The Spanish Armada (55 page)

1
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.357.

2
AGS CS 2a/278, f.167 and AGS CMC 2a/772.

3
It was later found to be ‘unserviceable’.

4
Medina Sidonia to Philip II;
San Martin
, 10 June 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.309.

5
CSP Venice
, vol. 8, p.362.

6
Medina Sidonia to Philip II;
San Martin
, Corunna, 24 June 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.316.

7
Ibid., pp.328–9.

8
Ibid., pp.330–2. The hulks returned safely to Corunna on 6 July. The two prizes that sank had both sailed from Dublin; one with a
cargo of wheat and tanned hides, bound for Biscay, and the other was carrying charcoal to France, together with two friars, one a Bernardin and the other a Franciscan.

9
Maura,
El designio de Felipe II
. . ., pp.258–61.

10
AGS Estado 455/320–1.

11
Memorandum from Juan de Idiáquez to Philip II; 2 July 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.332.

12
Bodleian Library – Douce Prints a.48; McGrath,
Papists and Puritans
, p.200.

13
This is a reference to Philip’s landing at Southampton to marry Mary on 20 July 1554. Olivares was a member of his entourage.

14
Olivares to Philip II; Rome, 8 July 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.333–4.

15
Ibid., pp.321–4. Don Pedro de Valdés complained to Philip a few days later that after expressing his opinions at the
council of war, Medina Sidonia was ‘looking upon him with an unfriendly eye and had used expressions towards him which had greatly grieved him’.

16
Oria
et al., La armada Invencible
, pp.210–14; Naish, ‘Documents illustrating the History of the Spanish
Armada’, p.23; Martin & Parker,
Spanish Armada
, pp.143 and 163.

17
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.327–8.

18
Ibid., pp.329–30.

19
Duro,
La armada Invencible
, vol. 2, pp.169–70.

20
Ibid., p.199.

21
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.334–5.

22
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.145.

23
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, fn. p.338.

24
Building operations began in 1587. The fortress is now joined to the mainland by a breakwater and houses the Museo Arqueológico e
Histórico.

25
AGS GA 225/55–6.

26
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.176.

27
England had a total of 1,392 merchant ships in 1588, of which 183 displaced more than one hundred tons. (Revd J. Silvester Davies,
History of Southampton
(Southampton, 1883), p.481.) On 31 March 1588, an embargo was placed on shipping of every county, not so much to obtain ships but to prevent their crews departing on
voyages. The Royal Navy still has contingency plans to hire civilian ships for various logistic roles in time of hostilities, known by the acronym STUFT, or Ships Taken Up From Trade.

28
A list of Seymour’s ships on 23 July includes ‘a ship of Romney [the
John Young
] sent to seize by order touching
Brasbridge, pirate, his prize’. TNA, SP 12/213/14.

29
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.189–90. On 13 June, the lord admiral told Walsingham that his crews ‘behaved admirably; none
have mutinied though all know they are short of rations. Kindly handled they will bear want and run through fire and water but their want of victuals is distressing.’ (
CSP Domestic
Elizabeth
,
1581–90
, p.488.) Howard commandeered a cargo of rice, almonds and other goods from the
Mary of Hamburg
at Plymouth to help meet the shortfall in
provisions.

30
Lincolnshire archives, 8ANC10/114; The Hague, 5 April 1588.

31
It was then called ‘the Hermitage Bulwark’ as it was built on the site of a monastic house dissolved three years before.

32
A.D. Saunders, ‘Tilbury Fort and the Development of Artillery Fortifications in the Thames Estuary’,
Antiquaries’
Jnl
, vol. 28 (1960), pp.155–6. Costs at Tilbury amounted to £247 8s 4d for timber for the drawbridges, gates and palisades and three hundred labourers at eight pence a day.
CSP
Domestic, Elizabeth
,
1581–90
, p.550. Additional expenditure was requested on 8 October.

33
William Page (ed.),
Victoria County History of Kent
, vol. 2 (London, 1926), p.296.

34
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.206–7.

