THE GREAT ARMADA

1588

“Attend, all ye who list to hear
Our glorious England’s praise.
I sing of the thrice famous deeds
She wrought in ancient days,
When that great fleet ‘Invincible’
Against her bore in vain
The richest spoils of Mexico,
The bravest hearts of Spain.”

Thus Macaulay begins his stirring ballad of the Armada. The lines have helped to perpetuate a popular error one of the many connected with the story as it is generally told in our English histories. It somehow became the fashion at a very early date to speak of the defeat of the so-called “Invincible Armada” of Spain. But the Spaniards never gave their fleet such a name. In the contemporary histories and in Spanish official documents it is more modestly and truthfully spoken of as the “Gran Armada” “the great armed force.” And, by the way, our very use of the word “armada” is based on popular ignorance of the Spanish language, and on the impression produced in England by the attempt of Philip II to make himself master of the narrow seas, and invade our islands. An “armada” is not necessarily a fleet. It is an armed force, an “army” either marching on land or embarked for service on the sea, in which case fleet and fighting-men are included in the word.

Philip II was King not of Spain only, but also of Portugal and of the Two Sicilies, ruler of other European lands and “Lord of the Indies,” the Sovereign of a widespread maritime Empire in Asia, Africa, and America, that had been won by a hundred years of enterprise on the part of sailors and soldiers like Columbus and Vasco da Gama, Cortes, Pizarro, and Albuquerque. The tradition of Spanish victory on the sea was a proud one, and as we have seen Spain had borne a leading part in the latest of decisive naval victories, when the Turkish power in the Mediterranean was shattered at Lepanto; King Philip might therefore reasonably look forward to success for his great fleet, and if it could once secure the mastery of the Channel, the invasion of England might be regarded as no very perilous enterprise. For the Spanish infantry were the best soldiers of the day, and the Duke of Parma, who was to command the land operations, was one of the best and most experienced leaders in Europe.

Looking back on the events of the wonderful year of the Armada, we must try to divest ourselves of the ideas of to-day, and see things as the men of the time saw them. Philip counted on divisions among the people of England. The event proved that he was mistaken, but he had reasonable grounds for the view he took. A hundred years later another fleet conveyed a foreign army across the narrow seas from the Netherlands to change effectively the course of English affairs. It found a divided people, and the invading army was welcomed by a party strong enough to effect a Revolution that was a new starting-point in English history. Nor must we suppose that the policy of Philip II was directed entirely by religious views. If kings were easily swayed by such motives, there would have not been such difficulty about organizing a League against the Turk.

Professor Laughton, in his introduction to the “State Papers relating to the Defeat of the Armada,” puts the matter so clearly that it is worth while quoting his words at some length:

“It is not strange that the action of the fleet was for long misunderstood, and that the failure of the Spaniards should have been represented as it often is even now as due to a Heaven-sent storm. ‘Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt’ was accepted as at once a true and pious explanation of the whole thing. It was, too, a flattering and economical belief. We were, it has been argued, a nation peculiarly dear to the Almighty, and He showed His favour by raising a storm to overwhelm our enemy, when the odds against us were most terrible. From the religious point of view such a representation is childish; from the historical it is false. False, because the Spanish fleet, after being hounded up Channel, had sustained a crushing defeat from the English, a defeat in which they lost many ships and thousands of men before they fled to the north.... Childish, because in affairs of State Providence works by recognized means, and gives the victory, not by disturbing the course of nature and nature’s laws, but by giving the favoured nation wise and prudent commanders, skilful and able warriors; by teaching their hands to war and their fingers to fight.

“But, in fact, much of the nonsense that has been talked grew out of the attempt, not unsuccessfully made, to represent the war as religious; to describe it as a species of crusade instigated by the Pope, in order to bring heretical England once more into the fold of the true Church. In reality nothing can be more inaccurate. It is, indeed, quite certain that religious bitterness was imported into the quarrel; but the war had its origin in two perfectly clear and wholly mundane causes.”

Professor Laughton then goes on to explain what these causes were: (1) the attempts of Drake and Hawkins to break the Spanish monopoly of trade in the West Indies by armed expeditions, which included the capture of Spanish ships and the sacking of Spanish trading posts. The Spaniards regarded Drake and Hawkins as smugglers and pirates, and in vain asked Elizabeth to disavow and make amends for their acts.

(2) “The countenance and assistance which had been given by the English to the King’s rebellious subjects in the Low Countries.”

The King was glad enough to put forward religious reasons as the motives for his enterprise in the hope of thus enlisting new allies on his side, but, like so many other wars, the conflict between Spain and England, which began in 1585, arose largely from rivalry in trade.

The Marquis of Santa Cruz, the same who had commanded the allied reserve at Lepanto, was then the most famous and the most trusted of King Philip’s admirals. Santa Cruz urged upon him the advisability of attempting an invasion of England itself, as the only effective means of cutting off the support given by Elizabeth to the revolt of the Netherlands, and checking at their source the raids on the West Indies. In March, 1586, he submitted to his master an elaborate plan for the operation. Santa Cruz’s scheme was an ambitious project for concentrating the whole force of the Spanish Empire in an attack on England. Some 500 ships, great and small, were to be assembled in the ports of the Spanish peninsula, and 85,000 men embarked on them.

Philip II thought the scheme too vast, and, above all, too costly. He substituted for it another plan, which was more economical. Santa Cruz was to assemble in the Atlantic ports of the Peninsula a fleet of more modest proportions, just strong enough to secure command of the Channel. This done, he was to cover the transportation across the narrow seas of the Spanish army that was already operating in the Netherlands, under the Duke of Parma. The army of the Netherlands would be reinforced with all the fighting-men that could be spared from the fleet. This was in its essential points the plan of campaign of the “Gran’ Armada” of 1588.

It was intended that the attempt should be made in the summer of 1587. It was delayed for a twelvemonth by a daring enterprise of Francis Drake, a memorable enterprise, because in proposing it he laid down the true principle for the defence of England against invasion. His policy was that of Edward III at Sluys, his principle that it was better to keep the enemy occupied on his own coasts rather than await him on those of England. On 2 April, 1587, Drake sailed for Spain with only thirty ships, and surprised and burned the half-armed transports and storeships collected at Cadiz for fitting out the Armada. His dashing enterprise had made its departure for that year impossible.

Before the preparations for the next summer’s campaign were completed the Marquis of Santa Cruz died, and Spain lost her best and most experienced admiral. King Philip put in his place a great noble, Guzman, Duke of Medina-Sidonia, who pleaded in vain to be excused, frankly declaring to his sovereign that he felt unfit for such high command, as he had scant knowledge of war and no experience of the sea. It is supposed that the King persisted in the nomination because Medina-Sidonia’s hereditary rank would place him above the jealousies of the subordinate commanders, and he hoped to supply for the Marquis’s inexperience by sending veteran sailors and soldiers with him as his staff-officers and divisional commanders.

