by Neil Hanson
The few ships to have escaped the coasts were “now departed for Spain, where, if they arrive not soon, they will die of famine. Her Majesty has great cause to praise God, that has so miraculously delivered her most malicious enemies into her hands without loss of her subjects, and broken the bond between them and this people, so that their hope from Spain is now gone . . . There is no rebellion in the whole realm, so much terror prevails.” Bingham also showed a sharp awareness of the quickest way to his monarch’s affections. “Thus God be praised, was all the province quickly rid of those distressed enemies and the service done and ended without any other forces than the garrison bands or yet any extraordinary charge to Your Majesty.” “Touching the ordnance and other munitions lost here, all diligence shall be used to save as much as may for Her Majesty’s use,” though, as elsewhere, looting had already reduced the value of the potential haul. “Treasure and great wealth has been taken no doubt . . . by unworthy persons.” Fitzwilliam issued orders that “Whereas . . . much treasure [is] cast away, now subject to the spoil of the country people, but also great store of ordnance, munitions, armours, and other goods of several kinds, which ought to be preserved for and to the use of Her Majesty . . . we authorise you to make inquiry by all good means, both by oaths and otherwise; to take all hulls of ships, stores, treasure, etc., into your hands; and to apprehend and execute all Spaniards found there, of what quality soever. Torture may be used in prosecuting this inquiry.”
Fitzwilliam was still displaying his chilling determination to complete the wholesale slaughter of survivors to the last man. “God has fought by shipwrecks, savages and famine for Her Majesty against these proud Spaniards.” “There cannot be gone above 300 of all the men which landed, neither have they now any one vessel left to carry the rest away; and since it has pleased God, by his hand, upon the rocks to drown the greater and better sort of them, I will, with his favour, be his soldier for the despatching of those ‘rags’ which yet remain.” “This sanguinary man” then made his own tour of the coastal provinces, inspecting the corpses and debris still littering Streedagh Strand and ordering the chieftains to “give hostages, disperse their forces, deliver up all the Spaniards and Portuguese to whom they had given refuge, pay fines and make amends for all spoils which they had taken. Fitzwilliam, while he remained in town [Galway], caused several of the Spaniards delivered up on this occasion to be beheaded near St. Augustin’s monastery on the hill amidst the murmurs and lamentations of the people . . . Their dead bodies were carefully wrapped in fine linen by the townswomen and committed to burial . . . Having thus wreaked his vengeance on these unfortunate men, he departed for Dublin.” His victims were buried in the grounds of the Augustinian Friary just outside the town walls.14
Transcripts of the interrogations of those few Spaniards made prisoner in Ireland were forwarded to London, but their reliability was suspect. The prisoners were “common seamen” without any knowledge of the strategies of their officers and their King, and “they were half-dead with cold and hunger and half-mad with terror, expecting that death which fell on most of them, and ready to say anything which they thought might be pleasant to their captors.” The chief translator, David Gwynn, was also prone to lies and wild exaggerations, as his account of his own escape from the galleys accompanying the Armada confirmed. He was later arrested for his “lewd and undutiful behaviour” in claiming that in Spain he had been shown a letter from Walsingham stating that “he was wholly for them and he would deliver Her Majesty’s person into their hands.” That accusation alone was sufficient to ensure a painful death, but he also stood accused of “embezzling, impairing and concealing of such chains, gold and money as he took from the Spanish prisoners at Tredagh, to the value of £160.”
A handful of Armada ships had also come to grief on the coast of Scotland and the Western Isles. The San Juan de Sicilia ran aground at Tobermory Bay on the island of Mull. The local clan chieftain, Lachlan MacLean of Duart, allowed them to make repairs and take on supplies in return for using some of the Spanish soldiers as unpaid mercenaries in his feud with another clan. Elizabeth could not afford to have a force of armed Spaniards loose in Scotland, where dissident Catholic lords were ever ready to conspire and rise in rebellion against her, and after an interval of several weeks one of Walsingham’s agents, John Smollett, succeeded in infiltrating the merchants provisioning the ship. On 18 November he laid a fuse to the powder store. “The great ship which lay in the West Isles [was] blown in the air by device of John Smollett,” killing most of its crew of over 300 and sending the ship to the bottom of Tobermory Bay.