35
The Nore is located midway between Havengore Creek in Essex and Warden Point in Kent.

36
Borough based his successful defence on a chart of Cadiz that amply demonstrated the perils of the
Golden Lion
’s station
assigned by Drake. See: Baldwin, ‘William Borough’,
ODNB
, vol. 6, p.671. Borough died in November 1598, having become one of the Brethren of Trinity House. In his will, he left
£10 towards a dinner for them to be held in remembrance of him. (TNA, PROB 11/92, ff.229–30.)

37
HMC Foljambe, p.43.

38
CSP Domestic Elizabeth
,
1581–90
, pp.489–90.

39
CSP Domestic Elizabeth
,
1581–90
, p.488.

40
TNA, SP 12/211/56.

41
Strype,
Annals
, vol. 3, pt 2, p.544 and HMC Bath p.28.

42
CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90
, p.487; Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.192–3.

43
CSP Domestic Elizabeth, 1581–90
, p.489; Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.195–7. Howard was frustrated by the weather:
‘We can do [no] good as this wind is, for its holds here at west and south-west and blows up so hard that no ship here but her majesty’s great ships dare ride in this sound but are fain
to go into the haven . . . We are not able by any means to get the weather [get to windward] of this harbour . . .’

44
TNA, SP 12/211/47.

45
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.221–2.

46
TNA, SP 9/210/34. Seymour dictated this letter, to Walsingham, as he had ‘strained his hand with hauling a rope whereby I cannot
write so much as I would’.

47
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.278–4.

48
Palavicino was a Genoese banker who settled in England where he accumulated a large fortune and was employed in the financial business
of Elizabeth’s government. He was knighted in 1587.

49
Stade was a prominent port of the Hanseatic League until eclipsed by Hamburg.

50
TNA, SP 12/212/66, f.139.

51
The crew and guns from
Diana
were saved but her hull was broken up. One of her slaves, the Welshman David Gwynn, later boasted
how he freed his fellow slaves, killed the Spanish crew and captured the other three galleys. History has unfortunately refuted his tall tale. See: Mattingly,
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
,
p.247.

52
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.146.

1
Laughton,
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
, vol. 1, p.289.

2
It was the thirty-fourth anniversary of Philip’s landing at Southampton to marry Mary I of England.

3
Graham,
The Spanish Armadas
, p.98.

4
Fugger Newsletters
, 1926, pp.165, 169.

5
Mendoza to Philip II; Paris, 24 July 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.353.

6
Medina Sidonia to Philip;
San Martin
, ‘in sight of the Lizard’, 30 July 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4,
pp.357–8.

7
Parker, ‘
El Testamento politico
’, pp.22–4 and 29.

8
Gentlemen and members of the aristocracy were apparently exempt from the ban on playing bowls.

9
Barratt,
Armada 1588
, p.47. In the second part of a 1624 tract entitled
Vox Populi
(which deals with Prince Charles
Stuart’s escapades in Spain), there is a report of a sitting of the
Cortes
(the Spanish parliament), which was discussing policy towards England. The Duke of Braganza said:
‘Did we not in 1588 carry our business to England so secretly . . . as in bringing our navy to their shores, while their commanders were at bowls upon the Hoe at Plymouth?’ The story of
the bowls game was therefore then current and was within living memory.

10
Warping is an agonisingly slow method of moving a becalmed ship by hauling on the anchor cable, usually assisted by a capstan. The
anchor is then taken forward by the ship’s boat, dropped ahead and the process repeated
ad nauseam
. Some ships may also have been simply towed out by their boats.

11
A position to windward to other ships, advantageous in battle.

12
Martin & Parker,
The Spanish Armada
, pp.146 and 149.

13
Graham, op. cit., p.100.

14
In contrast, King Philip had been advised by a bloodthirsty Italian, Cavaliere Fra Tiburtio Spanocchi, to take ‘the honourable
decision to declare war’ but perhaps it only ‘sufficed to set foot on the enemy’s territory’. See:
Fugger Newsletters
, 1926, p.152.

15
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.440.

16
To ‘luff’ is to steer a ship’s bows round to the wind.

17
Parker, op. cit., p.29.

18
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.302.

19
Duro,
La armada Invencible
, vol. 2, p.230.

20
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.149.

21
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.441.

