by Neil Hanson
Parma had certainly made considerable preparations for the invasion, including the construction of defensive fortifications made from wooden beams and bristling with pikes, and portable bridges built from barrels and spars to bridge the Medway on the advance through Kent. He had even obtained bundles of faggots that were to be issued to each man as crude shields for their firing positions when the invasion force first went ashore. He did not add a word, though he must have been tempted to do so, about the impossibility of maintaining such a huge force in constant readiness to embark on an Enterprise that had been heralded and then postponed over and over again during the preceding twelve months. He had wasted an entire campaigning season in The Netherlands waiting for the Armada to arrive; had he used his invasion troops against the Dutch instead, the rebellion might have been as good as over. Even now, it must have occurred to him that if the invasion did not take place, his Army of Flanders, augmented by the 6,000 soldiers that the Armada carried as reinforcements for his invasion troops, would be powerful enough to complete the stalled reconquest of The Netherlands.
Having sent his dispatch to Philip, Parma made haste to move from Bruges to Dunkirk and commence the rapid embarkation of his troops, but whether that was in realistic expectation of sailing or merely to safeguard himself against the kingly wrath that would follow a failure of the Enterprise of England was known only to Parma and his conscience. He always insisted that “my statement that we needed no more than three days to embark and be ready to sail forth was not made without justification. On the evening of the 8th I arrived at Nieuport where the embarkation of the men was so forward as to be practically completed, 16,000 troops having been shipped that day,” and at Dunkirk he “found the men on the quay and everything ready so by that evening matters would be completed there also.” It was a view not shared by another correspondent of the King, who, while careful not to criticize Parma, claimed that “the day on which we came to embark we found the vessels still unfinished, not a pound of cannon on board and nothing to eat. This was not because the Duke of Parma failed to use every possible effort . . . but because both the seamen and those who had to carry out the details openly and undisguisedly directed their energies not to serve His Majesty, for that is not their aim, but to waste his substance and lengthen the duration of the war, besides which the common people threw obstacles in the way.” Whichever version of events was true, the embarkation was in any event a pointless exercise, for a gale was blowing offshore, whipping the sea into waves that would have sunk the barges as soon as they had crossed the harbour bar, and the battle in the Channel had already taken a decisive turn.10
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Hell-burners
Early on the morning of Sunday 7 August, Englishmen took Communion aboard their ships, while Mass was celebrated aboard those of the Armada. At the conclusion of his prayers, Howard at once signalled another council of war. Whatever previous communication problems there may have been between Parma and Medina-Sidonia, Howard had to assume that they were now in frequent contact, and it was evident that Medina-Sidonia intended to remain at anchor until the invasion force was embarked. Howard could only guess when that would be, for he had no intelligence on the strength of Parma’s forces or the state of his preparations. Parma was only “one tide away” from England, and the spring tide at Dunkirk would allow the great ships of the Armada to approach nearer to the shore than at any other time to embark troops or provide an armed escort for Parma’s barges. The urgency of Howard’s deliberations with his commanders was also heightened by the dangers of their precarious anchorage. The previous evening, “there did drive aboard my Lord’s ship, Her Majesty’s ship, the Bear, and three others, who were all tangled together, so as there was some hurt done by breaking of yards and spoil of tackle, but a great favour of God showed that it had not made a destruction of many [of ] our ships.”
