With 1588 the final crisis came. Philip—haughty, gloomy, and ambitious
Philip, unskilled in arms, but persistent in his plans—sat in his
palace at Madrid like a spider forever spinning webs that enemies tore
down. Drake and the English had thrown the whole scheme of the Armada's
mobilization completely out of gear. Philip's well-intentioned orders
and counter-orders had made confusion worse confounded; and though the
Spanish empire held half the riches of the world it felt the lack of
ready money because English sea power had made it all parts and no
whole for several months together. Then, when mobilization was resumed,
Philip found himself distracted by expert advice from Santa Cruz, his
admiral, and from Parma, Alva's successor in the Netherlands.
The general idea was to send the Invincible Armada up the English
Channel as far as the Netherlands, where Parma would be ready with a
magnificent Spanish army waiting aboard troopships for safe conduct
into England. The Spanish regulars could then hold London up to ransom
or burn it to the ground. So far, so good. But Philip, to whom
amphibious warfare remained an unsolved mystery, thought that the
Armada and the Spanish army could conquer England without actually
destroying the English fleet. He could not see where raids must end and
conquest must begin. Most Spaniards agreed with him. Parma and Santa
Cruz did not. Parma, as a very able general, wanted to know how his
oversea communications could be made quite safe. Santa Cruz, as a very
able admiral, knew that no such sea road could possibly be safe while
the ubiquitous English navy was undefeated and at large. Some time or
other a naval battle must be won, or Parma's troops, cut off from their
base of supplies and surrounded like an island by an angry sea of
enemies, must surely perish. Win first at sea and then on land, said
the expert warriors, Santa Cruz and Parma. Get into hated England with
the least possible fighting, risk, or loss, said the mere politician,
Philip, and then crush Drake if he annoys you.
Early and late persistent Philip slaved away upon this 'Enterprize of
England.' With incredible toil he spun his web anew. The ships were
collected into squadrons; the squadrons at last began to wear the
semblance of a fleet. But semblance only. There were far too many
soldiers and not nearly enough sailors. Instead of sending the fighting
fleet to try to clear the way for the troopships coming later on,
Philip mixed army and navy together. The men-of-war were not bad of
their kind; but the kind was bad. They were floating castles, high out
of the water, crammed with soldiers, some other landsmen, and stores,
and with only light ordnance, badly distributed so as to fire at
rigging and superstructures only, not at the hulls as the English did.
Yet this was not the worst. The worst was that the fighting fleet was
cumbered with troopships which might have been useful in boarding, but
which were perfectly useless in fighting of any other kind—and the
English men-of-war were much too handy to be laid aboard by the
lubberly Spanish troopships. Santa Cruz worked himself to death. In one
of his last dispatches he begged for more and better guns. All Philip
could do was to authorize the purchase of whatever guns the foreign
merchantmen in Lisbon harbor could be induced to sell. Sixty
second-rate pieces were obtained in this way.
Then, worn out by work and worry, Santa Cruz died, and Philip forced
the command on a most reluctant landlubber, the Duke of Medina Sidonia,
a very great grandee of Spain, but wholly unfitted to lead a fleet. The
death of Santa Cruz, in whom the fleet and army had great confidence,
nearly upset the whole 'Enterprize of England.' The captains were as
unwilling to serve under bandylegged, sea-sick Sidonia as he was
unwilling to command them. Volunteering ceased. Compulsion failed to
bring in the skilled ratings urgently required. The sailors were now
not only fewer than ever—sickness and desertion had been thinning their
ranks—but many of these few were unfit for the higher kinds of
seamanship, while only the merest handful of them were qualified as
seamen gunners. Philip, however, was determined; and so the doomed
Armada struggled on, fitting its imperfect parts together into a still
more imperfect whole until, in June, it was as ready as it ever could
be made.
Meanwhile the English had their troubles too. These were also
political. But the English navy was of such overwhelming strength that
it could stand them with impunity. The Queen, after thirty years of
wonderful, if tortuous, diplomacy, was still disinclined to drop the
art in which she was supreme for that in which she counted for so much
less and by which she was obliged to spend so very much more. There was
still a little peace party also bent on diplomacy instead of war.
Negotiations were opened with Parma at Flushing and diplomatic
'feelers' went out towards Philip, who sent back some of his own. But
the time had come for war. The stream was now too strong for either
Elizabeth or Philip to stem or even divert into minor channels.
