The Spanish Armada

by Hutchinson, Robert

  A huge gale hit us broadside on, with the waves reaching the sky . . . the [anchor] cables could not hold and the sails were no use, so that we found ourselves hurtling ashore with all three ships on to a beach of very fine sand, hemmed in at either side by tremendous rocks.

  A colonel, Don Diego Enríquez, ‘the hunchback’, had loaded his ship’s boat with 16,000 ducats in jewels and gold coins. It had a deck, and four men sheltered below, ordering the hatch to be closed and caulked above them. Suddenly, more than seventy men who were left on the wreck jumped down into the boat and ‘an enormous wave’ submerged her, sweeping away the crew and washing it ashore, leaving it upside down on the beach.

  In this sorry plight, the gentlemen who had gone below died.

  When the boat had been a day and a half on the shore, some savages reached her and turned her over . . . Breaking open the deck, they pulled out the dead and Don Diego Enríquez who finally expired in their hands.

  Then they stripped them and took their jewellery and money, dumping the bodies around without burying them.

  Cuéllar was on the Lavia’s poop deck, watching with horror as many drowned inside the ships, whilst others jumped into the water ‘never to come up again’;

  others were shrieking inside the ships, calling on God for help. The captains were throwing their gold chains and gold coins into the sea. I could see . . . the beach full of enemies, dancing and skipping about with glee at our misfortune. When any of our men reached the shore, two hundred savages and other enemies went up to him and took everything he was wearing until he was left stark naked . . . Survivors were pitilessly beaten up and wounded.

  Cuéllar, who could not swim, looked around for some debris he could cling to as he struggled for the shore. Suddenly, Martin de Aranda, the judge advocate general who had reprieved him, was alongside him on the Lavia’s poop deck. He was ‘extremely tearful and dejected’ and could hardly stand as he was weighed down with gold ducats he had sewn into his doublet. Cuéllar, clutching a wooden hatch cover for buoyancy, jumped into the water. Aranda scrambled on top of the flotsam but was swept away by an enormous wave, piteously appealing to God as he drifted out of reach to drown. Covered in blood from injuries to both legs, Cuéllar managed to reach the beach, and hid that night. The next morning he found a deserted monastery that had been torched by the English. Inside the church there were twelve Spaniards hanging from the iron bars of the window gratings. On the beach were six hundred corpses, being eaten by scavenging dogs and ravens.50

  Much later Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam visited Streedagh Strand:

  I went to see the bay where some of those ships wrecked and where, as I heard, lay not long before, 1,200 or 1,300 of the dead bodies.

  I rode along that strand near two miles and then turned off from that shore, leaving before me [more than a] mile’s riding in which places . . . there lay a great store of the timber of the wrecked ships . . . being in mine opinion more than would have built five of the great ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables and other cordage . . . and some masts for bigness and length as in mine own judgement I never saw any two could make the like.51

  Fitzwilliam had sent David Gwyn (who had escaped from one of the Armada galleys wrecked earlier off Bayonne) to take charge of salvaging the treasure and guns from the ships at Streedagh Strand and to question Spanish prisoners in Drogheda. Unfortunately, Gwyn fled to La Rochelle in France with £160 in coins, gold chains and jewels, stolen from the survivors. Back in Dublin, he was the subject of scurrilous allegations that, while serving on the galleys, he had boasted that Walsingham ‘was for the Spaniards and would deliver her majesty’s person into their hands’. Incensed, the lord deputy swore he would defend Walsingham’s loyalty with the loss of his own blood.52

  Cuéllar later met two armed men, an Englishman and a Frenchman and ‘a most extremely beautiful girl’ of about twenty who prevented her companions from killing him but not from stripping him of his clothes and a gold chain and the forty-five ducats sewn up in his doublet – two months’ pay received before he left Corunna. His doublet was returned, but not his shirt, which ‘the savage damsel hung round her neck, saying, by signs, that she meant to keep it and that she was a Christian, being as much like one as Mohammed was’, the Spaniard recounted. Eventually Cuéllar escaped to Scotland and sailed on to Dunkirk where this unlucky man was shipwrecked again, and saw two hundred and seventy of his companions put to the sword by the Dutch at the harbour’s mouth. It was not until 4 October 1589 that he reached the safety of the Spanish-held city of Antwerp in the Low Countries.53

