The Confident Hope of a Miracle

by Neil Hanson

  The King had previously given him command of the forces defending the Andalusian coastline against pirates and corsairs, and the supervision of the transatlantic supply convoys to the New World. Medina-Sidonia had performed these largely administrative tasks with efficiency and Philip had already entrusted him with assembling the second fleet that would sail from Cadiz with supplies and reinforcements after the Armada had invaded England. Medina-Sidonia had also given Philip sagacious advice on a number of occasions, proposing the establishment of a permanent fleet to guard against English raids— “when that is known in England it will put a brake on them so that . . . its fleet dare not go far away”—and suggesting the use of a fleet of a dozen specially built gallizabras (fast, oared pinnaces) instead of the ponderous carracks and galleons used to transport the New World treasure to Spain. The gallizabras were only sixty tons in burthen and, if cornered, would have succumbed in minutes to the heavy armaments of English privateers, but they were fast enough to outrun even the swiftest English galleon. They brought the bullion through in safety and it flowed into Philip’s treasury in unprecedented and ever-increasing amounts throughout the later years of Elizabeth’s reign.

  Medina-Sidonia was also widely credited with having saved Cadiz from being sacked by Drake the previous year. The King had praised his conduct and the Venetian ambassador remarked that he was the only man not to dissolve into panic. But that aside, his military qualifications were far from outstanding and he had no experience whatsoever of naval warfare; indeed, he could not even put to sea without falling sick. Nor was he likely to be a forceful commander. His forebears were ferocious fighters who won the family estates on the field of battle—the family honorific El Bueno was accorded because of a Guzman’s value as an ally in conflict, not as a mark of his kindly disposition—but if the hollow, watery eyes and diffident, gloomy expression that look out from the only surviving portraits of the Seventh Duke may mislead a little, for they were painted in the later years of his life, the impression they convey cannot be wholly inaccurate.

  However, in Philip’s eyes at least, these defects were outweighed by several crucial advantages: Medina-Sidonia’s unimpeachable lineage gave him precedence over all the other nobles of the Armada fleet, ensuring that none could feel slighted by his promotion; “so many dukes, marquesses and earls, voluntarily going, would have repined [refused] to have been commanded by a man of less Quality than themselves.” Unlike Santa Cruz, he was also a devout, phlegmatic and mild personality, unlikely to lock horns with a headstrong commander such as Parma. His administrative abilities would bring some order to the chaos of the Armada preparations, and he was also hugely wealthy; despite his protestations of poverty, he was to contribute a vast sum towards the costs of the Armada, around a million pounds at twentyfirst-century prices.3

  Medina-Sidonia at once attempted to dissuade the King from his choice. “I have not the health for the sea, for I know by the small experience that I have had afloat that I soon become seasick . . . My family owes 900,000 ducats, and I am therefore quite unable to accept the command. I have not a single real to spend in the King’s service . . . The undertaking is so important that it would not be right for a person like myself, possessing no experience of seafaring or of war[,] to take charge of it. I cannot attempt a task of which I have no doubt I should give a bad account . . . and should have to be guided by others, of whose good or bad qualities I know nothing.” Medina-Sidonia instead recommended Don Martin de Padilla, a group commander at Lepanto and Captain General of the galleys of Spain, who had “great knowledge of the sea and has seen naval warfare and naval matters.” He was also “a very good Christian.”

  Medina-Sidonia’s protestations seem to have been genuine and not the ritual self-deprecation of a noble and self-effacing man, but the King rejected his plea out of hand, attributing it to “an excess of modesty . . . It is I who must judge of your capabilities and parts and I am fully satisfied . . . Prepare and steel yourself to the performance of this service in the manner I expect from you.” If anything, Medina-Sidonia’s self-effacement increased his value in the King’s eyes. Philip did not want another brilliant but temperamental military commander— another Parma or Santa Cruz—but a man who would follow his orders without question. As the instrument of God’s design, Philip had no need of earthly counsel; he alone would lay down the course that his commander was to follow without deviation.

  A year before Santa Cruz’s death, Medina-Sidonia had told Secretary Idiaquez that the Armada’s only prospect of success was if it was “very much superior” to the forces the English could range against it. He now wrote a further letter, arguing that the whole Enterprise of England was fatally flawed and whatever improvements he could make before sailing, the Armada would not be superior to the English fleet. His letter never reached Philip. His advisers, Idiaquez and Don Juan de Zuniga, took it upon themselves to withhold it from the King and berated Medina-Sidonia for writing in such negative terms about an enterprise so obviously blessed by God. They also added the threat that he would be exposed as a coward and lose his hard-won “reputation and opinion which today the world has of your valour and prudence, which would all be hazarded if it were known what you wrote.” Refused an audience with the King where he might have argued his case directly, Medina-Sidonia gave in to their blackmail and took up his post without further demur. 4

  Had Philip himself gone to Lisbon to take personal charge of the most complex, important and expensive project of his entire reign, he might have been able to resolve some of the problems that had faced the dying Santa Cruz and his unwilling successor. As it was, despite his insistence on overseeing even the tiniest details of the Enterprise of England, Philip remained in the Escorial, a fortnight’s hard ride for any courier travelling from Lisbon and then returning there after consulting the King. Such delays inevitably bred further problems.

  Medina-Sidonia arrived in Lisbon to find the Armada in something approaching chaos. Supplies were still being loaded, but mainly on the basis of the whims, seniority or nobility of the commanders rather than the needs of their ships, and Medina-Sidonia at once set himself the task of bringing order to this confusion. In a move that no doubt pleased his bureaucratic monarch, one of Medina-Sidonia’s first actions was to commandeer a printing press and produce printed forms to bear his orders with blank spaces for specific details to be added. The soldiers and seamen who had been ordered to remain on board their ships despite lacking proper provisions, armaments and even clothing were at once sent ashore and Medina-Sidonia then took stock of his fleet. Some merchantmen had already been converted to warships and the shipwrights were still at work on others, raising fore- and sterncastles, cutting additional gunports into their hulls and fitting the waistcloths or removable wooden screens pierced by firing slits that were used to hide musketeers and boarding troops in the waist of the ship from the sight of the enemy. Despite this work, there were few enough warships and most of them were either grossly overloaded or virtually empty. Some had almost no armaments, others so many that some of them could not even be deployed. Some had powder but no shot, others a mountain of cannonballs but no powder.

  After the shock of his initial inspection, the new Captain General devoted himself to preparing his fleet for sea. By an urgent appeal to the King, Medina-Sidonia succeeded in securing Santa Cruz’s plans and papers before his private secretary could remove them. He then put together a group of advisers, led by Don Diego Flores de Valdes and including two vastly experienced seamen, Don Diego de Maldonado and Captain Marolin de Juan, three squadron commanders, Don Pedro de Valdes, Don Miguel de Oquendo and Don Juan Martinez de Recalde, and an Italian expert on naval gunnery. The prime complaint of his commanders was that there were insufficient heavy guns. Even the royal galleons and galleasses were under-gunned, and most of the embargoed and requisitioned ships carried little ordnance beyond the guns that were on board them when they were seized, and those tended to be small, cast- or wrought-iron guns firing projec
tiles of no more than four pounds in weight. They might damage rigging or cause casualties at close range, but they were almost useless in an artillery duel.

  The existing weaponry and ordnance was redistributed, though if there was logic in the way it was done, it was artfully concealed. The greatest nobles still managed to obtain a disproportionate share on account of their rank, not their abilities or tactical requirements, and rather than concentrating the most powerful weapons in the warships that would bear the brunt of the fighting, the rest of the heavy guns seem to have been shared equally throughout the fleet. Allowances of powder and shot were also made on a pro-rata basis rather than being weighted towards the main fighting ships. Additional guns were sought but there were few available anywhere. Under Santa Cruz’s entreaties, the arsenal of Madrid had promised 36 new bronze cannon, demi-cannon, culverins and demi-culverins, and the Lisbon arsenal another 30, while a further 60 or 70 guns had been bought or impounded from foreign ships in Spanish harbours, though most of these were of modest size. Others were purchased or smuggled from abroad. The finest cannon came from the foundries of Venice, The Netherlands and England, but the master craftsmen of the Venetian Arsenal could not or would not meet the demand and, notionally at least, the export of English and Dutch cannon to Spain was prohibited by law. However, in such nations of smugglers, pirates and privateers, there were always those willing to seek the rich profits of contraband cargoes, whatever the national interest.

  Ralph Hogge, the Queen’s “gunstone maker and gunfounder of iron” and one of the first men in England to cast an iron gun, complained to Walsingham as early as 1574 about “the shipping and selling of ordnance and cast iron to strangers to carry over the seas, they say in such numbers that your enemy is better furnished with them than the ships of our own country are . . . under colour of carrying them along the coast they carry them where they wish.” No licence was required to move guns from port to port along the South Coast, and many ships loaded cannons from the Weald of Sussex and Kent that were ostensibly destined for delivery to Portsmouth or Plymouth and then sold them overseas, often to England’s bitter enemies.

  In January 1588 “two Spaniards in Flanders were asking for delivery of 20,000 crowns worth of iron ordnance” and during the two years before the Armada sailed, one Sussex iron founder sold over 100 cannons to Spain. Bristol merchants also supplied nine shiploads of culverins from foundries in the Forest of Dean, together with powder, muskets and shot, shipping them via Naples, even though all these items were in great demand in England. Either the guns smuggled to Spain commanded a high premium, or they knew that the Spaniards would pay for the guns in cash, whereas Elizabeth of England was notorious for her “forgetfulness” in matters of money. Guns of small calibre could also be legally exported and iron founders and smugglers showed great ingenuity in casting guns of small enough calibre to meet the regulations, but with such hugely thick barrels that foreign purchasers could then safely drill out the bore to a much greater calibre.5

  These smuggled weapons, and the ordnance transferred from captured prizes, even including a huge and unwieldy Turkish siege cannon taken at the battle of Lepanto, were but a fraction of the Armada’s requirements. Medina-Sidonia made desperate efforts to obtain still more large cannons and culverins, but the few he found were well below the number his commanders had hoped for. When the fleets came to face each other in the Channel, the Armada still had only 21 culverins and 151 demi-culverins, against the 153 culverins and 344 demi-culverins of the English fleet. Despite the efforts to obtain more heavy guns, only Miguel de Oquendo and Pedro de Valdes seemed to be fully aware of how comprehensively outgunned the Armada would be, and even then Oquendo chose to augment his ship’s weaponry with short-barrelled, heavy-shotted weapons that could only be used at close range.

  Attempts to obtain more cannons were also hampered by shortages of iron and copper, and a “great shortage of craftsmen” such as foundrymen, blacksmiths and metal polishers. As a result, production was even slower and more expensive; there were complaints that guns produced in Lisbon cost two-thirds more and took twice as long to make as those manufactured in Malaga, and had numerous faults. Guns hastily turned out by the Spanish and Portuguese foundries were often so poorly manufactured, with the bore cast off-centre or the metal flawed, that they were more dangerous to their crews than to their targets; a number exploded when fired. “Some of their pieces (and not a few) are bored awry . . . some are crooked . . . other of unequal bores . . . or full of honeycombs and flaws . . . [They] will either break, split, or blowingly spring their metals and (besides that mischief they do) will be utterly unserviceable ever after.” Spanish iron was often of poor quality, riddled with impurities, excess carbon and iron oxides, and so lacking in strength that the flukes of anchors often sheered off under the stress of weather. To speed production, foundries were also cooling newly cast cannonballs in water, making them brittle and prone to disintegration when fired. Yet despite all the efforts to buy or manufacture new ordnance, well under 5 per cent of the guns carried by Armada ships were newly manufactured.

  Even when guns and shot functioned properly, there were no side scales to aid accuracy of fire and the variations in the bore of weapons and the weight and diameter of the cannonballs they used caused chaos—the Señora del Rosario alone was carrying seventeen different calibres of shot—and rendered even the most experienced gunner incapable of predicting whether his next round would hit the target, overshoot or fall short. The pound weight in Milan or Naples was lighter than the one used in Spain and, with no standard calibre or measure, the individual variations in ordnance and munitions from different regions and countries caused massive problems to the quartermasters of the Armada. Many cannonballs were the wrong size for the guns they had been issued to feed and gunners were forced to carry a set of wooden calibrating rings to ensure that the shot they had been allocated would fit the muzzle of their weapons. Even so, shot was often an inch or an inch and a half less in diameter than the bore of the cannon. It ricocheted its way down the barrel and left the mouth of the gun at differing angles, making accurate gunnery as much luck as science. There was also little incentive for a gunner to practise his skills. “The cannon was held by the Spaniards to be an ignoble arm; well enough for the beginning of the fray, and to pass away the time till the moment of engaging hand to hand, that is of boarding. Actuated by such notions, the gunners were recommended to aim high, so as to dismantle [dismast] the enemy and prevent his escape; but as a vertical stick is a difficult thing to hit, the result was that shot were expended harmlessly in the sea or, at best, made some holes in the sails, or cut a few ropes of no great consequence.”6

