‘GOD BE PRAISED FOR ALL HIS WORKS’
My dear countrymen (and well-beloved in the Lord) . . . the trial of your valiant courage and proof of your warlike furnitures was prevented by the great mercy of God and the provident foresight of her excellent majesty, so as God Himself has stricken the stroke . . .
Anthony Marten, An Exhortation to Stir up the Minds of all her majesty’s Faithful Subjects . . . 1588.1
Ship by ship, the battered survivors of the Grande y Felicisíma Armada, the ‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’, limped gratefully into ports along Spain’s northern coast that September and October. The depleted roll call of the returning vessels and their dreadful condition was an eloquent testimony to the nightmare conditions of their voyage home. Of the 129 ships that finally departed Corunna on 21 July, a minimum of fifty (or 39 per cent) did not come back. Other estimates suggest that as many as sixty-four vessels were lost, including a number of the smaller and more vulnerable pataches and zabras.2 Only thirty-four great galleons returned, some so badly damaged that they were condemned as unseaworthy. These Armada losses represented ‘the greatest disaster to strike Spain in over six hundred years’3 as Friar José de Sigüenza, a monk at the Escorial Palace, acknowledged miserably shortly afterwards.
In contrast, the English lost just the eight vessels employed as fireships off Calais and lost a total of perhaps 150 killed in action.
Despite the triumphant claims by Elizabeth’s government, this was not a crushing defeat inflicted by the queen’s ships through overwhelming naval tactics or much vaunted racial superiority. Apart from the four ships destroyed in the Battle of Gravelines, all the Spanish casualties were lost in accidents or in the fierce storms that raged after the Armada had sailed north to Scotland. Philip, recognising that most lethal of enemies, complained: ‘I sent my fleet against men, not against the wind and the waves.’
The Armada’s run of appalling bad luck did not end with its ignominious and inglorious homecoming. After de Oquendo’s mighty 1,200-ton Santa Ana blew up in Santander harbour, another ship ran aground at Laredo simply because it had too few men left to lower the sails or drop the anchor. A third, awash with seawater from the leaking seams in her hull, sank beneath the waves after safely mooring.
Its losses in manpower were just as horrendous as those in its order of battle. The Armada returned with fewer than 4,000 from its complement of 7,707 sailors and only 9,500 of its 18,703 soldiers, a casualty rate of just over 49 per cent. These totals do not include the fatalities amongst the wretched slaves in the Neapolitan squadron or the Portuguese galleys whose losses were thought to be not worth counting by Spanish bureaucrats. Again, enemy action – even those cruel massacres and executions on the Irish west coast – accounted for only a small percentage. The majority of deaths were brought about by a scandalous litany of causes: the putrid food and contaminated water; inadequate medical care of the wounded; the ravages of disease; the unaccustomed cold of the North Atlantic; all compounded by poor navigation and pilotage. Many casualties were thus wholly avoidable. Indeed, ‘a great mortality’ from typhus, scurvy and influenza continued to rage amongst the hapless survivors on their return home.
Soon after the first ships arrived, Garcia de Villejo informed the secretary for war, Andres de Prada, in Madrid that there were ‘over one thousand sick and if the men be all disembarked at once, the hospital would be overcrowded . . . It is impossible to attend to so many sick and the men are bound to fall ill if they sleep in the ships full of stench and wretchedness.’
With an accountant’s stern eye, Villejo warned of a ‘great deal of rotten foodstuffs [still] in the ships and I beg you to order that it be thrown overboard. If this is not done, someone will be sure to buy it to grind it up to mix it with the new biscuit, which will be enough to poison all the armadas afloat.’4 The sick list soon grew to well over four thousand. Other survivors, already thin and wasted from reduced rations, finally died from starvation in port as the Spanish commissariat, overwhelmed by demand, could not provide sufficient provisions to feed them. What the English had signally failed to achieve, Spanish incompetence accomplished instead. The collapse of Medina Sidonia’s much-vaunted administrative arrangements, Philip’s impatience to sail as soon as possible and his flawed campaign strategy, fatally combined to destroy Spain’s invincible Armada.
