The Spanish Armada (11 page)

Elizabeth’s government took immense pains to conceal the preparations for the naval expedition. Its purpose was kept secret from all but its most senior officers and the southern English
ports were temporarily closed to prevent word of Drake’s mission leaking out. Afterwards, the Spanish claimed that:

Inevitably (and belatedly) the Spanish heard rumours of the fleet’s departure. One of their agents talked to a French merchant in Rouen, who had arrived the previous day
from England. He provided somewhat inflated estimates of its order of battle to the ambassador in Paris:

Drake put into Plymouth for a week to collect the ships assembled there and to provision his fleet. Speed was of the essence, as he had justifiable fears that his assault on
Spain could be halted by fresh orders from London before it had even sailed. His flag captain, Thomas Fenner in
Dreadnought,
told Walsingham that Drake ‘does all he can to hasten the
service and sticks at no charge to further the same and lays out a great store of money to soldiers and mariners to stir up their minds’.
⁵⁵

The admiral was signally unperturbed by the embarrassingly large-scale desertion by his sailors on the very eve of his departure, blaming subversion by those at Elizabeth’s court who
opposed his operation. ‘We all think [this was caused] by some practice of some adversaries to the action by letters written. They are mostly mariners. We have soldiers in their place,’
he assured Walsingham.
⁵⁶
Stocked up with food, water and munitions, Drake departed Plymouth on 12 April, his 600-ton flagship,
Elizabeth
Bonaventure
, leading out the fleet. He penned a typically flamboyant, swashbuckling letter to Walsingham at the very last minute:

Out in the south-west approaches to the English Channel, Drake encountered two vessels from Lyme Regis in Dorset, who readily agreed to join the expedition, making his fleet
twenty-seven strong. They sighted the Spanish coast of Galicia on 15 April, but forty-eight hours later were struck by five days of violent storms off Finisterre which dispersed the fleet and sank
the pinnace
Martigo.

Elizabeth meanwhile was having second thoughts about the wisdom of Drake’s adventure. Reports reached her that preparations for the Spanish invasion were slowing down and Andreas de Loo,
an envoy from the Duke of Parma, arrived with tempting promises of peace. Nine days after Drake had left Plymouth, she sent new and urgent instructions,
⁵⁸
dispatched by a fast pinnace. These ordered him to:

No warlike activity allowed then, but privateering, or more accurately, piracy, was still perfectly acceptable to a queen always worried about the paucity of cash in her
coffers.

The pinnace, delayed by the same storms that scattered Drake’s ships, never caught up with him. Perhaps the crew did not try too hard: sometime during the voyage they captured a ship which
yielded£5,000 in prize money when they arrived back in Plymouth.

Walsingham wrote to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris, informing him of the sudden change in orders issued to Drake. Stafford (whose stepmother was
Mary Boleyn, the queen’s late aunt) enjoyed a spendthrift lifestyle, including accumulating substantial gambling debts through unwisely playing cards with the French king’s brother,
François, Duke of Alençon. His consequent financial problems had forced him in January 1587 to traitorously approach Bernardino de Mendoza, his Spanish opposite number, offering his
services to Spain for hard cash. He was willing to supply any intelligence, short of that which might jeopardise the life of his queen.
⁶⁰
Mendoza,
delighted with this espionage coup, may have assigned him the codename ‘Julio’. Walsingham thoroughly mistrusted Stafford, even sending one of his agents, Thomas Rogers (alias Nicholas
Berden), the previous year, to monitor the ambassador’s untoward relationship with the exiled English Catholics in France. Elizabeth’s spymaster may therefore have used him as an
unwitting conduit to feed information, false or otherwise, to the Spanish. After his mistress’s mercurial change of heart, it was imperative to emphasise that England was not bent on
attacking the Spanish mainland. He informed Stafford: ‘There is a new order sent unto Sir Francis Drake to take a milder course, for that he was before particularly directed to distress the
ships within the havens themselves.’
⁶¹

From bitter experience, Drake understood very well that no fleet could operate effectively without adequate stores of food, water and ammunition. Therefore, instead of striking at heavily
defended Lisbon, where the Armada ships were mobilising, he planned to attack the main supply base at Cadiz in Andalusia. Two Dutch merchantmen, which he had intercepted, had reported a large
concentration of Armada provision ships there and this information confirmed his choice of target. Cadiz, reputedly the oldest inhabited city in Europe, stands on a narrow humpbacked peninsula at
the mouth of the River Guadalquivir, which provides shipping with safe shelter from the Atlantic weather and tides.
⁶²
Because of reefs and shifting
sandbanks, there was only one entrance channel for large ships and this had to pass under the guns on the city walls.

