There are only three ways in which fortified towns may be gained. The first is by stratagem … the second is by entrenchments and batteries to prepare a breach and to make the assault … the third is by entrenching an Army about a fort, whereby all passages are barricaded up; so that relief cannot possibly come to enter the town, so that by mere hunger they are constrained to yield.
– Robert Ward, Animadversions of War, 1639
AS CHARLES Blount cursed the rain and waited for his troops, Juan del Águila studied his favourite manual on fortifications and considered his next move. The veteran fighter had been in similar situations many times before, both as attacker and defender, and knew exactly what to expect.
Soon the full force of the English army would be hurled against these aged stone walls. The pleasant green countryside would be transformed into a blasted, muddy wilderness of dugouts and earthen ramps as his enemies relentlessly burrowed their way towards him in parallel and zig-zagging trenches. When they reached cannon range, they would mount their heaviest artillery behind barriers of compacted soil. They would establish new advance camps behind these lines, tightening their noose around the town. The great guns would roar. Dense iron cannonballs weighing eight kilo-grams or more would smash into the centuries-old walls. Their concentrated impact would weaken the tall, unstable edificies and, eventually, smash open a breach. No mediaeval stone wall could withstand modern cannon fire. It wasn’t a question of tactics. It was pure physics.
Over the past century (and Águila had been a soldier for nearly 40 percent of that time) there had been a total revolution in the science of warfare. Once, defenders had felt safe behind high stone walls. But the development of powerful, mobile cannon had changed all that. Repeated impact would quickly destabilise the gangling, top-heavy structures. Heavy masonry would tumble down, burying the defenders. The same friendly stones that had once provided shelter would shatter into flesh-ripping shrapnel. ‘Such is the shock of artillery,’ wrote the Italian military expert Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘that there is no wall, however strong, that cannon fire will not destroy in only a few days.’
Most modern European fortresses featured lower, wider walls constructed of hardened earth and faced by masonry. They were so bottom-heavy and stable that they rarely collapsed. Cannonballs fired at them would simply bury themselves deep into the earth, dissipating their energy. Viewed from above, modern forts resembled stars or magnified snowflakes, with angular, spear-like projections jutting out at strange angles from the wall. These ‘bastions’ ensured a clear view and a clean line of fire, however devious the enemy’s approach.
If you added defensive trenches, moats and slopes, you had a fortress that was almost impregnable. Águila could testify to this: he had built a superb example of a star fort in Brittany which had prevailed for years without being taken. But that fortress had been built from scratch. In crowded, mediaeval Kinsale, rebuilding was just not practicable. ‘[Kinsale] is well built and surrounded by walls,’ Águila wrote home, ‘[but] it is not favourable for fortification.’
He would have to opt for a more quick-and-dirty solution. Outside the walls, he would create a network of defensive trenches fronted by high earthen ramps. Some were oval. Others were ‘ravelins’ – outwardly jutting triangles, rather like bastions. Using these as refuges, his men could sally out and attack the English trench-diggers before they could approach within range.
All over northern Europe, war was being waged in this manner: by digging down into the earth. ‘We make war more like foxes than like lions,’ one military expert, Roger Boyle, was to complain half a century later. (He was actually the son of Richard Boyle.)
So Águila would dig down too. He ordered his men to excavate a line of trenches ‘upon a hill, [outside] the town’. Trenches and gun emplacements would also be thrown up around the two outlying fortresses, Castle Park and Rincorran. ‘They set about fortifying their camp, and digging trenches, arranging and planting the ordnance [guns],’ reported Hugh O’Donnell’s seventeenth-century biographer Lughaidh O’Cleary.
According to the Annals of the Four Masters: ‘They planted their great guns, and their other projectile and defensive engines, at every point on which they thought the enemy would approach them.’
Andrew Lynch, the Galway merchant who sailed with the Spanish fleet, witnessed some of these guns being set up. ‘Three pieces were mounted on carriages and brought into the middle of the town,’ he wrote. Lynch identified them as ‘sakers’, medium-sized guns with three-metre barrels capable of propelling an iron ball of up to 2.7kg for over 2.5 kilometres. Rather than hit a specific target, the missiles were designed to bounce wildly and cause maximum damage.
Another witness, Scotsman John Clerk, said the town’s churchyard was turned into a gun emplacement.
Later, Lynch saw Águila march his soldiers – reckoned at just over three thousand men – onto a hill outside the town for drill and mustering.
Set against the sombre green and dun backdrop of a damp Irish hillside, the muster would have made a colourful spectacle. Spanish army officers were encouraged to express their personality through their clothing, even in wartime. ‘There has never been a regulation for dress and weapons in the Spanish infantry,’ one commentator wrote in 1610, ‘because that would remove the spirit and fire necessary in a soldier.’
