All the Queen's Men (31 page)

Shortly after this unseemly row between the monarch and her Commander-in-Chief, Leicester began to besiege the Spanish-held town of Zutphen. It was here outside the town walls that his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, one of the most notable Elizabethan courtiers of the day, was fatally struck down by the enemy. Sidney had not been wearing armour on the lower half of his body, some think out of sheer bravado, others because he had become disenchanted with the way Elizabeth's reign was progressing and had developed a death wish. Sir Philip was out of favour with the Queen at that particular moment, following the writing of a highly critical letter advising against her marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon. Nevertheless, Elizabeth was greatly distressed when she heard the news that he had been so seriously wounded: ‘. . . the Queen much troubled at the report of Sidney's hurt'.
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Sidney was taken to nearby Arnhem where he died, at the age of thirty-two, after gangrene set in, the first notable English poet to die in Flanders fields. The Queen and all the nation mourned and Sidney was awarded the supreme accolade of a state funeral at St Paul's Cathedral, the first commoner to receive the unique honour subsequently given to Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Winston Churchill many centuries later.

The Earl of Leicester proved to be a disastrous military commander and resigned his commission to return to England shortly after Sidney's death. The Earl was also destined to die only two years later, possibly as a result of a recurring bout of malaria which he had first contracted in the cold, damp marshlands of the aptly named Low Countries; the war was to continue for another decade before the Dutch finally succeeded in gaining independence. The conflict also proved disastrous for the Spanish, being so costly that the nation went bankrupt three times during the course of the war. Effectively, all the wealth they had accumulated in the New World was squandered in a vain attempt to keep the region a Spanish colony. The English were to receive little thanks for their part in this protracted war: the major enemy which Elizabeth's successors encountered in the seventeenth century was to be the Dutch. England's involvement in the Low Countries further hardened Spanish animosity towards Elizabeth and her island kingdom. In the same week as Sir Philip Sidney's funeral in London, there occurred another dramatic event calculated to take the two nations further along the relentless road to all-out war: the execution at Fotheringhay Castle of Mary, Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587, the fall of the axe virtually a signal for the Armada to set sail.

Queen Elizabeth may have appeared a reluctant warrior but she was continually persuaded into belligerent acts by the more militant members of her Privy Council. By the time of Drake's famous ‘singeing of the King's beard', in the same year as Mary's execution, the die was well and truly cast. Drake's raid on Cadiz was essentially a pre-emptive strike on elements of the King of Spain's suspected invasion fleet, undertaken in order to buy further time for the Queen and her Council to prepare for the anticipated assault on her kingdom – it was no longer a question of if, but when, the blow would fall.

Drake's surprise attack on one of Spain's major naval bases was precisely the type of operation for which he was best suited, an audacious commando-like raid requiring minimum planning and maximum speed, surprise and sheer raw courage, coupled with an easy ability to rapidly adapt the assault as events dictated. Drake had sailed from Plymouth at the head of some two dozen ships, including six belonging to the Queen, urbanely signalling Lord Burghley, ‘The wind commands me away. Our ship is under sail. God grant we may so live in His fear as the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her Majesty as well abroad as at home. . . .'
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As so often proved to be the case, Elizabeth then quickly changed her mind and abruptly cancelled her previous directive to Drake to attack Spanish ports and shipping, forbidding him ‘. . . to enter forcibly into any of the said King's ports or havens, or to offer violence to any of his towns or shipping within harbouring, or do any act of hostility upon the land'.
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A small sailing vessel was dispatched after Drake but conveniently failed to catch up with him to countermand his original orders.

