A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

This check did not make Philip any wiser than before, but neither did it in any way damp his determination to collect such a fleet as should make an end of the English pirates. He began the work of getting his stores together again with imperturbable patient industry. Drake described his feat in the outer harbour of Cadiz as the singeing of the King of Spain's beard, and the phrase was accurate as well as humorous. He had insulted the enemy, and had done him as much injury as would compel him to abstain from action for the time being, but he had not seriously crippled his power. By the spring of the following year the Spanish fleet was ready for service, and if Don Álvaro de Bazan had lived, it might have sailed sooner than it actually did. The old man's own plan, communicated to the king some years before, had been to embark a sufficient army in Spain, and sail direct to the coast of England, but the resources of King Philip were not adequate to a scheme of the scale proposed by his admiral. He had to maintain an army under the Prince of Parma in Flanders, and could not meet the expense of organising another. He had therefore decided to make the fleet he was collecting in Spain co-operate with the army he already had in the Low Countries. It was indeed to carry reinforcements to the Prince of Parma, but it was on him that the task of providing an army for the invasion of England was to be laid. The Spaniards have always counted it fortunate for England that the Marquis de Santa Cruz died on the 9th February 1588. Perhaps it was, though it may be doubted whether the very complicated task set by the king could have been successfully performed even by him. To bring a fleet from Spain into the Channel, to carry it to the Low Countries, to embark an army there and transport it to the coast of England, would have made a long and complicated operation, to be conducted in difficult seas, of which the Spaniards had little knowledge, and in the face of the most determined opposition from Dutch and English seamen. However that may be, the Spaniards were deprived of such chance of victory as they might have had under the command of the "Iron Marquis" by his death; and then the king, acting on motives which are not a little mysterious, selected from among his subjects as leader of this great enterprise perhaps the gentleman who was more fitted than any other then living to lead it to ruin. This was Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia. He was a youngish man, small, of a swarthy complexion, and somewhat bandy-legged, who, according to his own candid and somewhat pitiful confession to the king, knew nothing of war by land or sea, was always sea-sick when he went in a vessel, and never failed to catch cold. What qualification he had, beyond his illustrious lineage and his great estates, for a high command nobody has ever been able to discover. These were no doubt to be taken into account at a time when obedience was more readily rendered to a gentleman of great social position than to others; but there were men of the duke's own rank among Philip's subjects who had served, and were at least not manifestly unfit for the post. But the king chose the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and, overcoming his manifest reluctance to take the command, sent him to succeed the Marquis de Santa Cruz. It was in reality consistent enough with the duke's first unwillingness to take the post, that, once in it, he had not the smallest hesitation in contradicting the advice and overruling the decisions of his veteran predecessor. He declared that what had seemed enough for Santa Cruz was not enough; he wanted more ships, more men, more stores; and thus the fleet, which ought to have started in February, did not leave the Tagus till May. During all this time the stores already collected began to go rotten and had to be replaced. The pressed-men ran, and others had to be found; and so delay bred delay, and the months passed in mere waste alike of time and material.

On our own side there were also defects of management, not, however, attributable to the officers in command, but partly to the poverty of the queen's Government, and partly to the vacillations of the queen. Elizabeth, it must not be forgotten, was a very poor sovereign, and the maintenance of a great fleet was a heavy drain upon her resources. Moreover, she had an artistic love of tricks. She could not be thoroughly persuaded that it was hopeless to expect to avert the Spanish invasion by artful diplomacy. Therefore, between her impatience under the expenses of the fleet and her profound belief in her own cleverness, she vacillated all through the spring of that eventful year. Her ships had been brought into excellent order by John Hawkins. Her subjects were full of zeal; and although the smaller ports met the demand for ships with loud complaints of poverty and of the ruin of their trade by war, yet London freely offered twice as many vessels and men as the Crown asked for, while the nobles and those adventurers of the stamp of Drake and Hawkins, who had grown rich at the expense of the Spaniards, were active in fitting out vessels and collecting crews. The queen's Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, Lord Effingham, was as fit a man for the place as could have been found. He had, it is true, no experience in war; and it does not appear, from anything recorded of him, that he was a man of much ability. But he had character and tact, and the happy faculty of allowing himself to be guided by his abler and more experienced subordinates, without suffering his authority to be diminished.

