Read The Spanish Armada Online
Authors: Robert Hutchinson
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Military, #Naval, #General
The Spanish Armada (37 page)
So the king turned his face away from the world, locking himself up in his quarters at San Lorenzo as the scale of the disaster became obvious, even to a man with an unshakeable faith in
God’s power to work miracles.
The daily business of government ground to an abrupt halt as Philip mourned his Armada and his lost hopes of victory in such a holy cause. Lippomano, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, observed
that ‘the king gives no audience and does not dispatch business. No one is paid [and] the cry of his people goes up to heaven.’ A royal chaplain, Padre Marian Azzaro, told Philip that
although his prayers and processions ‘were very good things, yet it was certain that God gave ear to other voices before his’. When the king asked him: ‘What voices?’ Father
Marian replied: ‘Those of the poor oppressed who stay about the court in pain, without being paid and without having their business attended to.’
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There was also no redress for the owners of vessels lost in the campaign. Lippomano reported that
some of the owners whose ships have been cast away or burned
have applied to the King for pay . . . Those owners have been told quite frankly that the
King is under no obligation, any more than a private individual who hired a ship . . . The contention that the ships were taken by force is of no weight against the privilege of the
King.
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Stubborn denial turned to bleak despair in the Escorial Palace that November. Now ill with recurrent fevers and a return of the painful gout, the king wrote an anguished,
desolate letter to his secretary Mateo Vázquez:
Very soon we shall find ourselves in such a state that we shall wish that we had never been born.
If God does not send a miracle (which is what I hope from Him) I hope to die and go to Him before all this happens . . . which is what I pray for, so as not to see so much ill-fortune and
disgrace.
Please God, let me be mistaken, but I do not think it is so.
Rather, we shall have to witness . . . what we so much fear, if God does not return to fight for His cause.
Philip emphasised: ‘All this is for your eyes alone.’
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He confided to his chaplain: ‘God does not return to
fight for His cause. [This] would not have been permitted except to punish us for our sins.’
Medina Sidonia tried to feed and care for the survivors but it was a daunting task, given the huge numbers of sick and starving and the lack of food available in the surrounding countryside. One
wonders what good the sugar, raisins and almond preserves that he ordered could have achieved.
Predictably, the captain-general faced harsh criticism in Spain for his conduct of the campaign. Lippomano reported that ‘what is heard on all sides is the bad generalship and timidity of
the duke . . . and everyone lays the blame [for] all these misfortunes upon his inexperience and lack of valour’.
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Medina Sidonia begged
royal leave to return to his home amid the orange groves of San Lúcar to recover, rather than go immediately to Madrid to explain why his mission had so totally failed. Philip, with a
surprising generosity of spirit and compassion, told him to ‘attend to his health and to vex himself about nothing [and] when he is better to go and see his wife as there will always be
plenty of time for him to come to court’.
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On 5 October, with his back-pay of 7,810 gold ducats in his saddlebags, Medina Sidonia ‘apparelled himself and his gentlemen all in black and like mourners’
set off for home across the mountains in a curtained horse-drawn litter
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leading a column of eleven mules and seventeen bearers carrying his
baggage. On his arrival nineteen days later, Padre Victoria observed that he ‘had gone to sea without grey hairs and had come back grey’. He retained his rank as captain-general of the
ocean and that of the coast of Andalusia, responsible for the region’s defence, as well as the governorship of Cadiz.
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In Rome, prayers for the Armada’s success were stopped at the end of October.
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Any remaining hopes of Spain ever seeing one penny of the
papal subsidy for the ‘Enterprise of England’ vanished like a puff of Vatican incense. Olivares told Philip: ‘I am greatly afraid that we shall get nothing from the Pope. It is
impossible to imagine how openly he has shown his selfishness and bad disposition on this occasion.’
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Sixtus V instructed one of his
cardinals to write to the king to console him on the Armada losses and to encourage him to launch a new expedition against England. He refrained from writing himself as he feared that Philip
‘might make it a pretext for asking him for money’.
