The Spanish Armada

by Hutchinson, Robert

The change in wind direction once more handed the weather gauge to the grateful English and Drake’s squadron attacked the rearguard forming the southerly flank of the Armada with Recalde’s San Juan coming first under fire from a dozen English ships. Other Spanish ships gave way in the face of the galling cannonades and Recalde complained indignantly of this lack of assistance ‘from any other ship in the fleet because they all seemed to want to take refuge one behind the other, so that they fled from the action and collided together. It is a disgrace to mention it.’29 Eventually, fourteen large Spanish galleons were ordered to assist Recalde.

  The English fleet switched its main attack on to Medina Sidonia’s now isolated flagship, San Martin, firing at her as each vessel, Ark, Elizabeth Jonas, Leicester, Golden Lion, Victory, Marie Rose, Dreadnought and the Swallow swept past. Calderón, in the hulk San Salvador, reported that the duke’s ship replied with more than eighty shots from its forty-eight guns, but the enemy had fired ‘at least five hundred cannonballs, some of which struck his hull and others his rigging, carrying away his flagstaff and one of the stays of his mainmast’.30 The holy banner was rent in two and the flagship began to take in water from roundshot holes in the hull which were swiftly plugged by battle-damage teams. San Martin was so enveloped in gun-smoke that observers on other Armada ships could not see her for more than an hour. Spanish vessels crowded around their flagship as the last of Drake’s squadron came up, shielding it from the English barrages, and the San Martin safely rejoined the Armada. During this engagement, William Coxe, captain of the 50-ton pinnace Delight, ‘showed himself most valiant in the face of his enemies at the hottest of the encounter’, Howard reported. ‘At which assault, after a wonderful sharp conflict, the Spaniards were forced to give way and flock together like sheep.’31

  An English (probably official) account of the action said the fight ‘was very nobly continued from morning to evening, the lord admiral being always [in] the hottest [part] of the encounter’.

  It may well be said there was never a more terrible value of great shot, nor more hot fight than this was for although the musketeers and harquebusiers of crock32 were then infinite, yet could they not be discerned nor heard that the great ordnance came so thick that a man would have judged it to have been a hot skirmish of small shot, being all the fight long within half a musket shot of the enemy.33

  Another narrative, by a sailor who spent two days with the Spanish fleet and later landed in Brielle, on the mouth of the New Maas in south Holland, confirmed these descriptions of the furious artillery duel off Portland, claiming that the English ‘fired four shots to every one of the Spaniards’. He also reported some of the Armada ships in flames: ‘When he left them and as long as they were in sight, there were great fires, as if several ships were burning.’ However, this is the only account of Spanish ships ablaze and he may have been misled by the thick billowing smoke of gunfire.34

  At around five o’clock, Howard broke off the attack, probably again because of his crippling shortage of gunpowder. After almost twelve hours of confused fighting, no side could honestly claim victory, nor indeed had suffered anything approaching a defeat. Frustratingly for the belligerents, the stalemate at sea was continuing. Warships on both sides had been damaged, but no killer blow had been landed on any vessel. Most of the English guns had been fired at ranges beyond that of the heaviest Spanish cannon and at those distances, there was little chance of causing any substantial harm to enemy targets. Conversely, whether through inexperience, excitement or panic, the Spanish were also firing too early – long before the English came into lethal range of their own cannon. Around fifty Spanish had been killed and another sixty wounded, but the English butcher’s bill was unknown.

  In tactical terms, Medina Sidonia may have cut Howard’s fleet in two, but he threw away any advantage gained by chasing the lord admiral’s squadron as it briefly moved seaward, away from the battle. Had he concentrated his vanguard’s firepower on Frobisher’s six supposedly stranded ships, Medina Sidonia would have forced Howard to turn and fight on Spanish terms – or be obliged to abandon Frobisher to a grim fate. As far as Howard was concerned, the English fleet had been fragmented into three uncoordinated divisions which had acted independently, paying little regard to events elsewhere in the engagement.35

