The Spanish Armada (27 page)

At around five o’clock, Howard broke off the attack, probably again because of his crippling shortage of gunpowder. After almost twelve hours of confused fighting,
no side could honestly claim victory, nor indeed had suffered anything approaching a defeat. Frustratingly for the belligerents, the stalemate at sea was continuing. Warships on both sides had been
damaged, but no killer blow had been landed on any vessel. Most of the English guns had been fired at ranges beyond that of the heaviest Spanish cannon and at those distances, there was little
chance of causing any substantial harm to enemy targets. Conversely, whether through inexperience, excitement or panic, the Spanish were also firing too early – long before the English came
into lethal range of their own cannon. Around fifty Spanish had been killed and another sixty wounded, but the English butcher’s bill was unknown.

In tactical terms, Medina Sidonia may have cut Howard’s fleet in two, but he threw away any advantage gained by chasing the lord admiral’s squadron as it briefly moved seaward, away
from the battle. Had he concentrated his vanguard’s firepower on Frobisher’s six supposedly stranded ships, Medina Sidonia would have forced Howard to turn and fight on Spanish terms
– or be obliged to abandon Frobisher to a grim fate. As far as Howard was concerned, the English fleet had been fragmented into three uncoordinated divisions which had acted independently,
paying little regard to events elsewhere in the engagement.
³⁵

As the Armada plodded on slowly eastwards, Howard sent ‘diverse barques and pinnaces on to the shore for more cannon shot and gunpowder’.
³⁶
Fresh supplies were ferried out from Lyme, Weymouth and Portsmouth, but Elizabeth’s government provided barely enough for any new engagement. Without the 220 barrels of
powder and 3,600 roundshot salvaged from the captured
Rosario
and
San Salvador
, some of Howard’s guns could have fallen silent.
³⁷
John Hawkins, in his precise and neat handwriting, later told Walsingham: ‘We had a sharp and long fight with them, wherein we spent a great part of our powder and shot
so it was not thought good to deal with them any more, till that [shortage] was relieved.’
³⁸

That night, in his note to Moncada, Medina Sidonia emphasised that ‘the important thing for us is to proceed with our voyage, for these people [the English ships] do not mean fighting but
only to
delay our progress’. Accordingly, the captain-general had again tinkered with the Armada’s formation, this time adopting a simple block of ships with a
vanguard and rearguard, commanded respectively by Recalde and Leyva. This was the very same tactical formation proposed weeks before by Don Pedro de Valdés during the Corunna council of war.
The captain-general, recalling the events of the day, ended his letter to Moncada on a barbed note: ‘You with your flagship and two other galleasses will join the rearguard . . . whilst
Captain Peruchio with his galleass
Patrona
[apparently an alternative name for the
Zúñiga
] will go in the vanguard with me. You will keep the three galleasses well
together and be ready to proceed without further orders to any point where they may be needed.’
³⁹
With his king’s instructions still in
the forefront of his mind, he might well have added: ‘I have dedicated this enterprise to God . . . Pull yourself together then and do your part!’

Medina Sidonia must have considered seizing a secure anchorage at Spithead
⁴⁰
or elsewhere in the Solent (the sheltered sea strait between the
Isle of Wight and the English mainland), having agreed at the onset of his passage up the Channel to pause at the island to await news of Parma. Worryingly, the captain-general still had heard
nothing from the Spanish general and he was growing ever more uneasy about awaiting the invasion barges off Margate on the Kent coast. Here, he reasoned, the Armada could easily become a sitting
duck to attacks from both east and west by elements of the English fleet. Better to hold a defensible anchorage, protected from the weather at Spithead or the Solent – which, as his pilots
would have told him, enjoys a double tide, a phenomenon that brings longer periods of high water. Here he would also have the chance to capture and hold a beachhead on the northern coast of the
Isle of Wight, where he could replenish his water and forage for fresh food.
⁴¹

Dawn on Wednesday 3 August revealed another problem for Medina Sidonia. During the night, the 650-ton
El Gran Grifón
, flagship of the hulks squadron, had fallen behind the Armada
rearguard on its seaward flank. As the sun rose, Drake in
Revenge
was naturally the first among the shadowing English ships to close on the hapless Spaniard. Clapping on as much sail as
possible to exploit the light south-south-westerly wind, the English vice-admiral came up alongside, fired a rippling broadside at his wallowing target; came
about to fire a
second and then swept past the stern, raking her with both cannon and musket shots. At least forty cannonballs hit the hulk, killing around sixty on her upper decks and wounding a further seventy.
Flemish deserters claimed later that Drake’s gunfire had miraculously killed only the English and Dutch exiles that were sailing with the Armada.
⁴²

Once again Recalde’s
San Juan
was first on the scene, together with the Armada’s flagship, and a series of fierce barrages were fired by both sides, perhaps upwards of 5,000
rounds. The mainmast of
Revenge
received a direct hit (bringing down the mainsail boom), from the stern guns of Moncada’s galleasses, while a sister ship successfully took the
Gran Grifón
in tow.

