The English ships were manned with sailors and gunners who could both sail the ships and fight the enemy. The guns were fired at the hulls of the Spanish ships and not wasted on the enemy’s rigging, which was harder to aim at.
The fleets met on the 21st of July, and there followed a week of fighting and of disasters to the Spaniards. Yet as the news of their coming up the Channel came to those on shore, who watched beside the beacon fires with anxious hearts, the danger must have seemed little less fearful than before. Those who viewed the “greatness and hugeness of the Spanish army” from the sea, considered that the only way to move them was by fire-ships.
Sidonia had steered his great fleet magnificently through the dangers of the Channel; he anchored outside Calais to await the answer to the urgent messages he had sent to the Duke of Parma. But, as we know, the “Narrow Seas” were well watched by the English, and they were so helped by the Dutch that Parma never reached the shores of England.
Eight fire-ships were hastily prepared and sent down upon the Spanish fleet, “all burning fiercely. These worked great mischief among the Spanish ships (though none of them took fire), for in the panic their cables and anchors were slipped.”
The great fight took place off Gravelines, on the Flemish coast, where most of the scattered ships of the Armada had drifted in the general confusion. The English hastened to take advantage of this confusion, while Sidonia was forming his fleet again into battle order. They “set upon the fleet of Spain (led by Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge) and gave them a sharp fight,” while Lord Howard stopped to capture a helpless ship, the finest, they said, upon the sea. “And that day, Sir Francis’ ship was riddled with every kind of shot.”
The fight went on from nine in the morning till six at night, when the Spanish fleet bore away, beaten, towards the north. Howard says that “after the fight, notwithstanding that our powder and shot was well near all spent, we set on a brag-countenance and gave them chase as though we had wanted nothing (or lacked nothing) until we had cleared our own coast and some part of Scotland of them.”
Drake was appointed to follow the fleet, and he writes, “We have the army of Spain before us, and mind, with the grace of God, to wrestle a pull with him. There was never anything pleased me better than the seeing the enemy flying with a southerly wind to the northwards. God grant you have a good eye to the Duke of Parma: for with the grace of God, if we live, I doubt it not but ere it be long so to handle the matter with the Duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St. Mary Port among his orange trees.”
At the end of this letter he says, “I crave pardon of your honour for my haste, for that I had to watch this last night upon the enemy.” And in another letter to Walsingham he signs himself, “Your honour’s most ready to be commanded but now half-sleeping Francis Drake.”
Many of the Spanish ships, being so crippled, were wrecked in stormy weather off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, which were unknown to them, and thus the more dangerous. Not half of those who put out to sea ever reached Spain again. Many men were killed in battle or died of their wounds, and they were the most fortunate, for others were drowned, or perished miserably by the hands of the natives of the coasts. Some who escaped were put to death by the Queen’s orders, and some lingered in the foul prisons of that time. The instinct of savage cruelty revives, even in highly civilised races, in time of war, and spreads, like an infection.
