The tide turned; the wind blew steadily from the south-south-west; the lanterns burned brightly on the English ships half a league astern; the night was very dark but clear. A little after midnight, when the tide at the full was racing past the Spanish ships, something was seen, perhaps a blot here and there of a deeper darkness, perhaps the sway of some great wing across the light of a lantern. Eyes were strained, questions asked in bated voices, and in a little while it was seen that eight ships with their sails set, but not a light burning on one of them, were coming down on the tide towards them. But they were not gybing and yawing and running up into the wind, as they would have been had they been derelict. These kept their course with their sails full. They were being sailed. They had their crews on board. And then suddenly lights shone on two of them, flames roared upwards from the decks, so that the rigging stood out against them, black lines on a sheet of red. By the blaze the crew was seen to be tumbling into their long-boats and pulling back to the English fleet. What had happened on two of the ships was repeated on the other six. They burst into flames, and only when they were too near to the Armada to be intercepted and towed out of range did the crews desert them. All the uneasiness and the forebodings which had been gaining on the Spaniards throughout the day now culminated in sheer panic. The panic increased as one after another the loaded guns upon the fire ships exploded. No one aimed them; they flung their round shot wildly into the air, but the thunder of them and the smoke joined with the roar of the flames to throw the Spaniards into a frenzy. Down they came on the swirling tide, the sails now on fire and streaming out before the wind like the devil’s pennants, eight tall ships, ablaze now from stem to stern. What wonder if the soldiers and sailors, and even the throng of priests on the Spanish galleons, believed that demons conjured up out of the sea by the abominable arts of Drake were working those red-hot cannon and holding the tillers? They cut their cables, they smashed into one another, some hoisted a few sails; and here huddled together in a cluster, there straggling in separate lines, without order or plan, they drove away north-eastwards on the tide. Medina-Sidonia, however, kept his head. He was held up by a group of entangled galleons. He was urged to abandon his San Martin. There might be others in the Armada who had a sounder knowledge of navigation, there was none with a heart more brave. He refused. The entangled galleons drifted away from across his bows. He got clear from them, clear from the fire ships too; and going about he dropped his spare anchors and fired a gun for the Armada to form up again about him. From the point of seamanship, as from that of courage, he was right. He had a hope that with the turn of the tide the whole fleet might beat up to its old anchorage. But it was a forlorn hope. Only a few ships led by the San Marcos, one of the big Portuguese men-of-war, heard or obeyed his signal. Panic was the Armada’s Admiral that night, and the grey of the morning showed this tiny cluster of ships lying head to wind in the face of the English, and the mass of the fleet adrift behind him six miles off Gravelines. The wind was still in the south-southwest. By no possibility could it rejoin him in time to save him from destruction. Medina-Sidonia took the only measure open to him. He raised his anchors, bore away, and wore his few vessels, meaning to pass his fleet and form a new battle line on the galleons furthest to leeward. He can be left for the moment with the San Marcos and her few companions running with all sails set to catch up his scattered “roundel.”
In the English plan, the fire ships were to be the prelude of a full-dress naval engagement at break of day. The Armada was to be caught in a confusion and its wings driven in upon its centre, and the whole mass of crowded ships battered to destruction. Howard’s formation of the fleet into squadrons remained, with the addition of Seymour’s fine fleet as an extra squadron on the left wing and outside the squadron of Frobisher. Howard thus occupied a true centre, with Seymour and Frobisher on his port side, Hawkins and Drake upon his starboard.
But he did not keep it. For as the English ships advanced and the light broadened, a huge galleasse was seen inshore. It was the flagship of the galleasses and the only one which, up to now, had escaped serious hurt. Her rudder had been torn off her by a collision in the hurly-burly of the night before, and her Admiral, Hugo de Moncada, was striving with all the strength of his galley-slaves to save her from capture by driving her on shore. According to the Spaniards, she was the bravest ship which ever sailed the seas, a Titan, a great whale, the Behemoth of ships. And even as Nuestra Señora del Rosario had proved too irresistible a lure for Drake, now the flagship of the galleasses tempted Lord Howard of Effingham and he fell. He hauled in his sheets, he drew out of the line, and followed by the Queen’s ships belonging to his squadron, the Golden Lion under Lord Thomas Howard’s command and the White Bear under Lord Sheffield, he reached shorewards to capture the prize.