22
Mattingly,
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
, p.259.

23
Harleian Miscellany
, vol. 1, p.120.

24
Barratt, op. cit., p.57.

25
Calderón listed those remaining on the
San Salvador
: sixty-four seamen; Captain Pedro de Priego, ‘who was badly
burnt and had ninety-four soldiers; Captain Don Francisco de Chaves, who was unhurt and had one hundred and thirty-three soldiers; Captain Geronimo de Valderrama, with ninety-two soldiers . . .
also unhurt’. See:
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.441. English accounts put the dead at about one hundred and twenty in the explosion (Laughton, op. cit., vol. 2, p.56).

26
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.151.

27
Oria
et al., La armada Invencible
, pp.352–3; Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.152; fn. p.164.

28
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 2, p.135.

29
Lord Admiral Howard to Walsingham;
Ark Royal
, Plymouth, 31 July 1588. TNA, SP 12/212, f.167.

30
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.290.

31
Medina Sidonia to Parma; on board
San Martin
, two leagues off Plymouth, 31 July 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4,
p.358.

32
Mattingly, op. cit., pp.263–4.

33
A private ship belonging to Sir Walter Raleigh.

34
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 2, p.136.

35
James A. Froude,
English Seamen of the Sixteenth-century
(London, 1896), p.264.

36
Amazingly Winslade survived the queen’s justice and is recorded as fighting for Spain in 1600 in a regiment of foreign pensioners
in the Netherlands under the command of the renegade English soldier Sir William Stanley (Loomie,
Spanish Elizabethans
, p.203). His interrogation is described in Surrey Local History
Centre, Loseley MS LM/1339/370. The Spanish saw Winslade as a loyal ‘well-born gentleman [who] has endured much suffering’ (McDermott,
England and Spain: The Necessary Quarrel
,
p.369).

37
Two barques landed the Spanish prisoners ashore at Dartmouth. The prize survey of the
Rosario
listed twenty-six brass cannon
and two of iron mounted on carriages. Costs associated with the prize at Torbay included £2 ‘to a man of my lord admiral’s that came for the powder of the Spaniard and so came by
post to Portsmouth’; £5 for dried fish to feed the prisoners and £1 10 for ‘guarding and watching of the
Spaniards two days and a night at their
landing’. See: Laughton, op. cit., vol. 2, pp.190–4. The
Rosario
was later taken to Plymouth and committed to the charge of George Cary and Sir John Gilbert, the latter
unfortunately responsible for filching some of the eighty-five casks of wine on board. The more honest Cary wrote to Walsingham in despair over the thefts of the prize’s goods: ‘Watch
and look never so narrowly they will steal and pilfer’. See:
APC
, vol. 16, pp.xxiv–v.

38
Barratt, op. cit., p.62; Martin & Parker, op. cit., pp.152–3; Mattingly, op. cit., p.266.

39
Barratt, op. cit., pp.62–3.

1
Laughton,
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
, vol. 2, p.63.

2
HMC Foljambe, p.48. Lord Chandos, lord lieutenant of Gloucestershire, for example, was instructed to appoint a provost marshal for
‘the arrest and punishment of idle vagabonds to prevent the spread of false rumours’ (Gloucestershire Archives, GBR/H/2/1 f.1).

3
HMC Foljambe, p.50.

4
Gerson, ‘English Recusants and the Spanish Armada’, p.590.

5
McDermott,
England and Spain: the Necessary Quarrel
, p.244.

6
TNA, SP 12/211/95.

7
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.372–3.

8
Ibid., p.480.

9
In 1584, the Member of Parliament Job Throckmorton claimed in a debate that ‘God had vowed himself to be English’ and went on
to describe the Pope as Antichrist, Catherine de Medici (mother of Henri III of France) as ‘an adder whose brood is left to pester the earth’ and Philip of Spain as ‘idolatrous
and incestuous’. It was not just foreign royalty that drew his ire: ‘A Frenchman was as vile a man that lives and no villainy can make him blush.’ As a boy, he had ‘heard it
said that falsehood was the very nature of a Scot’. Sir Christopher Hatton, later Lord Chancellor, reprimanded him for ‘speaking sharply of princes’ and Throckmorton was thrown
into the Tower. See: Brennan, ‘Papists and Patriotism . . .’, p.8 and Neale,
Elizabeth and her Parliaments
, pp.28, 168 and 169–73.