By the middle of May, 1588, the Armada was at last ready to sail from the Tagus. In England there had been the wildest reports as to its numbers and strength. These exaggerations were repeated by the popular historians of the fighting in the Channel, and have become almost a national tradition. The Spanish galleons were said to be floating monsters, more like castles than ships; the fleet was so numerous that it hid the sea, and looked like a moving town; it “seemed as if room would scarce be found on the ocean for so vast an armament.”

The glory of the English victory was great enough to need no exaggeration to enhance it. But in sober fact there was no such enormous disparity, as is generally imagined, between the opposing forces.

Large and small, there were 130 ships in the Armada. The detailed catalogue of them, from the list sent by Medina-Sidonia to Philip II, has been reprinted by Captain Duro in his “Armada Invencibile, and by Professor Laughton in his State Papers relating to the Armada.

The first point to note about the Armada is that it was almost entirely a fleet of sailing-ships. The new period of naval war had begun. There had been hundreds of galleys at Lepanto, seventeen years earlier, but there were only four in the Armada, and none of these reached the Channel. The long, low, oar-driven warship, that for two thousand years had done so much fighting in the Mediterranean, proved useless in the long waves of the Atlantic. The only oared ships that really took part in the campaign were the four galleasses, and in these the oar was only auxiliary to the spread of sail on their three full-rigged masts. The galleasse has been described in the story of Lepanto. It was an intermediate or transition type of ship. It seems to have so impressed the English onlookers that the four galleasses are given quite an unmerited importance in some of the popular narratives of the war.

But the day of sails had come, and the really effective strength of the Armada lay in the tall galleons of the six “armadas” or squadrons of Portugal, the Spanish provinces, and the Levantine traders. The galleon was a large sailing-ship, but even as to the size of the galleons the popular tradition of history is full of exaggeration. Built primarily for commerce, not for war, they carried fewer guns than the galleasses, though many of them were of heavier tonnage. In those days every large trader carried a certain number of guns for her protection, but such guns were mostly of small calibre and short range.

The largest galleons were in the armada of the Levant. The flagship, “La Regazona,” commanded by Martin de Bertendona, was the biggest ship in the whole fleet, a great vessel of 1249 tons. But she only mounted 30 guns, mostly light pieces. Compare this with the armament of the galleasses, and one sees the difference between ships built for war and galleons that were primarily traders. The largest of the four galleasses was only of 264 tons, the smallest 169, but each of the four mounted 50 guns. In all the six armadas of galleons there were only seven ships of over a thousand tons. There were fourteen more of over 800, and a considerable number of under 500 tons. But the galleon looked larger than she really was. Such ships had high bulwarks and towering fore and stern castles, and they appear to have been over-rigged with huge masts and heavy yards. A galleon under full sail must have been a splendid sight, the bows and stern and the tall “castles” tricked out with carving, gold and colour. Great lanterns were fixed on the poop. The sails were not dull stretches of canvas, but bright with colour, for woven into or embroidered on them there were huge coats-of-arms, or brilliantly coloured crosses, and even pictures of the saints with gilded haloes. From the mastheads fluttered pennons thirty or forty feet long, and flagstaffs displayed not only the broad standard of the Lions and Castles of Spain, but also the banners of nobles and knights who were serving on board.

But the tall ship, with her proud display of gold and colour, was more splendid than formidable, and the Elizabethan seamen had soon realized the fact. Built originally for the more equable weather of the trade-wind region in the South Atlantic, she was not so well fitted for the wilder seas and changing winds of the North. She was essentially an unhandy ship. In bad weather she rolled heavily, and her heavy masts and spars and high upper works strained the whole structure, so that she was soon leaking badly. With the wind abeam and blowing hard, her tall sides and towering castles were like sails that could not be reefed, a resisting surface that complicated all manoeuvres. The guns that looked out from her port-holes were mostly small cannon, many of them mere three and four-pounders, of short range and little effect. So small was the dependence the Spaniards placed upon them that they carried only the scantiest supply of ammunition.

The fighting method of the galleon was to bear close down upon her opponent, run her aboard, if possible, pour down a heavy fire of musketry from the high bulwarks and castles, so as to bring a plunging shower of bullets on the enemy’s decks, and then board, and let pike and sword do their work as they had done at Lepanto. These were, after all, the methods of the soldier, the tactics of the war-galley. It was the merit of Howard, Hawkins, Drake, and the other great captains, who commanded against the Armada, that they fought as seamen, using their more handy and better handled ships to choose their own position and range, refusing to let the Spaniards close, and bringing a more powerful, longer-ranging, and better served artillery to bear with destructive effect on the easy targets supplied by the tall galleons. It is worth noting that while there were more soldiers than seamen in the Armada, there were more seamen than soldiers in the fleet that met it in the narrow seas.

If the Armada had a commander whose only merit was personal courage, the admirals of the various squadrons were all men of long experience in war, both by land and sea. Martinez de Recalde, the second in command and admiral of the armada of Biscay, was a veteran seaman. Diego Flores de Valdes, the admiral of Castille, was an enterprising and skilful leader, and if his advice had been taken at the outset there might have been a disaster for England. Pedro de Valdes, the admiral of Andalusia, had sailed the northern seas, and Medina-Sidonia was told he might rely on his local knowledge. Moncada, the admiral of the galleasses, was a “first-rate fighting-man,” and De Leyva, the general of the troops embarked, who had taken command of the “Rata Coronada,” a great galleon of 800 tons in the Levant armada, showed that he was sailor as well as soldier.

The Duke of Parma, who commanded the army that was to be embarked from the Netherlands, was counted the best general of the day, and his 30,000 Spanish regular infantry were the most formidable body of troops then in Europe. His orders from the King were to build or collect a flotilla of flat-bottomed barges to ferry his army across the straits under the protection of the Armada, and for months thousands of shipwrights had been at work in fishing ports and creeks, canals and rivers along the coast between Calais and Ostend. The Dutch rebels held Flushing and the mouth of the Scheldt, and they had a small but efficient fleet ready to do good service as the ally of England a fact often overlooked in our popular stories of the Armada. Parma had proposed that he should attempt to reduce Flushing and obtain command of the Scheldt, as a preliminary to the enterprise against England. The Armada could then run for the Scheldt, and make Antwerp its base of operations. But Philip was impatient of further delays. Though the best of the Spanish admirals were against him, the King insisted that the Armada need only run up Channel and obtain temporary command of the straits to enable Parma to embark his army in the flotilla even from an open beach. In the King’s mind the necessity of destroying the hostile sea power as a prelude to any scheme of invasion was disregarded or was not understood.

On 30 May, in fine weather, the Armada at last sailed from Lisbon. The reports sent back to Philip II by Medina-Sidonia, as the fleet passed Cape Finisterre and stood out into the Bay of Biscay, told that all was well. But a few days later a storm from the Atlantic swept the sea, and partly dispersed the Armada. The storeships held on till they sighted the Scilly Islands, and then, finding they had parted from the fleet, turned back. Into the northern ports of Spain came scattered ships that had lost spars and sails, some of them leaking so badly that only hard labour at the pumps kept them afloat. Medina-Sidonia, with the main body, made for Corunna, where he ordered the stragglers to reassemble. On 19 June he wrote to the King reporting his arrival.

