The Defeat of the Spanish Armada Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE CALENDAR

  PICTURE CREDITS

  DEDICATION

  TITLE PAGE

  PREFACE

  I CURTAIN-RAISER. Fotheringhay, February 18th, 1587

  II SIMPLICITY OF A CITY. London, February 19th, 1587

  III PERPLEXITY OF A QUEEN. Greenwich, February 19th–22nd, 1587

  IV THE END OF A GAY SEASON. Paris, February 28th–March 31st, 1587

  V PLANS OF OPERATIONS. Brussels, March 1st–22nd, 1587

  VI THE BITTER BREAD. Rome, March 24th–30th, 1587

  VII GOD’S OBVIOUS DESIGN. San Lorenzo de Escorial, March 24th –31st, 1587

  VIII ‘THE WIND COMMANDS ME AWAY.’ London and Plymouth, March 25th–April 12th, 1587

  IX A BEARD IS SINGED. Cadiz Bay, April 29th–May 1st, 1587

  X ‘NO MATTER OF SUBSTANCE.’ The Portuguese coast, May 2nd –20th, 1587

  XI BARREL STAVES AND TREASURE. Cape St Vincent and the Azores, May 21st–June 18th, 1587

  XII AN ARM IS CUT OFF. Sluys, June 9th–August 5th, 1587

  XIII THE HAPPY DAY. Coutras, October 20th, 1587

  XIV THE USES OF VICTORY. France, October 21st–December 16th, 1587

  XV THE OMINOUS YEAR. Western Europe, midwinter, 1587–8

  XVI THE COMPANY OF THESE NOBLE SHIPS. Greenwich and English waters, January to March, 1588

  XVII ‘IN THE HOPE OF A MIRACLE.’ Lisbon, February 9th–April 25th, 1588

  XVIII THE DAY OF THE BARRICADES: I Paris, May 12th, 1588 and before

  XIX THE DAY OF THE BARRICADES: II Paris, May 12th, 1588 and after

  XX THE INVINCIBLE SETS SAIL. Lisbon to Corunna, May 9th–July 22nd, 1588

  XXI ‘THE ADVANTAGE OF TIME AND PLACE.’ Plymouth, the Sleeve and Biscay to 45° N, April 18th–July 30th, 1588

  XXII ENTRANCE TO THE ARENA. The Lizard to the Eddystone, July 30th–31st, 1588

  XXIII FIRST BLOOD. The Eddystone to Start Point, July 31st, 1588

  XXIV ‘A TERRIBLE VALUE OF GREAT SHOT.’ Start Point to Portland Bill, July 31st–August 2nd, 1588

  XXV IN FORMIDABLE ORDER. Portland Bill to Calais Roads, August 2nd–6th, 1588

  XXVI THE HELLBURNERS. The neighbourhood of Calais, August 6th and 7th, 1588

  XXVII THE ORDER BROKEN. Calais Roads to Gravelines, August 8th, 1588

  XXVIII THE TARDY MIRACLE. The banks of Zeeland and the North Sea, August 9th–12th, 1588

  XXIX MYSELF YOUR GENERAL. Tilbury, August 18th–19th, 1588

  XXX DRAKE IS CAPTURED! Western Europe, August and September, 1588

  XXXI THE LONG ROAD HOME. From the North Sea, about 56° N, around Ireland to Spanish ports, August 13th–October 15th, 1588

  XXXII END OF A TALL MAN. Blois, December 23rd, 1588

  XXXIII THE WINDS OF GOD. The Escurial, New Year’s Day, 1589

  XXXIV NOT A WHIT DISMAYED. Richmond, New Year’s Day, 1589

  EPILOGUE. New York, New Year’s Day, 1959

  A GENERAL NOTE ON SOURCES

  A NOTE ABOUT SHIPS AND THEIR GUNS

  NOTES TO CHAPTERS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Garrett Mattingly’s thrilling narrative sets out the background of the sixteenth-century European intrigue and religious unrest that gave rise to one of the world’s most famous maritime crusades and the naval battles that decided its fate.