The Gran Grifon, under Juan Gomez de Medina, was leaking so badly both from the English gunfire and the strains on her hull imposed by the recoil of her own armament that she could be kept afloat only by keeping the wind and waves at her stern and manning the pumps day and night. Driven far back to the north-east and battered by gales and storm seas, the crew eventually gave up the struggle and left the ship to sink. “Truly our one thought was that our lives were ended, and each of us reconciled himself to God as well as he could, and prepared for the long journey of death. To have forced that ship any more would only have ended it and our lives the sooner, so we gave up trying. The poor soldiers too, who had worked incessantly at the pumps and buckets, lost heart and let the waters rise.” But soon afterwards they spotted Fair Isle dead ahead and, regaining their will to live, they steered towards it and wrecked on the rocks of Stroms Hellier on 27 September 1588. Seven men died, but most of the crew of 280 managed to scramble ashore, taking with them from the wreck only the pay-chest. At first the islanders, seventeen families of crofters described as “dirty savages” by the Spaniards, sold them food in exchange for gold, but Fair Isle could barely support its existing population, let alone these castaways. A further fifty men died over the following seven weeks and were buried in a place forever after known as Spanniarts’ Graves. Many perished from their privations but some were murdered and thrown over the cliffs.
The remainder were eventually rescued by a Scottish boat and taken first to Shetland and then to the mainland, where they came ashore at Anstruther “not to give mercy, but to ask.” The commander, Juan Gomez de Medina, “grey-haired and very humble like,” forgot his pride and honour sufficiently to prostrate himself before the assembled local gentlemen. The Laird allowed them to come ashore, but de Medina and a handful of priests and expatriates who were certain to be executed if they fell into the hands of Elizabeth’s men then escaped in a small barque. Despite being wrecked off Cape St. Vincent, they eventually made their way home. De Medina at once repaid some of the debt he owed to his rescuers by freeing the crew of an impounded Scottish ship.15
Another thirty Spaniards staged an equally remarkable escape, overpowering the crew of the pinnace taking them from Ireland to Chester and sailing it to Corunna, but the most astonishing escape story—if it is to be believed—was that of Francisco de Cuellar, captain of the San Pedro . Condemned to be hanged for disobeying orders as the Armada fled through the North Sea, he was reprieved and transferred to the Lavia, one of the three ships wrecked on Streedagh Strand. He helped his saviour, the Judge Advocate General, Martin de Aranda, onto “a scuttle-board from the wreck” but then saw him washed away by a breaker and drowned, “calling upon God,” dragged down by the weight of gold coins sewed into the lining of his coat. Thrown ashore by the pounding surf, de Cuellar crawled up the beach, dragging his injured, bleeding leg, and hid among the reeds and sand dunes as his fellows were robbed, stripped and killed. He sought shelter in the roof-less stone ruins of Staad Abbey—despite its name, little more than a chapel—and found twelve of his countrymen had been hanged from “the iron grilles of the church . . . by act of the Lutheran English who went about searching for us, to make an end of all who had escaped from the perils of the sea.” He was stripped of his clothes and his valuables, beaten with staves by Irish peasants and slashed with a knife by an English soldier, but he was not killed and, dressed in “som
e bracken leaves and a piece of old matting,” eventually reached the house of a friendly chieftain, O’Rourke. There he met nineteen other survivors and together they set out for a Spanish ship that had put in on the nearby coast. Hampered by his injured leg, de Cuellar was the only one not to reach the ship before it sailed, to his good fortune, since it was driven back onto the coast by a storm and all on board were drowned or captured and executed by the English.