  Back in Ireland, the hulk Falcon Blanco Mediano, 300 tons, ran ashore near Inishbofin island, Galway, on 25 September. The eighty-strong crew were fed and hidden by the O’Flahertys of Connemara, until the governor issued a proclamation ordering that anyone who harboured Spaniards for more than four hours would be hanged as traitors, at which point the O’Flahertys surrendered their guests to Sir Richard Bingham.54 Even Bingham, who had boasted of killing eleven hundred survivors from the wrecks off Connaught, was perhaps tiring of the slaughter for he spared them – or was he thinking more of the ransom? However, they were later executed on Fitzwilliam’s own orders. Another ship, the 418-ton Biscayan Concepción de Juan de Cano came ashore further south at Ard Bay, near Carna, more than 18 miles (30 km) west of Galway city, after being lured to shore by the bonfires of a party of wreckers.55

  There were two more identified Armada wrecks – this time in Scotland.

  After parting company with the ill-fated La Trinidad Valencera on 4 September, the 650-ton flagship hulk El Gran Grifón had been blown backwards and forwards by errant winds off Scotland’s west coast. On 27 September, she sighted Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland, and was beached at dawn in a narrow inlet beneath the towering cliff of Stromshellier.56 Seven died as the crew scrambled ashore and the three hundred survivors (some of whom came from the Barca de Amberg) were well treated by the handful of crofter families on the island.

  They must have wondered at the strange world that fate had brought them to. The inhabitants were all bald, ‘not a hair between them and heaven’ – an affliction they ascribed to ‘excessive toiling in rowing through impetuous tides’.57 A senior Spanish officer, retaining some pride amongst all this privation, asked a local chieftain, Malcolm Sinclair of Owendale, if he had ever seen ‘such a man as he’. There was a pause and then the islander replied: ‘Fair in the face . . . [but] I have seen many [a] prettier man hanging in the Burrow Moor.’58 After months of neglect, some fifty Spanish died from wounds or disease and were buried at the south end of Fair Isle on a spot still marked as ‘Spainnarts’ graves’.59 The others were so weak that two of them were easily pushed off the cliff by the islanders. The survivors were taken to Anstruther, on the Scottish mainland, in hired ships, landing on 6 December, and two hundred and fifty were repatriated to Spain in March 1589.

  The 800-ton Ragusan warship San Juan de Sicilia, with a crew of more than three hundred, became the second Armada casualty in Scotland, but not through the effects of bad weather. Don Diego Tellez Enríquez had dropped anchor on 25 September in Tobermory Bay, at the north-east tip of the island of Mull, off the west coast. For more than four weeks, she remained there, repairing her damage and taking on fresh supplies, ready for the voyage home. In return for allowing her safe anchorage, the local landowner, Lachlan MacLean of Duart, employed around one hundred Spanish soldiers as mercenaries to sort out some of his local clan feuds. The Spanish plundered the nearby islands of Rum and Eigg, belonging to the MacDonalds of Clanranald, and also Canna and Muck, owned by the Macleans of Ardamurchan.

  On 5 November, the ship unexpectedly blew up, leaving just fifteen survivors from those aboard.60 MacLean kept on a force of fifty remaining Spaniards for another year before they were returned home.

  In Ireland, Fitzwilliam believed that a Frenchman who had been condemned for ‘embezzling treasure and jewels’ had lit some gunpowder and blown up the ship.61 B
ut it was Sir Francis Walsingham’s secret service that destroyed the enemy ship. His agent, John Smollett of Dumbarton, was one of the Scottish merchants who were selling foodstuffs to the Spanish. He took advantage of a heaven-sent opportunity when, unwisely, the crew were drying gunpowder on the foredeck. After dropping a piece of smouldering cloth nearby, he swiftly left the ship and headed for shore. Moments later, the huge explosion followed.62

  The scattered remains of the San Juan de Sicilia lie in eleven fathoms (20.12 metres) of water, around five hundred and fifty yards (500 metres) from the shore.63 In 1730 a cannon bearing the arms of Francis I of France was recovered – probably captured by the Spanish at the Battle of St Quentin in 1557. It is now at Inverary Castle. Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, she was not a treasure ship, although a silver plate eleven inches (27.94 cm) in diameter was brought to the surface in 1906.

