by Neil Hanson
Philip’s decision to intervene went against the hoary military dictum of never fighting simultaneous battles on two fronts and proved a fatal error, both weakening his effort in The Netherlands and failing to secure a Catholic victory in France. The depleted Army of Flanders mutinied every year from 1589 to 1602, and the Dutch recaptured lost territories and even had troops to spare to send to the aid of Navarre. Elizabeth also sent money, arms and forces to Navarre during the early 1590s. The Catholic League and their Spanish allies were defeated and Navarre duly claimed his inheritance, taking the throne as Henri IV and securing undisputed control of his kingdom by renouncing his Protestant faith; Paris was indeed “worth a mass.”
Whatever trust had existed between Philip and Parma had long been shattered and at bottom Parma’s continued loyalty was assured only by blackmail; his wife and children remained in his duchy a thousand miles away, at the mercy of a Spanish garrison. In June 1592 Philip summoned him to Madrid. As Parma well knew, it was a sentence of death. The Count of Fuentes was sent to succeed him in Flanders, with orders to ensure that the summons was obeyed but, campaigning in France and still suffering the effects of his wound from the previous year, Parma fell ill and was taken to Arras. There, like Don Juan of Austria before him, he cheated the fate that Philip had prepared for him, dying in December of that year at the age of forty-seven, almost fifteen years to the day since he had left Parma in the dead of night to ride to the Spanish Netherlands. In all those years Philip had constantly denied him permission to visit his home or see his sons, telling him that his elder son Ranuccio could manage the affairs of the duchy without him. As he died his lonely death, Parma’s last thoughts must have been of his wife and the boys, now almost men, that he had left behind.
Spain’s military success in The Netherlands died with Parma. The Dutch inexorably drove the Army of Flanders back on land, while at sea they remained the unchallenged masters of their coasts and also began to trade around the globe and launch raids on Spain’s spice and treasure fleets and overseas possessions. A treaty of 1609 finally granted the Dutch their independence, bringing to an end forty-five years of war with Spain and with it the formal extinction of the dream of a “Catholic Atlantic empire” stretching from northern Europe to the New World.
As soon as it was clear that the Armada had been defeated, the thoughts of Elizabeth and her Council had turned to means by which they could further damage Spain. Their first success was to persuade the young King of Denmark to enter into an alliance with England and sign a pledge not to supply Spain with grain. Freed of their obligations to the defence of the realm, England’s privateers also resumed business as usual, and in September Elizabeth issued orders to complete the destruction of the Armada in the harbours of Spain’s north coast. However, frightened by the expense of using her own fleet, she first delayed its departure until the following spring and then insisted on sending Drake with a fleet of privateers. His orders were to destroy the Armada ships and then attack Lisbon in an attempt to install the Portuguese Pretender Dom Antonio as king, before embarking on the customary round of looting and prize-taking.
The voyage was a shambles, as one of Mendoza’s spies in London had predicted. “These Englishmen, under cover of Dom Antonio, pretend to have great designs, but really will confine themselves to seizing ships and merchants.” Drake did attack Corunna and destroyed three warships including the San Juan de Portugal and the Regazona, the flagship of the Levant squadron, but although the remainder of the Armada fleet lay virtually defenceless in Santander and Guipuzcoa (San Sebastian), Drake sailed at once for Lisbon. The attack was unsuccessful—he did not have the siege guns and engineers to breach its defences and there was no sign of a rising in support of Dom Antonio. Drake then set sail to the west to intercept the flota, but overcrowding and poor provisioning were already causing serious problems to the fleet. Food and water were very low and the crewmen were falling sick in great numbers, forcing the voyage to be abandoned without even reaching the Azores. Drake returned home empty-handed and with 9,000 men either dead or so racked with typhus, scurvy and dysentery that they had to be discharged.
The Privy Council was not slow to draw the obvious conclusion from the failure of the expedition: “This army was levied by merchants; whereas in matters of this kind, princes only ought to have employed themselves.” Elizabeth ignored such oblique criticisms of her policy of “joint-stock warfare” but she had failed to reap her expected financial harvest from the voyage and showed her displeasure by banning the disgraced Drake from Court for four years. Nonetheless, English privateers continued to raid Spain’s territory and shipping with considerable success throughout the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. Cadiz was sacked in 1596 and Puerto Rico put to the torch two years later.9
English interests might well have been best suited by an indefinite prolongation of the conflicts in The Netherlands and France, for defeat for Philip’s forces in Flanders and his puppets in the Catholic League heralded an alarming resurgence of French power. Some modern analysts have claimed that Elizabeth’s policy was to give the Dutch and the Huguenots enough support to guarantee their survival but less than enough to ensure a victory, demonstrating the sharpness of her analysis and the brilliance of her policy, but there is no evidence to suggest that she was doing anything of the sort. It would be far more in line with her conduct of other areas of policy to deduce that she was merely fire-fighting—reacting to events rather than seeking to shape them—with no overall strategy in mind.
There is no doubting the clarity of Philip’s vision of his goals, or his willingness to expend his treasure to achieve them, and though his military strategy for the Armada was deeply flawed from the first, his parallel diplomatic strategy was brilliantly conceived. Potential opponents—the Turks, France, Denmark, Venice, the Palatinate— were neutralized or sidelined, potential supporters assiduously courted, and those who could bring military force to bear were recruited and mobilized. This wider strategy had only one flaw: its scale and ambition put it beyond even the financial capacity of imperial Spain. Had money been available, rebellions could and probably would have been fomented in Scotland and Ireland. The groundwork had been done and the Irish chieftains and Scots Catholic lords stood ready. Supplied with funds, arms and a stiffening of seasoned Spanish troops, they could at the least have proved an irritant and distraction to Elizabeth, diverting and dividing her forces, and it was far from inconceivable that Ireland would have fallen. The entire English garrison was fewer than 2,000 soldiers, aided by whatever additional men could be levied from the settlers in the Pale. Scotland was less easy to conquer, with a staunchly Protestant minority concentrated in the lowlands, but it was a state in name only, ruled by a king who exercised minimal control over his powerful and often lawless nobles. Once more, a rebellion required only the promised help from Philip, but the constant postponements of the Armada and the emptiness of the Spanish promises left the Scottish Catholic lords hopelessly exposed. Those who did rebel were isolated and hunted down, and the remainder nursed their grievances in private as the chance of successful rebellion passed.
The Armada itself was never equal to the task it had been set. There were insufficient warships and heavy guns to set against a far more technologically advanced opposing fleet, and the proposed rendezvous with the bulk of the invasion force broke every military rule and was quite simply unachievable. The crass omissions and contradictions in Philip’s otherwise carefully thought out and crafted strategy have never been, and probably never will be, satisfactorily explained. Why did he repeatedly insist that the Armada should rendezvous with Parma’s forces off the Cape of Margate when he knew that they could not put to sea without its protection? Why did he insist that the Armada was not to seek a confrontation with the English fleet when he knew that defeating it was “the essence of the business”? And why did he forbid Medina-Sidonia to capture the Isle of Wight or any other safe haven when it was the only means of safeguarding the Armada from destruction?
The answers cannot be found in the realms of logic; they can only be attributed to Philip’s frenzied haste to complete his ruinously expensive enterprise in the shortest possible time and his obsessive belief that God would produce the necessary miracles to guarantee the victory, no matter how flawed the strategy that his principal lieutenant, Philip of Spain, had laid down.
