The Pirate Queen (49 page)

Since Cape St. Vincent was not on the strategic map for the naval campaign agreed with Elizabeth, Burroughs objected strongly to Drake’s disobeying the queen’s orders. Drake countered accusing Burroughs of mutiny and treason, and ordering him put under arrest on the
Golden Lion.
But in an exceptional turn of events, Burroughs’s men mutinied against Drake, and released their captain, who hightailed it back to London in the queen’s ship. While sailing southward to Cape St. Vincent, Drake had him tried in abstentia for desertion and treason, sentencing him to death. But by the time Drake would catch up with Burroughs again in London, Burghley had ensured that his man was well beyond Drake’s wrath.

At Cape St. Vincent, the English fleet destroyed fishing boats and coasters bringing barrel staves for the Armada’s water barrels. From a twenty-first century vantage point, this may seem petty; yet it was the most successful portion of the Spanish raid in strategic terms. Without the staves to hold the water barrels together, it was impossible to store water and food for any long voyage. Through this single act of piracy, Drake had ensured that the Armada would be doomed to yet another lengthy delay, and escaped Elizabeth’s promised retribution.

Yet where was Recalde? While waiting for his answer, Drake wrote to Walsingham: “I assure your honour the like preparation
[at Cadiz] was never heard of nor known as the King of Spain hath and daily maketh to invade England…. I dare not almost write of the great forces we hear the King of Spain hath. Prepare in England strongly and most by sea!”
¹⁶

Drake’s tendency to lawlessness had always been overlooked because of his sheer brilliance as a commander. Cadiz was the first time the English lower, sleeker ships had been used against the Spanish vessels in “skirmish” tactics. It was also the first time that smaller ships had outgunned the towering Spanish galleons. But even Drake knew that unless he could bring back chests of swag, he would
be
history, rather than finding his place in it.

As luck would have it, by the time Drake sailed from Cadiz, Recalde had already anchored in Lisbon harbor. Drake pursued him, sailing north along the Portuguese coast, and landed unopposed at Lagos. Columns of Spanish horsemen shadowed the English invaders and opened fire, and the English made a dash to the rather unimpressive Sagres Castle and captured it. Drake probably never realized that it was the castle of Prince Henry the Navigator, the first royal ever to promote maritime exploration. Nonetheless, he wrote in his ship’s log that day, “continuing to the end, yields the true glory.”

Then, as ever, his luck changed. On June 1, the whole fleet weighed anchor, and ships carrying Drake’s dispatches and diseased or disabled turned northward, while the fleet sailed south for the Azores. Drake had had news that the king’s own carrack, the lumbering
San Felipe
, was homeward-bound from Goa with its annual cargo of spices, jewels, and other oriental goods that were fruits of Portugal’s eastern empire.

By now Philip II was apoplectic with rage at Drake’s ignominious escapades along the Portuguese coast and Cadiz. He already feared that
El Draco
had heard of the approaching
San Felipe
from caravels in the Guinea trade before the bad news had reached him. After all, the
San Felipe
was the vessel worth 3 million
reals
that Philip needed badly to fit out the Armada in its final stages. Most of all he needed her treasure.

On June 18, at São Miguel in the Azores, the
Elizabeth Bonaventure
“engaged” Philip’s carrack and easily seized her. The
San Felipe
’s
guns were so jammed with precious cargo that she was unable to use them against the English marauders. The carrack was stuffed with pepper, cinnamon, cloves, calicoes, silks, ivories, gold, silver, and caskets of jewels. The total value was £114,000 ($32.01 million or £17.3 million today) and three times the value of all the ships’ cargoes he had sunk, seized, or burned in Cadiz Bay. Considering that the queen’s ship, the
Elizabeth Bonaventure
, could be provisioned for £175 monthly, and that £40,000 put an entire army in the field, this was a colossal booty—even for Drake.