De Cuellar next fell into the hands of an Irish blacksmith who treated him as slave labour until forced to release him on the intercession of the local priest, and he then joined eight other Spaniards at a castle belonging to another Irish chieftain, set in the middle of a lake, and reached by a secret, winding causeway hidden below the surface of the water. There, or so de Cuellar claimed, they successfully resisted an English expeditionary force of several hundred men while the Irish all fled into the mountains. “Dreadful storms and heavy falls of snow” forced the English to withdraw but the Irish chieftain was so enamoured of his prisoners’ martial prowess that he showed no sign of ever being willing to let them go. De Cuellar and four of his countrymen then escaped in the dead of night and, after many further adventures, he eventually found a boat willing to take him to Scotland, even surviving as his ship almost foundered during its crossing of the Irish Sea. He later had yet another remarkable escape when he sailed for Flanders with other Spanish survivors. De Cuellar’s tale has been accepted at face value by every historian, and it is a vivid and often moving account, yet one is forced to wonder if the incessant catalogue of disasters, near misses and miraculous escapes that he recounts can really all have happened to one person in so short a compass of time. Parts must undoubtedly be true, but de Cuellar would not be the first raconteur to embellish a story a little with each retelling, and the fact that every woman under forty that he met appears to have been a dazzling beauty should alone be enough to sound warning bells.
Despite Fitzwilliam’s zeal, perhaps as many as 1,000 Spaniards escaped the English dragnet, going to ground in the wild and remote regions where Elizabeth’s writ barely ran. Some were later killed or captured but several hundred reached Scotland with the help of Irish rebel chieftains, who aided them out of hatred for the English, self-interest or common humanity. Some were given safe conduct to France aboard Scottish ships, but the men de Medina had left behind, joined by Francisco de Cuellar and 300 survivors from two ships wrecked on the Norwegian coast, were much less fortunate.
In August 1589, they were among 600 Spaniards ransomed through the largesse of the Duke of Parma, who paid five ducats for every one of his countrymen brought to Flanders. They were being carried there by four Scottish ships under a safe conduct signed by Elizabeth, but she had informed the Dutch Sea Beggars and their fleet was waiting in ambush. One ship was captured at sea and every man aboard tossed over the side to his death. The remaining ships were driven aground and many more of the Spaniards slaughtered. Once more Francisco de Cuellar was one of the few to survive. He saw “before our eyes the Dutch making a thousand pieces of 270 Spaniards . . . without leaving more than three alive.” Parma took swift and brutal revenge. “They are now being paid out as more than 400 Dutchmen who have been taken since then have been beheaded.”16
In Ireland, even Fitzwilliam’s appetite for slaughter was eventually sated and on 25 January 1589 he issued a formal pardon to all Spaniards still in hiding. Many must have doubted the word of the butcher of their countrymen, but some at least of those who gave themselves up or were handed over to the English authorities were treated with mercy and sent by way of England to Parma in Flanders, who had paid their ransoms. Some remained there, fighting for Parma’s army in the Low Countries, others were eventually restored to their homeland, but still others had stayed in Ireland, becoming retainers of rebel chieftains such as O’Rourke, Sorley Boy Macdonnell and Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The following spring, twenty-four of them were reported to be training O’Rourke’s kerne (foot soldiers) and some later took part in a terrible revenge for the killing of their countrymen, joining in a massacre of 500 of the Lord Deputy’s English troops. Eight of those wrecked on Streedagh Strand were still in the service of O’Neill and Macdonnell in October 1596, when they wrote to Philip seeking money “the better to serve Your Majesty here as guides, interpreters and otherwise as will be needful when the Spanish force lands.” A few Spaniards also chose to remain in Scotland, where they “sparkled abroad in noblemen’s houses, choosing rather to lead a serving man’s life at ease in this country than to follow the wars in Flanders in want and danger.”
The persistent claim that Spanish survivors fathered many children in Ireland whose descendants can be recognized to this day is one of many Armada myths. The dark eyes and hair of many Irishmen are attributable more to Celtic than Spanish blood, and those few who are of genuine Spanish descent are more likely to owe their ancestry to the centuries of trade between the two countries and the presence from medieval times to the present day of a large Spanish fishing fleet off the west coast of Ireland than to the amorous exploits of the battle-shocked, half-starved and half-drowned survivors of Armada shipwrecks.17
Other Armada survivors were imprisoned in England and most fared little better than their fellows in Ireland and Scotland. Captured English traitors faced an inevitably cruel regime. There were two Englishmen on board Pedro de Valdes’ ship when it surrendered to Drake. One of them, Tristram Winslade, was imprisoned in Newgate. “Their Lordships’ pleasure is that he be conveyed to the Tower . . . for the examination of the said Winslade upon the rack, using torture to him at their pleasure.” Even under the torments of the rack he maintained his innocence of the charge of treason, and managed to convince his interrogators that “he was brought hither against his will.” He was later released and at once fled England for Spain, where he was given a pension by Philip in recognition of his “having endured much suffering,” suggesting that even with the rack to aid them his interrogators had been fooled.