  In putting the naval campaign of 1588 back into the context of the first great international crisis of modern history, Mattingly builds up, like the movements of a symphony, a broad picture of how events of the time affected men’s actions, plans and hopes. He brilliantly connects a series of scenes or episodes, shifting the point of focus from England to the continent and from courts to ships and cities. The feeling of tension mounts to a crescendo throughout Europe as the great drama of the Armada is approached. The battle itself and the aftermath are so vividly and poignantly described that they might be happening in our world today.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Garrett Mattingly was born in Washington in 1900 and took an MA and Ph.D. at Harvard University. After service in the infantry during the First World War he wrote literary criticism, reviews and articles on the Tudor period for learned journals. In 1926 he became an instructor at Northwestern University, and from 1928 to 1942 he held a similar post at Long Island University. After the Second World War he became Professor of European History at Columbia University.

  Professor Mattingly specialized in early modern diplomatic history and worked mostly on Anglo-Spanish relations in the sixteenth century. In addition to contributions to many journals, he published Catherine of Aragon (1942), A Further Supplement to the Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 1513–1543 (1947) and Renaissance Diplomacy (1955). He died in 1962.

  Queen Elizabeth I. The ‘Armada’ portrait by George Gower, from Woburn Abbey.

  ABOUT THE CALENDAR

  THE dates in this book are all, unless otherwise specified, New Style – that is, according to the Gregorian calendar which everybody uses now and which, although it had only been proclaimed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, most of western Europe was already using by 1587. England, of course, was not. With sturdy conservatism the English resisted the innovation, and their vernal equinox continued for more than another century to occur on March 11th instead of on March 21st as it did across the Channel. Consequently English historians always say that the first day’s battle between the English and the Spanish fleets took place on July 21st, 1588, while the Spanish always date it on the thirty-first of the month.

  This puts any historian who is writing partly about English and partly about Continental events in a quandary. Some historians escape by writing 21/31 July, but most people find dates repulsive enough without encountering them disguised as fractions. Consequently, since in the following narrative the sequence of events in England and on the Continent is often important, and to go back and forth between two calendars would become too confusing, I had to choose between Old Style and New Style. I chose New Style because it corresponds to the actual season, and at some seasons ten days do make a difference in how much daylight there is and what kind of weather one may expect. Readers who are disturbed by finding events in England dated by the Continental system can recover the traditional date by subtracting ten days. Days of the week, of course, remained the same. Sunday was still Sunday, in Rome as in London.

  ‘A Thankfull Remembrance’. Popish plots and treasons from the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

  PICTURE CREDITS

  The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce black and white illustrations:

  Alinari.

  Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.

  Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris here and here.

  Bodleian Library.

  British Museum, London: here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

  Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  the Duchess of Medina Sidonia.

  Mary Evans Picture Library: here, here, here and here.

  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

  The Mansell Collection: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

  the Marquess of Tavistock and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates, p. ii;

  Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.

  National Galleries of Scotland.

  National Maritime Museum, Greenwich: here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

  National Portrait Gallery, London: here, here, here, here, here.

  Netherlands Maritime M
useum.

  New York Public Library Rare Books Division: here, here, here, here, here.

  Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge: here and here.

  Public Records Office, Crown copyright (MPF 318).

  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  To

  Ruth and Edward Mack

  THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA

  Garrett Mattingly

  PREFACE

  THE idea of writing a book about the defeat of the Spanish Armada first came to me, as it must have come to others, in June 1940, when the eyes of the world were again turned to the shores of England and their surrounding seas. If the idea attracted me, in spite of all that had already been written on the subject, it was because it seemed there might be some interest in replacing the narrative of the naval campaign in the broader European context in which it had once been viewed but from which, in the peaceful years before 1914, it had become more and more detached. To minds formed by A. T. Mahan and the theorists of empire the issue in 1588 seemed to be the command of the ocean seas and the opportunity to exploit the newly discovered routes to Asia and the Americas. To such minds it was rational and right to fight for economic interests, but absurd and rather shocking to fight about the relative validity of conflicting systems of ideas.