At around four in the afternoon of Wednesday 29 April, a council of war was held in
Elizabeth Bonaventure
as a brisk south-westerly breeze filled the fleet’s canvas sails. William
Borough,
Drake’s veteran vice-admiral and the commander of the queen’s ship
Golden Lion
, privately and forcibly argued against an immediate attack on the
Spanish. Drake would have none of it – ‘Action this day’ was ever his motto. ‘That is my opinion,’ he declared to his captains, ‘though there are some would have
us stay until morning. We shall not stay at all.’
⁶³

Drake’s fleet arrived outside Cadiz about one hour before sunset. His ships were under strict orders to fly no flags until the very last moment to confuse the lookouts positioned on the
walls and atop the masts of the ships inside the harbour. It was a typical warm spring evening and its inhabitants were taking their leisure. The central square was packed with spectators watching
an athletic tumbler turn his acrobatic tricks. Nearby, others roared with laughter at a bawdy comedy performed by some itinerant actors in the open air. Then word spread slowly through the crowds
that a line of ships was approaching the harbour entrance. What was the nationality of these mystery vessels? Were they friend or foe?

The first English cannon shots booming across the bay provided the definitive answer.

In Drake’s words, written soon afterwards, he sighted ‘thirty-two great ships of exceeding great burden [displacement] loaded . . . with provisions and prepared to furnish the
king’s navy, intended with all speed against England’. Another account reported sixty ships, of which twenty were French, who immediately hoisted sail and fled, as did six Dutch hulks.
The English ships fell upon the helpless anchored vessels like the wolf on the fold.

The first defensive shots were fired from eight oar-propelled galleys, commanded by Don Pedro de Acuña, which had providently arrived from a patrol near Gibraltar a few days
before.
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Inside the panic-stricken city, the mayor ordered women and children to take refuge within Matagorda Castle, but its captain slammed shut
the fortress gates in their faces and twenty-seven were suffocated or pressed to death in the crush.
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The galleys, although highly manoeuvrable in
the calm waters in the lee of the peninsula, were no match for Drake’s heavily armed warships. Two were badly damaged
⁶⁶
in a failed attempt to
lure the English ships on to sandbanks off the eastern shore and their commander was forced to retreat to St Mary’s Port, four miles (6.44 km) to the north, which was protected
by a network of treacherous shoals that required the local knowledge of a pilot for safe entry.

At nine that night Francisco de Benito de Maiora, in St Mary Port, wrote to officials in Seville reporting that:

Over the next two days, Drake’s sailors set ablaze the supply vessels, while under constant fire from ‘thundering shot’ from the shore batteries and from the
galleys when they sallied out in attack. Drake sank a Genoese ‘argosy’ or merchantman loaded with a cargo of logwood, hides, wool and cochineal destined for Italy, and also captured
four provision ships.
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The vessel displaced about 1,000 tons, was armed with thirty-six brass guns, and was ‘very richly laden’.

The following morning, Drake took advantage of the flood tide to lead a flotilla of pinnaces and frigates (supported by the London ship,
Merchant Royal
, commanded by Robert Flick), to
cut out and sink a 1,500-ton galleon owned by Santa Cruz that was moored in the inner harbour of Cadiz. The ship, valued at 18,000 ducats, was burned to the waterline.

The arrival of Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, leading six-thousand hurriedly mustered local militia, deterred any English landing on the inner harbour.
Artillery batteries were wheeled into position along the shoreline – but their subsequent fire only managed to damage the English vice-flagship
Golden Lion.
Borough warped the ship
out of harm’s way and then fought off an assault from the marauding galleys. Although that manoeuvre saved the ship, he was later to face charges of desertion and cowardice levelled by
Drake.

That night, the Spanish used some of the smaller vessels in the harbour as fireships to float out on the tide, but these were towed away by the English sailors and harmlessly beached in shallow
waters.

One of the admiral’s volunteer ‘gentleman adventurers’ estimated that twenty-eight barques had been burned, totalling 13,000 tons:

Drake’s ships were restocked with Spanish provisions: wine, oil, biscuit and dried fruits, while around 500 tons of bread were set alight, along with 400 tons of wheat.
One important coup was the destruction of a year’s supply of iron hoops and wooden staves for making barrels. This alone was later to prove a tactical disaster for the Armada; food and water
had to be stored in unseasoned, leaky casks that depleted water supplies and quickly rotted the food stored within.

Official Spanish estimates of their losses totalled twenty-four ships, valued at 172,000 ducats or more than £750,000 (£137,000,000 at current prices).
⁶⁹
Philip, in Madrid, was horrified when he read the news from Cadiz. With typical understatement, he noted: ‘The loss was not very great but the daring of the attempt was
very great indeed.’
⁷⁰

All this was achieved with remarkably few casualties: the master gunner of the
Golden Lion
suffered a broken leg smashed by a cannon shot fired from the town’s fortifications. The
volunteer soldier commented:

A brief truce offered by Don Pedro de Acuña, commander of the galley squadron, allowed the exchange of prisoners. Drake’s captives were swapped for Englishmen
amongst the galley slaves and
a five-man prize crew that had been captured in the course of the first night’s fighting. The courtly Spaniard sent his barge with
chivalrous gifts of wine and ‘sucket’ – a type of sweetmeat – during this break in hostilities.
⁷²
Drake had interrogated one
Spanish sailor who boasted that the Armada now numbered more than two hundred warships. Bravado and swagger were second nature to Drake and he easily brushed aside such Spanish bluster. Shrugging
his shoulders, he replied:
‘No es mucho
’ – ‘That’s not a lot’.
⁷³