by Neil Hanson
In our own era, wars between Israel and the Arab nations have invariably ended in Israel’s favour. Once more this is not because they are intrinsically braver than the Arabs, or because God is necessarily on their side—as is usual in wars their opponents would argue the opposite—but Israel is a U.S. client state and has been equipped with weapons that are decades ahead of those produced by the Arab world’s principal suppliers, the states of the former Soviet Union. In just the same way, the design of the warships, heavy weapons, munitions and gun-carriages of the English Grand Fleet in 1588 was not just years but two full generations ahead of those used by the Spaniards, who were operating ships that had not changed in significant detail in fifty years. Barring some catastrophic human error—and Elizabeth and her counsellors certainly did their best to supply that, for had the Rosario and San Salvador not been captured her fleet would have run out of powder and shot before the decisive battle of Gravelines had even begun—the technological advantage that her ships enjoyed was alone enough to guarantee victory.
During the autumn of 1588, a series of thanksgiving services was held at cathedrals and churches throughout England. A sermon preached in St. Paul’s on 30 August praised “our great victory by [God] given to our English nation by the overthrow of the Spanish fleet,” and a further service of thanksgiving was held there on 18 September. In Norwich on 2 October, “the day of giving God thanks for the overthrow of the Spaniard,” “the great guns were firing salvos in salute all day long from dawn to dusk,” yet the Queen still complained that “there has as yet been no Public Prayer and General Thanksgiving ordained” for the victory. A National Day of Thanksgiving, “a general concurrence of all the people in the Realm in repairing to their Parish Churches and giving public thanks,” was duly ordained on 29 November 1588, St. Elizabeth’s Day, “celebrating the return of the English Navy, the defeat of the Spanish Navy, news of disorders in Flanders and quarrels between the Spanish soldiers, their allies and the Duke of Parma, wherein is remembered the great goodness of God towards England.” 19
Five days later, on 4 December 1588, the Queen attended a final, triumphalist service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Shortly beforehand she was presented with the Armada Jewel, commissioned for her by Sir Nicholas Heneage and designed by Nicholas Hilliard. It was a double celebration, also commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne on 27 November. Arrayed in silks and velvets, richly dressed with gold, silver and pearls, the warrior queen was drawn by a team of white horses through streets lined with “fair blue cloth,” in a canopied, mock-Roman chariot, decorated with golden lions and dragons, and topped with an imperial crown. The Earl of Essex rode immediately behind her, followed by her ladies of honour. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen dressed in scarlet robes awaited her at the Temple, and she led them in procession through the streets of the City to St. Paul’s, followed by her Privy Counsellors, noble lords, courtiers, magistrates, officers of the Livery Companies, and “those who had been the instruments of so noble a victory”—by which of course was meant the admirals and high officers, not the fighting men. She paused frequently to watch pageants and hear the declamation of verses praising her wisdom and courage, but such was the continuing fear of insurrection or assassination that all the taverns and alehouses were closed and each householder whose property overlooked the route had to “stake his life and goods” on the loyalty of any people watching the parade from his house.
After arriving at St. Paul’s the Queen knelt in prayer on the steps of the cathedral, allowing the assembled multitude a full view of her devotions, before entering through the great west door. Captured Spanish flags, banners and other booty from the Armada were paraded down the aisle and draped around the altar. Some doggerel penned by the Queen herself was sung in celebration of the victory, allocating the victor’s palms in equal measure to God and his handmaiden.
He made the wind and waters rise
To scatter all mine enemies . . .
And hath preserved in tender love
The spirit of his turtle dove.
Following the service, the Queen dined in state at the bishop’s palace and was then conducted back to Somerset House by a torch-lit procession through the gloom of a December evening. In all the paeans of praise heaped upon “Gloriana, the Virgin Queen,” during the course of the day, the mariners who had won her battle and saved her throne, as many as half of them already dead of their wounds, starvation or disease, rated barely a mention.
