In November, however, Parma, conscious of a rapid deterioration of the situation in the Netherlands under his deputy, the Count of Mansfeld, disengaged himself in France and, although harassed all the way by French cavalry under Henry, retreated in perfect order and without loss; another notable feat of arms, though it was not appreciated by Philip who wished him to stay and by his continuing presence assist the Spanish Infanta’s claim under Salic law to the French throne. (She was of course the daughter of Henry III’s sister.)
Information reaching Spain that Sixtus was willing to recognize Henry IV if only, or as soon as, he turned Catholic, led to a dramatic scene in the Vatican, where the new Spanish Ambassador, the Duke of Sesa, delivered a curt message from Philip declaring it intolerable that the Papacy should even be considering a reconciliation with a man who in Spain would have been ‘burned a thousand times already’ for his relapses; and stating that if Sixtus persisted in this conduct Philip would demand a National Council (at which Sixtus might be deposed). The Pope thereupon uttered words which were not far from anathema upon Philip and all Spaniards and strode from the room, leaving his Cardinals trembling. Sesa, white with anger himself, then turned to the Cardinals and told them that if they trifled with his master he ‘would drop a brick on them’, and he too stamped out.
Whether or not consumed by his own choler, the sagacious, eccentric Sixtus V died shortly after this, whereby Philip lost an enemy and the world an utterer of outrageous but brilliant bons mots. Philip declared himself ‘muy contento’ with the Pope’s death.
Thereafter followed a succession so rapid that the Papal chair might have been electric: Sixtus in August 1590, Urban VII in October 1590, Gregory XIV in 1591, and Innocent IX in 1592, Clement VIII thereafter. But none of them, willing or unwilling, could or would help Philip to marry his much loved daughter to the new Duc de Guise and put her on the French throne.
Henry IV, deprived of Paris, was encouraged by Elizabeth and Burghley to lay siege to Rouen. Almost all the great towns of northern France were staunchly Catholic, and without their revenues he was poverty stricken. In one year alone Elizabeth had to advance him £60,000 apart from material help, which consisted of an army in the field. For this latest continental adventure Elizabeth, after Essex had spent two hours on his knees before her on three separate occasions, was persuaded to let him lead the English army, which was to consist of four thousand foot soldiers and appropriate cavalry. Cautiously and hoping for the best, she appointed his old friend and mentor, Sir Roger Williams, to be his chief of staff. Williams, hard-bitten, scarred and worldly-wise, is thought by many to be the original of Shakespeare’s Fluellen.
Essex was twenty-four, and, while conducting his part of the campaign on the best soldierly lines, yet contrived to give it all a flavour of twelfth-century chivalry. As soon as he landed he led a dangerous cavalry dash through enemy-held territory to link up with his hero, the French King; and the foot soldiers under Sir Roger Williams followed him, a notable march made without loss. A French writer describes Essex’s arrival in Compiègne: ‘ Nothing more magnificent could possibly be seen. Six pages preceded him mounted on chargers and dressed in orange velvet embroidered with gold. He himself had a military cloak of orange velvet all covered with jewels. His dress and the furniture of his horse alone were worth sixty thousand crowns. He had twelve tall body-squires and six trumpeters sounding before him.’
So the campaign for all its dour purpose took on a gayer air. At a dinner-party given by Essex the three Swiss colonels present could not stay the course and collapsed under the table, but Essex and his friends and the French officers present rode riotously out, shouting and singing right up to the gates of Rouen. When nearly there they met the Governor of Rouen out on a reconnaissance. Essex at once challenged him to a duel. The Governor’s only reply was a volley of shot from his escort of musketeers.
Nevertheless the siege failed, and for the same reason as the siege of Paris. The campaign had dragged on all winter and Essex had returned to England, when Parma once again suddenly appeared with his army only ten miles from the city. Reluctantly, under orders from his King, he had again withdrawn from his campaign against Maurice of Nassau and marched his men through the spring muds of Flanders to relieve yet another Catholic city. But at Caudebec, on the Seine west of Rouen, he received a wound in the hand which was eventually to prove fatal. The greatest general of his age died in Arras in December of that year, not long before the letter arrived from Philip which was to relieve him of his command.