Officers typically strove to outdo each other with their brightly plumed steel helmets, flamboyantly coloured topcoats, and padded doublets. In contrast, the ordinary troops wore doublets and stuffed knee-length breeches. But often they were shamefully under-clothed as well as under-equipped. ‘I have 2,500 effectives,’ Águila complained of his troops at Kinsale, ‘so untrained and so naked that it is a piteous thing to see.’
Drills like this were essential. Throughout Europe, the Spanish were renowned for their disciplined troops and their tight, block-like battlefield formation. Known to the English as ‘the Spanish Square’, this was a rectangle made up of 1,000 to 3,000 pikemen, musketeers and arquebusiers. It was effectively a moveable human fortress for use in an open field. The pikemen’s array of long, razor-sharp spikes would skewer any approaching cavalry as the mobile shooters at each corner unleashed murderous fire. Ideally, the overall force would form into three squares – hence the name ‘tercio’ or third.
Troops in a Spanish square could inflict almost unbelievable defeats upon a superior but less disciplined army. For instance, in two separate battles against the Dutch, the Spanish lost ten men and their enemies lost 5,000 and 7,000.
Meanwhile, back in Spain, Admiral Pedro de Zubiaur was having a tough time trying to get help for Águila’s stranded invasion force. The bureaucrats agreed in principle, but things were moving painfully slowly. Zubiaur’s main galleon, the San Felipe, had been seriously damaged in the Atlantic storms and would not be going anywhere before spring. Another of his missing ships had finally limped into El Ferrol in equally bad shape. By mid-October, Diego de Brochero – the admiral who had landed at Kinsale with Águila – had also returned to Spain. His ships, too, were in poor condition.
Zubiaur was anxious to rejoin his comrades in Ireland, but he was low on food supplies. In the meantime, his seven hundred troops were kicking their heels. He confessed he was so disenchanted that he was ready to quit after more than a quarter century of service.
Felipe III wrote to him personally, urging him to have another try. The ships should be re-fitted and ten infantry companies should be mustered as reinforcements.
—Speed is of the essence, he told Zubiaur.
But he added, contrarily, that Zubiaur should not spend too much because there wasn’t enough money in the royal purse to pay the troops.
Noting the lack of enthusiasm, the ever-perceptive Venetian diplomats were even more convinced that the only aim of the invasion was to have troops on the ready for the Queen’s death. ‘They are content to keep Kinsale alone,’ they wrote, ‘as a card in their hands when they want it.’
By this stage Águila’s position was difficult, but not a cause for despair. With the two harbour forts under his control and around a dozen ships remaining, he still commanded the sea entrance. His 3,000 to 3,500 men compared well to Blount’s initial force. He had every reason to expect thousands of reinforcements from Spain, and if Hugh O’Neill honoured his promise to join him within fourteen days, he could soon have thousands more.
But there was no sign of help from O’Neill. From Águila’s standpoint, the Irish chieftain’s failure to promise a relief force was baffling. The two northern earls had been demanding Spanish help for years. They would have heard of the landing within a fortnight, and Águila had since sent several envoys to press home the point. ‘[The] Spaniards have lately sent three special messengers to [O’Neill] to labour his coming into Munster,’ one English official reported.
At first O’Neill tried to persuade the Spaniards to come north, but the three messengers left him in no doubt that Águila wanted him to go to Kinsale.
—They are far away, the road is dangerous, and I have no horses, Águila mused aloud.
In Munster itself, the eerie silence from the Irish clans left the Spaniards worried. ‘Nobody worth a garron [a cheap workhorse] has as yet adhered to them,’ General Carew exulted. ‘There is no appearance of war in the province, except at the walls of Kinsale.’
Another English official wrote: ‘The Irish were never so mild … they hang their heads like hens who have been in the rain.’
No one on the Spanish side had expected a long wait and nobody had prepared for a shortage of food. They had brought large quantities of salt, expecting meat from the Irish. Águila boasted to locals that he had enough bread, rice, pulses and wine to last eighteen months, but he was probably putting on a brave face. ‘What they have consists of bread and suet,’ Carew wrote. ‘Their greatest relief is the townsmen’s provisions in Kinsale. They have no wine – except the officers. The soldier drinks only water.’
The captive Irish mariners testified that the Spanish had ‘neither rice, oil, fish or flesh’, only ‘coarse bread, full of worms, and very little wine’.
Beef wasn’t entirely absent from the menu. Before the English sealed off the surrounding countryside, Águila had built up a sizeable herd of cattle near Castle Park. However, these turned out to be easy prey for the English.
By day twenty, as Alférez Bustamante noted in his journal, it was ‘hard work’ to obtain any meat at all.
Inside the town, there was growing dissatisfaction among the wealthier townsfolk who wanted to take up Águila’s early offer and leave with their possessions, but who also wanted to negotiate a pardon from the English. Eventually Águila lost patience and informed them they had to forfeit their goods and stay. However, he could not seal the town completely. ‘Some English, Frenchmen and Scots have run from them,’ read one report, ‘and some Spaniards, Portuguese and other [deserters].’
