She did, however, allow land defences to be prepared. Burghley, by instinct rather than as a result of detailed secret intelligence, was exactly of Philip II’s mind – that the key to the whole campaign lay in the Armada’s ability to reach the mouth of the Thames. Philip imagined them reaching Margate and thereby holding the English fleet at bay or dividing it, as Parma’s barges, with their thousands of Spanish boats, sailed up the Thames into London. Burghley had precisely the fear that the Spaniards would capture London and said he was unable to sleep for worry about the Thames defences. £1,470 was spent on a boom across the river, which collapsed under its own weight. It was the brainchild of an Italian engineer, Federigo Giambelli. Though his Thames barrier did not work, his mere presence on the English side was a major propaganda coup, rightly calculated to put terror into the Spanish. For Giambelli’s most-celebrated contribution to the history of warfare were the ‘hell-burners’ of Antwerp, fire-ships that were in effect huge floating bombs, which would be used with deadly effect as the Armada crisis deepened.
But – at first – as Drake and Howard of Effingham and the others (whether or not playing bowls) looked out from the Devon coast, both sides remained in ignorance about the other’s precise intentions. Would the Spanish ships try to put into an English harbour? At Plymouth? At Weymouth? Would they plan to engage, by grappling with the English ships at close hand, or pound them with heavy guns? Would the English fleet – this was one of the Queen’s dreads – sail out to fight the Spanish and, deflected by wind or mist, sail past them, leaving the seas defenceless? The whole of southern England was on alert. Trenches were dug across fields. Forts were repaired. Beacons were constructed at strategic points all down the coast from the Lizard to Kent, and up from hillside to hillside throughout the island, to the Midlands, to Nottingham, to Durham, to York. On that night, 29 July, the fires were lit:
From Eddystone to Berwick Bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay, That time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day; For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flames spread – High on St Michael’s Mount it shone, it shone on Beachy Head. Far on the deep the Spaniards saw, along each southern shire, Cape beyond cape in endless range, those twinkling points of fire.7
But although the fires alerted the English to the Armada’s arrival, and although as the fires blazed and the church bells rang, the English land army mustered at rallying points, led in each county by the Lord Lieutenant, there followed nearly a fortnight of absolute suspense. It was impossible for those on land – for the English who embraced themselves for invasion, or the Duke of Parma encamped in Dunkirk, or the Pope in Rome, or the Queen immured in St James’s Palace – to know what was happening at sea. For eleven days the fate of the Elizabethans lay in the hands of Poseidon, god of the sea, though human beings had some part in reacting to his caprice. Notable among the heroes of the drama must be named John Hawkins.
It was through the mechanisms of Burghley that Hawkins, in 1577, had become Treasurer of the navy. It was an inspired choice. Hawkins had spent his young manhood as a privateer. He had a long, and sometimes painful, experience of life at sea. He was not alone in pioneering new designs of fighting ships for the Queen’s navy,8 but he was a pivotal figure. If Sir William Winter had streamlined ships, replacing demi-cannon with more accurate long-range culverin; if royal shipwrights Peter Pett, Matthew Baker and Richard Chapman9 are now credited with the design of some of the new ships, it was Hawkins – the sailor, the entrepreneur, the navigator, the money-lover and the millionaire – who saw through the reform of the Elizabethan navy. He, who had left behind the cumbrous old Jesus of Lübeck in the Caribbean in 1569, had learned the hard way that the majestic old wooden castles, useful in close fighting, were cumbrous and slow when there was a need to pursue the enemy or escape his fire-power. By 1588 two-thirds of Elizabeth’s navy comprised streamlined galleons, with greatly improved sail plans. It was this navy that was able to confront the Armada. Technology alone did not win the war, but it was a vital ingredient in the victory. Thanks to Hawkins, the English navy had made a fundamental psychological adjustment. It saw ships as gun-carriers, whereas the cumbrous old ships accumulated by Medina Sidonia were seen as troop-carriers. Victory, if the Spanish achieved it, was to be achieved by boarding tactics, which the new English vessels – with their speed of escape, longer-range fire-power and lower height – made all the less easy.
Nevertheless, when both fleets confronted one another, in the dawn of 30 July, they saw a formidable sight. The English saw that Medina Sidonia had drawn up his ships in the crescent battle-formation that had made the Spanish navy such an unbeatable force at Lepanto and Terceira. No one on the English side knew (as was obvious to the Spanish captains) that many of their ships would be useless in battle. It must have been the sheer size of the Spanish fleet, this huge crescent stretching across the sea from the Cornish coast, that sent a tremor into the hearts of the English sailors.
The first engagement took place off the Eddystone rock, with Howard’s Ark Royal crossing the stern of the rearmost Spanish ship, de Leiva’s Rata Coronada, and Drake in the Revenge, Hawkins in the Victory and Frobisher in the Triumph assailing the other side of the formation. The English did not come out of the exchange very well, and they had failed to check the stately advance of the Spaniards along the Channel. The English sailors were still uncertain of Spanish intentions. The two concerns uppermost in their minds were the possibility of the Spanish landing (they were beyond Plymouth now – but in Weymouth?) and the uncertainty of engagement at sea (when would the Spanish ships attack?). Sidonia’s prime concern – as we know – was to reach Calais or Dunkirk and meet up with the forces of Parma.
By the time they had all reached Portland Bill the weather had turned squally and we must assume visibility was poor. Drake made an extraordinary blunder, detaching himself from the main fleet and challenging an innocent German merchant ship, which loomed up out of the mist. By the time he had realised his mistake and rejoined the Lord Admiral, they found themselves a cable-length away from the Rosario, Don Pedro de Valdés’s flagship, which had been captured during the night by Captain John Fisher. The Rosario had already suffered damage by colliding with another Spanish ship. Although Drake had behaved foolishly during the night, Don Pedro apparently considered it something of an honour to surrender to the celebrated vice admiral. He himself enjoyed some hero-worship – among both sides – when he was imprisoned in England.
Just south of the Needles on 2 August, following a council of war, Howard divided the English navy into four squadrons, commanded respectively by Howard himself, Drake, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher. In what was now a calm sea, Hawkins’s squadron, followed by Howard’s, attacked the Spanish ships. The battle intensified as they drew near the Solent, whose eastern entrance had been recommended by King Philip as a good place for emergency anchorage, a place possibly to await Parma’s invasion force. Drake and Hawkins tried to push the Spanish ships towards the treacherous rocks called the Owers off Selsey Bill, but Sidonia was too quick for them. By dodging the rocks, however, the Spanish admiral narrowly missed capturing Frobisher in the Triumph, which would have done much for the morale of his squadron.
The Royal Navy, during this first week, had not achieved any notable victory, but it regarded the non-landing of the Spanish as an English achievement. For this reason, as if a victory had already been achieved, Howard knighted Hawkins and Frobisher on the deck of the Ark Royal. Hawkins’s streamlining of English ships had ensured that they had always eluded the big, lumbering Spanish castles and evaded the grappling, boarding and hand-to-hand fighting, which they might well have lost. Frobisher had not been captured. Men have been given knighthoods for lesser achievements. Yet English victory – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Spanish defeat – was still very far from being accomplished. In fact, there had been some heroism on both sides, some blunders and some unavoidable setbacks.
The crucial days were yet to come: 6 and 7 August, a
s the Spanish ships reached Calais. The weather was worsening all the time and there was a danger that the Armada would be driven on to the Flanders shoals or, worse, tossed into the North Sea, out of reach of the Duke of Parma.