Then he sent letters betraying so much discouragement and irresolution that one wonders he was not promptly relieved of his command. He proposed that the whole enterprise should be abandoned and some means found for arranging terms of peace. He reported that the fleet had suffered badly in the storm; that there was much sickness on board; that large quantities of provisions had gone bad, and must be replaced; and that the ships were short of water. Instead of dismissing him from the command, the King wrote to his admiral ordering and encouraging him to renew the attempt. The ships were refitted and provisioned, and drafts of men collected to replace the invalided soldiers and sailors. Early in July the Armada was again ready for sea.

The news that King Philip’s Great Armada had been beaten back by the wild Biscay gales reached England when the whole country was in a fever of preparation for resistance. A commission of noblemen and gentlemen had been appointed “to sett doune such meanes as are fittest to putt the forces of the Realme in order to withstand any invasion.” The Lord-Lieutenants of the counties were directed to be ready to call out the local levies, which formed a roughly armed, and mostly untrained, militia. Garrisons were organized in the seaports, formed of more reliable and better equipped men, and a small force was collected at Tilbury to oppose a landing in the Thames estuary. Faggots and brushwood were piled on hill-tops from Land’s End to Berwick to send the news of the Spaniards’ arrival through England by a chain of beacon fires.

The best of the Queen’s advisers, men like the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham, and such experienced seamen as Hawkins, Drake, and Fenner, realized, and succeeded in persuading the Council, that it was on the sea, and not on the land, that England must be protected from invasion. Their letters in the Armada State Papers are full of practical lessons even for the present time. While insisting that the main effort must be concentrated on the fleet, they did not disregard the advisability of subsidiary preparations on land, in case of accidents. But Howard insisted that a few well-trained men were worth fourfold their number of irregular levies, and wrote to the Council:

“I pray your Lordships to pardon me that I may put you in remembrance to move her Majesty that she may have an especial care to draw ten or twelve thousand men about her own person, that may not be men unpractised. For this she may well assure herself that 10,000 men, that be practised and trained together under a good governor and expert leaders, shall do her Majesty more service than any 40,000 which shall come from any other parts of the realm. For, my Lords, we have here 6000 men in the fleet, which we shall be able, out of our company, to land upon any great occasion, which being as they have been trained here under captains and men of experience, and each man knowing his charge and they their captains, I had rather have them to do any exploit than any 16,000 men out of any part of the realm.”

The fleet, from which Howard of Effingham was ready to land these trained men if necessary, was even more numerous than the Armada itself, though the average size of the ships was smaller. On the list there appear the names of no fewer than 197 ships, ranging in size from the “Triumph” of 1100 tons (Frobisher’s ship) down to small coasting craft. The flagship, the “Ark,” or “Ark Royal,” was a vessel of 800 tons. Contemporary prints show that she had a high poop and forecastle, but not on the exaggerated scale of the Spanish galleons; and that she had four masts, and was pierced with three tiers of port-holes for guns, besides gun-ports in the stern. She had a crew of 270 mariners, 34 gunners, and 126 soldiers. Contrary to the system on which the Armada was manned, the seamen in every ship of the English fleet exceeded the soldiers in number. “The Ark” carried no less than 44 guns, namely, 4 “cannon” (60-pounders), 4 “demi-cannon” (30-pounders) 12 “culverins” (long 18-pounders), 12 “demi-culverins” (long 9-pounders), 6 “sakers” (6-pounders), and six smaller pieces, some of them mounted inboard for resisting boarders at close quarters. This was an armament equalled by few of the Spanish ships, and the fact is that the English ships as a rule were better armed than the Spaniards.

But few of Howard’s fleet were of heavy tonnage. There were only two ships of over 1000 tons; one of 900; two of 800; three of 600; five or six of 500, and all the rest less than 400 tons, many of them less than 100. But though the English ships were smaller than the Spaniards, they were better at sailing and manoeuvring, thoroughly handy craft, manned by sailors who knew how to make them do their best, and who were quite at home in the rough northern seas.

The main body of the fleet under Howard of Effingham assembled at Plymouth. Detached squadrons under Lord Henry Seymour and Sir W. Winter watched the Straits of Dover. Some of the captains thought Plymouth had been unwisely chosen as the station of the main fleet, pointing out that a south or south-west wind, which would be a fair wind for the Spaniards, would be a very foul one for ships working out of the long inlet of Plymouth Harbour.

In June, Howard had news that the Armada was not only at sea, but far on its voyage. Merchantmen ran for shelter to Plymouth, and told how they had met at least two squadrons of large ships with great red crosses on their foresails off Land’s End, and in the entrance of the Channel. One ship had been chased and fired on by a Spaniard. Then all trace of the enemy was lost. There was no news of him in the Channel or on the Irish coasts. The weather had been bad, and it was rightly conjectured that the squadrons sighted off Land’s End were only detachments of the Armada scattered by the storm, and that the great fleet had put back to Spain, probably to Corunna. This was soon confirmed by reports from France.

For a while there was an impression that the danger was over. Drake, Hawkins, and other captains urged that now was the time to take the English fleet to the Spanish coast and destroy the crippled and discouraged Armada in its harbours. But the Queen and her Council hesitated to adopt so bold a policy, and only a few ships were sent out to watch for the enemy in the Bay of Biscay. These returned driven before a strong south wind, and then fugitives from the Channel brought news that there was a crowd of ships off the Lizard, and Howard in a short note reported that he had gone out to engage them. The Armada had come in earnest at last.

After refitting at Corunna, Medina-Sidonia had sailed on 22 July with fine weather and a fair south wind. Progress was not rapid, for the great fleet’s speed was that of its slowest ships. On the 26th, when the Armada was well out to sea off the headlands of Brittany, the morning was dull and cloudy, and towards noon the wind went round to the northward and increased to half a gale, raising a heavy sea. The course was changed to the eastward, and the ships were kept under shortened sail. The four galleys, unable to face the rising storm, ran for shelter towards the French coast, and never rejoined. They went southwards before the wind. One was wrecked near Bayonne. The three others reached Spain.

All next day the gale blew heavily. The Armada, scattered over a wide extent of sea, beat slowly to windward, working away from the dangerous French coast. Many ships temporarily parted company. It looked as if there would be another failure. But on Thursday the 28th (to quote the Spanish admiral’s diary) “the day dawned clear and bright, the wind and sea more quiet than the day before. Forty ships were counted to be missing.” The admiral sent out three pinnaces to look for them, and next day, Friday, 29 July (19 July, O.S.), had news that all but one of them were with Pedro de Valdes off the Lizard. This was the crowd of ships reported that same day to Howard at Plymouth.

