Chapter IX · 1584-1588 (continued 2)

Then Parma passionately protests against Philip’s attitude. Let the King, he says, tell him plainly what he wishes him to do. He will do it at all risks and at any cost; but to give him orders to do one thing and expect him to do another in quite impossible circumstances is unfair. The position has changed, he continues, and the force brought by the Armada must be an overwhelming one to clear the seas or the troops from Flanders cannot cross. “The delay in the coming of the Armada is causing the total ruin of Flanders, and is hardly less disastrous to the rest of the States. The country can bear the burden but a short time longer. The greatest trouble of all is my lack of money. The cost of maintaining the boats, the keep of the soldiers, the subsidy to Guise and Lorraine, and the contract with the German mercenaries, is all so great that your Majesty must provide me with a great sum of money. If I run short, as indeed I am doing, your Majesty may be certain that evil will befall and all the past expenditure and effort will be wasted.”⁠[288]⁠

Two months after this, when the death of Santa Cruz had cast a still deeper gloom over the prospects of the Armada, Parma, now quite disillusioned, and convinced that the great enterprise would fail, urged Philip earnestly to allow him to turn the feigned negotiations for peace into real ones. “I should fail in my duty,” he wrote, “if I did not tell your Majesty that the general opinion is that if the English are proceeding straightforwardly, as they profess, and their alarm at your Majesty’s preparations and great power really inclines them towards you, it would be better to conclude peace with them. We should thus end the misery and calamity of these afflicted States, the Catholic religion would be established in them, and your ancient dominion restored. Besides this, we should not jeopardise the great fleet which your Majesty has raised, and we should escape the danger of some disaster causing you to fail in the conquest of England whilst losing your hold of the Netherlands. It is thought that it would be much best to try to settle and pacify everything during your own happy reign, so that all might prosper by the grace of God and your Majesty’s goodness. Nothing more honourable and beneficent could happen to us, no step would be more heartily welcomed by your vassals, or more effectually check your rivals, especially the heretics, than a good and honourable peace. We should thus avoid the danger of disaster. If the enterprise were in the condition we expected it to be, and secrecy had been kept, we might, with God’s blessing, have looked more confidently for a successful issue. But things are not as we intended. The English have had time to arm by land and sea, and form alliances with the Danes and the German Protestants.... They are well aware of our plans, and we shall have plenty of work to do in effecting a landing and advancing afterwards, especially if our force is inadequate.”⁠[289]⁠

And thus, point by point, the greatest soldier of his time lays bare in letter after letter the weakness of Philip’s position and the hopelessness of success in the circumstances. But to all Parma’s remonstrances and advice the King had but one cold, precise reply. The expedition was to go in God’s own service, and it would be duly carried through by His help. That being the case, Parma could only stand more stiffly than ever upon the absolute fulfilment of his conditions, without which he knew that failure and disgrace would befall him. The sea must be kept clear of enemies before he would embark a man for England, and he must have six thousand Spanish veterans from the Armada or he would not undertake the conquest. To Philip’s embarrassments there seemed no end. His greatest military officer thus predicted disaster, and would take no responsibility beyond the letter of his instructions, and Santa Cruz, his greatest seaman, had assumed the same attitude for similar reasons.

But the death of Santa Cruz in February plunged the King into deeper difficulty than ever; for although it allowed him to control the details of the command more completely than Santa Cruz would have allowed him to do, he had no officer of sufficient rank, authority, and experience to replace the dead admiral. Seamen he had, many of them fine mariners from the Biscay coast, who had commanded the great flotillas from the Indies, and had faced with varied fortune the English plundering craft any time these twenty years; but the tradition lingered that the seaman was a mere drudge to carry the nobler soldier into the fight, and the quarrelsome, haughty soldier nobles scorned to serve under a man who was a seaman only. The men in nominal command of the great ships were nearly always military officers whose orders the shipmasters obeyed. So although Oquendo, Bertondona, and Recalde, with a half score of others, were as splendid sailors as ever ploughed the seas, the supreme command of the Armada could not be given to such as they. The Spanish nobles were jealous of each other, each standing upon his dignity in a way that to modern men looks ridiculous, but which to them was a matter of the first concern in life.

