In Madrid, Philip was rewriting the invasion plan. On 4 September 1587, he instructed the Duke of Parma that once the Spanish treasure fleet had been safely escorted to Cape St Vincent, Santa Cruz should collect all his ships and ‘sail directly, in the name of God, to the English Channel, proceeding along it until they drop anchor off Margate point [Kent]21 having first sent notice to you . . . of his approach’.
When you see the passage assured by the arrival of the fleet at Margate, or at the mouth of the Thames, you will, if the weather permits, immediately cross with the whole army in the boats which you will have ready.
You and the marqués will then cooperate, the one on land and the other afloat, and with the help of God, will carry the main business through successfully.
Until you have crossed over with the army, the marqués is not to allow himself to be diverted from assuring your safe passage and keeping at bay any force of the enemy which may come out to prevent it . . .
When you have landed (the marqués giving you 6,000 selected Spanish infantry as ordered) I am inclined to leave to the discretion of both of you what would be the best for the marqués to do with the fleet.
Should Santa Cruz continue to protect the sea lanes from Flanders or capture ‘some port’ or ‘seize some English ships . . . to deprive them of maritime forces which are their principal strength’? After both commanders had considered these options, Santa Cruz should carry out the joint decision ‘and you will hasten to the front . . . I trust in God, in whose service it is done, that success may attend the enterprise and that yours may be the hand to execute it.’22
The king badgered his admiral to complete repairs to his ships and be ready to sail on 25 October. His patience was fast running out and he told Santa Cruz on 10 October: ‘There is no more time to waste on requests and replies. Just get on with the job and see if you cannot advance the agreed departure date by a few days.’ As the departure date loomed nearer, Philip became increasingly agitated and frustrated: ‘So much time has been lost already that every further hour of delay causes me more grief than you could imagine. I charge and command you most strictly to leave before the end of the month.’23 But his increasingly strident and imperious orders alone could not alter the harsh reality: the Armada was very far from being ready to sail.
Unlike many dilemmas in the history of intelligence, the English were in a position to build up a picture of Philip’s military capabilities as well as correctly gauging his hostile intentions. But they could only guess where the Spanish intended to land. An assessment of the potential danger areas was included in a document entitled Such means as are considered to put the forces of the Realm in order to Withstand an Invasion. Milford Haven (Pembrokeshire), Falmouth, Helford, Plymouth (Cornwall), Torbay (Devon), Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight were singled out as places of especial danger and ‘the places following are apparent for the army of Flanders to land in: Sussex, the Downs and Margate in Kent, the River Thames, Harwich, Yarmouth, Hull [and] Scotland:
It is unlikely that the King of Spain will engage his fleet too far . . . before he has mastered [a] good harbour of which Plymouth is nearest to Spain. [It is] easy to be won, speedily to be by him fortified and situated convenient to find succour unto, either out of Spain or France.
Portland [Dorset] is a great harbour for all his ships to ride in; a good landing for men [and] this isle [having] being won, is a strong place for retreat.
The reason why the Downs, Margate and the Thames are thought fit for landing places is in respect of the commodity of landing and nearness to the Prince of Parma, of whose forces the King of Spain [is] reported [to have] special trust.24
Available intelligence was inevitably confusing and contradictory. Thomas Dence ‘a pensioner of the King of Spain, a great papist, but not yet wishing the destruction of England’ believed that the Armada would seize Milford Haven and fortify it, as well as Lambay Island, off the east coast of Finegal in Ireland.25 As late as May 1588, there were reports that the Spanish ‘would rather land in the Isle of Wight than in any other place in England’.26
Elizabeth’s government sought professional advice about the size and nature of a successful invading force from Sir William Wynter, the English naval surveyor and commander. He replied:
Whereas it is said that [Parma’s] strength is thirty thousand soldiers, then I assure your honour, it is no mean quality of shipping that must serve for transporting that number [of men] and that which appertains to them, without the which I do not think they will put forth; three hundred sail must be the least.