  The men of 1588 did not think so. To them the clash of the English and Spanish fleets in the Channel was the beginning of Armageddon, of a final struggle to the death between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Which side was which depended, of course, on where one stood, but all across Europe the lines were drawn, and though most of the nations were technically non-combatants there were no real neutrals. All Europe watched the battle in the Channel with breathless suspense because upon its outcome was felt to hang not just the fates of England and Scotland, France and the Netherlands, but of all Christendom. Ideological wars are revolutionary wars, easily transcending national boundaries, and always, at least in intention and in the imaginations of the men involved in them, total wars. It was easier in 1940 to appreciate this point of view than it had been in, say, 1890.

  In 1940 I contemplated a short book based on the standard accounts and mainly devoted to pointing out the various issues which depended, or were felt to depend, on the success of the Spanish attempt to invade England, the first of those efforts by Continental military powers to establish a European hegemony which have provided a recurrent pattern in modern history. Before I could get very far with my notion other matters intervened. Before I could get back to it I had acquired some acquaintance – no more than a nodding acquaintance certainly, but more than I would have supposed likely to befall a sedentary middle-aged historian – with some aspects of naval and amphibious operations, and with some of the waters through which the Armada had sailed.

  When I had time to think about the Armada again, although it no longer seemed urgent to finish a book about it right away, the idea still appealed to me of doing one which would present the campaign not just as a naval duel between Spain and England but as the focus of the first great international crisis in modern history. Since there was no hurry I decided to start again, working this time from the original sources, in the archives and in print, and visiting or revisiting as many as possible of the places I would want to talk about, not because I had any conviction of the higher purity of such procedures, or even because I expected to make any startling discoveries, but because that is the way I enjoy working. Besides, Professor Michael Lewis’s brilliant series of articles in The Mariner’s Mirror, ‘Armada Guns’ (vols. XXVIII–IX, 1942–3), had shown me that a fresh eye and a few fresh documents could make evidence long in the public domain yield a fresh and significant interpretation, and my friend Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision (1943) and Across the Wide Missouri, the manuscript of which I began to read not long after I got out of uniform, made me wonder whether it might not be possible, with luck, to re-create for the late sixteenth century a series of connected historical scenes perhaps half as alive as those DeVoto evoked from the history of the Rocky Mountain West.

  In the end I found no startling fresh interpretation, but excavations among the unpublished documents and re-examination of the published ones did yield scraps of new evidence weakening certain accepted views and strengthening others. And the same spade-work did turn up, now and then, a communicative and resonant phrase or a concrete visual image to freshen a familiar tale. So, although this account agrees in the main with currently accepted scholarship, I hope it may prove to have enough shifts of emphasis and unfamiliar details to keep it from seeming completely trite.

  Since this book is addressed not to specialists but to the general reader interested in history there are no footnotes. But on the chance that some student of the period, turning these pages, might feel a bit of curiosity about the grounds for some judgment or assertion, I have appended a general account of the documents and printed books most relied on, followed by short notes on the chief sources for each chapter with special reference to the evidence for any views which depart from those generally accepted.

  My exploration of the archives was assisted by a Fulbright research fellowship and two grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The many librarians, curators and archivists in England, on the Continent and in the United States, whose helpfulness I have shamelessly exploited will forgive me if I do not here thank them all by name. I cannot forgo a special word of thanks to Dr Ricardo Magdaleno and his staff at the Archivo General de Simancas for many kindnesses to myself and to my students, and to Dr Louis B. Wright and his staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. for their sympathetic co-operation. The cordial interest and encouragement of Lieutenant-Admiral J. T. Furstner, and the unstinting generosity with which Professor T. H. Milo of the University of Leiden placed at my disposal his expert knowledge of Dutch naval history and its archival sources, made my all too brief stay in Holland far more fruitful than it could otherwise have been. My friends Ida and Leo Gershoy read most of the manuscript and made very helpful suggestions, and Edward Mack went painstakingly over every line of it, as he has done with almost everything I have written for the past thirty years. Mr Charles H. Carter also curry-combed the entire manuscript and helped prepare the Index. I am indebted to the Tides and Currents Division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for a tide-table, to my colleague Professor Jan Schilt of Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy for advice about celestial phenomena, and to Dr Hugh S. Rice of the Hayden Planetarium for additional help with puzzles involving the heavens and the tides and tidal currents in the Channel. In every stage of research and writing I have taken my wife’s full participation so much for granted that this seems to me, as usual, as much her book as mine.

