The Spanish Armada (14 page)

At Portsmouth itself, the strength and design of the newly built ramparts to defend the land approaches to the town had been severely criticised by Sir Walter Raleigh and were therefore
demolished, much to Elizabeth’s indignation at this waste of her money. New earth walls were constructed in just four months by eight hundred labourers and these were protected by five stone
arrow-head-shaped bastions
⁴¹
behind a flooded ditch. Yet, more than half the garrison were rated ‘by age and impotency by no way
serviceable’ and the Earl of Sussex happily escaped unhurt when an old iron gun, supposedly one of his best cannon, exploded into smithereens in front of him.
⁴²
In November 1587, Sussex complained that the town’s seaward tower was ‘so old and rotten’ that he dared not fire one gun to loyally celebrate the anniversary
of the queen’s accession to the throne.
⁴³

In eastern England, the walls of Great Yarmouth were heightened by ramparts in 1587 ‘at which time they were . . . very fully and formally finished to the top . . . with earth and manure
more than forty feet (12.9 m) in breadth, resistible by God’s help against any [gun] battery whatsoever’. The following year, an earth mount or mound was enclosed with brick and stone
walls and ‘a great piece of ordnance’ placed on top.
⁴⁴
Harwich, in Essex, was reported in a ‘weak state [with] an open
situation’ in February 1587, so Elizabeth contributed £1,000 towards its fortification with the remainder of the cost expected to be stumped up by local people. Its citizens were
pointedly reminded that ‘the particular welfare of every private person requires them (as to favour the public weal [good] of their country and their own security), to yield some reasonable
contribution’.
⁴⁵

Elizabeth’s government was well aware of the lack of training amongst the militia who might have to fight Parma’s veterans, many
of them foreign mercenaries. A
proclamation in 1580 had sought to improve military training by banning ‘unlawful games’ and, instead of wasting their time on gambling, encouraging fathers to bring up their sons
‘in the knowledge of shooting’. It decreed that

Playing bowls ‘or any other unlawful game in the fields’ would incur a fine of 6s 8d for each offence, or being gaoled.
⁴⁶

As early as 1577, the total manpower capable of being placed in the field was estimated at just fewer than 324,000 men aged between sixteen and sixty in England and Wales. This may seem an
impressive figure, but it belies the quality of the forces that could fight to defend England’s honour. A census eleven years later revealed only one hundred experienced ‘martial
men’ available, and as some had fought in Henry VIII’s French and Scottish wars more than forty years before, these old sweats were considered
hors de combat.
The infantry and
cavalry were drawn from trained bands, volunteers, and a handful of conscripted personnel with special skills, such as the thousand veterans from the English army in the Netherlands who were
hurriedly recalled to stiffen the ranks. Many of these, however, soon deserted and hid in the crowded streets and tenements of the Cinque Ports of Kent.
⁴⁷

The militia officers were noblemen, esquires and gentlemen whose motivation was not only defence of their country but defence of their personal property too.
⁴⁸
As such they may have been ‘natural guardians’ of the land in which they dwelt, but they were largely amateurs.
⁴⁹
Some who lived near the coast believed it more expedient to shift their households and movable wealth inland to places of greater safety, but this defeatism plainly cut across government policy. A
proclamation of November 1587 ordered them to return ‘on pain
of her majesty’s indignation, besides such forfeiture of [their] lands and goods . . . No excuse
shall be allowed as any just cause for non performance . . .’
⁵⁰

Like so many of the gentry and some clergy, Walsingham paid personally for a contingent of troops – fifty mounted lancers, twenty cavalry, armed with pistols, and two hundred foot
soldiers
⁵¹
as well as ordering himself new armour from the Low Countries. Not everyone was prepared to give wholehearted support to the defence of
Elizabeth’s realm. Even the Protestant clergy were less than willing to fund the militia, and in May 1588, the Privy Council was forced to write to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, to
ginger them up:

The bishops eventually contributed money for surprisingly small contingents: Chichester paid for thirteen soldiers, Salisbury, twenty-three, Peterborough, twenty-three. Their
clergy also paid for troops. The diocese of Canterbury supplied a total of one hundred and sixty-five; London, two hundred and twenty-three and Winchester two hundred and seven.
⁵³

Amateurs have little place in repelling an invasion. The defence of Hampshire was plagued by a personal feud between the Fourth Earl of Sussex and the even more petulant William Paulet, Third
Marquis of Winchester. At one planning meeting, the two nobles clashed publicly. Sussex found fault with the deployment of the Portsmouth forces, saying he could see neither sense nor reason in the
orders. Unfortunately, the troops’ disposition was Paulet’s own idea and he snatched the vellum on which the orders were written, snapping: ‘I will read the same myself and if I
cannot find therein both sense and reason, then say I have no more brains than a woodcock.’
⁵⁴
The marquis then bickered with seventy-year-old
Thomas Cooper,
Bishop of Winchester, complaining that his clergy had promised much in arming the militia but had delivered nothing. The bishop, who had contributed £100
of his own money, huffily retorted that he had personally mustered the clergy’s men under Paulet’s very nose at Winchester. ‘Albeit I am well-nosed’ came the marquis’s
riposte, ‘yet not so long [as] to reach or smell from Tidworth to Winchester, being twenty-six miles distant’.
⁵⁵

A professional soldier, Captain Nicholas Dawtrey, who had been sent to train the Hampshire militia, warned Walsingham in January 1588 that if three thousand infantry went across the Solent to
defend the Isle of Wight, the Marquis of Winchester would be left ‘utterly without force of footmen other than a few billmen
⁵⁶
to guard and
answer all dangerous places’. Local people complained about being posted away from home: they and their servants being compelled ‘to go either to Portsmouth or Wight upon every sudden
alarm, whereby their houses, wives and children shall be left without guard and left open by their universal absence to all manner of spoil’. Dawtrey emphasised that ‘many of the common
sort [were] recusants. My lord bishop [of Winchester] was able to give me a note of two hundred in a little corner. I do perceive that many of these people inhabit the sea
coast.’
⁵⁷