Lord Howard of Effingham, as Lord High Admiral of England, was charged
with the defence at sea. It was impossible in those days to have any
great force without some great nobleman in charge of it, because the
people still looked on such men as their natural viceroys and
commanders. But just as Sir John Norreys, the most expert professional
soldier in England, was made Chief of the Staff to the Earl of
Leicester ashore, so Drake was made Chief of the Staff to Howard
afloat, which meant that he was the brain of the fleet.
A directing brain was sadly needed—not that brains were lacking, but
that some one man of original and creative genius was required to bring
the modern naval system into triumphant being. Like all political
heads, Elizabeth was sensitive to public opinion; and public opinion
was ignorant enough to clamor for protection by something that a man
could see; besides which there were all those weaklings who have been
described as the old women of both sexes and all ages, and who have
always been the nuisance they are still. Adding together the old views
of warfare, which nearly everybody held, and the human weaknesses we
have always with us, there was a most dangerously strong public opinion
in favor of dividing up the navy so as to let enough different places
actually see that they had some visible means of divided defence.
The 30th of March, 1588, is the day of days to be remembered in the
history of sea power because it was then that Drake, writing from
Plymouth to the Queen-in-Council, first formulated the true doctrine of
modern naval warfare, especially the cardinal principle that the best
of all defence is to attack your enemy's main fleet as it issues from
its ports. This marked the birth of the system perfected by Nelson and
thence passed on, with many new developments, to the British Grand
Fleet in the Great War of to-day. The first step was by far the
hardest, for Drake had to convert the Queen and Howard to his own
revolutionary views. He at last succeeded; and on the 7th of July
sailed for Corunna, where the Armada had rendezvoused after being
dispersed by a storm.
Every man afloat knew that the hour had come. Yet Elizabeth, partly on
the score of expense, partly not to let Drake snap her apron-strings
completely, had kept the supply of food and even of ammunition very
short; so much so that Drake knew he would have to starve or else
replenish from the Spanish fleet itself. As he drew near Corunna on the
8th, the Spaniards were again reorganizing. Hundreds of perfectly
useless landlubbers, shipped at Lisbon to complete the absurdly
undermanned ships, were being dismissed at Corunna. On the 9th, when
Sidonia assembled a council of war to decide whether to put to sea or
not, the English van was almost in sight of the coast. But then the
north wind flawed, failed, and at last chopped round. A roaring
sou'wester came on; and the great strategic move was over.
On the 12th the fleet was back in Plymouth replenishing as hard as it
could. Howard behaved to perfection. Drake worked the strategy and
tactics. But Howard had to set the tone, afloat and ashore, to all who
came within his sphere of influence; and right well he set it. His
dispatches at this juncture are models of what such documents should
be; and their undaunted confidence is in marked contrast to what the
doomed Spanish officers were writing at the selfsame time.
The southwest wind that turned Drake back brought the Armada out and
gave it an advantage which would have been fatal to England had the
fleets been really equal, or the Spaniards in superior strength, for a
week was a very short time in which to replenish the stores that
Elizabeth had purposely kept so low. Drake and Howard, so the story
goes, were playing a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe on Friday afternoon
the 19th of July when Captain Fleming of the _Golden Hind_ rushed up to
say the Spanish fleet was off the Lizard, only sixty miles away! All
eyes turned to Drake. Divining the right way to calm the people, he
whispered an order and then said out loud: 'There's time to end our
game and beat the Spaniards too.' The shortness of food and ammunition
that had compelled him to come back instead of waiting to blockade now
threatened to get him nicely caught in the very trap he had wished to
catch the Great Armada in himself; for the Spaniards, coming up with
the wind, might catch him struggling out against the wind and crush his
long emerging column, bit by bit, precisely as he had intended crushing
their own column as it issued from the Tagus or Corunna.
But it was only the van that Fleming had sighted. Many a Spanish
straggler was still hull-down astern; and Sidonia had to wait for all
to close and form up properly.
Meanwhile Drake and Howard were straining every nerve to get out of
Plymouth. It was not their fault, but the Queen's-in-Council, that
Sidonia had unwittingly stolen this march on them. It was their glory
that they won the lost advantage back again. All afternoon and evening,
all through that summer night, the sea-dog crews were warping out of
harbor. Torches, flares, and cressets threw their fitful light on
toiling lines of men hauling on ropes that moved the ships apparently
like snails. But once in Plymouth Sound the whinnying sheaves and long
_yo-hoes_! told that all the sail the ships could carry was being made
for a life-or-death effort to win the weather gage. Thus beat the heart
of naval England that momentous night in Plymouth Sound, while beacons
blazed from height to height ashore, horsemen spurred off post-haste
with orders and dispatches, and every able-bodied landsman stood to
arms.
