The Spanish “army,” as Winter calls it, was making a brave show. It was bearing north-north-east or north by east as closely as it could— “I assure your Honour, in very good order.” But it was making leeway all the time. Hardly a man slept on any ship even after that exhausting day. Darkness caught them wondering when they would strike. But as the big lanterns began to cluster on the English ships a greater terror still assailed them. Better the sandbanks than the smoke and thunder of the English guns. A friar upon one of the galleons paints a vivid picture of the panic which through that night prevailed in all except the flagship and a few galleons which stood by her. Medina-Sidonia stood as close to the wind as his torn sails and shattered yards enabled him, and when morning broke he was still facing his enemy, whilst six miles to leeward the bulk of his panic-stricken fleet was flying with all possible sails set upon its certain destruction. Medina-Sidonia was urged to surrender, to seek flight in a pinnace. He would not. He hoisted a signal, ordering the Armada once more to form up about him. Not a ship went about to obey him. He confessed himself with his officers, and companioned by the faithful three or four, Oquendo, de Leyva, Recalde — all that was left of the vaunted chivalry of Spain — waited for the coup de grâce.
But the English were in no hurry. The weather and the shoals were going to finish their work. Why waste the trifle of ammunition they had left? Even under their keels the water was growing dangerously shallow. And then once more Deus flavit, and once more to the discomfiture of the English. The wind veered into the south and the Armada had only to gybe and run away clear into the North Sea. “The reason best known to God” had been Drake’s comment when, a few years before, he had missed the Plate fleet by twelve hours.
Howard went after them. Drake was to lead the chase. Seymour and Winter and his squadron of the Narrow Seas were to stay behind and make sure that Parma did not seize his chance and attempt the invasion when there were no ships to hinder him. Seymour hated the great duty assigned to him. He wrote to Walsingham “from on board the Rainbow, this 1st of August, 1588, at anchor at Harwich at three in the afternoon.”
“....so having done the uttermost of my goodwill (to the venture of my life) in prosecuting the distressing of the Spaniards, which was thoroughly followed the 29th of July, I find my Lord jealous and loath to have me take part of the honour of the rest that is to win, using his authority to command me to look to our English coasts that have been so long threatened by the Duke of Parma.” And so strongly did his disappointment oppress him, he must needs add in a postscript:
“I pray God, my Lord Admiral do not find the lack of the Rainbow and that company; for I protest before God and have witness for the same, I vowed I would be as near or nearer with my little ship to encounter our enemies as any of the greatest ships in both armies; which I have performed to the distress of one of their greatest ships sunk, if I have my due.”
There is no doubt that Seymour was jealous of the authority which Drake had established in Howard’s mind, and it is seen rankling in him through many of his letters.
He returned none the less to Dover and the Channel Ports, whilst Drake pursued the Armada in a spirit which is clearly reflected in the letter he wrote to Walsingham on board his ship on the morning of July 31st.
“We have the army of Spain before us and mind with the grace of God to wrestle a pull with him. There was never anything pleased me better than the seeing the enemy flying with a southerly wind to the northwards. God grant you have a good eye to the Duke of Parma,” and it was then that he expressed his confidence that he would make Medina-Sidonia wish himself back amongst his orange-trees at St. Mary Port.
Parma, however, had now abandoned hope of the Enterprise of England, and as the noise and smoke of the battle rolled away out of his hearing, he dismantled his flotilla at Dunkirk and withdrew with his army to Bruges.
For a little while an expectation was held by Howard’s war-council that the Armada might be hoping to rouse Scotland to avenge the death of Mary Stuart. With the wind as it blew, the Spaniards might very well make the Firth of Forth. It was perhaps more of a hope than an expectation. For “a stratagem” — doubtless the fire ships again — had been arranged which would place the Armada at their mercy. But when the two fleets had reached the latitude of Newcastle, with the Armada still holding a course north-west by north, it was evident that if Scotland were her goal, she was seeking a harbour in a higher latitude.
A council was held upon the Ark Royal. Food was short, ammunition shorter, and disease was spreading through the ships with the rapidity and the deadliness of a plague. It was decided, therefore, that they should make for the Firth of Forth. The Advice, a pinnace of the Navy, and a caravel belonging to Drake were left behind to keep the Armada in sight, and Howard’s fleet swung over to the west. But the next morning the wind shifted into the north-west and all their plans must be reconsidered. The Armada could no longer reach any part of Scotland. She might bear away for Denmark or Norway — and this was Drake’s own opinion — or she might go about and with the breeze on her quarter run boldly back to make her junction at Dunkirk with Parma after all. It was not probable. Prisoners had told Drake that not a ship in the Spanish fleet was free from sickness. Many of them had left behind their only anchors at Calais. All were riddled with shot, their spars broken, their sails torn, their rigging decayed. But this was Friday, the 2nd of August. There had been three days of unmolested flight in which to make repairs. It was possible, and so great a risk could not be taken. A last council of war was held in the familiar cabin of Lord Howard, and as a consequence a course was set for the North Foreland.
