by Neil Hanson
Hawkins and the other senior commanders—Francis Drake, Thomas Howard, Thomas Fenner, the Earl of Cumberland, Edmund Sheffield and Edward Hoby—all joined the Lord Admiral in putting their signatures to a resolution agreeing “to follow and pursue the Spanish fleet until we have cleared our own coast and brought the Firth [of Forth] west of us; and then to return back again, as well to revictual our ships, which stand in extreme scarcity, as also to guard and defend our own coast at home; with further protestation that if our wants of victuals and munitions were supplied, we would pursue them to the furthest that they durst have gone.”9
As the rest of the fleet tracked the Armada northwards, Seymour’s squadron was once more detached and sent back to the Downs—the sea area between the East Kent coast and the Goodwin Sands—to maintain a patrol in case Parma might even yet put to sea with his invasion force. Feeling he had earned the right to see the battle through to its conclusion, Seymour made furious complaints at Howard’s apparent determination to keep the glory and the prizes to himself. “His Lordship was altogether desirous at the first to have me strengthen him, so having done the uttermost of my good will (to the venture of my life) in prosecuting the distressing of the Spaniards . . . I find my Lord jealous and loth to have me take part of the honour that the rest is to win.”
His protests were to no avail. The captured second-in-command of the San Lorenzo had suggested that Spanish aims might yet be achieved “if they could but draw our fleet to the northward . . . whereby without impeachment, the Duke of Parma’s men might land here.” Vigilance had to be maintained against this threat and, whether through greed, ignorance or mistrust of his allies, Howard continued to insist that “there is not a Hollander or a Zeelander at sea,” despite the Dutch blockade of the coast and the alacrity with which they had seized the grounded San Mateo and San Felipe. Seymour’s ships were ordered to delay their departure until nightfall so that they could “bear away in the twilight, [so] the enemy might not see our departing,” but the deceit was unsuccessful, for Medina-Sidonia recorded that “this night Juan Acles [the name by which the Spaniards knew John Hawkins, still erroneously thought to be in charge of the Squadron of the Narrow Seas] turned back with his squadron.”10
Meanwhile, a council of war aboard the San Martin was taking stock of the Armada’s dismal condition. The great ships had taken such a battering and lost so many men that fighting and even sailing some of them was difficult, if not impossible. Some were also very short of powder and shot, though it was by no means a universal complaint; many Armada ships still had large stores of unused munitions on board, a reflection not only of the difficulties in reloading the great guns during combat, but also of the illogical distribution of powder and shot and the often-voiced grievance that a handful of ships had borne the brunt of the fighting while others kept aloof. Despite the condition of their ships and men, the spirit of their commanders apparently remained unbroken. “When the Duke had explained the state of the Armada and the lack of shot . . . he wished them to say whether it were best to turn back to the English Channel or to return to Spain by the North Sea, seeing that the Duke of Parma had not sent word that he was ready to come out.”
Despite the astonishment of some officers that Parma had neither used warships to try to breach the Dutch blockade—even at the risk of their destruction—nor tried to send out to the Armada whatever forces he had ready, they voted without a single dissenting voice that if the wind changed they would return to the attack and either seize an English port where they could reprovision and repair their ships, or fight their way back into the straits for a final attempt at a rendezvous with Parma. However, if the wind remained in the south-west for four more days, they agreed that they would have no option but to take the long route home around the north of Scotland. It was a daunting prospect. “We should have to sail . . . 750 leagues through stormy seas almost unknown to us before we could reach Corunna,” and supplies would then be so short that their crews would come close to starvation before they could hope to reach Spain.
