The Spanish Armada
Page 32
Many of the Spanish prisoners captured by the English and Dutch suffered a terrible fate. Some of less exalted rank were thrown into London’s Bridewell gaol and left to rot. In September 1588, a Spanish spy reported that ‘last week there died Alonso de Serna and there are many of them ill. They suffer much, especially as winter is coming on and they have not enough clothes to cover their nakedness. My heart aches for them but I have not the power to help them.’6 Six days later, another of Madrid’s agents, Marco Antonio Messia, said the Italians in London ‘have given them alms freely, but there are so many of them that a very small sum falls to each one’. He had visited the prisoners and found that a Sardinian and an Andalusian7 had been released after converting to Protestantism. ‘Those who refused to listen to the preaching of a Sicilian they have there, are not allowed any share in the alms.’8 ‘David’, another spy, managed, doubtless through bribery, to rescue nine imprisoned Spaniards and Italians. He provided them with false passports and, in July 1589, shipped them from ‘a rough beach near Plymouth’ to land later on the Brittany coast from whence they made their way home.9
Eventually, in May 1589, Elizabeth’s government accepted ransoms of £10 a head from the Duke of Parma for five hundred prisoners. The same deal was struck to release those held by the Dutch. For those of real status, the ransoms naturally came much higher – lending a sinister new meaning to the saying ‘every man has his price’. Vasco de Mendoza and Alonso de Zayas were freed on payments of £900 apiece; Alonso de Luzón, captain of the ill-fated Levantine La Trinidad Valencera (lost on the reef in Kinnagoe Bay, Northern Ireland) and Diego Pimentel of the Portugal squadron’s San Mateo (which had been captured by the Dutch after running aground off Nieuport) attracted ransoms of £1,650 each in March 1591.10
In contrast, Pedro de Valdés was treated well, even though he was disliked by his English captors because of his habitual haughty and arrogant speech and manner. Elizabeth wanted him imprisoned in the Tower. Drake managed to prevent this as the admiral was his personal prisoner, if not his own trophy of war. Valdés was not released until 1593, when his freedom was secured by payment of£1,500. In happier times, he succeeded to the estates owned by his despised cousin, Diego Flores Valdés, and died in 1615, aged seventy, leaving four bastard children and one legitimate heir.11
For the poor sailors of both fleets, there was no such happy ending. More than half who had sailed with Howard and Medina Sidonia were dead from disease or starvation by the end of 1588.
But attitudes to the sailors’ role in Tudor society were slowly changing. In 1590, Howard, Hawkins and Drake established the so-called ‘Chatham Chest’ as a mutual benefit fund for seamen suffering poverty after being disabled on active service. This was funded by deducting six pennies per month from the pay of each seaman serving in the royal ships.12 Four years later, Hawkins was licensed to build a hospital for ‘the relief of ten or more poor mariners and shipwrights’. (The Hawkins Hospital still exists today in Chatham’s High Street, providing eight flats for needy or disabled men or women who have served in the Royal Navy or Royal Marines – the oldest surviving naval charity.) Elizabeth’s government continued to shy away from taking any responsibility for caring for those injured in her service. In 1595, her council directed the mayor and corporation of Bristol to enforce the collection of dues from ships because of ‘the great number of mariners who of late have been maimed in her majesty’s service . . . who may have relief there’.13
In Madrid, after the initial devastating shock over the disaster that befell his Armada, Philip overcame his crisis of confidence and refused to be diverted from his personal crusade against the heretics who governed England. On 12 November 1588, his council of state unanimously recommended that the war with Elizabeth should continue, and so the long, painful process of rebuilding a new fleet began. That same month, four cities from the northern province of Asturias loyally offered the king ten galleasses displacing 120 tons apiece and six ships of between 400 and 500 tons. Similarly, neighbouring Biscay offered him the lease of fourteen galleons and Guipúzcoa, fourteen or fifteen ‘great ships’ with a zabra attached to each vessel. The Venetian envoy reported: ‘This fleet is to be ready by April 1589 or May at the latest, fully fitted out except for bronze cannon.’14 His prediction, no doubt based on the king’s own deadlines, was hopelessly optimistic.
Twelve new 1,000-ton warships, nicknamed the ‘Twelve Apostles’, were laid down in the shipyards of Cantabria and money was spent on refitting those Armada ships judged still capable of active service.
