THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA - PART TWO
THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA – PART TWO
The heady days of Henry V in the early fifteenth century when England had a professional army well equipped and trained, led by career officers and capable of defeating many times its own numbers were long gone. The dynastic struggles and the expense of the later-to-be-called Wars of the Roses had dissipated English military abilities and now the only professional troops were the royal bodyguard and those few in castle garrisons. Otherwise defence on land was entrusted to the part-time Trained Bands and the even more part-time militia whose equipment and training varied from the abysmal to the quite good given a lot of luck. As early as 1570 Elizabeth had promulgated an order that all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were to be in possession of bows and a laid down number of arrows and that they should practise with them regularly. That was all very well, and there were certainly those who claimed that English archers had destroyed the French at Agincourt, and would surely do the same to the Spaniards 150 years later. In reality the archers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were men who had trained from a very young age to be able to discharge ten arrows a minute and who were already experienced, disciplined and under command of competent NCOs and officers, which was far from the case in the sixteenth century. Walsingham conclude that if the Spaniards did manage to effect a landing then not only would the Trained Bands be unlikely to stand in the face of battle-hardened Spaniards, but many of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects would join the invaders, and he drew up a list of potential defectors, including a number of peers of the realm.
If defeat of an invasion on land was unlikely, then it must be dealt with at sea, and Elizabeth had, reluctantly, agreed to spend what little money remained in the treasury on augmenting the navy, with new ships and cannon. England had long used technology as a force multiplier, to compensate for her numerical inferiority to her traditional enemies: the French and the Spanish. In the Hundred Years War it had been the longbow, England’s weapon of mass destruction, which allowed tiny English armies to defeat far larger French ones. Now it was to be cannon. Cannon had been part of the equipment tables of armies and navies for over two hundred years, but they had been painstakingly manufactured using ‘hoop and stave’ whereby washer-like segments of iron were welded together. This took considerable time and no two made in this way had exactly the same ballistic characteristics. Ammunition was stone, carefully shaped by hand, and even with the advent of iron shot, the manufacturing process was still manual, with differences in weight and diameter, small but enough to vary the range when fired. Added to this was the difficulty in making gunpowder which would always produce the same propellant force for a given weight. All this meant that cannon on board ships were only effective if the attacker could get as close as possible to its enemy and open fire at very short range, hoping to hole the hull or collapse the rigging, followed by boarding. In England, however, the development of the blast furnace allowed large quantities of iron to be melted and cast in moulds, which meant that the English could produce cannon and iron shot not only more cheaply and faster than by the old methods, but which were consistent in length, bore diameter and weight. Added to this was the English method of corning gunpowder to produce the same propellant power for the same weight of powder. The whole was a gunnery system which was more accurate at a much longer range than the older, Spanish methods. This would be crucial in the battles to come.
If any threatened invasion was to be stopped at sea then it was essential to know when it was coming and from where. Intelligence agents in Spain could spot where ships were being concentrated, but early warning of a fleet’s approach would be given by fishing smacks stationed well out to sea, after which the monitoring of their progress would be the responsibility of the ‘Guard of the Sea’ which manned lookouts from Cornwall all along the south coast. Manned by four to six men, each post consisted of a stone hut with a hole in the roof through which was a long pole with a beacon on top and a step for the duty lookout man. If an enemy fleet was sighted and a landing was imminent then the beacon would be lit and that was the signal for all churches in the vicinity to ring one bell, all other bell ringing having been forbidden. If a landing was not imminent then the lookouts would observe and report. Simultaneously possible landing sites were surveyed, weapons stores evaluated and training stepped up, while a mass round up and detention without trial was ordered of those considered to be untrustworthy .