A National Day of Thanksgiving commemorating both the defeat of the Armada and the accession of Elizabeth was celebrated throughout the remainder of her reign, and a re-enactment of the lighting of the beacons became the centrepiece of festivities in each town and village. The Stuart dynasty that began with the accession of James VI of Scotland, crowned as James I of England, following Elizabeth’s death on 24 March 1603, had less enthusiasm for the continued celebration of a Catholic humiliation, and after the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605 the commemoration of the Armada was subsumed into a celebration of national deliverance held on 5 November, the anniversary of the plot. Although few today are conscious of the link to the events of 1588, and the central figure in the celebrations is an effigy of Guy Fawkes, it is thrown into a bonfire that echoes those beacon fires that blazed to warn of the coming of the Armada.20
Demobilization of Elizabeth’s troops continued through August and September 1588, but it did not proceed smoothly. The familiar complaint, a failure to pay the wages owing, led some soldiers to sell their arms to raise the money to return home. The Queen responded with a furious proclamation against those who had “most falsely and slanderously given out that they were compelled to make sale of [their arms] for that they received no pay, which is most untruly reported.” However, the allegation was true, and the only dispute was whether it was the result of Crown parsimony or the dishonesty of the soldiers’ commanders.
Elizabeth meanwhile demanded an accounting from everyone involved in supplying the fleet. Hawkins was forced to justify and then rejustify every item of expenditure on powder, shot and supplies, the Earl of Sussex was subject to scathing criticism and ostracized at Court for answering Howard’s pleas for munitions without the Queen’s authorization; had he not done so, the Armada would not have been defeated. Even more outrageously, the victualler Marmaduke Darell was imprisoned in the Tower after exceeding his orders and purchasing more victuals for the fleet than had been authorized by the Queen. By restricting their victuals, Elizabeth may have intended not only to save money but to force her fleet to remain close to its base, preventing any further adventures on the coast of Spain, but the true effect had been to put her fleet and her throne in peril. And the debilitating effects of the weeks and months on short rations before the Armada had even appeared off the coast undoubtedly made a substantial contribution to the subsequent death toll from starvation and disease.
A hard-headed appraisal had been made by the Queen and her Privy Council as soon as her ships returned to port, and an order went out on 30 August 1588 to discharge the entire fleet except the Squadron of the Narrow Seas. From that moment on, she and her most senior courtiers showed no interest whatsoever in how that would be managed or what the effects might be, and no money to feed or pay her seamen was forthcoming. The Controller of the Navy, William Borough, went to St. James’s for more detailed instructions, but after waiting in Burghley’s outer chamber for some time he was told that “most of the navy should be discharged,” and dismissed with curt instructions to “husband things as well as I could.” Seeking further elucidation, Borough went to Walsingham’s chamber but found him surrounded by other nobles and watching a “show of horsemen”—a victory parade passing in the street outside. Borough was ignored and left to reach his own conclusions; he and Elizabeth’s other officers performed their unpleasant duties with such efficiency that the total paid in “rewards to the injured” came to no more than £180.21
By 14 September the numbers of ships and men at the Que
en’s charge had been reduced from a peak of 197 ships and 15,925 men to 34 ships—many of them keeping Chatham Church—and 1,453 seamen. But many seamen would not or could not leave their ships until they were paid. Sir William Monson argued that “it were better for them and much more profit and honour to the Queen to discharge them upon their first landing than to continue them longer unpaid,” but it was not done. To her anguish and undisguised fury, Elizabeth was caught in a double bind. If the seamen remained on board, they had to be fed at Crown expense; if they were discharged, the wages owing to them became due. Both prospects filled her with equal horror, and her solution was to discharge the men unpaid. The pay—not that the majority received it in any case—of sick and crippled seamen was also stopped as soon as they were put ashore. As parsimonious as a pawn-broker even in the moment of victory, Elizabeth displayed an attitude that chimed perfectly with that of her Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, whose only published comment on the reports of the wholesale death of English seamen from disease and starvation was to remark that it should serve to reduce the wage bill for the fleet. Hawkins rejected any such idea. “Your Lordship may think that by death, by discharging of sick men, and such like, that there may be spared something in the general pay. First, those that die, their friends require their pay. In place of those which are discharged sick and insufficient, which indeed are many, there are fresh men taken, which breeds a far greater charge.” And even dead men had wives and children.
