The Spanish Armada (41 page)

In February 1589, the queen issued orders to Drake and Norris,
emphasising that their mission had two overriding objectives: ‘the one to distress the King of
Spain’s ships, the other to win possession of the islands of Azores thereby to intercept the convoys of treasure that yearly pass that way to and from the West and East Indies’. Only
after the destruction of the surviving Armada ships could they move on to restore Dom Antonio to the Portuguese throne. But this phase carried the stern proviso that ‘nothing can be attempted
without very great hazard’ should local Spanish forces prove too strong. If popular support for the pretender was overwhelming, the English army should stay long enough merely to ensure that
Dom Antonio’s frontiers with Spain were protected and the English army’s costs of the operation repaid by the new king.
¹⁴
Her orders
could not have been clearer or more insistent.

Elizabeth demanded that Drake and Norris swore solemn oaths, promising to obey these operational priorities. If they failed to fulfil their vows, they fully acknowledged they would be
‘reputed as traitors’. The queen must have suffered nagging doubts that Drake would resort to his old tricks and become distracted by the prospects of lucrative plunder. She decided to
send a ‘trusty servant of her own’, Anthony Ashley, one of the clerks of the Privy Council, to be her ‘eyes and ears’ on the expedition. He was granted authority ‘for
the observation of their actions and for writing of their common letters . . . and to assist them with good counsel and advice’. He was also told to ‘keep a true journal in writing of
all public actions and proceedings’.
¹⁵

Many of the discharged soldiers were swept up in this new call to arms against Spain. Other recruits were found among the much-despised vagabonds, ‘the scum and dregs’ of English
society, and the Privy Council noted with alarm the ‘ragged condition and debauched condition’ of many volunteers. The Spanish spy codenamed ‘David’ reported they were
recruited ‘under the impression that they have only to land and load themselves with gold and silver . . . They also say that they have been promised by Dom Antonio the sack of all towns
which do not submit to him and that when they enter Castile they shall sack every place and carry war with blood and fire through the country.’
¹⁶

War is not always such fun. Some recruits were seriously wounded during training when they fired gunpowder contaminated by ‘small
hailshot’ either put in the
mix by ‘the lewdness of those who sold the same [to make it heavier] or by other negligence’.
¹⁷
In Southampton, justices and
‘other gentlemen dwelling near the sea coast’ were instructed to issue proclamations to enrol all ‘mariners and fishermen to the end there may be a good choice had of apt and
sufficient men for her majesty’s service’.
¹⁸

Periods of national crisis often throw up the more eccentric among us. John Trew wrote to the queen in December offering his services for ‘her preservation and salvation . . . Though an
old man, I desire to be employed in the wars.’ Like those unfortunates who, in later centuries, scurry between newspaper offices carrying tattered brown paper packages containing
incontrovertible evidence of a world secretly governed by aliens, Trew’s fixation soon became apparent in his letter: ‘I have an invention which would do as much service as five
thousand men in times of extremity and also an engine which can be driven before men to defend them from the shot of the enemy,’ he boasted. Like others of his ilk, his offer was politely
declined and we shall never know whether John Trew was the earliest inventor of the main battle tank.
¹⁹

Predictably the expedition’s plans soon went awry and the costs began to climb, rendering the original budget set by the commanders hopelessly inadequate. Promises were not kept. There was
no siege train of artillery. No Dutch warships ever hove into sight. Around half of the military stores which Norris bought in the Netherlands never arrived. No cavalry came from the Low Countries
and only twelve experienced infantry companies were sent over from Flanders – 1,800 trained men rather than the 3,500 expected. The
Minion
of Fowey, laden with biscuit, beef and
beer, sank within Dover harbour during a storm, but was later raised.
²⁰
There were too few ships to transport what had become a 19,000-strong army
gathering there in March 1589.

Then, over the horizon, sailed a rare piece of good fortune. Sixty Dutch flyboats displacing 150–200 tons each, passed through the Straits in ballast, en route for France to collect
cargoes of sea salt. Drake immediately commandeered every one, citing the passports from Parma found in some of the vessels as justification for this act of war.
²¹

The fleet sailed on to Plymouth but were delayed there by ‘unusually
stormy’ weather, with the ‘wind continuing contrary’. Finding provisions for
the fleet proved increasingly problematic. William Hawkins, mayor of Plymouth, could not purchase more than twelve tons of oil ‘and by reason it is now seed time, we cannot both in peas and
beans furnish above four hundred quarters’ [5,080.24 kg]. No more than two thousand new landed fish could be bought from the fishermen, but beef supplies were abundant and there was plenty of
butter and cheese ‘which the country yielded readily’.
²²

The expedition was turning into a financial disaster before it had even sailed. Stuck in harbour for longer than planned, they had no option but to raid the provisions earmarked for the voyage
to feed the army as well as the four thousand sailors in the fleet. Drake and Norris had already spent in excess of £96,000 – 18 per cent more than their latest budget for the entire
expedition. After the fleet was forced back to Plymouth by adverse winds on 17 April, Norris told Burghley the next day:

Burghley saw through this piece of thinly disguised blackmail, but the project had progressed too far to pull back now. The Council authorised the mayor of Plymouth to victual
the fleet for one month more. The sum of £10,000 was to be sent down in carts from London and a further £4,000 supplied by Cornwall and Somerset tax collectors. In the event, there were
economies imposed by sleight of hand: fish and peas were substituted for beef, and there were no supplies of beer, saving nearly £7,000 in the cost of provisions. Moreover, the final cost to
the exchequer of this latest contribution was £11,000 rather than the £14,000 promised, as not all the money left London.
²⁵

Elizabeth’s new court favourite was the red-haired Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, Leicester’s twenty-two-year-old stepson. This tall, handsome, vain and quarrelsome young man
had first come to court four years earlier, burdened with the huge debts
inherited from his imprudent father’s abortive attempts to subdue the Irish province of Ulster.
The son’s wilful and extravagant lifestyle soon augmented his army of creditors. Faced with massive debts amounting to £23,000 (£70,000,000 at 2013 spending power), Essex became
disenchanted with the fripperies of court life and decided to seek military glory (and profitable plunder) from the expedition to Spain and Portugal, both to brighten his aimless life and appease
his twitchy creditors. Without the queen’s permission, he recklessly left St James’ Palace late on the afternoon of 13 April and headed off to the West Country.

He wrote to the Privy Council from Plymouth, itching to fight but seeking pardon ‘of her majesty’. He appealed to ‘your lordships to mediate . . . for me, [as] I was carried
with this zeal so fast that I forgot those reverend forms which I should have used. Yet I had rather have had my heart cut out of my body than this zeal out of my heart.’
²⁶
In another letter, he was frank about his need to earn some cash:

Elizabeth was incensed at his unauthorised absence and concerned that his life would be endangered by this foreign military adventure. The next day she sent off his uncle, Sir
Francis Knollys, to find Essex and bring him back to court like a naughty schoolboy truant.

It was too late. Essex sneaked on board Henry Noel’s
Swiftsure
and hid there until that evening, when she departed Plymouth. A panting and dishevelled Knollys was given use of a
pinnace by Drake and Norris to pursue the errant favourite, but the vessel could not clear nearby Rame Head before the wind veered southerly and he was forced back into harbour.

The actions triggered by the queen’s infatuation with the unruly earl were fast assuming the comedy, chaos and confusion of a Keystone Cops’ chase. The Earl of Huntingdon was
dispatched
to Plymouth hard on Knollys’s heels with fresh commands from Elizabeth, so the expedition commanders sent Knollys off again in another pinnace. Unknown to
all, the change in wind direction had forced
Swiftsure
back into port – at Falmouth, 60 miles (96.56 km) west of Plymouth – and there Essex remained for more than ten days,
spending his time carousing with army officers, particularly ‘my faithful friend’ Sir Roger Williams, colonel general of the infantry. Drake told Burghley: ‘The matter of the Earl
of Essex has been a great trouble to us but we have as yet been unable to discover him.’
²⁸
Despite his blandishment, there seems little
doubt that Drake colluded in his escapade.

The expedition finally sailed on 28 April 1589. It numbered around one hundred ships, formed into five squadrons, including eleven hired armed merchantmen, some of them veterans of the Armada
campaign –
Merchant Royal, Edward Bonaventure, Toby, Centurion, Golden Noble, Tiger
and
Vineyard.
Essex was in
Swiftsure
when she departed Falmouth the same
day.

Instead of making for Santander and the damaged Armada ships, Drake steered for Corunna, blaming contrary winds. Besides, in a strange echo of those phantom
Hansa
ships that unwittingly
led him to the plunder of the
Rosario
, he and Norris claimed to have received reports of two hundred ships ‘of diverse nations at The Groyne [Corunna] and other ports of Galicia and
Portugal with a store of munition, masts, cables and other provisions for the enemy’. As the queen rightly feared, the lure of plunder aplenty had distracted Drake from his agreed tactical
objectives before a shot had even been fired.

The English fleet anchored a mile (1.61 km) off Corunna at three o’clock on the afternoon of 4 May. Their arrival took the Spanish completely by surprise. The new Venetian ambassador to
Madrid, Tomaso Contarini, reported:

There was no sign of Drake’s two hundred ships. The only vessels within the quiet harbour were the battered
San Juan
, a 600-ton Flemish hulk, another ship loaded
with pikes and firearms, and two oared galleys.

Despite the wet and stormy weather, seven thousand soldiers were landed within three hours on the narrow isthmus that connects Corunna to the mainland and their fire drove back the few enemy
forces to shelter behind the walls of the lower or ‘base town’. Norris landed two demi-culverins on 5 May and opened fire on the two galleys (which promptly rowed off to the safety of
Ferrol) and the
San Juan
, silencing her few remaining operational guns.

Another two thousand English soldiers landed before dawn on 6 May and attacked the lower suburbs of Corunna, swiftly winning control of the streets. The
San Juan
was set ablaze by the
defenders and the two hulks abandoned to the English who set about looting the town. Many soldiers were soon lying insensible from drinking the copious supplies of wine they had
‘liberated’. The alcohol certainly did not help, but epidemics further decimated the troops, possibly caused by typhus picked up from ‘the old clothes and baggage of those which
returned with the Duke of Medina Sidonia’, as Sir Roger Williams suggested.
³⁰
During the subsequent interrogation of prisoners, Norris and
Drake heard there was a ‘good store of munitions and victuals’ within the upper part of Corunna. Rather than consuming their own stores, they decided on its capture. After a four-day
siege of the upper city, they reported: