One wonders how widely the knowledge of what a Spanish victory would mean was spread throughout England when the Armada was sailing up the Channel. The men of the coastline knew it, and the sailors, Drake above all. He had seen the Spanish system at its work, had suffered from its treachery, had made friends with its victims and had smitten it so often and so hard that he had lost all respect for it. The sailors knew. No doubt, too, the traitors who looked across the water to Cardinal Allen at Douai as their adviser, the nobles who hated this new middle-class which “the whore of Babylon” was creating, the Fifth Columnists and Quislings of the North of England. But did the inland peasant who took up arms joyously for the Queen who threw him a laugh and a jest as she rode through the countryside? Was he doing more than fight the foreigner who attacked the soil on which he was born and adore the Queen who reigned over it? The Queen Elizabeth, both in her actions and her words, repeats the riddle. Her ships went out from her harbours to fight the battle of England short of food, powder, and shot. On this morning of Friday July 26th, when both fleets were lying becalmed within sight of one another off the Isle of Wight, Howard was sending ashore to collect the plough-chains to serve him instead of cannonballs. On the same day, when Lord Seymour was ordered to carry his fleet to Dunkirk and impeach the passage of Parma’s boats he was forced to reply that he had been promised seventy-eight sail, that he once had thirty-six and that now he had twenty. Of these, eight were Queen’s ships and Queen’s ships were the only ships which with the wind west-south-west could ride over against Gravelines and Dunkirk. In addition, he mentioned that he had just four days’ provisions.
Could Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, have understood the incomparable peril? A week before, on the 19th of July, he wrote to Walsingham that his mind was as unwilling to write down what the defence was costing as his stomach to accept a purge. And the defence, even so, was not provided. Seymour was promised eight more ships of the Navy to be brought out to him by Nicholas Gorges. Nicholas never arrived, nor any one of his eight fine ships. Ten more galleons belonging to the Merchant Adventurers and victualled for twenty days were ordered to join Seymour at Dunkirk; and they remained on order A Dutch fleet of a hundred vessels would take their places in his line before the day of battle. But the defeated Armada flying up the coast of Zeeland from the disaster of Gravelines never caught sight of them.
Preparations on land were in no better state. On this Friday of the 26th July, Leicester marched four thousand men of Essex for twenty miles to a prepared camp at West Tilbury; and when they reached the camp there was not a loaf of bread nor a barrel of beer to refresh them. “But all with one voice, finding it to be the speediness of their coming, said they would abide more hunger than this to serve Her Majesty and the country.” Leicester did not take the neglect so lightly. A thousand men were to march to the camp that night from London. He sent off a messenger to stop them, and he wrote sharply to Walsingham:
“And because I see and find many causes now to increase my former opinion of the dilatory wants you shall find upon all sudden hurley-burleys, for which respect I am in duty bound to move Her Majesty and humbly to beseech her that as the cases that touch her honour, life and state, that there may be such due regard had for all provisions as in times past hath been. But in no former time was ever so great a cause as at this time.”
Did the Queen herself understand the deadly peril to her realm? Pages have been written blaming her avarice and parsimony for the defects of her services. Pages more to acquit her. The supplies of ammunition, the victualling of the ships, the provisioning of the camps were dockyard matters of which she had neither knowledge nor control. A third excuse has been found in the rapidity of fire which the English gunners developed; and no doubt there is justice in that plea. So fast a service of the guns had never been heard of in the world before. The Spanish historians bear tribute to it. The few casualties in the English fleet attest it. For, while giving full value to the bad gunnery of the Spaniards, the smaller calibre and number of their guns and their higher elevation, it is still clear that the English fire had a paralysing effect upon the enemy; in so little a space could the Queen’s ships go about and deliver the other broadside. But men like John Hawkins, James Quarles the Surveyor to the Navy, and his assistant Marmaduke Darell, were all aware of this quality in the English ships, and indeed had been striving for it; so that adequate preparation to make full use of it should have been made.
