The ‘Enterprise of England’, 1585–1588
Spain under attack
SOON after his election as pope in April 1585, Sixtus V mentioned to the Spanish ambassador in Rome his zeal to commission ‘some outstanding enterprise’ for the Catholic Church, such as the conquest of England. The ambassador dutifully informed his master, but Philip angrily scribbled on the back of the letter, ‘doesn’t [the reconquest of] the Low Countries seem “outstanding” to them? Do they never think of how much it costs? The English idea lacks substance.’1
For a while, Sixtus obligingly shifted his attention elsewhere, but in August 1585 he again called on Philip to invade England. Once more Philip rejected the idea, albeit slightly less firmly. After emphasizing the cost and the long duration of the war in the Netherlands – ‘entirely to avoid concessions over religion’ and ‘to maintain obedience there to God and the Holy See’ – the king urged his ambassador to impress upon the pope the strategic dilemma that faced him.
Let His Holiness judge whether I can undertake new enterprises, with this one [the Dutch war] in its current state … because one cannot deal effectively with more than one thing at a time; and let him consider whether reducing the pressure there [in the Netherlands] for anything else would be right, or a service to Our Lord … because the war is fought against heretics, which is what the pope wants. He should not think me idle as long as it continues.
Nevertheless, Philip conceded, ‘If God is pleased to end that war, as (with His favour) one may hope, then there would be a way to satisfy the pope’s holy zeal in some other area.’2
The news that Sir Francis Drake and his English expeditionary force had sacked Galicia (chapter 15) transformed the king’s position: in the words of the Imperial ambassador in Madrid, ‘With this act the English have removed their mask’. Although initially Philip could do nothing – ‘you must realize that the event was so unexpected that we can provide you with no help from here’, he apologized to his officials in Galicia – the question was no longer whether he would counter-attack but when and how that counter-attack would take place. Philip commissioned his principal adviser on foreign affairs Don Juan de Zúñiga to prepare a thorough review of Spain’s security priorities in the light of Drake’s attack.3
Zúñiga’s response represented Spanish strategic planning at its best. He first identified four major enemies – the Turks, the French, the Dutch and the English – and then reasoned that the Ottoman sultan, previously Spain’s foremost antagonist, had committed so many resources to a struggle with Persia that Philip need only maintain a defensive posture in the Mediterranean; while the French, also once a major threat, now seemed so thoroughly mired in their own civil disputes that although it might be necessary to intervene at some stage to prolong them, the cost to Spain would probably not be high. This left the Dutch and the English. The former had been a thorn in Philip’s flesh since the rebellion of 1572, because every Spanish success had been counterbalanced by a reverse; but although costly and humiliating, at least the problem remained confined to the Low Countries. The English menace was quite different. It had arisen recently and it threatened the entire Hispanic world, because Elizabeth had provided support to the Dutch and to the Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, as well as to Drake. Zúñiga argued that since England had now openly broken with Spain, ‘to fight a purely defensive war is to incur a huge and permanent expense, because we have to defend the Indies, Spain and the convoys travelling between them’. He therefore asserted that an amphibious attack in overwhelming strength on Elizabeth’s realms represented not only the most effective form of defence but the cheapest. He also argued that although the immediate diversion of resources to the Enterprise of England (as the venture was called) might temporarily halt the reconquest of the Netherlands and increase the vulnerability of Spanish America, these risks must be taken because English aggression threatened the entire Spanish Monarchy.4
Events soon vindicated Zúñiga’s analysis. English troops paid by Elizabeth arrived in the Netherlands and her Favourite, the earl of Leicester, became governor-general of the rebellious provinces; meanwhile Drake continued his destructive progress through the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands to the Caribbean, where he sacked Santo Domingo. In Madrid, Cardinal Granvelle fretted that ‘the queen of England makes war on us so boldly and dishonestly, and that we cannot get our own back’, while in Lisbon the marquis of Santa Cruz composed a Discourse that reviewed various ways to guard against the possibility of further attacks by Drake.5 By contrast Archbishop Don Rodrigo de Castro of Seville, who had worked with the king to re-Catholicize England in the 1550s, roundly condemned such craven and pusillanimous responses. What was the point, he enquired, of concentrating on Drake, a fine sailor with a powerful fleet? Surely the best way to end the English menace would be to attack England while its leading admiral was absent from home waters. ‘If we are going to undertake a campaign against England,’ he thundered, ‘there will never be a better time.’ The king agreed, scribbling on the dorse of Castro’s letter ‘The decision has already been taken.’6
It had indeed: on 24 October 1585, scarcely two weeks after Drake’s forces landed in Galicia, Philip informed the pope that he would, after all, accept the invitation to undertake the conquest of England. The king sounded only two notes of caution. First, ‘although His Holiness and His Majesty agree and are of the same mind about this enterprise, the lack of time (since putting the venture into effect requires extensive preparations) excludes the possibility of doing it in 1586, and so it will have to be delayed until 1587’. Second, because the total cost of the venture might exceed three million ducats, at a time when the war in the Netherlands already stretched Spain’s finances to the limit, the king emphasized that although he was ‘happy to contribute what he can, it cannot be more than a third – or at the most a half – of the cost. The rest will have to come from [Rome].’7 Once Philip received reassurance on this score, in December 1585 he invited his nephew Alexander Farnese, prince and later duke of Parma, fresh from his triumphant reconquest of most of Flanders and Brabant, to devise a suitable strategy for invasion.