  In London, Walsingham had heard reports by 8 September that the Spanish ‘had lost a great number of their ships towards the back side of Ireland in the last storm’ and three weeks later the English government had sufficient information to prepare a ‘printed book’ that provided details of the Armada losses.64 He wrote to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris: ‘We do look shortly to hear . . . of other ships to fall into the like distress for the south-west winds have blown so hard as, in the judgement of our seamen, it has not be possible for them to return to Spain.’65

  Reports of Spanish soldiers roaming the wild wastes of Ireland alarmed Elizabeth, who ordered the lords lieutenant of England’s western counties to put their militia ‘into readiness to march for Ireland with an hour’s warning’. Fitzwilliam asked for ‘five or six ships from Bristol’ to be stationed off the Irish coast ‘to destroy the forty sea-beaten vessels returning into Spain’.66

  In the event, no army was needed as the supposed Spanish military threat just melted away. Of the survivors, some soldiers entered the service of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Eight years later, there were eight still working for him, including Pedro Blanco, who had escaped from the Juliana shipwreck to become the earl’s bodyguard.

  About one hundred ‘ransomable’ well-born Spaniards were reprieved by Fitzwilliam, of whom sixty-one were sent to England. Thirty others managed to escape en route between Dublin and Chester in the last months of 1588. They were put into the Swallow, a pinnace owned by Christopher Carleill, constable of Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland (and Walsingham’s stepson by his first marriage), as she was anchored in Dublin Bay. Afterwards, when he claimed compensation for his stolen vessel, Carleill reported that his eight-man crew and the one gentleman on board were overcome by the prisoners who ‘forcibly . . . carried both pinnace and men away’. They arrived at Corunna safely and the pinnace was seen there in August or September 1589. Luke Plunkett reported that Swallow and another vessel, which had rescued some Italians from the Armada, were preying on shipping along the Irish coast. Three ‘sailors from Ireland’ – presumably members of her original crew – had been executed by the Spanish by December 1589.67

  Estimates of the number of Spanish who perished off Scotland and the west coast of Ireland or were subsequently slaughtered vary greatly. Beltrán del Salton, in his report to Philip in April 1589, believed that 3,428 drowned and 1,016 were executed by the English.68 He listed only thirteen wrecks, however, with one hundred and six survivors and if the casualties from the ships lost but not known to Beltrán are included, the total number who died rises to 6,751 – fairly close to earlier official Spanish totals of about 6,161.69 George Fenton noted sixteen shipwrecks and 5,394 killed.70 More recent documentary research suggests that 3,750 drowned or died from hunger and disease after coming ashore; 1,500 were killed by the English or Irish; and there were 750 survivors.71

  As Fitzwilliam told Burghley on 26 September: ‘God has fought by shipwrecks, savages and famine for her majesty against these proud Spaniards.’72 He did not think it relevant to mention the English massacre of the survivors.

  Unfortunately, the Armada had not yet suffered its last ship losses.

  On 4 October, the 600-ton Neapolitan galleass Zúñiga was driven by gales into the French port of Le Havre and her purser, Pedro de Igueldo, told Mendoza in Paris that she had to be re-masted, careened and her seams re-caulked with pitch to make her hull seaworthy. Rations were at meagre levels and it is unsurprising therefore that, almost immediately, sixteen Frenchmen and twelve Italians and Spanish deserted. ‘It is the greatest trouble in the world to guard them on board and none is allowed on shore,’ said Igueldo.

  Two convicts escaped this morning and I reported to the [French] governor that the guard at the town gate had aided them to get away.

  He at once went in person and gave the corporal of the guard twenty blows with his crutch and would have put him in chains in the convicts’ place if I had not begged for mercy for him.

