Sir Francis Drake

Post: From Dover cliff we might discern them join;

Twixt that and Calais; there the fight began.

Sir Francis Drake, Vice-Admiral, was first to give the onset.

This Drake, I say, …

Gave Order that his squadrons, one by one,

Should follow him some distance; steers his course

But none to shoot till he himself gave fire.

TOWARDS MIDNIGHT ON 28 July, 1588, in a fresh wind and occasional rain, several dark shapes gathered ominously in the gloom outside Calais Road and hesitated. They were ships, eight of them, eight ships of 90 to 200 tons, and they were in line abreast, with their sails set and their bowsprits pointing the course taken by both the wind and a strong tide, straight into the anchorage. Aboard them skeleton crews quickly secured the ships’ rudders, tying them fast, and then briefly went to work at the bows before running to the sterns, tumbling over them into small boats and pulling furiously away, out to sea, to safety. Abandoned now, the eight ships ran swiftly forward with wind and current, towards Calais about a mile and a half to leeward, and as they did so first one and then another sputtered into flames. Fireships! In the high wind they flickered fiercely, throwing an eerie orange light across the roadstead that intensified as they came, feeding not only on the timber, rigging and canvas of the ships themselves, but also upon the pitch, tar and faggots stored aboard. When the flames licked around the loaded ordnance explosion after explosion tore open the night. Like gigantic fire-crackers, the burning vessels swept towards the anchorage, towards the large concentration of shipping shifting there, the fleet of the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

It was a fresh attempt on the part of the English to break the Armada’s iron formation, and although fireships were seldom effective (indeed, they had failed miserably to dislodge Drake in Cadiz the previous year), here they promised some success, for Calais offered little shelter. The Armada had anchored in this neutral French port on 27 July, and had not moved since. Howard and Drake, whose proximity to home was not the least of their many advantages in this continuing battle, had replaced their sick with new recruits, including merchants such as Palavicino, nobles of the stamp of the earls of Cumberland and Northumberland, as well as many gallants hot in their nation’s cause, and scraped together enough shot and powder to fight another battle. Their victuals were meagre, especially after forty ships under Lord Henry Seymour and Sir William Winter joined them in Whitsand Bay on the evening of the 27th, bringing the English fleet up to its full strength of 140 ships, but sufficient for a few days.

On the morning of the 28th, a Sunday, there had been a council of war aboard the Ark Royal, and the decision to use the fireships was made. Winter, who joined Howard’s committee with Seymour and probably Sir Henry Palmer of the Antelope, put his influence behind the idea, but provision had already been made for it, and vessels were even then being prepared for the purpose in Dover. Sir Francis certainly favoured the idea. According to Thomas Cely, he was an expert in smoke and incendiary devices, and so enthusiastic was he that when the admirals decided to fit up fireships from the fleet rather than wait for those from Dover, Drake offered his own Thomas Drake as one of them. The English hoped that their blazing vessels would either force the Armada out of Calais in disorder, or ground some of the Spanish ships on the shoals to leeward of the anchorage. If the attack was successful, the Lord Admiral would lead Elizabeth’s fleet into battle, and his division would be followed by Sir Francis Drake.

The Spanish commanders were just as aware of the inadequacy of Calais as a haven, but there was no port beyond that could be of service, and Medina Sidonia’s pilots assured him that to venture further, without some plan to join with Parma, would risk being carried by the currents into the North Sea. Calais was neutral, but its governor, Girault de Mauleon, Seigneur de Gourdan, was believed to sympathize with the Catholic League. He had no great love for the English, and had lost a leg getting them out of Calais thirty years before. While the Spaniards anchored there, they were allowed to buy provisions ashore and to send messengers to Parma, urgent dispatches calling upon the general to be ready to assist the fleet. The replies, when they came, were the first Medina Sidonia had received from the army he was supposed to meet, and they were crushing. Parma would not be ready for several days, and it seemed from the messengers that the troops at Dunkirk and Nieuport were in no state to embark.