The Queen held the purse-strings; that is true enough. But it was a very small purse which those string closed. Burghley was at his wits end to raise money on July 19th. “I have had conference with Palavicino and with Saltonstall how £40,000 or £50,000 might be had for ten per cent.; but I find no probability how to get money here in specie which is our lack, but by exchange to have it out of the parts beyond sea which will not be done but in a long time.” Yet, though the Queen’s poverty may be fairly taken as a truer explanation of the deficiencies than her parsimony, she was surprised by the actual arrival of the Armada. Her Commission for the making of a permanent peace with Philip’s Viceroy, Parma, was still sitting in Flanders when Captain Fleming broke in upon the famous game of bowls. She clung to her dream of peace even when she had waked from it; and it is likely that her very nature hindered her from a true vision of what a Spanish triumph meant. She was of too tolerant a mind, she had such a whole-hearted hatred of bigotry of all kinds, that she may have been unable to understand that the complete and eternal nullification of the English people was what her cousin Philip intended.
Fortunately for England, its mariners did; and they brought to a sublime trust in their cause a glorious confidence in their ability to make it prevail. The letters of Howard, Seymour, William Winter, John Hawkins and Drake, even when they are charged with pleas and demands and complaints, ring with the trumpets of victory. They were violent, jealous, quarrelsome men, tenacious of their rights and prerogatives, but when they fought the Spaniard they fought like brothers. They took up the tale of their quarrels as soon as the battle was over. One man had not the post of honour he should have had. Another should not have had to take his orders from a coward. But whilst the battle raged, the one fought as if his station was the very heart of the engagement, and the other took his orders from “the coward” without a growl and carried them out to the last twirl of the letter.
Lord Howard, seizing the opportunity of this idle day, summoned his chief Captains on board the Ark Royal, and in reward of their good services, as well as for the encouragement of the rest, conferred on them the honour of knighthood. Lord Thomas Howard, the Lord Sheffield, Roger Townshend, John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher and George Beeston, a veteran of the Navy who was now Captain of the Victory, returned to their ships dignified by a title which was rarely accorded. That good work done with due ceremony, Howard sent off a messenger to Seymour, who was lying with his squadron off Dover, to join him with all his ships as quickly as he could, and since he had now become a real sailor from top to toe, we must suppose that for the rest of the day he whistled for a wind.
Medina-Sidonia also spent a portion of that day in rewarding merit. He transferred the command of the Andalusian squadron, Don Pedro de Valdes being now a prisoner on the Revenge, to Don Diego Enriquez, the Captain of the San Juan de Sicilia, and the son of that Viceroy of Mexico who in Drake’s earlier days had done him so much hurt at St. John de Ulua. Then, in some surprise that Parma had neither answered his message nor come out with his flat-bottomed boats to join hands with him, he despatched his pilot, Domingo Ochoa, to repeat his request. Parma, of course, had never contemplated anything so foolish as trailing out twenty thousand soldiers in barges from Dunkirk to the Isle of Wight whilst the English fleets were in the Channel. To satisfy him, an important preliminary was needed, a great naval battle, ending in a great Spanish victory which would clear the Narrow Seas. So while Howard whistled for a wind, Medina-Sidonia scanned the horizon for Parma’s barges.
Howard’s prayer was gratified as the sun
sank. A wind sprang up in the west, and both fleets sailed on before it through the night and the next day, past Selsey Bill and Dungeness towards Dover and the Downs. Howard was in no hurry. All along the coast as he went he was collecting powder and shot and men with a good name for gunnery; and ahead, Seymour with his squadron was beating towards him. Just out of gunshot Howard followed, shortening his sails to keep the pace of the Armada. But it was not Dover and the Downs that the Spaniards were making for. Medina-Sidonia had recognized that his towering fortresses could not cope with the handy, nimble ships of the Queen’s Navy; and, hopeful once more, he had asked Parma to despatch to him at the same time as the shot, forty flyboats with which, since they were easier to handle, he might grapple and board. He was in search of those forty flyboats, and he bore up towards the coast of France to meet them. In the afternoon he saw the sunlight strike upon the white cliffs of Calais.
The Admirals of the English fleet must have observed that change of course with astonishment and Delight. The threat to England dwindled as the size of the great galleons dwindled before the eyes of the coast-watch men of the Cinque Ports. Let but the wind hold in the same quarter, and Medina-Sidonia had delivered the Armada into their hands. He had learnt enough of wind and sea since he had left the Groyne on July 12th to understand that he must stop to windward of Dunkirk if he and Parma were to join forces at all. So he dropped his anchor in Calais Roads, and Howard, a culverin’s shot behind him, joyfully followed his example.