Hampshire eventually raised a remarkable total of 9,088 men, but Dawtrey pointed out that ‘many . . . [were] very poorly furnished; some lack a head-piece [helmet], some a sword, some one
thing or other that is evil, unfit or [unseemly] about him’.
⁵⁸
Discipline was also problematic: the commander of the 3,159-strong Dorset
militia (1,800 of them completely untrained) firmly believed they would ‘sooner kill one another than annoy the enemy’.
⁵⁹
Compared to
these Elizabethan militia, the raw but enthusiastic Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) of the German invasion scare of the 1940s appears a finely honed military force.

An anonymous correspondent suggested to Walsingham that the most effective means of resisting enemy landings was to resort to ‘our natural weapon’ – the bow and arrow. It had
destroyed the French at Agincourt in 1415; why not the Spanish in 1588? One can imagine an old buffer, bristling at the threat to queen and country and hearth and home, offering up advice that the
bow and crossbow were ‘terrible weapons’ which Parma’s veterans were unused
to. After further reflection, he concluded that ‘the most powerful weapon
of all against this enemy was the fear of God’.
⁶⁰

In reality, despite strenuous efforts to buy weapons in Germany and harquebuses from Holland at 23s 4d (£1.17) each, many militiamen did have to be content with only bows and arrows with
which to face the enemy. Kent had 12,654 available men, of whom 2,958 were ‘trained’ infantry and 4,166 untrained, including 1,662 archers and 1,762 ‘shot’,
⁶¹
armed with harquebuses and calivers, but these had little ‘powder, match, lead, nags and carts’.
⁶²
Equipment shortages were endemic and the old, rusty armour and weapons brought out of store did little to improve morale or create an aggressive
esprit de corps
within
the militia. The Earl of Leicester complained that:

Gradually, out of the administrative chaos grew order and organisation. As in the dark days of 1940, when Britain faced the prospect of a Nazi invasion, it was realised in
1587–8 that, rather than attempting to defend every inch of the coastline, it would be much better to concentrate forces to stand and fight at the most dangerous landing places. The veteran
soldier Sir John (‘Black Jack’) Norris was commissioned to travel to the southern maritime counties and identify sites where invading troops could be ‘impeached’ and
‘some apt and fit places for retreat of forces to withstand’ the enemy ‘and the erecting of a body of an army to make head against him’. Norris had with him only men of
‘skill and trust’ for ‘there should not be many acquainted with the danger and weakness of the said places’. In vulnerable Kent, probable landing places were identified on
the Isles of Sheppey and Thanet, in the Downs, at Sheerness on Romney Marsh and along the broad Thames estuary.
⁶⁵
Parties of local militia were
stationed at these possible invasion beaches, but as they rarely numbered more than two hundred strong, they were very much ‘forlorn hopes’ – expendable sacrifices to buy time to
allow larger forces to be concentrated inland, rather than seriously intended to halt the Spanish on the high-water mark. Kent’s defence plan also listed the ‘fittest places to be put
into defence to hinder the enemy’
at Canterbury, Sandwich, Rochester, Aylesford and Maidstone.

Throughout the south and south-west of England, the militia would therefore be concentrated near major ports and would counterattack if possible, but in retreat, would practise a ‘scorched
earth policy’, destroying bridges, burning crops and driving off farm animals to deny the invader sustenance from the land. Kent was to send four thousand men to any port or part of Sussex
threatened and if Sheppey was attacked, four thousand reinforcements from Essex would join the men of Kent.
⁶⁶
In March 1587, the southern counties
were warned to ensure that their militia were ready to repel an invasion: ‘The trained bands are to be [re]viewed and put in strength and to repair to such places as were formerly instructed
within an hour’s warning.’
⁶⁷

The main army was divided into two groups. The first, under the Earl of Leicester, with 27,000 infantry and 2,418 cavalry, would engage the enemy once he had landed in force. The second, under
Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, numbered 28,900 infantry and 4,400 cavalry, would defend the sacred person of the queen herself, who would probably remain in London, with Windsor Castle as a
handy bolt-hole if the capital fell.

On 8 March 1588 Elizabeth wrote to the City of London, ordering them to provide men and weapons as part of this personal bodyguard:

The trained men were divided into four regiments, each 1,500 strong, armed with harquebuses, pikes and halberds with which they drilled twice a week. Those untrained were also
mustered into four regiments.
⁶⁸

As well as fears about how an invasion could be driven back into the sea, there remained nagging doubts about the loyalty of Elizabeth’s
Catholic subjects if or when
the Spanish arrived. Burghley and Walsingham were plainly as afraid of a Catholic rising as Cardinal Allen was confident of it happening.
⁶⁹
These
worries were reinforced in early June 1586 by reports of an intended rebellion ‘in the country near Portsmouth’. Within days, the Earl of Sussex reported that he had quelled it and had
arrested a number of its leaders, adding on 13 June that ‘some recusants, privy to the insurrection, were going to sea’ and that he would attempt to detain them.
⁷⁰
Raleigh reported in December 1587 that several of his commissioners in Devon were ‘infected in religion and vehemently malcontent’. The citizens of Exeter had
refused to pay their contribution towards the cost of defending the county.
⁷¹
The same month, a list of English captains who had served under the
Spanish flag in the Low Countries was submitted to the Privy Council. Apparently realigning their loyalties, they wanted passports to return to England but they were described as ‘most
dangerous papists and thought to be bloody men, not fit to have any liberty in England’.
⁷²