Its capture also meant that Sir Francis needed to set sail immediately for England to save his prize, forfeiting all the unfinished goals set by his queen back home. The loss of the
San Felipe
would aggravate Philip’s precarious financial position and lead him to make ever more desperate deals with his enemies and allies alike in order to launch his Armada. While Drake, as admiral, had not destroyed the Armada fleet, he had so confused and disrupted Spanish and Portuguese shipping that he had bought Elizabeth’s England another year to prepare for the enterprise. In Drake’s own words, “there must be a beginning of any good matter.”
¹⁷

36. The Plundering of the Spanish Armada

If the late Queen would have believed her men of war as she did her scribes, we had in her time beaten that great empire in pieces and made their kings kings of figs and oranges as in old times.

—SIR WALTER RALEIGH

T
he country was in an uproar when Drake returned with the treasure from King Philip’s carrack. Not only was Drake’s name on everyone’s lips, in every pamphlet, and blessed in every church in an exultation of joy, but he had provided a boost of confidence to the court and the people. The queen was delighted with her portion of the takings, but again threw the court into dismay against her when she steadfastly refused to prepare for the inevitable war. Drake cajoled and begged Elizabeth, having written to Walsingham while still in pursuit of Recalde and the flota: “I dare not almost write unto your Honour of the great forces we hear that the King of Spain hath out…. Prepare in England strongly, and most by sea. Stop him now, and stop him ever.”
¹

From that moment until the time he was finally let loose, Drake sang the same song, over and over. He longed to capture the fleet, in port, at Lisbon while it was still assembling its victuals and forces. “The advantage of time and place,” Drake wrote to the queen on April 13, 1588, “in all martial actions is half the victory.”
²
He had certainly convinced Lord Admiral Howard that his tactics were right, but the queen remained unmoved. England possessed the most sophisticated mobilization system of the age, and could muster and load men and supplies aboard ship in weeks, as opposed to the Spanish method that seemed to take years. Though she didn’t want to let on to Drake, his latest escapade had done more damage than the taking of the
San Felipe
and the destruction and plundering of
ships and critical supplies. Philip had been obliged to suspend the silver fleets for 1588 and, in addition to his astronomical papal loans, borrow money from the merchant banking houses of Fugger and Spinola.
³
The blow to Spanish pride had been colossal.

Yet the queen knew that her own system, while finely tuned, was also fragile. Unlike Philip, her borrowing capability was restricted to small sums and for short periods of time. Parliament had voted an increase in her expenditure to £72,000 a year at the beginning of 1588, and, thanks to her parsimonious nature, she still had a further £154,000 in her reserves ($41.94 million or £22.67 million today). Considering that the first year of Dutch financial assistance had cost her £160,000, and that the navy’s best estimate for a partial naval mobilization would cost £15,000 a month, Elizabeth simply couldn’t afford the luxury of granting Drake his “advantage of time and place” until—possibly—the very last second.
⁴
Her parsimony has been blamed for much of what went wrong in the preparations for the Spanish Armada battle, but even with all the money in the world, it would have been unwise to prepare and man the fleet. It was virtually impossible to keep ships manned for combat at sea for any length of time without sickness—scurvy or dysentery—ravaging the crews. The lack of funds, in this case, saved English lives.

In addition to her financial woes, the queen also had to assuage any number of bruised egos in the formation of her fighting force. Her dear “Water” had been begging to send relief to his second group of colonists newly installed in Virginia, but she dared not allow any of her expert captains to sail with men and provisions for such a task. England needed all its resources to hand. Raleigh also could not understand why his West Country cousin had been selected as the lieutenant general of the fleet when
he
was the queen’s obvious favorite! Frobisher, too, cut up rough when she had selected Drake as Howard’s second in command, but he was swiftly reminded of his numerous failures at sea and Drake’s phenomenal successes to keep him in check. William Burroughs, too, had been offended by Drake’s appointment, especially as his “case” had not as yet been settled by the High Court of the Admiralty. Henry Knollys had taken a dislike to the upstart Drake after their run-in during the 1585 West Indies voyage, and he let his feelings be known as well. The only naval man not to make his ego felt was Drake himself, who never made any
reference to the Lord High Admiral Howard’s having no sea battle experience whatsoever.
⁵