For I well remember that in the journey made to Scotland in the queen’s majesty’s father’s time, when we burned Leith and Edinburgh27 there was in that expedition two hundred and sixty sail of ships and yet we were not able to land above eleven-thousand men and we then [were] in fear of none that could impeach us by sea.28
Walsingham suspected that most ‘mischief’ was likely to come from Scotland ‘where the employment of two thousand men by the enemy, with some portion of treasure, may more annoy us more than thirty thousand men landed in any part of this realm’.29
Unaware that Parma planned to land on the Kent coast, Elizabeth’s military advisers eventually selected Essex as the most likely place where the Spanish would storm ashore and the focus of defensive effort was switched there. Fears of an east coast landing were reinforced in March 1588 when three suspicious ships were seen off Yarmouth ‘sounding the depths at diverse places’.30
The Thames estuary had a wide channel leading straight to the heart of the capital. On either side there were expanses of shallow mudflats that posed a serious obstacle to a vessel of any draught. Therefore, the defensive plans included the installation of an iron chain across the river’s fairway at Gravesend in Kent, designed by the Italian engineer Fedrigo Giambelli. This boom, supported by one hundred and twenty ship’s masts (costing £6 apiece) driven into the riverbed and anchored to lighters, was intended to stop enemy ships penetrating upriver to London. Unfortunately the first flood tide broke the barrier.31 A contemporary map of the Thames defences, drawn by Robert Adam, shows the raking fields of fire from cannon on both banks and a second boom (or bridge of boats) further west at Lees Ness, before Blackwall Reach.32 A similar boom was stretched across the River Medway from the new fort at Upnor, Kent, in 1586 to protect the safe anchorage there.33
Mobilising England’s defences imposed an immense administrative burden on the Tudor government. After years of neglect there was so much to do and so little time in which to do it. A detailed survey of potential invasion beaches along the English Channel produced an alarming catalogue of vulnerability. In Dorset alone, eleven bays and coves were listed, with annotations such as: ’Chideock and Charmouth are two beaches to land boats but it must be very fair weather and the wind northerly’. Swanage Bay could ‘hold one hundred ships and [the anchorage is able] to land men with two hundred boats and to retire again without danger of low water at any time’.34 Further east in Hampshire, ‘from Calshot to Lymington, [there are] good landing in two places, between Stansgore and Lepe and at Pits Deep and Siblers Lane’. The coast from Christchurch harbour to Bournemouth had ‘for the most part good landing with small boats and their shipping may safely ride with[in] half a mile (804 m) of the shore in great number’.35 In Sussex, the breach in the coastal defence works at Bletchington Hill caused during a French raid forty-three years before remained unrepaired.36
Lacking money and resources, Elizabeth’s government decided that only the most dangerous beaches would be defended by wooden stakes rammed into the sand and shingle as boat obstacles, or by deep trenches excavated above the high-water mark. Earth ramparts were also thrown up to protect the few cannon available37 or troops armed with harquebuses or bows and arrows. Those earthworks on the Isle of Wight were to be at least four feet (1.22 m) high and eight feet (2.44 m) thick, with sharpened poles driven into their face and with a wide ditch in front. Despite his frequent and vociferous complaints to London,
the island’s governor, Sir George Carey, had just four mounted guns and enough gunpowder for only one day’s use.38 He wrote testily: ‘If this place be of so small importance to be thought worthy of no better provision, having discharged my duty in declaration of my wants, I will perform what I may with my small strength and wish better success than I have reason to expect.’39 Carey also criticised plans to reinforce the island with raw recruits from the Hampshire militia – ‘a brand of men termed trained, who I find rather so in name than in deed’. Carey suspected, not unreasonably, that the irascible Henry Radcliffe, Fourth Earl of Sussex, in charge of the defence of Portsmouth, would retain the best men to fulfil his own responsibilities.40
At Portsmouth itself, the strength and design of the newly built ramparts to defend the land approaches to the town had been severely criticised by Sir Walter Raleigh and were therefore demolished, much to Elizabeth’s indignation at this waste of her money. New earth walls were constructed in just four months by eight hundred labourers and these were protected by five stone arrow-head-shaped bastions41 behind a flooded ditch. Yet, more than half the garrison were rated ‘by age and impotency by no way serviceable’ and the Earl of Sussex happily escaped unhurt when an old iron gun, supposedly one of his best cannon, exploded into smithereens in front of him.42 In November 1587, Sussex complained that the town’s seaward tower was ‘so old and rotten’ that he dared not fire one gun to loyally celebrate the anniversary of the queen’s accession to the throne.43
In eastern England, the walls of Great Yarmouth were heightened by ramparts in 1587 ‘at which time they were . . . very fully and formally finished to the top . . . with earth and manure more than forty feet (12.9 m) in breadth, resistible by God’s help against any [gun] battery whatsoever’. The following year, an earth mount or mound was enclosed with brick and stone walls and ‘a great piece of ordnance’ placed on top.44 Harwich, in Essex, was reported in a ‘weak state [with] an open situation’ in February 1587, so Elizabeth contributed £1,000 towards its fortification with the remainder of the cost expected to be stumped up by local people. Its citizens were pointedly reminded that ‘the particular welfare of every private person requires them (as to favour the public weal [good] of their country and their own security), to yield some reasonable contribution’.45
Elizabeth’s government was well aware of the lack of training amongst the militia who might have to fight Parma’s veterans, many of them foreign mercenaries. A proclamation in 1580 had sought to improve military training by banning ‘unlawful games’ and, instead of wasting their time on gambling, encouraging fathers to bring up their sons ‘in the knowledge of shooting’. It decreed that
every man, having a male child . . . of the age of seven years and above, till the age of seventeen, shall provide, ordain and have in his house, a bow and two shafts [arrows] to induce and learn them and bring them up in shooting.
No person . . . shall for his gain, lucre or living, keep, have hold, occupy, exercise or maintain any common house, alley or place of bowling . . . coils, half-bowl, tennis, dicing, table or carding or any other manner of game prohibited by statute . . . or any game new invented.