The light breeze died away in the early afternoon, leaving both fleets drifting slowly eastwards towards The Needles, the line of white chalk sea stacks off the western tip of the Isle of
Wight.
⁴³

Howard, only too well aware of the dangers posed by a Spanish occupation of the island or the seizure of an anchorage, called another council of war in
Ark Royal
to discuss how to block
their entry into the Solent. He decided to reshape his fleet’s tactical fighting formation into four independent squadrons of twenty-five ships apiece, commanded by himself, Drake, Frobisher
and Hawkins. In addition, he ordered that six armed merchantmen from each squadron should ‘set upon the Spanish fleet in sundry places at one instant in the night time to keep the enemy
waking’.
⁴⁴
Such plans to deny sleep to those in the Armada had to be cancelled that night because all ships were becalmed.

Thursday 4 August saw no return of the wind and the two fleets merely drifted on the current, with a speed more appropriate to that of a rowing boat than a galleon. It was St Dominic’s
Day, seen as auspicious by the Spanish because it celebrated Medina Sidonia’s personal patron saint.

It always seemed improbable that the Armada would try to enter the Solent from the west as the narrow and shoaled tidal race between The Needles and the mainland would deny them sea room and
they would be forced within range of the guns of Hurst Castle, on the end of a long hook-shaped shingle spit jutting into the channel from the mainland.
⁴⁵
If the Spanish wanted a Solent anchorage, they would have to pass the southern cliffs of the Isle of Wight and enter from
the east, via St Helen’s
Roads.
⁴⁶
Time and tide were firmly against them as the flood would allow entry into the Solent only between seven o’clock and noon that
morning. Afterwards the current would work against the Armada.
⁴⁷

Medina Sidonia wrote to Parma, informing him of his change of plan: he would now steer for the coast of Flanders, rather than awaiting him off the North Foreland, near Margate. He also brought
the land commander up to date with the frustrations of his repeated skirmishes with the English fleet:

The captain-general was also running low on munitions and asked Parma ‘to load speedily a couple of ships with powder and balls
⁴⁸
and to despatch them to me without the least delay’. He emphasised:

More fighting now confronted the Armada as Howard sought to drive the Spanish safely past Selsey Bill, on the western tip of the Sussex coast, far distant from any hope of
gaining a Solent anchorage. He also nurtured hopes that some enemy ships would founder on the Owers and Mixon reefs that lie off the low peninsula.

Early that morning, there were two more stragglers astern of the Armada: the Portuguese vice-flagship
San Luis de Portugal
and the Andalusian
Duquesa Santa Ana.
Were they
laggards or bait in
another elaborate trap? The westerly wind was still very light, barely a breeze. The nearest English squadron was led by John Hawkins and because of the
lack of headway he was forced to lower his boats to tow his flagship
Victory
into attack against the two Spanish vessels. Almost immediately,
San Lorenzo, Napolitana
and
Girona,
Moncada’s three galleasses, recently attached to the rearguard, came up, their oars providing rapid propulsion in the flat calm. One towed the
Rata
into the fray to
provide additional firepower. The jaws of this carefully laid ambush were about to snap shut.

Lord Thomas Howard’s
Golden Lion
and Howard’s
Ark Royal
, hampered by the same lack of wind, also had to resort to tows by their ship’s tenders, and slowly
moving into range on Hawkins’ port side, opened fire on the galleasses. One began to list, another’s prow or ram was damaged, and the third had its stern lantern shot away. The official
English account was unusually vivid:

It claimed that the oared vessels were so beaten about ‘that the galleasses were never seen in fight any more’, but their damage was plainly not too serious as they
managed to tow away the two decoy galleons.

It was now around nine o’clock and the two fleets were south of the Isle of Wight’s Dunnose Point, with Frobisher’s ships close in to its yellow and red sandstone cliffs,
riding the one-knot easterly current in an attempt to slip past the northern flank of the Armada. A brisk south-westerly had blown up and the fighting continued in the rear of the Armada with
Howard and his squadron attacking the
San Martin
. Medina Sidonia described the fighting:

Frobisher was unexpectedly becalmed as he exchanged shots with the
San Martin
and the galleass
San Lorenzo
, dutifully keeping station on her flagship. He
lowered his ensign briefly and fired three signal guns to summon assistance. Eleven ship’s boats from his squadron were sent to tow him to safety as the ships on the northern flank of the
Armada attacked. Two of Howard’s galleons,
Bear
and
Elizabeth Jonas
, swept in to delay the Spanish sortie. Then the wind suddenly freshened,
Triumph
’s sails
were filled, and Frobisher rejoined his squadron. Calderón described how he made off so swiftly ‘that [although] the galleon
San Juan
and another quick ship – the
speediest vessels in the Armada – gave chase, [they] seemed . . . to be standing still’.
⁵³

Medina Sidonia, again thwarted of a tactical victory and anxious about his low remaining stocks of munitions, fired a signal cannon to re-form the Armada in his new defensive
‘roundel’ (as the English called it) to continue on eastwards. Recalde had been closing on
Triumph
and was beside himself with fury at her escape and that the battle had ended
suddenly and so inconclusively: