John Masters (21 page)

In 1556 Charles, King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful ruler the world had yet seen, abdicated to a monk's cell in Yuste. Philip II succeeded him and continued his father's policy of neglecting Gibraltar, whose few inhabitants were left at the mercy of the Barbary pirates. The Invincible Armada which Philip launched against England in 1588 had two odd connections with Gibraltar. The admiral he appointed to command it was the aging but most capable and experienced Alvaro de Bazan; but he died before he could embark, and in his place the king appointed a proud, stupid grandee, a soldier with no experience of the sea—Alonso de Guzman, Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia and Sixth Marquis of Gibraltar.

The years pass.... An autumn storm in Gibraltar Bay sinks a warship preparing to escort the galleons to America.... A king completes the evil work of the
Reyes Catolicos
by expelling all the
Moriscos
(descendants of Moors forcibly converted to Christianity) from Spain; there are more than a million of them. Many concentrate in and sail from Gibraltar, as many Jews had done 120 years earlier.... The same king builds watch towers all along his southern coast, one actually on the Rock (on what was then called Tarfes Altos and now Windmill Hill Flats)—this tower rather mysteriously becomes known as the Genoese Tower—and another at the foot of the north face, on the isthmus—this one is called the Devil's Tower.

... Another king visits Gibraltar but has to walk in because his carriage won't go through the gate. His courtiers upbraid the governor, who replies coldly that the gate was not made to let carriages in but to keep enemies out.... A terrible pestilence attacks the town (it is the same Great Plague which struck London in 1665).... There is a lack of oil and wheat, though a surplus of fish; and it is ordained that no ship will be allowed to load fish for export unless it has brought in a cargo of wheat or oil.... There is a steady, slow recovery from the years of neglect, and a new large mole is built, thrusting out from the western shore beyond the old southern limit of the town.

While Gibraltar thought about its fisheries and King Philip IV about the gold mines of Peru, some northern islanders were thinking about Gibraltar. In 1625 a Colonel Henry Bruce—apparently with no particular emergency in mind—presented a plan for the seizure of Gibraltar to Charles, Prince of Wales. Charles did nothing, and in 1649 (the year of the Gibraltar plague) lost his head on the block as King Charles I. His successor, Cromwell, was a military genius and on April 28, 1656, wrote to Admiral Montague on the advantages to England and the disadvantages that could be imposed on Spain if England were to gain possession of Gibraltar. The matter was further discussed and investigated, but Cromwell never took any action. His successor, Charles II of England, married a Portuguese princess, who brought him Tangier as part of her dowry. Tangier was not as easy to defend as Gibraltar, but it did give England a naval outpost at the mouth of the Mediterranean, threateningly close to Spain, and so met some of the needs which had made Cromwell think of the Rock. But in 1684 England abandoned Tangier, which reverted to the Moroccan Empire.

Spain's two centuries as the most powerful nation in the world were coming to an end. Its king, Carlos II, was a sick man with no direct heirs. France was rising fast under the unscrupulous and ambitious Louis XIV. England, recovered from its civil wars, only awaited a favorable wind to spread its sails. None of this might have directly affected Gibraltar except for the chance of a sea fight off Cape St. Vincent in 1693. The English admiral, Sir George Rooke, was severely handled by a French squadron (one of the century's small, purposeless wars was in progress). Spain happened to be allied with England in that war, and Rooke sailed his battered ships through the strait and took shelter under the Rock. The Spanish only had a few guns mounted, but they fired on the French, who veered off. Rooke was able to stay ten days, rest, and refit. The circumstance made a deep impression on him.

Before relating Gibraltar's next and critical appearance on the world stage, in a starring role, let us look at the Rock more closely in these final years of the seventeenth century.

The larger wild animals had fled, though there were still wild pig. The ape population was large, perhaps three hundred, as they had the whole Rock to roam over except for the town itself. The human population, about six thousand, was all white, and all Spanish-Catholic except for a few Genoese, some of whom lived on the east side of the Rock, round the little bay at the foot of the great sand slope. This settlement (modem Catalan Bay) was called Almadrabilla, as the Genoese worked a tunny factory there. Ferdinand and Isabella had sent prisoners into Gibraltar, partly to increase the population, but it was no longer as necessary to people the Rock as it had once been, and thieves, murderers, and runaway women no longer formed a large part of the population.