The ‘masterplan’
It was one thing to decide that the Tudor state must be eliminated and quite another to achieve it. The king knew from his history lessons as a boy, as well as from his experience as Mary Tudor’s consort, all about successful seaborne invasions of England. Some consisted of a combined operation by a fleet strong enough to defeat the opposing English navy while shepherding across the Channel an army sufficient to accomplish the conquest, just as William of Normandy had done in 1066. Others involved mounting a surprise assault, as Henry VII (Elizabeth’s grandfather) had done in 1485, likewise with spectacular success. Yet other invaders had assembled an army in secret near the Channel while launching a diversionary assault elsewhere to draw off most of England’s defenders, leaving the mainland relatively open to invasion by the main force. That all three possible strategies received consideration in 1586–8 reflects great credit on the vision and competence of Philip and his ‘national security advisers’; that the king eventually tried to undertake all three at once does not.
Confusion commenced in February 1586, when Santa Cruz sent an eloquent paper arguing that the best way to defend the Iberian world would be an amphibious attack on England, which he offered to command. Philip immediately instructed the marquis to prepare and send ‘a paper showing the way in which you believe this could be effected, should circumstances permit’.8 The following month Santa Cruz sent a detailed discussion on logistics, entitled ‘The fleet and army that it seems would be necessary to assemble for the conquest of England’. It prudently omitted both the precise strategy and the exact target envisaged, because ‘the business is such that it is absolutely impossible to deal with or discuss it in writing’, but the immense quantity and nature of the munitions specified – 510 ships, carrying 55,000 infantry and 1,600 cavalry, with all their supporting equipment, munitions and artillery – made his intentions clear enough. He aimed to emulate William the Conqueror and invade in overwhelming strength.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, Parma completed and dispatched his own detailed plan for invading England, as requested by the king the previous year. The 28-page assessment began by regretting the lack of secrecy surrounding the king’s intentions, asserting that even ordinary soldiers and civilians in the Netherlands now openly discussed the Enterprise of England. Nevertheless, he believed that three basic precautions might still ensure success. Philip must have sole charge ‘without placing any reliance on either the English Catholics, or the assistance of other allies’; he must also ensure that the French could not interfere, either by sending assistance to Elizabeth or by intervening in the Netherlands; and he must command enough troops and resources to defend the Netherlands from attack after the assault force had left. Parma offered to lead 30,000 infantry and 500 cavalry drawn from the Army of Flanders across the Channel aboard a flotilla of seagoing barges in a surprise attack on England. He felt sure that the invasion could be undertaken with a fair chance of success, provided his precise intentions remained a secret, ‘given the number of troops we have at hand here and the ease with which we can concentrate and embark them in the barges, and considering that we can ascertain, at any moment, the forces which Elizabeth has and can be expected to have, and that the crossing only takes 10 to 12 hours without a following wind (and 8 hours with one)’. ‘The most suitable, close and accessible point of disembarkation,’ he concluded, ‘is the coast between Dover and Margate’, which would permit a rapid march on London. Only two paragraphs of the letter addressed the possibility of naval support from Spain, and even then only in the context of ‘the worst possible scenario’: that somehow details of the plan leaked, forfeiting the element of surprise and allowing Elizabeth to mobilize her forces to prevent a landing. In that case, Parma suggested, perhaps Santa Cruz and his fleet could ‘create a diversion which will draw the English fleet away from the Channel’. This corresponded to the third alternative strategy for invading England: a naval decoy to facilitate an attack by a relatively unprotected invasion army.9
Parma entrusted his assessment to a special messenger who only arrived at court in late June. By then, the Spanish capital was in turmoil. Mateo Vázquez complained to the president of the council of Castile, responsible for law and order, that
the people of Madrid are talking very freely about the damage done by the Englishman Francis Drake, using brazen and careless words, implying that we failed to take appropriate steps to stop him. This raises the suspicion that someone is trying to unsettle people, instead of stressing the great prudence and wisdom with which His Majesty has acted and is acting to do everything possible.
The president replied suavely (and revealingly) that ‘although there are always some wicked people and unquiet spirits everywhere, in this case I do not believe that those who talk about this do so because they are wicked’. Rather ‘everyone can see how much England and the Englishman Francis Drake affect public affairs here’, and so naturally people talked about it. He therefore suggested that Philip should create a special committee to discuss (and be seen to discuss) ‘all matters of state and war that involve the English’.10 But ‘open government’ was not the king’s style. Instead, he passed Parma’s assessment to Zúñiga.
After due deliberation, Zúñiga advised the king to embrace a more ambitious version of Parma’s strategy. He should concentrate a fleet of 120 galleons, galleasses, galleys, merchantmen and pinnaces, together with an army of 30,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry in Lisbon, and launch them against either Waterford in Ireland or Milford Haven in Wales. At the same time, Philip should send reinforcements to the Army of Flanders, ostensibly to tie down the Dutch and English forces in Holland but really to cross the Channel in small boats in preparation for a surprise march on London while Elizabeth’s forces tried to destroy the distant bridgehead established by the Armada. Given that Spain would gain no advantage from the direct annexation of England (‘because of the cost of defending it’), Zúñiga recommended that the newly conquered realm should be bestowed upon a friendly Catholic ruler. He suggested Mary Stuart, after she had married a dependable Catholic prince such as Parma.11
These suggestions formed the basis of the comprehensive invasion strategy, henceforth called (for security reasons) ‘the masterplan’. In July 1586, Philip had sent it to both Parma in Brussels and to Santa Cruz in Lisbon, and although no such document has so far come to light (if indeed the plan was ever committed to paper) its contents can be deduced from subsequent correspondence. Santa Cruz would lead an Armada from Lisbon in the summer of 1587 – one year later – carrying all available troops together with the heavy equipment (above all, a powerful siege train) needed for a successful attack on London. He would sail first to Ireland and secure a beachhead to distract Elizabeth’s naval forces and neutralize their potential for resistance; then, after some two months, he would suddenly leave Ireland and make a dash for the Channel. At that point, and not before, Parma would embark the main invasion force of 30,000 veterans on a flotilla of small ships secretly assembled in the ports of Flanders, and cross to Margate on the Kent coast shielded by the Armada, which would maintain local command of the Narrow Seas. Parma’s men, reinforced by the soldiers and the siege train aboard the fleet, would then advance on London and seize it – preferably with Elizabeth and her ministers still there.