By the mouth of Howard, Elizabeth's captains implored her for leave to repeat the cruise for 1587. They pointed out that, if we must fight the Spaniard, it was better to fight him on his own coast than ours, and, moreover, it was safer, since, even if we were to be beaten, defeat would be less dangerous a long way off than at home. But Elizabeth would not part with the hope that her diplomacy, which had stood her in such admirable stead during the twenty-eight years of her reign, would serve her again, and she would not allow her fleet to sail for an attack upon Spain, which must necessarily have broken off the negotiations of peace. Still, the preparations for war were not neglected. The Admiral of England, Lord Howard, with Drake as Vice and Hawkins as Rear Admiral, had his headquarters at Plymouth, while Lord Henry Seymour commanded the ships of London and the East Coast, in the Thames. On the approach of the enemy, his station was to be in the Downs, where he was to watch the Duke of Parma, who was collecting the army of invasion in the Flemish ports. In this work Seymour had the help of a squadron of Dutch vessels, commanded by Justinus of Nassau, a natural son of William the Silent.

At the end of May the Duke of Medina Sidonia did at last sail. All his demands had been supplied by the king. His banners had been solemnly blessed by the Cardinal Albert—the cardinal who was Viceroy of Portugal; all his officers and men had taken the Communion and confessed their sins; and at last the Armada was on the way, with assurances from the king that "it must succeed, since God would not fail to help it on an enterprise so much for His service as this was." When Cromwell told his soldiers to trust in God, he also added the order to keep their powder dry; in other words, not to allow their reliance on divine assistance to tempt them into neglecting ordinary human precautions. King Philip was lavish in good advice and intelligent direction, but he was neither so practical as Oliver Cromwell, nor would he take equally good care that what he directed his men to do should be within their power. It was worthy of a king who, throughout the whole of his life, was endeavouring to achieve vast ends with very insufficient means, that Philip sent his fleet out with the knowledge that it suffered from a great cause of inferiority, but without making the slightest effort to remove the defect. He knew that the gunnery of his crews was altogether inferior to the English, and that his guns were not so good. Therefore, as he warned the Duke of Medina Sidonia, it was to be expected that the English ships would endeavour to engage at a distance, and would avoid coming so close that the Spaniards would have a chance of boarding them. It was also not unknown to Philip that the English ships sailed better than his own, and that therefore it would be in their power to choose the distance at which they would engage. Yet, instead of providing quicker ships and better guns, and of training more skilful gunners, he could only advise his admiral to come to close quarters with the English fleet without telling him how the feat was to be achieved. The very first experience of his fleet after leaving Lisbon ought to have shown him how little hope there was that the unlucky Duke of Medina Sidonia would have it in his power to engage the English except on their own terms. By a curious coincidence, Lord Howard and the duke left port at about the same time; the Lord Admiral sailing from Plymouth to the south and west in order to meet the coming Spaniards, and Medina Sidonia sailing from Lisbon towards England. Had no accident intervened, they would probably have met in the neighbourhood of the Scilly Isles. A few days after the duke had left Lisbon, a gale broke out from the south-west. It affected both fleets,—the Spaniards, who had just rounded Cape Finisterre, and the English, who were at the mouth of the Channel. But whereas these latter were only hindered, the Invincible Armada was completely scattered. The duke had given his fleet only one rendezvous in case of an accident of this kind, and that was the neighbourhood of the Scilly Isles. The squadron of urcas, or storeships, which accompanied his fleet held on to the appointed place, and there remained. But the heavy galleons were so maltreated by the wind that they were scattered along the coast. The duke himself anchored at Corunna, and there collected his ships after some days of confusion. A whole month passed before he was ready to go to sea again. He himself was so dispirited that he actually proposed to advise the king to give the enterprise up altogether, and was only restrained from writing to that effect by the strenuous efforts of a council of war. Meanwhile, Lord Howard, after being driven back by the gale, had taken to the sea again, and had despatched a squadron to reconnoitre towards the coast of Spain, while the bulk of his fleet was stretched across the mouth of the Channel, in order to be the better able to catch sight of the enemy if he endeavoured to pass. Nothing was seen of the Spaniards, and Lord Howard returned to Plymouth. Although undoubtedly better fitted than the Invincible Armada, the English ships were not without wants of their own. In the hope of diminishing expenses, or perhaps rather from the difficulty found in collecting provisions, it was thought necessary to put the men "six on four," that is to say, that each set of six men received the rations of four. It is doubtful whether the gaol fever, which broke out later on, had already appeared, but the health of the fleet was not good. From Cecil there came incessant appeals to keep down "charges," and complaints that, no matter how much money was sent, he was worried out of his life by appeals for more, to the no small aggravation of the gout, from which he suffered cruelly. This idle hope to diminish expense, at a moment when England had need to spend every man and every penny, led the Treasurer, and perhaps Elizabeth, to propose a measure of enormous practical folly. It was actually proposed to the Lord Admiral to pay off four or five of his biggest ships on his return to Plymouth. Howard, with patriotic indignation, professed that he would rather pay the expenses out of his own pocket. The proposal was never carried out, for the Spanish fleet appeared off the Lizard.

