Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  ‘The objective of this Armada’, a secretary of the king observed, ‘is both the security of the Indies and the reconquest of the Netherlands.’77 It took about four years to prepare. The most impressive aspect of the naval preparations was the ability of the monarchy to call upon seemingly endless resources in its efforts to crush the insolent English. It was not an exclusively Castilian effort. The shipyards of Naples contributed. The Portuguese vessels and warships made up one-tenth of the entire Armada.78 Vessels leased from private owners made up the greater part of the fleet. Castile was unable to supply adequate weapons, and basic supplies for food, cannon and cannonballs had to be imported: copper from Milan, gunpowder from the Germans, biscuit from Naples.79 The manpower was overwhelmingly peninsular: up to ninety per cent were Spaniards, and ten per cent Portuguese.80 But there were also soldiers and sailors from Serbia, Germany, Belgium, France, the northern Netherlands and even England. It was perhaps the first great enterprise since the Granada wars, in which so many men from so many states collaborated. The vessels finally put together were evidence of co-operation among the states of the monarchy.

  The end product, however, left much to be desired. Possibly two-thirds of the men on the Armada were raw recruits, who had never been to sea or fought in battle.81 Although the Spanish fleet probably exceeded the English in tonnage, it was less seaworthy, less well-armed, and less well-manned. The ships came from all over Europe, and some (from the Adriatic) were not suitable for the waters of the Channel. In contrast the English had a force of more efficient and speedy warships. The eventual Armada of one hundred and thirty ships that left La Coruña on 22 July 1588 under the command of the duke of Medina-Sidonia carried seven thousand seamen and seventeen thousand soldiers, with instructions to proceed to the Netherlands to pick up the main military force of seventeen thousand from the army of Flanders.

  The junction of forces was never made. The English warships, organized in small squadrons under Lord Howard of Effingham, Francis Drake, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher, began to harass the great ships and force them into the Channel. By 6 August Medina-Sidonia was able to bring most of his vessels intact into the waters off Calais, where he received the first response from the duke of Parma. The Flanders army, the duke wrote, would not be available for boarding for at least six more days. There was a yet more pressing problem. Parma did not have adequate boats to ferry his men out to the galleons. These could not come in further because the waters were too shallow. Parma could not venture out because of the waves and the fleet of Dutch vessels patrolling the coasts. On the night of 7 August the English sent in six small fireships packed with explosive and shot. The anchored galleons cut their cables and fled. At dawn the next day the remaining galleons saw before them the bulk of the now reinforced English fleet, drawn up for battle. A long and fierce engagement of some nine hours took place. The Spanish ships were at a consistent disadvantage. Few vessels were lost, but the casualties were high. By the end of the day the fleet had to make a run for it, away from Flanders and up into the uninviting waters of the North Sea. The objective of the whole expedition, to take on board an invading force, had failed.

  The greater part of the Armada, some hundred and twelve vessels, was still intact. But the wind had carried it beyond any possibility of returning to Flanders or to the battle. By mid-August it was heading into the Atlantic. Off Orkney Scottish fishermen reported seeing ‘monstrous great ships, about a hundred in number, running westwards before the wind’. Medina-Sidonia instructed his captains to sail southwest past the Irish coast and thence for Spain. From this point forward the great disasters commenced. Most of the ships perished in the Atlantic storms or on the coast of Ireland, where the natives plundered the wrecks and showed the survivors little mercy.

  Not until the third week of September did Medina-Sidonia stagger into Santander with eight of his galleons. Twenty-seven more ships from the fleet made it into other northern ports. Possibly sixty of the one hundred and thirty vessels that had sailed out in May eventually made it home. But some fifteen thousand of the men on board had perished. It was, commented a monk of the Escorial, ‘one of the most notable and unhappy disasters ever to have happened in Spain and one to weep over all one's life… For many months there was nothing but tears and laments throughout Spain.’ An officer in the Armada sent a report to a secretary of the king, saying: ‘You will now not find anyone who is not saying, “I told you so”. We found the enemy with a great advantage in ships, better than ours for battle, better designed, with better artillery, gunners and sailors.’82

  The failure of the Armada was by no means a mortal blow to Spain, which continued to count on the resources that had made the 1588 expedition possible. The English, however, gained a major advantage in terms of time, and in 1589 a number of London investors backed the expedition that was sent to Portugal under Drake's command with the aim of helping the pretender Antonio of Crato. It was a large fleet, of some 150 vessels, carrying over 10,000 soldiers, but suffered from the defect of having no other objective than looting. ‘This army was levied by merchants’, a critic stated at the time;83 and Drake was by mentality a pirate rather than a general. The expedition was destructive, but failed to dent Spain's power. Another even larger expedition was sent against Cadiz in 1596 and was also destructive, as well as being humiliating to Castilians. But it also achieved nothing. The great fallacy of the naval attacks on the peninsula was the assumption that Spanish power rested there.