During that run, once more Deus flavit. But this time England was favoured. The wind strengthened into a westerly gale so violent that the English fleet itself was scattered and must seek a refuge in roadsteads and harbours from Harwich to the Downs. The Armada might make for Norway, it could not reach back again into the Channel. Parma was the only danger. “The Prince of Parma, I take him to be as a bear robbed of her whelps; and no doubt but, being so great a soldier as he is, that he will presently, if he may, undertake some great matter.”
But the Queen had had enough. Her expenses had been for her impoverished Exchequer enormous, and although many galleons had drifted on the Flanders coast, the Dutch had seized them. She summoned the Lord High Admiral to take his place in the Council on August 11th, and at midnight of that day Drake wrote in his cabin on the Revenge a letter to Walsingham, which proves how close and cordial had been the relations between the Vice-Admiral and his Chief throughout these weeks of stress. To anyone who has followed the development of Drake’s character and seen how his independence upon others grew with his success; and how the boy who had been the deckhand of a little bark trading with the ports of Zeeland slowly became a great Captain listening to all but deciding for himself; and how a not unnatural arrogance had been worn by him as a sort of breastplate against his feudal superiors; this letter cannot fail to be acceptable as a very moving and very graceful statement:
“Most Honourable: The sudden sending for of my very good Lord, my Lord Admiral, hath caused me to scribble these few lines. First most humbly beseeching your Honour to deliver this letter unto Her Majesty as a testification of my Lord Admiral’s most honourable using of me in this action, where it hath pleased his good Lordship to accept of that which I have sometimes spoken, and commended that little service which I was able, much better than in either of them both I was able to deserve. Wherein if I have not performed as much as was looked for, yet I persuade myself his good Lordship will confess I have been dutiful.”
Howard, however, did not attend that Council. The demands made upon him by the ravages of disease in his fleet, the want of new clothes, of food, of pay, all of which were lacking, kept him busy. On August 15th, however, he took Drake and Hawkins with him, and by their advice it was agreed that the fleet should be at once reduced to a hundred sail. Howard and his two Vice-Admirals returned hurriedly to Sheerness; and
whilst they were engaged upon a plan to divide the fleet between the Downs and Margate, so that the sick men could be brought ashore over a wider area, Sir Edward Norreys brought news that the Armada was on its way back to the Channel. It seems that a younger Norreys was on board the pinnace Advice which had been left behind to shadow the Armada; and some confusion may have occurred through the identity of the two names. The rumour certainly stayed for a day the paying-off of any ships, although Drake from the first refused it any credence; and the next day his “poor opinion” was confirmed by the sure news that the Armada had been sighted in full flight westward of the Orkneys. She was making north-about for home through the stormy waters of Cape Wrath.
Of its dreadful voyage home, as of the no less dreadful mortality and starvation which ravaged the English sailors, one may read in other histories. Sixty-three ships, according to the Spanish, were lost; some fifty or sixty straggled home. From the first to reach Spain news of a great victory was spread. Church bells were rung joyously, and Figleazzi, the Ambassador to Spain of the Grand Duke, wrote sadly to Walsingham his friend that the Queen was to be burned at St. Paul’s Cross — a fitting inauguration of the enslavement of England. As the remaining ships with their riddled hulls and woebegone crews crept into Coruña and Vigo and Lisbon, a more modest opinion began to prevail. Leyva was shipwrecked on the Irish coast. Diego Flores de Valdes was thrown into prison. Recalde and Oquendo died of broken hearts; and Medina-Sidonia returned to those orange groves at Port St. Mary which he had never wished to leave. Of the men who were lost there was no roll made. Sir Horatio Palavicino, a Genoese banker settled in England and a financial agent of the Government, saw the battle of Gravelines from the deck of the Ark Royal and put the Spanish casualties as five thousand in that battle alone. On the English side less than two hundred were killed from the moment when Recalde was sighted off the Lizard to that when the last shot was fired.
Thus the dark cloud passed away from England. It was the fashion for both sides to claim the intervention of God on their behalf and to ascribe to His favour each variation of wind and sea which helped them. Thus to the Spaniards the two shifts of the breeze which saved them at Gravelines were the special benediction and providence of God. Whereas the English, whom those two changes robbed of victory, are careful never to mention them at all, and discovered their favour and approval in the storms of the North Sea and the savage waters of Cape Wrath. It is better to find the hand of God in the long process and the steady growth than in the manipulation of the laws of nature. A race that looked out upon a wondrous world from winch an arbitrary line drawn upon a map debarred it, a great Queen, a passionate belief in the Protestant religion, and the growing habit of the sea: here were the seeds which flowered red in the famous summer of 1588. No changes of weather gave the victory. The better men under better leaders, Howard and Hawkins and Winter and the Fenners and Fenton and, above all, Francis Drake, gained it. On Plymouth Hoe Drake stands, looking expectantly at an ever-opening door. He saw it at its widest as he sat in the cabin of the Revenge in the Downs and wrote his letters to the Queen and Walsingham. Afterwards, alas! it began to close.