The missing ship, the “Santa Ana,” the flagship of Biscay, rejoined later. In the evening Medina-Sidonia saw the coast of England, and notes that it was “said to be the Lizard.” On the Saturday the admiral writes that “at dawn the Armada was near with the land, so as we were seen therefrom, whereupon they made fire and smokes." The crew of a captured fishing-boat later in the day told him they had seen the English fleet coming out of Plymouth, and in the evening Medina-Sidonia’s diary tells that “many ships were seen, but because of the mist and rain we were unable to count them.”

“From the deep the Spaniards saw
Along each southern shire,
Cape after cape in endless range,
Those twinkling points of fire.”

A council of war had been held on board his flagship, the “San Martin.” The wind was south-west, the very wind to carry the Armada into Plymouth, and dead against the English fleet coming out. De Leyva proposed that the opportunity should be taken to attack the English in Plymouth Sound. Once in the narrow waters the Spaniards could run them aboard and have the advantage of their superior numbers of fighting-men in a hand-to-hand conflict on the decks. The soldier’s advice was good, but the sailors were against him. They argued that the fleet must enter Plymouth Sound in line ahead at the risk of being destroyed in detail, as the shoals at the entrance (those on which the breakwater of to-day stands) left only two narrow channels. De Leyva’s bold plan was rejected, and it was decided that the Armada should proceed up Channel.

Next day the fighting began. The wind had shifted to the north-west, a good enough wind for working up Channel on the port tack. English contemporary accounts say the Armada was formed in a half-moon, a centre and two wings slightly thrown forward. Howard had as yet only brought part of his fleet out of Plymouth, but though greatly outnumbered by the Spaniards, he had his best ships and his most enterprising captains with him, and nothing daunted by the grand array of the Armada, he began a series of harassing attacks upon it.

It was Sunday morning, 31 July, according to the Spanish reckoning, the 21st according to the Old Style still used in England. It was a sunny day, with just enough wind to help the nimble, seaworthy English ships in their guerilla tactics. Howard’s policy was to take full advantage of the three factors that were on his side in the solution of the problem, better seamanship in his crews, better gunnery, and handier ships. To close with and grapple in the fashion of earlier naval battles would have been to risk being crushed by superior numbers. His policy was to hang upon the flank or rear of the Armada, close in and try to cripple one or more ships by artillery fire, slip away if the enemy turned upon him, come on again as they gave up the attempt to close, and he was ready all the time to swoop down upon and capture any ship that might be detached from her consorts. At the time arm-chair critics on shore found fault with what they considered the half-hearted conduct of the admiral, and the Queen’s Council inquired why it was that none of the Spanish ships had been boarded. Sir Walter Raleigh, who, as Professor Laughton notes, “must have often talked with Howard, and Drake, and Hawkins, while the business was fresh in their memories,” thus explains and defends the admiral’s conduct:

“Certainly, he that will happily perform a fight at sea must believe that there is more belonging to a good man of war upon the waters than great daring, and must know that there is a great deal of difference between fighting loose or at large and grappling. To clap ships together without consideration belongs rather to a madman than to a man of war; for by such an ignorant bravery was Peter Strozzi lost at the Azores, when he fought against the Marquis of Santa Cruz. In like sort had the Lord Charles Howard, Admiral of England, been lost in the year 1588, if he had not been better advised than a great many malignant fools were, that found fault with his demeanour. The Spaniards had an army aboard them, and he had none; they had more ships than he had, and of higher building and charging; so that, had he entangled himself with those great and powerful vessels, he had greatly endangered this kingdom of England. For twenty men upon the defences are equal to a hundred that board and enter; whereas then, contrariwise, the Spaniards had a hundred for twenty of ours, to defend themselves withal. But our admiral knew his advantage and held it; which had he not done, he had not been worthy to have held his head.”

The shift of the wind to the north-west had given the English the weather gage. They could run down before it on the enemy, and beat back against it in a way that was impossible for the clumsy galleons. Thus Howard and his captains could choose their own position and range during the fighting. It began by a pinnace, appropriately named the “Defiance,” firing a shot at the nearest Spaniards, a challenge to battle. Medina-Sidonia held his course and took no notice of it. Howard’s squadron now swept past his left, and then engaged his rear ships. The admiral himself in “The Ark” steered for De Leyva’s tall galleon, the “Rata Coronada,” perhaps taking her to be the flagship of the whole Armada. The two ships were soon in action, the English gunners firing at the Spaniard’s great hull, and De Leyva’s men aiming at the masts and yards of the “Ark” in the hope of bringing down her spars and sails, crippling and then boarding her. The better gunnery was on the English side. They fired three shots to the Spaniards’ one, and every shot told on the huge target. And shots in the hull meant much loss of life and limb in the crowded decks.

As Recalde with the rear division shortened sail, and turned to the help of De Leyva, the “Ark” and her consorts bore away, only to return again to the attack, bringing their guns into action against Recalde’s huge galleon, the “Santa Ana,” and Pedro Valdes’s ship, the “Rosario,” “Capitana,” or flagship of the Biscayan armada. These two had become separated from the main body with a few of her ships that now formed a kind of rearguard. Frobisher in the “Triumph” and Hawkins in the “Victory” were prominent in the attack. On the Spanish side several of the flagships joined in this rearguard fight. The admirals showed a chivalrous disposition to come to close quarters, and thus Howard was engaged with some of the largest and best commanded ships of the enemy. Oquendo, the admiral of Guipuzcoa, in his 1200-ton galleon, called, like that of Recalde, the “Santa Ana,” had soon to draw out of the fight, with his ship on fire and badly damaged, not by the English cannon, but by a powder explosion on his main gundeck. One only wonders that such accidents were not frequent on both sides, for the powder was ladled into the guns from open gunpowder kegs, and matches were kept burning beside each gun.

The “fighting loose and at large” went on for about three hours. Recalde’s ship was badly hulled, and also had her rigging cut up and one of her masts damaged. Pedro Valdes’s flagship, the “Rosario,” was twice in collision with a consort, with disastrous results. Her bowsprit was carried away, and her foremast went over the side, the strain on the rigging bringing down the main topmast with it. When the English drew off just before sundown, Valdes was busy cutting away the wreckage. Medina-Sidonia shortened sail to enable the rearward ships to rejoin, and then held his course up Channel. Valdes sent a request to him that a ship should be detailed to tow the disabled “Rosario,” which otherwise could not keep up with the fleet. It is generally stated that Medina-Sidonia took no notice of the message, and abandoned Valdes to his fate, but in his narrative the Duke reports to King Philip that he personally endeavoured to assist the disabled “Rosario,” and succeeded in removing the wounded from her, only failing to save her “owing to the heavy sea and the darkness of the weather.”

The English do not seem to have been troubled by the weather, and it cannot have been very bad, or the wounded could not have been taken by boats from Oquendo’s ship. Evidently no great effort was made to succour the “Rosario,” and the ships detailed for the work did not like to lie in isolation so near the English during the night. The impression in the Armada certainly was that the gallant Valdes had been shamefully abandoned by the admiral.