  The men who gained most in the conflict of those years were the sea-captains who, ignoring the peninsula, attacked the sources of Spain's wealth overseas. In England, merchants and seamen put their investment in joint-stock companies84 directed towards a combination of trade and plunder. This new business, carried to a peak of perfection by the English, was known as ‘privateering’, and unleashed on to the seas of Europe and America a flood of small ventures that operated quite legally under the cover of war. Quite often the privateers were single ships, but the most efficient were organized into official companies. They increased the wealth of England through commerce, and above all stimulated the enormous increase in shipbuilding that began in the closing years of the sixteenth century. In this way ‘big business’ in England managed to profit from the existence of the Spanish empire.

  The most outstanding privateering entrepreneur in Elizabethan England was the merchant John Watts, who sent six squadrons to the Caribbean between 1588 and 1597, contributed four ships to Drake's expedition of 1595, and others on diverse occasions.85 As we have seen (Chapter 6) the foreign corsairs dominated the Caribbean and its trade routes at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1595 the treasurer of Santo Domingo reported that ‘corsairs are as numerous and assiduous as though these were ports of their own countries. They lie in wait on all the sailing routes. Coming or going, we always have a corsair in sight. If this continues, either this island will be depopulated or they will compel us to do business with them rather than with Spain.’86 A Spaniard in London in 1591 reported that though sugar was produced by the Spaniards and Portuguese in America, the amount traded illegally to London was so great that ‘sugar is cheaper in London than in Lisbon or the Indies’.87

  The inauspicious military events in Europe in the closing years of the sixteenth century, the complaints in Castile about heavy taxation and decay of population and agriculture, echoed unfavourably among the subjects of the overseas empire. The king's own secretary informed Philip II in a confidential document that ‘the people are full of complaints and many say that things are not going well’.88 ‘I am astonished at what they tell me about Castile’, commented a Spanish resident of faraway Lima in 1590, ‘that it is finished, and I believe it from what people say here. Here we go neither hungry nor thirsty, nor do we lack for clothing.’ Another, writing from the same city to relatives in Jérez de la Frontera, was alarmed by news of ‘the hardship that you suffer in Spain. Since we want for nothing over here, we can hardly believe it.’89

  Well befor
e his death in 1598, Philip II was coming to terms with the possibility that he could not achieve victory in Western Europe, nor even peace on his own terms alone. For half a century the government had organized a brilliant attempt to harness all the resources of the nations in the empire. But could the effort be continued?

  By way of a reaction against the apparent intransigence of Philip II, some ministers of his son and successor Philip III moved explicitly towards a policy that twentieth-century diplomats came to know as ‘peaceful coexistence’, or living together without compromising ideology. The need had not arisen in the case of peace with France, which was theoretically a Catholic state. But peace with formally Protestant states, such as England and the Dutch provinces, made it impossible to avoid the issue of religion. More crucial was the fact that in the case of both of these states Spain had always insisted on the right of their large Catholic populations to enjoy freedom of worship. Peace could not be made without this essential condition. And if it was essential to respect the beliefs of Catholics, was there not also an argument for respecting the beliefs of non-Catholics? Despite itself the great Spanish monarchy, which had implacably expelled Jews and Muslims from its territories, and persecuted Protestants wherever they appeared, moved forward slowly and reluctantly towards accepting plurality of belief.

  The idea appears startling. How could Spain, champion of Catholicism and home of the notorious Inquisition, condone toleration? Yet there can be no doubt of it. Philip II, who had spent many years living among Protestants in Germany, England and the Netherlands, knew what religious coexistence entailed and was not happy about it, but never excluded it as a political alternative.90 He had accepted the need for it in the case of a successful Spanish invasion of England. In 1591 he was willing to grant toleration ‘for a limited time’ in the Netherlands if the Dutch submitted to Spanish rule. The thorny issue of coexistence between ‘true’ and ‘erroneous’ beliefs became much easier to handle after the pope gave his unofficial backing to the king of France's Edict of Nantes (1598), which established coexistence of Christian beliefs in that country. The chief Spanish delegate to the peace talks with England, the Constable of Castile, advised his master Philip III that ‘Your Majesty is not obliged to make France and England Catholic if they do not wish it’, and supported a general policy of what he called ‘liberty of conscience’ for both Catholics and Protestants.91

  The conclusion of peace between France and Spain in 1598, the year of the death of Philip II, was a momentous event that appeared to many Spaniards to be a humiliating retreat. The pause, however, could also be seen as a final opportunity to bring to an end the wars in the north. The late king's desperate attempt to achieve peace through a political solution was taken further by his granting of a limited autonomy to the southern Netherlands, which would be ruled over by his daughter Isabel and her husband, Philip II's nephew, the archduke Albert of Austria. Though Spain still had final control of the army in Flanders and of most political decisions, Albert was able to pursue important initiatives that did not always coincide with views in Madrid. Perhaps the most significant of his measures was the decision at the end of 1604 to appoint as commander of the army of Flanders an Italian, the marquis of Spinola.

