The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  Hawkins returned to England in a battered, leaking ship crewed by just fifteen men—eighty-five starved to death on the voyage home— and his brother at once applied for redress from Philip’s treasure. In fact Lord Burghley had already taken steps to seize it, sending orders to the Vice-Admiral of Devon, Arthur Champernoune, “under colour of friendship . . . use all policy to acquire the treasure for the Queen.” Champernoune, who had three privateers at sea himself, was only too happy to oblige: “Anything taken from that wicked nation is both necessary and profitable.” The bullion, supplied by Genoese bankers, was brought ashore “for greater safety.” Elizabeth then ordered it to be transferred to the Tower of London under the feeble pretext that the money remained the property of Genoa, not Spain, until it was landed in Flanders. English property in Spain and The Netherlands was embargoed in retaliation; Elizabeth countered by embargoing Spanish ships in English ports, and from that moment legitimate trade between the countries entered a steep decline.

  Soon afterwards Philip wrote to Alba demanding a plan to “damage” Elizabeth sufficiently to force her, at the least, to seek an accommodation with him. He also claimed a higher motive: “God has already granted by my intervention and my hand that kingdom has previously been restored to the Catholic church once,” at the time of his marriage to Mary Tudor. He now proposed to restore Catholicism a second time. In furtherance of this, he gave Alba a letter of credit for 300,000 ducats to provide arms and money for those seeking Elizabeth’s overthrow. Philip was content to rely on God to remove the “many inconveniences and difficulties” such a plan would entail, but, in a reply bordering on insubordination, Alba remarked that “since He normally works through the resources He gives to humans, it seems necessary to examine what human resources would be needed.”9

  Philip first used the phrase “the Enterprise of England” about the Ridolfi Plot against Elizabeth in 1571. Elizabeth was to be assassinated during her annual summer “progress” and the Duke of Alba would at once invade with part of the Army of Flanders to place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Even if the assassination did not take place, Philip insisted that Alba was still to invade. Once more God was to make up for any deficiencies in the plan or the force assembled: “I have such confidence that God our Lord, to whose service it is dedicated . . . will guide and direct it.” But his confidence was misplaced; the plot was exposed and the invasion never took place.

  In the face of these Spanish-backed threats to her throne, Elizabeth encouraged the activities of English privateers against Spanish shipping and possessions in the New World, from which she often profited handsomely. As relations deteriorated, Philip expelled Elizabeth’s ambassador to Spain, Dr. John Man, after he described the Pope as a “canting little monk,” though it may have been as much in retaliation for English privateering. Elizabeth was also persuaded to be less discreet in her support of Dutch and Huguenot rebels, causing Philip in turn to accelerate his plans for the Enterprise of England. In 1575 he began to assemble an armada of over 200 ships at Santander, but epidemics decimated the crews and delays in provisioning caused many of the ships to disperse. Only thirty-eight ships, many of them of modest size, eventually set out for Dunkirk. Five ran aground on the shoals there, three were driven back to Spain by storms, and the remainder, under the joint commanders Juan Martinez de Recalde and Don Pedro de Valdes, were forced to shelter in the Solent before fleeing for home.

  A planned invasion of Ireland in 1578 was also aborted, but the following July, infuriated by the “notorious” activities of Sir John “Black Jack” Norris and his English volunteers against Spanish troops in the Low Countries, Philip backed a fresh enterprise, seeking to establish a bridgehead in Ireland from which the eventual invasion of England could take place. The preparations were noted by an English spy, Thomas Cely, who sent Elizabeth warnings of “great store of fireworks made, great store of scaling ladders, great provision of yokes to draw ordnance by mules and horses, and terrible cannons and many, with all other provision for war.” A small armada led by an exiled Irishman, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, funded and blessed by Pope Gregory XIII but equipped and organized by Spain, duly landed at Smerwick in County Kerry and established a base, the Castello del Oro (the Golden Fort). In 1580 Philip answered their appeals for reinforcements by sending another 800 to 1,000 Italian and Spanish troops in a fleet commanded by Juan Martinez de Recalde, but the hoped-for wholesale Irish uprising never occurred, and a squadron of English ships led by Sir William Wynter used their cannons to pound the Golden Fort into ruins. The defenders surrendered on the promise of fair treatment; all but fifteen were then killed in cold blood. Sir Walter Ralegh “helped in the slaughter.” For the second time Juan Martinez de Recalde had been involved in the failure of an armada from Spain. It was not to be the last.10

  If the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was the catalyst for the launching of the Armada, Philip’s annexation of Portugal in 1580 had been the essential prerequisite. His nephew, King Sebastian of Portugal, had died in 1578 while fighting the Moors in a campaign in which Philip fatefully refused to come to his aid, having already agreed to a secret treaty with the ruler of Fez, Abd-el-Malek. Some even suggested that Philip had connived at his nephew’s death, since it furthered his own territorial ambitions. Sebastian’s successor, his ailing great-uncle, Cardinal Henry, was the last legitimate male in the line of Portuguese succession and after his death, Philip, son of a Portuguese princess, claimed the throne. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia led a force to occupy the Algarve, while the commander of Philip’s navy, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, launched an amphibious attack on Lisbon, in concert with a thrust by the main army led by the Duke of Alba. There was little organized resistance to Philip’s troops, who plundered, raped and slaughtered as they advanced on a scale that made the infamies of the blood-drenched Army of Flanders pale into insignificance, and left even the notorious Alba complaining that the indiscipline and atrocities were “such that I never imagined I would see them, nor that soldiers were capable of them.” His second-in-command reported that “I have hanged or beheaded many of them on a scale I never did in my life.”

  The Portuguese capital, site of the finest and most strongly defended harbour in Europe, fell on 25 August 1580, leaving the colony of the Azores, 1,000 miles into the Atlantic, as the only remaining centre of Portuguese resistance, led by Dom Antonio of Crato, an illegitimate nephew of the former king. The following year, a first assault led by Don Pedro de Valdes on Salga on the island of Terceira was a humiliating failure. A Portuguese priest cajoled the islanders into stampeding herds of wild bulls towards the invaders, and as the Spaniards turned and ran they were cut apart by the guns of the defenders. Only 60 out of 600 men survived.

  In 1582, Santa Cruz led a much stronger armada of 60 ships and 8,000 men to the attack. Dom Antonio’s fleet, commanded by Filippo Strozzi, a former officer in the French Guards, was larger and more heavily armed, including over 40 French ships and eleven English privateers. On 26 July the two fleets met in the naval battle of Villa Franca. The cannon of Strozzi’s fleet inflicted serious damage on the Spanish flagship, the San Martin, and several of the other vessels, but Strozzi’s “ill-judged and suicidal manoeuvre” of closing with Santa Cruz’s fleet played into Spanish hands, since their preferred tactics were to engage the enemy at close range, and grapple and board them at the first opportunity. Santa Cruz captured the enemy flagship and Strozzi was killed along with thousands of his men. Seeing the battle lost, the English privateers shook out their sails and departed, leaving their allies to their fate. It was a cold, commercial calculation; the hopes of prizes and trading or territorial concessions having evaporated, there was no profit—in any sense—in the English ships remaining to share in the inevitable defeat. But seeing his vaunted enemies cutting and running, Santa Cruz was moved to assure Philip that he would take on the whole might of the English navy at the King’s command, and the flight of the English ships also had a strong influence on Philip’s advisers.
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  The following spring, Santa Cruz assembled a huge amphibious force of 100 ships and 15,000 men to complete the destruction of Dom Antonio’s last redoubt, the island fortress of Terceira. Using his galleys as seaborne gun platforms, Santa Cruz landed his invasion force in barges and, after bloody fighting, they overran the Portuguese defences. Dom Antonio survived and fled, but his cause was lost. Spanish officers crowed, “Now that we have all of Portugal, England is ours.” The annexation of Portugal had delivered the Lisbon dockyards, arms foundries and the great Atlantic fleet of royal galleons into Philip’s hands. These fighting ships had been the defenders of Portuguese trade and possessions in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, defeating the Turks in the east and repelling Spanish, French and English attempts to break the Portuguese monopoly of African and Brazilian trade. Several of them were reaching the end of their lives but, combined with Spain’s own Indian Guard, Philip felt that he now had a fleet of galleons to match those of Elizabeth.