Parma’s absence with part of his troops from the Netherlands had already opened the way to a Dutch revival. Though only twenty-four, Maurice of Nassau, William of Orange’s son by his second wife, Anna of Saxony, had inherited his father’s military talents, and in the space of five months he recaptured Breda, Zutphen, Deventer and three other vital forts, by the conquest of the last of which, Nijmegen, he was able to gain control of the whole of Gelderland. Surviving the customary attempts at assassination, he reorganized the army of the Netherlands, instituting a high level of training and discipline which matched the Spanish, and introducing many new ideas, such as arming his cavalry with carbines instead of with swords. Behind the army Jan Oldenbarneveldt was organizing the rebel provinces into a unit of great economic strength. Indeed the contrast between the southern provinces, which, under Spanish rule, were declining into poverty and banditry, and those northern provinces comprising the Union of Utrecht, which prospered in conditions of war, was yearly more marked. Antwerp, occupied and blockaded, lost its great position as the trading centre of Europe. Amsterdam, free and thriving, took its place.
Nor by sacrificing such advantages as his great general had gained in the Low Countries did Philip advance his cause in France. The Duc de Mayenne permitted twelve hundred Spanish troops to be garrisoned in Paris; but the Spaniard had by now become more unpopular in France even than the Englishman. If Spain sent money the French accepted it but derided the Spanish for sending it; if they sent troops it was a greater offence. It is not an unfamiliar pattern.
In January 1593, Mayenne summoned the States General and received the Spanish Ambassador with regal honours. The Count de Feria reminded the French of all the favours they had received and the six million gold ducats Philip had spent. He urged the assembly not to disperse until they had elected a truly Catholic King – or preferably Queen.
But even this gun was in process of being spiked. Convinced at last by the Spanish armies of Parma and the obduracy of his own people that there could never be peace in France with a Protestant on the throne, Henry IV changed his religion for the last time. In his famous words, he had decided that ‘Paris was worth a Mass’. Elizabeth, shocked and indignant, sent him several strongly worded letters on the theme of ‘what shall it profit a man’. Henry replied that his change of religion would not affect his friendship towards England. Nor did it. As Francois Guizot later wrote: ‘He became a Catholic of France without ceasing to be the prop of the Protestants in Europe.’ But for many earnest Protestants in England and elsewhere it was a bitter disillusion.
In consequence of his apostasy Henry was able to enter Paris without a shot fired and, from a window in the Port St Denis, to watch the Spanish garrison marching out. ‘ Commend me to your master,’ he said, ‘but do not return.’
If Philip had been giving ground on the military front he had been recouping it on the naval. By 1590 there had been a complete reorganization of the defences in the Caribbean. All the ports, such as St Domingo and Cartagena, and those in the Canaries and Azores too, had been greatly strengthened to resist surprise attack, and at most of these places frigates and other small but fast warships were now stationed to be on hand if the Flotas were attacked. A system of communication had been established by means of pinnaces which could make the passage across the Atlantic in twenty-eight days and carry advance news of hostile squadrons approaching. More important, Pero Menendez Marquez in Havana developed a new type of warship of about two hundred
tons burden which he called galleyzabras – on the same principle as the galleass but of quite different proportions and seaworthiness. Built like galleys but mainly propelled by sail, they were sufficiently heavily armed to outfight anything of their own size and too fast to be caught by anything bigger. (One thinks of Admiral Fisher’s dicta in the First World War, of the birth of the battle-cruiser, and, later, of the German pocket-battleships.)
But these ships were not just for war: they were to take over the carrying of the silver bullion and other treasure from the old conventional slow-moving carracks. Merchants were compelled to unload at Havana and have their valuables refreighted in the galleyzabras. There were not nearly enough of these ships yet to take over from the East India carracks, and they for the time being still had to take their chance. Towards the end of 1589 both the Earl of Cumberland and Sir Martin Frobisher seized prizes of great value on the trade routes; but this sort of raid was to become more difficult with each year that passed.