The man to be appointed to command, since the King himself could not go, must be of rank so exalted as to overtop the rest, and yet so amenable to Philip’s control as to allow the fleet to be commanded practically by the King from his writing-table. The only man in Spain who seemed to unite in himself these two qualities was appointed by Philip to lead the fleet upon which depended the fate of Spain and Catholic Christendom, and he was of all men the least fit to carry to success such a forlorn hope as the Armada—the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the magnate and admiral of Andalusia, who had been so busy collecting ships and stores in Cadiz and his other ports. He was a dignified noble of early middle age, well meaning and not without administrative ability in normal circumstances, though utterly unequal to deal with critical conditions. His high rank was sufficient to ensure the obedient respect of the other nobles and to hold the sailor commanders in awe. But, as he plaintively protested to the King, in dismay, when he was first informed of his appointment, he was utterly inexperienced in practical warfare both on land and sea. He knew nothing of navigation, he was always wretchedly seasick as soon as he lost sight of land, and he was quite unable to bear the expense which such a command entailed. His wife and friends were more emphatic still, and ridiculed the idea that such a poor creature as this should assume a responsibility so tremendous. Perhaps Philip was not sorry to have a weak and timid commander who would not dare to depart a hair’s breadth from his orders. At all events, his mind was made up; and Medina Sidonia, with a shrinking heart and unwilling spirit, was forced to go to Lisbon to replace the great Santa Cruz as the Captain-General of the Invincible Armada.⁠[290]⁠

The Tagus was crowded with ships when, in March, 1588, Medina Sidonia took command. Eleven huge galleons, contributed by Portugal, headed by the flagship San Martin, was to be the squadron of the high admiral. The Andalusian squadron of fifteen vessels was to be led by Don Pedro de Valdés; and the famous Biscay seamen Oquendo and Martinez de Recalde were to lead other squadrons, and Diego Flores yet another. There were thirty-one armed store-ships, all carrying their quota of fighting-men as well as sailors, seven-and-twenty pinnaces and sloops, and four armed galleys, such as in the Mediterranean formed the Spanish fighting force. In all 114 ships lay there before the white city of Lisbon on its amphitheatre of hills. Gallant and strong they looked with their carved and gilded prows, their fluttering silken banners, and the soaring crucifix upon the highest pinnacle of their bows. But, alas! the dry-rot of Philip’s system was at the very heart of the enterprise. The soldiers came still in driblets and unwillingly. Arms were accumulating in one part of Spain, whilst the men to bear them were mustered in another. Stores went astray or remained bogged and derelict many miles from their destination; wine ran short and water went bad upon the ships. The long delay had caused the bottoms to foul and the seams to gape; and the overburdened Duke of Medina Sidonia could but clamour more piteously than Santa Cruz had done for more supplies, more men, more arms, more money, more everything, unless disaster were to fall upon the expedition. The Irish and English Catholics on the quays of Lisbon, and the priests and friars who flocked everywhere, made light of difficulties. Was it not God’s own fleet, going upon His errand, and could He be beaten? Was not England tired to death of their heretic Queen and her ministers? and was not a whole nation waiting with open arms to welcome those who came as friends and deliverers? And the haughty, confident Spanish nobles, courtiers, and soldiers, fretting in idleness, scoffed and reviled the timid councils of the Duke of Medina Sidonia. But the sailormen shook their heads sadly. They knew that Biscay storms and Channel gales could not be controlled by swords and pikes, and that at sea Drake and the West-country ships could sail several points closer to the wind than could their lumbering round-bowed galleons that looked so mighty.

