Elizabeth's Spymaster (31 page)

The renowned naval commander John Hawkins wrote to Walsingham on 1 February, urging a naval reconnaissance expedition to Spain or imposing a small blockade. He understood very well which arguments would convince the reader of his letter:

Having of long time seen the malicious practices of the papists combined generally throughout Christendom to alter the government of this realm and to bring it to papistry and consequently to servitude, poverty and slavery, I have a good will from time to time to do and set forward something as I could have credit to impeach their purpose …

If we stand at this point in a mammering [hesitation] and at a stay, we consume [burn in a fire], and our commonwealth utterly decays…

Therefore, in my mind, our profit and best assurance is to seek our peace by a determined and resolute war, which in doubt, would be both less charge, more assurance of safety and would best discern our friends from our foes … abroad and at home and satisfy the people generally throughout the whole realm.
¹⁰

Hawkins urged that a permanent force of six English warships should be stationed off the Spanish coast, with enough food, water and munitions for four months, supported by six smaller scouting vessels. This naval force would ‘be a sufficient company to distress anything that goeth through the seas’. He estimated the resources required should include a complement of 1, 800 sailors, with a monthly pay and supplies bill of £2,700 (or £442,792 at today’s prices). Finally, Hawkins added persuasively: ‘By open wars, all the Jesuits and ill-affected persons would be discerned and cut off from the hope of their malicious practices.’

The following month, Walsingham received, by a circuitous route,
¹¹
alarming intelligence of the progress of the Spanish build-up: 400 ships and fifty galleys were now in and around Lisbon, with 74, 000 soldiers being mustered in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Flanders. This order of
battle did not include the 1, 200 gunners and 8, 912 sailors already in Spain, together with accumulated provisions including 184, 557 quintals of biscuit, 23, 000 quintals of bacon, 23, 000 butts of wine, 11, 000 quintals of beef and 43, 000 quintals of cheese.
¹²
The invasion clock was ticking faster.

Early reports received by Walsingham also concerned the Armada’s armament, which was for ‘the most part… cast iron pieces [cannon] and lying very high, not to do great damage’
¹³
– important intelligence about Spanish firepower that later helped determine the English tactics for the coming battle at sea.

In London, news of these preparations suggested that a pre-emptive naval strike on the growing Armada was now becoming imperative – to win more time for the painfully slow preparations for the defence of England, which were constantly hampered by Elizabeth’s procrastination and penny-pinching.

The queen was urged to send Sir Francis Drake with a squadron of warships, ostensibly to support the pretender to the Portuguese crown, Don Antonio. In reality, an attack was planned on Spanish ports and the provisions necessary for invasion stored there and to destroy as much enemy shipping as possible. There was absolutely no hope of totally neutralising the mounting threat posed by the Armada, but the invasion plans could be disrupted and its sailing date delayed.

Elizabeth, as was her usual wont, hesitated over giving approval to the daring plan despite Walsingham, Leicester and Lord Admiral Howard arguing strongly for such decisive action. Raleigh, if later Spanish spy reports are believed, was an equally vociferous opponent.
¹⁴
On 15 March 1587, the queen eventually (and reluctantly) permitted Drake’s bold mission, involving twenty-seven ships and 2, 200 men, for what was to become a punitive expedition against Spain. With typical parsimony, she agreed to only four of her own warships
¹⁵
accompanying Drake, with the remainder fitted out and paid for by London merchants or other private investors.

He departed on 2 April, embarrassingly delayed by a large-scale desertion by his sailors on the eve of sailing, perhaps subverted by those
in government opposed to the naval adventure, as the operation had been kept strictly secret from all but the highest ranks. On board his flagship, the 600-ton
Elizabeth Bonaventure,
on the River Thames, Drake penned a last flamboyant letter to Walsingham:

Let me beseech your honour to hold a good opinion not only of myself, but of all these servitors in this action …

The wind commands me away.

Our ship is under sail. Haste!
¹⁶

Despite the clandestine preparations for the voyage, the Spanish soon learnt of Drake’s departure. On 7 April, one of their agents across the English Channel in Rouen recounted his conversations with a French merchant who had arrived the previous day from England. He reported that

Captain Drake had left the Thames with forty well-armed ships, five belonging to the queen, of 800 or 900 tons each and carrying 5, 000 men. The merchant saw the fleet pass before Rye [Sussex] on the way to Falmouth, where they are to join forty or fifty more …

The rumour was that this fleet was going to encounter the [West] Indian flotilla.

We are astonished at the great diligence and secrecy with which this fleet has been equipped, for up to the moment, not a word of it has reached us here.
¹⁷

The southern English ports had been closed by government order to prevent news of Drake’s mission leaking out. Afterwards, the Spanish claimed that

so much cunning was employed that even Secretary Walsingham refrained from sending hither [Paris] a dispatch from his mistress [Elizabeth] so that the courier might not say anything about it.
¹⁸

It was almost inevitable that Elizabeth would begin to have second thoughts. Reports reached her – perhaps simply propaganda issued by the Spanish – that preparations for invasion had slowed and the phantom
of peace materialised before her eyes, replacing the spectre of an expensive war that had haunted both her waking hours and her closely guarded purse. A week after Drake had sailed, she sent an urgent message to Plymouth instructing him to attack only Spanish shipping at sea, and to steer well clear of Spanish ports. Her new orders prohibited him from entering ‘forcibly into the said king’s [Philip’s] ports or havens, or to offer violence or to do any act of hostility upon land’.
¹⁹
Walsingham feared, as suggested by the rumours he picked up at court, that the queen would now recall the force altogether. Elizabeth’s new orders were sent on by a pinnace,
²⁰
but it was delayed by storms in the Bay of Biscay. Drake was long gone. The queen’s change of heart had come too late; quite literally, she had missed the boat.