Next morning Drake was in the Channel, near the Eddystone, with
fifty-four sail, when he sighted a dim blur to windward through the
thickening mist and drizzling rain. This was the Great Armada. Rain
came on and killed the wind. All sail was taken in aboard the English
fleet, which lay under bare poles, invisible to the Spaniards, who
still announced their presence with some show of canvas.
In actual size and numbers the Spaniards were superior at first. But as
the week-long running fight progressed the English evened up with
reinforcements. Spanish vessels looked bigger than their tonnage, being
high built; and Spanish official reports likewise exaggerated the size
because their system of measurement made their three tons equal to an
English four. In armament and seamen-gunners the English were perhaps
five times as strong as the Armada—and seamen-gunners won the day. The
English seamen greatly outnumbered the Spanish seamen, utterly
surpassed them in seamanship, and enjoyed the further advantage of
having far handier vessels to work. The Spanish grand total, for all
ranks and ratings was thirty thousand men; the English, only fifteen.
But the Spaniards were six thousand short on arrival; and their actual
seamen, many of whom were only half-trained, then numbered a bare seven
thousand. The seventeen thousand soldiers only made the ships so many
death-traps; for they were of no use afloat except as boarding
parties—and no boarding whatever took place. The English fifteen
thousand, on the other hand, were three-quarters seamen and one-quarter
soldiers who were mostly trained as marines, and this total was
actually present. On the whole, it is hardly an exaggeration to say
that the Armada was mostly composed of armed transports while all the
English vessels that counted in the fighting were real men-of-war.
In every one of the Armada's hundred and twenty-eight vessels, says an
officer of the Spanish flagship, 'our people kneeled down and offered a
prayer, beseeching our Lord to give us victory against the enemies of
His holy faith.' The crews of the hundred and ninety-seven English
vessels which, at one time or another, were present in some capacity on
the scene of action also prayed for victory to the Lord of Hosts, but
took the proper naval means to win it. 'Trust in the Lord—and keep your
powder dry,' said Oliver Cromwell when about to ford a river in the
presence of the enemy. And so, in other words, said Drake.
All day long, on that fateful 20th of July, the visible Armada with its
swinging canvas was lying-to fifteen miles west of the invisible,
bare-masted English fleet. Sidonia held a council of war, which,
landsman-like, believed that the English were divided, one-half
watching Parma, the other the Armada. The trained soldiers and sailors
were for the sound plan of attacking Plymouth first. Some admirals even
proposed the only perfect plan of crushing Drake in detail as he issued
from the Sound. All were in blissful ignorance of the astounding feat
of English seamanship which had already robbed them of the only chance
they ever had. But Philip, also landsman-like, had done his best to
thwart his own Armada; for Sidonia produced the royal orders forbidding
any attack on England till he and Parma had joined hands. Drake,
however, might be crushed piecemeal in the offing when still with his
aftermost ships in the Sound. So, with this true idea, unworkable
because based on false information, the generals and admirals dispersed
to their vessels and waited. But then, just as night was closing in,
the weather lifted enough to reveal Drake's astonishing position.
Immediately pinnaces went scurrying to Sidonia for orders. But he had
none to give. At one in the morning he learnt some more dumbfounding
news: that the English had nearly caught him at Corunna, that Drake and
Howard had joined forces, and that both were now before him.
Nor was even this the worst. For while the distracted Sidonia was
getting his fleet into the 'eagle formation,' so suitable for galleys
whose only fighting men were soldiers, the English fleet was stealing
the weather gage, his one remaining natural advantage. An English
squadron of eight sail manoeuvred coast-wise on the Armada's inner
flank, while, unperceived by the Spanish lookout, Drake stole away to
sea, beat round its outer flank, and then, making the most of a
westerly slant in the shifting breeze, edged in to starboard. The
Spaniards saw nothing till it was too late, Drake having given them a
berth just wide enough to keep them quiet. But when the sun rose,
there, only a few miles off to windward, was the whole main body of the
English fleet, coming on in faultless line-ahead, heeling nicely over
on the port tack before the freshening breeze, and, far from waiting
for the Great Armada, boldly bearing down to the attack. With this
consummate move the victory was won.
