by Henry Kamen
Medina Sidonia's instructions were to effect a meeting with Parma off the English coast, and take on board the Flanders army which was to carry out the invasion of England. Many councillors in Madrid had grave doubts about whether the rendezvous was feasible.22 The English had no intention of even allowing it to take place. Their naval forces, organised 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, nevertheless, Medina Sidonia was able to bring most of his vessels intact into the waters off Calais.
His chief problem was that he had been unable to make any contact with Parma. Not until he was off Calais did he receive the first response from the duke. 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 farther because the waters were too shallow. Parma could not venture out because of the waves and the fleet of Dutch vessels patrolling the coasts.
Howard and the English had no intention of waiting until Medina Sidonia and Parma could unite the Spanish forces. On the night of 7 August they sent in six small fireships packed with explosive and shot. The anchored galleons cut their cables in terror 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.23 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 Parma's troops and invade, had failed.
The greater part of the Armada, some 112 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’.24 Medina Sidonia instructed his captains to sail south-west 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.
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The king in all these months was in chronically poor health. Through January 1588 he was in and out of bed. Mateo Vázquez sent him flowers, which were put on his bedside table.25 He cut down on the amount of work. ‘I have here papers of several days but have been unable to look at them, I don't know if I shall be able to tonight.’26 When in February a quack wrote offering him some medicine, Philip retorted that he would take only what his own doctor – Dr Vallés – prescribed.27 ‘I am convalescing very slowly,’ he noted in March, ‘but I can't manage in the way I used to, and there is more work than ever.’28 ‘I have been extremely weak,’ he reported a week later. ‘I feel better, but I still have to walk with a stick.’29 He continued to move about, going out into the park of the Alcázar in Madrid, or visiting El Pardo to accompany Isabel on hunts.
But the pain would not go away. It prevented him thinking clearly about anything else. When asked for a decision on a matter, instead of replying he scribbled a note about his state: ‘I was better yesterday, but tonight when I got up I had a pain, which lasted two hours.’30 Mateo Vázquez tried to urge him on: ‘if Your Majesty could manage to call me sometimes, we could get through a great deal, and there is much need of it’.31
Early in April 1588 the royal family made their now regular visit to San Lorenzo to keep Holy Week. In May the king was well enough to make outings. They went fishing at Fresneda and hunting in the woods nearby. His relaxation ceased on the day the Armada put to sea. Daily processions and prayers were ordered in the Escorial for the expedition's success. In mid-June, when the Armada was at sea, he continued to excuse himself from paperwork. ‘I don't dare now to look at papers as long as this,’ he scribbled on one.32 ‘The poor health is having its effect,’ one of his secretaries commented to another.33
Waiting for news, the king was in a constant state of nerves. ‘If God sees fit to grant us success with the Armada, all my hope is that he will provide the remedy, if not it will be a very great reverse in every way; I really do not dare think about it.’34 On the feast of St Anne, 26 July, the date on which his forces had gained the naval victory of Terceira, his thoughts turned to his late wife again. She had helped then; she could help now. He ordered the prior of the Escorial to hold a solemn procession in honour of St Anne, which the monastery should repeat annually.35
In the council of State, ministers were fearful that the Turks would choose this moment to attack from the Mediterranean.36 There were, inevitably, erroneous reports about the Armada ships. In mid-August a letter from Bernardino de Mendoza, dated the seventh of the month from Rouen and announcing a victory, reached Madrid. ‘I hope it's true,’ commented Philip.37 He felt hopeful enough to write immediately to Catalina of ‘the news we received yesterday that my armada has defeated that of England’.38 But he refused to accept the news without confirmation.
More than anybody else, the king was aware that his country was facing fearful odds. From the very beginning he had premonitions of disaster. Early in 1588 he drafted in his own hand the text of an appeal which he hoped to address to the Cortes, meeting in April. It presented Spain's ‘darkest hour’, and appealed for sacrifice:
We must be fully armed and on guard and ready for whatever may happen. This obliges us to make heavy and unprecedented expenditure, or else leave everything to terrible disaster. Nothing less is at stake than the security of our seas and of America and of our fleets, and the security of our own homes. We can go forward only if the Cortes does something to help, for you know the state of the treasury.