Drake's sudden appearance at Cadiz caught the Spanish completely off guard and the English fleet was able to sail into the outer harbour, creating havoc among the tightly packed shipping at anchor: ‘In this yeare Sr Fraunces Drake . . . wente here hence to the seas the thirde daie of Aprill. He arrivede at Cales, where he did greatlie annoye the king of Spaines fleete, & sett manye of fire. . . .'
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By the time Drake departed from Cadiz, more than two dozen large Spanish ships had been set ablaze together with a massive amount of stores which had been stockpiled on the adjacent quays ready for the Armada. Drake returned to Plymouth in triumph at the end of June 1587, bringing with him the
San Felipe
, a huge merchant ship belonging to the King of Spain that had been intercepted off the Azores, carrying valuable cargo of spices, gold bullion and other treasure: ‘A great carricke of 1000 tonnes or upwardes, belonging to the said Kinge laden with spices and other commodities and brought the same into England to the great comforte of her majesty and her subjects.'
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The Queen was exceedingly pleased and Drake's position as one of the leaders of the English fleet destined to fight the Spanish was assured – the transformation from pirate king to respected naval officer was complete, in English eyes at any rate.

The Spanish view of Drake's unheralded and unprovoked assault on Cadiz at a time when war had not officially been declared between the two nations was similar to that of the Americans after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor some three hundred and fifty years later – a criminal act of despicable treachery. To Philip this was the latest outrage in a long line of provocative actions deliberately instigated by the English Queen against Spain: replacing Catholicism in her country by a heretical faith, persecuting a religious minority within her kingdom, murdering her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots after she had sought asylum, treacherously supporting revolutionaries within his Dutch colony, continually encouraging English privateers to prey on lawful Spanish territories and shipping in the New World. Queen Elizabeth and her followers must be destroyed for the sake of the Catholic faith and the good of the civilized world. The Pope, God's representative on Earth demanded it. It was Philip of Spain's bounden duty to respond.

Elizabeth was fortunate to possess so many capable seafarers who could become swordbearers in her hour of need. They had been unofficially practising war games against the Spaniards for many years: Drake and Hawkins, Grenville, Frobisher, Fenner, Borrough and Fenton were all highly experienced seamen who had become well acquainted with Spanish fighting techniques and adept at combating them. They were completely familiar with the nature of their warships, how they sailed and how their crews performed. This was to prove invaluable in the coming conflict which would be conducted in home waters as opposed to far away on the Spanish Main. Elizabeth's kingdom stood firmly in the front line.

In many respects, the events that preceded the arrival of the Spanish Armada off the south coast of England in the summer of 1588 proved to be every bit as important as the ensuing conflict and had a vital bearing on its eventual outcome. The Queen and her Council took a number of key decisions which were to considerably influence the course of a mighty conflict in which Elizabeth was to play no personal part; unlike many previous monarchs, she was not destined to lead her troops into battle, and was therefore unable to exercise any direct control once hostilities had begun. Nevertheless, two particular appointments, which she personally initiated prior to the two fleets engaging, proved decisive in ensuring ultimate victory in one of the most famous sea battles in England's long and turbulent history.

The first of these had been the Queen's appointment in the autumn of 1577 of John Hawkins as her Navy Treasurer. Hawkins's subsequent redesigning and re-equipping of Her Majesty's ships, based on his own practical experiences of voyaging on the Spanish Main, often in combat conditions against Spanish ships, provided warships capable of outsailing the larger, more cumbersome, Spanish galleons. Hawkins utilized knowledge gained from sailing in the Caribbean to cut down the original fortress-like topsides of the English ships, while at the same time reducing weight and deepening their keels, thus enabling them to be sailed closer to the wind. The English warships proved far more manoeuvrable than lumbering Spanish galleons, which were ideal for transatlantic voyages but far less suited to the confined waters of the Channel, the battleground for the two fleets when they ultimately met. The English vessels were also narrower in the beam in relation to their overall length than was customary in maritime design of that period and considerably lower in the water, thereby providing an excellent gun platform. The Queen had invested in a number of new vessels including her flagship, the
Ark Royal
, which she had purchased from Sir Walter Ralegh and was scheduled as her admiral's command post. As a result of her directives, a dozen or so of her ships were of very recent construction, while many more had been substantially altered and updated, providing the nucleus of a thoroughly modern fleet.

