanent garrisons in Berwick on the Scottish border, and in Dover Castle on the English Channel coast. Her fortifications were broken down and decayed, her exchequer impecunious and her nation divided by religious dissent. Outwardly, only her small but powerful navy and the skill and determination of her sea captains stood between her and the threatened all-conquering might of the Spanish Armada.
The more superstitious amongst her increasingly apprehensive subjects considered the two eclipses of the moon predicted for March and August 1588 as alarming portents of catastrophe. Additionally, in the noisy alehouses and around the bustling market stalls, many talked of the fifteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Regiomontanus of Königsburg2 who had prophesied grimly that the same year the world would ‘suffer upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation’.3
Overseas there were equally ominous omens of dark days to come for England. On 4 August 1587, the battle-weary survivors of the English garrison of the port of Sluis in the Low Countries surrendered to Parma’s forces after a brutal siege of fifty-three days, having expended all their gunpowder. The Spanish butcher’s bill may have been almost seven hundred killed and many more wounded, but Parma now held a deep-water port in Flanders, seemingly a convenient base from which to invade England.
France was an object lesson in the likely fate of a nation riven by widespread and violent religious discord which King Henri I I I seemed powerless to resolve. Elizabeth’s neighbour had been wracked by a series of bloody civil wars between the Protestant Huguenots and Catholics since 1562. As far as the queen was concerned, the stakes in France were high: a victory for the Catholic League and a pro-Spanish regime in Paris could well gift the Armada a vital strategic prize: the use of its harbours up and down the English Channel.
In April 1587, three towns in Picardy (on the then Netherlands border), were seized by French Catholic troops but they failed in their primary objective of capturing the port of Boulogne. The end of that summer’s campaigning saw Huguenot forces under Henri of Navarre crush the Catholic army at the Battle of Coutras in Aquitaine on 20 October. Little quarter was offered by the victors and more than three thousand Catholic soldiers were slaughtered, including three hundred of noble blood. Protestant celebrations were short-lived. Six days later the Huguenots’ German and Swiss mercenary allies (who were liberally subsidised by Elizabeth) were roundly defeated at the Battle of Vimory, in Loiret, central France. The reiters retreated in good order to the walled town of Auneau, ten miles (16.1 km) east of Chartres in Eure-et-Loire, but were routed on 24 November. Catholic Paris was ready to take to the streets in support of their hero, Henri Guise, Third Duke of Guise, and to topple the king. As Mendoza jubilantly told King Philip: ‘Events here could hardly have gone more happily for your majesty’s affairs. The people of Paris can be relied on at any time. They are more deeply than ever in obedience of the Duke of Guise.’
Elizabeth had written to James V I of Scotland after the execution of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, protesting her innocence in the matter and describing the ‘extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident which, far contrary to my feeling’ had befallen the exiled queen. She assured him that no one would ‘watch more carefully to preserve you and your estate’ than her.4 Those soft words might have mollified the young king, but reports of widespread pro-Spanish sentiment in Scotland so troubled the queen that in September 1587 she hurriedly sent 6,500 speedily-recruited troops to secure her northern border.5 Despite this prudent deployment, the situation worsened with John, Seventh Lord Maxwell, launching an abortive Catholic insurrection in Dumfries and Galloway in south-west Scotland in the spring of 1588, with the aim of providing the Spanish with a northern base.6
Compounding all Elizabeth’s other troubles, attempts on her life remained an ever-present threat. In March 1586, information was received of a plot by ‘certain Jesuits against the queen’s majesty, one having come to England to do a desperate enterprise upon her . . . even as was done upon the Prince of Orange’. Concurrently, there was a conspiracy to kill the Earl of Leicester ‘either by poison or other violent means’.7 Danger could also lurk close to home. Walsingham heard in April that Peter Wilcox, purveyor of the queen’s buttery, ‘was a great dealer with priests and papists’.8 The spymaster sent one of his agents, Stephen Paul, to Venice early the following year to pick up news in the city state. In November, he reported that Michael Giraldi, from Bergamo in Lombardy, had left for England, disguised as a merchant:
It is thought . . . [he is] to poison her majesty at the instigation of the Pope.