Before sunset a council of war had been held by Howard on board the “Ark.” It was decided to follow up the Armada through the short summer night. To Drake in the “Revenge” was assigned the task of keeping touch with them and guiding the pursuit by displaying a large stern lantern on his ship.

After dark Howard lost sight of the lantern, and then thought he had picked it up again, but at daylight he found that he must have steered by a light in the Armada, for as the day broke he lay with only a few ships perilously near the main body of the enemy. Drake explained that in the darkness he had thought that some ships of the enemy were turning back, and had followed them. He had certainly failed in his important duty, and there was a suspicion that the veteran buccaneer was really manoeuvring to make sure of a prize, for at sunrise his ship, the “Revenge,” lay near the crippled “Rosario,” which had been deserted by her consorts. He summoned Valdes to surrender, and the Spaniard, with his ship helpless and menaced by the main English fleet, hauled down his flag. The huge galleon was towed into Weymouth, the first prize of the campaign.

Howard had drawn off from the enemy, helped to secure the “Rosario,” and rallied his own fleet, which had straggled during the night. This day, Monday, 1 August (or 22 July, Old Style), there was no fighting, the Armada working slowly up Channel, followed by the English out of cannon-range. Medina-Sidonia formed a rearguard of forty galleons and three galleasses, “in all 43 of the best ships of the Armada to confront the enemy, so that there should be no hindrance to our joining with the Duke of Parma; and the Duke with the rest of the Armada should go in the van, so that the whole fleet was divided into only two squadrons, Don Alonso de Leyva taking the rear under his charge.” At 11 a.m. Oquendo’s ship was reported to be sinking. Her crew and “the King’s money” were taken out of her, and the “Santa Ana,” largest but one of King Philip’s galleons, disappeared under the grey-green waves of the Channel. In two days the Armada had lost two of its divisional flagships.

Howard had been reinforced during the day from the Western Channel ports. After the free expenditure of powder and shot the previous day, his magazines were half empty, and he husbanded his ammunition and followed up the Spaniards out of fighting range, writing to Portsmouth to have all ships there ready to join him. “We mean so to course the enemy,” he added, “that they shall have no leisure to land.”

Seymour reported to the Council from Dover that the Armada was well up Channel, and he feared they might seize the Isle of Wight. He asked for “powder and shot” for his squadron “whereof we have want in our fleet, and which I have divers times given knowledge thereof.” All the English commanders felt this want of ammunition and supplies. The Queen’s parsimony was endangering the country.

On the Tuesday morning, 2 August (23 July, Old Style), the Armada was off Portland. In the night the wind had gone round to the north-east, and as the sun rose Howard’s fleet was seen to be between the Spaniards and the land and to leeward of them. Medina-Sidonia was no sailor, but his veteran commanders saw the chance the shift of the wind had given them. The Armada turned from its course up Channel, and on the starboard tack stood towards the English fleet, hoping in Spanish phrase to catch the enemy “between the sword and the wall.”

It was an anxious moment for Howard and his captains when the Armada came sweeping down on them, the galleasses in front pushing ahead with sail and oar, behind the long lines of galleons with the wind in the painted sails of their towering masts. It looked as if the Spaniards would soon be locked in close fight with the English squadron, with every advantage on the side of King Philip’s floating castles. Led by the “Ark,” the English ships began to beat out to seaward with scant room for the manoeuvre. But just as the close fight seemed inevitable and the tall “Regazona” had almost run the “Ark” aboard, and while both ships were wrapped in a fog of powder smoke, the wind suddenly shifted again, backing to the northward. Howard was now working out well from the land, and every moment improved the position.

There was a heavy cannonade on both sides, but as the range lengthened, the advantage was with the better gunners of the English ships. The galleasses, led by the great “Florencia,” tried, with the help of their long oars, to fall on the English rear, the galleons tacked and made one more attempt “to come to hand-stroke,” but, writes Sidonia, “all to little effect, the enemy avoiding our attack by the lightness of their vessels.” Good seamanship told. Howard’s ships were soon in a position to resume the “fighting loose” tactics of the first battle, and the Spaniards knew that at this game they were the losers. So the Armada bore away, resuming its course up Channel, and the cannonade died down into dropping long shots, and then ceased, for Howard had no ammunition to spare.

On the Wednesday the two fleets crept slowly up Channel, the English some six miles astern of the Armada. Once they closed up, and a few shots were exchanged with the galleasses in Recalde’s rearguard. But Howard did not want to fight. He was only “putting on a brag countenance,” for he was woefully short of ammunition, and writing urgently for much-needed supplies. The wind had fallen, and in the afternoon some of the galleons were drifting along, heeled over by shifting guns and stores to enable the carpenters slung over the sides to plug shot-holes near the waterline.

On Thursday the fleets were off the Isle of Wight, and it was almost a calm, with occasional flaws of wind to help them on their way. Welcome reinforcements from Portsmouth joined Howard, and he received some ammunition. Soon after sunrise there was a sharp fight. The “Santa Ana” and a Portuguese galleon had fallen astern of the Armada, and Hawkins, in the “Victory,” supported by several other ships, attacked them. He had done considerable damage to the “Santa Ana,” and already reckoned her a prize, when the ever-ready De Leyva, with the great “Rata” and the galleasses, came to the rescue, and Hawkins reluctantly drew off. Howard, with the “Ark,” and his nephew, Lord Thomas Howard, in the “Golden Lion,” had come up to cover the retirement of Hawkins. They became involved in a fight with the Spanish rearguard, and the “Ark” was damaged, according to one account, by a collision, but it seems more likely that her steering gear was temporarily put out of order by a chance shot. She fell behind her consorts, and lowered boats to tow her out of action. For the moment the wind was helping the Spaniards, and, led by Medina-Sidonia himself, several galleons turned to attack the “Ark.” But the wind freshened and changed suddenly, and the English ships escaped from their dangerous position, and so the fight ended.

On the Friday it was almost a dead calm. It was a bright summer day, and from the hills of the Isle of Wight there was a wondrous spectacle of the two fleets drifting idly over miles of sea, with the sails flapping against the masts. On board the “Ark,” now repaired and again fit for action, there was a stately ceremony, the admiral, in the Queen’s name, conferring knighthood on Hawkins, Frobisher and several other of the captains who had taken a leading part in the fighting. It was decided not to engage the enemy again till the fleets had reached the Straits of Dover. Shortness of ammunition was the reason for this decision.

Medina-Sidonia was anxious on the same score. He sent off a pilot-boat to the Duke of Parma, asking him to send him a supply of “four, six, and ten-pound shot,” “because much of his ammunition had been wasted in the several fights.” The mention of such small weights shows with what light artillery most of the galleons were armed. He also asked Parma to send forty light craft to join the Armada, “to the end he might be able with them to close with the enemy, because our ships being very heavy in comparison with the lightness of those of the enemy, it was impossible to come to hand-stroke with them.”

