A Short History of the Royal Navy, 1217 to 1688

by David Hannay

Nothing of note is recorded to have happened on the 24th, unless it be that complaints were heard of want of powder in the fleet. In the meantime the country had become thoroughly aroused. The Spaniards had seen the beacon fires blazing on the hills of Devon on the night of the 20th, and before daylight those flames had leapt from hill-top to hill-top—

"From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay."

Volunteers swarmed down to the fleet. As English and Spaniards rolled heavily along the Channel, ships slipped out from the different ports to reinforce Howard. To the eastward, Lord Henry Seymour and Sir William Winter were concentrating their squadrons in the Downs, while the squadrons of Holland and Zeeland, united under the command of Justinus of Nassau, were blocking every port in Spanish Flanders. It was one of the most fatal of the misconceptions of the Spaniard that he had hoped to draw help from those very harbours which the son of William the Silent was blockading. On the 25th of July, Medina Sidonia despatched a quick-sailing ship in advance to the Duke of Parma, informing him of his own approach, and begging him to come out, in order that they might combine their forces. The Spanish fleet was then off the Isle of Wight. It was the day of St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, and a member of the house of Guzman. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, as was only natural in a Roman Catholic, and a gentleman of a family which had produced so eminent a saint, was in expectation that the anniversary would be marked by some signal manifestation of divine assistance. But none came. Lord Howard was so little disturbed by his enemy, and, we may add, was so little anxious to force on a battle with him, that he spent some part of the day in conferring the honour of knighthood on Lord Thomas Howard, Lord Sheffield, Roger Townsend, Hawkins, and Frobisher. There was indeed some fighting, but the day was calm, with very light breezes from the west, and the engagement was a mere artillery duel, which in times of rude gunnery meant a great waste of powder and shot. On the 26th there was no action, and next day the Spaniards anchored in the Roads of Calais.

In his own belief and in that of most of his contemporaries, the Duke of Medina Sidonia had now carried out one main purpose of his expedition. He had come to a place at which, if distance and their own relative position were alone to be considered, he could effect his meeting with the Duke of Parma. From Calais, therefore, he sent another officer, urging the prince to come out at once with his seventeen thousand soldiers. As a matter of fact, however, the Duke of Parma was unable to move. The vessels he had been building to serve as transports were in no state to go to sea, and if they had been they could not have moved, for the prince had few sailors, and the Dutch squadron, numerous and well appointed, was waiting for him outside. Alexander Farnese, who does not seem ever to have had any effective belief in the advisability of invading England, made a show of embarking his men, but until the Dutch blockading squadrons were cleared away this was a mere parade, and there was no naval force at hand to drive them off. As on a famous occasion in our own later history, the Duke of Medina Sidonia waited for the Duke of Parma, while the Duke of Parma, for his part, stood waiting for the Duke of Medina Sidonia. So the 27th and the 28th of July wore away.

Meanwhile, Howard had been joined by Lord Henry Seymour and Sir William Winter, and a council of war was held on the flagship, the Ark Royal. At this council it was decided to do some service against the Spaniards at anchor by fireships. Seven vessels were filled with combustibles and primed with powder. These preparations did not pass unperceived by the enemy, and it was at least suggested to the Duke of Medina Sidonia to prepare pinnaces with grappling irons for the purpose of towing off any fireships the English might send among them. Ever since a weapon of this kind had been used against them at the siege of Antwerp, the Spaniards had regarded the fireship with considerable fear. But measures of precaution were either not taken at all, or were taken very ill. After dark, and when the tide was flowing strongly, the fireships were sent in before the westerly wind. An instantaneous panic broke out in the Spanish fleet. The whole swarm of ships hurried to escape their assailants by getting up anchor and running away to leeward. The better disciplined ships, in which the officers of experience and volunteers of noble birth were numerous, weighed anchor, and moved off in some order. The others cut their cables, and ran for it in great confusion. Collisions were common. One great galleasse, the flagship of Don Hugo de Moncada, had her rudder unshipped, and was stranded while endeavouring to get into Calais harbour. Here the greater part of her crew deserted her. The remainder, under the command of Don Hugo, made a gallant fight for it against the swarm of English boats, till Moncada fell shot through the head with a harquebus bullet, when the others surrendered. Wild confusion prevailed throughout the rest of the now beaten fleet. The vessels which had cut their cables drifted away to leeward, for, as the Spaniards at that time carried no anchors on deck except those at the catheads, they could not hoist others out in time from the hold, and had no means of bringing themselves up. Thus, when the day broke, such of Medina Sidonia's vessels as were in a position to anchor were separated by miles from the great majority, which the tide had carried far to leeward. The duke got under way, and ought to have run down to leeward. But, having been yielding when he ought to have been firm, he was, after the not uncommon habit of timid men, obstinate when he might very well have yielded. He stood out to sea with the galleons immediately about him, and signalled for the rest of his fleet to join him. As they had to tack against the wind, this movement could not be executed by most of them in less than many hours. The isolated position of the Spanish commander was at once obvious to the English admirals, and their whole force fell upon the part of the Spanish fleet nearest them. This was the hottest day's fighting of the whole campaign. The English were confident, and threw aside some of the caution they had hitherto displayed. They came to close quarters, and their artillery did heavy damage to their enemies. No Spanish ship was actually taken, but one was seen to sink, and others were so crippled that they drifted out of action and sought refuge in the Flemish ports held by the Duke of Parma. These, with few exceptions, became prizes to the Dutch.