  Honoured by Philip with the title Captain General of the Ocean Seas, Alvaro de Bazan, first Marquis of Santa Cruz, Knight of Santiago, Mayor for life of Gibraltar and one of the heroes of the great battle of Lepanto against the Turks, where he had commanded the Spanish reserve fleet and, by committing them at a crucial moment, had helped to swing the battle in Spain’s favour, added even more lustre to his reputation with the victory at Terceira. His father had also been Captain General of the Spanish fleet and Santa Cruz had spent his life at sea, seeing his first action off Galicia when he was just sixteen. More than forty years had passed since then, but the ageing Santa Cruz remained Spain’s foremost admiral. The amphibious landing at Terceira was almost a dress rehearsal for an invasion of the English coast, and in the wake of his victory Philip asked his advisers to prepare summaries of the potential means of conquering England and the record of success of previous invasions.

  An exiled English Jesuit, Robert Parsons, obliged him with a catalogue that included the conquest by Julius Caesar in 55 B.C. and the Norman invasion of A.D. 1066. The Tudor era had begun with another invasion. On 7 August 1483, Henry VII, a man “without money, without power, without reputation, and without right,” led his army of 3,000 French, Breton and Scots troops ashore at Milford Haven, and on to eventual victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field. The Pretender Perkin Warbeck twice made landings with foreign troops, the French burned Brighton in 1514 and Seaford in 1545, there were other invasion scares in 1539 and 1545, and the Scots had also invaded in 1497, 1513 and 1542. “Sixteen times England has been invaded. Twice only the native race have repelled the attacking force. They have been defeated on every other occasion and with a cause so holy and just as ours, we need not fear to fail.” In his enthusiasm, Parsons may have been guilty of exaggeration, but there were certainly precedents enough. Far from being an impregnable island fortress, England had proved remarkably easy to invade; ten seaborne invasions had been at least partially successful.12

  The combined merchant fleet of Spain and Portugal was by far the largest in the world—the great majority of all trans-oceanic trade was conducted by their vessels—and Philip could also draw on several fleets of galleys, but when asked for his estimate of the forces needed for the Enterprise of England, Santa Cruz warned, “If we fall to considering the difficulties of the task, nothing will be done . . . It will be necessary to mobilise and to concentrate in the English Channel, the whole naval power of Your Majesty’s dominions, together with land forces.” In all he required over 500 ships: 150 great ships, including armed merchantmen and every available galleon, 40 galleys and six galleasses—huge hybrids four times the size and weight of galleys, and regarded as the equal of five of them in battle. They carried the sails and armaments of ocean-going galleons in addition to 25 to 30 oars per side, each manned by five to eight convicts, slaves or buenaboya—“volunteer” oarsmen, press-ganged into service and chained to their oars just like the rest. There would also be 40 hulks (cargo ships) to carry the expedition’s munitions and stores, 80 auxiliary craft including fast pinnaces to carry despatches, scout ahead of the main fleet and maintain picket lines, and 240 landing craft, carried to England on the decks of the transport ships. This vast armada was to be crewed by 30,000 seamen and would carry 64,000 fighting troops, allowing for the loss of 10,000 men to disease, desertions and battlefield casualties. The provisions would include 373,337 hundredweight of biscuits, 22,800 of bacon, 21,500 of cheese, 23,200 barrels of tunny fish, 16,040 of salt-beef, 11,200 of vinegar, a quarter of a million gallons of water and 46,800 of wine. He estimated the total cost of equipping, arming, provisioning and maintaining this expeditionary force over a period of eight months at almost four million ducats.13

  Santa Cruz was a vastly experienced and battle-hardened commander and his estimate of his requirements was no doubt a shrewd one, but such a fleet would have emptied Spain’s Atlantic and Mediterranean ports of almost every available craft and the cost would have drained the Royal Treasury dry. A plan proposed by Philip’s other great military strategist, the Duke of Parma, Captain General of the Army of Flanders, was altogether more modest in scale and cost. He insisted that the operation should be self-sustaining without assuming any initial involvement or support from English Catholics, and saw that the twin foreign threats to the enterprise—the intervention of the Dutch or French—must be neutralized in advance. But, given favourable conditions, he believed that just 30,000 infantry and a company of horsemen could bring England to its knees, and that the invasion force could be shipped across the Channel in flat-bottomed barges in the course of a single night. In 1513 Henry VIII’s armada of 300 ships had crossed from Dover to Calais to invade France in just three hours. Under cover of darkness, with favourable winds and a spring tide to carry them, Parma’s forces could certainly cross from Dunkirk and Nieuport to Kent in one night. A mere 25 great ships, Parma estimated, would be enough to safeguard them as they crossed the Channel. With the element of surprise they could establish a strong bridgehead before the English even knew they were there. A thousand men would be left to fortify and hold the beachhead; the rest would march on London.