The Duke of Parma, an accomplished soldier with no experience of naval warfare, was resolved not to imperil his invasion force of thousands of men. He was also hampered by scepticism. He never really believed that the Armada would beat the British navy or arrive in time to provide his troops with a safe passage across the English Channel. Parma had been understandably impressed by the ‘flyboats’, fast, shallow-draught little ships-o’-war, which had been pioneered in the early days of the Netherlands revolt by the Dutch admiral, Justin of Nassau. Parma convinced himself that it would not be safe to cross the Channel until the Spanish had constructed a fleet of such ships in the yards of Dunkirk. At Dunkirk and Nieuport he had assembled a huge ‘fleet’ of canal boats – flat-lsted open-ended barges, which, far from risking on the open sea, he would not even venture on a coast-hugging voyage the thirty miles or so to Calais.
On Sunday morning, Don Rodrigo Tello de Guzmán came aboard the San Martin in Calais harbour to break catastrophic news to Sidonia. Tello had been to Dunkirk and found no waiting Spanish army, merely a flotilla of unseaworthy canal barges. Parma was skulking in his headquarters at Bruges, forty miles away.
There was nothing for Sidonia to do but wait, but time was not, as it happened, on their side. Having successfully driven the Armada into a French harbour – this was how it seemed to Howard – they were now in a position to use Federigo Giambelli’s deadly weapon of fire-ships. They had not been especially constructed. Drake gave one of his ships, the Thomas of Plymouth, of 200 tons. Hawkins gave a ship. They had eventually assembled eight big ships (150–200 tons each), which they loaded with explosives. At midnight on Sunday, 7 August these great infernal, blazing ships drifted destructively across the water of Calais Roads. They maintained a perfect straight line, as if manned by some unseen force; they were very close together. With phenomenal skill the Spanish used two pinnaces to swing round two of the fire-ships and drag them towards the shore in the choppy waters, but by now the six remaining fire-ships had borne down into the heart of the Armada. Their double-shotted guns were white-hot and were spraying shot at random. Exploding guns, a fountain of sparks, a roar of noise and fire broke upon the anchored Spanish ships, and there was panic. The San Martin raised anchor and sailed out to sea for a mile, but most of the Spanish captains lacked Sidonia’s sangfroid. Many cut their cables. The fire-ships had not managed to set a single Spanish ship ablaze, but they had broken the order of battle that Sidonia had maintained unflinchingly all the way up the Channel. Without their primary anchors, these ships were going to suffer dearly in the weeks ahead. Many were now rudderless.
The Spanish ships were in disarray in choppy seas on that Monday morning, 8 August, in unknown seas, when they confronted the whole naval force of England, 150 sails. At Gravelines the disheartened and bedraggled Spanish fleet took a pounding. Ammunition on both sides was now low after ten days of Channel fighting, but the English had the advantage. For the first time since the Armada had been sighted off the Lizard, there was close-range fighting. The ships were about fifty yards apart, and the superiority of the English artillery began to tell. English rates of fire were of the order of one or one-and-a-half rounds an hour per gun; the Spanish about the same per day. At least one Spanish ship was sunk, but the exact progress of the battle is impossible to reconstruct. The Spanish evidently managed, in spite of English fire and bad weather, to restore a fighting formation. They avoided being driven into the Zealand Banks, which would have exposed them to wreckage on the shoals and to being taken by the Dutch, who were waiting for them. But they chose between Scylla and Charybdis. The only way to avoid this fate was to head northwards, into the North Sea. No Spanish pilot was familiar with these waters, and not one chart of the North Sea was possessed by any ship in the Armada.10 It had never been part of any Spanish plan to enter this turbulent and unknown area. With Howard’s ships chasing behind them, they lurched into the heaving northern waves. Where were they heading? The English sailors feared they would attempt a northern landing. Or perhaps they were going to Hamburg, or to Norway? In any event, the worst of the danger was now over. And the worst English nightmare was over: that the Duke of Parma, with all his military expertise and his thousands of troops, might be landed on English soil. Drake wrote to Walsingham, ‘God hath given us so good a day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward as I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Medina Sidonia shall not shake hands this few days; and whensoever they meet, I believe neither of them will greatly rejoice of this day’s service.’
