At dawn the fighting almost stopped. No Spaniard lived on the decks of the Revenge, but few English either. All the upper works had been shot away down to the main deck. Not a mast or a spar was standing. English and Spanish dead and dying lay heaped together in the scuppers. Not a pike remained unbroken. All powder was spent. The Spaniards surrounded her still, but they had fired something like eight hundred rounds of heavy shot, had lost nearly four hundred men killed, including two captains, and they waited for her surrender to save more bloodshed. Out of the morning mists another English ship, the Pilgrim, under Captain Whiddon of Plymouth, having hovered in the area all night listening to the battle, put in a brief appearance, but a dozen Spanish ships closed on her and she slipped hastily away.
Meanwhile Grenville, dying in his cabin, gave orders to the master gunner to split and sink the Revenge so that she should not fall into enemy hands. The gunner and others were willing but were stayed by Captain Langhorne and the Master, who argued that the Revenge was already so badly holed that if surrendered now it was unlikely anyone would ever get her safe to port, and it was not dishonourable to save themselves and those others not mortally wounded to fight another day.
While some pleaded with Grenville, the Master, who had ‘at least ten or twelve wounds in his head or on his body,’ – and was to die of them later – hastened to be conveyed aboard the San Pablo where he met Don Alonso de Bazan and demanded generous terms if they were to yield. The terms were willingly granted, and the great fight was over. ‘When the answer was returned and that safety of life was promised, the common sort being now at the end of their peril, the most drew back from Sir Richard and the master gunner, it being no hard matter to dissuade men from death to life. The master-gunner, finding himself and Sir Richard thus prevented and mastered by the greater number, would have slain himself with a sword, had he not been by force withheld and locked in his cabin … Sir Richard thus overmatched, was sent unto by Alonso Bazan to remove out of the Revenge, the ship being marvellous unsavoury, filled with blood and the bodies of dead and wounded men like a slaughter-house.’
Sir Richard Grenville died two days later on board the San Pablo. Shortly afterwards a storm of hurricane force from the west and north-west scattered and sank many of the Spanish ships. With them went the Revenge. So many ships were wrecked and so many thousands of bodies were cast up on the islands that, according to a Dutch merchant called Van Linschoten, the islanders began to doubt the power of God. ‘So soon as they had thrown overboard the dead body of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Grenville, they verily thought that, as he had a devilish faith and religion and therefore the devils loved him, so he presently sank into the bottom of the sea and down into hell, where he raised up all the devils to the revenge of his death. Such and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to utter, without being reproved by any man.’
Lord Thomas Howard was much criticized at the time for leaving the Revenge to her fate, rather as Medina Sidonia was for leaving Pedro de Valdes in the Rosario. Although the behaviour of the two captains thus left behind is so opposite as to belong to different worlds, the action of the admirals has a similarity in that it was dictated by larger considerations than the safety of one ship. Medina Sidonia by staying with the Rosario would have split his Armada. Howard by returning to fight alongside the obstinate commander of the Revenge would probably have lost his squadron. Also to stay to grapple or be grappled would have been contrary to all the precepts of the Armada battle. It was precisely this that the Spaniards wanted, precisely this that the English had learned to avoid.
But Howard, it is argued, might have stayed near, harrying and biting at the edges of the Spanish fleet and distracting them from their attack on the Revenge. This presupposes that the English ships were still much faster and more manoeuvrable than the Spanish. But the Spanish ships, or the majority of them, had been built in the last four years on lessons learned in the Armada battle; the English were the same ones and had been at sea four months. It is doubtful if Howard could have harried the Spanish ships and yet maintained his distance. Indeed the Spaniards claimed that had night not fallen, they would have overtaken several of the English ships, certainly the Defiance, which was the slowest of the royal vessels.