No day passed without some fresh demand from Medina Sidonia; and at last Philip himself, long-suffering as he was, began to lose patience, for the spring was wearing on, and Parma, in despair, was, as we have seen, praying him either to abandon the enterprise or send him means for keeping together his dwindling army. At length, in April, it was impossible to hide any longer the open complaints of the soldier nobles. Medina Sidonia’s insatiable demands, they said, were prompted by sheer cowardice, with a view to preventing the sailing of the expedition altogether. Already he had under his command the strongest force that ever sailed the seas—130 vessels of an aggregate tonnage of 58,000 tons, 2,431 cannon, and 30,000 men, between soldiers and sailors. All was ready. The orders to the fleet had been given long since—orders that prescribed a code of conduct for the rough seamen and men-at-arms such as would have befitted a convent school. There was to be no bad language or loose talk, no dicing or card-playing, no evil living. Prayers and Masses were to be sung daily, and every man, high and low, was to be confessed and absolved; for all were going on a sacred crusade against the foes of God and the faith. The friars and priests, both on the ships and ashore, exhorted ceaselessly all these reckless soldiers and half-savage sailors, until, with hearts aflame, they too began to scowl at the tardy Duke, who alone seemed to hold them back from their heaven-sent mission.

At length, at the end of April, peremptory command came from Philip that the Armada must sail at once. The old orders to Santa Cruz were repeated. The fleet must go straight up the Channel to the North Foreland, avoiding an engagement if possible, until the main body of the English fleet should be met, as he thought it would, off Margate, where it was to be defeated or held in check, and then Parma and his army were to be protected on their way across to the Thames. All difficulties and dangers in such a plan were ignored or smoothed over by Philip. The warnings of years had been lost upon him. He still counted upon his big ships outmanœuvring and gaining the wind of the English craft; he still believed that the old grappling tactics were possible, in the face of Drake’s new strategy and the superior build of the English ships. And he broke faith with Parma too. Parma had never wavered in his condition. He would not cross the sea until he was reinforced by six thousand Spanish veterans from the Armada; and yet in these last instructions to Medina Sidonia it was left to his discretion whether these veterans should be sent. Thus all the elements of discord existed before the great fleet sailed. An almost monkish discipline was enjoined on the fleet by the King, and it is clear that Philip himself had worked his spirit into a state of fervour which made him believe that sanctimoniousness would compensate for the absence of practical provisions for success. Saints’ names alone formed the watchwords, Jesus for Sunday, the Holy Ghost for Monday, the Holy Trinity for Tuesday, and so on; whilst the ships’ boys were to chant the Salve and good-morrow at daybreak and the Ave Maria at sunset on every vessel.

On the 25th April, 1588, the sacred banner was delivered to the Duke by Philip’s Viceroy, the Archduke Albert, in Lisbon Cathedral; and thence with raised crosses, swinging censers, flaming candles, and chanting priests it was borne before the whole kneeling hosts of the Armada in the great square of the city. And then, sped by prayers and psalms of rogation, the Armada, with its cargo of hopes and fears, tried for a month in vain to get out of the Tagus, with a boisterous westerly gale blowing full into the mouth of the river. But at length, at the end of May, 1588, the fleet got clear out to sea; the Duke complaining to the last of his subordinates and of his ships to the King, and praying that God would avert disaster. Contrary winds still held the fleet back for a fortnight more on the coast, and then, on the 19th June, a great storm came and scattered the ships like chaff. Some, with the Duke, fled in dire danger to shelter in Corunna, some even were blown within sight of the Scilly Isles, and many ran into the Biscay and Galician ports. Confusion, utter and complete, overcame the host. Many of the ships were crippled, spars broken, sails split, and planks started. Provisions were spoilt; the long delay had consumed stores and water; and again Medina Sidonia appealed to the King to abandon an enterprise which seemed so ill-starred, and again he clamoured for more stores, more men, more money, more arms.