By 20 May, Mendoza had discovered the true mission of Drake’s squadron. After tapping a source obviously close to his English counterpart in the French capital, he wrote immediately to King Philip, reporting that Walsingham and Howard had described in letters just

how diligent they were in getting Drake away with the fleet, without anything being known about it a week before its departure.

[Drake’s] orders were to prevent the junction of your majesty’s fleet and enter what ports he could.

They have fresh letters from Spain reporting that… the [West] Indian flotillas were not coming this year, so they have sent a dispatch boat after Drake, ordering him on no account to enter any port in Spain, but to confine himself strictly to preventing the junction of the fleet, especially the galleasses
²¹
coming from Italy. He was to wait and capture two argosies
²²
which were to bring munitions from Italy.
²³

But events overtook even this astonishingly accurate intelligence. On 19 April, Drake sailed audaciously into the harbour of Cadiz in Andalucia in south-west Spain, surprised the garrison and destroyed thirty-seven of the eighty ships anchored there, setting them ablaze or blowing them up in an enjoyable twelve-hour orgy of demolition.
²⁴
Drake wrote to Walsingham on 27 April that he had burnt one ship of 1, 500 tons and brought away four ‘to sell to the Moors. God make us all thankful that her majesty
sent out these few ships in time. There must be a beginning of any great actions, but continuing to the end yields the true glory’.
²⁵

But he made no mention of a disquieting incident that occurred during the action. Drake’s second-in-command William Borough
²⁶
was outraged at his foolhardiness in launching the attack and sulkily took his flotilla out of the harbour during the action. Despite this less than shining example of English naval dash and derring-do, after wreaking destruction at Cadiz, Drake cast around for other convenient targets of opportunity. Lisbon was too strongly fortified, and after taunting the Spanish admiral there in the vain hope of luring his ships into the open sea and battle, the English squadron sailed on to Cape St Vincent.

An assault on Lagos was beaten off, but Drake personally led the force that attacked, up a steep slope, the fort perched high on Cape Sagres. Timber, pitch and bundles of firewood were piled high up against the fort’s wooden gates under covering small-arms fire and set alight, but before the blaze could provide entry into the stronghold, its defenders cravenly sought terms for surrender.

Drake daringly held the fort for three weeks as a base from which he could harry Spanish shipping, and around 100 ships were captured and their cargoes destroyed. Thomas Fenner, one of Drake’s captains, told Walsingham in a dispatch on 17 May:

The marquis of Santa Cruz [the Spanish naval commander] was near with seven galleys … but would not attack. Twelve of her majesty’s ships were a match for all the galleys in the King of Spain’s dominions.
²⁷

One important coup was the destruction of a year’s supply of iron hoops and oak staves for making barrels. This alone was later to prove a tactical disaster for the Armada: food and water had to be stored in unseasoned, leaky casks that depleted water supplies or quickly rotted the food stored within.

The small English force then headed west for the Azores in the hope of intercepting a treasure ship from the Americas and winning some more booty for their merchant backers. Drake’s luck still held good. He
captured the Portuguese carrack
²⁸
San Felipe
on 18 June, together with her cargo of precious spices, ivory and silks from the East Indies, valued then at
£
114, 000, or
£17,
900, 000 at today’s prices.

Elizabeth, her earlier doubts now swiftly and conveniently forgotten, told the French ambassador Châteauneuf that she had heard on 13 May that Drake ‘had burnt the ships at Cadiz and had sacked the country’. The envoy found her dramatic news difficult to believe and she told him acidly: Then you do not believe what is possible.’

The squadron arrived back in Plymouth on 26 June 1587 to national hero-worship and unbridled adulation. Drake had destroyed or crippled about 10, 000 tons of Spanish shipping, ruined much of the Armada’s stock of provisions and, as an added benefit, captured a cargo that paid for the adventure many times over, no doubt thrilling the queen and his number-crunching financial backers in London. Furthermore, his awesome, reckless exploits had created a lasting moral ascendancy for English seamanship and naval tactics, and the much-vaunted Spanish naval and military power now seemed impotent against him. Most importantly, he had achieved the strategic objective of his mission: to delay the sailing of the Spanish invasion force for at least twelve months. No wonder the fearful Spanish called him
El Dracque –
the Dragon.

Walsingham was cock-a-hoop at the success of the expedition. He urged that Drake should immediately be sent back to the Azores to prey on the ponderous treasure ships that regularly brought silver bullion from the Americas, as a means of waging bruising economic warfare on King Philip. The best way ‘to bridle their malice is the interrupting of the Indian fleets’, he advised Burghley on 16 July.
²⁹
Elizabeth, however, unsurprisingly turned down the idea.

Attacking the Armada in and around its home ports was one thing, but Walsingham clearly had other methods for crippling or delaying the projected invasion. There are indications that he regularly monitored Spain’s annual revenues as a means of evaluating its financial ability to wage war against England.
³⁰
One of his schemes for countering the invasion fleet was to turn off the cash tap that financed it. To achieve this, he recruited the assistance of the powerful foreign banks.

The spy master suggested, via the London financiers, that the great banking houses of north Italy, like the Corsinis, and the gold exchanges of Genoa and Florence should refuse to provide any lengthy credit to the king of Spain – thereby starving the Armada of necessary funds. Thomas Sutton, the merchant, financier and founder of the Charterhouse almshouses in the City of London, may have been one of his prime agents in negotiating such useful cooperation from the hard-nosed Italian bankers,
³¹
and they turned down or delayed the Spanish king’s request for loans.