Nearly everyone lived inside the walls in the three joined "neighborhoods" which constituted Gibraltar—Villa Vieja to the north, under the Moorish castle; Barcina in the middle; Turba to the south; the whole being tucked into the northwest angle of the peninsula. The chief Moorish mosque had been converted into a church, and there were four other churches, together with a monastery, two convents, and the friars who manned the Hospital of San Juan de Dios. A public-spirited citizen had built this in 1587 in the upper part of Barcina for patients suffering from the new scourge brought back from the Americas along with tomatoes, potatoes, turkeys, and maize: syphilis.

A small chapel and shrine to Our Lady of Europa stood at the southern tip of the Rock and over the years had been richly endowed with silver crucifixes, candlesticks, and ornaments. The Nuns' Well does not seem to have been used, and there was no other settlement on the southern plateau (Tarfes Bajos, or Europa Flats).

For defense there were the Devil's Tongue Battery on the Old Mole, Tuerto Battery by the New Mole, San Joaquin Battery below the Moorish castle, facing over the isthmus, and Half Moon Battery near the foot of Charles V's Wall, plus various towers, bastions, small isolated forts, and, of course, the walls. The Governor was Diego Salinas, an able and conscientious general of artillery. To man his batteries, towers, bastions, forts, and walls he could count on 60 infantry, 6 cavalry (without horses), 140 military pensioners, and about 220 citizen militia. Many of the guns were dismounted, and for others there was no powder or shot. Blinded by the westward glare of the gold from Potosi, Spain had left its back door open.

As the unhappy King Carlos II of Spain approached his death, the maneuverings in the courts of Europe to influence the choice of his successor became more frantic and unprincipled. Carlos himself wanted to name his nephew Charles, an archduke of the Holy Roman Empire. Louis XIV wanted him to name another nephew, the Duke of Anjou, who was Louis' grandson. The wretched dying king turned to the Pope for advice. The Pope supported Louis, and Carlos gave in. On November 1, 1700, he died. Louis XIV made two famous remarks: first, to his grandson: "You are now King of Spain, but never forget that you are also a prince of France"; second, to the world at large and Spain in particular: "There are no more Pyrenees"—which, in practice, meant that Spain would be tied to the French chariot wheels for the next century, the century of England's great overseas drive.

England, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire (its capital was Vienna) did not acquiesce in the accession of the Duke of Anjou, as Philip V, to the Spanish throne. They supported the Archduke Charles, who styled himself King Charles III. The War of the Spanish Succession began. The English and Dutch sent a combined fleet and marines to seize Cadiz. Repulsed there, they landed at Puerto Santa Maria across the bay and raped, killed, sacked, and pillaged the undefended town in a strenuous effort to win the Spanish people's affection for the Archduke Charles. Don Diego Salinas, feeling exposed and abandoned on his Rock, started pestering Madrid for more men, guns, powder, and money. Madrid made urgent and successful preparations to do nothing. The Archduke Charles' agent, Prince George of Hesse, supported by another large Anglo-Dutch fleet, set up headquarters in Lisbon, rather to the embarrassment of the Portuguese.

There have always been separatist tendencies in Spain, where at least two of the principal cultures, those of the Basques and Catalans, are alien to the Castilian tradition of the central power; and the Prince of Hesse thought he could raise Catalonia for the archduke if he landed in sufficient strength in Barcelona, its capital. The large fleet therefore sailed, made its landing, seized and held Barcelona, and waited for the popular rising. The Catalans' conspiracy failed to rise.

The fleet reembarked its marines and sailed away. The naval commander-in-chief must have been racking his brains thinking what he could do to wipe out the setback. He had, after all, been entrusted with some sixty warships and seventy transports for many months, and what did he have to show for it?

As the fleet headed into the Strait of Gibraltar the admiral, contemplating the gray lion-rock on his starboard bow, had an idea—for his name was George Rooke. He quickly hove the fleet to off Tetuan and held a council of war. All agreed to seize Gibraltar. The fleet sailed again, and on August 1, 1704 (N.S.), anchored off the Rock. At 3 P.M. 1,800 marines of the battalions of colonels Sanderson, Villars, and Fox (later the 30th, 31st, and 32nd Foot) landed on the isthmus, cutting off Gibraltar from land contact with the rest of Spain. The Eleventh Siege had begun.