The news of the capture of the Revenge and the scattering of the English fleet was brought in to Lisbon by one of the Apostle galleons, the San Andrea, which had been in the thick of the fight, with all her flags and banners flying. This was the first and only English capital ship captured throughout the war, and efforts were made in Spain to make the most of it and to hide the cost in Spanish ships and the disaster of the gale which followed. In England the death and defeat of Grenville was accompanied by wild rumours which only the publication of Ralegh’s Report helped to stifle. The Queen privately was upset and offended by the manner of Grenville’s death. The ultimate realist, she saw no point in sacrificing a valuable and famous warship and a valuable and brave commander and crew for the sake of an immortal gesture. Pedro de Valdes, safe in comfortable captivity in England, would no doubt have agreed with her.
But the last fight of the Revenge has become a legend in men’s minds that defies rational assessment. In Froude’s memorable words: ‘As the most glorious actions, set like jewels in the history of mankind, are weighed one against the other in the balance, hardly will those three hundred Spartans who in the summer morning sat combing their long hair for death in the passes of Thermopylae have earned a more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern Englishmen.’ In 1590 the Earl of Essex married Frances, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Her Majesty was furious but quickly forgave him. Late in 1591 Sir Walter Ralegh secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies-in-waiting, and when it was all discovered the following year they found themselves both in the Tower – in separate cells, as Ralegh’s numerous enemies were amused to point out. Even when released, Sir Walter was banished from court, and it took him years to regain a partial return to favour.
Elizabeth was as conscious as most of her court that she alone had raised Ralegh to great eminence, Essex, on the other hand, had royal blood in his veins. Through Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, he traced his ancestry from Edward III. An ancestor, Eleanor de Bohun, had been the sister of Mary, wife of Henry IV. Another, Anne Woodville, had been the sister of Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV. His grandmother had been Anne Boleyn’s sister. There was almost too much royal blood in his veins, as Elizabeth was to decide later. But for the moment it counted in his favour. And his choice, though perhaps it aligned him too closely with the Walsingham faction, was otherwise a highly respectable one. Whereas Ralegh had married one of her ladies-in-waiting – this was the unforgivable sin: a breach of his oath as Captain of the Guard, and of the girl’s oath too. It was a direct affront to the Queen; and even when it was discovered there seems to have been no full submission or apology.
When it came to recovering the Queen’s favour, Essex had the additional advantage of being thirteen years younger – and so handsome and chivalrous and so much the popular hero. And it may have been that for all Ralegh’s loyalty – and this never wavered towards the Queen, terribly to his detriment in the last two years of her life – the dark, haughty brilliance of his mind was a challenge to hers, as other men’s were not, and that, although at first fascinated, almost hypnotized by it, she later, when the spell began to wear off, unconsciously resented the challenge.
Just before his disgrace, Ralegh had the mortification once again of mounting a naval expedition in which he was to play the leading part, this time in company with Sir John Borough, and once again of being recalled to court, while Sir Martin Frobisher was appointed in his place. But neither Borough nor Robert Crosse, Ralegh’s vice-admiral, would serve under Frobisher; so the expedition broke up and went its several ways, Frobisher to sail to Cape St Vincent, only to feel the full weight of Spain’s new naval power and be forced to run for cover. Borough and Crosse, however, succeeded in capturing
the seven-deck, two-thousand-ton Madre de Dios, the richest prize of all the war, and bringing her into Dartmouth. Here scenes of pillage and looting took place which were so uncontrollable that Elizabeth, who had only just consigned Ralegh to the Tower, was forced much against her will to release him in company with a gaoler to try to restore order. This he quickly did, since he was as popular with his sailors and Devonshire country folk as he was unpopular with the courtiers of Westminster and the citizens of London.
For a time these and smaller raiding successes, which helped to disrupt the Spanish trade routes, disguised the lack of purpose in English naval policy. It looked for a time as if Philip did not intend another Armada, but planned instead to establish a naval base somewhere along the Channel coast so as to harass English shipping at its source. So England’s chief energies were still directed to helping Henry IV in France and Maurice of Nassau in the Netherlands. Between 1589 and 1595 Elizabeth sent five armies to France in support of Henry, and by the latter year Henry could call himself King in more than name, in spite of individual pockets of League resistance and in spite of an attempt on his life by a Jesuit youth. Guise was made governor of Provence in an attempt to heal the schism, and Henry, to fulfil his obligations to his chief ally, declared war on Spain in January 1595. By the Edict of Nantes full rights, religious and civil, were granted to Protestants and Catholics alike.