It is the oddest circumstance of all that day. Yet no one thought a penny the worse of Lord Howard. As soon as he was near enough, he sent off a hundred men under Captain Amyas Preston to seize her. It became a race between Howard’s pinnaces and the galley-slaves at the oars of Hugo de Moncada’s huge vessel. Hugo de Moncada won. He grounded his galleasse on the sand before the long-boats and pinnaces could reach her, and when summoned to surrender, claimed to be on the land of France. The hundred men from Howard’s ships swarmed by the ports, by the tiers of oars, on each other’s shoulders up the high bulwarks of the galleasse, arquebusiers and pikemen and sailors. For an hour the battle raged along the broad decks. Finally Hugo de Moncada was killed by a bullet which entered his head between the eyes, and the survivors of his company clambered and jumped overboard on to the beach. Order came from Lord Howard to tow her off, but the men in the pinnaces, strive as they might, could not make her move.
Hugo de Moncada had succeeded in beaching his great ship just under the guns of Calais Castle, and Monsieur Gourdan, the Governor, observing the efforts made to tow the galleasse away, thought that the time had come for him to take a hand in the affair. He sent a polite message to the captors of the galleasse, that looting was permitted unquestionably, but that the ship, having run ashore at Calais, was as unquestionably his. The captors had not waited for Monsieur Gourdan’s permission, they took the treasure chest of twenty-two thousand golden scudi and everything else of value upon which they could lay their hands. They then made a final effort to drag the galleasse into deep water and were driven away by the castle guns. For some time Lord Howard and his comrades watched the proceedings — for well over an hour certainly — and then sailed on to resume their proper positions in the battle of Gravelines.
From a modern point of view, such an episode seems a frank impossibility. Drake deserting the fleet, which his lantern was guiding, to secure a prize is a shock; but a Commander-in-Chief dropping out with his best ships from what was meant to be a decisive battle, just before the engagement began, in order to pick up and make certain of another prize, is hard to believe. Yet he relates the incident quite simply. The veteran Sir William Winter mentions it to Walsingham, with such details as that William Coxe, Master of Winter’s bark, the Delight, was the first to board the galleasse and was subsequently killed; and that the pinnaces did very valiantly behave themselves; but without a word of censure for the Admiral. Henry White, Captain of the Bark Talbot, writes in the same spirit:
“Part of our fleet made haste to overtake the enemy; my Lord Admiral with another part lingered a space to see what would become of those he sent to attempt the galleon.”
But naval tactics were new; they were due to the experience and imagination of great sailors like Drake and Hawkins; up till now fleets did not so much fight fleets as a number of ships fought a number of ships; and it was natural enough that an hereditary Admiral and even an old sailor like Sir William Winter with fifty years’ service in the Navy should follow the old style. In addition, the enormous value of a rich prize is not to be forgotten. The haste with which Queen Elizabeth sent to Dover for strict details of the taking of the galleasse is evidence enough. England was short of specie
and ammunition. Both were to be got in large quantities from a huge ship like the San Lorenzo. Besides, there would be young gentlemen on board, seeking honour and the favour of the Saints and the possession of great seignories in England. “Scarce was there any family,” Emanuel van Meteren wrote, “of account or any one principal man throughout all Spain that had not a brother, son, or kinsman in that fleet.” All these young gentlemen were worth their weight in gold to the captors. Captain Amyas Preston was unlucky in the case of the San Lorenzo. For those who were not killed outright in the bloody hand-to-hand fight jumped overboard and escaped to the kindly ministrations of Monsieur Gourdan.
Whilst this curious side-issue was being decided, Drake was leading the attack. The defection of Lord Howard had brought about a change in the English plan. All the squadrons swung to their right to intervene between Dunkirk and the Armada and drive Medina-Sidonia’s left wing so violently into his centre that he would be forced with all his fleet on to the shoals.