At sunset the wind freshened, and at daybreak on Saturday the English were seen following up closely, but there was no fighting, “the Armada sailing with a fair wind and the rear close up, and in very good order.” At 10 a.m. the French coast near Boulogne was in sight. At four in the afternoon the Armada was off Calais, and at five orders were given to anchor in Calais roads, “seven leagues from Dunkirk,” or between Calais and Gravelines. The Spaniards noticed that some thirty-six ships had joined Howard’s fleet, which anchored about a league away. The new arrivals were Seymour’s and Winter’s squadrons from Dover and the Downs.

Medina-Sidonia now believed that he had all but accomplished his task. English writers say that the enemy were disappointed and discouraged when they anchored off Calais, but there is no proof of this in contemporary Spanish accounts. Medina-Sidonia thought it a success that he had got into touch with the Viceroy of the Netherlands. He had sent off a messenger to his head-quarters at Dunkirk, asking him to embark his army at once, and declaring his readiness to convoy it across Channel.

But Medina-Sidonia was in a fool’s paradise. His ignorance of war was the ultimate source of his satisfaction with the outlook. Better men, like Leyva and Recalde, realized that until the enemy’s fleet was not merely eluded, but effectively beaten, there could be no invasion of England. The French Governor of Calais told the admiral that a change in the weather might make his position very unpleasant, and Medina-Sidonia urged Parma to act at once by telling him “that he could not tarry without endangering the whole fleet.”

But Parma was neither ready nor anxious for any prompt action. The fleet of the Netherlanders, some fifty sail, was blockading most of the places along the coast where he had prepared his flat-bottomed boats. He knew better than to embark the force he had in hand at Dunkirk till Howard’s fleet was disposed of.

But Howard was determined not to leave the Armada undisturbed in its exposed anchorage. He had no sooner been joined by Seymour and Winter than he hurriedly prepared eight small craft in his own fleet to be used as fireships, by turning over to them all the inflammable lumber he could collect from the other vessels, and removing their guns, ammunition, and stores.

Medina-Sidonia had spent the Sunday writing pressing letters to the Prince of Parma, and obtaining fresh water and other supplies from Calais. When the long summer twilight ended the Armada was still riding at anchor, the irregular lines of dark hulls stretching for miles, with lanterns flickering at yard-arm or poop, and guard-boats rowing about the outskirts of the floating city. At midnight there was a cry of alarm passed from ship to ship. The tide was running strong from the westward through the Straits, and sweeping along on its current came eight dark masses, each defined in the night by a red flicker of fire that rose higher and spread wider as the English fireships came nearer and nearer.

Three years before, when Parma was besieging Antwerp, the revolted Netherlanders had attacked the bridge he had thrown across the river below the city by sending drifting down upon it a ship laden with powder barrels, with a burning fuse and powder-train to fire them, and blocks of stone heaped over them to increase the force of the explosion. The awful destruction caused by this floating volcano made the Spaniards long after fearful of the attempt being repeated elsewhere, and Medina-Sidonia tells in his diary that when Howard’s fireships came drifting through the summer night off Gravelines, he and his captains thought that they were likely to be máquinas de minas, “contrivances of mines,” like the terrible floating mine of Antwerp. With this suspicion, all idea of grappling them was abandoned. As they drew nearer there was something like a panic in the Armada. The admiral signalled to weigh anchor and make sail, but few of the ships waited for the tedious operation of getting the heavy anchors up to the cat-heads by slow hand labour on windlass or capstan. In most of the galleons the carpenter’s broad axe hacked through the cables and left the anchors deep in Channel mud. Sails were hurriedly shaken out, and like a startled flock of sheep the crowd of ships hurried away to the eastward along the coast in wild disorder. Moncada, the admiral of the galleasses, in the “San Lorenzo,” collided with the galleon “San Juan de Sicilia,” and the great galleass dismasted and with shattered oars drifted on a back eddy of the tide towards Calais bar. The fireships went aground here and there, and burned harmlessly to the water’s edge. Medina-Sidonia, seeing the danger was over, fired a gun as a signal for the fleet to anchor, but most of the ships had cut their cables, and had no spare anchors available on deck, and they drifted along the coast, some of them as far as Dunkirk. The sunrise on the Monday morning showed the great fleet widely scattered, only a few of the best ships being with the admiral. Moncada’s flagship had been left by the falling tide hard aground on Calais bar.

The English attacked the stranded galleass in pinnaces and boats, Howard with some of the larger ships standing by “to give the men comfort and countenance.” Some of the Spaniards escaped to the shore. The rest, headed by Moncada, made a brave stand against the boarders, who swarmed up her sides, led by one Richard Tomson, of Ramsgate. Moncada was killed, and the ship taken. The English pillaged her, but the hulk was abandoned and seized later by the French Governor of Calais.

During this fight on the bar Medina-Sidonia had reassembled about half his fleet, which he formed in a great crescent off Gravelines. The wind was from the west, and numbers of galleons were away to leeward. Some of them were in dire peril of driving ashore. Howard saw his advantage, and the whole English fleet bore down on the Spanish crescent. It was the nearest thing to a pitched battle in the whole Armada campaign. The English came on with wind and tide helping them and, with the confidence that was the outcome of their growing sense of superiority, ventured to close quarters with the tall Spaniards, while taking care never to give them the chance of grappling and boarding. As the fight went on the Spaniards worked slowly towards the north-east edging off the land, for their deep draught and the fate of Moncada’s galleass made them anxious about the Flanders shoals.

Howard and Hawkins led the English centre, Drake and Frobisher the right, Seymour and Winter the left. Not a shot was fired till they were at musket range, and then the English guns roared out in a well-sustained cannonade in which every shot told. It was the first of modern naval battles, the fights decided by gunfire, not by hand-to-hand conflict on the decks. The Spaniards answered back with their lighter and more slowly served artillery, and with a crackle of musketry fire. Before noon the Spanish cannon were mostly silent, for sheer lack of ammunition, and the galleons defended themselves only with musket and arquebuse, while striving in vain to close and grapple with their enemies. Spars and rigging were badly cut up, shots between wind and water were letting the sea into the huge hulls. Just as the English thought the “San Juan de Sicilia” had been put out of action and would be their prize, the galleon heeled over and went to the bottom. Soon the fight was only sustained by the rearward ships, the rest trying to extricate themselves from the melee, not for any lack of courage, but because all their ammunition was gone, their decks were encumbered with wreckage from aloft, and the men were toiling at the pumps to keep them afloat.

The English at last drew off from their persistent attacks on the rearward ships, only because after a hot cannonade of seven hours they were running short of ammunition; so they used the advantage of position and better seamanship and seaworthiness to break off from the battle, Howard hanging out the “council flag” from the “Ark,” as a signal to his leading captains to come on board and discuss the situation with him.