  As the Armada plodded on slowly eastwards, Howard sent ‘diverse barques and pinnaces on to the shore for more cannon shot and gunpowder’.36 Fresh supplies were ferried out from Lyme, Weymouth and Portsmouth, but Elizabeth’s government provided barely enough for any new engagement. Without the 220 barrels of powder and 3,600 roundshot salvaged from the captured Rosario and San Salvador, some of Howard’s guns could have fallen silent.37 John Hawkins, in his precise and neat handwriting, later told Walsingham: ‘We had a sharp and long fight with them, wherein we spent a great part of our powder and shot so it was not thought good to deal with them any more, till that [shortage] was relieved.’38

  That night, in his note to Moncada, Medina Sidonia emphasised that ‘the important thing for us is to proceed with our voyage, for these people [the English ships] do not mean fighting but only to delay our progress’. Accordingly, the captain-general had again tinkered with the Armada’s formation, this time adopting a simple block of ships with a vanguard and rearguard, commanded respectively by Recalde and Leyva. This was the very same tactical formation proposed weeks before by Don Pedro de Valdés during the Corunna council of war. The captain-general, recalling the events of the day, ended his letter to Moncada on a barbed note: ‘You with your flagship and two other galleasses will join the rearguard . . . whilst Captain Peruchio with his galleass Patrona [apparently an alternative name for the Zúñiga] will go in the vanguard with me. You will keep the three galleasses well together and be ready to proceed without further orders to any point where they may be needed.’39 With his king’s instructions still in the forefront of his mind, he might well have added: ‘I have dedicated this enterprise to God . . . Pull yourself together then and do your part!’

  Medina Sidonia must have considered seizing a secure anchorage at Spithead40 or elsewhere in the Solent (the sheltered sea strait between the Isle of Wight and the English mainland), having agreed at the onset of his passage up the Channel to pause at the island to await news of Parma. Worryingly, the captain-general still had heard nothing from the Spanish general and he was growing ever more uneasy about awaiting the invasion barges off Margate on the Kent coast. Here, he reasoned, the Armada could easily become a sitting duck to attacks from both east and west by elements of the English fleet. Better to hold a defensible anchorage, protected from the weather at Spithead or the Solent – which, as his pilots would have told him, enjoys a double tide, a phenomenon that brings longer periods of high water. Here he would also have the chance to capture and hold a beachhead on the northern coast of the Isle of Wight, where he could replenish his water and forage for fresh food.41

  Dawn on Wednesday 3 August revealed another problem for Medina Sidonia. During the night, the 650-ton El Gran Grifón, flagship of the hulks squadron, had fallen behind the Armada rearguard on its seaward flank. As the sun rose, Drake in Revenge was naturally the first among the shadowing English ships to close on the hapless Spaniard. Clapping on as much sail as possible to exploit the light south-south-westerly wind, the English vice-admiral came up alongside, fired a rippling broadside at his wallowing target; came about to fire a second and then swept past the stern, raking her with both cannon and musket shots. At least forty cannonballs hit the hulk, killing around sixty on her upper decks and wounding a further seventy. Flemish deserters claimed later that Drake’s gunfire had miraculously killed only the English and Dutch exiles that were sailing with the Armada.42

  Once again Recalde’s San Juan was first on the scene, together with the Armada’s flagship, and a series of fierce barrages were fired by both sides, perhaps upwards of 5,000 rounds. The mainmast of Revenge received a direct hit (bringing down the mainsail boom), from the stern guns of Monca
da’s galleasses, while a sister ship successfully took the Gran Grifón in tow.

  The light breeze died away in the early afternoon, leaving both fleets drifting slowly eastwards towards The Needles, the line of white chalk sea stacks off the western tip of the Isle of Wight.43

  Howard, only too well aware of the dangers posed by a Spanish occupation of the island or the seizure of an anchorage, called another council of war in Ark Royal to discuss how to block their entry into the Solent. He decided to reshape his fleet’s tactical fighting formation into four independent squadrons of twenty-five ships apiece, commanded by himself, Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins. In addition, he ordered that six armed merchantmen from each squadron should ‘set upon the Spanish fleet in sundry places at one instant in the night time to keep the enemy waking’.44 Such plans to deny sleep to those in the Armada had to be cancelled that night because all ships were becalmed.