  Medina-Sidonia had more success in locating supplies of gunpowder, and the amount carried by the fleet had almost doubled since Santa Cruz’s death. Virtually all of it was fine-corned musket powder, 20 per cent more powerful than the “cannon corn” or “serpentine” powder formerly used for cannon; however, given the brittle nature of Spanish iron and the poor casting of many guns, this was not necessarily an advantage. The new cannons had been tested only with serpentine powder and the additional explosive force of the higher grade of powder was enough to cause some poorly cast guns to shatter when fired, with disastrous consequences for the gun-crews. Medina-Sidonia had also managed to obtain more shot; there were fifty cannonballs for each gun, compared to the thirty per gun that the King’s Captain-General of Artillery had specified, but it was still not enough. The Armada’s most experienced military commander, Don Francisco de Bobadilla, the Maestre Campo General (senior army general), later claimed to have made the prophetic complaint that “there was great scarcity of cannon balls . . . if the enemy did not allow us to board them and if the artillery fight lasted four days what might [we] do on the fifth day if we carried so few rounds?” Greater supplies of pikes, half-pikes, armoured morions, corselets, muskets, arquebuses and calivers had also been obtained. The muskets, so long and cumbersome that the weight of the four-f
oot barrel had to be supported on a long U-shaped rest propped against the deck, fired a ball of about 40 grams. The lighter arquebuses and calivers, braced against the firer’s chest or shoulder, delivered a ball of one-third that weight.

  The attempt to requisition all these mountains of equipment for the Armada had created desperate shortages of almost every warlike supply. One Spaniard complained that “there is no musket left in the whole of Spain,” and Spanish agents scoured Europe for gunpowder, cannonballs, helmets, breastplates, guns, pitch, ropes, sails, cables and every kind of foodstuff, but the greatest weakness of the fleet remained provisions. In January Elizabeth had “advices from Lisbon that the victuals there had gone bad,” and the information proved to be correct. The supplies of salt-fish, salt-meat and ship’s biscuit packed the previous October and held in readiness over the winter often proved to be inedible, either through sharp practice by the victuallers, faults in the store-barrels or overlong storage before use. Although the Armada remained miraculously free of an epidemic of ship’s fever, the long periods on board during the winter months, subsisting on a poor diet, had steadily depleted the crews; many more took any chance to desert. Peasants could be impressed from the surrounding area to replace the losses—“they commanded 2000 Portingals [Portuguese] to go aboard upon pain of death”—but the shortage of trained seamen and gunners was growing more and more acute. Three more gunners were lost— two killed and one mutilated—when another of the poorly cast cannons exploded while being test-fired.7

  Over the course of three months, Medina-Sidonia had brought some order to the chaos of preparations. By the end of April the worst of the Armada ships had been repaired and most had been careened and tallowed. The fleet had also grown greatly in size, with 134 ships instead of the 104 that Santa Cruz had mustered, in eight broad classes, including twenty galleons, four galleys and four giant galleasses of Naples. Philip had also been persuaded to detach the eight first-line galleons of the “Indian Guard” from their normal duties of escorting the flota and patrolling the sea lanes between Spain and the Spanish Main, and they appeared at the end of March from Cadiz. The galleons of Portugal were older and less well built but still formidable, and the renamed San Francisco embargoed from the Duke of Tuscany was the strongest and most powerful ship in the Armada. The front-line fighting ships were divided into three squadrons: the galleons of Portugal and the galleons of Castile, with ten great ships in each squadron, and the four galleasses of Naples. The second line comprised four squadrons, again of ten ships each: the Biscayans, the Guipuzcoans (from the province surrounding San Sebastian), the Andalusians and the Levant squadron of ships from Ragusa, Genoa, Sicily, Venice and Barcelona. Many of them were large and heavily armed merchantmen converted into floating fortresses; the Levant ships were mainly grain carriers. Their sheer size and the numbers of heavy weapons and fighting troops they carried led Spanish optimists to believe they would provide a decisive advantage in close-quarter combat.