One wonders whether Philip realized the enormous risks inherent in the masterplan. Santa Cruz’s initial proposal contained much merit: the 1588 campaign proved that, once they got an Armada to sea, the Spaniards could move 60,000 tons of shipping from one end of the Channel to the other, despite repeated English assaults. Likewise, the successful landing at Kinsale in 1601 showed that an amphibious force from Spain could capture and hold a beachhead in southern Ireland. Parma’s counter-proposal of a surprise landing in Kent also had much to recommend it: time and again, his troops had shown their mettle under his leadership, and Elizabeth’s army, largely untrained and taken by surprise, would have found it difficult if not impossible to repel the Army of Flanders once it got ashore. The failure of the Enterprise of England ultimately arose from the decision to unite the fleet from Spain with the army from the Netherlands as the essential prelude to launching the invasion.
Why did he make this crucial error? Philip had participated in two victorious campaigns at the beginning of his reign (chapter 3) and in the early 1580s he had approved both the daring transfer of a large army and its equipment from Setubal to Cascais, a sea journey of 125 miles, and the dispatch of two amphibious forces to capture islands over 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula (chapter 15). He also possessed direct experience of the route his invasion forces would follow: in 1554 he had sailed from Corunna to Southampton, a journey he completed in just one week, and over the next three years he crossed the Channel three times. But once he returned to Spain, the king remained an armchair strategist: technical, tactical and operational considerations were a closed book to him. Moreover, since he refused to return to Lisbon and supervise the assembly of the fleet in person, as some of his advisers suggested, Santa Cruz had to wait at least a week to receive approval of each decision he referred to the king. Parma, for his part, had to wait at least four weeks. Furthermore, Philip declined to brief either of his commanders properly. Both received the masterplan by courier, so they could not insist that Philip explain precisely how the two large and totally independent forces, with operational bases separated by over 600 miles of ocean, could attain the accuracy of time and place necessary to accomplish their junction; or how the vulnerable and lightly armed troop transports collected in Flanders could evade the Dutch and English warships stationed offshore expressly to intercept and destroy them. Finally, since both Zúñiga and Granvelle, the only ministers in Madrid who possessed the authority and the knowledge to raise objections, died in the autumn of 1586, no one insisted that Philip must devise a ‘Plan B’.
Instead the king signed a stream of commands mobilizing the resources of his Monarchy to put the masterplan into effect. Officials in all ports must embargo any merchant ship deemed suitable to transport troops and munitions and send them to Lisbon; captains must raise troops in Spain to serve on the Armada; the viceroys of Naples and Sicily must send troops along the Spanish Road to reinforce Parma as well as supplies, ships and more soldiers to join Santa Cruz.
The Armada takes shape
The enormous cost of the Enterprise of England forced the king to economize elsewhere. In 1586, he rejected a proposal from the council of the Indies to improve the defences of the Caribbean in the wake of Drake’s depredations. ‘No one regrets the damage and no one desires a remedy more than I do, if only we had a way to execute it as we wish,’ he informed the council, ‘but your plan presents a lot of problems, and the biggest one is the lack of money with which to pay for it.’ He likewise vetoed a proposal to build a fortress at Mombasa in East Africa, and a call from the settlers of the Philippines to invade China: the reason given in each case was the need to concentrate all resources on taking down the Tudor state.12
The king also deployed other means to weaken and isolate Elizabeth. He prohibited all trade from England to Spain and Portugal – English goods arriving even on neutral shipping would now be regarded as contraband – and he encouraged several plots hatched by groups of English Catholics to murder Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Stuart. He promised to send assistance from both Spain and the Netherlands to the plotters led by Anthony Babington ‘with the greatest possible speed as soon as he knew that the venture had succeeded’, confident that ‘God would be pleased to permit what they plan, since the time has perhaps arrived for Him to advance His cause’.13 But Elizabeth already knew all about Babington’s plot and, as soon as she had sufficient evidence, she had the participants arrested, tortured and executed. Mary also went on trial for treason, and she died on the scaffold in February 1587.
Philip’s involvement in Babington’s plot infuriated Elizabeth, and she ordered Drake to return to the Iberian peninsula and do as much damage as he could to prevent or at least delay the various parts of the Armada from joining together. In April 1587, a powerful English fleet entered the harbour of Cádiz, where it captured or destroyed over twenty vessels as well as food supplies and stores accumulated for the Armada. Given that sixteenth-century Europe enjoyed few food surpluses, it proved almost impossible to obtain large supplies at short notice, and Philip found it hard to replace the provisions destroyed. Worse still, after he had ‘singed the king of Spain’s beard’ (as the English put it), Drake spent a month interdicting all sea traffic between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; then he left for the Azores, proclaiming his intention of intercepting the returning treasure fleets from America and India. To avert this calamity Philip ordered Santa Cruz to head for the Azores to protect the fleets, which carried treasure and merchandise worth 16 million ducats, and escort them back to the peninsula in safety. Although the marquis succeeded, he returned to Lisbon only on 28 September 1587.
