The Spanish Armada
Page 38
35 Sixtus V to Philip II; Rome, 7 August 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, pp.132–3.
36 Olivares to Philip II; Rome, 16 March 1587. Ibid., pp.38–9.
37 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.105.
38 Olivares to Philip II; Rome, 2 March 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.28.
39 The full text of the treaty is in Meyer, op. cit., p.454. See also: McGrath, ‘Papists and Puritans. . .’, p.199.
40 Welwood, op. cit., pp.8–9; Read, op. cit., vol. 3, p.285.
41 The information came from Oda Colonna, nephew of one of the cardinals, who had been captured and questioned by the Dutch. Initially, no one put any credence to his claims. Martin & Parker op. cit., p.106.
42 Strype, Annals, vol. 3, book 2, pp.551–2.
43 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.386; Corbett, op. cit., pp.192–3.
44 A quintal was a measurement of weight, equal to 102 lb (46.28 kg). The capacity of a butt, a large cask, varied, but generally was around 108 gallons (477 litres).
45 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, pp.383 and 388.
46 Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, p.395.
47 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, pp.387, 391, 394 and 399.
48 Laughton, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, vol. 1, pp.58–62.
49 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.24. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, described Raleigh as being ‘very cold about these naval preparations and is secretly trying to dissuade the queen from them’. In January 1587, he reported ‘several conversations’ with Raleigh ‘and signified to him how wise it would be to offer his services’ to Philip as ‘the queen’s favour to him could not last long’. Raleigh allegedly agreed to prevent the expeditions to Spain or Portugal sailing from England (ibid, p.1).
50 Rainbow had been launched a few months earlier and was built on the lines of a galleass. She was commanded by Henry Bellingham.
51 Among the London ships were: Merchant Royal (400 tons), Susan (350 tons), Edward Bonaventure (300 tons), Margaret and John (210 tons), Solomon (200 tons), George Bonaventure (150 tons), Thomas Bonaventure (150 tons), Minion (200 tons). See: Corbett, Drake and the Tudor Navy, vol. 2, fn. p.68. A subsequent Spanish description of Drake’s fleet was: ‘Two capitanas of at least five hundred tons; two almirante of the same burden; another ship of the same build; two galleasses of extreme beauty each two hundred tons; seven ships of one hundred and fifty tons and thirteen large frigates of from fifty to sixty tons.’ (CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.275.)
52 BL Lansdowne MS 56, f.175. The agreement was signed by Drake and examined and verified by Richard May, public notary.
53 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.97.
54 Ibid., p.63.
55 Thomas Fenner to Walsingham; Plymouth, 11 April 1587. CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.401.
56 Hopper, Sir Francis Drake’s Memorable Service, p.5.
57 Corbett, Spanish War, pp.103–4.
58 The messenger was said to be ‘a base son’ (a bastard), of John Hawkins.
59 Hopper, op. cit., pp.28–9.
60 Neale, Essays, p.174 and Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.106. Mendoza was said to have three informants within the English embassy – but these may all have been the same person.
61 Hopper, op. cit., p.29.
62 Cadiz was still recovering from a huge fire that devastated its older districts in 1569.
63 Mattingly, op. cit., p.96.
64 Ibid., p.97.
65 According to a French account of Drake’s attack. Corbett, Spanish War, p.117.
66 One had to be beached to prevent it sinking.
67 BL. Lansdowne MS 53, f.23.
68 Drake to Mr John Foxe ‘preacher’; from Elizabeth Bonaventure, 7 May 1587; BL Harleian MS 167, f.104. Drake added a postscript in his own hand: ‘Our enemies are many but our Protector commands the whole world. Let us all pray continually and our Lord Jesus will help us, in good time mercifully.’ Foxe, the Protestant polemicist, never received the letter as he had died before Drake had written it.
69 Oria et al., La armada Invencible, document 14 bis.
70 Mattingly, op. cit., p.107.
71 BL Harley MS 167, f.104r. Probably written by Robert Leng.
72 De Acuña’s reputation was damaged badly by his part in the fighting at Cadiz. He later served in the Armada merely as an officer without an individual command.
73 Oria et al., La armada Invencible, p.230.
74 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.109.