Medina-Sidonia, in his diary of the day, says nothing of the sinking of the “San Juan de Sicilia,” but he goes on to tell how the “San Felipe” and the “San Mateo” were seen drifting helplessly towards the shoals of the Zealand coast; how efforts were made to take off their crews, but these failed, “for the sea was so high that nothing could be done, nor could the damage be repaired which the flagship had suffered from great shot, whereby she was in danger of being lost.” This talk of rough seas shows that, brave though he undoubtedly was in battle, the Duke had the landsman’s exaggerated alarm at the choppy waves of the Channel, and regarded as a gale and a storm what a sailor would call fine weather with a bit of a breeze. None of the English commanders thought that there was a high sea that summer afternoon.

In the night it blew somewhat harder from the north-west, and as the early dawn came it was seen that the Armada was in a perilous position. The galleons, many of them with badly damaged spars and rigging, many more without anchors at their cat-heads ready to bring them up, were being forced nearer and nearer to the low sandy shores that were marked only by the white foam of the breakers, and the leadsmen were giving warning that the keels were already dangerously near to the shelving bottom along the outlying fringe of shoals. The English ships, with plenty of sea-room, looked on without closing in to attack. Little ammunition was left, and Howard and his captains were not going to waste good powder and shot on ships that seemed doomed to hopeless destruction. Some of Medina-Sidonia’s captains proposed that he should show the white flag and obtain the help of the English to tow the endangered vessels off the lee shore, but he refused to hear of such base surrender, and told them he was prepared for death. He tells in his journal of the day how a sudden change of the wind saved the fleet:

“The enemy held aloof, seeing that our Armada must be lost. The pilots on board the flagship men of experience of that coast told the Duke at this time that it was not possible to save a single ship of the Armada; for that with the wind as it was in the north-west, they must all needs go on the banks of Zeeland; that God alone could prevent it. Being in this peril and without any remedy, God was pleased to change the wind to west-south-west, whereby the fleet stood towards the north without hurt to any ship.”

The deliverance was not quite as complete as the Duke supposed. Far astern the great “San Mateo” had grounded on the shoals “between Ostend and Sluys.” Next day three English ships came to take her, but the Spaniards, notwithstanding their helpless plight, made a desperate fight for two hours before they surrendered. Don Diego de Pimentel was in command, with several nobles among his officers and volunteers. These were spared, for the sake of the ransom they might fetch, but no quarter was given to the common crowd. William Borlas, one of the captors, wrote to Secretary Walsingham: “I was the means that the best sort were saved; and the rest were cast overboard and slain at the entry." These Elizabethan sea-fighters were as cruel as they were brave.

Other ships drifted ashore or found their way into ports along the low coast to the north-eastward, but all these were taken by Prince Maurice of Nassau, admiral of the United Provinces, who with some thirty sail gleaned up the wreckage of the Armada, though he had taken no part in the fighting, only blockading Parma’s flotillas as his share of the service.

Meanwhile, saved by the shift of the wind, the main body of the Armada was speeding into the North Sea, led by Medina-Sidonia in the leaky “San Martin.” Howard and the English fleet held a parallel course, shepherding the enemy without closing in to fire a single shot. Howard was again, to use the phrase of the time, “putting on a brag countenance,” for he was in no condition for serious fighting, even against such crippled opponents. The magazines of the English fleet were all but empty, its “cannon, demi-cannon, sakers, and falconets” doomed to useless silence, food and water short in supply, and much sickness among the tired crews, who were complaining that they were badly fed and that the beer was undrinkable.

In the evening Medina-Sidonia held a council of war on board the “San Martin.” Soldiers and sailors, veterans of many wars, and the chief pilots of the fleet sat round his cabin table, and there was anxious debate. No one could say how long it would be before Parma’s army was ready; ammunition and provisions were short, men falling sick, ships badly damaged, though only a dozen had been actually lost. The wind was increasing from the south-south-west, and the pilots urged that the best course was to run up the North Sea, round the north of Scotland, reach the open Atlantic, and so return to Spain without further fighting.

Some of the best of the officers, men who had been throughout in the thick of the fighting, protested against this course, to which their admiral was evidently inclined. Recalde, Oquendo, and Leyva spoke for the brave minority. Most of the great fleet was still safe, and Recalde begged the Duke to lie off and on till the wind blew fair for the Channel again, and then risk another fight. Leyva supported him, and said that though his own ship, the “Rata Coronada,” had been sorely battered, was leaking like a sieve, and had only thirty cartridges in her magazine, he would rather take her into action again and sink fighting than see the Armada run away northward like a pack of cowards. But what seemed the easiest course prevailed. Medina-Sidonia saved his conscience as a soldier by summing up the resolution of the council as a decision to sail northward, but turn back and fight if the wind and weather became favourable.

So in the following days the Armada sped northward before the south-west wind, which sometimes blew hard and raised a sea that increased the distress of the Spaniards. Howard followed with the English fleet, just keeping the Armada in sight. If the Spanish admiral shortened sail to collect his rearward stragglers, Howard followed his example, making no attempt even to close and cut off the nearest ships. He was still reluctantly compelled by empty magazines and half-empty lockers to be content merely “to put on a brag countenance.” His shortness of supplies forced him at last to lose touch of the enemy. Off the Firth of Forth he abandoned the pursuit.

When the English ships returned to their ports the captains were not at all sure what had become of the Armada. Some thought it might have gone to the harbours of Norway and Denmark to winter and refit there, and renew the attempt next spring. One sees in the letters of Secretary Walsingham the uncertainty that prevailed among the Queen’s counsellors, and some disappointment that the victory was not more complete, though this was the result of himself and his colleagues leaving Howard so ill supplied. On the same day (8 August, Old Style) Walsingham writes to Lord Burghley: “It is hard now to resolve what advice to give Her Majesty for disarming, until it shall be known what is become of the Spanish fleet”; and to the Lord Chancellor: “I am sorry the Lord Admiral was forced to leave the prosecution of the enemy through the wants he sustained. Our half-doings doth breed dishonour and leaveth the disease uncured.”

Meanwhile, the Armada had held its course to the northward, sometimes sighted far off from a Scottish headland. On 20 August (10th, Old Style), twelve days after the battle off Gravelines, it was passing between the Orkneys and Shetlands, heading for the Atlantic, helped by a change of wind which now blew from the east, filling the great sails, but chilling the southern sailors and soldiers to the bone. Though it was summer, the cold was like that of winter, and the bitter weather grew even worse as the galleons sailed on into the North Atlantic. The great ships straggled for miles over grey foam-flecked seas, under dull cloud-packed skies that sent down showers of sleety rain. Men huddled below in the crowded gundecks, and in fore and stern castles, and there were days when only the pilots kept the deck, while gangs of men took their turn at the never-resting pumps. There were semi-starvation and fever in every ship. The chaplains were busy giving the last consolations of religion to dying men, and each day read the burial service over a row of canvas-shrouded dead, and “committed them to the deep.”

The Armada no longer held together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank in the ocean, their fate unknown and unrecorded till, as the months went by and there was no news of them, they were counted as hopelessly lost. Of others the fate is known.