In February 1587 spies reported a fleet of 200 Spanish and Portuguese ships concentrated in harbour at Lisbon with rations and powder being loaded. In England the Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, Baron Effingham, fifty-one years old, a privy councillor and highly experienced soldier and sailor, was convinced that a pre-emptive attack should be launched. While this would not prevent the Spanish ‘English Enterprise’ it might at least delay it and give England more time to prepare. Howard and his advisers proposed that a squadron of twenty-five ships commanded by Sir Francis Drake, the forty-seven-year old sailor, merchant, pirate, ex-mayor of Plymouth and Member of Parliament, with three thousand marines, should attack the Spanish fleet in harbour and harass the Portuguese coast. The Queen took some considerable persuading, unhappy about risking precious ships in such a dangerous escapade, but eventually approved the venture with the restriction that only five ships of the Queen’s navy would take part. The other twenty ships would be purely commercial ventures provided by investors, including the Levant Company, forerunner of the East India Company, the deal being that they would share whatever loot might be acquired. Drake sailed from Plymouth on 12 April 1587 and decided that rather than trying to take on the main Spanish fleet massing in Lisbon, he would go for the less well defended supply vessels mustered in Cadiz.
Shortly after Drake had left Plymouth the Queen changed her mind, partly because of the Spanish offer of peace talks (dismissed by Walsingham as merely a smokescreen for further preparation) and partly because the presence of five ships of the Royal Navy would mean that hostile action could no longer be deniable, as previous raids and privateering had been. The fast pinnace carrying the order not to attack Spanish territory (although allowing the capture of ships caught at sea) either did not catch up with Drake, or if it did he ignored it, and the raid on Cadiz was a stunning success. Raids on lightly defended ports, like Cadiz, was Drake’s speciality and he burned twelve Spanish ships, sequestered four which he added to his own fleet, and took on board the vast stores of armaments and provisions intended for the Spanish fleet in Lisbon, burning that which he could not take away. The latter included a huge stock of seasoned wooden staves and metal hoops for assembling into the barrels that would hold the food and wine for the fleet. Their destruction meant that only unseasoned wood was available, meaning that barrels would leak and contents rot, a factor that would become important in the coming campaign. From Cadiz Drake raided along the coast of Portugal, destroying shipping and burning churches and government buildings and storehouses. To cap his achievements on his way home he captured a Spanish treasure ship en-route from Peru laden with gold, spices and precious stones. He returned to Plymouth on 20 June 1587 to national jubilation, particularly from those who had invested in the civilian ships. It was calculated that Drake had put back Spanish planning by at least a year. Spanish morale was not improved by the results of the raid, and it was further depressed by Walsingham’s psychological warfare whereby he spread exaggerated accounts of English troop strengths and had false weather almanacs distributed which predicted fierce storms in the channel and the Atlantic for 1587 and 1588. That these forecasts proved to be true was, of course, purely fortuitous.
Philip was furious at what Drake described as the ‘singeing of his beard’ and orders demanding that the Spanish fleet should sail came thick and fast. His plan now was to abandon any idea of a feint on Ireland prior to an invasion of England: there were not enough men and Drake’s raid had severely damaged the logistics system. Instead the entire fleet would sail up the Channel, destroying the English fleet on the way, anchor off Margate, and protect the army from Flanders as it crossed the channel on flat-bottomed barges and landed. Although the two fleets, English and Spanish, had roughly the same number of ships, those of the Spanish were bigger and carried substantial boarding parties – they would, thought Philip, be more than a match for anything the English might deploy to stop them. The commander of this Armada that would conquer England was Spain’s most celebrated sailor, Captain General of the Sea and General Admiral Alvaro de Bazan, First Marquess of Santa Cruz. A highly experienced sailor he had been at sea since the age of eight and had saved the day at the battle of Lepanto in October 1571, when the Ottomans had broken the right wing of the Christian fleet. He knew exactly what had to be done to fit the fleet for its great purpose.
To the king, Santa Cruz’s protests that the fleet was not ready and had not the requisite stores and that the sailors were insufficiently trained was evidence of incompetence or cowardice or both, and in September 1587 he ordered Santa Cruz to sail by the end of October. That was never going to happen, and in December the king ordered the Duke of Parma, commanding the Spanish army in the Netherlands, to cross and invade England without the protection of Santa Cruz and his fleet – an order which Parma prudently evaded. In February 1588 Santa Cruz died, probably of typhus, aged sixty-one and worn down by the king’s constant hectoring and criticism. In his place Philip nominated the thirty-eight-year old Captain General of the Coast of Andalusia Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was an experienced administrator and a reasonably competent general but who, despite being given the rank of Captain General of the Ocean Sea, knew absolutely nothing about ships or naval warfare.
TO BE CONTINUED