  Forced to defend hundreds of miles of coastline, the English would be unable to mass troops quickly enough to repulse a determined thrust by the invaders. The countryside through which they would pass was easy for infantry to negotiate and rich and fertile enough to yield plentiful supplies of food to foraging parties, and Parma expected his forces to have taken the capital in no more than eight days. Having seized London and captured the Queen or forced her to flee, he would await the Catholic risings in the north and in Ireland that would inevitably follow, to help cement his victory. However, more than 700 barges would be required to transport this invasion force and such a vast concentration of ships and men could scarcely escape the notice of Elizabeth’s agents in The Netherlands, depriving him of the crucial element of surprise. In that event 25 ships would be completely inadequate to protect the invasion force from English attacks. Philip himself wrote “Nonsense!” in the margin of Parma’s letter.

  Philip had only ever experienced battle once. It unnerved him sufficiently never to repeat the experience, but an absolute ruler of thirty years’ standing did not lack confidence in his own abilities, even in areas in which he possessed minimal expertise. From the plans of his two commanders he produced a synthesis of his own. An armada commanded by Santa Cruz would set sail from Spain carrying a siege train and several thousand fighting troops. Strong enough to hold off the English navy, it would be far larger than the fleet of 25 ships that Parma had envisaged, but much smaller than the 500-ship fleet that Santa Cruz had originally specified. The necessary prelude to the invasion of England would be a diversionary landing on the coast of Ireland or west Wales, drawing off much of Elizabeth’s land forces and naval strength, before striking the decisive blow. Parma’s forces, reinforced by fresh troops from Italy, would assemble on the Flanders coast in their invasion barges and the Armada would then escort them across the Channel
. If the English fleet sought a battle, Santa Cruz would give them one, but his main instruction was simply to protect the landing force. The experience of the battle for the Azores had taught Philip the dangers of naval battles; Santa Cruz had triumphed over Strozzi’s fleet, but his own ships had been so damaged in the process that a further year had elapsed before he was able to complete the task of taking Terceira. That experience was crucial in shaping Philip’s determination that the Armada should be a purely defensive formation, holding the English fleet at bay while the invasion force was convoyed to England.

  Once the English coast was reached, the tactics of Terceira would be repeated, albeit on a much larger scale. The shallow-draught galleys and galleasses would act as mobile firing platforms, reducing coastal defences and laying down covering fire under which the landing barges could come safely to shore and the invasion forces and their siege train be unloaded. The troops remaining in Flanders would also be reinforced to prevent adventures by the Dutch and to stop the French from using the moment of Spanish weakness while Parma’s main force was occupied overseas to seize the southern territories of Flanders that they had long coveted. The Armada would remain offshore to secure Parma’s supply lines until Elizabeth had been overthrown. The original plan was that she would be replaced by Mary, Queen of Scots, with a suitably pliant Catholic consort to ensure that her ties with the French did not lead her astray—Parma was suggested as one possible partner. Should the battle against Elizabeth’s forces prove inconclusive, the Spanish troops were to fortify and hold their positions until concessions had been exacted from her.

  On 29 December 1585 Philip began drawing up plans and collating intelligence on the state of English defences, and on 2 April 1586 he authorized Santa Cruz to begin assembling an armada in Lisbon. Don Juan Martinez de Recalde, the veteran of two previous failed armadas, was to form a northern squadron based in the Cantabrian port of Santander, while the Duke of Medina-Sidonia was to assemble troops and supply vessels in Cadiz and the other Andalusian ports. Medina-Sidonia and Santa Cruz had collaborated during the annexation of Portugal in 1580 but they had barely been on speaking terms since then, and the Venetian ambassador remarked that Medina-Sidonia’s presence in the Armada was “incompatible with that of the Marquis of Santa Cruz.”