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In those long silent and solitary hours in the Escorial Palace, the king mentally revisited every facet of the Armada expedition and slowly, his organised mind rationalised the disaster and
reinforced his steely determination to destroy England.
Accordingly, he came out fighting. The Venetian ambassador believed that Philip
made up his mind that the late disasters are to be attributed, not to the ability of the enemy, nor to the unfavourable weather but rather to the want of courage shown by
his officers.
He declares that if they had lost, as they have, fighting instead of flying – for one must call it flying when they showed no heart for the fight – he would have considered all
his expenses and labour as well invested.
Above all, he feels the stain on the Spanish name and declares that with a prudent and valorous commander, they can still recover the honour they have lost.
Philip could not countenance talk that the Queen of England ‘may
possibly be able to defend herself against his forces’. He stalwartly
maintained that she was weak, weary, short of money and her miserable people were ‘downtrodden, some by the burden of taxes, others on the score of religion’. Lippomano added:
In short, his majesty outwardly displays a fixed resolve to try his fortune once again next year . . . Whatever decision is taken, everyone is agreed that prayers for the
life of the king are needed, for though he maintains the contrary, he is really deeply wounded by these disasters.
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The king decided to send a revitalised, re-armed and rebuilt Armada to assail Elizabeth’s realm. In November, representatives of the
Cortes
, the Spanish
Parliament, met Philip and ‘secretly told him they would vote four to five million [of gold], their sons and all they possess so that he may chastise that woman and wipe out the stain which
has fallen upon the Spanish nation’.
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But the astute Venetian envoy warned of the dangers of a new attack on Spanish ports by a triumphant Drake:
No small trouble would arise now if Drake should take to the sea and . . . make a descent on the shores of Spain, where he would find no obstacle to his depredations and
might even burn a part of the ships that have come back, for they are lying scattered in various places along the coast without any troops to guard them, as all the soldiers reached home sick
and in bad plight, besides which some of these ships are in harbours which have no forts.
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Meanwhile in Flanders, there had been baseless reports that Parma had attempted to break out with his invasion barges on 13 August but was driven back with the loss of two
Spanish ships off Dunkirk.
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Two days later the duke had written to Medina Sidonia, urging him to return with the Armada to escort his army across
the narrow seas. His letter was too late and he knew, in his heart, it was just an empty gesture, although vaingloriously ‘he protested [that] he would go on with the attempt and would die in
the pursuit of it’.
25
On 31 August, Parma stood down his invasion fleet and redeployed his army to resume campaigning against the Dutch rebels, despite growing dissension in his ranks. His Spanish soldiers
‘bitterly railed’ against him for not invading and his Walloon troops
‘demanded their pay very rudely’ but were bluntly told it was still in the
Armada pay-chests.
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Paying no heed to this discord, Parma besieged the town of Bergen-op-Zoom, but after six weeks of indecisive fighting
abandoned his fieldworks and marched away. Elizabeth cheerfully observed that his ignominious failure was a further blow to Spain’s military reputation and represented ‘no less [a]
blemish by land, than by sea’.
Naturally, it was time for recriminations in Spain.
Lippomano reported ‘serious differences’ between Medina Sidonia and Parma – ‘each one trying to throw the blame on the other’. His fellow ambassador in France
reported ‘charges of gross negligence’ levelled against Parma by his enemies, whilst his supporters claimed he had been ‘ready to embark and that he had already begun to do so but
that Medina Sidonia, though he sailed by Parma, did so in his flight from the fireships’.
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Count Nicolo Cesis, one of Parma’s dependants, arrived in Rome and went to great lengths with the Pope and cardinals to
justify the duke, his master’s conduct, by showing . . . that he had not failed to carry out the king’s orders. He had embarked 14,000 men and being unable,
through stress of weather, to join [Medina Sidonia], he awaited the [Armada] in a place where it was quite easy for the [fleet] to put in but Medina Sidonia had not chosen to effect the
junction and Parma could do nothing.