75 Hopper, op. cit., p.7.
76 Baldwin, ‘William Borough’, ODNB, vol. 6, p.671.
77 BL Lansdowne MS 52, article 39.
78 Hopper, op. cit., p.42.
79 Ibid., p.19.
80 Corbett, Spanish War, pp.107–8.
81 CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.283.
82 Laughton, op. cit., vol. 2, p.101. Borough’s defence against Drake’s charges is in BL Lansdowne MS 52, article 31. An account of the general court martial on board the Elizabeth Bonaventure on 30 May 1587 is in BL Add. MS 12,505.
83 ‘Pompeo Pellegrini’ (alias Anthony Standen) to Jacomo Manucci, 3 July 1587. BL Harleian MS 296, f.44. Manucci was a Florentine who worked for Walsingham in France in 1573–4 before being imprisoned. Returning to London, he lived in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft, as a controller of a section of the English spy network in Europe.
84 BL Harleian MS 6,994, f.76. Walsingham’s plan was supported by Lord Admiral Howard and the Lords Cobham and Hunsdon of the Privy Council.
85 Murdin, op. cit., vol. 2, p.592.
CHAPTER 3: Ramparts of Earth and Manure
1 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.483.
2 His real name was Johannes Müller (1436–76). His Ephemeris was employed by the explorer Christopher Columbus to successfully predict the lunar eclipse of 29 February 1504, thereby impressing the inhabitants of Jamaica (where he was stranded) and persuading them to give him food. The name Regiomontanus was given to Müller by the Protestant reformer Phillip Melanchthon in 1534. Königsburg, then the capital of east Prussia, is present-day Kaliningrad, capital of Russia’s Oblast of the same name.
3 Mattingly, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, p.167.
4 BL Cotton MS Caligula C ix, f.2.
5 Elizabeth wanted, at all costs, to avoid fighting a war on two fronts as her father, Henry VIII, had done in 1513 and again in the 1540s.
6 Martin & Parker, The Spanish Armada, p.103. Maxwell (1553–93) adopted the double-headed Imperial eagle flag of the Holy Roman Empire as his personal banner. He was imprisoned but released after the Armada had limped back to Spain. Later, at the head of the clan Maxwell, he invaded Annandale, the ancient lands of the clan Johnstone, but his force was ambushed at Dryfe Sands, near Lockerbie, on 3 December 1593 and seven hundred of his men were killed. Legend has it that as he tried to surrender, his outstretched arm was completely severed by a sword before he was hacked to pieces.
7 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.314.
8 Ibid., p.322.
9 BL Harleian MS 296, f.48. In reality, Sixtus V refused to listen to the proposals of those who offered to assassinate her. This was in stark contrast to the policy of his predecessor, Gregory XIII, whose secretary of state declared: ‘There can be no doubt that while that guilty woman of England holds the two noble Christian kingdoms [England and Ireland] she has usurped, and while she is the cause of such great harm to the Catholic faith and the loss of so many millions of souls, whoever moves her from this life with the due end of God’s service, not only would not sin but would be doing a meritorious deed, especially as the sentence still stands which Pius V of holy memory pronounced upon her.’ See: McGrath, Papists and Puritans. . ., p.195.
10 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.484.
11 CSP Domestic, Elizabeth Addenda 1580–1625, p.232. The Bristol merchants were named as Thomas and Humphrey Hollman, William Swanley, Robert Pentecost, Robert Alder, William Dawson, Ralph and Richard Sadler and Richard James. The domiciles of John Roberts, Robert Barra
tt and Francis Poyllis were not stated.
12 Mendoza to Philip II; Paris, 5 April 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.62.
13 BL Cotton MS Vespasian C viii, f.207.
14 Mendoza to Philip II; Paris, 12 July 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.123.
15 Ousley later served as a gentleman volunteer in Drake’s ship Revenge against the Armada and Lord Admiral Howard revealed his reward: ‘It has pleased her majesty, in respect of his good service . . . in Spain, in sending very good intelligence thence, and now since in our late fight against the Spanish fleet, to grant him the lease of [the rectory of] St Helen’s in [Bishopsgate] London.’ CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, fn. p.123.
16 Read, Secretary Walsingham . . ., vol. 3, p.290.
17 BL Harleian MS 6,994, f.76.
18 For comparison, the budget for today’s British intelligence and security agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ (the equivalent of the USA’s FBI, CIA and NSA) totalled £2.2 billion in 2013.
19 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, p.123.
20 Deacon, History of the British Secret Services, p.20.
21 The North Foreland.
22 Philip to Parma; El Escorial, 4 September 1587. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, pp.136–7.
23 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.119.