So Medina-Sidonia’s official diary reported his council’s judgement, but Recalde had a different recollection. He claimed that he had argued fervently that honour required them to return at once to the attack but had been overruled and the decision to return to Spain made there and then without conditions. He was also writing a report that would in due course be put before the King and so, like the others who spoke at the council of war, he sought to put the best possible gloss on his actions. They knew that their opinions and arguments would be recorded and that they would have to answer for them to Philip. In those circumstances it is unsurprising that none was willing to be publicly identified with the decision to flee for home. For the moment at least, the disagreement was academic, for the wind stayed in the same quarter for three days and the Armada was driven further and further from the Channel. Appalled and humiliated by the defeat of the Armada, Medina-Sidonia, “being frightened and dismayed,” took to his cabin and left Diego Flores de Valdes and Don Francisco de Bobadilla in command. “Besides the ill success he [Medina-Sidonia] always had with the enemy . . . he had been told that the two galleons, San Mateo and San Felipe, had been destroyed and sunk, and almost all hands drowned. For this reason the Duke kept himself in his cabin.”11
Over that day and the next, the Spanish ships held on to the north, “pursuing their course with a strong wind from the south-west and a high sea.” For the most part, the English fleet was content simply to track them, knowing that each northward mile made the prospect of the Armada’s return to the Channel more remote, but as the wind eased a little towards the evening of Wednesday 10 August the English ships “came on under all sail towards our rear,” hoping to isolate one or two of the stragglers and seize a prize. Medina-Sidonia—or Flores de Valdes—at once struck his topsails and fired three signal guns, ordering the fleet to lie to and await the enemy. Many of the Armada ships continued to bear away northward, but the sight of “the galleasses of the rearguard and as many as twelve of our [the Armada’s] best ships” apparently inviting a further battle was enough to deter Howard’s fleet from pursuing its attack. They also “shortened sail without shooting of ordnance,” and the game of bluff and counter-bluff having produced no decisive result, the two fleets resumed their northward course.
However, more than half of the Armada had ignored the signal to lie to and await the enemy, and as soon as the danger from the English fleet had been averted a summary court martial was held aboard the San Martin. Medina-Sidonia may or may not have been presiding in person—one of the condemned men claimed he remained incommunicado in his cabin, leaving de Valdes and de Bobadilla to pass sentence— but after it had been determined that the order had been deliberately disobeyed, twenty captains were sentenced to death. One of them, Don Cristobal de Avila, a neighbour of Medina-Sidonia’s at San Lucar in Jerez, was at once hanged at the yardarm of a pinnace “with insult and cruelty, although he was a gentleman.” The dangling body was then paraded around the fleet as a warning to the others. The remaining nineteen captains were removed from their commands and “condemned to the galleys . . . reducing some soldier-officers [to the ranks].” Another captain, Francisco de Cuellar of the Don Pedro, was also sentenced to death but after his furious protests, citing the casualties his ship had suffered as proof of his service where the action had been hottest, he was placed aboard the Lavia, the vice-flagship of the Levant squadron, in the custody of the Judge Advocate General, Martin de Aranda. Believing that de Cuellar had “served His Majesty as a good soldier,” de Aranda refused to carry out the sentence of death without a direct order to do so from Medina-Sidonia, and since that was not forthcoming de Cuellar remained alive.12
The feints and counter-feints of the two fleets were repeated towards sunset of the following day, Thursday 11 August, once more without shots being fired, and they again sailed on to the north, the English a couple of miles in trail and keeping slightly to shoreward of the Armada, ready to prevent any Spani
sh attempt to make landfall or capture a port. Yarmouth, Hull, Newcastle and Berwick had already been left astern, but Howard still expected that the Spanish ships “would put into the Firth [of Forth], where his Lordship had devised stratagems to make an end of them,” but about noon of Friday 12 August the Armada crossed the mouth of the Firth, still sailing north.