10
Mattingly,
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
, p.311.

11
McDermott, op. cit., p.241.

12
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.378.

13
A Spanish spy in London reported on 7 September that the Dutch
musketeers had mutinied because they had not
‘been paid a penny’ and had killed their colonel and lieutenant colonel. ‘They are said to have fortified themselves in a castle near Sandwich but I hear from another quarter they
have now been pacified and embarked’ to return home to the Netherlands.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.421.

14
Martin & Parker,
The Spanish Armada
, pp.255 and 257; P. Clark,
English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the
Revolution; Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640
(Hassocks, 1977), p.249.

15
On 2 August, Leicester told the Privy Council: ‘I have put these forts [Tilbury and Gravesend] in as good strength as time will
permit but there must be planks sent in with all haste and workmen to make [gun] platforms.’ R.P. Cruden,
History of Gravesend and the Port of London
(London, 1843), p.237.

16
APC
, vol. 16, pp.174–6.

17
Ibid., p.183.

18
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.319.

19
Ibid., p.321.

20
Hogg, op. cit., pp.34–5.

21
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.331.

22
BL Cotton MS Caligula D i, f.420. The spelling of the letter, written in English, has quaint lapses into the Scottish vernacular.

23
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.63.

24
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.397.

25
BL Cotton MS Otho E ix, f.185
v.

26
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.460.

27
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.155.

28
TNA, SP 94/3/11;
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.359.

29
Parker, ‘
El testamento politico
. . .’, p.31.

30
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.442.

31
BL Cotton MS Julius F x, f.114; Corbett,
Drake and the Tudor Navy
, vol. 2, p.227. The
Delight
was owned by Sir William
Wynter, Surveyor of the navy.

32
A ‘crock’(or crook) was the forked wooden or metal rest on which the heavy harquebus was rested when it was aimed and
fired.

33
BL Cotton MS Julius F x, f.114. This account suggests that the cannon were fired rapidly like muskets in a land battle.

34
CSP Foreign Elizabeth
, vol. 22, p.5. The sailor also repeated what he had heard from ‘the Spanish captains that they
meant to carry off the English women to Spain and that the king’s [Philip’s] commission
instructed them to massacre everyone they met in England, even the
children’. As this comes from an English source, the report’s veracity may be tainted.

35
Corbett, op. cit., vol. 2, p.228.

36
BL Cotton MS Julius F x, f.114.

37
Graham,
The Spanish Armadas
, p.117; Parker, ‘The Dreadnought Revolution’, p.269.

38
TNA, SP 12/213/71, f.164.

39
Medina Sidonia to Don Hugo de Moncada; on board the royal galleon
San Martin
, 2 August 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
,
vol. 4, p.359.

40
Named after ‘The Spit’ a sandbank that stretches south from the shore of Hampshire for 3.1 miles (5 km). Spithead, later the
traditional anchorage for the Royal Navy, is fourteen miles (22.5 km) long with an average breadth of four miles (6.5 km). On 2 August, Seymour had written to the Privy Council warning them of a
possible Spanish landing on the Isle of Wight. See Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.300.

41
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.157.

42
Fernandez-Armesto,
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War
, p.159.

43
Both fleets would have seen four stacks in 1588 instead of the three ‘Needles’ of today. A 120-foot (36.58 metres) rock,
nicknamed ‘Lot’s Wife’, stood just to the north of the central stack. It collapsed in 1764.

44
BL Cotton MS Julius F x, f.115.

45
One of the Spanish pilots reported ‘there is a risk in passing here because there is a castle on the mainland called Hurst which
is the strongest in England. Its artillery reaches into the channel.’ Repairs to the central tower, built by Henry VIII in the 1530s as one of his coastal artillery forts, had been completed
in 1585. Around eight hundred roundshot and two lasts of gunpowder had been ordered for the castle early in 1588. See: Jude James,
Hurst Castle: An Illustrated History
(Lymington, 2003),
p.21.

46
St Helen’s Roads had its own dangers: submerged shoals off the island’s Horsestone Point, and a prominent rock, later
nicknamed ‘Ben Ben’, off a plateau of rocks extending six hundred yards (548.64 m) south of Nettlestone Point, between present-day Ryde and Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. There are
thirteen wrecks recorded in the area.