So much stress caused Philip’s health to collapse. In May 1587, one of the ministers trying to coordinate Armada logistics complained that ‘a lot of time is being wasted in consultations, and His Majesty is slow to respond; so we are losing time that cannot be recovered’; while a month later, one of the king’s valets lamented that ‘His Majesty’s eyes are still running, his feet tender, his hand weak – and the world is waiting’.14 The king’s insistence on supervising every decision himself meant that his indisposition left a gap at the centre of power that no one could fill; and when he did resume control in September, he abandoned the masterplan and signed detailed instructions ordering both Santa Cruz and Parma to follow another totally – fatally – different strategy.
Philip now commanded the marquis ‘to sail in the name of God straight to the English Channel and go along it until you have anchored off Margate head, having first warned the duke of Parma of your approach’. Then came a crucial ambiguity: ‘The said duke, according to the orders he has received, on seeing the passage thus made safe by the Armada either being off the said headland or else cruising in the mouth of the Thames (if time allows), will immediately send across the army he has prepared in small boats, of which (for transit alone) he has plenty.’ Until Parma and his men had made their crossing, the Armada ‘should do nothing except make safe the passage, and defeat any enemy ships that might come out to prevent this’.15 This left several critical questions unanswered. Above all, would the Armada approach the ports of Flanders to cover the embarkation of Parma’s army or were the invasion barges expected to meet the fleet in open waters? If the former, how would the deep-draught ships of the Armada negotiate the shallows and sandbanks that fringed the Flemish coast; if the latter, how could a fleet cruising offshore protect the exposed barges from the waiting Dutch or English blockade ships?
The parallel set of instructions sent to the duke of Parma also evaded these vital questions. ‘I have decided’, the king told his nephew, that the marquis of Santa Cruz ‘will sail in the name of God straight to the English Channel and go along it until he has anchored off Margate head’. The king promised Parma that the fleet would send advance warning of its approach and, he continued, ‘you will be so well prepared that, when you see the Narrow Seas thus secured, with the Armada arriving off the said headland [Margate] … you will immediately send the whole army over in the boats you have prepared’. The king once again promised that, until the army was safely across, the Armada would concentrate solely on maintaining a clear passage, and he commanded Parma not to stir from the Flemish coast until the fleet arrived. But on how Parma would cross the forty miles that separated Dunkirk from Margate, the king wrote not a word. It was, to say the least, an unfortunate oversight.16
Nevertheless, now that his mind was made up, the king would tolerate no further delays, objections or even queries. Once again, he sent his detailed and inflexible instructions to both Lisbon and Brussels by courier, rather than with a personal messenger empowered to brief his theatre commanders on their role, answer their questions or provide feedback on the state of their readiness and morale. Instead he told Parma to stop complaining:
I cannot refrain from reminding you that, apart from the initial idea of this enterprise and the selection of yourself to command it (which were my decisions), everything else connected with your end of the plan, including the resources prepared, were according to your own instructions of which you alone were the author. Moreover, for its preparation and execution, I have given you in great abundance everything you have asked me for.
Parma must put the plan into execution without further question or delay.17 Santa Cruz received the same treatment as soon as he brought his storm-battered fleet back to Lisbon. He must stop complaining and set sail for Flanders: ‘There is no more time to waste in requests and replies: just get on with the job and see if you cannot advance your departure by a few days.’ As the days slipped by, the king lamented that ‘so much time has been lost already that every further hour of delay causes me more grief than you can imagine. And so I charge and command you most strictly to leave before the end of the month.’18 Letters of exhortation – wheedling and hectoring by turns – left the king’s desk for Lisbon almost daily.
The Venetian ambassador in Madrid, who obtained a copy of one of Santa Cruz’s measured refutations of these unrealistic tirades, speculated on why the king would refuse to believe his most experienced admiral. He came up with three reasons, all linked to Philip’s temperament and style of government. First, it was ‘difficult for him to change plans, once he has decided on something’. Second, Philip’s supreme confidence ‘in his good fortune’ led him to assume that God would reward his efforts if only he performed his own part to the full. Finally, the king’s knowledge of international affairs led him to see operations in each theatre as part of a wider context, which increased his anxiety to act before he lost his diplomatic advantage.19
Although Philip never saw this analysis, he would surely have agreed with it – but he would have added a fourth reason for urging haste: the cost of delay. Each day the Armada lay inactive cost 30,000 ducats for the fleet and a further 15,000 ducats for Parma’s army. Funds for even the basic tasks of government ran so low that Philip began to demand weekly statements of the amount of money in his treasury and personally determined which obligations he could meet and which must wait (see plate 41). He now realized that ‘I need to close the door to everything except raising money’, and he drummed into his councillors that ‘finding money is so important that all of us must concentrate only on that and on nothing else, because whatever victories we may win, without money I do not know what fruit they will bear (unless God performs a miracle)’.20
The constant delays and the extraordinary inconsistency of Philip’s planning process nevertheless brought one important advantage: it confused and frustrated not only his subordinates but also his enemies. At different times, the king gave serious consideration to a landing in Scotland, a surprise attack on Ireland or the Isle of Wight, a sudden solo assault by Parma’s army on the coast of Kent – as well as an amphibious assault from Lisbon on Algiers or Larache instead of on England. The ambassadors and spies at the court of Spain detected each proposal and counter-proposal, and duly reported it to their principals, creating a cacophony of background ‘noise’ that disguised the king’s real intentions. Few could accept that the most powerful monarch in Christendom could be so irresolute; still less did they imagine that after so much apparent vacillation he would adopt the most obvious of all strategies, the one that everyone had been talking about for months, and choose for his target the most obvious landing zone – the exact spot where the Romans, the Saxons and others had landed before.