Elizabeth's second crucial decision prior to the battle was her choice of overall naval commander. While it was customary to have a member of the aristocracy in control, the Queen might well have been influenced by public opinion and appointed the hugely popular Sir Francis Drake, who was by then a national hero. However, the Queen was shrewd enough to realize his limitations in controlling large and substantial fleets as well as recognizing that this mercurial man was regarded with suspicion and heartily disliked by many of his fellow sea captains. So Elizabeth selected Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, for the vital post of Commander-in-Chief of her fleet, with Drake as Vice-Admiral and Hawkins as Rear Admiral. She made an excellent choice. Howard had succeeded the Earl of Lincoln as Lord High Admiral in 1585, the fourth Howard to hold this post. He was an experienced seafarer who had commanded fleets in the past and more importantly was prepared to listen to those like Drake and Hawkins, whose knowledge of the sea considerably exceeded his own, saying, ‘. . . and will yield ever unto them of greater experience'.
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Above all, Howard commanded the respect of the greatest of the Elizabethan seafarers: ‘I finde my Lord Admirall so well affectede for all honourable services in this accion as it dothe assure all his followers of good successe and hope of victorie',
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Drake wrote to Lord Burghley. The Queen had displayed her usual impeccable judgement in selecting the only man capable of welding a highly temperamental bunch of buccaneering individuals into an effective fighting force, able to challenge the Armada.

Unlike the Spaniards, the English seafarers of the Elizabethan era had no experience of large-scale sea actions and a substantial Royal Navy as such did not exist at that time. Whenever a venture was contemplated that required more than a single ship, a number of vessels would be gathered together piecemeal on a private enterprise basis; those that survived the subsequent action would be returned to their individual owners together with an appropriate share of the spoils. These temporary fleets would normally be used to attack enemy ports rather than engage rival squadrons on the high seas.

Prior to the arrival of the Armada off the Cornish coast, English seafarers had not experienced a major battle at sea. The Spaniards, on the other hand, had defeated a large Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in the Mediterranean during 1571. One of those taking part as a young staff officer had been the Duke of Parma, now Spanish Commander in the Netherlands, while an equally young naval officer named Miguel Cervantes was wounded there while taking part in the fighting. A large Spanish fleet had also decisively beaten the Portuguese in a savage encounter off the Azores at Terceira in 1582. Thus the Spanish had much better experience of deploying large groups of ships at sea and engaging hostile fleets of similar numbers. This supposed advantage ultimately proved to be of no particular benefit as these encounters had involved the usage of tactics that were to prove completely outdated when the Armada confronted the English fleet under Lord Howard of Effingham. The Spanish regarded cannon as ‘an ignoble arm'
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and were accustomed to using their galleons as floating castles crammed with soldiers, sailing alongside the enemy and capturing a ship by boarding. Conversely, the English deployed their warships largely as gun platforms to bombard the enemy at long range. When first engaging the tightly packed Armada, they shocked the Spaniards by adopting a line astern formation in order to fire a series of devastating broadsides, a revolutionary manoeuvre in naval warfare at that time, which introduced tactics to be subsequently used by Nelson, Jellicoe and every admiral afloat for as long as there were big-gun warships.

While the English Queen had made an excellent choice of naval commander, the King of Spain's decision to appoint Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia, Lord of San Lucar and Knight of the Golden Fleece, to spearhead the assault on England represented a serious error. Medina Sidonia, Captain General of the Ocean Seas, possessed no previous experience of command at sea, suffered acute seasickness, did not want the job and had no faith in the plan of attack. In this last issue, Medina Sidonia had more than a degree of justification: the concept of sending the Armada up the entire length of the Channel, while running the gauntlet of a hostile fleet in order to rendezvous with the Duke of Parma off the coast of Flanders was seriously flawed, particularly as there were no suitable sizeable ports to use when he reached his destination. Instead, there awaited an open shoreline with treacherous sandbanks and shallow water wherein lay strong currents, erratic crosswinds and small, shallow-draft Dutch warships waiting to pounce.