Hawkins had a more methodical plan, which was the establishment of a regular blockade off the Azores, maintained by a squadron of English warships four months at a stretch, each squadron to be relieved by another, so that at no time throughout the year would the treasure-ships be free to sail through. It was a plan he had advocated before the Armada, but then the menace to England was too great to see it implemented. The year 1590 was the big opportunity, and although like most such schemes of the time it failed to be efficient for the half measures employed to furnish it, the fact of its presence, plus the remarkable depredations of a leading city merchant, Alderman John Watt, and other privateers in the Caribbean, caused Philip to send word that the treasure-ships were not to risk the Atlantic crossing that year.
As soon as this was learned in England it was resolved to fit out a squadron of warships to intercept the treasure-fleet in the spring of 1591. Drake remained in eclipse, though busying himself reorganizing the defences of Plymouth; neither Hawkins nor Frobisher had particularly distinguished himself in the Queen’s eyes in last year’s blockade – that is they had brought nothing of value home; Lord Admiral Howard’s was rather too big a name to command this light compact squadron. So Elizabeth chose Lord Thomas Howard, the Lord Admiral’s young cousin, with Sir Walter Ralegh as second-in-command. Lord Thomas Howard, who was thirty, had commanded the Golden Lion against the Armada and had handled his ship like a master; but his other sea experience was slight. Ralegh, now thirty-nine, had had a lifetime’s experience of soldiering but relatively little naval experience, though as an empire builder he had already set down one colony of settlers in Virginia.
However, at the last moment the Queen, who seldom liked her favourites to stray far from court – and just then Ralegh was back in favour – forbade him to go. She may also have realized that the Howards as a family no more liked Ralegh than he liked them. They looked on him as an arrogant upstart living on the Queen’s favour. He looked on them as his mental inferiors, which, not unnaturally, they were.
Probably on Ralegh’s initiative, the Queen appointed his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, to sail in his place. The outcome is both history and legend. The squadron that sailed was small but well found. Howard in the Defiance, Grenville in the Revenge, were accompanied by two comparable Queen’s ships, the Bonaventure, Captain Robert Crosse, and the Nonpareil, Sir Edward Denny, of around five hundred tons each with crews of two hundred and fifty and about forty guns. The Crane, a ship of half that size, a half dozen well-armed London merchantmen, and about eight pinnaces, made up the fleet. Before they had been at sea more than a month news reached London that a Spanish fleet of remarkable size and power was abroad: about fifty sail, of which thirty were galleons, including six of the new ‘Apostles’ of fifteen hundred tons each. They were under the command of Don Alonso de Bazan, younger brother to the dead Santa Cruz; and immediately this news reached Ralegh he sent off a fast pinnace to warn the English. At the same time strenuous efforts were made to reinforce Howard’s fleet. Thomas Vavasour in the Foresight and George Fenner in the Lion, with seven more armed merchantmen, were hurried off towards the rendezvous that Howard had left, an area a little to the west of the island of Flores.
In mid-August the Spanish fleet reached Terceira, the main naval base in the Azores, and shortly afterwards news of the English took them to Flores. By this time the English squadron had been at sea nearly four months, had captured little and were heartily tired of waiting for the treasure-fleet. As usual they were beset by sickness, and when Captain Middleton, who had been dispatched by the Earl of Cumberland, arrived in a pinnace to warn them of the approach of a Spanish fleet, most of the ships’ companies were ashore. Ralegh in his famous Report writes: ‘Some were providing ballast for their ships; others filling of water and refreshing themselves from the land with such things as they could either for money or by force recover … one half part of the men of every ship were sick … in the Revenge there were ninety diseased.’
The Spanish admiral had so divided his fleet that the English would be surrounded and attacked from all sides; and, but for Cumberland’s warning pinnace, the plan would have been entirely successful. As it was, Howard had less than an hour in which to recover his crews from the land before, at around four in the afternoon, the first squadron of the Spanish fleet under Marcos de Arumburu – that Paymaster of the Castilean galleons who was so nearly wrecked off the Blasket Islands – came round the corner of the island and was upon him. So close was it that several of the English ships had to slip their cables in order to be away in time; and then it was touch and go whether they could gain the weather gage and so make out to sea. One indeed, the Revenge, did not.