Philip scored another remarkable success in maintaining Elizabeth’s diplomatic isolation. The keystone of this policy was the paralysis of France, where his agents increased their subsidies to the duke of Guise, who in return agreed to engineer a general rebellion by the Catholic League the moment he heard that the Armada had left Lisbon. The Catholics of Paris began to take over the city in May 1588, and when King Henry III deployed his Swiss Guards to preserve order the inhabitants of the capital erected barricades and forced him to flee. The ‘Day of the Barricades’ made Guise the master of Paris and shortly afterwards he became ‘lieutenant-general of the kingdom’. The Imperial ambassador in Madrid observed with admiration:
At the moment, the Catholic King [Philip] is safe: France cannot threaten him, and the Turks can do little; neither can the king of Scots, who is offended at Queen Elizabeth on account of the death of his mother [Mary Stuart] … At the same time, Spain can be confident that the Swiss cantons will not move against him; nor will they allow others to do so, since they are now his allies.
In short, he opined, no foreign power could now stop Philip executing the Enterprise of England.21
Nevertheless, new problems constantly arose, including the king’s own ill health. Philip was now 60 and at Christmas 1587 he fell ill again and took to his bed. For four weeks, he lacked the strength to govern his empire – or his Armada. But the enforced idleness seems to have restored some of the king’s legendary prudence, and he now took more rational steps to save both the Armada and the Enterprise for which it had been created. To ascertain the true state of the fleet in January 1588 he dispatched a special envoy to Lisbon, who reported a state of utter chaos: Santa Cruz was seriously ill and deeply depressed, trying to command from his sickbed a shambles of unseaworthy ships and rotting supplies and (more critical because less easily cured) dispirited and disillusioned men. Obviously, Santa Cruz must go.
‘The largest fleet since the creation of the world’
The king now took a decision that has been much criticized in retrospect but which made excellent sense at the time. What the Armada needed, if it were to sail at all, was not another fighting admiral but someone with the determination and the administrative skills to turn the chaos at Lisbon into a coherent fighting force. Such a man was Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, seventh duke of Medina Sidonia.
The duke’s qualifications were impeccable. He had amply proved his administrative talents both in governing his own vast estates and in supervising the dispatch of the huge fleets sailing from Andalusia to America; and he had recently overseen with great efficiency the outfitting and dispatch of the ships and supplies assembled for the Armada in Andalusia. Although he lacked combat experience, the duke had raised and led an army during the Portuguese campaign of 1580, and commanded the relief force whose expeditious arrival had saved the town of Cádiz from being sacked during Drake’s ‘beard-singeing’ exploit in 1587. His rapid response on that occasion earned widespread praise. The Venetian ambassador in Madrid considered that the duke had been the only man who kept his head in the crisis, while Secretary of State Gabriel de Zayas told a colleague ‘if my opinion counted for anything, I would make [Medina Sidonia] president of the council of the Indies and member of the council of State’.22 Furthermore the duke knew the strategic aims of the Armada, having spent some weeks at court in autumn 1587 discussing with ministers the conduct of the impending war with England. Finally, and equally important, he was the head of one of Spain’s foremost aristocratic families: none of the senior officers already serving in the Armada (several of whom had proposed themselves to Philip as suitable successors to Santa Cruz) could feel any resentment or injustice in serving under the seventh duke of Medina Sidonia.