In June 1596, a forty-eight-strong English fleet under Howard and Essex attacked Cadiz again, sinking two of the new ‘Twelve Apostles’, the San Felipe and San Tomas,15 and capturing San Andrea and San Mateo. They also held the city for two weeks before leaving it ruinous. Medina Sidonia, as local governor, faced criticism for his slow military response to the assault, which allowed time for the city to be sacked.16 He still had some supporters. One drew attention to his years of loyalty to the Spanish crown, ‘much to his cost and those occasions that have met with misfortune have been the heaviest burden for him because of the care he has always put into royal service’.17 In 1606, Medina Sidonia’s obstinacy caused the loss of a Spanish squadron of ships in an action against the Dutch fleet off Gibraltar. He died in 1615 at San Lúcar, his reputation tarnished beyond repair.
Philip’s new Armada sailed against the West Country or Ireland in October 1596, armed with an edict pledging that he was answering the ‘universal demand of the oppressed Catholics’ and was seeking ‘to release them from the yoke that oppresses them without punishing the great majority of the [English] people whose innocence he recognises’. Times had clearly changed. The Spanish king promised that he had ‘no quarrel with the English people as a whole and will punish with the utmost severity any man in the Catholic army who molests, injures or attacks the lands or people of the country, other than those who resist’.18
But his fleet of one hundred and twenty ships, commanded by Don Martin de Padilla Manrique, were caught in a fierce storm off the Galician coast which sank thirty. The remainder headed back for their home ports.
Philip tried his luck again a year later, while the English fleet was preoccupied off the Azores. A total of 136 ships, with nine thousand soldiers embarked, sailed with the objective of establishing a bridgehead at Falmouth, seizing Pendennis Castle, and marching on Plymouth. Nine days into the voyage, a three-day north-easterly storm sank twenty-eight vessels when they were only 30 miles (50.7 km) south-west of the Cornish port and Padilla reluctantly ordered a return to northern Spain. It was déjà vu: the ‘Protestant Wind’ had come to England’s rescue yet again.
But the Spanish did manage to land twice in Elizabeth’s dominions. In July 1595, four galleys – Capitana, Patrona, Peregrina and Bazana – sailed from southern Brittany under the command of Carlos de Amésquita, with four hundred harquebusiers embarked. Richard Burley of Weymouth, a Catholic exile and salaried officer with the Armada in 1588, acted as their guide. The ships arrived at dawn on 23 July off the Cornish fishing village of Mousehole and landed two hundred troops who torched the settlement and the parish church of St Paul before the flotilla set off again. The galleys then sailed two miles (3.2 km) to Newlyn, near Penzance, and landed four hundred men. A small force of the Cornish militia fled in blind panic at their first sight of the Spanish troops and Penzance was then bombarded, destroying houses and sinking three ships in its harbour. Newlyn was also burnt. Fear of the imminent arrival of a fleet commanded by Drake and Hawkins forced the Spaniards to depart on 4 August – but not before a Catholic Mass was celebrated openly on English soil. Three Cornishmen were killed during the raid.19
The second landing came in 1601, when three thousand Spanish troops disembarked at Kinsale in south-west Ireland, in support of another Irish rebellion, this time by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. However, English forces eventually defeated Tyrone’s followers and forced a Spanish surrender.
The E
nglish privateers continued the war against Spain. In the decade after the Armada, English ships made 236 attacks on Spanish ships in Caribbean or Atlantic waters. An attempt to ambush treasure ships in August 1591 ended in disaster when a small English squadron was attacked by fifteen warships under Don Pedro Alonso de Bazán. Five ships escaped, but Sir Richard Grenville in Revenge (Drake’s old flagship) fought on alone off Flores in the Azores for twelve hours before finally surrendering with most of her crew dead. A week-long storm later sank fifteen of the Spanish ships and the captured Revenge off the island of Terceira.
Although the feared Catholic uprising in support of the Armada never happened, the continued threat of invasion ensured that government pressure was maintained on the recusant community and the seminary priests sent secretly to support them.