  He then sent the corporal to seek out the convicts and he was so smart about it that he brought them both back this afternoon, finely tricked out in French clothes.73

  The three-hundred-strong crew were marooned in France for almost a year until Zúñiga’s repairs were completed and paid for. She became the last Armada ship to return home.

  The 550-ton hospital ship San Pedro el Mayor was lost when, having successfully skirted the dangers of the Irish west coast, on 6 November she ended up stranded on Bolt Tail, a rugged headland in South Devon. Her one hundred and sixty-eight survivors were eventually sent to France; together with the three hundred from the Biscayan Santa Ana which lost her mainmast on 27 July and sought refuge in the French port of Le Havre; they were back in Spain by the end of the year.

  Parma finally abandoned his plans for an invasion on 31 August, standing down his fleet and dispersing his army for attacks on Dutch objectives.

  On 3 September the first hints of the disaster that had befallen the ‘Enterprise of England’ reached the Escorial Palace via a dispatch from France that reported the defeat off Gravelines and the Armada’s flight northwards to Scotland.

  After some delay, Philip’s private secretary Mateo Vázquez chose to break the news obliquely to his master by passing on to the king a letter from another official, Pedro Nuñez, written late the previous day. Among its courtly phrases came a hard-edged sentence that warned of imminent grim news by citing ‘the case of Louis IX of France, who was a saint and was engaged in a saintly enterprise74 and yet saw his army die of plague, with himself defeated and captured’. It added pointedly: ‘We certainly cannot fail to fear greatly for the success of our Armada.’ Vázquez suggested in a separate note that further prayers should be offered up for the safety of the mighty Spanish fleet. Philip, taken aback, scribbled in the margin: ‘I hope that God has not permitted so much evil for everything has been done for His service.’75

  Medina Sidonia arrived in Santander on the north Spanish coast on 21 September. It was not a joyous homecoming.

  He anchored off Point Enoja ‘as the tide was against us [in our] intention of entering the harbour by the morning tide’. The captain-general was very ill after twenty-five days of fever and dysentery ‘which have grievously weakened me’ and described himself as ‘almost at my last gasp’. He was lowered into a pilot boat to come ashore, leaving the San Martin to be towed in by pinnaces.

  But the weather that afflicted him so sorely throughout the ‘Enterprise of England’ still had the last word. A south-westerly wind was blowing so strongly that the flagship had to run for Laredo, where she was anchored with the galleass Napolitana. Three hawsers were wrapped around her hull, because her sprung seams were letting in so much seawater.

  ‘Eight ships have entered this port and five or six others have run for the Biscay coast,’ the captain-general reported to Philip.

  There are also six or seven more cruising off this port so that I hope to God that they will all come in, one after the other.

  The troubles and miseries we have suffered cannot be described. They have been greater than have ever bee
n seen in any voyage before and on board some of the ships, there was not one drop of water to drink for a fortnight.

  On the flagship, one hundred and eighty men died of sickness, three out of the four pilots on board having succumbed and all the rest of the people on the ship are ill, many of typhus and other contagious maladies.

  All the men of my household, to the number of sixty, have either died or fallen sick and only two have remained to serve me.

  ‘God be praised for all He has ordained,’ the captain-general added, without any trace of irony or bitterness. He then returned to his sick bed ‘unable to attend anything, however much I might wish to do so’.76

  Miguel de Oquendo brought five of his ships back to Guipúzcoa. Almost immediately, his flagship was ravaged by fire after a magazine blew up, killing one hundred of her crew. Oquendo, whose wife and children lived in Santander, refused to see them. He turned his face to the wall and died, probably from typhus.

  In Rome, the cardinals supporting Spain’s cause complained that the promised money had not been paid – ‘for it is not the king’s fault if no landing was effected. If things have not gone well,’ they added with masterly understatement, ‘that is a reason for consoling, not for further harassing of his majesty.’77

  Before he died, Recalde sent Philip his journal of the Armada campaign. ‘I have read it all,’ the king noted in his aide-memoire, ‘although I would rather not have done, because it hurts so much.’

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