Medina Sidonia sailed from Corunna on the 12th of July. This date and all the others must be understood to be in the old style used by us, and not in the new or Gregorian employed by the Spaniards. The strength of the Spanish fleet is put at 132 ships of 59,120 tons, carrying 29,287 men, of whom 21,621 were soldiers and 8066 were sailors. It is doubtful whether all these vessels were actually present after the various disasters the Armada had already experienced. The four galleys must be deducted from its strength. They proved perfectly incapable of facing the winds and currents of the Channel, and were compelled to take refuge in French ports. Nearly a third of the others were urcas, and of no use for fighting purposes. The whole was divided into ten squadrons. The first in dignity—for it included the flagship of Medina Sidonia—was the squadron of Portugal, consisting of ten galleons. Then followed the squadron of Castile, of fourteen sail, under the direct command of Diego Flores de Valdes. This officer had commanded the yearly flota, or convoy, which went to and fro between Spain and its American possession, carrying the trade; on account of his experience as a seaman, Diego Flores had been especially recommended to Medina Sidonia as his adviser, and sailed with him in the flagship. His character seems to have been envious, and, whatever he may have done to supply the duke's deficiencies as a seaman, he proved an indifferent military adviser. Pedro de Valdes commanded the squadron of Andalusia, of ten ships. The squadron of Biscay was of the same strength, and the flag officer in command was Juan Martinez de Recalde, who was also senior admiral of the whole fleet, by which we may perhaps understand that he was the officer responsible for the navigation, subject to the directions of Medina Sidonia. Miguel de Oquendo led the ten ships forming the squadron of Guipuzcoa. The squadron of Italy, under Martin de Bertendona, was of the same force. Twenty-three urcas or storeships were under the command of Juan Gomez de Medina, while a miscellaneous swarm of other small craft were under Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza. Four galleasses, great overgrown galleys, formed a squadron apart, under Hugo de Moncada. The four galleys under Diego de Medrado proved, as has been said above, useless from the first, and never took any share in the fighting in the Channel. They were driven by the weather to seek refuge in French ports, and were able, later on, to return in safety to Spain. Although the names of the various kinds of ships forming the Armada are strange, the vessels themselves, with the exception of the galleasse, described above, were not essentially different from our own. The "galleon" was, for instance, only our "capital ship." Although it has been customary to speak of the Spanish ships as exceeding ours in bulk, it does not appear that any of them were larger than the best of the queen's—the White Bear, for instance, or the Triumph, or the Ark. Some twenty or twenty-five of our largest were equal to eighty or ninety of the Spaniards in average size, and far superior in seaworthiness. The smaller ships were equal to their smaller in size, and vastly superior in number.

In the number of guns, also, the superiority of the Spaniards was much more apparent than real. There is a doubt as to the actual excess in the number of the Spanish cannon over the English. On the other hand, modern Spanish writers have endeavoured to show that the English had the advantage in the point of weight. It is, however, easy to make too much of this. The number of cannons royal, and even of demi-cannon, in the English navy was not great. The large majority of our guns were culverins and demi-culverins of about the same calibre as the guns carried by the Spaniards. For practical purposes, however, the English had really a greater number of cannon, for it is beyond doubt that the fire of our gunners was both more rapid and better directed. The Spaniards themselves confessed that we fired three to one. It is self-evident that a gun which is fired three times in five minutes is, for the purpose of doing damage, quite as effectual as three guns which are fired once each in the same space of time. The Spaniards, indeed, looked down upon the use of artillery as being somewhat ignoble. The management of the guns was left entirely to the sailors, who were a despised and subordinate element in the crews of their ships. It does not seem that they had any class of gunners. When, then, we remember that the Spanish ships were ill fitted for the navigation of the Channel, and that their seamen had no knowledge of its waters, it will be seen that even with good leadership they would have been at a disadvantage.

When we turn to our own fleet, the conditions are completely reversed. In mere material force, that is to say, in the number of capital ships and of guns, we were inferior, but in every other respect we had the superiority. We had experience, familiarity with the waters in which the fighting was to take place, and a far higher level of skill in gunnery. The value of the fleet, the fighting instrument, must depend on the skill of the men by whom it is used, that is to say, of the seamen. Now, whereas the Spanish sailor was, as has been said above, subordinate and despised, the English seaman had conquered his due place of superiority in the fleet. But, after all, the greatest element of superiority on our side was to be found in the quality of the leaders. Lord Howard of Effingham, without being a man of extraordinary ability, had a valuable mixture of intellectual docility and vigour of character. And his subordinates, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, were all in various degrees capable men. The subordinate leaders among the Spaniards were not unworthy to compete with our own. Pedro de Valdes, Martinez de Recalde, and Miguel de Oquendo, not to mention many others, were able officers, but they were not listened to by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, whose conduct presented a familiar combination of vacillation and obstinacy. He alternately allowed himself to be earwigged by his official adviser, Diego Flores, or insisted upon having his way when the advice of any seaman would have saved him from committing a blunder. The number of ships with Lord Howard at Plymouth was about a hundred, including all the best of the queen's. The other vessels, which altogether amounted to nearly another hundred, were either still in the ports along the Channel, or were collecting, under the command of Lord Henry Seymour and Sir William Winter, in the Thames and the Downs.

The orders the Duke of Medina Sidonia had received from his king were both intelligent and explicit. He had been told that his first duty was to cripple or destroy, if he could, the English fleet, and that the transport of Parma's army was only to be a secondary object. A large discretion was very properly left him in the carrying out of his duties, while the general principles upon which he was to act were made quite clear. How the duke contrived to disobey at once the letter and the spirit of his orders will be seen from the following narrative.

On the 20th of July his fleet reached the Lizard, after eight days of easy navigation from Corunna, which he had left upon the 12th. As not infrequently happens in the case of a long-expected danger, the actual crisis was a surprise. When the Spaniards were reported to be in the neighbourhood of the Lizard, Lord Howard was lying with the whole of his fleet in Plymouth Sound. As the Spaniards came up with a good south-westerly breeze, they had, if they had known how to use it, a great opportunity to strike with advantage. The same breeze which brought them up made it extremely difficult for the English to get out, since the wind was blowing across the Sound. If, then, the duke had kept straight on and had steered boldly into Plymouth Sound, he might have forced the English to battle under circumstances highly favourable to himself, for in a confined anchorage the English ships could not have manœuvred, nor would it have been within their power to choose their distance. The heavy Spanish galleons could have run them aboard, and then the fight must have been conducted in conditions which it was the interest of the Spaniards to seek. From the report of one Captain Vanegas, a military officer serving in the flagship, it appears that the proposal to sail in and attack the English in Plymouth Sound was actually made to Medina Sidonia by Alonso de Leiva, but it was rejected with the advice of a council of war, on the ground that the Spanish fleet could not attack in a line abreast, because of the shoals at the mouth of the Sound (those upon which the breakwater now stands); while if they entered in line ahead, that is to say, one ship following another through the channels on either side of the shoal, they would be destroyed in detail by the fire of the English ships and forts. This was a line of reasoning, and these were dangers, which, fortunately for us, were destined to have a powerful influence with our enemies, both French and Spanish, for centuries. In reality, the perils of an attack in line ahead were greatly exaggerated, and, even if it had been necessary for the Duke of Medina Sidonia to sacrifice a few ships, the results would have repaid the cost. But the Spanish leader, who could over-ride his professional advisers roughly enough when he pleased, was on this occasion slavishly obedient to the advice of the mere seamen, when it would have been better for him to have listened to the bolder council of the military officer. He stood on past Plymouth, and by that action he decided the fate of the Armada.

From the moment that his approach had been reported, the most strenuous efforts had been made on the part of the English fleet to get to sea. Working all through the night of the 20th and the morning of the 21st, they had warped out a large part of the ships. While they were carrying out this movement, undeterred by the Spaniards, Medina Sidonia was rolling slowly up Channel. On the 21st July, so soon, in fact, as he was out of harbour, Howard stood after the Spaniards and sent them in the old chivalrous fashion a solemn defiance to battle. He despatched a pinnace appropriately named the Defiance, with orders to fire a gun at the Spaniard as a symbolical announcement that it was open war. Then a confused action began between the two fleets. The Spaniards were advancing along the Channel in a long half-moon, or concave line abreast, stretching seven miles from north to south. This formation, which was copied from the galleys, was absurdly ill fitted for vessels carrying a broadside of guns, since it is clear that he who is between two ships of his own side can fire neither to right nor to left without injuring his own friends. Such a blundering arrangement almost dictated to Lord Howard the course it was most convenient for him to adopt. He attacked the two extremities of the Spanish line. It is probable that the English ships more or less roughly carried out the method of attack which has been described as "concentration by defiling"; that is to say, they ran down from windward till within easy gunshot, then they fired into the stern and quarter of the galleons at the extremity of the Spanish wing, and hauled to windward so soon as there was any danger of coming too near, or of heading, and therefore falling to leeward of, their enemy. Under the pressure of such an attack as this, the extremities of the Spanish half-moon would naturally flinch inwards, and the danger of collision between the ships thus thrown out of their order of sailing would be very serious. We know as a matter of fact that the ships at the extremity of the Spanish line did suffer very severely. One, the Sta Catalina, was very much cut up. Oquendo's flagship was crippled by an explosion of gunpowder, said to have been caused by a Flemish gunner in revenge for some ill usage. But the most serious loss to the Spaniards, both materially and in honour, occurred in the squadron of Andalusia. The Nuestra Señora del Rosario was the flagship of Pedro de Valdes, one of the best and ablest officers in King Philip's service. In the confusion produced throughout the Spanish fleet by the English attack, the Rosario had been run into and crippled by another ship of the squadron. Her bowsprit was carried away and the foremast brought down. In this state Valdes was incapable of keeping up with the fleet unless he was towed. But no help was afforded him. At sundown, apparently immediately after the accident had happened, the duke signalled to the fleet to hold on its course, and stood up Channel before the westerly wind. Pedro de Valdes was left to his fate, which not only might have been, but was, foreseen by every ship in the Armada. There is a general agreement among the witnesses on the Spanish side, who are many and circumstantial, that the desertion of the flagship of the squadron of Andalusia spread a profound discouragement. There was not a man in the fleet who did not say to himself, "If so good an officer as Pedro de Valdes is deserted, what can the rest of us expect if we are disabled?" During the night Lord Howard followed the Spaniards close, but was not himself accompanied by the rest of the fleet. Drake had been ordered to carry the guiding light for the night, but, tempted by the sight of some vessels passing him to the westward, he had turned back, thinking, or professing to think, that they formed a part of the Spanish fleet endeavouring to escape out of the Channel. Lord Howard mistook the light of the Spaniards for that of his own vice-admiral. Meanwhile the rest of the English fleet, having lost the guiding light, lay to. Thus when day broke we were all scattered, though fortunately all to windward, and the different parts of our force were most characteristically placed. The gallant and disinterested Lord Howard was in dangerous proximity to the enemy, the bulk of the English fleet was lying off some distance in safety, but Drake, the ex-slaver and buccaneer, was close to the crippled Spaniard—a prize which he could seize at no great cost of danger or trouble to himself. Pedro de Valdes, being surrounded on all sides, had no resource but to surrender at discretion, and the Rosario was sent into Weymouth. The remainder of the 22nd passed without any incident of note. By the following day the Spaniards had rolled slowly along to Portland. Here they seemed about to enjoy a change of fortune. By this time, indeed, they had begun to understand that it was upon fortune they must depend for a chance of bringing the English to battle on terms fairly favourable to themselves. The operations of the 21st had convinced them of the great superiority of the English fleet in weatherliness. When, then, on the morning of the 23rd the wind shifted to the N.E. and thereby gave the Spaniards an opportunity of securing the weather-gage, they were flattered by a prospect of taking their revenge. A part of the English were between them and the shore. The Spaniards turned in the confident hope of catching their slippery enemy between the "sword and the wall," to use their own expressive idiom. But they were not to enjoy any favour of fortune on this campaign. Just when a close engagement seemed to be inevitable, the wind again swept round to the west, transferring the weather-gage once more to the English. The duke resumed his course to the east, and the English fell back a short space, and then again followed their lumbering enemy, looking keenly for every chance to strike him with advantage.