In that note, Drake uttered the first hint of the new strategic plan for the conduct of the Navy. It was a mistake to send “the smaller sort of our shipping daily upon acts of reprisal.” They did little good and only fell victims to big men-of-war or little fleets of flyboats. Fenner, for his part, was wishing that all Drake’s fleet was down upon the coast of Spain. “We rest here, a great number of valiant men,” and even when they were bidden to go, they would want a month to get their ships victualled.
On the 9th of March, Howard learned at Flushing that Santa Cruz was dead, but that the work on the Armada had not been stayed. He left Flushing the same day to cross to Margate, and there met Frobisher of the Foresight, who had spoken with two ships out of Lisbon. They had reported that March 15th was the day appointed for the Spanish fleet’s departure for Coruña. “Sir,” he wrote to Walsingham, “there is none that comes from Spain but brings this advertisement,” and complains that the refusal to let Drake move would breed grave trouble.
Messages of this kind, coming hot one upon the other, did at last arouse the Queen and her Ministers to look the facts squarely in the face. A plan of campaign had been provisionally drawn up by the Council, and it was proposed that this should now be put in action. Sir Henry Palmer was, as before, to patrol the Narrow Seas, and the Lord High Admiral was to take the main fleet to Plymouth. This station he was to keep until the Armada passed him. Then he was to follow her up-channel whilst Drake sailed with a squadron to raid the coasts of Spain and a further squadron attacked the Azores. The plan was inevitably, to a man of Drake’s eager nature, as bad as inexperience and tradition could make it. Its basic principle was defence, not attack, and it split the fleet into four separate divisions instead of welding it into one tremendous weapon. Some time in March, Drake was informed of the plan. He was ordered to organize and lead the raiding squadron which should ravage the coasts of Spain and make a landing in Portugal, after the Armada had left its harbour and whilst it was fighting to land its troops and Parma’s troops on the shore of England. Not by such a frittering away of power had San Domingo or Cartagena been won, or would England be saved.
Drake had been given little consideration during the last months. Burghley was no admirer of either his manners or his methods, and though Walsingham remained his staunch friend, Walsingham was out of favour. Thus Drake had not been called upon for his advice. But he was the greatest navigator of his age, and if he claimed to be heard, he could not be denied. He did so claim. On March 30th he wrote from Plymouth to the Lords-in-council very modestly, begging them to hear his poor opinion with favour and to judge of it according to their great wisdoms. Then quite simply and logically he put his argument:
“If Her Majesty and your Lordships think that the King of Spain meaneth any invasion of England, then doubtless his force is and will be great in Spain.” The more solidly that force is built up in Spain, the easier will it be for the Prince of Parma to invade England with his troops. “But if there may be such a stay or stop made by any means of this fleet in Spain, that they may not come through the seas as conquerors — which I assure myself, they think to do — then shall the Prince of Parma have such a check thereby as were meet.”
Attack, in other words, was the best defence — a familiar idea to us who live after Nelson’s day, but brand-new then, minted new from the brain of a man who all his life had been learning, not from books, but from his own triumphs and rebuffs.
“To prevent this (i.e. the Spaniards coming through the seas as conquerors) I think it good that these forces here should be made as strong as to your Honours’ wisdoms shall be thought convenient, and that for two special reasons. First for they are like to strike the first blow, and secondly it will put great and good hearts into Her Majesty’s loving subjects...for that they will be persuaded in conscience that the Lord of all strength will put into Her Majesty and her people courage and boldness not to fear any invasion in her own country but to seek God’s enemies and Her Majesty’s where they may be found.”
Concentrate, seek the enemy on its own coasts, and strike the first blow! Not one section of the fleet waiting for the passage of Parma’s soldiers, and a second section waiting until the enemy had sailed triumphantly past, and a third section waiting merely to raid an unprotected coast, and a fourth waiting to attack his outlying islands. Here was the first real comprehension of sea-power expressed in the roundabout phraseology of the day, a little cumbersomely no doubt, for Drake had a heavy pen — and a good deal more devoutly than we should expect in an appeal to a Cabinet now, but clear as can be in its premisses and its conclusions.