The failure of the Armada had dealt a blow to Philip’s personal morale that at first seemed as terminal as the blow to his nation’s prestige. Like most of his subjects, in the immediate aftermath of the return of the defeated Armada he gave himself up to grief and despair. Even those people who had not suffered the loss of a loved one went about their lives as if in mourning. On 10 November 1588, having heard the full extent of the disasters that had overtaken his Armada on the Irish coast, Philip was praying for death. “I hope to die and go to Him. That is what I pray for so as not to endure so much ill fortune.” Yet just two days later he had decided to continue the war against Elizabeth and convinced himself that, despite the humiliation he had suffered, God remained firmly on his side.
As ever, Bernardino de Mendoza was urging him on, having set aside his own disappointment and restoked the fires of his hatred for a woman whose name he could not even bear to utter, calling her either “the daughter of the devil” or “the Englishwoman.” “If it was important before to hold the Catholic nobles to their good resolve, it is doubly so now, and also to show the Queen of England that Your Majesty intends to assail her on all sides . . . She was so weak that her fleet which left port at the end of July was obliged to return on the 12th of August for want of victuals and stores. They had not even powder to fire after the combat off the Isle of Wight, until they took that which was on board Don Pedro de Valdes’ ship. All this shows that the difficulty of reaching the place of combat in fit condition is much greater than that of fighting the enemy.” His agents in England echoed his theme. “If the Armada had been conducted as it should have been and its commanders had taken advantage of the opportunities offered to them, the King of Spain would now be as much King of England as he is King of Spain.”
The same source, the Genoese Marco Antonio Micea, reported that “the Queen is much aged and spent and is very melancholy. Her intimates say this is caused by the death of the Earl of Leicester, but it is very evident that it is rather the fear she underwent and the burden she has upon her. In order to send 1,500 men to Bergen she had to bleed at every pore and even then she could not get them together. Those that went had to be driven on board with cudgels.” Micea also raised the possibility of invading Ireland. “If the King of Spain wishes to see the Queen of England dead, with the Treasurer, Walsingham and all the Council . . . if he wants to stop them from molesting them in the Indies or Portugal, let him send 3,000 or 4,000 men to Ireland . . . this is the only thing that the English fear and the real true way to take this country with little risk and trouble, and if a part of the Armada were to effect this, they would find it a very different matter from attacking this country.” The King annotated this with his standard exclamation, “Ojo!” and added, “This would be a very important matter.”10
Before the year was out, Philip was laying plans for a further armada to achieve the success that had eluded its predecessor and fulfil his destiny as the warrior of Christ. An English spy, Anthony Copley, reported that Philip had sworn “a great oath that he would waste and consume his Crown . . . but either he would utterly ruin Her Majesty and England, or else himself and all Spain become tributary to her.” Others reported a more phlegmatic response to the manifestation of God’s will, but Philip’s repeated attempts to bring about the downfall of Elizabeth during the remaining decade of his life seem to bear out Copley’s version of events. Each reverse only served to strengthen Philip’s belief in his God-given destiny and further armadas were launched without apparent thought to the season, the weather or the prospects of success.
In late 1588 Philip entered discussions with one of his few surviving senior officers, Martin de Bertendona, on a better means of landing an invasion force in England. At the same time, the richest cities of his dominions were persuaded to pledge millions of ducats towards the cost of a fleet of a dozen new galleons, the “Twelve Apostles,” constructed on the English race-built model and armed with powerful cannons and culverins. In the decade following the Armada year, a further sixty new warships were constructed. “Great thanks do I render unto Almighty God,” Philip wrote, “by whose generous hand I am gifted with such power that I could easily, if I chose, place another fleet upon the seas. Nor is it of very great importance that a running stream should sometimes be intercepted, so long as the fountain from which it flows remains inexhaustible.” The flow of gold and silver from the New World, and Catholic volunteers and pressed men, would continue throughout his reign. Many, many more would go to their deaths pursuing Philip’s impossible dream.11
If Philip’s European plans unravelled in the wake of the Armada, as he lost control of The Netherlands and France and saw his dreams of an empire stretching from the Baltic to the New World ended for ever, Spain grew more, not less, powerful at sea over the following decades, before finally ceding military supremacy to France in the mid-seventeenth century. But in economic terms the Armada defeat and the privateering “war” that both preceded it and continued long after 1588 was much more decisive. Although the English privateers never succeeded in capturing the treasure fleet or cutting off the supply of silver to Spain, the constant attrition of lost ships had a considerable cumulative impact on the Spanish economy. Well over a thousand ships— galleons, carracks, merchantmen, hulks and pinnaces—were captured or sunk during the period of hostilities and no economy, not even that of Imperial Spain, could sustain such losses indefinitely. Spain became “utterly without [merchant] shipping of regard . . . how many millions we have taken from the Spaniard is a thing notorious,” and as more and more ships were diverted to the vital convoys to and from the New World, the control of first European and then international trade was effectively handed to Spain’s competitors. The great Spanish and Portuguese merchant fleets had almost ceased to exist by the end of Philip’s reign, at the same time as those of his European competitors were rapidly expanding. Before many years had elapsed, merchants from England, The Netherlands and France had established a near-complete dominance of trade, not only in Europe but in the New World, Africa and the Far East as well.