Playing bowls ‘or any other unlawful game in the fields’ would incur a fine of 6s 8d for each offence, or being gaoled.46
As early as 1577, the total manpower capable of being placed in the field was estimated at just fewer than 324,000 men aged between sixteen and sixty in England and Wales. This may seem an impressive figure, but it belies the quality of the forces that could fight to defend England’s honour. A census eleven years later revealed only one hundred experienced ‘martial men’ available, and as some had fought in Henry VIII’s French and Scottish wars more than forty years before, these old sweats were considered hors de combat. The infantry and cavalry were drawn from trained bands, volunteers, and a handful of conscripted personnel with special skills, such as the thousand veterans from the English army in the Netherlands who were hurriedly recalled to stiffen the ranks. Many of these, however, soon deserted and hid in the crowded streets and tenements of the Cinque Ports of Kent.47
The militia officers were noblemen, esquires and gentlemen whose motivation was not only defence of their country but defence of their personal property too.48 As such they may have been ‘natural guardians’ of the land in which they dwelt, but they were largely amateurs.49 Some who lived near the coast believed it more expedient to shift their households and movable wealth inland to places of greater safety, but this defeatism plainly cut across government policy. A proclamation of November 1587 ordered them to return ‘on pain of her majesty’s indignation, besides such forfeiture of [their] lands and goods . . . No excuse shall be allowed as any just cause for non performance . . .’50
Like so many of the gentry and some clergy, Walsingham paid personally for a contingent of troops – fifty mounted lancers, twenty cavalry, armed with pistols, and two hundred foot soldiers51 as well as ordering himself new armour from the Low Countries. Not everyone was prepared to give wholehearted support to the defence of Elizabeth’s realm. Even the Protestant clergy were less than willing to fund the militia, and in May 1588, the Privy Council was forced to write to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, to ginger them up:
Their lordships were given to understand that . . . [the] clergy in most parts of the realm, although they have good and sufficient livings, refuse to find and show at the musters any lances [cavalry] or light horse, desiring to exempt themselves from that charge . . .
The present time requires that those of the clergy should rather by their forwardness encourage others in these public services towards the general defence of the realm than withdraw themselves from any manner of necessary charge.52
The bishops eventually contributed money for surprisingly small contingents: Chichester paid for thirteen soldiers, Salisbury, twenty-three, Peterborough, twenty-three. Their clergy also paid for troops. The diocese of Canterbury supplied a total of one hundred and sixty-five; London, two hundred and twenty-three and Winchester two hundred and seven.53
Amateurs have little place in repelling an invasion. The defence of Hampshire was plagued by a personal feud between the Fourth Earl of Sussex and the even more petulant William Paulet, Third Marquis of Winchester. At one planning meeting, the two nobles clashed publicly. Sussex found fault with the deployment of the Portsmouth forces, saying he could see neither sense nor reason in the orders. Unfortunately, the troops’ disposition was Paulet’s own idea and he snatched the vellum on which the orders were written, snapping: ‘I will read the same myself and if I cannot find therein both sense and reason, then say I have no more brains than a woodcock.’54 The marquis then bickered with seventy-year-old Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, complaining that his clergy had promised much in arming the militia but had delivered nothing. The bishop, who had contributed £100 of his own money, huffily retorted that he had personally mustered the clergy’s men under Paulet’s very nose at Winchester. ‘Albeit I am well-nosed’ came the marquis’s riposte, ‘yet not so long [as] to reach or smell from Tidworth to Winchester, being twenty-six miles distant’.55
A professional soldier, Captain Nicholas Dawtrey, who had been sent to train the Hampshire militia, warned Walsingham in January 1588 that if three thousand infantry went across the Solent to defend the Isle of Wight, the Marquis of Winchester would be left ‘utterly without force of footmen other than a few billmen56 to guard and answer all dangerous places’. Local people complained about being posted away from home: they and their servants being compelled ‘to go either to Portsmouth or Wight upon every sudden alarm, whereby their houses, wives and children shall be left without guard and left open by their universal absence to all manner of spoil’. Dawtrey emphasised that ‘many of the common sort [were] recusants. My lord bishop [of Winchester] was able to give me a note of two hundred in a little corner. I do perceive that many of these people inhabit the sea coast.’57
Hampshire eventually raised a remarkable total of 9,088
men, but Dawtrey pointed out that ‘many . . . [were] very poorly furnished; some lack a head-piece [helmet], some a sword, some one thing or other that is evil, unfit or [unseemly] about him’.58 Discipline was also problematic: the commander of the 3,159-strong Dorset militia (1,800 of them completely untrained) firmly believed they would ‘sooner kill one another than annoy the enemy’.59 Compared to these Elizabethan militia, the raw but enthusiastic Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) of the German invasion scare of the 1940s appears a finely honed military force.
An anonymous correspondent suggested to Walsingham that the most effective means of resisting enemy landings was to resort to ‘our natural weapon’ – the bow and arrow. It had destroyed the French at Agincourt in 1415; why not the Spanish in 1588? One can imagine an old buffer, bristling at the threat to queen and country and hearth and home, offering up advice that the bow and crossbow were ‘terrible weapons’ which Parma’s veterans were unused to. After further reflection, he concluded that ‘the most powerful weapon of all against this enemy was the fear of God’.60
The Spanish Armada Page 10