CHAPTER XXI
REFORMS IN THE FLEET. THE CADIZ. EXPEDITION. ITS IMPORTANCE AND ITS FAILURE. THE CAUSES OF ITS FAILURE.
BEFORE THE CHURCH bells had stopped ringing and the ashes of the bonfires were cold, uneasiness had returned, at all events to thoughtful people. The victory had been very incomplete. Few prizes had been taken, few ships sunk in battle. England had to thank the skill of her sea-captains, the sandbanks of Flanders, the gale in August and the rock-bound coast of Ireland rather than the fighting qualities of her fleet. Moreover, the order which the Spaniards had kept and the gallantry which they had shown had surprised and alarmed many who had slept peacefully on the pot-house stories of the privateers. The might of Spain had been crippled. It had not been destroyed. It had received no mortal hurt.
Committees examined the whole fabric of the Navy and, guided by men of the calibre of Drake, made useful reports. The English gunnery had been disappointing after all. More gunners, and they better trained, were recommended. Drake when training his squadron at Plymouth with target-practice had been urged, if not ordered, not to waste his powder in such exercises. That was to be changed. The ships were to have the longer line of the galleasse and a higher free board. It had been found that the lower tier of camion could only be run out through the ports and fired when the sea was as smooth as a pond. Although the Admirals and Captains had made much in their reports of how they fought at the range of musket and pistol shot, it was clear nevertheless that there had been a great deal of banging away at long distances when there was no possibility of doing any harm. Many useful lessons were learnt and applied.
But the urgent immediate question remained: how to benefit by the incomplete victory and roll up for ever the threat of Spain; The Queen, proud of her diplomacy and conscious of her poverty, persuaded herself that another successful capture of the Indian fleet would suffice. Hawkins took a longer view. He asked for the permanent establishment of a squadron of “six principal good ships of Her Majesty’s, with six smaller ships,” all victualled for four months, which should haunt the coasts of Spain and the Azores. He had made the proposal originally on board the Bonaventure on February 1st of 1587. He renewed it now on September 5th, 1588, on board the Victory in the Downs.
But the plan which carried the day was of a more drastic kind. It was the work of Drake and of an old comrade of his Irish days who had won upon land a reputation comparable to that which Drake had won upon the sea — Sir John Norreys, who after a long apprenticeship with Coligny and William of Orange was now Marshal-of-the-Field of all the Queen’s armies. They proposed a sudden and secret descent upon Lisbon by land and sea, the seizure of the country, the enthronement of Don Antonio and the transfer back to Portugal of the lucrative East Indian trade. The adherence of the Azores would inevitably follow, with or without a struggle — probably without. Spain, stripped of the Portuguese possessions, would be more than ever dependent upon her Indian fleet. The gold from Peru was her life-blood. But with the Azores in English hands, the artery through which that lifeblood passed would be cut and the Spanish Empire would dwindle into so many pages of a history-book.
It was a plan after Drake’s heart: adventurous, sweeping and, with a few implications, feasible. It implied that the enterprise should be undertaken on a national scale. Drake alone could probably never have secured as much. He had made too many enemies among the envious on the one hand and the humdrum on the other. But Drake and Norreys made a combination against which it was difficult to argue. The first soldier and the first sailor of the age were agreed that — to use the phrase of Hawkins — there is no other way to avoid the misery that daily groweth among our peoples. Between them they had their way.
But there were two other conditions of success — nay three. The first, that the secret should not leak out; and Don Antonio had a confidant, Manuel de Andrada, who even when his master was debating his plans in Drake’s house was revealing them in letters to Philip. The second condition was that Don Antonio should himself be welcome to the people of Portugal, should have the panache — I know no other word — to rouse and bring them to his side; and he had not. The third was that the plan should be prosecuted as it was planned. But none of these conditions was fulfilled, and an enterprise more promising than Philip’s Enterprise of England ended in as complete a fiasco.
Let us look at it as it was planned. It was to be a joint-stock undertaking. Elizabeth, Drake and Norreys were each to contribute twenty thousand pounds, the City of London ten, and wealthy subscribers an indeterminate sum. The Queen, moreover, should lend six of her battleships and two pinnaces and four months’ victuals for them and wheat for three months more. She should contribute besides a siege-train, and, if the fleet were detained in an English harbour beyond its date of sailing, either by contrary winds or Her Majesty’s countermands — here spoke the experience of D
rake — she should pay the cost.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 898