The survivors of the San Pedro el Mayor were captured after the ship went aground in Devon, though many of the local populace would have preferred to see them killed outright. The local clerk to the council passed on its “pleasure for the deferring of the execution” of the Spanish noblemen pending an assessment of their value at ransom, but requested a decision “touching . . . of the rest as soon as your Lordships shall think convenient, for avoiding of the charge of their diet.” The decision of the Privy Council would not have pleased him, since he was told to keep them alive and, even worse, the costs of feeding them were transferred from the Crown to the county on the ingenious grounds that, since the ship was endeavouring to return home when it was wrecked, its men were merely shipwrecked mariners rather than prisoners of war. As many of the Spaniards were also “greatly diseased,” they were “conveyed to certain barns and outhouses standing apart from other tenements and dwelling places” to avoid the contagion’s being passed to the inhabitants. The Spanish Barn in the grounds of Torre Abbey served as a temporary prison for many Spaniards; the sick were treated at two “leper houses” at Bodmin and Plympton.18
Securing the valuables from captured ships was as urgent a priority for Elizabeth and her ministers as minimizing the cost of keeping prisoners, but the Sheriff of Devon, George Cary, bemoaned his inability to achieve either aim in his county, complaining of “the great pilfering and spoils that the country people made” from the Rosario. “There is such havoc made thereof that I am ashamed to write what spoils I see . . . and though I have written to Sir John Gilbert to know what is become of the wines I left in his custody, yet I can receive no direct answer from him, but this I know by others, that all the best wines are gone” and “the tackle of the ship so spoiled by his negligent looking unto that 200 pound in ropes and other necessaries will not suffice to set her to the seas again.”
Cary also complained that Gilbert, having demanded fourpence a day to feed each prisoner in his charge, but “being unwilling to take any pains w
here no profit arises, would fain thrust the 226 prisoners which remain at the Bridewell, sixteen miles from my house, to my charge. And he would take unto him the charge of 160 of the said Spanish prisoners remaining a-shipboard hard by his house, and every day hardly labouring in his garden in the levelling of his grounds, so that he is too wise for me (as he thinks) to have their daily labour and yet allowance from Her Majesty of 4d per diem to each of them.” A week later, with fifteen of the prisoners in the Bridewell dead in the interim, Cary again wrote to the Council that they were “in some distress for want of relief to sustain them . . . I have taken order . . . to relieve their misery in allowing to each of them 1fid per diem and to some of them 2d per diem, and have disbursed the money out of my purse to make provision for victuals at the best and cheapest hand, for otherwise they must needs have perished through hunger and possibly thereby bred some infection, which might be dangerous to our country.” Such an allowance was miserable indeed compared to the 6½d per man, per day, in harbour and 7d at sea paid to contractors supplying English ships with their modest provisions.19
The sufferings of some of the 397 men of the Rosario were only just beginning. The ship had been “cast ashore in England on the land of Sir William Courteney, where she was pillaged and her people imprisoned.” Twelve of them—those more likely to attract a ransom payment—were separated at the orders of a commissioner from the Queen. “To each of these they gave 4d for his daily sustenance and to each of the rest they gave 1d,” starvation rates. Over a year later, on 24 November 1589, the surviving prisoners were released “by the Queen’s order, excepting twelve which the Queen gave to Sir William Courteney.” They were thrown back into jail with a ransom of 5,000 ducats on their heads, “which sum was not paid, for that there were none save only poor men.” In January 1590 other Spanish prisoners in Devon were wandering “up and down the country” begging for food and the Privy Council issued an order that in future anyone taking a prisoner would be responsible for his upkeep, effectively instructing privateers to kill captives outright or throw them overboard to drown. By 11 August 1590, Courteney had increased his ransom demands for the men he still held to 12,000 ducats, and in desperation the prisoners wrote a letter to the Queen begging for the same clemency that had been granted to the other Spanish prisoners.