In his sailing instructions Medina-Sidonia had been warned that he should take “great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that may happen to you on that coast,” where, as a sixteenth-century sailor wrote, “the ocean sea raiseth such a billow as can hardly be endured by the greatest ships.” There was heavy weather in the “ocean sea” that August and September, but even so the galleons that steered well to the westward before shaping their course for Spain, and kept plenty of sea-room by never sighting the “island of Ireland,” succeeded in getting home, except where they were already so badly damaged and so leaky that they could not keep afloat. But along the coasts of Scotland and Ireland there was a succession of disasters for those who clung to, or were driven into, the landward waters.

The first mishap occurred when the Armada was rounding the north of Scotland. The “Gran Grifón,” the flagship of Juan Lopez de Medina, admiral of the urcas or storeships, drove on the rocks of Fair Isle, the solitary cliff-bound island in the channel between the Orkneys and Shetlands. Here such few as escaped the waves lived for some six weeks in “great hunger and cold.” Then a fishing-boat took them to Anstruther in Fifeshire, where they surrendered to the bailies. Lopez de Medina was among this handful of survivors. Melville, the Presbyterian minister of Anstruther, describes him as “a very reverend man of big stature and grave and stout countenance, grey haired and very humble like,” as he asked quarter for himself and his comrades in misfortune.

Other distressed ships fled from the Atlantic storms for shelter inside the Hebrides. Three entered the Sound of Mull, where one was wrecked near Lochaline, and a second off Salen. The third, the great galleass “Florencia,” went down in Tobermory Bay. The local fishermen still tell the traditional story of her arrival and shipwreck. She lies in deep water, half-buried in the sand of the bottom, and enterprising divers are now busy with modern scientific appliances trying to recover the “pieces of eight” in her war-chest, and the silver plate which, according to a dispatch of Walsingham’s, was the dinner-service of the “Grandee of Spain” who commanded her.

But it was on the shores of the “island of Ireland” that the most tragic disasters of the Armada took place. Its wrecks strewed the north and west coasts. Fitzwilliam, the “Deputy” or the Viceroy, in Dublin, and Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, had taken precautions to prevent the Spaniards finding shelter, water, and food in the ports by reinforcing the western garrisons. Bingham feared the Irish might be friendly to the Spaniards, and industriously spread among the coast population tales that if they landed the foreigners would massacre the old and carry the young away into slavery. The people of the ports, who had long traded with Spain, knew better, but some of the rude fisher-folk of the west coast perhaps believed the slander. Where shipwrecked crews fell into the hands of Bingham’s men no mercy was shown them. He marched four hundred prisoners into Galway, and his troops massacred them in cold blood, and then he reported that, “having made a clean despatch of them both within the town, and in the country abroad, he rested Sunday all day, giving praise and thanks to God for Her Majesty’s most happy success in that action, and our deliverance from such dangerous enemies.”

One of the urcas came into Tralee Bay in an almost sinking condition, with her crew reduced to twenty-three men, ill and half starved and unable to work the ship. Sir Edward Denny, the Governor of Tralee Castle, was absent. The Spaniards surrendered to Lady Denny and her garrison. The men begged for their lives, and some said they had friends in Waterford who would pay ransom for them; but the lady had them all put to the sword, because “there was no safe keeping for them.”

In all, some twenty-five galleons were dashed to pieces under the giant cliff walls of the Irish coast, or on outlying skerries and rocky headlands. In a few cases the Irish coast folk helped the survivors, but too often they were as cruel as the English, and killed and plundered them. Sir George Carew wrote to the Queen, rejoicing that there was now “blood between the Irish and the King of Spain.” The Government troops marched along the coasts hunting for Spaniards. The Lord-Deputy Fitzwilliam accompanied one of these parties, and told how in Sligo Bay he saw miles of wreckage, “timber enough to build five of the greatest ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables, and other cordage, and some such masts for bigness and length, as I never saw any two could make the like.” Fitzwilliam fairly revelled in the destruction of the Spaniards. He wrote to Secretary Walsingham: “Since it hath pleased God by His hand upon the rocks to drown the greater and better sort of them, I will, with His favour, be His soldier for the despatching of those rags which yet remain.” At last he got tired of this miserable kind of “soldiering,” and proclaimed mercy for all Spaniards in Ireland who surrendered before 15 January, 1589. Numbers of ragged and starving men surrendered. Others had already been smuggled over to Scotland, still an independent country, where they were well treated and given transport to Spain.

The gallant Alonso de Leyva, after escaping from the wreck of his good ship the “Rata Coronada” in Blacksod Bay, was steering for Scotland in one of the galleasses that had rescued him and his comrades, when the ship was driven by a storm against the wild cliffs of Dunluce Castle, near the Giant’s Causeway. The galleass was shattered to matchwood, and Leyva perished with all on board save five who swam ashore.

In the last days of September the surviving ships of the Armada came straggling into the northern ports of Spain with starving, fever-stricken crews. Medina-Sidonia had kept some fifty sail together till 18 September. He had resigned all active duties of command to his lieutenants, Flores and Bobadilla, for he was ill and broken in spirit. His hair had whitened, and he looked like an old man, as he sat all day in the “great cabin” of the “San Martin,” with his head in his hands. A Biscay gale scattered the remnant of the Armada, and on 21 September the “San Martin” appeared alone off Santander. The wind had fallen; her sails hung loose from the yards, and the long swell that followed the gale was driving the ship towards the rocks outside the port. Some boats went out and towed her in. Most of the crew were sick. Nearly two hundred had been buried at sea.

Recalde and Oquendo brought their ships home, but landed broken with the hardships of the terrible voyage, and only survived it a few weeks. Every ship that arrived told of the many buried at sea, and landed scores of dying and fever and scurvy-stricken men, so that all the northern ports were like great hospitals. When the last galleon had struggled into harbour, fifty-five great ships were still missing. The best of the leaders were dead. Not more than a third of the sailors and soldiers survived. It was a disaster from which Spain as a naval power never really recovered. For fifty years to come the Spanish infantry still upheld their claim to be invincible on the battlefield, but the tall galleon had ceased to be the mistress of the seas.

The campaign of the Armada is remarkable not only for inaugurating the modern period of naval war, the era of the sail and the gun, but also because, though it ended in disaster for one side and success for the other, there was from first to last in the long series of engagements in the narrow seas no battle “fought to a finish.” In all the fighting the English showed that they had grasped the essential ideas of the new warfare, and proved themselves better sailors and better gunners, but the number of the ships they took or destroyed was insignificant. Howard was so crippled by parsimonious mismanagement on the part of his Government that he had to be content with “half-doings,” instead of decisive results. But there was worse mismanagement on the Spanish side, and this led first to failure, then to disaster.

The story of the Armada is full of useful lessons, but for England its message for all time is that her true defence against invasion lies not in armies, but upon the sea. The Elizabethan captains knew well that if once Parma’s veterans landed in Kent or Essex, the half-trained levies gathered by the beacon fires could do little to stop their onward march. So they took care to make the narrow seas an impassable barrier to the enemy by harrying the covering fleet and making it hopeless for Parma even to think of sending his transports to sea. The lesson is worth remembering even now.