On the 24th June, in despair, he wrote to the King as follows: “When your Majesty ordered me to take command of this fleet I gave many reasons why I ought not to undertake it.... I saw that it was going against a powerful nation, which had the help of its neighbours, and that the task would require a much larger force than that collected at Lisbon; I therefore declined the command.... Since then the ships have suffered much, and the fleet is now greatly inferior to that of the English; the crews are weakened by sickness, and numbers fall ill daily in consequence of bad food.... The provisions are rotten, the water is stinking, and our stores will not last two months under the most favourable conditions.”⁠[291] Then he goes on to say that all the power of Spain, all the King’s hopes, credit, and prestige, are entrusted to this Armada, and its loss would mean irretrievable ruin. “It would be unwise,” he says, “to run such a risk even with equal forces, but much more so with such an inferior force as we have now, the men inexperienced, and the officers, on my conscience I assure your Majesty, hardly any of them knowing or capable of doing their duty.... Believe me, your Majesty, we are very weak; pray do not allow any one to persuade you otherwise.” The timid Duke was full of forebodings, but Don Pedro de Valdés and other officers were writing at the same time to the King, impatiently scoffing at the delay, and Philip sternly, almost angrily, ordered Medina Sidonia to carry out his instructions without further parley—to patch up and collect his vessels again and sail up the Channel, with God’s blessing, to conquer the heretics who were holding the fair land of England.

And thus Philip the Prudent cast to the winds all the dictates of prudence. Parma, at all events, could not be accused either of ineptitude or of cowardice, and yet he had twice solemnly warned his uncle to abandon his plan, now that all Europe knew of it and was prepared to frustrate it. If Philip had determined (as indeed he had) to run all risks and depend upon the special interposition of Providence in his favour, it was surely the height of folly to entrust the task, upon the success of which the whole future of his cause depended, to two unwilling commanders, both of whom deliberately foretold failure. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to dismiss Parma at short notice; but the letter from Medina Sidonia quoted above would amply have justified either his recall or the abandonment of the enterprise for which he, the commander, foretold defeat. Like Villeneuve at Trafalgar, Medina Sidonia was a beaten man before he met his enemy; but Philip, blind to all worldly considerations and steadfast in his faith in himself and his cause, elected to strike his supreme blow against Elizabeth with an obsolete and faulty weapon wielded by a feeble hand.

With plentiful prayers and the blessings of Churchmen, with abundant copies of Father Parsons’s allocutions to his countrymen on the blessings of Spanish rule, and Cardinal Allen’s exhortations in favour of the old faith, the Armada sailed. The victuals were scanty and bad, the water was putrid, the craft overcrowded and fever-haunted; the admiral was faint-hearted and prophesied disaster; but the crank ships, with strained spars and gaping seams, though they looked so brave and loomed so high, sailed out of Corunna on the 12th July, 1588, doomed beforehand to disaster, which only a miracle from on high could avert from them. How the disaster fell there is no space here to relate; but a week’s running fight up the Channel, and one hopeless battle at bay, struck the first irreparable blow at the fable of Philip’s irresistible power, and the prestige that clung still around the name of the Emperor and his son.

We have followed the process by which circumstances and the personal character of the chief actors in the great drama had driven Philip, after thirty years of diplomacy in trying to win England to his side without any concessions on his part, into a violent course at last. The result of his over-caution for so many years had been that he was forced to be reckless after all or fail entirely; the outcome of his fatal desire to win all for himself without risking anything was that when the crisis came he had to risk everything on a losing hazard. Elizabeth was more fortunate in the issue than her brother-in-law, but hardly more wise. Almost to the day when the Armada sighted her coasts she was beguiled into a belief that her negotiations with Parma might avert war, though Walsingham and the sailors were almost in despair at what they saw was the terrible risk she ran. She was far more hard-fisted and parsimonious than Philip, too, when once it was brought home to her that she and her people would have to fight for the independence of England. Her men, unlike those at the bidding of Philip, were full of initiative and boldness, though they had to cope with material obstacles almost as great as his. All was unready in England when the peril loomed near, and even if the Queen had been as liberal as she was stingy, sufficient stores could not in the circumstances have been improvised and concentrated.