His letter provoked an angry retort from Burghley, implying that Hawkins was lining his own pockets at the Crown’s expense. “I am sorry I do live so long to receive so sharp a letter from your Lordship,” the aggrieved Hawkins replied, “considering how carefully I take care to do all for the best and to ease charge . . . I do stay any payments saving sick men, such of the gentlemen that can be spared with their retinues, and soldiers, and discharge all the merchant ships . . . Some [seamen] are discharged with fair words, some are so miserable and needy, that they are helped with tickets to the victuallers for some victual to help them home, and some with a portion of money, such as my Lord Admiral will appoint, to relieve their sick men and to relieve some of the needy sort, to avoid exclamation [protest and riot] . . . It is impossible for me to spare time to peruse them but when the officers put their hands [sign their names] to confirm the pay books . . . that Her Majesty is charged with and no more. And I never knew yet any penny profit by sea books, nor know what a dead pay means, as it has been most injuriously and falsely informed . . . I pray God I may end this account to Her Majesty’s and your Lordship’s liking and to avoid my own undoing, and I trust God will so provide for me as I shall never meddle with such intricate matters more; for they be unbearable . . . if I had any enemy, I would wish him no more harm than the course of my troublesome and painful life.”22
The following day, Howard wrote to Walsingham in response to orders to transport soldiers under the command of Sir Thomas Morgan to Sandwich. “I doubt much the soldiers will march before they have money . . . It is no small trouble that I have here in the discharging of ships of sundry places . . . to the westwards as far as Bristol and Bridgwater. We are fain to help them with victuals to bring them [there]. There is not many of them that has one day’s victuals and many have sent many sick men ashore here and not one penny to relieve them.” The ships from the West Country were ordered home, the crews unpaid, sick and dying, barely able to man their vessels, and carrying precisely one day’s rations for a voyage of over 200 miles against the prevailing winds.
Howard and the other senior commanders did what they could to help their men. “I am driven to make John Hawkins relieve them with money as he can. It were too pitiful to have men starve after such a service . . . Therefore I had rather open the Queen’s Majesty’s purse something to relieve them, than they should be in that extremity; for we are to look to have more of these services, and if men should not be cared for better than to let them starve and die miserably, we should very hardly get men to serve. Sir, I desire that there may be but double allowance of as much as I [ give] out of my own purse, and yet I am not the ablest man in [the realm]; but before God, I had rather have never penny in the world than they should lack.” Lack they did, despite Howard’s efforts. The discharged seamen had nothing to eat, only rags to wear and no means of travelling to their homes. Those suffering from dysentery and typhus were sent ashore to reduce further infection on board but were then left to their fate.
Fatalities in battle had been remarkably few, “the least losses that ever have been heard of . . . I verily believe there is not three score lost of Her Majesty’s forces,” but English seamen were now dying in their hundreds and thousands from ship’s fever, scurvy and the bloody flux, a death toll exacerbated by the effects of starvation. By mid-September mortality rates, even in the flagships of the fleet—the Ark, Revenge and Triumph—were in excess of one-third. The Victory had lost 40 per cent of its 400-man crew, and the White Bear half its complement of 500. The placing of “six upon four”—six men sharing the rations of four to conserve supplies—was a routine practice on long voyages, but it was unusual for mariners in home waters to be subjected to it, and it had undoubtedly played a part in weakening the seamen and making them a more ready prey to disease. Poor sanitation was also significant and one commentator pointed out that “the ships commanded by the experienced old salts escaped comparatively lightly.” Those that were most badly affected by typhus were the Elizabeth Jonas, the Lion and the White Bear, all commanded by kinsmen of Lord Howard with “no experience in the very necessary art of keeping a ship clean and sweet.”23
During her speech at Tilbury, Elizabeth had promised her cheering men: “You have deserved rewards and crowns, and we do assure you, in the word of a Prince, they shall be duly paid you.” The hollow-ness of those words quickly became apparent to the discharged seamen who had saved her throne. She showed an indifference bordering on contempt for the plight of the sick, starving and destitute men landed daily at ports from Harwich in the east to Plymouth in the west. In response to pleas from Howard, Hawkins and Drake, even the notoriously careful Burghley wrote to Walsingham, “What shall now be determined by Her Majesty I cannot judge, yet I mind to provide some money in readiness to be carried down to the seaside to relieve the decayed men for a time . . . yet I will not send it from London before I shall hear from you what you or Her Majesty shall think meet. My Lord Admiral I think will discharge all sick men and the refuse of the small vessels but being absent here alone, I dare not direct anything to him.” Walsingham replied the same day. “For the sending of some money to the fleet for the relief of the decayed men, I think the same may be deferred until Her Majesty’s return.” Meanwhile “the refuse” would just have to starve.
