The Last Years of the War
The war was not ended; and though Philip was restrained by the rise of Protestant power in France under Henry of Navarre, he was still able to gather his sea forces on almost as grand a scale. In the latter stages of the war the naval expeditions on both sides were either, like the Armada, for the purpose of landing armies on foreign soil, or raids on enemy ports, colonies and commerce. Thus Drake in 1589 set out with a force of 18,000 men, which attacked Corunna, moved thence upon Lisbon, and lost a third or more of its number in a fruitless campaign on land. Both Drake and the aged Hawkins, now his vice admiral, died in the winter of 1595-96 during a last and this time ineffective foray upon the Spanish Main. Drake was buried off Puerto Bello, where legend has it his spirit still awaits England's call—
"Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder's running low.
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll leave the port of Heaven,
An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."[1]
[Footnote 1: Drake's Drum, Sir Henry Newbolt.]
We are still far from the period when sea control was thought of as important in itself, apart from land operations, or when fleets were kept in permanent readiness to take the sea. It is owing to this latter fact that we hear of large flotillas dispatched by each side even in the same year, yet not meeting in naval action. Thus in June of 1596 the Essex expedition, with 17 English and 18 Dutch men-of-war and numerous auxiliaries, seized Cadiz and burned shipping to the value of 11,000,000 ducats. There was no naval opposition, though Philip in October of the same year had ready a hundred ships and 16,000 men, which were dispersed with the loss of a quarter of their strength in a gale off Finisterre. Storms also scattered Philip's fleet in the next year; in 1598, Spanish transports landed 5,000 men at Calais; and England's fears were renewed in the year after that by news of over 100 vessels fitting out for the Channel, which, however, merely protected the plate fleet by a cruise to the Azores. As late as 1601, Spain landed 3500 troops in Ireland.
But if these major operations seem to have missed contact, there were many lively actions on a minor scale, the well-armed trading vessels of the north easily beating off the galley squadrons guarding Gibraltar and the routes past Spain. Among these lesser encounters, the famous "Last Fight of the Revenge," which occurred during operations of a small English squadron off the Azores in 1591, well illustrates the fighting spirit of the Elizabethan Englishman and the ineptitude which since the Armada seems to have marked the Spaniard at sea. In Drake's old flagship, attacked by 15 ships and surrounded by a Spanish fleet of 50 sail, a bellicose old sea-warrior named Sir Richard Grenville held out from nightfall until eleven the next day, and surrendered only after he had sunk three of the enemy, when his powder was gone, half his crew dead, the rest disabled, and his ship a sinking wreck. "Here die I, Richard Grenville," so we are given his last words, "with a joyful and a quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a good soldier ought to do, who has fought for his country and his queen, his honor and his religion."
The naval activities mentioned in the immediately preceding paragraphs had no decisive effect upon the war, which ended, for England at least, with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne. James at once adopted a policy of rapprochement with Spain, which while it guaranteed peace during the 22 years of his reign, was by its renunciation of trade with the Indies, aid to the Dutch, and leadership of Protestant Europe, a sorry sequel to the victory of fifteen years before.
The Armada nevertheless marks the decadence of Spanish sea power. With the next century begins a new epoch in naval warfare, an age of sail and artillery, in which Dutch, English, and later French fleets contested for the sea mastery deemed essential to colonial empire and commercial prosperity.
REFERENCES
Drake and the Tudor Navy, Sir Julian Corbett, 2 vols., 1898.