Sir Richard Grenville is one of the strangest, fiercest, most heroic figures of all that fierce, heroic age. Obstinate, of an inflammable temper, a man of action, always at war either on land or sea and a natural leader, his reputation in Spain was nothing like Drake’s, but it was a darker one. ‘ Ricardo de Campo Verde gran cossario.’ A great pirate. He took a pride in his grim reputation. The legend was current at the time, and for long after his death, that when Grenville took prisoners he would have them to dine and would chew and swallow glass till the blood ran from his mouth. Returning from Virginia in 1585 he had come on a Spanish ship containing treasure and, having no small boat to board her, had used an old ship’s chest which floated him and his men across and sank as they sprang aboard the Spaniard. Not a man to turn his back on the enemy however much common sense demanded it.
By turning tail and running back before the wind the Revenge almost certainly could have got clear. Instead, while Arumburu and Howard exchanged broadsides, Grenville decided to force his way right through the Spanish fleet, obliging the big galleons of Seville to give way before him. Naturally they did no such thing. The San Felipe first got a grappling-line aboard, but this parted, being of rope, and the Revenge ‘discharged her lower tier loaded with cross-bar shot and forced her to fall away and stop her leaks’. But so big was the San Felipe beside the Revenge that she becalmed the sails of the English ship, and after a succession of further broadsides Martin de Bertendona, thirsting to repay all the defeats he had suffered, came up on the other side in the San Barnabas, and was able to grapple more securely.
‘The Spanish ships,’ says Ralegh, who got it all direct from survivors, ‘were filled with companies of soldiers, in some two hundred besides the mariners … In ours there was none at all beside the mariners but the servants of the commanders and some few voluntary gentlemen. After many interchanged volleys of great ordnance and small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter the Revenge, and made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the multitudes of their armed soldiers and musketeers, but were still repulsed again and again, and at all times beaten back, into their own ships or into the seas.’
One English ship only turned back to help, the George Noble, an armed London victualler of one hundred and fifty tons, which sailed recklessly into the fighting zone and put herself under Grenville’s
command. Grenville’s order was to save herself before she was shot to pieces.
In the meantime Arumburu had crashed into the poop of the Revenge and got some men aboard, who fought their way as far as the mainmast and captured the ship’s ensign; but he had so damaged his own galleon in the collision that she had to disengage and request aid from others of the fleet. His place was immediately taken by Don Pedro Manrique in the Ascension and behind him came Don Luis Cuitifio who put his flagship alongside the Ascension and ran his men across her decks. Then the San Andrea forced her way in near the bows.
By now night had fallen, but the fight went on in the dark unabated. Grenville was everywhere, wolfishly encouraging his men and directing them, and somehow he bore a charmed life in all the slaughter about him. The Revenge’s upper works were completely torn to pieces and many of the crew who had taken to the tops for better aim had died. At eleven Grenville at last was seriously wounded in the side, and had to retire behind a splintered bulwark while his surgeon attempted to dress the wound. While fastening the bandages the surgeon was shot dead and Grenville again wounded, this time in the head.
The commander of the Spanish fleet, Alonso de Bazan, having very narrowly missed catching and boarding Howard and having lost the other English in the dark, returned and circled helplessly round this bitter and bloody battle in which one lone Queen’s ship was locked inextricably with fifteen of his own, like a fox among a pack of hounds. About three in the morning the galleon Ascension began to sink, and her crew were taken off by other vessels. Later, as the Ascension went to the bottom, Don Luis Cuitino’s flagship was found to be fatally holed, and this too was abandoned, to sink soon after dawn. Two others were so damaged that they foundered later. But there were always more eager for the kill. And Bertendona’s San Barnabas was still locked to the Revenge’s larboard side in a grip that could only end in death.