Philip, too, had a number of worries beyond the obvious financial double whammy of no fleets arriving with treasure, combined with past depredations coupled with the threat of future ones. Then, of course, Santa Cruz had done the unthinkable. He died. It was with an extremely heavy heart that Philip named the soldier and “hero” of Cadiz, Medina Sidonia, as Santa Cruz’s replacement. Medina Sidonia was the next most high-ranking peer of the realm, and, as such, his appointment was “God’s obvious design.” Philip may have been obliged to make him admiral of the fleet, but he was not obliged to trust him. Medina Sidonia made his lack of confidence in the undertaking clear to his king, and all Philip could urge was, “sail…sail.” Parma, too, had lost any enthusiasm for Philip’s hybrid scheme devised to save money, since it would most likely lose lives. Like Elizabeth, the King of Spain had no conception of how wars were actually fought at sea, and the difficulty that his generals would have in meeting up with the English baying at their heels. No practical suggestions were forthcoming either as to how Parma’s forces could board from their two hundred or so skiffs onto the Spanish galleons without being attacked by the Dutch, who still controlled the deepwater ports. Above all, Spanish mutinies could be brought on by lack of prompt pay. This would mean that the Armada would need to travel with treasure for her mariners, and keep them loyal.
⁶

Philip also had to play a treacherous double game—persuading Protestant nations of the north of Europe (and thereby ones which could inconveniently intervene in his battle plan) that his invasion of England was strictly political, while reassuring the Catholic countries that his motivations were purely religious. Such conceits could be kept “secret” for only a short period. Time was, as a result, his enemy as well.
⁷

And so, through a series of half-measures, concessions on the part of the monarchs and their nobility, and the disparate voices of their adventurers, Elizabeth and Philip prepared to have their fleets meet in what would become the first modern naval battle in history. Pitted against the imperious, high-castled Spanish galleons
were Hawkins’s smaller, sleeker, more heavily armed warships and pinnaces. Yet the notorious English weather conspired against each of them, preventing Medina Sidonia from reaching England until the end of July and keeping Drake and Howard from sailing out beyond France to attack Lisbon. It would become an engagement simplistically remembered by history as won by “a great wind.” It was, in fact, no such thing.

The formation of England’s fleet was divided into seven types: the queen’s ships; merchant ships serving “westward under Sir F. Drake”; those “set forth and paid for by the City of London”; merchant ships and barks in the queen’s pay; coasters under the lord admiral paid for by the queen; coasters under Lord Henry Seymour; and volunteers that joined the fleet after the attack by the Armada.
⁸
In all, some 182 ships and 15 victualing ships. Six ships only were 300 tons or more—the
Galleon Leicester
, the
Edward Bonaventure
, the
Merchant Royal
, the
Roebuck
, the
Hercules,
and the
Sampson
. Another twenty were between 200 and 300 tons, and proven fighters, like John Watts’s
Margaret and John
, a merchant ship from the City of London. Also on England’s side was a superior naval efficiency in victualing and in repairs, with the long established royal dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich, and Chatham.
⁹

Spain, amazingly, had no royal dockyards, which made their preparations ponderous and extremely inefficient. Through attrition, by the time the Spaniards reached the Channel, their fleet had already lost over twenty ships. While the 127 vessels sailing toward England were slightly fewer than the total English contingent, they were dramatically impressive in their tightly knit crescent formation, and vastly outweighed the English ships. Twenty were warships, or armed merchantmen of considerable stature and force. Four of these were galleasses (mixed oared and sail vessels that had helped Philip to win at Lepanto over sixteen years earlier). All the rest were transports, the tubby
urcas
for victuals or small craft for communications and distribution. In the spring storms that drove them back to Corunna in May, they had lost four other galleys.