Medina-Sidonia could hardly have made a mistake more deadly. There was no harbour; the tides ran swiftly; to windward of him sat the English squadrons, their wounded replaced and, to some extent, their ammunition restored; to leeward of him spread the great sandbanks from the Sandettie and the Outer Ruytingen to the Wandelaar. To make his position still more dangerous, at eight o’clock on that Saturday night he sighted a new fleet of thirty-six ships led by five great galleons beating up from the coast of England. “Juan Achines!” The name went round the Armada, a name of terror only second to the name of Drake. But John Hawkins had already been justifying his name under Howard’s command during the last week. The newcomers were the ships of the Channel squadron, Seymour having received fresh orders from the Council to join Howard at the same time as he received Howard’s summons. Medina-Sidonia never so much as moved a pinnace to prevent the junction of the two English fleets. He was possessed by one dominant purpose: to make a connection with the Duke of Parma. After that, all would be well. Whether he had any nebulous plan in his mind by which he hoped to hold off the English attack whilst Parma’s little hoys and boats crowded with soldiers and cannon crossed to the Isle of Thanet or the Thames; whether he proposed to concert one with Parma; or whether he trusted to find one on Parma’s desk ready-made; there is no knowing. His own Relation is silent. He kept his fleet at anchor “in the form of a roundel,” and one of Seymour’s ships, as he swept up to take his position on Howard’s left wing, drew near enough to the Armada to rake the rearguard with a broadside and got no answer but a couple of culverin shots from the stern-guns of the rear galleasses. Except for the eight ships with which Nicholas Gorges should have reinforced Seymour, there was now gathered on the weather side of the Spanish fleet the entire Navy which England could put upon the sea. From a hundred and thirty-six to a hundred and forty sail they numbered, of which twenty-four were the Queen’s galleons and as many those formidable merchantmen which were wont to fight their way to and from the markets of the world.
Seymour had done little more than arrange the position of his ships for the night when a pinnace from the Lord Admiral drew alongside the Vanguard and summoned Sir William Winter to a private conference.
Sir William Winter hurried on board. He had a proposal to make. He made it at nine o’clock of the night, “and his Lordship did like very well of it and said the next day, his Lordship would call a council and put the same in practice,” which was all very tactful of his Lordship and altogether in keeping with that modest deference he was accustomed to use towards the veterans of the sea. The subject of his discourse was the use of fire ships and their particular application to the Spanish fleet. But it was a familiar story which Sir William Winter was telling. Already nineteen small hoys had been collected at Dover for this very purpose and laden with faggots and one barrel of tar apiece. In addition, Walsingham had sent down seventy-two barrels from London, and these were put into one of the small barks and all were ready and waiting for some officer of Howard’s fleet to come and fetch them.
Camden, the historian, attributes the fire ships to the insight and wisdom of Queen Elizabeth. But it was a common device of naval warfare in those times. The Spaniards themselves had tried it out on Drake in the harbour of Cadiz, and it is not necessary to account for its use now by looking beyond the combined intelligence of Howard’s war-council. Calais Roads, with their fierce tides and currents, were obviously the ideal spot for their employment; the English fleet had besides the advantage of the weather-gauge; and those hard-bitten mariners who gathered from time to time in Howard’s cabin on the Ark Royal would have been a set of ninnies if the scheme had not occurred to them.
Howard, however, sent the old sailor back to the Vanguard without relieving him of the credit of his originality. He summoned a council on the next morning, Sunday the 28th. No one could tell how long Medina-Sidonia would remain at his unfavourable anchorage. The opportunity was not to be missed. It was decided to man the fire ships with crews and send them down before the wind on to the Armada at midnight when the tide would be running at its full strength up-channel. The ships would tow rowing-boats in which at the last moment the crews were to escape. As soon as these orders were drawn up, Sir Henry Palmer was hurried off in a pinnace to fetch the prepared vessels from Dover. He had hardly got under way, however, when it occurred to some bright spirit at the council that by no possibility could Sir Henry return with them before the following morning. The English could not afford to wait that time. Some negotiations must be going on between the Prince of Parma and Medina-Sidonia. At any moment a decision might be reached. The council resolved to make a little fleet of fire ships by sacrificing some of the many craft they had with them which were not fit for the battle line. Drake supplied a ship belonging to him, the Thomas, of two hundred tons. Captain Yonge, the Bear Yonge of a hundred and forty. In all, eight ships were secretly made ready under the command of Captains Yonge and Prouse. The guns were left on board loaded with powder and shot. Whether this was an oversight due to lack of time, or an accident from the need of complete secrecy, or done of set purpose, there is no record. But if it was an accident or an oversight, it turned out to be one of the most profitable kind.