  Thursday 4 August saw no return of the wind and the two fleets merely drifted on the current, with a speed more appropriate to that of a rowing boat than a galleon. It was St Dominic’s Day, seen as auspicious by the Spanish because it celebrated Medina Sidonia’s personal patron saint.

  It always seemed improbable that the Armada would try to enter the Solent from the west as the narrow and shoaled tidal race between The Needles and the mainland would deny them sea room and they would be forced within range of the guns of Hurst Castle, on the end of a long hook-shaped shingle spit jutting into the channel from the mainland.45 If the Spanish wanted a Solent anchorage, they would have to pass the southern cliffs of the Isle of Wight and enter from the east, via St Helen’s Roads.46 Time and tide were firmly against them as the flood would allow entry into the Solent only between seven o’clock and noon that morning. Afterwards the current would work against the Armada.47

  Medina Sidonia wrote to Parma, informing him of his change of plan: he would now steer for the coast of Flanders, rather than awaiting him off the North Foreland, near Margate. He also brought the land commander up to date with the frustrations of his repeated skirmishes with the English fleet:

  We have made but slow headway, owing to the calms that have beset us and the most I have been able to do is to arrive off the Isle of Wight.

  The enemy’s ships have continued to bombard us and we were obliged to turn and face them so that the firing continued on most days from dawn to dusk . . .

  The enemy has resolutely avoided coming to close quarters with our ships although I have tried my hardest to make him do so.

  I have given him so many opportunities that sometimes some of our vessels have been in the very midst of the enemy’s fleet to induce one of his ships to grapple and begin the fight, but all to no purpose as his ships are very light and mine very heavy and he has plenty of men and stores.

  The captain-general was also running low on munitions and asked Parma ‘to load speedily a couple of ships with powder and balls48 and to despatch them to me without the least delay’. He emphasised:

  It will also be advisable for [you] to make ready to put out at once to meet me, because, by God’s grace, if the wind serves, I expect to be on the Flemish coast very soon.49

  More fighting now confronted the Armada as Howard sought to drive the Spanish safely past Selsey Bill, on the western tip of the Sussex coast, far distant from any hope of gaining a Solent anchorage. He also nurtured hopes that some enemy ships would founder on the Owers and Mixon reefs that lie off the low peninsula.

  Early that morning, there were two more stragglers astern of the Armada: the Portuguese vice-flagship San Luis de Portugal and the Andalusian Duquesa Santa Ana. Were they laggards or bait in another elaborate trap? The westerly wind was still very light, barely a breeze. The nearest English squadron was led by John Hawkins and because of the lack of headway he was forced to lower his boats to tow his flagship Victory into attack against the two Spanish vessels. Almost immediately, San Lorenzo, Napolitana and Girona, Moncada’s three galleasses, recently attached to the rearguard, came up, their oars providing rapid propulsion in the flat calm. One towed the Rata into the fray to provide additional firepower. The jaws of this carefully laid ambush were about to snap shut.

  Lord Thomas Howard’s Golden Lion and Howard’s Ark Royal, hampered by the same lack of wind, also had to resort to tows by their ship’s tenders, and slowly moving into range on Hawkins’ port side, opened fire on the galleasses. One began to list, another’s prow or ram was damaged, and the third had its stern lantern shot away. The official English account was unusually vivid:

  Three of the galleasses and an armado50 issued out of the Spanish fleet with whom the lord admiral and the Lord Thomas Howard fought a long time and much damaged them, that one . . . was fain to be carried away upon the careen with another, by a shot from the Ark lost her lantern, which came swimming by, and the third his nose.

  There were many good shots made by the Ark and the Lion at the galleasses in the sight of both fleets, which looked on and could not approach, it being calm.51

  It claimed that the oared vessels were so beaten about ‘that the galleasses were never seen in fight any more’, but their damage was plainly not too serious as they managed to tow away the two decoy galleons.