The number of priests smuggled into England declined after the defeat of the Armada, perhaps in response to the high proportion (possibly as high as 62 per cent) that were apprehended by Elizabeth’s pursuivants throughout her reign. But the numbers secretly entering her realm stepped up again after 1591.20 That year, a network of commissioners was set up in every county, town and port, to hunt down suspects, and in 1592 obdurate recusants were ordered to be imprisoned once more.21 Yet, strong anti-Spanish feelings remained amongst English Catholics, as nationalism slowly became a more compelling force than religion. The Jesuit Robert Southwell declared her Catholic subjects’ loyalty to the queen and assured her ‘that whatever army . . . should come against you, we would rather yield our breasts to be broached by our country’s swords than use our own swords to the effusion of our country’s blood’. Another priest, Anthony Copley, warned pruriently that if the Jesuits were allowed to establish Spanish influence over the realm, Englishmen could expect ‘the rape of your daughter, the buggery of your son or the sodomising of your sow’.22
Yet Catholics still suffered for their faith. We last met Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, allegedly praying for the success of the Armada while imprisoned in the Tower. He was found guilty of high treason by his peers in a trial in Westminster Hall on 14 April 1589.23 Although attainted and condemned to death, Elizabeth never signed his execution warrant and Arundel lingered on for six years in the Tower, the sword of death always hanging over his head. He grew sick and malnourished and appealed to the queen to be permitted to see his wife and children. Elizabeth was resolute:
[If Arundel] will but once go to the [established] church, his request shall not only be granted but he shall moreover be restored to his honour and estates with as much favour as I can show.
The earl’s response was equally determined: ‘On such condition, I cannot accept her majesty’s offer. If that be the cause in which I am to perish, sorry am I that I have but one life to lose.’ He died on 19 October 1595 (some say by poison) and was buried in the church of St Peter ad Vincula within the walls of the fortress, in the same grave as his father, the Duke of Norfolk, was buried twenty-three years before. Arundel’s funeral was designed to vilify him and his faith. The Minister humbly beseeched God
as Thou has hitherto very gloriously and in great mercy preserved Thy servant, our Queen Elizabeth [and] to preserve her despite of all her enemies, who either secretly or openly go about to bring her to the grave, [her] glory to the dust.
Confound still all Thine enemies and or convert them.
The earl was canonised as a saint by Pope Paul VI as a witness of Christ and an example of the Roman Catholic Church on 25 October 1970. The following year, his remains were placed in a shrine in the Catholic cathedral in Arundel, West Sussex.24
That other Howard, the lord admiral, was of course, a Protestant of unquestionable loyalty, and was created Earl of Nottingham – the second peer of the realm – on 22 October 1597. Two years later, he was appointed ‘lieutenant general of all England’ but finally retired from public life in January 1619, aged eighty-three. One of his favourite pastimes was hunting with dogs – he was a leading breeder of spaniels – and he continued to hunt enthusiastically right up to his final illness. He died on 14 December 1624 and was buried in the Effingham family vault at Reigate in Surrey.
Francis Drake spent some years labouring under the disgrace of his failures on the Portuguese expedition. Times were changing and he may have sensed that the glory days of his buccaneering exploits were drawing to a close, especially once the Spanish introduced a convoy system which, with improved intelligence, increasingly frustrated English privateer attacks on their treasure fleets from the New World. Perhaps deciding it was better to go out with a bang than a whimper, Drake joined Sir John Hawkins in embarking on a punitive expedition to the West Indies, intending to prey upon Spanish settlements. Hawkins, old, tired and sick, succumbed to dysentery at sea off Puerto Rico on 12 January 1596.
Drake had heard alluring talk of treasure hulks anchored in the harbour of Puerto Bello, on the coast of Panama, but after a fortnight of sickness, he died aged fifty-five, also from dysentery, at four in the morning of 28 January 1596. His body was dressed in his armour, encased in a lead coffin, and buried at sea, three nautical miles (5.56 km) off Puerto Bello, amidst salvoes fired in salute from the ships of his fleet. A foreigner who had met him at court had been captivated by his character, describing him as ‘perceptive and intelligent . . . his practical ability astonishing, his memory acute; his skill in managing a fleet virtually unique; his general manner moderate and restrained so that individuals are won over and gripped by affection for him’.25 Despite his charm, his career marked him out as little more than a pirate.
In 1594, Spanish forces landed in France at Blavet, opposite Lorient in Brittany, in support of their Catholic League allies. They went on to capture and fortify Crozon, a rocky promontory dominating Brest harbour. Fearing that Spain would now capture a Channel port, the English mounted an expedition that November under a rehabilitated Sir John Norris and one of the last of Elizabeth’s Armada sea-dogs, Sir Martin Frobisher, to expel the Spaniards. Frobisher was shot in the thigh as he gallantly led his sailors up a scaling ladder in an assault on the fort’s walls. He was wounded at close range: the wadding used to tamp down the bullet in the musket barrel was trapped in his wound and he died from blood poisoning two days later on 15 November.26
We have seen how Elizabeth subsidised the Protestant forces in France’s bloody religious wars. After the Duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic League, forced Henri III to flee Paris, he was appointed lieutenant general of France. Guise was summoned to attend the king at the Château de Blois on 23 December 1588 and he was assassinated there, crying out ‘Treachery’ as the royal guards thrust their daggers into his body. There is an apocryphal story that Henri looked down at the body of his slain opponent and commented: ‘How tall he is! I had not thought he was so tall. He is even taller dead than alive.’27 The bloodshed at the château was not over. Guise’s brother, Cardinal Louis, was killed by pike thrusts from the king’s bodyguard the next day.
Henri himself was assassinated on 1 August 1589 at Saint Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine. Jacques Clément, a Dominican friar, stabbed him with a dagger before being killed by the king’s guards. The king lingered on until the next morning and died after naming the Protestant Henri of Navarre as his successor. The religious wars continued but the new king realised that he would need to convert to Catholicism if he were to have any chance of holding Paris. Accordingly, King Henri IV was received into the Catholic Church in 1593 and entered the French capital in March the following year. France’s tragic civil wars of almost four decades were only resolved by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted substantial rights to Protestants, as well opening up a path towards secularism and tolerance.
Parma also became involved in the French religious wars. In September 1590, he attempted to relieve Paris, besieged by Huguenot and royalist forces. Two years later he invaded Normandy but was wounded in the hand. He returned to Flanders only to be removed from the governorship. He died in Arras, France, aged forty-seven.
Philip was the
first of the two warring monarchs to die. He had spent the winter of 1598 in Madrid but, when spring arrived, he had become so ill with gout and fever that his doctors refused to allow him to be moved. That June, he insisted on returning to the Escorial Palace so that he could die in peace ‘to lay down my bones in my own house’.
It took six agonising days to carry him by litter the 28 miles (45 km) to the palace. The Spanish king had four suppurating sores on the fingers of his right hand, another on one foot and an abscess on his right knee. He could not eat or sleep and his stomach was agonisingly distended by dropsy. His pain from diabetic gangrene was so intense that it became impossible to move him and so for fifty-two days he remained unwashed, lying in his own excrement on his bed. Holes were cut in his mattress to drain his urine. Both his doctor and his daughter fled the sick-room because of the stench. As Philip lay wretchedly in constant humble prayer, he stoically told his son: ‘Look at me! This is what the world and all kingdoms amount to in the end.’ He died at dawn on 13 September 1598, aged seventy-one, clutching a crucifix in his hands, and was succeeded by Philip III, his son by his fourth wife, Anne of Austria.28
Elizabeth was scornful of the new Spanish monarch: ‘I am not afraid of a King of Spain who has been up to the age of twelve learning his alphabet,’ she declared. This was not just her curmudgeonly nature speaking: old age was creeping up on Gloriana and she became increasingly depressed by the loss, through death, of those she was accustomed to have around her.
Walsingham, her ‘dark Moor’, had died, heavily in debt, in the early hours of 6 April 1590, probably from testicular cancer.29 Burghley, her loyal minister of four decades, was taken ill two years later, possibly from a stroke or heart attack. The queen spent hours sitting at his bedside, tenderly nursing him and feeding him with a horn spoon.30 In a rare moment of sentiment, she told him that she would not wish to outlive him – a statement that brought tears to her old minister’s eyes – and that she gave ‘hourly thanks’ for his services. She urged him to ‘use all the rest possible you may, that you may be able to serve me at the time that cometh’. Although still suffering from decayed teeth and gout in his legs, Burghley did recover enough to regularly attend her council right up his last illness in 1598. He died at his London home, Cecil House in Covent Garden, at seven o’clock on the morning of 4 August, after declaring in his agony: ‘Oh what a heart have I that I will not die.’ He was succeeded as Elizabeth’s chief adviser by his son Robert (by his second wife), whom Elizabeth had nicknamed ‘her little pygmy’.