Meanwhile Medina-Sidonia was sending off his messages to Parma without result, but with every help from Monsieur Gourdan, the French Governor of Calais. Monsieur Gourdan construed the laws of neutrality in a way very unfavourable to the English. We are perhaps more accustomed to that treatment from the Powers of the Continent now than we were then. We hit back in those days quick and hard, having men like Drake to take these matters in hand. Monsieur Gourdan was polite to Howard, helpful to Medina-Sidonia. He facilitated the journeys of his messengers to Dunkirk. He supplied him with what information he had; he warned him of the peril of his anchorage; he sent him flowers and fruit and encouraging sentiments. And indeed the unhappy Duke needed all the encouragement he could get.
Vicente Alvarez, the Captain of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, when questioned in the Bridewell on August 2nd, declared that the Prince of Parma was understood to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Enterprise and that the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s mission was merely to hand over his forces to the Prince and thenceforth act under his directions. If this declaration were true and Medina-Sidonia a mere subordinate, much that is puzzling in his conduct of the expedition becomes clear. His determination to avoid a battle, his neglect to attack the ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth, even his anchorage in Calais Roads, must be attributed not so much to
lack of seamanship as to the loyalty of a Second-in-Command to his Chief. On the other hand, it would make absolutely inexplicable the absence of the Prince of Parma from Dunkirk at this particular moment. For absent he was. On Saturday night Medina-Sidonia had sent his secretary Arceo to warn Parma that he could not linger where he was. On Sunday he despatched Don Jorge Manrique with the still more urgent summons to sally out at once. But Parma was away at Bruges. Neither soldiers nor munition had been embarked and, according to the message which the Secretary Arceo sent back to his Admiral on the Sunday evening, it would take at least a fortnight before the expedition could start.
Why was Parma absent? Meteren, the Dutch historian, gives an explanation so odd that one cannot but wish it to be true. He says that Parma had persuaded himself that as soon as London had been captured he was to be crowned King of England by Cardinal Allen. For this reason he had resigned the Government of the Low Countries to Count Mansfeld and had gone off to make his vows to St. Mary of Hall in Hainault. Thus the first news of the presence of the Armada in the Channel reached him on his way back at Bruges from the mouth of Roderigo Tello, whom Medina-Sidonia had despatched to him in a pinnace on the day before the battle of the Isle of Wight. And the first evidence of its arrival in French waters he got the next day from the thundering of its guns as he travelled on the Monday towards Dunkirk. When he reached that town on Tuesday, July 30th, the Spanish fleet was scattered along the shallow seas of Zeeland and his chance of a crown was gone.
However enheartening to himself the Prince’s devotions at the shrine of St. Mary of Hall may have been, they inflicted a day of grave disquiet upon his co-religionists in the Roads of Calais. The whisper grew that Parma could not be found. The rumour was officially denied but not killed. For a time hopes grew and spirits rose, but as the long day wore on and no orders were issued and no bustle of activity was observed on the Duke’s galleon, a foreboding of disaster spread from ship to ship. In the English fleet, less than two miles astern, quiet though it looked, something was surely being prepared. Drake was there with his magic mirror. Achines too— “Ojo Achines!” How often had Philip himself scrawled that phrase on the margin of the despatches he read! The English were a devilish people with black and subtle arts. The haunting presentiment grew as the darkness fell. It reached and troubled Medina-Sidonia and his staff on board the flagship. He sent a warning to his fleet to watch well throughout the night and have their boats alongside lest fire ships should be sent against them. He despatched the soldier he most trusted, Antonio Serrano, Captain of the forecastle of the San Martin, in a pinnace to patrol the water between the fleets.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 896