The hopeless futility of the whole plan now bore down relentlessly upon Medina Sidonia and Parma. The Armada could get no closer than Calais to the little ports Parma was using, those small shallow havens hiding behind extensive banks off shore. For its part, the army’s barges would have to run the gauntlet of the Dutch warships before reaching deep water, and would even then be totally unequal to helping the Armada fight a battle with the English. Philip himself, apprised of the difficulty by Parma, shuddered at what seemed an insurmountable obstacle. ‘Please God,’ he wrote in the margin of the duke’s letter, ‘let there not be some slip-up here.’¹

But a slip-up there was, and now Medina Sidonia was sitting in an open roadstead, waiting for Parma to gather himself for a run through the shoals, vulnerable to attack. The Armada ships were each moored by two anchors to hold them in place, but they were directly in the path of the current entering Calais that night of 28–29 July. The Spanish admirals suspected that an effort would be made to dislodge them with fireships, and had detailed a number of small boats to intercept such vessels and tow them away. But when the attack came most of the English fireships got through, and drifted upon the crowded Spanish shipping. It seems that the guns that discharged aboard the oncoming craft convinced the Spaniards that they were not dealing with ordinary fireships, laden with combustibles, but explosion ships, floating mines liable to detonate at any minute and destroy everything close by. Fresh in the memories of the Spaniards were stories of the ‘hell-burners’ of Antwerp, the explosion ships launched by the Dutch against a bridge of boats Parma had thrown across the Scheldt in 1585. Only one of the two had reached the target, but it smashed away part of the bridge, killed about eight hundred soldiers and wounded many more, including Parma himself. Now, as the English fireships advanced upon the anchorage, burning vividly and occasionally erupting in the thunder of artillery, some of the Spaniards also remembered that the inventor of those Dutch hellburners, Federigo Giambelli, had gone to England, and might, for all they knew, even then be in league with ‘El Draque’. The small boats kept their distance, and six of the fireships reached the Spanish anchorage and threw it into disorder.

The flames, the gunfire and the darkness would have created total confusion in a fleet less capable and disciplined than the Spanish Armada. As it was they wrought great damage. Captains severed their cables, leaving their anchors behind, and spread sail to escape the hellburners, manoeuvring to avoid their fellows, and for the most part struggling out to sea. Only Medina Sidonia’s San Martin, Recalde’s San Juan and three of the Portuguese galleons, more judicious than the rest, preserved their anchors, shifted position and then remoored in safety. But the flag galleass, Moncada’s San Lorenzo, was less fortunate, running afoul of another vessel, losing her rudder and taking the ground beneath the guns of the fortress of Calais. The fireships did not destroy a single Spanish ship, and ran upon the banks east of Calais, where they burned themselves out; but they had done something the English fleet had failed to do in four battles: they had scattered the Armada, driving all but the San Martin, her four consorts and the beaching San Lorenzo alongside the intricate banks of Zeeland, north-east of Calais.

At dawn the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Recalde and the three Portuguese galleons with them weighed anchor, and with the wind at south-west quit Calais to join their fleet off the banks, hoping to be able to reform it before the English attacked. It was Monday, 29 July, 1588, and the decisive battle of the campaign, the battle of Gravelines, had begun.

In the opening stages of the action, when it was imperative for the English to fall upon the scattered Armada ships before Medina Sidonia and Recalde could reach and reform them, Howard made an enormous error of judgement. He seems to have had little understanding of the opportunity that lay before him. For Howard success meant, as he once said himself, plucking the Armada’s feathers one by one, and the San Lorenzo, incapable as she was to influence the battle, was a prize plume. And so he led some twenty ships, including the important Ark Royal, Golden Lion and White Bear, the pick of his squadron, out of the main battle to perform in an unnecessary and as it transpired largely futile sideshow at a time when they were badly needed elsewhere.