It was too new for complete acceptance. But it stirred the Council to some profitable doubts as to the wisdom of their plan — doubts which showed themselves in orders to the corporations of the sea-coast towns, such as Poole, Weymouth, Lyme Regis and Exmouth, to provide ships and pinnaces, armed and manned and victualled for two months, and despatch them to Sir Francis Drake at Plymouth. It moved the Queen also to send to Drake by her Secretary a couple of questions to which she commanded his answer. How could the forces in Lisbon best be distressed, and to what strength should her fleet be raised in order to defeat the enemy? It would, no doubt, have helped to the triumph of his ideas if Drake could have answered exactly these two very practical questions. But he could not. The immediate “how,” the tactics of the battle, must be left to the man on the spot. He had not “intelligences” certain enough whilst he remained at Plymouth. It was a reasonable answer, though not very useful as a persuasion. But even so, he must go out of his way to lessen its force by adding that a good deal depended upon the presence or absence of another Borough in his fleet. Borough was actually commanding the Golden Lion in Lord Howard’s big squadron. Was it necessary to drag his faults up again? But it is extraordinary how much of a great man’s greatness his littleness will undo!
“The last insample at Cadiz is not of divers yet forgotten; for one such flying now, as Borough did then, will put the whole in peril....” Doughty and Borough were his two red rags. But it was not a diplomatic preliminary for a man anxious to secure the command of a great fleet from a reluctant Queen to allow the supposition to be made that he could not quite trust his Captains.
Then followed his actual proposal, which was sound enough to persuade anyone who read it with a clear picture in the mind of the man who made it and what he had done. Let him have the ships which were already assembled in Plymouth — some seventeen — and four more of Her Majesty’s ships of the line, and the sixteen sail with their pinnaces which were being equipped and manned in London, a fleet of more than forty good ships of war; then, if they were properly victualled and Philip’s Armada came out of Lisbon, it would be fought “through the goodness of our merciful God in such sort as shall hinder his quiet passage into England.”
The prudence which always went hand in hand with audacity in Drake’s schemes was evident here. The two narrow channels of the Tagus, with the Old Fort and the Fort of Saint Julian commanding them and the castle of Belem in the middle of the fairway beyond, made a direct assault upon Lisbon, without a land force to march upon it simultaneously as at Cartagena and San Domingo, too hazardous an experiment. And he ends that part of his letter with the prayer to be found in the letter of every sea-captain at that moment, for a proper supply of victuals. Provision for two months would not do for a fleet which must wait upon its opportunity. “Here may the whole service and honour be lost for the sparing of a few crowns.”
Drake could answer the Queen’s second question with no more precision than he could her first. There was probably no one in England, with the exception of Walsingham, who had any exact idea of how many ships Philip had now at his command. He, through friends like Figleazzi, the Ambassador in Spain of the Grand Duke, and his own private spies, probably did know. But the wildest exaggerations were current. Fenner, for instance, had reported on March 3rd, upon the authority of a Portuguese victualler at Lisbon, that four hundred ships and fifty galleys wou
ld sail out of Lisbon on the Enterprise of England; and that they would carry forty-nine thousand infantry, twelve hundred gunners, two thousand six hundred horses and nine thousand mariners. These were to be joined by twenty-five thousand foot-soldiers from Parma’s army in Flanders. Drake received information of the same kind from two other sources. But he could not know, and he could only reply to the Queen’s “How many ships do I need?” with the same answer which the Sea Lords would give today if they were asked exactly how many destroyers they needed. As many as we can get, would be the only answer; as it was Drake’s to Elizabeth, though not so bluntly put.
His letter, however, did bring about an important alteration in the plan of campaign. For, before April 17th, Howard was ordered to leave fourteen of the smaller vessels under Lord Henry Seymour to guard the Narrow Seas and, with the greater part of his fleet, join Drake at Plymouth. Howard was engaged in selecting the ships which should reinforce Seymour’s squadron when, from three separate sources, Drake received fresh information of the mighty preparations in Spain, which clashed altogether with Parma’s suave words to the Peace Commissioners. He made bold to write another letter to the Queen, urging her once more to meet those preparations off the Spanish coast, and sent Fenner to deliver it to the Queen. It was indeed no longer possible, even for the blindest, to believe in Parma’s sincerity, and upon receipt of Drake’s letter she summoned him to the Court. Face to face with her, he got most of his way. They were good friends; he had served her with devotion, to her profit, and she had stood between him and the many who would have sacrificed him in a vain dream of appeasement. She took his side now. On May 10th, the Council resolved that the ships under the Lord Admiral should be provisioned for three months, and that he should use them as he thought meet upon such intelligence as he received, having care to prevent an invasion of England, Scotland or Ireland. Howard was given a free hand to fight the Spaniard where he would, and Drake was by the Queen made his Vice-Admiral and Second-in-Command.