Several of the English captains, including Thomas Fenner, were now convinced that the only thoughts of Medina-Sidonia and his commanders were of flight for home. “I verily believe great extremity shall force them if they behold England in sight again. By all that I can gather they were weakened of eight of their best sorts of shipping, which contained many men, as also many wasted in sickness and slaughter, their masts and sails much spoiled, their pinnaces and boats, many cast off and wasted, wherein they shall find great wants when they come to land and water, which they must do shortly or die.” Fenner also prophesied the fate that the Spaniards would meet. “I verily believe they will pass about Scotland and Ireland to draw themselves home; wherein, the season of the year considered with the long course they have to run, and their sundry distresses and—of necessity—the spending of time by watering, winter will so come on as it will be to their great ruin . . . Mine opinion is they are by this time so distressed . . . as many of them will never see Spain again.”13
Howard was also sure that Medina-Sidonia had no intention of taking a port in England or Scotland but he remained worried that, resupplied and reprovisioned, the Armada might yet return to the attack. “I think they dare not return [to Spain] with this dishonour and shame to their King and overthrow of their Pope’s credit. Sir, sure bind, sure find. A kingdom is a great wager.” However, the English fleet’s own supplies were almost exhausted, for they had received virtually no food, water or beer since the fleet sailed from Plymouth and, more ominous still, ship’s fever—typhus—was now ravaging the fleet. With a north-west wind to speed them home, Howard gave up the pursuit on Saturday 13 August, “for the safety of men’s lives and shipping,” leaving only “a pinnace of Her Majesty’s, the Advice, and a fine caravel of my own [Drake]” to “dog the fleet until they should be past the Isles of Scotland [the Orkneys and Shetlands].” Howard intended to take his fleet into the Firth of Forth to replenish victuals and put the most sick men ashore, “but the wind coming contrary . . . the Lord Admiral altered his course and returned back again for England with his whole army.” The power of the Queen of England, Mendoza later observed, “may be easily gauged by this: that her fleet was in Plymouth on 30th July, and yet on 12th August it was obliged to return to port to victual.”
Had the Armada commanders been serious about returning to the Channel to make the rendezvous with Parma, this would have been their chance; the English fleet turning for home and a north-westerly wind to speed them south again. But no voice, not even that of the sick and dying old warhorse Recalde, was raised to propose this, and the Armada sailed steadily on to the north, as close to the wind as was possible for those cumbersome galleons and hulks. It was a humiliating retreat, with all thoughts of invasion abandoned. “God be praised, the enemy had never power to land so much as one man upon any territory of ours.” The “sea giant . . . having not so much as fired a cottage of ours at land, nor taken a cockboat of ours at sea, wandered through the wilderness of the northern seas,” never to return. 14
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Rags Which Yet Remain
When the Spanish commanders saw the English fleet at last abandon its pursuit and disappear below the horizon, they were able to pause and take stock of the Armada. Seven front-line great ships had been lost, either captured, sunk or grounded. None of the others had escaped unscathed and some were so badly damaged that they were floundering in the North Sea swell, barely able to make headway. On every ship, men laboured day and night at the pumps. Each pump could raise from four to twelve gallons a minute, depending on the number of men at the levers, but that was barely enough to keep pace with the water spurting into the holds as the damaged hulls twisted and flexed in the heavy ocean swell. The San Martin itself was riddled with holes, including a huge one just above the waterline blasted at close range by an English heavy gun. Despite the best efforts of divers and carpenters to patch the holes, the flagship continued to ship water at an alarming rate.
The timbers of the San Marcos were in even worse condition, so holed and sprung that the captain was forced to pass three massive cables right under her keel. Secured to each of her masts, the cables bound the ship together for fear that otherwise it would simply fall apart. The San Juan was also badly holed and leaking, and unable to hoist sail on her mainmast, which had been struck by two cannonballs during the fighting. The ships of the Levant squadron, battered both by battle and by seas far heavier than those they had been built to face, were floundering badly and dropping further and further behind even the snail’s pace that the rest of the fleet was able to make. Many of the hulks were also wallowing in the Armada’s wake.
The lack of supplies was equally critical and grew even more so when a Hamburg barque sank almost without warning. Its crew was saved but its precious stores went to the bottom. With virtually no opportunity to replenish their food and water, other than a modest amount of fish they obtained from some Dutch and Scottish fishing boats that crossed the Armada’s path, the remaining stores had to be conserved. Rice stored aboard the San Salvador was divided among those capable of sending boats to receive their share, and Medina-Sidonia ordered every man in the fleet, without distinction of birth or rank, to be issued with a daily ration of eight ounces of biscuit, half a pint of wine and a pint of water—nothing more. Even with this miserable allowance, there was water for only three or at most four more weeks.