It was the only boarding action of the campaign. As the smaller of Howard’s ships crept to the San Lorenzo, Moncada worked his ship further inshore, grounding her more firmly on the sandbanks so that she heeled over and her artillery could not be used. The English shot was, as usual, too distant to inflict much damage. According to a French report, and it was the French who eventually secured the prize, ‘not one of the English cannon shots had pierced the hull of the ship, but only her upper planks above the oars. She was therefore still very sound.’² The matter was decided by boarders. Boatloads of them now pulled towards the Spanish ship, and, rather than fight, the Spaniards leaped into the water and floundered ashore, leaving behind their gallant commander, Hugo de Moncada, shot through the head by an English musket ball. However, the English did not enjoy their prize for long. The Governor of Calais insisted that she fell within his jurisdiction, and when the English demurred, the French drove Howard’s men off the galleass with shot from the castle. The Lord Admiral eventually returned to the centre of the action, but after about a third of it, some three hours, was over.

As Howard dropped away to tackle the San Lorenzo Sir Francis Drake led the rest of the English fleet against the Armada. Ahead he could see the San Martin and the four galleons with her offering battle. Never lacking in courage, Medina Sidonia had chosen to meet Drake’s attack and gain time for the balance of his fleet to reform. He signalled the Armada to beat to windward and join him and then stubbornly put his five ships in the face of the oncoming English. Now, with the advantage of numbers on their side, Elizabeth’s captains closed to point-blank range, directing their fire horizontally into the Spanish hulls. First came Drake’s Revenge, then Fenner and the rest of his squadron, and then the divisions of Hawkins, Frobisher and Seymour, pouring shot into the five Spanish ships at less than musket range.

But the punishment they took was not without purpose, for although Drake soon left Medina Sidonia’s small squadron and passed to leeward to open fire upon the Armada ships beyond, the Spaniards there doggedly manoeuvred around, turning into the wind to their admiral’s support and eventually aiding Medina Sidonia to bring his ships up to the main body. That inspiring discipline that had so often stood them in stead once again sustained them, allowing them to develop a ragged formation in the shape of a half moon, the head of the steer with the horns trailing behind. On this occasion, however, the English continued to press the attack, concentrating their fire upon the ships around the San Martin, Portuguese galleons such as Recalde’s San Juan, the San Felipe, and the San Mateo; big armed merchantmen including the San Juan de Sicilia, La Trinidad Valencera, La Maria Juan, La Rata Santa Maria Encoronada, and La Regazona; Castilian galleons such as the Nuestra Sēnora de Begona; and hulks such as El Gran Grifon. In some respects the engagement resembled earlier battles, with the Armada conducting a fighting retreat, and the English warships trying to exploit the gaps that opened up, but this time Drake and his comrades blasted away at close range, creating so much gunsmoke that Medina Sidonia had to climb to his fighting tops to ascertain what was going on. And this time that shot was telling.

One of the most exposed of the Spanish ships was the San Felipe, under Don Francisco de Toledo. Galled by the fire of several English opponents, Toledo gamely tried to run his ship amongst his enemies, searching desperately for a way to employ his boarders. Yet the English refused to grapple, only darted away from the ponderous galleon as she lunged forward, and then returned to slash her with a fierce fire, piling her decks with dead and wounded men and the debris of shattered masts and spars and shredded sails, and riddling her hull. The San Mateo endeavoured to assist her, only to come under a similar pounding, and both ships were soon so badly damaged that they fell further behind and were almost cut off, encircled and pummelled by the bulk of the English fleet. And they were not alone. The Maria Juan was reduced to a sinking condition. An Italian ship was observed severely battered and ‘all full of blood’. One witness, Pedro Estrade, recalled:

This day was slain Don Philip de Cordova, with a bullet that struck off his head and struck with his brains the greatest friend that he had there, and 24 men that were with us trimming our foresail. And where I and other four were, there came a bullet and from one struck away his shoe without doing any other harm, for they came and plied so very well with shot. And in the afternoon as I was below discharging my artillery there was a mariner that had his leg struck all in pieces and died presently. Many misfortunes have happened, I cannot recount them all.³

English participants also recorded intense action. It was said that Winter’s Vanguard fired five hundred great shot within musket range. A more remarkable story still, and almost certainly exaggerated, came from Drake’s Revenge:

That day Sir Francis Drake’s ship was pierced through by several cannon balls of all sizes which were flying everywhere between the two fleets, seeming as thick as arquebuses usually are. It is true that his cabin was twice pierced by cannon balls and there was an occasion in which two gentlemen, who towards evening had retired to rest a little, after the battle, and one of them lying upon the bed, when it was broken to pieces under him by a saker ball, without his taking the least hurt. And shortly afterwards the Earl of Cumberland … and Sir Charles Blount were resting on the same bed in the same place when it was again hit by a ball of a demi-culverin which passed through the cabin from one side to the other without doing any harm other than scrape the foot, taking off the toes of one who was there with them.⁴

Late in the afternoon the action drew to a close. The English were running out of ammunition, and the weather was turning squally, with the wind at north-west, threatening to press the fleets against the Zeeland shoals. For the Armada the ensuing hours proved no less critical, and as darkness fell Medina Sidonia’s ships were still striving to avert disaster, their exhausted men wrestling with broken timbers and ropes, trying to repair the worst of the damage, plug the shot holes and shorten sail to haul the vessels away from the threatening banks.

Some did not make it. The Biscayan La Maria Juan settled so low in the water that boats from other ships began to evacuate her crew, but only one got away before the vessel went straight to the bottom with the remaining men on board, the first Armada ship to be sunk by gunfire. Two of the Portuguese galleons, the San Felipe and the San Mateo, were driven on to the banks, one near Nieuport and the other between Ostend and Sluys, both falling into the possession of the Dutch. The Spaniards had tried to repair the ships, and a diver had plugged the holes in the San Mateo, but both were so battered that they had no sooner been brought by the Dutch to the Scheldt than they sank. As for their crews, some of the men from one of the ships were taken off by the Doncella hulk, but the rest became prisoners of the Dutch, who reportedly murdered about three hundred of them. Exultant Zeelanders capered in the streets of Flushing, attired in costumes plundered from the Spanish ships, and celebrating a triumph cheaply won.

Thus, at least four ships – the Biscayan, two Portuguese galleons and the galleass San Lorenzo – were lost by Medina Sidonia in the battle of 29 July. Many more were seriously damaged, without anchors (which had been cut away in Calais), shot-ridden, and loaded with wounded or debilitated men, and the flagship herself was almost lost. She had taken, it was said, two hundred shot on her starboard side, many of her guns had been dismounted, and the sea was leaking through holes below her waterline. At one time it seemed that nothing could be done to save her from falling helplessly on to the sandbanks. Early the next morning Medina Sidonia called to the pugnacious Oquendo, commander of the Santa Ana, flagship of the Guipuzcoan squadron. ‘Senor Oquendo, what shall we do? We are lost!’ But the other petulantly referred him to Diego Flores de Valdes of the San Crístobal, who had been named the admiral’s naval adviser. ‘Ask Diego Flores,’ he snapped. ‘As for me, I am going to fight, and die like a man. Send me a supply of shot!’⁵

The wind helped spare the Armada further losses. It changed to the south-west, and enabled the crippled ships to bear north-eastwards, away from the shoals, from the English and from Parma. The Armada was in poor shape, and had possibly lost as many as 1,500 men killed, drowned and captured and some eight hundred wounded in the fight off Gravelines. Some sizes of shot appear to have been in short supply. Yet for the moment the English did not renew the attack, but rode gently to windward, threatening, shadowing, but keeping their distance, for their reserves of powder and shot were even more precarious, hardly sufficient for another battle. As long as the Armada kept her course into the North Sea, leaving Parma’s superfluous barges still at their embarkation points, Drake and Howard could bide their time. The crucial moments of the campaign had passed.