  A sketch of the trial of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, preserved among the papers of Robert Beale (1541–1601), the clerk to Elizabeth I’s Council.

  I

  CURTAIN-RAISER

  FOTHERINGHAY, FEBRUARY 18TH, 1587

  MR BEALE HAD not brought the warrant until Sunday evening, but by Wednesday morning, before dawn outlined its high windows, the great hall at Fotheringhay was ready. Though the Earl of Shrewsbury had returned only the day before nobody wanted any more delay. Nobody knew what messenger might be riding on the London road. Nobody knew which of the others might not weaken if they waited another day.

  The hall had been cleared of all its ordinary furniture. Half-way along its length a huge fire of logs blazing in the chimney battled against the creeping chill. Towards the upper end of the hall they had set up a small platform like a miniature stage for travelling actors, jutting twelve feet into the hall, eight or nine feet wide and less than three feet high. At one side a pair of stairs led up to it, and the fresh wood of the scaffolding had everywhere been decently covered in black velvet. On the platform in line with the stairs stood a single high-backed chair, also draped in black, and three or four feet in front of it a black cushion. Next to the cushion and rising above it something like a lit
tle low bench showed where the velvet imperfectly concealed an ordinary wooden chopping-block. By seven in the morning the stage managers were satisfied, the sheriff’s men trying to look soldierly in morion and breastplate and to hold their halberds stiffly had taken their places, and the chosen audience, two hundred or more knights and gentlemen of the neighbourhood peremptorily summoned for that early hour, had filed into the lower end of the hall.

  The star kept them waiting more than three hours. In the almost thirty years since she had wedded a future king of France in the glittering, devious Court beside the Loire she had failed repeatedly to learn some of the more important lessons of politics, but she had learned how to dominate a scene. She entered through a little door at the side, and before they saw her was already in the great hall, walking towards the dais, six of her own people two by two behind her, oblivious of the stir and rustle as her audience craned forward, oblivious apparently of the officer on whose sleeve her hand rested – walking as quietly, thought one pious soul, as if she were going to her prayers. Only for a moment, as she mounted the steps and before she sank back into the black-draped chair, did she seem to need the supporting arm, and if her hands trembled before she locked them in her lap no one saw. Then, as if acknowledging the plaudits of a multitude (though the hall was very still), she turned for the first time to face her audience and, some thought, she smiled.

  Against the black velvet of the chair and dais her figure, clad in black velvet, was almost lost. The grey winter daylight dulled the gleam of white hands, the glint of yellow gold in her kerchief and of red gold in the piled masses of auburn hair beneath. But the audience could see clearly enough the delicate frill of white lace at her throat, and above it, a white heart-shaped petal against the blackness, the face with its great dark eyes and tiny wistful mouth. This was she for whom Rizzio had died; and Darnley, the young fool; and Huntly, and Norfolk, and Babington and a thousand nameless men on the moors and gallows of the north. This was she whose legend had hung over England like a sword ever since she had hastened across its borders with her subjects in pursuit. This was the last captive princess of romance, the Dowager Queen of France, the exiled Queen of Scotland, the heir to the English throne and (there must have been some among the silent witnesses who thought so) at this very moment, if she had her rights, England’s lawful queen. This was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. For a moment she held all their eyes, then she sank back into the darkness of her chair and turned her grave inattention to her judges. She was satisfied that her audience would look at no one else.