Medina-Sidonia was still astern of his drifting ships, though he was catching them up, but the water was shoaling under his keel and he was warned by his pilots that if he held on with his original intention of reforming on the most leewardly of his galleons they would all be on the sands before the manœuvre could be completed. Desperate measures were needed if the Armada were to be saved, and once more the Duke did not fail his King. Drake with the three Fenners on the Nonpareil, the Swiftsure and the Aid, and Robert Crosse on the Hope, were coming up swiftly behind him. He had only the San Marcos and the San Juan to support him. A couple of days afterwards, Drake promised so to handle the matter with the Duke of Medina-Sidonia “as he shall wish himself at St. Mary Port among his orange-trees.” The Duke must indeed have been anticipating that wish at this moment. But he did not hesitate. He sent off a pinnace ordering the fleet to turn and form up about him; he threw his own three ships up into the wind, and going about on to the port tack, with his bows to the west, awaited the charge. Not a shot was fired until the San Martin and the Revenge were within musket range — so short were both the antagonists of ammunition. Drake’s bows were pointing towards the port bow of the San Martin. He fired his bow guns, luffed, poured in his full broadside as he passed her and swept on to the mass of the Spanish ships, which were now, under the Duke’s order, beginning to turn and beat back to him.
By this action of Drake, Martin Frobisher, already exasperated by the capture of Pedro de Valdes and Nuestra Señora del Rosario, was driven into a fury, and expressed his feelings in unbridled terms. “He came bragging up at the first, indeed, and gave them his prow and his broadside and then kept his luff and was glad that he was gone again like a cowardly knave or traitor, but the one I will swear.”
Frobisher was no doubt honest in his belief. But, apart from his undoubted skill as a navigator, he seems to have been a heavy, unintelligent man. In the running fights from the Lizard to the Wight it was Frobisher on the left wing who got cut off from his fellows and must be extricated. He had the moribund idea of a naval battle fixed in his head. A ship chose a ship to fight and bombarded it until it was sunk.
Drake, however, wanted more than a ship. Hawkins was behind him with the Victory and his squadron. Behind Hawkins again were Frobisher and Winter and Lord Seymour. Enough to deal with the Spanish flagship. His business was to hinder if he could the reforming of the Armada upon its Admiral. The process had indeed already begun. The fifty best fighting ships under Recalde and Oquendo and Alonzo de Leyva had turned into the wind and were diminishing rapidly the distance between themselves and their Chief. Medina-Sidonia stood up to the battering, shrouding the San Martin in the smoke of her guns. She was pierced through and through by a fifty-pound shot upon her water-line, and her yards and rigging were damaged with her hull. But none the less he succeeded. His great fighting galleons, the Guipuscoans, the Andalusians, the Portuguese, gathered about him in the form of a half-moon, the convex side towards the enemy, with Oquendo and de Leyva in command of his right and Recalde responsible for his left and weatherly wing. It was not a battle formation. The fleet had not opened out so that supporting vessels could pass between them. Medina-Sidonia did not mean to fight a battle if he could help it. He was thinking of Parma, hoping that he would sally out, and he was beating out to the north-west so as not to overrun Dunkirk. But he was not allowed a passage out of danger that way. Whilst Hawkins attacked in the centre, the main strength of the English fleet was thrown against Recalde’s wing. Owing to Howard’s absence, Oquendo and de Leyva were left unharmed, and even the San Martin had a respite in which to stop her leaks with lead. But on the weather flank the attack fell with the greatest violence. Two great galleons, the San Felipe and the San Mateo, were cut off and surrounded, but Recalde came to their rescue and they were recovered into the body of the fleet. They had short relief; they were so crippled in rigging and hull that they could not keep their place and dropped away again astern. They came now under the fire of Winter’s squadron, the San Mateo, as a friar on board of her described her, a thing of pity to see, riddled with shot like a sieve. The San Felipe, commanded by an old soldier, Francisco de Toledo, was hardly in better case. Both of them were forced into a collision with a Castilian galleon, Nuestra Señora de Begoña, and the San Juan de Cecilia of the Levantine squadron. The Nuestra Señora was able to cut herself free from the entanglement, but the San Juan, a ship of eight hundred tons, crowded with soldiers, was so roughly handled that through her port-holes she was seen to be full of blood.
A dense cloud of smoke hung over the battle, but Medina-Sidonia learnt of the distress of his two great ships, and though he had managed to stop only the most dangerous of his bullet-holes, he went about to the rescue. The English galleons had never been so brilliantly and gallantly handled as on that morning. Their nimbleness was a miracle to the Spaniards. They charged down upon the enemy, fired a broadside, went about like ships setting to partners in a coranto, fired the other broadside and were off again.