Sir Francis Drake’s spirits had risen after the battle of Gravelines. That evening he wrote to his friend Walsingham that ‘God hath given us so good a day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward as I hope in God the Prince of Parma and Duke of Sidonia shall not shake hands this few days.’⁶ In council the following afternoon it was decided that Seymour would remain with his squadron in the Narrow Seas, covering Parma’s ports, while Howard and Drake pursued Medina Sidonia northwards. When Sir Francis addressed another letter to Walsingham, on the last of the month, he was almost cheerful:

We have the army of Spain before us, and mind, with the grace of God, to wrestle a pull with him. There was never anything pleased me better than the seeing the enemy flying with a southerly wind to the northwards. God grant you have a good eye to the Duke of Parma, for, with the grace of God, if we live, I doubt it not but ere it be long so to handle the matter with the Duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St Mary Port among his orange trees.⁷

He obviously wanted another battle, and we can see why. Behind his obvious relief at the frustration of the Spanish plan to link with Parma lay some dissatisfaction with what the English had achieved. They had, it appeared, ultimately won victory from those running battles through the Channel. Excluding the San Salvador (which had been abandoned because of mishap and evacuated of all but a few seriously wounded men), but including the Rosario (taken substantially intact with a full complement and battery), and the San Lorenzo (run ashore at Calais), the English action had cost the Armada in all five fighting ships and perhaps 2,100 men dead and prisoners. The English had damaged other vessels and wounded several hundred men, and they had suffered insignificant hurt in return. Yes, it was a victory, but hardly an impressive one. If we can borrow some boxing terms, it was a bare win on points rather than a knock-out. For the Armada was still intact as a fighting force, shorn of a few important plumes perhaps, but largely as formidable as it had been before the fighting began. Indeed, it would be impossible to regard the English victory as decisive, but for one fact: Medina Sidonia’s intention of facilitating Parma’s invasion of England had been frustrated.

The truth was that if the English performance can be deemed satisfactory, it was far from a good one. The English had displayed brilliant seamanship, and sometimes superb courage, and they had identified the weapons that would dominate naval warfare in succeeding centuries: the sailing ship and the gun. But they had not learned how to use those weapons efficiently. Their inexperience showed ashore and afloat. They had not prepared the ammunition necessary for sustained gun action. Their artillery was too light, and only effective at close range. Their tactics were, with one exception, unable to break the Armada’s formation and were too restricted to mobbing stragglers or small groups of Spanish ships that became isolated. Despite the superior fire power and sailing qualities of their ships, and the impunity with which they could assault their under-armed opponents, they generally failed to understand the importance of close-quarter action. Their gunnery skills were almost certainly deficient. No, Drake cannot have been satisfied. An opportunity had been missed, and he felt it personally. No one had done more than Drake to defeat the Armada. He had led the attack on Recalde off Plymouth, captured the Rosario, launched vital counter-attacks on the Spaniards at Portland Bill and the Isle of Wight, and taken his division unsupported into one battle. He had led the fleet into the decisive action off Gravelines. And yet he felt he had done less than was expected, and that all his bragging had not been fulfilled.

He wanted another battle, but for the moment the fleet had too little ammunition to risk an unnecessary encounter. As they trailed the Armada northwards the English held several councils, and eventually decided to follow Medina Sidonia into Scottish waters and then run into the Firth of Forth for supplies, leaving two of their ships, the Advice and a caravel belonging to Drake, to continue watching the retreating Spaniards. It was not a bad decision, for the English were low on all kinds of provisions, and the Armada seemed intent only on flight. Initially, Medina Sidonia and his officers had wanted to turn back towards the Channel for another attempt to meet Parma, but by 2 August, when the English planned to enter the Forth, the idea was less practical. The Spanish ships were full of sick; their water and food were stale, and the men were showing the symptoms of combat fatigue and the effects of a long sea voyage. Drake guessed the state the Armada was in, and even foretold that it would suffer losses on its homeward run.

But the English ships too were foul, and disease was spreading as it always did in such large fleets. Less than sixty Englishmen had died in the Channel battles, but the threat of pestilence promised far greater mortality. Contrary winds prevented Drake and Howard from reaching the Forth, as they had planned, and they headed for the North Foreland instead. Off the Norfolk coast their ships were scattered by a storm, and made what ports they could. Drake was in Margate on the evening of the 8th.