Officials in Guipúzcoa estimated that 502 men from their province had died in the Spanish fleet – 128 from the port of San Sebastián alone. Just over a hundred of them had died in Ireland, but 221 had succumbed to disease in Lisbon before the Armada had even made its abortive first departure on 30 May. Only twenty-three Guipúzcoans were killed in action.5 This appalling death toll was mirrored in other areas of northern Spain: ‘The like lamentation was never in any country as in Biscay and Asturia,’ reported one traveller.6
The impact on thousands of families, both rich and poor, was too dreadful to bear. For some, entire male lines had been wiped out: for example, nine cousins of Martin de Aranda, the fleet’s judge advocate general (who drowned at Streedagh Strand) did not return home.7 The new papal nuncio to Spain, Annibale de Grassi, who arrived in November, met so many people wearing mourning that (rather unfeelingly) he inquired the reason and was told they were related to those killed in the Armada.8 If the stress and pain of bereavement was immense, the inconsolable agony of not knowing what had happened to a father, brother or son was even more insupportable. Three months later, families were still desperately trailing along Spain’s northern coast, trying to establish the fate of their missing menfolk, their fading hopes regularly and cruelly raised by sightings of each new ship that straggled back over the horizon.
In late October, Philip wrote to the Archbishop of Toledo, presenting a brave public face to the catastrophe.
Seeing that it is our duty to thank God for all it has pleased Him to do, I have returned Him thanks for this and for the pity He has shown to all, for owing to the violent storm that attacked the fleet, a much worse issue might reasonably have been looked for and I attribute this favour to the devout and incessant prayers which have been raised to Him.
But the time for supplication was over: ‘I consider that the prayers and public orations have done their work for the present and may now cease,’ he ordered.9
The shock of the Armada’s defeat was all the more devastating because hopes of its success had been raised by false rumours. One of Walsingham’s secret informants, Edward Palmer, an English Catholic priest in Spain, related how news reached San Sebastián of Howard and Drake being captured; Plymouth and the Isle of Wight taken; and that Parma’s army was expected in London within a few days. ‘Upon the news, the towns made great feasts all that day, running the streets on horseback [in] rich apparel and crying out that the great dog Drake was a prisoner in chains and fetters. At night, [they] made bonfires and reviled her majesty and broke all my windows with stones.’ But after the Armada returned, ‘they all hang down their heads like cur-dogs and are ashamed of all they did. The king keeps in the Escorial and no one dares speak to him for all the world laughs [at] him in scorn.’10
So the king turned his face away from the world, locking himself up in his quarters at San Lorenzo as the scale of the disaster became obvious, even to a man with an unshakeable faith in God’s power to work miracles.
The daily business of government ground to an abrupt halt as Philip mourned his Armada and his lost hopes of victory in such a holy cause. Lippomano, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, observed that ‘the king gives no audience and does not dispatch business. No one is paid [and] the cry of his people goes up to heaven.’ A royal chaplain, Padre Marian Azzaro, told Philip that although his prayers and processions ‘were very good things, yet it was certain that God gave ear to other voices before his’. When the king asked him: ‘What voices?’ Father Marian replied: ‘Those of the poor oppressed who stay about the court in pain, without being paid and without having their business attended to.’11
There was also
no redress for the owners of vessels lost in the campaign. Lippomano reported that
some of the owners whose ships have been cast away or burned have applied to the King for pay . . . Those owners have been told quite frankly that the King is under no obligation, any more than a private individual who hired a ship . . . The contention that the ships were taken by force is of no weight against the privilege of the King.12
Stubborn denial turned to bleak despair in the Escorial Palace that November. Now ill with recurrent fevers and a return of the painful gout, the king wrote an anguished, desolate letter to his secretary Mateo Vázquez:
Very soon we shall find ourselves in such a state that we shall wish that we had never been born.
If God does not send a miracle (which is what I hope from Him) I hope to die and go to Him before all this happens . . . which is what I pray for, so as not to see so much ill-fortune and disgrace.
Please God, let me be mistaken, but I do not think it is so.
Rather, we shall have to witness . . . what we so much fear, if God does not return to fight for His cause.
Philip emphasised: ‘All this is for your eyes alone.’13 He confided to his chaplain: ‘God does not return to fight for His cause. [This] would not have been permitted except to punish us for our sins.’