Four other Spanish armadas were launched. In 1596 the bizarre decision to sail in November was rewarded by the Second Armada’s being wrecked by a winter storm before it had even left Spanish waters. In the following year the Third Armada was assembled to land a 6,000-strong invasion force at Falmouth, but yet again its departure was unaccountably delayed until 9 October, and though the first ships sailed to within twenty miles of the Lizard, a north-easterly gale battered and scattered the fleet, forcing the remnants to return home unsuccessful once more. The Fourth Armada sailed undetected the length of the Channel to reach the safety of Calais in February 1598, but though its arrival provoked panic in London, its target was not the invasion of England but the reinforcement of the Spanish Army in Flanders, to increase the pressure on Henri IV of France in peace negotiations. The Peace of Vervins was duly signed in April, leading Elizabeth to call Henri “the antichrist of ingratitude” for turning his back on her after she had supported him—albeit with great reluctance—for years.
Philip died the same year and was interred in a coffin made from the keel of a Spanish galleon—at least one Armada ship had arrived unscathed at its final resting place—but three years after his death his son, Philip III, continued his father’s grand ambition by sending the Fifth Armada to support the revolt of the Earl of Tyrone in Ireland. Tyrone had cut a swathe through the English troops garrisoned there, but just as in both Scotland and Ireland at the time of the First Armada, the King of Spain had promised much and delivered nothing but useless blessings, letters of encouragement, small gifts and portraits of himself. Elizabeth so fo
rgot herself that she poured in money and men on a scale that dwarfed any of her previous military adventures, even including the war in The Netherlands—she spent £1.8 million on the war in Ireland between 1595 and 1603, compared to an average annual cost of around £100,000 when the war in The Netherlands was at its peak. The tide of the conflict had turned and Philip, like his father, had delayed and prevaricated too long. Once more the Armada was a humiliating failure. The rebellion was already faltering and was brutally repressed, many Spaniards were killed and the remainder surrendered.12
The Duke of Parma had once warned Philip II that “God will tire of working miracles for us.” His remark was prophetic; in 1588, and on each subsequent occasion when an armada was launched against England, the confident hope of a miracle proved to be nothing more than a foolish delusion.
Bibliography
British Library (BL)
Additional MS 28,376/66–7; Cotton MS Caligula D.I f. 292; Harleian MS 168/166–174, 168/180–5, 296, 3; Lansdowne MS 51 f. 46, 73, f. 130, 96.12; Salisbury MS, III, P 67–70, CSPF, XIX, 95–8; Sloane MS 262/62 and 66–7; Yelverton MSS 31 f. 545
Bodleian Library, Oxford
James P. R. Lyell, “Commentary on Certain Aspects of the Spanish Armada,” (unpublished MS); Bod. Ashmole 830 f. 13 and 830 f. 18; Tanner MS 78
Historic Manuscripts Commission