On the morning of May 23rd the citizens of Plymouth, who happened to be walking on the Hoe, were rewarded with a glorious sight. For at eight o’clock with, to quote the Lord Howard, “a pleasant gale” blowing from the east, a procession of great ships of war, all sails set and the sea combing backwards from their bows, swept in majesty past the Mewstone. Half-way across the Sound the yards were swung and the ships headed into the Bay: eleven great ships of the Royal Navy with eight attendant pinnaces, and sixteen great ships of the Port of London with four, and seven ships which belonged to the Lord Admiral, and eight ships and a dozen barks from the Channel ports; fifty-four ships in all with their pinnaces, cloud upon cloud of towering white canvas hollowed by the wind and glinting in the sun. In the van rode the Ark Royal, once the Ark Raleigh, with the Royal Standard streaming from her main and at the first view incongruously a Vice-Admiral’s pennon flying at the fore. A sight to stir the blood and bring a sob into the throat! But Plymouth was to be regaled that morning. To meet his Commander-in-Chief in worthy deference, Drake, flying his flag as Admiral on the Queen’s great ship Revenge, stood out of the harbour at the head of his thirty vessels. The little frigates and pinnaces preceded them like dainty pages. Three abreast they sailed, keeping their distance one from the other, captained and manned by Drake’s old comrades, and making a pretty boast of seamanship and discipline. As the Revenge came abreast of the Ark Royal, Drake struck his Admiral’s pennon. A second later the Vice-Admiral’s flag fluttered down on to the deck of the Ark Royal. A small pinnace was cast loose and rowed to the Revenge. It carried, with Lord Howard’s compliments, that Vice-Admiral’s flag which a few minutes ago had been streaming from his foremast top; and as Drake’s fleet manœuvring into line ahead fell in behind Lord Howard’s, it rose in a ball and fluttered out on the Revenge. The ships flowed into Plymouth Sound, a stately river of foaming white cutting through the blue of the sea, and from the Cattewater to the Tamar, one by one they anchored before the town. Drake’s heart must have swelled as he watched the scene, until it threatened to burst even his strong breast. There was a Grand Fleet now in England and, in two days’ time, it was to sail for the Spanish coast.
There were men of bad blood in that age as in this. Eyes were watching with malicious expectation for jealousies and quarrels between the great sailor who was second and the great nobleman who was first. They were disappointed. After all the danger was over, Howard may have taken too much of the credit to himself, Drake may have been too quick to count himself slighted. But this was 1588, the year of destiny for England. The see-ers of visions, the tellers of the stars, the queer students who find the keys of the future hidden in the passages of books, had for months and months been crying that 1588 was marked in the calendar of history for England’s doom or England’s triumph. Throughout the land the belief was spread. Men waited for it in suspense, like men in a ship before the burst of a tornado. But they were equal to it when the storm broke. Howard had been opposed to Drake’s strategy, but had sufficient greatness to change his mind. “Sir,” he wrote to Walsingham on June 15th, “you know it hath been the opinion both of Her Majesty and others that it was the surest course to lie on the coast of Spain. I confess my error at that time, which was otherwise; but I did and will yield unto them of greater experience.” And that loyalty he continued. Nor did Drake complain that though the knowledge and the authority were his, the outward emblems of it were not. It was an age of swift transitions. The new gentry, sprung from the merchants and traders, was fostered by Elizabeth and daily growing more powerful. But enough of the feudal tradition still reigned to make it fit and comely in men’s eyes that a great nobleman with an hereditary claim upon the office of Lord Admiral should command the fleet as Her Majesty’s deputy, at a time of great peril for the realm. Drake rose to his greatest. Could a finer tribute have been paid by a Commander to his Chief of Staff than was paid by Howard after they had been a fortnight in each other’s company?
“Sir,” he wrote to Walsingham, “I must not omit to let you know how lovingly and kindly Sir Francis Drake beareth himself; and also how dutifully to Her Majesty’s service and unto me, being in the place I am in; which I pray you, he may receive thanks for by some private letter from you.”