Medina Sidonia tried to feed and care for the survivors but it was a daunting task, given the huge numbers of sick and starving and the lack of food available in the surrounding countryside. One wonders what good the sugar, raisins and almond preserves that he ordered could have achieved.
Predictably, the captain-general faced harsh criticism in Spain for his conduct of the campaign. Lippomano reported that ‘what is heard on all sides is the bad generalship and timidity of the duke . . . and everyone lays the blame [for] all these misfortunes upon his inexperience and lack of valour’.14 Medina Sidonia begged royal leave to return to his home amid the orange groves of San Lúcar to recover, rather than go immediately to Madrid to explain why his mission had so totally failed. Philip, with a surprising generosity of spirit and compassion, told him to ‘attend to his health and to vex himself about nothing [and] when he is better to go and see his wife as there will always be plenty of time for him to come to court’.15
On 5 October, with his back-pay of 7,810 gold ducats in his saddlebags, Medina Sidonia ‘apparelled himself and his gentlemen all in black and like mourners’ set off for home across the mountains in a curtained horse-drawn litter16 leading a column of eleven mules and seventeen bearers carrying his baggage. On his arrival nineteen days later, Padre Victoria observed that he ‘had gone to sea without grey hairs and had come back grey’. He retained his rank as captain-general of the ocean and that of the coast of Andalusia, responsible for the region’s defence, as well as the governorship of Cadiz.17
In Rome, prayers for the Armada’s success were stopped at the end of October.18 Any remaining hopes of Spain ever seeing one penny of the papal subsidy for the ‘Enterprise of England’ vanished like a puff of Vatican incense. Olivares told Philip: ‘I am greatly afraid that we shall get nothing from the Pope. It is impossible to imagine how openly he has shown his selfishness and bad disposition on this occasion.’19 Sixtus V instructed one of his cardinals to write to the king to console him on the Armada losses and to encourage him to launch a new expedition against England. He refrained from writing himself as he feared that Philip ‘might make it a pretext for asking him for money’.20
In those long silent and solitary hours in the Escorial Palace, the king mentally revisited every facet of the Armada expedition and slowly, his organised mind rationalised the disaster and reinforced his steely determination to destroy England.
Accordingly, he came out fighting. The Venetian ambassador believed that Philip
made up his mind that the late disasters are to be attributed, not to the ability of the enemy, nor to the unfavourable weather but rather to the want of courage shown by his officers.
He declares that if they had lost, as they have, fighting instead of flying – for one must call it flying when they showed no heart for the fight – he would have considered all his expenses and labour as well invested.
Above all, he feels the stain on the Spanish name and declares that with a prudent and valorous commander, they can still recover the honour they have lost.
Philip could not countenance talk that the Queen of England ‘may possibly be able to defend herself against his forces’. He stalwartly maintained that she was weak, weary, short of money and her miserable people were ‘downtrodden, some by the burden of taxes, others on the score of religion’. Lippomano added:
In short, his majesty outwardly displays a fixed resolve to try his fortune once again next year . . . Whatever decision is taken, everyone is agreed that prayers for the life of the king are needed, for though he maintains the contrary, he is really deeply wounded by these disasters.21
The king decided to send a revitalised, re-armed and rebuilt Armada to assail Elizabeth’s realm. In November, representatives of the Cortes, the Spanish Parliament, met Philip and ‘secretly told him they would vote four to five million [of gold], their sons and all they possess so that he may chastise that woman and wipe out the stain which has fallen upon the Spanish nation’.22
But the astute Venetian envoy warned of the dangers of a new attack on Spanish ports by a triumphant Drake:
No small trouble would arise now if Drake should take to the sea and . . . make a descent on the shores of Spain, where he would find no obstacle to his depredations and might even burn a part of the ships that have come back, for they are lying scattered in various places along the coast without any troops to guard them, as all the soldiers reached home sick and in bad plight, besides which some of these ships are in harbours which have no forts.23
Meanwhile in Flanders, there had been baseless reports that Parma had attempted to break out with his invasion barges on 13 August but was driven back with the loss of two Spanish ships off Dunkirk.24 Two days later the duke had written to Medina Sidonia, urging him to return with the Armada to escort his army across the narrow seas. His letter was too late and he knew, in his heart, it was just an empty gesture, although vaingloriously ‘he protested [that] he would go on with the attempt and would die in the pursuit of it’.25
On 31 August, Parma stood down his invasion fleet and redeployed his army to resume campaigning against the Dutch rebels, despite growing dissension in his ranks. His Spanish soldiers ‘bitterly railed’ against him for not invading and his Walloon troops ‘demanded their pay very rudely’ but were bluntly told it was still in the Armada pay-chests.26 Paying no heed to this discord, Parma besieged the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, but after six weeks of indecisive fighting abandoned his fieldworks and marched away. Elizabeth cheerfully observed that his ignominious failure was a further blow to Spain’s military reputation and represented ‘no less [a] blemish by land, than by sea’.