Not that they escaped. The Revenge had forty shot pass into her at the one side and out at the other; and one of the officers who lay down in his cabin for a moment’s rest had his bed carried away from under him by a round shot and himself remained unhurt. For the Spanish ships, hampered by their crowded soldiery, slow and stubborn to their helms, and equipped with fewer cannon and those of smaller calibre than their enemy possessed, were valiantly fought. No one sustained the fame of the Spanish army more nobly than Diego Pimentel. He commanded the crack regiment of Sicily and the galleon San Mateo. He was twice cut off and set upon like a bear amongst the mastiffs in the bear-pit of Southwark. Few were left alive of his soldiers, many of his sailors were killed. His sails were torn to ribbons, his castles shot away, his spars tumbling about his ears and his guns dismounted. The sea was pouring through the holes in his planks. He had nothing left to fight with but his muskets, and he fought with them. Warned that his ship was sinking under him, he tried to grapple and board the nearest of the enemy, first one, then another. But he was no match for the nimble ships of the Queen. One after the other eluded him, yet by so little that in one case an English officer leaped across into the top of the San Mateo and, poised there with his flashing sword above the smoke, cried: “Soldiers so heroic should surrender to the Queen. That’s honest war.” The only reply was a musket shot, and as the ships swung apart the officer fell dead.
Medina-Sidonia’s flagship, supported by the San Marcos and one or two others of his fleet, was now near enough to attract away Hawkins and Drake to himself. The San Felipe and the San Mateo were left to the care of Seymour and Winter. The flagship and her consorts were surrounded. The enemy ships “placed themselves athwart her bows, at her side and under her stern, and for four hours made her suffer the tempest of their shot.”
Leyva and Oquendo with the starboard wing of the Armada strove to beat up to the help of their Commander-in-Chief. But the wind was veering more into the west, and then suddenly, to their amazement and dismay, through the sm
oke there swung into view a new squadron, fresh as paint, banners streaming, music playing, led by a great ship with the Lord High Admiral’s pennant flying at the main. Howard, with the Ark Royal, the Bear, the Bonaventure and the Lion and the rest of his squadron, sailed into the battle, but he sailed into it four hours after Drake had begun it, and those lost hours were of very great importance.
Medina-Sidonia was now forced to abandon his plan of escaping battle by a flight to the north. There had been dissensions already amongst his staff, violent words had been exchanged, the Duke had been accused of cowardice to his face. But there was now no option for him. He must stand and fight. Upon his left wing the fury of the attack increased. Winter, writing home to Walsingham on August 1st, declared: “I deliver it unto your Honour upon the credit of a poor gentleman that out of my ship there was shot five hundred shot of demi-cannon, culverin, and demi-culverin; and when I was farthest off in discharging any of the pieces, I was not out of shot of their harquebus, and most times within speech of one another. The Maria Juan, a Biscayan galleon of six hundred and sixty-five tons, twenty-four guns, manned by a hundred and seventy soldiers and a hundred sailors, was sunk outright by Crosse of the Hope, and only eighty of her men were saved. The San Mateo and the San Felipe drifted away and were driven ashore between Nieuport and Ostend. The San Marcos followed their unhappy example. The English Admirals wasted no time now in taking prizes. Whilst Howard bombarded the centre of the Armada, Drake and his squadrons sheared off galleon after galleon from the left wing and left them spinning away to the sandbanks and the shoals. The San Martin itself had no more than eight fathoms under keel. Of the fifty great ships which eight hours before, the crown and flower of those three years’ work in Lisbon Harbour, had formed up about Medina-Sidonia, fifteen were cut away I altogether from the main body, and waited in a helpless isolation for the moment when the English would be free to round them up. The complete destruction of the Armada was certain, was at hand when — suddenly — Deus flavit. But it was not, as the inscription recorded, in favour of the English. Never did the inconstancies of wind and sea so rob a fleet of victory. It was close upon six о clock of the evening when a sudden squall accompanied by torrents of rain swept out of the south-west upon the battle. The English, as they saw its black approach, threw up their ships into the wind. The men, who a minute before had been serving the guns, were now strung out upon the yards taking in the topsails. The battle was broken off. A greater commander than Drake or Howard or Hawkins so willed it. And for twenty minutes not a shot was fired. For the Spaniards necessity and policy agreed. Crippled and torn, they were forced to scud away to leeward. When the squall ceased, they were in shoal water. The English, it seemed, had but to wait for a few more hours than they would have done. The wind was strong, the sea was rising. It was breaking on the banks. The Armada was still their prize. They were all the more willing to wait, since once more they had come to their last quintals of powder, their last pyramids of shot.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 897