Of each of the two men, great Lord and great sailor, one may justly quote from a poem of later date:
“He nothing common did or mean,
Upon that memorable scene.”
Great seamanship and driving power on the one side, great tact and natural authority on the other, made a perfect combination. In fact, two hundred years later they made Nelson.
CHAPTER XVIII
ATTEMPTS TO ANTICIPATE THE ARMADA. HOWARD AND DRAKE GET THEIR WAY. THE FAMOUS GAME OF BOWLS.
THE CONTRARINESS OF man and nature plays havoc with the best-laid plans. James Quarles, the Surveyor of the victuals for the Navy, had promised Howard that ten provision ships should follow him from Chatham within the week. Lord Howard watered his fleet in readiness, but on June 28th he received notice that the provisions would not be assembled until a fortnight had passed, and that even then the ten ships would not be fit to sail nor would there be crews to man them. Lord Howard had food for eighteen days, no more. But he was of the same mind as Drake now, and he had the right touch with his officers and his men. “God send us a wind to put us out; for we will go though we starve,” he wrote to Burghley, and again, on the same day, “My good Lord, there is here the gallantest company of captains, soldiers and mariners that I think ever was seen in England. It is a pity they should lack meat when they are so desirous to spend their lives in Her Majesty’s service.”
His consolation was that the seas were so high and the wind so adverse that he could never beat out against it. His officers ransacked Plymouth for food, and news came in. A bark from Cape St. Vincent had taken two or three fishermen, who said that the Spanish fleet was to come out with the first wind; and a ship belonging to Sir George Carey, on its way from Spain to the Isle of Wight, reported that i
t had come out. The wind which penned the English fleet in the Sound helped the Spanish fleet out of the Tagus, and if it held still in that quarter for six days, cried Howard, “we shall have them knocking at our door.”
But towards the end of the month the storm abated, and Howard led his fleet out past Rame Head into the Channel. He was hardly clear of the land before the wind blew up again hard from the south-west. Howard beat into it. He had news from a merchantman homeward bound that he had seen the Spaniards coming from Lisbon on May 14th. A hundred and fifty, two hundred sail, so many that he could not see the last of them. Howard could not resist that evidence. The wind had changed from south-west to due west. Although the English ships were lower in the water than the Spanish and carried a fore-and-aft sail at the mizzen, he could not hold his position. He was driving astern, might indeed be pushed to leeward of the Sound and forced to leave Plymouth at the mercy of invading Spain. Howard wisely made the harbour whilst he could. But even then his victualling ships had not arrived. Once more he sought provisions through the countryside, whilst he waited for the storm to die and expected each moment the topsails of the Armada as it drove up-channel before the wind.
But nothing was seen. It was the end of the first week of June. If the Armada had left Lisbon half-way through May, some watchman by a bonfire on the Lizard, or Dennis Head, or the Dodman, should have sighted it before now. Drake had an explanation. The Spanish ports nearest to England were Vigo and the Groyne, as Coruña was called. One of these would be the final rendezvous, before the great fleet started on the Enterprise. Drake’s facts were right but his argument wrong. The Armada was at the Groyne, but the final rendezvous had been fixed at the Scilly Islands. It straggled, however; the provision hulks were clumsy and lost touch; though it had started on May 18th it was still not clear of Finisterre on June 9th; and by this time the food had turned bad and the water-casks were leaking like sieves. It was the unfortunate custom in Spanish ships that when a water-cask was empty its hoops were removed and its staves taken apart, and the custom did not increase their serviceability. Medina-Sidonia accordingly put into Coruña. Some of the ships nearest to him followed him in; others, in sight of him, stood hove-to outside; whilst a third section of not less than twenty ships, including the provision hulks, carried on, unaware of any change in the orders, towards the Scillies. That night a gale sprang up and scattered over the coast the galleons which had not dropped anchor within the harbour. So much damage was done that Medina-Sidonia proposed to Philip the entire abandonment of the Enterprise. But Philip would not listen. The dispersed ships must be collected and refitted; a pinnace was sent northwards to bring back the score of vessels which had gathered at the Scilly Islands; and for a month the Armada lay helpless as a rabbit in front of a snake.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 891