Naturally, it was time for recriminations in Spain.
Lippomano reported ‘serious differences’ between Medina Sidonia and Parma – ‘each one trying to throw the blame on the other’. His fellow ambassador in France reported ‘charges of gross negligence’ levelled against Parma by his enemies, whilst his supporters claimed he had been ‘ready to embark and that he had already begun to do so but that Medina Sidonia, though he sailed by Parma, did so in his flight from the fireships’.27
Count Nicolo Cesis, one of Parma’s dependants, arrived in Rome and went to great lengths with the Pope and cardinals to
justify the duke, his master’s conduct, by showing . . . that he had not failed to carry out the king’s orders. He had embarked 14,000 men and being unable, through stress of weather, to join [Medina Sidonia], he awaited the [Armada] in a place where it was quite easy for the [fleet] to put in but Medina Sidonia had not chosen to effect the junction and Parma could do nothing.28
Parma’s pleas were not well received and many believed ‘that in exculpating himself . . . [he h
as] been [found] wanting in respect to his majesty by making his excuses for his attacks on Medina Sidonia to any other than his sovereign’.29 Far from being persuaded of the justice of Parma’s case, the Vatican cast ‘much of the blame on [him] and they say that the Duke of Medina Sidonia should lose his head’ according to Olivares.30 In Turin, Jusepe de Acuña, the Spanish ambassador, passed on the Duke of Savoy’s offer to take command of Philip’s forces in Flanders, in place of Parma. They had heard accounts ‘of how badly Parma has carried out his orders (whether through malice or carelessness) to be ready to aid Medina Sidonia [and] it seems impossible to the duke that your majesty can leave him in the Netherlands’.31
The campaign’s key strategic failures were the Armada’s lack of a sheltering port and Parma’s inability to embark the Spanish invasion force in time for Medina Sidonia’s arrival off Calais. The great vulnerability of Philip’s plans for the subjugation of England had always been the vital timing of the rendezvous between his land and naval forces, and this, not unexpectedly, was exposed by a series of mishaps. Unreliable and (in modern terms) snail-like communications by sea had prevented any coordination between the two commanders. Parma, trying to disguise his tactical intentions from the blockading Dutch, could not keep his heavily armed soldiers on the flimsy, crowded invasion barges whilst impatiently awaiting the arrival of the Armada. Medina Sidonia, beset by the harrying English ships, had nowhere safe to go where he could await the embarkation of the Spanish troops. He also felt unable to risk taking on the combined Anglo-Dutch fleets in the dangerous shoaled waters off Dunkirk in order to clear the narrow seas for the invasion to be mounted.
However, if Parma’s troops had landed in Kent and had been able to deploy the siege artillery carried by the Armada, the prospects for Elizabeth’s government would have looked very bleak indeed. The ill-trained and poorly armed levies and partially completed defences are likely to have been easily overcome by the duke’s seasoned veterans. Judging by Parma’s progress in 1592, when his 22,000 troops covered 65 miles (104.61 km) in just six days after invading Normandy, he could have been in the streets of London within a week of coming ashore.32 But amphibious landings are the most risky of any military operation, with so much dependent on favourable weather and tides and still more on good fortune. Parma would have been the luckiest of generals not to have lost hundreds of men in the hazardous transit of the narrow seas in their vulnerable flat-bottomed barges.
The Spanish Armada Page 27