24 TNA, SP 9/210/33.
25 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.472.
26 Ibid., p.486.
27 In May 1544.
28 Laughton, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, vol. 1, p.213.
29 Hardwick Papers, vol. 1, p.360.
30 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.470.
31 APC, vol. 16, p.168; CSP Domestic Elizabeth, p.507; Fernandez- Armesto, Spanish Armada: The Experience of War, p.111. Burghley admitted he suffered sleepless nights worrying about the Thames defences, which cost £1,470. Richard Gibbes, one of Walsingham’s agents in Lisbon, who posed as a Scotsman, was questioned about the suitability of various English rivers and harbours for use by the Armada ships. Misleadingly, he told them that the River Thames was ‘very ill, full of sands within and without sight of land, and [it was] impossible to bring in a navy’. See: Deacon, op. cit., p.20.
32 BL Add. MS 44,839.
33 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.304.
34 Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, p.129.
35 TNA, MPF 1/134.
36 McDermott, England and Spain: A Necessary Quarrel, p.187.
37 The southern maritime counties had only two sakers, two minions and two falcons each in March 1587. Ibid., p.184.
38 Sir George was the son of Lord Hunsdon. History supported his argument: more than 2,000 French troops had landed on the Isle of Wight in 1545.
39 TNA, SP 12/168/4. Repairs to the keep and walls of Carisbrooke Castle were undertaken in March 1587, together with the excavation of an outer ditch.
40 APC, vol. 14, p.229.
41 The protruding bastions provided flanking fire against attackers attempting to scale the walls.
42 Boynton, op. cit., p.130.
43 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.440.
44 O’Neill & Stephens, Norfolk Archaeology, vol. 28, pp. 5–6.
45 APC, vol. 15, p.351.
46 The effect of certain branches of the Statute made in Anno. XXXIII Henry. VIII touching the maintenance of Artyllery and the punishment of such as vse vnlawfull games, very necessary to be put into execution (Society of Antiquaries Proclamations, vol. 4, Elizabeth, 1558–90, f.26).
47 APC, vol. 14, pp.110 and 212.
48 Hogg, ‘England’s War Effort’, p.25.
49 Boynton, op. cit., p.141.
50 Hughes & Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 2, pp.541–2.
51 HMC Foljambe, p.40. Walsingham’s contribution was larger than any other member of the English nobility or Privy Council, save for Sir Christopher Hatton and the Earl of Essex.
52 APC, vol. 15, pp.88–9; BL Add. MS 21,565, f.21.
53 BL Add. MS 21,565, f.21.
54 Boynton, op. cit., p.143.
55 Ibid., p.143.
56 ‘Billmen’ carried ‘pole arms’ such as halberds or spears, some developed from agricultural implements.
57 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.75.
58 Ibid., p.485.
59 In Huntingdonshire, one of the captains was named as ‘Oliver Cromwell’, commanding two hundred men (Murdin, Collection State Papers, vol. 2, p.601). After losing most of his money supporting the royalist cause in the civil war, he died in 1655, aged ninety-two, after reputedly falling into a fire whilst drying himself after a bath. Cromwell was the uncle and godfather of the ‘Lord Protector’ of the same name (born in 1599), who ruled England as a republic in the mid-seventeenth century.
60 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.521.
61 McGurk, ‘Armada Preparations in Kent’, p.80.
62 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.255.
63 A type of helmet with a peak and protective cheek pieces.
64 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.520.
65 HMC Foljambe, p.35.
66 McGurk, op. cit., p.71.
67 TNA, SP 12/199/93.
68 HMC Foljambe, pp.33 and 39.
69 Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans, p.7.
70 BL Lansdowne MS 50, items 19–21.
71 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.445.
72 Ibid., p.449. Some had also fallen on hard times. Samuel Lewknor joined Parma’s army in the early 1580s and was wounded in the arm whilst serving as a captain. He had married the daughter of a Brabant merchant but was crippled financially by a costly lawsuit over her dowry. Penniless, Lewknor begged a passport back to England in 1590. Five years later, he published The Estate of English Fugitives in which he warned that Spain’s motives in helping English exiles was to ‘sow sedition’ or ensure their deaths in Philip’s military service. Loomie, op. cit., p.10.
73 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.472.
74 Ibid., p.463.
75 See: Watson, Historical Account of the Town of Wisbech (Wisbech, 1827), p.127 and Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spymaster, pp.305–6.
76 Covington, Trail of Martyrdom . . ., p.70.
77 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.425.
78 Ibid., p.458.
79 Boynton, op. cit., p.149.
80 Sir Richard Knightly, who was organising construction of new beacons in Hampshire in December 1586, wrote to Sir Edward Montague, seeking an estimate ‘for the number of trees needed for a beacon . . . I think you must set down more than three to a beacon unless your trees [are] a great deal bigger than ours.’ HMC Montague, p.12. The earliest mention of a beacon system is in 1324, dealing with thirty-one in the Isle of Wight and the system was still operational in 1745 when Prince Charles Stewart – ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ – was expected to land on the south coast and again in 1804 when Napoleon Bonaparte threatened invasion. (White, ‘The Beacon System in Kent’, pp.78–9 and 91.)
81 Kitchen, ‘The Ghastly War Flame: The Beacon System in Essex’, p.42. An almost contemporary map of the beacon sites in Kent is in BL Add. MS 62,935.
82 Invasions were considered unlikely to be launched in the winter months. In December 1580, the Hampshire justices were told to stand down their beacon watch ‘in consideration of the extremity and sharpness of the weather’.
83 Boynton, op. cit., p.134; Kitchen, op. cit., p.42.
84 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, pp.339–40.
85 Surrey Local History Centre LM/1945.
86 White, ‘Beacon System in Hants’, p.279.
87 APC, vol. 15, pp.xi and 17.
88 The Privy Council were told that Poole was suffering ‘decay and disability’ and so they thought it ‘convenient [that] they shall be spared for the present and eased of that burden’. APC, vol. 16, p.23.
89 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.473, APC, vol. 15, p.59.
90 Revd. J. Silvester-Davies, History of Southampton (Southampton, 1883), p.253.
91 CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90, p.477; APC, v
ol. 15, p.60.
92 APC, vol. 15, p.92.
93 By comparison, the navy strength at the time of Henry VIII’s death in January 1547 was fifty-three ships, displacing a total of 10,000 tons.
94 Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.23.
95 Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.33.
96 Ibid., pp.34–5.
97 McDermott, op. cit., p.77.
98 TNA, SP 12/208/79, f.181.
99 The ship had been bought for the navy from Sir Walter Raleigh for £5,000, the sum being deducted from his debts to the queen. She was launched on 12 June 1587.
100 TNA, SP 12/208/87 f.201v.
101 TNA, SP 12/209/40 f.77.
CHAPTER 4: The Great and Most Fortunate Navy
1 Laughton, Spanish Armada, vol. 1, p.175.
2 In Rome, Pope Sixtus believed Santa Cruz’s death was caused by the admiral’s ‘disgust at two orders issued by the king; first that Don Pedro de Fuentes of the house of Toledo was to sail with the marqués [and] the other that [he] was to obey the Duke of Parma’. CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.343.
3 Santa Cruz’s body was exhumed in 1643 and reburied in the convent of San Francisco.
4 CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.339.
5 Mattingly, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, p.192.
6 In early January, the Venetian envoy listed three thousand as dead from disease and a thousand were sick. A further one thousand had deserted.
7 CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.329.
8 This Venetian ship was commandeered in 1587 while she was alongside in a Sicilian port. She had been hired to transport troops to Lisbon.
9 CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.336. The Spanish planned to build temporary wooden fortifications to protect their bridgehead in Kent.
10 Ibid., pp. 337–8.
11 CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, pp.187–8.
12 Ibid., p.200.
13 Thompson, ‘Medina Sidonia. . .’, p.198.
14 CSP Venice, vol. 8, p.340.
15 A real was a small Spanish silver coin, 0.8 inch diameter (20.3 mm), eight of which were worth a silver dollar.
16 Medina Sidonia to Juan de Idiáquez; San Lúcar de Barrameda, 16 February 1588. CSP Spain (Simancas), vol. 4, pp.207–8; and printed in full in Duro, La armada Invencible, vol. 1, pp.414–17. Most of Medina Sidonia’s income came from foreign trade (particularly from England) and this had slumped during the hostilities, although he was accused of conniving at illegal trade for his own profit. See: Thompson, op. cit., p.213 and Braudel, La Méditerranée . . ., pp.575–6. In fact, despite his protests of poverty, Medina Sidonia contributed 7,827,358 maravedis, or £2,245, towards the Armada costs.