Remember that, as yet, those on land knew nothing of the outcome of the naval battles over the previous long ten days. The rumour flew across Europe that Drake had been captured by the Spanish. As late as 20 August, the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, Don Bernadino de Mendoza, was writing to Philip II, ‘as yet the story wants confirmation from the Duke himself, but it is widely believed and seems highly probable’. In Prague a solemn Te Deum was sung in thanksgiving for a Catholic victory. If Pope Sixtus failed to do the same in Rome it was only because he did not wish to pay out the first instalment of two million golden ducats, which he had promised as his contribution to the war effort if Parma set foot on English soil. Cardinal Allen nevertheless asked for his legatine Bulls at once, so that he could set out immediately from Italy to the Netherlands in order to expedite the conversion of England.11
It was in this atmosphere of total uncertainty that Elizabeth herself acted with decisive courage. Leicester, with his experience of fighting in the Low Countries, was convinced that the Spanish would sail up the Thames. The mustering of a land army, which was largely his responsibility, took much longer than he would have hoped. The everlasting shortage of money for victuals continued throughout the crisis. On 26 July Leicester had complained to Walsingham that he had an army of ‘as gallant and willing men as ever were seen’, but that, after a twenty-mile march, there was ‘not a barrel of beer nor a loaf of bread’ among them.12 The Council had hoped to raise an army of 50,000 men, but nothing like this number had materialised. Leicester had only 4,000 men in the main army camp at Tilbury.
At this decisive hour, thirty years into her reign, Elizabeth was caught between the conflicting temperaments of Cecil and Dudley. Lord Burghley, the snow-haired old Polonius, was appalled when she declared that, if necessary, she would ride to the confines of her realm at the head of an army:
Now for your person being the most dainty and sacred thing we have in this world to care for, a man must tremble when he thinks of it, specially finding your Majesty to have the princely courage to transport yourself to the utmost confines of your realm to meet your enemies and to defend your subjects. I cannot, most dear Queen, consent to that, for upon your well doing consists all the safety of your whole kingdom and therefore preserve that above all.
Always cautious, Burghley was also ever-mindful of the nightmare that would ensue, were Elizabeth to be removed from the scene. As the Armada made its fateful progress up the English Channel, with guns pounding and boys’ voices singing the Litany of Our Lady, everything that Cecil had worked for politically over the previous thirty years hung in the balance: the Protestant-humanist life of the universities; the power of the Protestant axis at court and in the Council; the prodigious wealth and power of the Cecils, the Dudleys and the other members of the junta, who kept alive this particular way of governing England; the independence of England both from France and from Spain. All this and so much more was embodied in the fifty-five-year-old woman to whom Burghley had consecrated his existence. He trembled indeed at the thought of her riding out in an act of extravagant daring. Among the 4,000 men mustered at Tilbury, who was to know if there was not a Catholic with a pistol, yearning for the return of monasteries and papal rule?
But Elizabeth would never have captured the he
arts and imaginations of her people if she had been the obedient slave of all Burghley’s balance, caution and common sense. She was also the flamboyant woman who had deeply loved Robert Dudley, and probably – though he was now vermilion-faced, paunchy and grey-haired – she still did. It was Leicester who could see what a tremendous boost to national morale would be occasioned by her riding forth, rather than huddling immured under guard in Whitehall. He told her to go to her house at Havering, fourteen miles from the camp at Tilbury, where she should spend ‘two or three days to see both the camp and the forts . . . I trust you will be pleased with your poor lieutenant’s cabin and within a mile there is a gentleman’s house, where your Majesty may also be. You shall comfort not only these thousands, but many more shall hear of it, and thus far, but no farther can I consent to adventure your person.’
By the time Elizabeth reached this gentleman’s house – it belonged to a Mr Rich and was ‘a proper, sweet, cleanly house’ – Walsingham and Burghley were beginning to receive rumours that the Armada had been defeated. It would have been the perfect excuse for them to save money by disbanding the army, but Leicester longed for the great drama of her appearance before the troops. He could not know that it was the final pageant he would ever lay on for her, but he could know the significance of the hour. And he knew that her words and actions would more than rise to the occasion.
The Elizabethans Page 35