47
Barratt,
Armada 1588
, p.81.

48
Medina Sidonia asked for smaller calibre roundshot – 4, 5 and 10 lbs (1.81, 2.27 and 4.54 kg) in weight ‘in as large a
quantity as possible’.

49
Medina Sidonia to Parma; ‘Royal galleon, off the Isle of Wight’, 4 August 1588.
CSP Spain
(Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.360.

50
A large galleon.

51
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.13.

52
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.398–9.

53
Ibid., p.443.

54
Parker, op. cit., p.32; Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.160.

55
Fernandez-Armesto, op. cit., p.160; Laughton, op.cit., vol. 2, p.40. The wounded received a collective bonus of £80.

56
Eighteen miles (28.97 km) but Carey’s landsman’s estimate of the distance is too great: the fighting was much closer to
land.

57
TNA, SP 12/213/40, f.97. In France, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Mocenigo later reported that Spanish reports of the battle off the
Isle of Wight claimed they had ‘got the best of it, sinking fifteen ships, among them the flagship. The rest fled towards Dover . . . where the body of the English fleet is lying. They said
that three ships which had lost their masts were captured and one large ship took fire. A Breton, who was taken by Drake . . . has come home. He declares that a galleass attacked the flagship and
with the first broadside cut down her masts and at the second sank her and that Drake escaped in a boat under cover of the thick smoke.’
CSP Venice
, vol. 8, p.373.

58
BL Cotton MS Otho, E, ix, f.214
r
.

59
BL Add. MS 33,740, ff.2–3. Four hundred had already been supplied to the fleet from Hampshire. The Earl of Sussex wrote to
Walsingham the same day reporting receipt of a letter from Howard requesting powder and shot ‘saying he has a very great want [of it] indeed’ but pointing out that if he sent the five
lasts of gunpowder he had received from the Tower of London, ‘there would be none left’. See Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.323.

60
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, p.331.

61
CSP Foreign Elizabeth
, vol. 22, p.85.

62
A Lancashire gentleman who was also imprisoned for his adherence to the Catholic faith.

63
Hammond was ‘an old aged woman. . . a laundress in the Tower’.

64
BL Add. MS 48,029, f.102.

65
Ibid., f.81.

66
Norfolk,
Lives of Philip Howard. . . and Anne Dacres his wife
, pp.87–9.

67
Archer,
Progress, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth
,
pp.196–7. Montague had spoken
against the Act of Supremacy of 1559, arguing that a Catholic settlement was imperative because of the dangers from abroad that would result from Protestantism becoming England’s national
religion. He warned: ‘I fear my prince’s sure estate and the ruin of my native country. May I then, being her true subject, see such peril grow to her highness and agree to it?’
See Brennan, op. cit., p.5.

68
AGS Estado 693/30.

69
Medina Sidonia to Parma; ‘from the Armada before Calais’. 6 August 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4,
pp.362–3.

70
BL Sloane MS. 262/62.

71
AGS 594/113. Letters written from the Armada on 25 July about the departure from Corunna did not arrive in Flanders until 2 August.
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.182.

72
Oria
et al.
,
La armada Invencible
, p.42. See also Martin & Parker, op. cit. p.168.

73
Martin & Parker, op. cit., pp.171–2.

74
Parma to Philip II; Bruges, 8 August 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, p.366.

75
Medina Sidonia to Parma; ‘Galleon
San Martin’
, 7 August 1588.
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4,
pp.364–5.

76
AGS 594/113.

77
Laughton, op. cit. vol. 2, p.9. Wynter may have been suffering from wishful thinking; none of the Spanish ships was burnt.

78
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.443–4. The fireship attack became one of the cheapest tactical achievements of the Tudor
period. Replacement value of the eight burnt vessels was later estimated at £5,111 10s.

79
Many believed that Asculi was an illegitimate son of Philip II.

80
Martin & Parker, op. cit., p.175–6.

81
Ibid., p.176.

82
Laughton, op. cit., vol. 1, pp.347–9.

83
CSP Spain (Simancas)
, vol. 4, pp.377 and 383. The English initially wanted to wait for high tide to float out the
San
Lorenzo
but then tried three times to burn her.