Were the British fleet of to-day to attack the Dutch the situation would be much the same. It was a comfort to the English that they had given most ample provocation and to spare, but still they felt it was very awkward. They had five million people, only the ninth part of their present strength; no battle-ships, and only thirty cruisers. The merchant service rallied a hundred vessels, the size of the fishing smacks, the Flemings lent forty, and nobody in England dared to hope.
To do Spain justice she made plenty of noise, giving ample warning. Her fleet was made invincible by the pope’s blessing, the sacred banners and the holy relics, while for England’s spiritual comfort there was a vicar of the inquisition with his racks and thumbscrews. Only the minor details were overlooked: that the cordage was rotten, the powder damp, the wine sour, the water putrid, the biscuits and the beef a mass of maggots, while the ship’s drainage into the ballast turned every galleon into a floating pest-house. The admiral was a fool, the captains were landlubbers, the ships would not steer, and the guns could not be fought. The soldiers, navigators, boatswains and quartermasters were alike too proud to help the short-handed, overworked seamen, while two thousand of the people were galley slaves waiting to turn on their masters. Worst of all, this sacred, fantastic, doomed armada was to attack from Holland, without pilotage to turn our terrific fortifications of shoals and quicksands.
Small were our ships and woefully short of powder, but they served the wicked valiant queen who pawned her soul for England. Her admiral was Lord Howard the Catholic, whose squadron leaders were Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher. The leaders were practical seamen who led, not drove, the English. The Spanish line of battle was seven miles across, but when the armada was sighted, Drake on Plymouth Hoe had time to finish his game of bowls before he put to sea.
From hill to hill through England the beacon fires roused the men, the church bells called them to prayer, and all along the southern coast fort echoed fort while guns and trumpets announced the armada’s coming. The English fleet, too weak to attack, but fearfully swift to eat up stragglers, snapped like a wolf-pack at the heels of Spain. Four days and nights on end the armada was goaded and torn in sleepless misery, no longer in line of battle, but huddled and flying. At the Straits they turned at bay with thirty-five hundred guns, but eight ships bore down on fire, stampeding the broken fleet to be slaughtered, foundered, burned or cast away, strewing the coast with wreckage from Dover to Cape Wrath and down the Western Isles. Fifty-three ruined ships got back to Spain with a tale of storms and the English which Europe has never forgotten, insuring the peace of English homes for three whole centuries.
A year passed, and the largest of all the armadas ventured to sea, this time from the West Indies, a treasure fleet for Spain. Of two hundred twenty ships clearing not more than fifteen arrived, the rest being “drowned, burst, or taken.” Storms and the English destroyed that third armada.
The fourth year passed, marked by a hurricane in the Western Isles, and a great increase of England’s reckoning, but the climax of Spain’s undoing was still to come in 1591, the year of the fourth armada.
To meet and convoy her treasure fleet of one hundred ten sail from the Indies, Spain sent out thirty battle-ships to the Azores. There lay an English squadron of sixteen vessels, also in waiting for the treasure fleet, whose policy was not to attack the escort, which carried no plunder worth taking. Lord Howard’s vice-admiral was Sir Richard Grenville, commanding Drake’s old flagship, the Revenge, of seven hundred tons. This Grenville, says Linschoten, was a wealthy man, a little eccentric also, for dining once with some Spanish officers he must needs play the trick of crunching wine-glasses, and making believe to swallow the glass while blood ran from his lips. He was “very unquiet in his mind, and greatly affected to war,” dreaded by the Spaniards, detested by his men. On sighting the Spanish squadron of escort, Howard put to sea but Grenville had a hundred sick men to bring on board the Revenge; his hale men were skylarking ashore. He stayed behind, when he attempted to rejoin the squadron the Spanish fleet of escort was in his way.
On board the Revenge the master gave orders to alter course for flight until Grenville threatened to hang him. It was Grenville’s sole fault that he was presently beset by eight ships, each of them double the size of the Revenge. So one small cruiser for the rest of the day and all night fought a whole fleet, engaging from first to last thirteen ships of the line. She sank two ships and well-nigh wrecked five more, the Spaniards losing four hundred men in a fight with seventy. Only when their admiral lay shot through the head, and their last gun was silenced, their last boarding pike broken, the sixty wounded men who were left alive, made terms with the Spaniards and laid down their arms.
Grenville was carried on board the Flagship, where the officers of the Spanish fleet assembled to do him honor, and in their own language he spoke that night his last words: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion and honor; whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body; and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”