Medina-Sidonia also had ample proof of the strength of the tides that his pilots and Gourdan had warned him about. During the night the spring tide had run so strongly that most of the Armada ships had had to drop a second anchor to enable them to hold station. They were still in great danger of dragging their anchors in the soft, shifting sands and running aground on the Calais shore, and their pilots counselled a constant watch on the Armada. The watch should also have been extended to the men, for “at dusk the previous evening, the master and pilot of the hulk San Pedro el Menor deserted to the enemy’s fleet.” Once more, seeing his fleet’s hopelessly exposed position and the haven of Calais harbour so close, a more decisive commander than Medina-Sidonia might have forced the issue and given Gourdan an ultimatum: to allow the Armada to enter or be attacked. The mere threat might have been enough to allow Gourdan a face-saving surrender, and if not, even with the guns of the castle his town could not long have resisted an assault by the Armada’s troops. Torn by civil war, France was in little condition to exact reprisals on Spain for this breach of her borders, and with the capture of the harbour Medina-Sidonia would have had a port in which Parma’s soldiers—a two-day march away by land—could have embarked for the crossing to England. The harbour then was much too small for the whole fleet to have entered, but screened by the warships, the hulks and armed merchantmen could have taken the troops on board with ease and safety, and Howard’s ships could only have maintained their blockade at the risk of leaving themselves exposed to the dangers of the lee shore. However, there is no sign that such a course of action ever occurred to Medina-Sidonia—it was not in his instructions from Philip, after all—and any such considerations were soon to be rendered academic.
As the Armada rode the swell beneath the Calais cliffs that morning, Philip sat down at his desk in the Escorial to compose a letter to Medina-Sidonia. Had the Duke ever received the dispatch, it might have provoked even that mild man to an outburst of rage, for Philip was now advocating the very thing that he had previously been at such pains to forbid: “taking one of the enemy’s ports where the Armada may refit. I think well to . . . impress on you how important it would be for you to enter and make yourself safe in the Thames itself. The season is so far advanced that this course seems to be necessary.” But even as a courier was riding out of the Escorial, the English were taking steps to put the Thames beyond Medina-Sidonia’s reach. At their meeting that morning, Howard and his commanders had resolved to use fireships to break up the Armada and drive it from its anchorage. They would then isolate and attack individual ships or groups and push them towards the threatening shoals and sandbars littering the coast and stretching as much as fifteen miles out to sea from Gravelines to beyond the Scheldt estuary. The dangers had been increased still further by the Dutch, who had demolished or taken up all the marker posts, buoys and other navigation points that might have helped pilots unfamiliar with those treacherous waters.1
One of Seymour’s newly arrived captains, Sir Henry Palmer, was at once dispatched in a pinnace to Dover to collect ships loaded with brushwood, pitch and combustible materials. Nineteen such ships had already been prepared there at the orders of Sir Francis Walsingham but, impatient for action and fearing the consequences of the delay while awaiting Palmer’s return, Howard and his commanders decided to use the spring tide and the freshening wind to make the attack that very night. Drake may have been one of the prime movers in this change of plan, for it was typical of his boldness and impetuosity, and he was the first to offer one of his own vessels, the Thomas, a 200-ton merchantman, as a fireship. John Hawkins matched the offer and a further six ships were assembled from within the fleet, the least of which was 90 tons burthen and the majority between 140 and 200 tons, far heavier than the normal fireships, making it correspondingly difficult for Spanish defenders in longboats to divert them from their course. The offer of their ships was not necessarily a disinterested one; the use of fireships was a standard practice and compensation was routinely paid. The compensation could often exceed the true value of an old, sea-worn ship near the end of its useful life: “There were seven or
eight ships fired by my Lord Admiral’s appointment for the removing of the Spanish fleet out of the Calais road, for which the owners demand £5,000.”
A Cornishman, Captain Prouse, and John Young, an old Devonian countryman of Drake’s who had been serving at sea since the time of Mary Tudor, were put in charge of preparing the fireships. During that Sunday afternoon, all eight were tethered in line abreast at the downwind edge of the English fleet and stripped of their stores, though one owner, Henry Whyte, claimed that he had been ruined by volunteering the use of his craft, “the Bark Talbot. I rest like one that had his house burnt and one of these days I must come to your Honour for a commission to go a-begging.”