The duke was at his castle at Sanlúcar when he opened an unexpected and unwelcome letter signed by the king on 11 February announcing that, since Santa Cruz was now too ill to lead the Armada, he must leave for Lisbon at once and take charge. Given the current state of the Armada – and few knew better than the duke how chaotic that state was – Medina Sidonia did everything he could to be excused. Initially, he pleaded that ill health, poverty and inexperience disqualified him from command, all of which the king dismissed as misplaced modesty; but he might have paid more attention had he seen a second letter written by the duke. This time, Medina ‘drew to Your Majesty’s attention many relevant reasons to show why I should not undertake this service – not to avoid hard work but because I see that the attack on such a large kingdom, with so many allies, requires far more forces than those that Your Majesty has assembled’. The duke had evidently reached the same conclusion as Parma and Santa Cruz before him – that the Enterprise of England, as currently conceived, was doomed to failure – but his cogent rationale never reached the king.23
Don Juan de Idiáquez and Don Cristóbal de Moura, in constant attendance on the king, handled the immense quantity of paperwork generated by the Enterprise of England. Nothing of consequence concerning the Armada bypassed them. When, in the course of their duties, they opened Medina Sidonia’s frank letter, they were appalled. ‘We did not dare to show his Majesty what you have just written,’ they chided the duke, adding: ‘Do not depress us with fears for the fate of the Armada, because in such a cause God will make sure it succeeds.’ Here was another striking example of ‘groupthink’ at the Spanish court: those in charge of policy-making systematically belittled or rejected all discordant views – but this time the policy-makers also issued a palpable threat. Everyone knew (they reminded the duke) that he had been offered command of the Armada, so that to refuse it now would lead to accusations of ingratitude, selfishness, even cowardice. ‘Remember that the reputation and esteem you currently enjoy for courage and wisdom would entirely be forfeited if what you wrote to us became generally known (although we shall keep it secret).’24 Dismayed by this naked blackmail, Medina Sidonia asked for an audience with the king, but – as usual – Philip refused. The duke therefore tried to wrest substantial concessions from his master before reluctantly travelling to Lisbon, where he found a cheery letter from the king reassuring him that ‘If I were not needed so much here, to provide what is necessary for that [enterprise] and for many other things, I would be very pleased to join [the Armada] – and I would do so with great confidence that it would go very well for me.’25
The duke’s reaction to this message has not survived, but a senior officer of the Armada, Martín de Bertendona, complained to Philip acidly: ‘I really wish that Your Majesty could be present’ at debates on how best to prepare for the Enterprise, ‘because it would be very different to discuss them in Your Majesty’s presence, where you could not fail to hear the truth, than to discuss them there [at court] where those who understand and those who do not can all give their opinions’. But, Bertendona concluded serenely (and undoubtedly sarcastically), ‘since it is your Majesty who has decided everything, we must believe that it is God’s will’.26
Nevertheless, under Medina Sidonia’s efficient and courteous direction, aided by his willingness to seek the opinions of his more experienced subordinates, the fleet became seaworthy in less than two months. The ships already at Lisbon were repaired and several new ones added, while sick soldiers and sailors were nursed back to health, until by May 1588 the 104 ships and scarcely 10,000 troops that the duke had found at his arrival had risen to 130 vessels and almost 19,000 troops. Provisions and water were stowed according to a carefully planned turnover system, and each ship received a printed set of pilotage instructions and a standardized chart of the Channel approaches. On 28 May 1588 the duke led the great Armada down the Tagus to the open sea, ready to sail towards the 300 small ships and 30,000 veterans assembled by Parma in Flanders. At this point, Philip’s forces far outnumbered those of his enemies.
The king and his minsters believed with absolute confidence that the Armada would solve all the strategic problems that faced the Monarchy. In a message to the Cortes of Castile in January 1588, written in his own hand, the king reminded the deputies that ‘You all know that the Enterprise that I have undertaken for the service of God and advancement of our Holy Catholic Faith is also for the benefit of these kingdoms, because it is the same cause’. A month later, Idiáquez and Moura assured Medina Sidonia that ‘now that all wars and ventures have been incorporated in this Enterprise’, the invasion and conquest of England would solve all Spain’s problems.27
This was rousing rhetoric, but once they moved from theory to practice, Philip and his advisers became vague. Above all, the instructions drawn up for Medina Sidonia on 1 April 1588 failed to make clear exactly how he could achieve his ambitious objectives. In part, the document repeated the orders issued to Santa Cruz the previous September, commanding the duke to lead his fleet directly to ‘the appointed place’ (almost certainly the anchorage of the Downs), there to ‘join hands’ with Parma and his army; but just how to do this became lost in measures to curb the immorality of the fleet’s sinful human cargo on such a saintly enterprise. The king specified all the necessary steps to ensure there was no blasphemy, drinking, gambling, feuding or sodomy aboard any of his ships, but he maintained a deafening silence on tactics: how, exactly, should the rendezvous be effected, and how, precisely, could the Armada secure local command of the sea while Parma and his vulnerable troop transports crossed the Channel? A few sentences did indeed touch on the second point, but their implications were more alarming than illuminating:
There is little to say with regard to the mode of fighting and the handling of the Armada on the day of battle … [but] it must be borne in mind that the enemy’s objective will be to fight at long distance, in consequence of his advantage in artillery, and the large number of artificial fires with which he will be furnished. The aim of our men, on the contrary, must be to bring him to close quarters and grapple with him, and you will have to be very careful to have this carried out.
To all of this, the king concluded, ‘you will have to take such precautions as you consider necessary’. We may admire the king’s tactical insight on this problem; but at the same time we must censure him – as no doubt his unfortunate commanders censured him privately – for his total failure to suggest a solution.28
For three months, such oversights remained academic because the Armada made such slow progress. Despite all the duke’s preparations at Lisbon, provisions soon started to run out. Some of the food was putrid, and had probably been so from the start, while Medina Sidonia’s success in increasing the size of the fleet meant that the rest was inadequate. The duke reluctantly cut the daily biscuit ration to one pound and reduced the issue of meat. The Armada’s unexpectedly slow progress intensified the problem still further. On 20 June, since the fleet had only advanced as far as Cape Finisterre, the duke saw no alternative to putting in to Corunna to take on new supplies, but a sudden and violent tempest struck part of the fleet as it tried to enter the harbour, scattering some vessels as far afield as the Scilly Isles, off the tip of Cornwall.