  The most successful general ever to direct Spanish operations in Flanders had also been an Italian, Alessandro Farnese. But there was criticism this time of the appointee's lack of military experience. Ambrogio, Marquis of Spinola, born in 1569, came from the highest aristocracy of Genoa.92 By profession not a soldier at all but a businessman, he was the epitome of the factors that had helped to create and maintain the empire of Spain. His family was prominent in banking activities both in Genoa and in Seville, and some of its members had been domiciled in Spain since the end of the fifteenth century. They contributed to financing the enterprise of America and developing the commerce and military power of Spain in Europe. Ambrogio's younger brother Federigo had served under Farnese in Flanders, and in 1601 began contracting to supply men and ships to the Spanish authorities there. The collaboration between the Belgians and the Spinolas by sea and by land opened one of the most remarkable, but also typical, phases of Spain's imperial effort. The Madrid government had few of the resources - in money, men, ships or arms - necessary to carry on the war against the Dutch and their allies. It was now the turn of the Belgians to come to the rescue of Spanish power. Despite constraints that Madrid tried to impose on them, the new rulers of the southern Netherlands were able to act with a remarkable degree of autonomy. ‘The Spaniards could not be more sorry’, the Venetian ambassador in Madrid reported, ‘for they have been left with the cost but not with the control of the government there.’93

  Flemish corsairs, operating principally from the port of Dunkirk, rendered valuable aid by preying on the shipping of the Dutch and of their allies, England. Drawing on the credit of his family, Federigo raised large sums of money, put together a galley fleet in the Mediterranean, and took it to Flanders to join the Dunkirk ships, where he scored notable successes against the Dutch in the narrow seas.94 At the same time he financed preparations for a projected invasion of England from the Low Countries. Ambrogio likewise raised an army in Milan at his own expense, and took it down the Rhine valley to join the forces in Belgium in 1602. Federigo died in a military action in 1603 but his work was continued by his brother. The latter scored a spectacular success when in September 1604 his army succeeded in capturing the city of Ostend after previous commanders had failed to do so for three years. The English had just (August 1604) made peace with Spain and no outside help was available for the weary defenders. However, there was little reason for the victors to be satisfied; the siege cost them the lives of over sixty thousand soldiers, a loss no smaller than that sustained by the losers. It was not a comforting outcome for Philip III, who only two years before had apparently given in to his more belligerent advisers and committed himself to make war on the rebels ‘with blood and fire, carrying it by sea and land into their very homes, burning and drowning them and laying waste to their fields’.95

  The unexpected success at Ostend emboldened Albert to appoint Ambrogio, whose career had hitherto been dedicated largely to finance, as commander-in-chief of the army of Flanders. No Spanish nobles suitable for the post could be found, but that was not the main reason for the appointment. The Council of State in Madrid admitted that the financial factor was what weighed most, because Spinola ‘with the credit and capital at his disposal can act rapidly to supply everything that is required, such as the wages and provisions of the soldiers’.96 From this moment his substantial financial resources became the mainstay of Spain's effort in Flanders. The appointment of a foreign banker as its principal general offered the clearest possible evidence of the priority given to business matters in the running of the empire. For another quarter of a century Spinola exercised the supreme military command in the north, developing into Spain's greatest general of the age. His campaigns helped to push both sides in the Dutch conflict towards the making of peace. When in 1607 the archduchess heard that agreement on a truce was certain she commented with relief that ‘it is no small achievement to have attained what everybody thought impossible’.97

  After the making of peace with France in 1598 and England in 1604, some form of agreement with the Dutch seemed inevitable. Eventually on 9 April 1609 in the townhall at Antwerp the delegates for Spain, Belgium and the United Provinces agreed on conditions for a truce, in the presence of mediators from England and France. The truce was to last for twelve years, during which the military status quo would be preserved and commerce permitted under certain conditions.

  In Brussels, where Madrid attempted to pull the strings but where the autonomous government of the archdukes made the effective decisions, there was seldom much doubt about the need for ‘peaceful coexistence’. It was a strange truce, in which limited military moves continued to be made, but always with a care not to provoke a war situation. The army of Flanders relied on bases in adjacent German territory
, to ensure access to Dutch territory and also to protect the transport of troops down the ‘Spanish Road’. As it happened, a number of these bases were in Protestant territory, for the German lands were a complex patchwork of the different Christian faiths. When Spinola's army in the years after 1605 began its campaigns in the area, it successfully occupied several major cities that were wholly Protestant, and had no option but to tolerate the dominant religion. In 1613, for instance, Spinola captured the solidly Calvinist city of Wesel, and granted complete religious freedom in exchange for introducing a garrison of Spaniards and Germans. During this campaign the army of Flanders managed to leave garrisons in over sixty towns, in all of which the free exercise of Calvinism and Lutheranism was conceded. A quarter of a century later, the Protestant faith was still flourishing in them.98

  It always remained official Spanish policy that the true religion alone had rights. But in practice the empire frequently came to terms with realities. It was not possible, for example, to insist that all troops employed by Spain be Catholic. Like his father before him, Philip II accepted the need to employ Protestant mercenaries. Protestants fought in the army of Flanders and helped to secure the victory of St Quentin in 1557. In the early seventeenth century the Spanish Council of State advised Spinola not to employ Protestant troops such as Germans and Scots. The general agreed with the idea in principle but felt that it was essential to continue recruiting from all nations regardless of religion, because (as he reported in 1622) ‘the number of Spanish and Italian soldiers available is always small’.99