Confirm to me the confidence that I have in such good subjects. Come forward with the speedy supplies that this moment demands, and discuss the matter with the attention and concern that I very much expect from your loyalty and love for God's service and my own.39
The same sense of peril haunts a written instruction to the head of Finance, Rodrigo Vázquez, in June. More money, he insisted, is the only solution: ‘without it the sailing of the armada is of little use … and we will lose all we have spent, and everything else besides’. Above all, there is
the great peril that we face if we do not impede what is very close to happening. And if it should happen, there will be no safety even in Madrid, though I expect that I shall not see it, because I shall have gone to carry out my duty.40
A week after this stoic declaration, the king was informed that a Carmelite nun in Valladolid had cried out ‘Victory! victory!’ during a trance. She also promised good news. Two weeks later she sent a written message of hope to the king. Philip scribbled on it: ‘Please God it be as this paper says. We shall soon know.’41
When the first reliable reports arrived in mid-August, their impact was profound. The messenger, on arriving at the Escorial, was received by Moura and Idiáquez.42 The former volunteered to break the news to the king. Philip was at his desk and broke off to ask if anything was known. Moura replied that the news of the Armada was bad. The messenger was brought in, and delivered his report to the silent king. Philip then said (according to one version), ‘I give thanks to God, whose generous hand has helped me with strength and troops, and will make it possible for me to raise another armada. It does not much matter if the flow of water is cut off, so long as its source is still running.’ He turned to his desk, and resumed writing. The same day he ordered 50,000 crowns to be assigned to the relief of the wounded, and ordered the churches to give thanks for the safe return of the survivors.
Moura was astonished at the king's resigned acceptance of the disaster. When an anxious Idiáquez asked him what Philip's reaction had been, he replied, ‘The king does
not make much of this mischance, nor do I.’ Philip's stoic response has since passed into the history books. It was a momentary exercise of self-control, but it was criticised by many courtiers, who disapproved of play-acting at such a grave moment.43 In reality, the king was deeply shocked. He got the first full report in a letter from Parma, dated 10 August, which arrived in Madrid on 31 August. ‘His Majesty has felt the blow more than you would believe,’ Idiáquez wrote back to Parma that same day. Three days later he wrote, ‘Although he felt the news very much at the beginning, he feels it more every day … It hurts him immensely that he failed to render a great service to God, after doing more than you could have asked or imagined.’44 Philip's private reflection was: ‘I hope that God has not permitted as much harm as some fear; everything has been done in his service, and we must not stop praying.’45 The fault was nobody's. In the draft of the king's next letter to Parma, a secretary referred to ‘the honour (reputación) of all, which is at stake’. Philip scored out the phrase and wrote in the margin: ‘see if you can remove this, since in the affairs of God it is not a question of losing or gaining honour’.46 The Venetian ambassador that week, observing the king closely, commented that he appeared to feel utterly alone.47
The full extent of the disaster took some time to sink in. Not until the third week of September did Medina Sidonia stagger into Santander with eight of his galleons. A further twenty-seven battered ships made it into other northern ports. Possibly sixty of the 130 vessels that had sailed out in May had made it home. But some 15,000 of the men on board had perished. The impact on Castilians was devastating. It was, commented a monk of the Escorial, ‘one of the most notable disasters ever to have happened in Spain and one to weep over all one's life … For many months there were only tears and laments throughout Spain.’48 That year the inquisitors in Madrid came into possession of an anonymous paper which may have been written after the bad news was known. The author, a priest, described a dream in which he was ‘walking through a city in ruins, without buildings because they were all demolished’. A voice addressed one of the figures in the dream: ‘You are no longer the shepherd … The good shepherd should be watching over and protecting his flock … How deceived we have been!’ Was the person addressed meant to be the king?49
In retrospect, little can be said to defend the enterprise of England. Neither the king nor anyone else was quite sure what it was meant to achieve. No concrete plans were ever drawn up, either military or political, on what was to be done should the invasion succeed. Those with most experience in war, namely Alba and Parma, always had doubts about it and opposed it. Forecasts of its failure which appeared in prophecies of the time very likely drew on a current of opinion circulating among members of the administration.
Those who always had doubts now spoke out. An officer in the Armada sent a report to Idiáquez, dated 20 August. ‘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.’50 There is good reason to support the traditional view of the Armada as the ‘supreme disaster of the reign’.51 It did not destroy Spain's capacity to launch new armadas or new armies. But it severely undermined the confidence of many Spaniards in the king. It gave rise to a new and oppressive cycle of taxation and state debt. It blocked the way permanently to a resolution of the Flanders problem through the removal of English interference. The imperialist triumphalism of the early 1580s, generated largely by the successful occupation of Portugal, now rapidly evaporated. To add to the government's problems, the wheat harvest in Castile in both 1588 and 1589 failed.