This disaster broke Medina Sidonia’s spirits. He composed two long and detailed appeals to the king that boldly restated the sweeping objections he had voiced at the time of his appointment to ‘attacking such a large kingdom, with so many allies’. Despite his best efforts, he feared that ‘the strength of the Armada remains inferior to that of the enemy’, and yet the whole fate of the Monarchy ‘depends on the success or failure of this campaign, to which Your Majesty has committed all his resources – ships, artillery, munitions’. If these assets were lost, they would take ‘much time’ to replace. Moreover, once he got to sea, Medina Sidonia had found that ‘the soldiers are not as well-trained as they should be’ while ‘I find few, indeed hardly any officials who understand and know how to carry out their duties. I write this from personal experience’, he added, perhaps in a swipe at Idiáquez and Moura: ‘so let no one deceive Your Majesty by saying something else.’29
The king learned of this setback in the midst of another bout of ill health brought on by pressure of work. ‘I have to spend so much time on incoming papers,’ he lamented, ‘that I believe it is making me ill … Please tell some of the ministers in Madrid to moderate the number of papers they send.’ Nonetheless he knew what he must do, telling Mateo Vázquez, ‘It will require a lot of time and effort to find all the money that has already been spent, and will have to be spent, so that nothing will be left for me to do in what we have begun.’ Ensuring the success of the Enterprise ‘is so important that it now leaves me little time to do or think of anything else’.30 He therefore gave Medina Sidonia’s pessimistic assessment his immediate and undivided attention.
When the duke started to read the royal reply to his letters, the colour must have drained from his cheeks:
Duke and cousin. I have received the letter written in your own hand, dated 24 June. From what I know of you, I believe you have brought all these matters to my attention solely because of your zeal to serve me and the desire to succeed in your command. The certainty that this is so prompts me to be franker with you than I should be with another …
After this terrifying start the rest of the missive, although firm, was considerate and mild in tone. Having restating the original reasons for the undertaking, Philip systematically demolished the duke’s objections and doubts with his own perverse logic: ‘If this were an unjust war, one could indeed take the tempest as a sign from Our Lord to cease offending Him; but being as just as it is, one cannot believe that He will disband it, but will rather grant it more favour than we could hope.’ The English had no allies and their forces (despite the fears of his doubting commander) remained inferior to those of Spain. With a following wind the fleet could be in the Channel within a week, whereas if it remained in Corunna it represented a sitting target, liable either to be destroyed at anchor or blockaded in port while the English ravaged the unprotected Iberian coasts and captured the next treasure fleet. ‘I have dedicated this enterprise to God,’ concluded Philip, with a command that brooked no further dissent. ‘Pull yourself together, then, and do your part.’31
On this occasion, the king’s obstinacy was surely correct. Disbanding the fleet before it had gained its objective would achieve nothing except to waste all his resources and tarnish Spain’s reputation. Moreover, the English fleet might indeed easily descend on Corunna, just as it had done the previous year on Cádiz, and wreak havoc as the fleet lay helplessly at anchor. So far, therefore, so good; but unfortunately for his plans, Philip also seized the opportunity offered by the delay to resume micromanagement of the campaign. He had received a copy of a letter to Parma written by Medina Sidonia just after he left Lisbon, reporting that ‘I assembled all the pilots and nautical experts aboard the fleet who are familiar with the coast of England and asked them to decide in which port there we could all shelter’ while he waited for news that Parma had his forces ready. Events would reveal the wisdom of this ‘Plan B’, but Philip forbade it. ‘The main point [of the plan] is to go on until you join hands with the duke my nephew,’ he chided Medina Sidonia, ‘and proceed to the agreed location and make safe the duke’s transit.’32 The Armada must not halt in any port on its way to pick up Parma’s waiting troops. The central weakness of the king’s operational strategy thus remained intact.
At least this verbal spanking restored Medina Sidonia’s confidence. On 21 July 1588 he led the Armada to sea once more, and on the 30th, with the English coast in sight, he ordered the 130 ships under his command to deploy in a half-moon battle order that measured three miles from one tip to the other. Spain’s enemies now ruefully recognized that they faced ‘the largest fleet that has ever been in these seas since the creation of the world’ and ‘the greatest and strongest combination, to my understanding, that ever was gathered in Christendom’. Meanwhile, Philip concentrated on prayer: according to the friars of the Escorial, he and the royal family knelt for three hours each in relays before the Holy Sacrament to ensure the success of the Enterprise. After all the crises and ‘tests’ sent by God, the king felt calm and confident that ‘nothing on my part remains to be done’, and he told Idiáquez: ‘Things hang in the balance: not just these affairs [of northern Europe] but of all areas.’33
For a time, it seemed as if ‘the balance’ had tipped in his favour. Repeated attempts by Elizabeth’s navy to break the Armada’s formation failed, and on 6 August 1588 it dropped anchor off Calais, just twenty-five miles from Parma’s forces at Dunkirk and within sight of the designated landing area at the Downs. It remained there for thirty-six hours, and Medina Sidonia might justifiably have felt that he had indeed ‘done his part’. Unfortunately for him, for the men aboard the Armada and for Spain, thirty-six hours were not long enough.
Both Medina Sidonia and Philip seem to have expected that the Armada would maintain reliable communications with Parma after it had put to sea – an assumption that betrays a fatal lack of familiarity with the realities of naval warfare (one cannot imagine Santa Cruz making the same elementary mistake). It never seems to have occurred to either the duke or his master that messengers from the fleet had either to run the gauntlet of hostile ships lurking in the Channel or else to make for the French coast and hope to find a relay of horses ready to convey them overland to Flanders. It was foolish to assume that they would arrive – let alone return with an answer – much before the fleet reached ‘the appointed place’. In the event, none of the couriers sent to advise Parma of Medina Sidonia’s progress reached him in time to do much good. The envoy dispatched on 31 July, when the fleet was drawing level with Plymouth, could not make sail until the following morning, and only reached Parma’s headquarters early on 6 August. Later that same day the messenger dispatched off the Isle of Wight on 4 August arrived. Yet by then the Armada was dropping anchor off Calais, just over the horizon – though Parma did not learn this for another day. So although Medina Sidonia repeatedly expressed regret at his slow progress, and sought to increase his speed exactly as Philip had exhorted him to do, from Parma’s perspective he arrived much too soon.