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Parma’s pleas were not well received and many believed ‘that in exculpating himself . . . [he has] been [found] wanting in respect to his majesty by making his
excuses for his attacks on Medina Sidonia to any other than his sovereign’.
29
Far from being persuaded of the justice of Parma’s case,
the Vatican cast ‘much of the blame on [him] and they say that the Duke of Medina Sidonia should lose his head’ according to Olivares.
30
In Turin, Jusepe de Acuña, the Spanish ambassador, passed on the Duke of Savoy’s offer to take command of Philip’s forces in Flanders, in place of Parma.
They had heard accounts ‘of how badly Parma has carried out his orders (whether through malice or carelessness) to be ready to aid Medina Sidonia [and] it seems impossible to the duke that
your majesty can leave him in the Netherlands’.
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The campaign’s key strategic failures were the Armada’s lack of a
sheltering port and Parma’s inability to embark the Spanish invasion force in time for
Medina Sidonia’s arrival off Calais. The great vulnerability of Philip’s plans for the subjugation of England had always been the vital timing of the rendezvous between his land and
naval forces, and this, not unexpectedly, was exposed by a series of mishaps. Unreliable and (in modern terms) snail-like communications by sea had prevented any coordination between the two
commanders. Parma, trying to disguise his tactical intentions from the blockading Dutch, could not keep his heavily armed soldiers on the flimsy, crowded invasion barges whilst impatiently awaiting
the arrival of the Armada. Medina Sidonia, beset by the harrying English ships, had nowhere safe to go where he could await the embarkation of the Spanish troops. He also felt unable to risk taking
on the combined Anglo-Dutch fleets in the dangerous shoaled waters off Dunkirk in order to clear the narrow seas for the invasion to be mounted.
However, if Parma’s troops had landed in Kent and had been able to deploy the siege artillery carried by the Armada, the prospects for Elizabeth’s government would have looked very
bleak indeed. The ill-trained and poorly armed levies and partially completed defences are likely to have been easily overcome by the duke’s seasoned veterans. Judging by Parma’s
progress in 1592, when his 22,000 troops covered 65 miles (104.61 km) in just six days after invading Normandy, he could have been in the streets of London within a week of coming
ashore.
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But amphibious landings are the most risky of any military operation, with so much dependent on favourable weather and tides and still
more on good fortune. Parma would have been the luckiest of generals not to have lost hundreds of men in the hazardous transit of the narrow seas in their vulnerable flat-bottomed barges.
Parma was questioned by officials in Madrid about ‘the real truth as to the date when this army could have been ready to sail, if weather had permitted and the Armada had performed its
task’. On 30 December, he wrote to Don Juan de Idiáquez from Brussels:
I will reply frankly and freely to your question. Notwithstanding all that has been said or may be said by ignorant people or those who maliciously raise doubts where none
should exist, I will say that on 7 August . . . I saw already embarked at Nieuport 16,000 foot soldiers and when I arrived in Dunkirk on Tuesday the eighth before
dawn,
the men who were to be shipped there had arrived and their embarkation was commenced.
They would all have been on board with the stores . . . as everything was ready and the shipping was going on very rapidly if the embarkation had not been suspended in consequence of the
intelligence received of the Armada.
But for that, they might well have begun to get out of port that night and have joined those from Nieuport during [the] next day, so that together they could have fulfilled their task, as
nothing necessary was lacking.
It is true that, in consequence of the number of infantry having increased, there was little room for the cavalry, there being only twenty rafts for them, unless the Armada could aid us with
accommodation for the rest.
Even if this had been impossible, we should have tried to send the rest of the cavalry over in the other boats and no time would have been lost in the principal task and in taking a port for
the Armada in the channel of London.
Parma felt secure against any criticism of his conduct. He offered to supply certificates and sworn depositions by his commanders and local magistrates about the readiness of
provisions and stores, adding: ‘You may truly believe that when I told [Medina Sidonia] that only three days would be required for the embarkation and the sailing, I did not speak lightly and
I should have effected it in less time than I [predicted], with God’s help.’
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