The Cornish seaman John Edie had an especially good reason for wanting to escape. Even if the Spanish were to win, he could look forward only to a return to the galley oars. When an opportunity arose, he secretly slipped away on the road north to Cork, leaving Kinsale behind him forever.
As the two sides dug in like foxes, there was a bizarre twist to the conflict. The first serious battle of the campaign took place not on ground level, and not on the subterranean level … but on the heavenly plane.
In this strange war where power and empire-building were inextricably entangled with religion, it was not enough to win the hearts and minds of the public. It was also vital to win their souls. And the Spanish clerics had a super-weapon that was, in its way, far more powerful than anything in the English armoury. It was called excommunication.
Up until now, most priests in Ireland had instructed their Catholic flock to remain loyal to the Queen and to obey all her laws except those on religion. Philip O’Sullivan, a historian of Catholicism in Ireland, recorded that ‘at this time there was no persecution of priests’. Most clerics preached that ‘it was not only lawful to assist the Queen, but even to resist the Irish party and to draw the sword upon it’.
Blount’s fear was that the newcomers would change all that by offering indulgences to the insurgents and damnation to those who opposed them. Anxious to pre-empt that, he issued a proclamation warning that Queen Elizabeth had been ‘truly anointed’ by God. Anyone who opposed her would defy the divine will.
Mateo de Oviedo hit back with his own proclamation, issued in the name of Águila but clearly written in his own distinctively bombastic style. ‘We endeavour not to persuade anybody [to] deny due obedience … to his prince,’ he said. However, he claimed, the heretic Elizabeth had been stripped of her crown by the Vatican – and therefore wasn’t queen at all. In the words of one seventeenth-century writer, the proclamation announced that she had been ‘deprived of her kingdoms, and her subjects absolved and freed from their oaths of allegiance’. The Spanish would ‘deliver them out of the devil’s claws and English tyranny’.
What he said next drew gasps of astonishment throughout Europe. ‘The Pope, Christ’s Vicar upon earth, doth command you to take up arms for the defence of the Faith,’ Oviedo declared. ‘[Whoever] shall attempt to do otherwise, and remain in obedience to the English, we will persecute him as an heretic and a hateful enemy of the holy Church.’ The Spanish cleric was unleashing the ultimate deterrent. And this was something he had no right to do.
Oviedo, desperate for Irish support, and impatient to reach his cathedral in Dublin, had unwittingly stumbled into a diplomatic minefield. There had been earlier Papal Bulls – official edicts – excommunicating Catholics who supported Elizabeth. But they had never applied in Ireland, and the backlash against the English Catholics had been so severe that the current Pope, Clement VIII, had quietly let them gather dust. Clement’s main aim was stability in Europe. He had spent years enticing the Protestant King of France back into the Church and establishing peace between the great rivals France and Spain.
Oviedo’s proclamation could be interpreted – and was interpreted – as meaning that the Vatican was upsetting this delicate balance of power by encouraging Spanish expansion against France’s interests. In Venice, it was important breaking news. ‘Don Juan del Águila … has announced that His Holiness has renewed the Bull against the Queen of England, absolving her subjects from their allegiance,’ ambassador Marin Cavalli reported from Paris.
When the French King Henry IV heard of the Kinsale proclamation, he was furious. He summoned the Vatican’s representative and gave him an earful. ‘The [invasion] has profoundly impressed the King of France and his Ministers,’ Cavalli said. He warned that the news had put the French on a war footing. If the Spanish were to succeed in Ireland, France would be honour-bound to intervene.
The English were amused at the chaos the proclamation had caused. The Spanish were ‘discharging curses like thunderbolts’, one observer wrote.
Rome was highly embarrassed. For the ambitious Oviedo, it was not a good career move.
Oviedo could have lived with all these problems if his tactic had worked. But most Irish Catholics simply ignored his threat … and for the titular Archbishop of Dublin, that was the greatest snub of all.
By late October, Águila’s soldiers were falling ill with crippling abdominal cramps, fever and chills. When they began excreting blood, the hospital workers immediately recognised ‘the bloody flux’ – dysentery, the same illness that had killed Spain’s arch enemy Sir Francis Drake a few years earlier.
In the crowded surroundings, the disease spread rapidly. Tiny micro organisms travelled from unwashed hands into mouths, and then burrowed deep into the intestines. The Spanish invaders were themselves being invaded – and the microscopic assailants were to kill more Spanish troops at Kinsale than the English could ever manage.
Then, just as his numbers were seriously declining, Águila received a message which many of his subordinates regarded as a chink of light in the darkness. An Irish clan leader on the western fringes of County Cork was offering to provide him with two thousand extra troops.
You can imagine how Águila reacted to this offer. After all, he was stranded in Kinsale with a rapidly depleting force; he didn’t know if the northern earls were ever going to join him; and he could be waiting for weeks for any help from home. Two thousand extra troops?
No thanks, he replied.