All the sails, spars and riggings were kept in place, for the fireships would be sent downwind under full sail. Nor were the guns removed; instead they were double-shotted and “loaded to the mouth with bullets, old iron, and every sort of destructive implement that could be collected” in the hope that their detonations as the flames reached them would create fresh panic and damage within the Armada. Prouse and Young “dressed them with a wild-fire, pitch, and resin and filled them full of brimstone and some other matter fit for fire.” Everything from the masts and rigging to the deck timbers and rails was coated with pitch, and tar barrels were also lashed to the bows. A dozen men were detailed to crew each fireship, hauling the sails, holding them to their course and, at the last minute, as they approached the Armada’s defensive screen, igniting fires to engulf them. 2
In his precarious anchorage downwind of the English fleet and hemmed in by a lee shore, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia was well aware of the danger. He and his men had all heard tales of the “hell-burners of Antwerp” that had been used three years previously against the great bridge built by Parma to block the Scheldt below the city. One and a half miles long, protected by siege-gun batteries, armed blockhouses and a bullet-proof palisade stretching from shore to shore, and with a central floating section of barges linked by massive chains, the bridge had appeared impregnable, but the Spaniards had reckoned without the ingenuity of an Italian engineer named Federico Giambelli. He converted two 70-ton ships—the Hope and the Fortune—and lined their holds with walls of dressed stone and brick. Within each of these floating stone keeps he placed 7,000 pounds of gunpowder, shot, chains, shards of broken iron and angular rocks, then roofed them with timbers fire-proofed with lead sheet and overlaid with paving stones and old gravestones. The decks above were piled with wood. The triggers for these floating hell-burners were clock-operated flintlocks supplied by an Antwerp watchmaker. At a pre-set time a lever would engage, starting a steel wheel grinding against a flint surrounded by a charge of priming powder.
On 4 April 1585, two normal fireships were lit and sent downstream towards the bridge. Spanish soldiers in barges easily caught and steered them aside to burn out harmlessly against the banks, but while they were thus engaged, the Hope and the Fortune were set alight and loosed on the current and they swept past and crashed into the bridge. The defenders leaped aboard to extinguish the flames and cut the slow fuses they found leading from the deck. As more Spanish troops crowded around to examine their smouldering but apparently defused prizes, the bombs detonated with a blast that was heard over fifty miles away. The shock wave blew Parma, watching nearby, off his feet, and the blast killed 800 Spaniards, raining down shrapnel and flaming debris for a mile around.
Giambelli was now known to be working for Queen Elizabeth in England. In fact he was attempting—unsuccessfully—to construct a boom to protect the Thames at Gravesend, but the Spaniards had no way of knowing that. Coupled with the unease already spreading through the fleet as rumours circulated about the state of Parma’s preparations, the mere suggestion that hell-burners might be set loose among them was enough to fill many with terror. Their fears appeared to be confirmed on the Sunday afternoon, when the Armada’s lookouts saw more vessels joining the English fleet. They were actually supply ships bringing food, water, powder and shot, but the Spaniards feared that these might indeed be the dreaded hell-burners. An air of foreboding settled over the Armada. The English had daily demonstrated the superior speed, handling and gunnery of their ships, and the knowledge of how the Rosario and the San Salvador had been abandoned to their fate, and their presence here on a lee shore, with the English fleet upwind and able to attack at will or release fireships on the flood tide, conspired to undermine Spanish morale. The soldiers and crews had been recruited or conscripted from a dozen different nations and many saw no reason to risk their lives in a hopeless cause for a foreign ruler. A few men had already gone over the side, either swimming ashore, bribing the supply boats to ferry them, or deserting to the English. If the tide of battle continued to run against the Armada, there might soon be many more.