The Armada was so short of water that all the hundreds of animals that would have served the invasion force were thrown overboard. They “cast out all their horses and mules into the sea” and left them to drown. While saving the water that they would have drunk made every sense, the chronic shortage of food made it astonishing that they were not at least butchered for meat. The terrified horses swam to keep pace with the lumbering ships for a while, but then gradually dropped astern. After the Armada had disappeared over the horizon, the crew of a fishing boat sailing through those waters reported the extraordinary sight of a sea devoid of ships but black with horses and mules, their eyes bulging and their tongues protruding, still locked in a desperate struggle to stay afloat, until one by one they slipped beneath the waves for the last time.
The morale of the Armada’s officers and men alike had collapsed. A few ships, like de Leiva’s Rata Encoronada, maintained at least a semblance of discipline, keeping the watches, manning the pumps, and making what light they could of their hardships and shortages, but others fell easy prey to despair. Hunger, thirst, wounds and disease, incessant labour, the bludgeoning of the winds and seas and the numbing cold and damp of the fog-shrouded, rain-sodden days, combined with the knowledge that the great enterprise had ended in humiliation, reduced many in each ship’s complement to a sullen indifference to their fate. Others railed at the perceived failings of their commanders and their comrades, and the always simmering hostility between landsmen and seamen, soldier and sailor, erupted in taunts, insults and brawls.
At the council of war that Saturday, 13 August, not one Spanish captain was willing even to continue to pay lip service to the idea of returning to the Channel in an attempt to unite with Parma. De Leiva argued that the Armada should make for Norway to take on water and supplies and Diego Flores urged a landing in Ireland, but, supported by the remainder of his commanders, Medina-Sidonia instead proposed that they sail on around the north of Scotland and Ireland and, when there was searoom enough, set a direct course for Corunna. A unanimous vote, saving only Recalde, who lay dying in his bunk, confirmed the decision. It was a journey of over two thousand miles “through stormy seas almost unknown to us,” and Medina-Sidonia stressed that the Armada should keep well to the west of the Irish coast. �
��Take great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland, for fear of the harm that may happen to you upon that coast.” The danger was not only from the rocks, reefs and shoals that littered the coast but also from the English forces stationed in Ireland.1
Divers and carpenters had laboured without cease to repair the worst of the battle damage, but as the Armada struggled on, holding its course a little to the east of north, with rising seas, fog and driving squalls of rain making it harder and harder to keep the fleet together, ships continued to disappear. Few of the captains had any charts of these northern coasts, sun-sights were impossible by day and the Pole Star was hidden by fog and cloud at night. Whenever the Armada was within sight of the rocky coasts of the mainland or the islands, men watched its progress from the clifftops. Some were loyal to Catholic lords such as Morton, Bruce and Huntly, still with fervent hopes that a Spanish landing might inspire a rising among their countrymen; others were Protestants, reporting at some remove to James VI in Edinburgh or to Elizabeth in London; some were clan chieftains musing on the uses to which Spanish soldiers could be put in pursuit of their endless feuds with rival clans; and still others were poor crofters, fishermen, wreckers and pirates, assessing the chances of spoil to augment their meagre harvest from the land and sea. Some of these at least were not disappointed in their hopes.
On Sunday 14 August, “there arose a great storm, which continued forty hours.” Three Levant carracks, trailing far behind the Armada and wallowing ever deeper in the water, turned aside in an attempt to reach a coast, any coast, no matter how hostile, but they had left it too late; none of them was ever seen again. Three days later, during the night of 17 August, a fierce squall again blew up. By dawn the next morning the Trinidad Valencera; the Gran Grifon, the flagship of the hulks; and two ships of its squadron, the Barque of Hamburg and the Castillo Negro, had disappeared. None would survive.