Given this breakdown in communications, Parma could not possibly have embarked his men aboard his small ships by 6 August, ready to ‘join hands’ with Medina Sidonia, because he did not know until that day that the Armada had even entered the Channel, let alone that it had reached Calais. Nevertheless Parma had prepared a meticulous embarkation schedule, and on 2 August, on learning that the Armada had arrived off the Lizard, he placed his forces on alert; and on the 6th, on learning that the fleet’s approach continued, all units began to move to the ports. Over the next thirty-six hours, almost 27,000 men managed to embark without mishap – no mean feat for any army in any age – but by then the Armada had, in the unkind words of a contemporary Dutch historian, ‘vanished into smoke’.34
On the evening of 7 August, the English launched eight fireships against the Armada anchored off Calais. Most captains simply cut their cables and fled – only to find that the strong currents which prevail in the Narrow Seas made it impossible for them to regain their positions and re-anchor. At a stroke the Armada had been transformed from a cohesive and still formidable fighting force to a fragmented gaggle of panic-stricken ships. The next morning, English warships managed to break into the Armada’s close order and inflict catastrophic damage on several vessels. The following day, Medina Sidonia gave the order for the fleet to sail back to Spain on what one of his officers grimly called ‘the voyage of Magellan that we have begun’ around Scotland and Ireland – a journey (for those who survived it) of some 3,000 miles.35
Counting the cost
The first certain news concerning the Armada’s failure to ‘join hands’ with the Army of Flanders arrived at court on 31 August, and Philip immediately sought to regain control of the situation with his pen. He informed Medina Sidonia, wherever he might be, that ‘the news of the defeat before Calais … worries me more than you can imagine’, and he ordered Idiáquez to prepare a detailed memorandum telling the duke what he should do if the Armada had taken refuge in Scotland or elsewhere (refit, and discuss ways of effecting the invasion the following year), or had started on the journey back to Spain (put some troops ashore in Ireland and create a bridgehead for operations the following year). On 15 September, he issued even more unrealistic orders: Medina Sidonia must land in Scotland, ally with the local Catholics and winter there. Philip had finally recognized the need for a ‘Plan B’. This unusual willingness to contemplate alternative strategies reveals, perhaps more clearly than anything else, that the king’s self-confidence had received a shattering blow. When he read the draft of a reply to Parma, expressing the hope ‘that we may yet perform the service that we wanted to dedicate to God and to regain the reputation that is now in jeopardy’, the king underlined the passage. ‘Think whether it might be better to delete this’, he told his secretary, ‘because in what we do for God, and what God does for us, there is no gain or loss of reputation. It is better not to talk about it.’36
On 3 September a courier from France brought more detailed news concerning the Armada’s defeat and northward flight. The disconsolate cipher clerks and ministers debated which of them should break the news to the king. The choice fell upon Mateo Vázquez, but even he broached the subject with great trepidation and indirectly, choosing to forward a tactless parallel drawn by a courtier: ‘When we consider the case of King Louis IX of France, who was a saint and was engaged on a saintly enterprise [the Seventh Crusade in 1250], and yet saw his army die of plague, with himself defeated and captured, we certainly cannot fail to fear greatly for the outcome’ of the Enterprise of England. Vázquez suggested that yet more prayers be said to stave off a similar disaster. This proved too much for the king: ‘I hope that God has not permitted so much evil,’ he scribbled angrily on the letter, ‘because everything has been done for His service.’37
In October, after reading some painful accounts by Armada survivors, Philip wrote, ‘I have seen all this, although I think it would have been better not to see it because it hurts so much’; and the following month, when he learned of further losses, he predicted:
Very soon we shall find ourselves in such a state that we shall wish that we had never been born … And if God does not send us a miracle (which is what I hope from Him), I hope to die and go to Him before this happens – which is what I pray for, so as not to see so much misfortune and disgrace.38
In all, perhaps 15,000 men – almost half the soldiers and sailors who had embarked on the Armada – perished during the Enterprise of England, and at least one-third of the ships, together with their equipment and armament, never returned to Spain. Philip lost almost all his experienced naval commanders; and the venture had absorbed 10 million ducats to no effect.
On top of these material losses, Philip had suffered a major moral setback. As early as June 1588, when storms scattered the fleet, the papal nuncio in Madrid wondered whether ‘these impediments that the devil creates’ might be a sign that ‘God does not approve of the enterprise’; and in November he noted that the pointless loss of so many ships and men had ‘disturbed everyone, since they can almost openly see the hand of God raised against us’.39 Even the monks of El Escorial, normally Philip’s greatest supporters, came to see the Armada campaign as his greatest failure. Fray Jerónimo de Sepúlveda considered it a misfortune ‘worthy to be wept over for ever … because it lost us the respect and good reputation that we used to have among warlike people … The grief it caused in all of Spain was extraordinary: almost the entire country went into mourning … People talked of nothing else.’ According to his colleague Fray José de Sigüenza, ‘it was the greatest disaster to strike Spain in over six hundred years’ because, quite apart from the destruction of human and material capital and the loss of reputation, the king’s policies had plunged Spain into an open war with England as well as with the Dutch and their other allies that would last long after his death.40