There was a deep belief among the commanders that from first to last their effort had been blunted by inadequate support from the government, and that with greater reserves they could have attacked the Armada after the battle of Gravelines and continued the pursuit beyond 2 August. So strongly did the senior officers hold these views that they signed a joint memorandum to that effect. The government could not be acquitted of tardiness, and well knew it. ‘Our half doings doth breed dishonour and leaveth the disease uncured,’ Walsingham admitted.⁸ During the fighting only about 60,000 pounds of powder had been sent to the fleet by the Crown. At the same time, shortages were not all down to the government. There had been misadventure, problems of supply ships reaching the fleet, and not least the enormous squandering of powder and shot to little advantage in futile cannonading by English ships.

Nevertheless, the queen and Privy Council behaved abominably in their treatment of the mariners who had saved their country. Disease, probably typhus fever, had been troubling the English ships, particularly those of Howard’s division, for some time, but after the fleet’s return the losses reached alarming proportions, welcomed only by the enemy and, almost incredibly, some members of the government who saw it merely as a saving on wages. The men had not been paid and could not, therefore, be fully discharged, and they began dying daily on the ships and in the ports, their miseries multiplied by deficiencies in clothing and what seems to have been a form of food poisoning occasioned by the consumption of contaminated victuals. The admirals entreated the government to help, and Howard and Drake went to court soon after their return, but were unable to resolve the matter. Sir Francis was probably not surprised, but Howard was disgusted throughout. It broke his heart ‘to see them that have served so valiantly to die so miserably’, and although he began fairly to insist upon the Privy Council doing its duty, he also dived into his own pocket to discharge some of the most vulnerable.⁹ In two more years Howard would join Drake, Hawkins and others in founding the first naval charity.

The admirals were not only angry with the government, but with less justification began to set about each other. Seymour was castigating Howard for detaching him to watch Parma when the rest of the fleet followed Medina Sidonia north, and Frobisher fulminated against Drake in an almost hysterical manner. He accused Sir Francis of cornering the reward for the capture of the Rosario, and even charged him with cowardice off Gravelines. At Harwich he exploded in public. ‘Sir Fra. Drake reporteth that no man hath done any good service but he; but he shall well understand that others hath done as good service as he, and better too. He came bragging up at the first, indeed, and gave them his prow and his broadside; and then kept his luff, and was glad that he was gone again, like a cowardly knave or traitor – I rest doubtful, but the one I will swear.’¹⁰ It was as well that when essential visits to the court had been completed, and Howard and Drake met their council in Dover on 21 August, Frobisher was absent, because he was still at loggerheads with the vice-admiral as late as November.

There were some rumours that Howard, too, resented popular acclaim being assigned to Drake at his expense. On the Continent, certainly, the English fleet was almost personified by the character of the burly Devonian, and little was said of any other. ‘Have you heard how Drake with his fleet has offered battle to the Armada?’ demanded the Pope in conversation one day. ‘With what courage! Do you think he showed any fear? He is a great captain!’ One infuriated Spaniard, seizing an arquebus to show his friends how he would serve ‘El Draque’ if he saw him, grew so excited that he accidentally shot one of his listeners dead.¹¹ The letters of the Lord Admiral and his deputy do not betray such jealousy, and when Drake left again for court (for the second time that August), Howard plainly expected Sir Francis to speak wéll of him. Nonetheless, the Lord Admiral can only have felt undervalued, because Drake and not he had been summoned to discuss plans for a new expedition. Vice-admiral or not, Sir Francis was still the nation’s leading seaman.

Some of the irritation may have arisen from the initial sense of disappointment that pervaded the fleet. ‘If I have not performed as much as was looked for, yet I persuade myself his good Lordship will confess I have been dutiful,’ sighed Drake on 11 August.¹² Whatever the merry crowds gawping at the captured Spanish banners exhibited on London Bridge might say, there was uncertainty as to whether Medina Sidonia might return, and early in the month the queen herself turned out to review the troops at Tilbury and declared that she would fight beside her soldiers if need be. It was stirring stuff – Elizabeth cantering on her white gelding, and protesting that within the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman’ there lived ‘the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’, one that scorned ‘that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.’ They were bold words in the state of continuing apprehension, for the Armada was still within striking distance and Parma had not yet dismantled his invasion flotilla.