But every one in England, high and low, did his best. There was but little of the vapouring self-confidence that led the Spanish soldiers into the disillusionment which destroyed their nation’s potency; but the predictions and assurances with regard to England of Parsons and the English Jesuits and Spanish pensioners, were all signally falsified. The moderate English Catholics, who quite conceivably might have welcomed the adoption of an English Catholic successor to Elizabeth under Spanish patronage, were indignant at the Jesuit-Spanish plan to foist Philip’s daughter upon the throne after deposing Elizabeth and submitting the country to conquest. The treatment meted out to Englishmen in Spain by the Inquisition had given even to Catholics no desire to live under a rule which made such an institution a branch of Government. So, when the time of trial came, the Howards, Catholics though they were, and often as they had been parties to Philip’s plans, fought against him as stoutly as the veriest Puritan of them all. A generation had passed away since Philip had personally felt the pulse of England. Allen, Englefield, and Parsons had not, for many years before the Armada sailed, seen with their own eyes the growing spirit of patriotism which under Elizabeth was binding Englishmen as such together, independent of their creeds; and the Jesuit Churchmen and pensioned laymen who advised Philip that the English people would welcome the men on the Armada with open arms as liberators were as the blind leading the blind, for they were not in touch with nor understood the England that had arisen since their time.

For the rest of Philip’s life, ten years, a more pressing task even than that of winning England by finesse or force claimed his every effort. The murder of Henry III. made a Protestant King of France; and to prevent the country from joining the Reformation Philip and Spain would have to fight until the last dollar was spent and the last Spanish soldier was dead. Again, the Infanta was his candidate for the Crown of all or a portion of her mother’s land; and, as in the case of England, the forces of patriotism in the end overrode the differences of creed, and all Frenchmen coalesced to oppose foreign aggression. Henry IV. “went to Mass,” it is true, and that France remained a Catholic country through his efforts was the only great triumph of Philip’s strenuous life.

From the time when the Armada, or such of the ships as escaped the wild Atlantic gales, crept home, plague-stricken, battered wrecks, and the cry of mortal anguish went up from all Spanish hearts at the cruel disappointment of their hopes, Philip, it is true, continued to strive against the woman who had beaten him. These efforts I have described elsewhere: but with no hope of conquering England by frontal attack was one little expedition after another with infinite difficulty and friction fitted out thenceforward in Corunna. For that Philip knew well the time had passed, notwithstanding the continued exhortations of the Churchmen and pensioned refugees. Thenceforward it was his plan to incite Irish Catholics to revolt, to render Elizabeth unsafe and uneasy, in order to prevent her from aiding Henry of Navarre in France; to look forward to the time when her death, by natural or unnatural means, should give him a chance of manœuvring a sovereign apt for his purpose upon the throne of England. With the failure of Philip’s thirty-five years’ struggle to gain the control of England for his ends under two sister Queens, the downfall of his own system and the decay of Spain were absolutely inevitable, though the tradition of its potency died hard and was maintained long after its reality had fled.

It is bootless to consider what would have been the result if Philip’s methods had been less rigid, and if he could have fought his enemies with their own weapons; for if such had been the case he would not have been Philip, and the situation that made the long struggle incumbent upon him would never have been created. But, though on his agonising death-bed in his poor cell at the Escorial, in the autumn of 1598, he knew that Elizabeth still defied him, and the Dutch Protestants repudiated his rule, that wherever the yoke of Rome was shaken off it could be imposed no more, he still held firmly to his faith beyond all earthly evidence, that God in His good way and time would send triumphant victory to the cause for which He and Philip had fought in partnership—the supremacy of Catholicism and the preponderance of Spain amongst the nations.