During the remaining hours of daylight, Medina-Sidonia urged all his commanders to refill their ships’ water casks and obtain whatever provisions they could. He also made further vain attempts to secure more cannonballs and sent another succession of messages to Parma, still harbouring hopes that Parma would provide him with the fast, light boats that might enable him to outmanoeuvre and destroy the English fleet, and urging him to greater speed: “I therefore beg you to hasten your coming out before the spring tides end.” Meanwhile he made what preparations he could to defend the Armada against a fireship attack. Captain Antonio Serrano, the commander of the forecastle of the San Martin and a man of proven courage and competence, was sent upwind with a screen of pinnaces and ships’ boats equipped with grapnels to catch and pull aside any fireships drifting towards the fleet. Medina-Sidonia sent a message to every vessel in the Armada, warning that such an attack was expected. Only if the screen failed and their boats could not divert the fireships were his captains to slip and buoy their cables and put out to sea, leaving the fireships to drift ashore on the current. At first light they would then pick up their cables and regain their former anchorage.
During the afternoon a pinnace ventured out of the English fleet, and with an insouciance that must have driven the watching Spanish officers to fury mingled with despair, it circled the San Martin and loosed off four shots from its bow and stern chasers before returning to the English fleet. Only Hugo de Moncada’s galleass, the San Lorenzo, managed to fire in reply, and that was but two shots, one of which missed. The other passed through the pinnace’s topsail but caused no other damage. It may have been another English taunt, but with the fireship attack pending it is more likely that the pinnace’s officers were gathering further intelligence on the Armada’s disposition and state of preparedness.
Lord Howard called a further council with his senior commanders that evening, laying down the tactics that they would follow at dawn, providing the fireships had done their work. The San Martin and the strongest Spanish galleons and galleasses would be attacked in succession by the squadrons of Howard, Drake, Seymour, Frobisher and Hawkins. If the great ships could be crippled or destroyed, the rest of the Armada would then be forced to surrender or be hunted to destruction. The commanders dispersed to their own ships, summoned their men to prayer and spoke of the coming battle and the fate of their families, homes and country if it should be lost. Then all moved to their stations, the gunners stacking cartridges of powder and mounds of shot, soaking blankets and filling the butts with water, the captains studying their charts and the surgeons laying out their instruments. Those charged with readying the fireships made their final preparations, then all was vigilant silence as they waited for darkness and the turn of the tide.
The early watches of the evening passed without incident, as the wind freshened a little and cloud often obscured the moon. The strengthening tide set the Armada ships straining against their cables but there was no sign of any danger until the stroke of midnight, when the English skeleton crews cut the cables tethering the fireships and they began to move downwind in darkness and silence, gathering speed as they advanced. The tide, now at the flood, was running towards shore at around three knots and the wind was
almost dead astern. It took ten minutes at most for the fireships to reach the Armada. Handfuls of men crouched in the holds and around the decks of each ship, holding flints or lengths of smouldering match, while each helmsman aligned his ship with the heart of the Armada and then lashed the helm to hold it to its course. At first the Spanish lookouts straining their eyes towards the point where the massed English ships formed a dark, spiked outline against the night sky may not have glimpsed the shapes separating from the main body of the fleet. Then they saw sparks in the night and flickers of flame, and within moments pillars of fire were rising from all eight ships. As the flames took hold with a roar, the helmsmen and the crews who had ignited the fires scrambled into dinghies towed behind the fireships or threw themselves into the sea to be rescued by waiting boats. They had done their work with such skill and bravery that Howard gave them £5 to share among themselves.
The Spanish lookouts screamed the alarm as the fireships, “with sail set, and fair wind and tide . . . all burning fiercely,” bore down on the Armada, sweeping on under full sail, their outlines etched in red against the night sky as fires raked them from stem to stern, climbing the tarred ropes of the rigging and beginning to devour the sails. Still gaining speed as they rode the incoming tide, they advanced in what seemed to the Spaniards a perfectly straight line, as tight and disciplined as the Armada in manoeuvre. Black against the fierce glow of the flames, Serrano’s pinnaces and small boats moved to their task within sight and gunshot of the English fleet, but the fireships were sizeable vessels. It required great skill and timing to get grapnels aboard and divert them from their course, and they worked “fearing that they should be explosion-machines” that at any moment might detonate, scattering flames and burning debris to engulf their own craft and shrapnel to shred their bodies.3