In the Netherlands a new English commander. Sir Francis Vere, proved to be the most successful ever sent, both as a soldier and as a friend of the Dutch. And for the first time the two nations fought together and worked together in complete harmony. Parma’s successor in the Low Countries, the Count of Fuentes, a Portuguese of noble birth, was another very able commander who, taking over after a brief interim period, soon brought the Spanish troops up to their old level of efficiency and discipline and was a combatant to be respected by both Maurice of Nassau and Henry of France. Indeed, he besieged and took Doullens, only forty miles from the French coast south of Boulogne, and then swung east and took Cambrai too. In the meantime the Spanish penetration of the Brittany peninsula went on – indeed it sometimes seemed that Henry, preoccupied with emergencies nearer his capital, left the defence of Brittany entirely to Elizabeth – and in 1594 the Spaniards, having been able to land strong support for their troops at Blavet, opposite Lorient, marched across country and seized and fortified Crozon, a rocky promontory overlooking Brest harbour. Quite clearly their next move would be to take the city and so obtain a near-Channel port.
This was not to be tolerated, so a joint expedition under the two veterans, Sir John Norris and Sir Martin Frobisher, was launched with a substantial army and a fleet of eighty sail, and after weeks of sporadic but bitter fighting the Crozon fort was captured and the remains of its garrison put to the sword. Leading his sailors up a ladder over a wall, Frobisher was shot in the thigh. So close was the gun discharged that wadding entered the wound. It was allowed to remain and caused blood poisoning, from which the tough, quarrelsome, courageous old sailor eventually died.
So went the first, if the least, of the great triumvirate of sea captains and strategists who had fought against Medina Sidonia in 1588. In England at this time the other two were making ambitious plans which were to lead equally to their own end.
Chapter Twelve
Ralegh at Cadiz
By 1592 Philip II was sixty-five, and he was ageing quickly. Gout and arthritis constantly plagued him, and he had withdrawn more and more into the monastic life of the Escorial. When in that year there was an insurrection in Aragon he made the long and difficult journey across the mountains to Segovia, Valladolid, Burgos, Logrono and Tarazona, where the Cortes was waiting for him, and received its expressions of loyalty and a grant of six hundred thousand ducats towards his expenses of war. On his return to Madrid he was thought to be a dying man. The doctors warned him that unless he reduced the amount of work and took more regular and prolonged rest he could not hope to survive.
The famous Junta de Noche had been in existence since 1588, whereby a few intimate counsellors worked far into the night with the King, formulating policy and carrying out his secret instructions; but from 1592 it became still more exclusive, the King’s closest advisers being Don Cristoval de Moura, who was a Portuguese, and Don Juan de Idiaquez, a Basque; and it was seldom that directives were not signed by Idiaquez on behalf of the King. Philip also recalled the Cardinal Archduke Albert from Portugal to act as Regent if he were to die while Philip, his sole surviving son, was only fifteen. The thirty-three-year-old Albert was the son of the late Maximilian II, the enlightened ruler of Austria and Germany, and therefore Philip’s second cousin. He was also Philip’s nephew and brother-in-law, and, in the almost incestuous way of the time, was in a few years to become his son-in-law, when he married the Infanta Isabella, Philip’s beloved daughter.
The following year the King’s health improved again, and he was able to bend all his considerable energies once more to the prosecution of the war. Setbacks in the Netherlands and in France, induced at least partly by English support, convinced him that his only hope of military success was by way of naval supremacy. His spies reported that Drake was emerging from the eclipse he had suffered and was much at court now; and there were rumours that he would soon be let loose again. In the Parliament which met in February 1593 both Drake and Ralegh had argued for a new and aggressive naval policy against Spain. Ralegh had also been active in planning a new adventure to Guiana, and in 1594 sent out his emissary, a Devonshire captain called Whiddon, on a reconnaisance to the Orinoco. All this trespassed on the King’s domains.
Where, however, when it was assembled, should the next Armada be directed to land? Ireland was, as always, in a state of smouldering rebellion, and a landing there with several thousand troops could set the whole country aflame. Then a bargain might be struck that Spain would only withdraw from Ireland if the English agreed to withdraw from the Continent. Or another descent on the Isle of Wight, this time to capture it and possibly to parley with Elizabeth from there. To attempt any ferrying of troops from the Netherlands was clearly impracticable without a French port. But Philip as always was reluctant to land in support of the Irish; and in any event an occurrence in 1595 had the effect of turning his attention elsewhere.
In July of that year the aristocratic Don Carlos de Amesquita, commanding a squadron of four Spanish galleys with their accompanying small craft on a routine cruise, raided a fishing-village in Brittany and then was blown by adverse winds across towards the Scillies. Running short of water, he decided to put in on the Cornish coast and get water and to see what was to be found. It was not of course unusual for Spanish warships to be about in those waters. In May of that year a shallop from Blavet had captured a St Keverne fishing-boat in Falmouth Bay and taken its crew prisoner; a month later there had been galleys close in to the savage cliffs of St Eval on the north coast; following that there were twenty enemy sail sighted off the Manacles. The English coastal towns, particularly the west-country towns, lived ever on the qui vive. What was exceptional about this was that the Spanish captain dared to land. But Captain Amesquita had aboard with him at the time a noted English renegade called Captain Richard Burley, who knew the coast well and no doubt directed the landing at Mousehole.
It was a startling success. The population fled in panic and Amesquita landed two hundred men, pikes and musketeers, and burned the village, then sent pickets up the hill and they burned Paul Church and several hamlets around. Sir Francis Godolphin rushed an urgent message to Plymouth for help, supposing this to be the opening move of a full-scale invasion; but the Spaniards returned to their ships, rowed two miles across Mount’s Bay and landed again at Penzance, which they fired also. Godolphin tried to rally opposition here, but apart from his servants none would stay with him, and the Spaniards, four hundred of them now, celebrated Mass on the western hill and took an oath to build a friary on the spot after they had conquered England. Then, learning of the nearness of a fleet under D
rake and Hawkins, they took advantage of a favourable wind and made off for Brittany.
It was the first time Spanish soldiers had ever landed on English soil, and the weakness of the opposition was something that Philip was not to forget.
If the galleys had not left when they did they would in fact have been trapped by Drake, who at last had received a commission to go to sea again. It was tardy and reluctant when it came, and the Queen, no longer sure of her old hero, appointed the even older Hawkins to sail with him as joint commander. No doubt she felt that in sudden crisis or emergency the sager counsels of Hawkins would keep Drake in check. Hawkins was by now sixty-three, a tired man who had spent much of his life in the service of his country, who was unwell and had no desire to go to sea again; but he accepted the commission as an order from the Queen. Drake was only just turned fifty and was itching to resume his role as England’s greatest sailor. But neither of them quite appreciated the change in sea power which had taken place in the six years of their retirement.
In any event the shared command soon proved to be a grave error – as shared commands always do. Their fleet, though small, was well found, with six of the Queen’s ships and twenty-one other warships of varying sizes. It carried as colonel-general of the army Sir Francis Baskerville, another of the new officers, who had so distinguished himself against Parma that, in a brief period of truce, Parma had embraced him and told him that there was no braver soldier alive.
Four days out of Plymouth Hawkins discovered that Drake was carrying three hundred men more than he had provisions for – they had so flocked in he had not had the heart to turn them away – and proposed to raid the Canaries first to levy a ransom of new supplies. There was a quarrel between the two captains which Baskerville attempted to heal by appealing to Hawkins’s good nature. In the end this early diversion was agreed to.