During the following months the full extent of the Spanish disaster unfolded, as Medina Sidonia’s care-worn ships attempted the long and miserable voyage home, through hundreds of miles of cold grey seas around the north of Scotland and the rugged western shores of Ireland. The Armada separated, and within the space of two months suffered ferocious losses on the Irish coast. The Santa Maria de la Rosa was disembowelled on a rock in Blasket Sound, and there was but one survivor. The Gran Grin ran ashore off Clare Island, and the part of her crew that got to the shore was murdered by the Irish. Off the Giant’s Causeway the Girona galleass, packed with survivors from two other ships, including Don Alonso de Leiva, went down with over 1,000 men. There were more losses, many more. It was said that twelve hundred bodies were counted on a beach in Donegal Bay.

Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy in Ireland, Sir William Fitzwilliam, wanted no Spaniard to stir the Irish against his own puny forces, and callously ordered his subordinates to put survivors from Armada shipwrecks to the sword. The complement of a ship lost in Tralee Bay struggled ashore only to be caught and hanged by the English. Sir Richard Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, had hundreds of Spaniards executed. Only one officer refused to obey Fitzwilliam’s orders – Drake’s old comrade, Christopher Carleill, then governing Ulster – and it was to his credit that he sent his Spanish prisoners to neutral Scotland and paid for their transportation out of his own pocket.

Slowly and painfully the remnants of the once-mighty crusade limped home, broken in body and spirit. Hundreds of sick were disembarked in Spanish ports. Medina Sidonia led a small weary squadron into Santander in September. One hundred and eighty men aboard the flagship had died during the voyage home, and many more were ill, including the duke himself, who had to be carried ashore in a litter. All he wanted was a quiet retirement from further service. Oquendo got back, but was dead within six days of his arrival at San Sebastian. Among the last there arrived at Corunna the brave Recalde, and he, too, was dying. As the catalogue of disasters multiplied the English celebrated, Elizabeth arranging for her ‘Armada portrait’ to be painted and having a medal struck, the first to be minted by an English sovereign in commemoration of an historical event.

Philip’s fortitude, even that which he embraced most, his faith, began to quail. It became clear that if the core of his royal ships had survived (all of his Castilian and seven of his Portuguese galleons), the losses had otherwise been horrific. Studying a report sent from Corunna by Recalde, he remarked, ‘I have read it all, although I would rather not have done, because it hurts so much.’ In all some sixty of the 130 ships that had sailed for Spain had been lost, and, no less troubling to a monarch who genuinely felt for many of his servants (unlike Elizabeth, Philip insisted that his veterans be paid), the toll in dead, prisoners or dying probably rose to 15,000 or more. By November Philip’s grief was extreme. ‘If God does not send us a miracle …,’ he wrote, ‘I hope to die and go to Him … 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.’¹³

It was what Sir Francis Drake had always wanted. The spirits of the King of Spain had reached their lowest ebb.

² Advice from Rouen, 11 August, 1588, Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers … in the Archives of Simancas, 4: 376–8.

⁴ Ubaldino narrative, Naish, ed., Naval Miscellany, 72. Although this narrative was seen by Drake, and the Revenge certainly sustained damage during the battle, this account was exaggerated. The statement that the cabin was pierced ‘towards evening’ and ‘after’ the battle cannot be accurate. If there was a basis to the anecdotes, it probably occurred in the afternoon.

⁶ Drake to Walsingham, 29 July, 1588, Laughton, ed., Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1:341–2.

¹¹ Giovanni Grittl to Doge and Senate, 3 September, 1588, Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers … in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 383–4; Edward Palmer to Walsingham, 19 September, 1588, Lemon, et. al., ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 12: 254–6.