Lord Howard was a man of notorious venality, hungry for prize money in his own right and also garnering a rich harvest of “tenths” from the prizes of others and pocketing bribes from those seeking commissions and preferment, or chasing letters of marque. His relatives, promoted by him to high positions, shared his preoccupations. “The pernicious influence of the Howards was a manifestation of the disease inherent in the system of patronage, a manifestation worse than most because the opportunities for private gain at the public expense were greater here than elsewhere and because the normal restraints of law and morality were more easily overborne where the proper business of all concerned was robbery with violence.” Yet in the aftermath of the Armada campaign, Howard’s actions on behalf of his men were entirely without thought for his own personal profit, and indeed cost him very substantial sums.
In the absence of word or action from London, he had made yet more pleas for provisions—“I hear nothing of my victuals and munition this night here, I will gallop to Dover to see what may be there, or else we shall starve”—but they went unanswered, as did his requests for the seamen to be paid the wages owing to them so they could at least buy food for themselves. He reported “the great discontentments of men here . . . who well
hoped after this so good service, to have received their whole pay, and find it to come but this scantly among them.” “There is a number of poor men of the coast towns—I mean the mariners—that cry out for money, and they know not where to be paid. I have given them my word and honour that either the towns shall pay them or I will see them paid. If I had not done so, they had run away from Plymouth by thousands. I hope there will be care had of it.” The only reply he provoked from Elizabeth or her Council was a memorandum from Burghley, his resolve now perhaps stiffened by the return of his royal mistress, that in its smug complacency in the face of human suffering must have driven Howard and his fellow commanders to helpless fury. “To spend in time convenient is wisdom. To continue charges without needful cause brings repentance. To hold on charges without knowledge of the certainty thereof, and of means how to support them is lack of wisdom.” 24
The crews of the merchant ships fared even more dismally than those of the Queen’s galleons. “These unfortunate men were, in word as well as deed, deserted by everyone.” While the seamen starved on the docksides, their captains and ship owners made desperate but unsuccessful pleas for payment of money owing. Anthony Potts, owner of two ships “lately employed in Her Majesty’s service . . . with victuals and the wages” of 100 men employed in them, had been “a continual suitor unto your Honours the space of six weeks past for such money as is due unto him, as well his great cost and intolerable expenses as also to the utter undoing of him and his for ever, by reason of his great charge and absence.” The captains of Sandwich and Dover also complained that for four months they and their men had “dutifully and faithfully served Her Majesty . . . at their own great and excessive cost and charges . . . It may therefore please your Honour to grant speedy order for pay to be made . . . the great outcries and pitiful complaints of the poor needy mariners and soldiers, daily made for want thereof, cannot otherwise be relieved and appeased.” Thomas Fleming, the man who had brought the first news of the sighting of the Armada, also sought payment for himself and his thirty-six men for “victuals . . . wages . . . loss of cables, anchors and masts, amounts to the sum of £70 at the least.” Compensation for the vessels used as fireships was paid rather more quickly, probably on the grounds that if the Armada returned, fireships might again be needed and none would provide them if they knew they would not be compensated. In October Drake collected £1,000 for his 200-ton ship, the Thomas of Plymouth, and Hawkins £600 for “the Bark Bond of the burden of 150 tons,” though an attempt by Thomas Meldrun to claim additional sums for the cost of six tons of beer, biscuit, beef and other provisions allegedly left aboard his fireship, the Elizabeth of Lowestoft, proved less successful.