  It was now around nine o’clock and the two fleets were south of the Isle of Wight’s Dunnose Point, with Frobisher’s ships close in to its yellow and red sandstone cliffs, riding the one-knot easterly current in an attempt to slip past the northern flank of the Armada. A brisk south-westerly had blown up and the fighting continued in the rear of the Armada with Howard and his squadron attacking the San Martin. Medina Sidonia described the fighting:

  They came closer than on the previous day, firing off their heaviest guns from the lowest deck, cutting the trice [halyard] of our mainmast and killing some of our soldiers.

  The San Luis came to the rescue and the enemy was also faced by Recalde, the San Juan [Bautista] of Diego Flores’ squadron and [Miguel de] Oquendo, who placed himself before our flagship, as the current made it impossible for him to stand alongside . . .52

  Frobisher was unexpectedly becalmed as he exchanged shots with the San Martin and the galleass San Lorenzo, dutifully keeping station on her flagship. He lowered his ensign briefly and fired three signal guns to summon assistance. Eleven ship’s boats from his squadron were sent to tow him to safety as the ships on the northern flank of the Armada attacked. Two of Howard’s galleons, Bear and Elizabeth Jonas, swept in to delay the Spanish sortie. Then the wind suddenly freshened, Triumph’s sails were filled, and Frobisher rejoined his squadron. Calderón described how he made off so swiftly ‘that [although] the galleon San Juan and another quick ship – the speediest vessels in the Armada – gave chase, [they] seemed . . . to be standing still’.53

  Medina Sidonia, again thwarted of a tactical victory and anxious about his low remaining stocks of munitions, fired a signal cannon to re-form the Armada in his new defensive ‘roundel’ (as the English called it) to continue on eastwards. Recalde had been closing on Triumph and was beside himself with fury at her escape and that the battle had ended suddenly and so inconclusively:

  As we were . . . harassing the enemy and pressing home our victory, our flagship fired a signal gun to call us back, so we could resume our voyage.

  In my opinion, we should not have desisted as our flagship did, until we had either made them run aground or else followed them into a port.

  Nor was it wise to sail . . . beyond that anchorage, near to the Isle of Wight, until we had heard from the Prince of Parma, because it was the best anchorage in the whole Channel.54

  The Armada moved slowly forward, safely skirting the hazardous Owers reef six miles (10.16 km) south-east of Selsey Bill. Another fifty had been killed and seventy wounded in the day’s fighting. The official Spanish casualty list for the three actions since they entered the English Channel totalled 167 dead and 241 wounded. This must be a dramatic understatement, given the losses when the San Salvador blew up, and may have been driven not o
nly by the desire to put the best gloss on events, but more cynically, to allow commanders to claim the pay of those killed but not yet reported dead. The practice was prevalent in both fleets, as Burghley noted grimly: ‘The men are dead but not the pay.’ On the English side, Thomas Fenner, captain of the Nonpareil also played down his fleet’s losses, writing to Walsingham:

  God has mightily protected her majesty’s forces with the least losses that ever have been heard of, being in the compass of so great volleys of shot, both great and small.

  I verily believe there is not three score men lost of her majesty’s forces.

  God make us all majesty’s good subjects to render hearty praise and thanks to the Lord of Lords therefore.55

  The fighting had been watched anxiously from the cliffs as the Wight’s small force of defenders prepared to repel any landing. Its governor, Sir George Carey, had only three thousand men to protect the strategically important island and he must have worried what the day would bring. He sent his eye-witness account to London, which echoed others’ earlier impressions of the intensity of the fighting:

  This morning began a great fight betwixt both fleets south of this island six leagues56 which continued from five of the clock until ten with so great an expense of powder and bullet that during the said time the shot continued so thick together that it might have been judged a skirmish with small shot on land than a fight with great shot on sea in which conflict, thanks be to God, there has been [only] two of our men hurt.

  The news in the fleet [is] that my Lord Harry Seymour is hardly laid unto by the Dunkirkers and that Scilly is taken by the French or Spanish.

  (Neither of these rumours was true: Seymour had not been attacked by Spanish forces based in Dunkirk and the Scilly Islands had not been captured.) The two embattled fleets had sailed out of sight by three that afternoon.57