The Pope, under pretence of supporting the war against the heretics and for performing some great enterprise, has enriched himself exceedingly.9
And in May 1588, one of the prisoners interrogated in the Tower of London was ‘Andrew van Metico, a Dutchman, suspected [of] being sent over to poison the queen’.10
There were some among Elizabeth’s subjects who placed profit ahead of patriotism. Sometime in 1587, Elizabeth’s government learned that twelve English merchants – most from Bristol – had been supplying the Armada, ‘to the hurt of her majesty and undoing of the realm, if not redressed’. Their nine sizeable cargoes of contraband, valued between £300 and £2,000, were not just provisions but also supplies of ammunition, gunpowder, muskets and ordnance. What happened to these traders (were they Catholics?) is unknown, but in those anxious and edgy times, they would be unlikely to have enjoyed the queen’s mercy.11
Walsingham was still hampered by a crippling lack of intelligence assets in Spain, and was forced to rely on merchants providing eye-witness accounts or just plain gossip. These brave men were easily compromised: in April 1587, Mendoza told Philip that he had heard from a ‘good quarter’ (?the treacherous Stafford) that
a Scots merchant, who says he is the King of Scotland’s banker, is in Spain with twelve well-fitted English boats freighted with merchandise from England – the mariners also being English.
It would be well for your majesty to send orders to the ports to have this merchant arrested.
His name is Hunter.12
The spy, based in Lisbon, was detained, put on trial as an English agent and supporter of heretics and imprisoned in the city. A much later letter from him confirmed Mendoza’s suspicions. He described his incarceration but then boldly appended details of the munitions and ordnance still stored in the city. Although he used a tiny sketch of a hunting horn to identify himself as the writer, the letter’s true provenance is revealed by Walsingham’s marginal note, scribbled back in London: ‘From Mr Hunter of Lisbon.’13
Nicholas Ousley in Malaga smuggled his reports to England hidden in wine casks. Mendoza again uncovered the English spy in a note to Madrid on 12 July 1587:
Ousley . . . sends advertisements [news] to the queen and on Walsingham receiving certain letters from him, said he was one of the cleverest men he knew and the queen was much indebted to him from his regular and trustworthy information.14
Ousley was arrested but managed to bribe his way out of gaol and was still sending his reports to England as late as April 1588.15
Walsingham’s most effective agent overseas was the Catholic Anthony Standen, who operated under the somewhat grandiose alias of Pompeo Pellegrini, or sometimes the more mundane initials ‘B.C.’. He had been a member of the household of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (Mary Queen of Scots’ murdered second husband) and later lived in Tuscany. Standen befriended Giovanni Figliazzi, the Duke of Tuscany’s ambassador in Madrid, and used this friendship to garner Spanish military intelligence. Standen’s efforts produced an impressive espionage coup de théâtre in May 1587. In a coded letter, he told Walsingham:
Since your last [letter] in which you desire intelligence on Spanish matters, I have borrowed one hundred crowns and dispatched to Lisbon a Fleming who has a brother in service with the Marqués of Santa Cruz and of his chamber.
I have given him [the] address for his letters to me at the [Tuscan] ambassador’s house in Madrid who straight [away] will send them to me.
He is a proper fellow and writes well and I sent him away with these four [Genoese] galleys [who have sailed for Spain to join the Armada].16
Given the painfully slow transportation resources available in the sixteenth century, there would always be inevitable delays in receiving the information, but Wa
lsingham now had a spy within the household of the Armada commander-in-chief himself. One of the first fruits was a copy of Santa Cruz’s most recent order of battle, dated 22 March 1587, complete with the wages bill of the fleet, signed by the captain-general himself and the navy secretary Barnaby de Pedrosa. Three months later, Standen reported that Spanish preparations would not be completed in time that year to take advantage of the best weather to launch the invasion. A relieved Walsingham passed this letter on to Burghley with the comment: ‘I humbly pray your lordship that Pompeo’s letter may be reserved to yourself. I would be loath [sic] the gentleman should have any harm through my default.’17
The spymaster’s maxim was that the acquisition of knowledge is ‘never too dear’ and his espionage network was becoming increasingly expensive. The queen grudgingly granted £3,300 (£600,000 at current prices)18 in March and June 1587, and a further £2,000 the following year towards the cost of Walsingham’s secret service activities. Considering the scale of his network of spies and informers, it seems certain that he had to supplement this spending out of his own purse.
Another weapon in his secret war against Spain was the black art of propaganda and psychological warfare. In July 1587, Mendoza complained about English newsletters ‘written by one of Walsingham’s officers . . . the son of a Spanish friar who fled many years ago from St Isidro in Seville with a nun of Utera to whom he is married. The son is a much worse heretic than the father . . . I mention this matter to your majesty that you understand that although these reports have some appearance of probability, they are really hatched by Walsingham’s knavery.’19 The spymaster also printed almanacs in Amsterdam and Paris that forecast damaging storms for the summer of 1588 and great disaster for the Armada. These morale-sapping prophecies damaged recruitment to the Spanish army and in Lisbon an astrologer was arrested for making ‘false and discouraging predictions’.20
The Spanish Armada Page 9