When the battle of Gravelines was over, the Armada was beaten. It had not suffered very severe loss in numbers, but it had become convinced both of its own inferiority in manœuvring power to its opponents, and of the utter incapacity of its chief. He, for his part, was thoroughly sick of his command, and was already in a humour to tell the king, as he did on his arrival in Spain, that he would rather have his head cut off than meddle with the command of fleets again.

In truth, neither fleet was in a condition to continue the action. The English had exhausted their gunpowder, and the gaol fever was extending with dreadful rapidity. There was also a want of provisions, for which the queen's Government has been severely, and perhaps not altogether justly, blamed by historians. If the queen and Lord Burleigh were eager to keep down expenses, it must be remembered that the Crown was very poor. The resources required to keep a great fleet on foot for any length of time could only be obtained by an appeal to Parliament. The political difficulties of her position made Elizabeth at all times unwilling to put herself in the position of having to make a bargain with the House of Commons, which was certain to exact concessions in return for supplies of money. At such a time, indeed, nothing ought to have been allowed to stand in the way of the defence of the country, or to prevent the fair treatment of the officers and men serving in the fleet. Yet there is no reason to suppose that Elizabeth and her Lord Treasurer were careless of their duty; but the Government of the time had very little experience in the maintenance of great military forces. The naval administration was in a rudimentary condition, and it may very well be that the want of powder and provisions and the very irregular payment of wages were due rather to awkwardness and ignorance, helped perhaps by dishonesty on the part of subordinates, than to meanness in Elizabeth. The fleet which in the following year was sent to the coast of Spain to retaliate for the Spanish invasion suffered much from the want of food and from pestilence. Yet it was organised not by the queen, but by a committee of adventurers, who had every motive to fit it out well, since they must needs rely upon its efficiency to repay them by the capture of Spanish prizes. However the blame must be divided, the fact remains that within a few days after the battle of Gravelines the English fleet was in danger of being paralysed by the want of necessary stores, and by the unmanning of the ships through sickness and desertion.

The English fleet had the resource of retiring to its own harbours, but there was no such escape for the Spaniards. There was no port of their own available for the heavy ships nearer than the Bay of Biscay. Parma did indeed advise the duke to betake himself to the free city of Hamburg, where, as he was well provided with money, he would have no difficulty in finding stores, and from whence he could issue later on for the purpose either of renewing the attack on England, or of co-operating in a serious effort to reduce Holland and Zeeland. Whatever the worth of the advice may have been, and whether it was physically practicable or not, the Duke of Medina Sidonia was in no condition to act upon it. He had become completely cowed. Indeed, he had just had a demonstration of the utter unfitness of his fleet for the work his master the king had sent him to perform. The battle of Gravelines was followed by strong breezes, for they do not seem to have attained to the dignity of a storm, from the S. and S.W. Under the impulse of these winds, the heavier ships of the Armada began to drift on the shallows of the coast of Zeeland. By the confession of the Spaniards, their vessels were wholly at the mercy of the wind and the currents. They drifted along quite unable to help themselves, and only a lucky shift of the wind saved them from going ashore. When the wind did turn to a point more favourable to them, the Spanish ships, still very little diminished in number, but entirely broken in spirit, straggled out into the North Sea, and then, by the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, all stood to the northward for the purpose of making their way back to Spain by the west of the British Isles.

When the Armada was seen to be in retreat, Howard told off Lord Henry Seymour to remain in the Downs for the purpose of operating with Justinus of Nassau in the blockade of Parma's ports. He himself followed the Spaniards as far north as the Firth of Forth. That he made no attack upon them, shows either that his own vessels were wholly destitute of stores, or that the enemy still inspired him with an amount of respect not justified by their real condition. At the Firth of Forth, Howard left the enemy and returned to the mouth of the Thames. For a time there was a belief that the Duke of Parma might still sally out, and there was even in the opinion of some of our leaders a fear that the Armada might return. It was not, indeed, until months afterwards that the world began to know what had been the fate of the King of Spain's great fleet. It had stood to the north until the pilots, by whose advice the Duke of Medina Sidonia acted, thought it safe to turn to the west, and up to this period it had apparently not suffered much. Nine vessels had in all been lost by capture or abandonment to the enemy. But on the way home fifty-four perished by shipwreck. Almost from the very day in which the galleons and urcas of the King of Spain turned the north of Scotland on their way home, they were subjected to a succession of storms of extraordinary violence for the season of the year. Being ill provided with pilots and charts, as well as essentially unseaworthy, they were quite unable to struggle with the violence of the weather. Nineteen vessels were wrecked on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Those of the Spaniards who were wrecked within the dominions of Queen Elizabeth were massacred by orders of her officers, many of them being put to death in cold blood, after they had been received to quarter. About one-half of the King of Spain's ships were lost. Those which reached his ports were almost unmanned, for the scurvy broke out during the miseries of the return home, and, as the provisions were exhausted, the crews died from actual starvation. Few of the leaders lived to return home. Alonso de Leiva perished in the wreck of the Rata. Oquendo and Martinez de Recalde did indeed live to cast anchor in Spanish waters, but they died almost immediately afterwards from the effect of the sufferings they had endured, and the shame of the great disaster. The Duke of Medina Sidonia spent his time, while returning to Spain, sitting in his cabin with his face buried in his hands, in complete prostration and stupor, while Diego Flores and Don Francisco de Bobadilla carried on the duties of commander. The duke had left Spain a very prosperous gentleman; he returned a white-haired old man.