It did not last long. The prince sent a demand to the governor to surrender to him as the representative of Gibraltar's lawful sovereign, Charles III. The governor replied stoutly that they were loyal subjects of Philip V. The surrender demand was repeated and again rejected. Contrary winds prevented the fleet's moving into position until August 3, when it anchored close in and opened fire. The warships mustered about 4,000 guns and 25,000 sailors; the transports held 9,000 troops. Even if Don Diego Salinas' six cavalrymen had had horses, they could only have used them to fade more rapidly from such a bad scene.

Later that day sailors assaulted direct from the ships. Captain Jumper of the
HMS Lenox
led one party ashore inside the foot of the New Mole (the modem Jumper's Bastion). The Tuerto fort was blown up and 100 English sailors with it, but these were almost the only allied casualties, and next day the governor asked for an armistice while the terms of capitulation were worked out.

Some of the English ran amok, pillaging, looting, and raping—the worst excesses being committed at the Shrine of Our Lady of Europa. Here they raped a number of nuns and girls sent there from the Convent of Santa Clara in the town for safety from the bombardments. They also smashed the images, stole the relics, and defiled the sanctuary. They were Protestants—the Inquisition had taught the rest of Europe to translate "Spaniards" as "cruel fiends"—they had been a long time at sea, they were following a hallowed tradition of how the English behave in victory (some of them must have taken part in the picnic at Puerto Santa Maria): but their actions did little to advance the reputation of their country or the cause of the archduke.

On August 5 the governor signed the surrender. One of the terms was that any Spanish inhabitant of Gibraltar who took the oath of allegiance to Charles as the true king of Spain could stay and keep his house and all his possessions. Few did, and those mostly Genoese. The exodus—the fourth in Gibraltar's recorded history—began. For days the people, carrying what they could, straggled across the isthmus, past the ruins of Carteia, into the hills above the Guadarranque. Here they founded the new town of San Roque "in which is incorporated that of Gibraltar." Over the weeks the intrepid priest of St. Mary's Church, Father Juan Romero de Figueroa, smuggled church valuables and town records out to San Roque. One large image of St. Anthony is legendarily said to have been taken out on a donkey's back, clothed and supported as a sick man.

But the Key of Spain, as King Enrique IV had called Gibraltar, was in the hands of the pretender, the Archduke Charles ... for a few minutes. At the surrender ceremony the Spanish flag was lowered (a mistake of protocol, this: if Charles claimed to be King of Spain, it should have been left flying) and Charles' personal standard, a modification of the imperial flag, raised.

Admiral Sir George Rooke looked at it and decided that it would not do. This was not what he had in mind when he proposed the seizure of Gibraltar. He ordered Charles' flag taken down and the English flag run up instead. Gibraltar now belonged to Queen Anne.

Bad feeling spread quickly. Some admirals stole guns, some stole wine, Dutch squabbled with English, sailors with marines. Admiral Rooke sailed out and met a French fleet off Malaga. It was a hard-fought day, and the French might have had a clear victory but for the "advice" of Louis XIV's personal representative afloat, who, of course, had to be obeyed. As it was, Rooke was very early able to prove the value of his capture, as he once more limped into the shelter of its guns to repair and refit. Then he sailed again, with all the warships and transports.

The force ashore, left to wait the inevitable counterattack, looted the empty houses, found hidden wine and brandy, and, sometimes, paid for the excesses they or their comrades had committed in the assault. The Spanish sprang into galvanic action to regain what, with a little care, they need never have lost. An army of 9,000 Spanish and 3,000 French soldiers (these latter under General Cavanne) began to gather on the mainland opposite Gibraltar, under the overall command of the Marquis of Villadarias. The British now had some 3,000 men in permanent garrison with many guns, all in working order. They dug inundations on the sandy isthmus to canalize any attack still more narrowly. On October 8, 1704, the Spanish started on their siege trenches.

Inside the besieged town and fortress of Gibraltar, then, the night of October 25, about midnight...