The king was ill and depressed. The gout continued its attacks: in late September, ‘I cannot write or even sign’.52 At court it was obvious to all that his outward equanimity was a cover. ‘Though he maintains the contrary, he is really deeply wounded,’ the Venetian ambassador observed.53 Philip's depression lasted for weeks, as he searched for solutions. ‘I am under great pressure with all this,’ he confided to Vázquez, ‘seeing how slow we are to find a solution and how the time moves on and how we need to be aware that our enemies do not sleep and are gaining on us. But all this is not so bad as seeing the slackness with which our people move, especially those in the committee of the Cortes, whose slackness I think affects everybody else.’54
Who was to blame? Medina Sidonia, a failure at the early age of thirty- nine, was seriously ill. Allowed to retire to his estates without coming to see the king, he was never blamed by Philip for the disaster. Parma also was absolved by Philip. But Spaniards, especially those who did not like to see their armies under the command of an Italian, were quick to criticise Parma.55 Months later, a leading Spanish noble, commenting on ‘the decay of our former military discipline’, observed that ‘the truth is that for some time our arms have been in decay … Since the school is in Flanders and the general is Italian, the arms of Italy will improve and those of Spain will decline.’56 Others, within the highest levels of government, blamed their own ministers. The veteran soldiers were merciless in their criticism. Alba's natural son Hernando de Toledo, now a councillor of state, complained in December 1589 to the Venetian ambassador that ‘things must go ill when all decisions are taken by the inexperienced’.57 His criticism was directed against Moura and Idiáquez. The first, he said, ‘has never been out of Spain, the other never in a campaign’.
Philip was not unaware that in these months there was much discontent at all levels. In his own administration there were senior officials who questioned his personal capacity. In August 1589 Vázquez pleaded with him to listen with attention to reports on the state of the finances, ‘and also to look at and think over what can and should be done to satisfy, conciliate and get together the ministers in Madrid and those over here, so that business can function to the satisfaction of everybody’.58 Philip played down the in-fighting. ‘Really,’ he replied, ‘I don't know why you say this is needed, nor do I know of differences between them nor why there should be any.’ To him, the conflicts may have appeared normal. He failed to see that criticisms which ministers made of each other were now in great measure being directed against himself.
In Portugal an ex-ambassador, Juan de Silva, count of Portalegre, lamented in 1589 that the English were landing troops without any opposition. In the early summer a considerable English fleet, commanded by Drake and Sir John Norris, ranged off the coasts of Galicia and Portugal, attacking at will, with destructive blows at Coruña, Vigo and the environs of Lisbon. Though the English achieved nothing substantial, Spaniards were indignant that the enemy could ravage their coasts with impunity. ‘I must confess that never in my life have I found myself so close to having to flee from danger,’ an angry Silva protested. Complaints poured into Madrid, but the authorities could do little. ‘And all of this is happening because our reputation is lame and broken, laid low by the defeat of the recent Armada.’59 A plan for another Armada was presented to the king in May 1589, but nothing came of it.60 In effective command of the narrow seas, enemy vessels succeeded in cutting off a good part of the vital naval supplies (masts, pitch) on which Spain depended. The Armada defeat threatened to initiate a rapid decline in Spanish shipping.61 The economic life of the northern coastline decayed. Only the great ports of Andalusia were unaffected, in part because English and Dutch merchants played an important role in the trade of Seville. When the king a few years later tried to control their activities,62 he was soon persuaded that Spanish interests would be the most hurt if he did so.
In his letters to a senior administrator in Madrid,63 Silva reflected the views of others who were serving the king:
I agree with everything you say in your last letter, and so would everyone who is disturbed by affairs and deplores what is happening. I have just one thing to add to confirm this view. A man of leisure, a thinker, told me that after examining in detail the actions of His Majesty since he came to the throne, one had to conclude that we cannot b
lame any of our reverses on bad luck or attribute any of our successes to diligence.64
In a biting criticism, he commented that ‘as for the attention that His Majesty pays to details of little consequence, we have agreed for years that it is lamentable that he wastes time in these things … His Majesty's head is capable of absorbing a vast quantity of business but does not distinguish between what he should reserve for himself and what he should entrust to others.’ The king's failure to distinguish between what was important and what was not, led him (Silva said) to make the wrong decisions. ‘As a result time and effort is spent in not taking measures which should be taken; and taking them when there is no time or money or reason; and making savings which cost three times more than is saved; and beginning late and therefore in haste, but because in haste beginning inadequately. Whoever doesn't see this is blind.’ Thanks to a failure of methods, the king put his trust only in miracles. ‘It seems that everybody agrees with this, for I see that all put their faith in miracles and supernatural solutions.’ The general mood of criticism was unmistakable. ‘For some time now opinion has been so clear-cut,’ Silva felt, ‘that nobody could mistake it.’65
After the long months of illness and disaster, Philip's health was slow to improve in 1589. In early February, ‘he rises at midday and sits in his wheelchair, as he cannot walk yet’.66 A week later he began walking with the help of a stick, but suffered relapses. He was less concerned for his own health than for that of his son. The prince fell seriously unwell late in February, but the king because of his own infirmities was unable to visit him for nearly a week. Not until April was Philip able to break out of this environment. ‘I've finally decided to make an outing to Aranjuez, it's nearly two years since I was last there.’67