The rest was slaughter, borne by the Spaniards with a resolution that
nothing could surpass. With dauntless tenacity they kept their 'eagle
formation,' so useful at Lepanto, through seven dire days of most
one-sided fighting. Whenever occasion seemed to offer, the Spaniards
did their best to close, to grapple, and to board, as had their heroes
at Lepanto. But the English merely laughed, ran in, just out of reach,
poured in a shattering broadside between wind and water, stood off to
reload, fired again, with equal advantage, at longer range, caught the
slow galleons end-on, raked them from stem to stern, passed to and fro
in one, long, deadly line-ahead, concentrating at will on any given
target; and did all this with well-nigh perfect safety to themselves.
In quite a different way close-to, but to the same effect at either
distance, long or short, the English 'had the range of them,' as
sailors say to-day. Close-to, the little Spanish guns fired much too
high to hull the English vessels, lying low and trim upon the water,
with whose changing humors their lines fell in so much more happily
than those of any lumbering Spaniards could. Far-off, the little
Spanish guns did correspondingly small damage, even when they managed
to hit; while the heavy metal of the English, handled by real
seamen-gunners, inflicted crushing damage in return.
But even more important than the Englishmen's superiority in rig, hull,
armament, and expert seamanship was their tactical use of the
thoroughly modern line-ahead. Any one who will take the letter T as an
illustration can easily understand the advantage of 'crossing his T.'
The upright represents an enemy caught when in column-ahead, as he
would be, for instance, when issuing from a narrow-necked port. In this
formation he can only use bow fire, and that only in succession, on a
very narrow front. But the fleet represented by the crosspiece, moving
across the point of the upright, is in the deadly line-ahead, with all
its near broadsides turned in one long converging line of fire against
the helplessly narrow-fronted enemy. If the enemy, sticking to medieval
tactics, had room to broaden his front by forming column-abreast, as
galleys always did, that is, with several uprights side by side, he
would still be at the same sort of disadvantage; for this would only
mean a series of T's with each nearest broadside crossing each opposing
upright as before.
The herded soldiers and non-combatants aboard the Great Armada stood by
their useless duties to the last. Thousands fell killed or wounded.
Several times the Spanish scuppers actually ran a horrid red, as if the
very ships were bleeding. The priests behaved as bravely as the Jesuits
of New France—and who could be braver than those undaunted missionaries
were? Soldiers and sailors were alike. 'What shall we do now?' asked
Sidonia after the slaughter had gone on for a week. 'Order up more
powder,' said Oquendo, as dauntless as before. Even then the eagle
formation was still kept up. The van ships were the head. The biggest
galleons formed the body. Lighter vessels formed the wings. A reserve
formed the tail.
As the unflinching Armada stood slowly up the Channel a sail or two
would drop out by the way, dead-beat. One night several strange sail
passed suddenly by Drake. What should he do? To go about and follow
them with all astern of him doing the same in succession was not to be
thought of, as his aftermost vessels were merchantmen, wholly untrained
to the exact combined manoeuvres required in a fighting fleet, though
first-rate individually. There was then no night signal equivalent to
the modern 'Disregard the flagship's movements.' So Drake dowsed his
stern light, went about, overhauled the strangers, and found they were
bewildered German merchantmen. He had just gone about once more to
resume his own station when suddenly a Spanish flagship loomed up
beside his own flagship the _Revenge_. Drake immediately had his
pinnace lowered away to demand instant surrender. But the Spanish
admiral was Don Pedro de Valdes, a very gallant commander and a very
proud grandee, who demanded terms; and, though his flagship (which had
been in collision with a run-amuck) seemed likely to sink, he was quite
ready to go down fighting. Yet the moment he heard that his summoner
was Drake he surrendered at discretion, feeling it a personal honor,
according to the ideas of the age, to yield his sword to the greatest
seaman in the world. With forty officers he saluted Drake,
complimenting him on 'valour and felicity so great that Mars and
Neptune seemed to attend him, as also on his generosity towards the
fallen foe, a quality often experienced by the Spaniards; whereupon,'
adds this eyewitness, 'Sir Francis Drake, requiting his Spanish
compliments with honest English courtesies, placed him at his own table
and lodged him in his own cabin.' Drake's enemies at home accused him
of having deserted his fleet to capture a treasure ship—for there was a
good deal of gold with Valdes. But the charge was quite unfounded.
A very different charge against Howard had more foundation. The Armada
had anchored at Calais to get its breath before running the gauntlet
for the last time and joining Parma in the Netherlands. But in the dead
of night, when the flood was making and a strong west wind was blowing
in the same direction as the swirling tidal stream, nine English
fire-ships suddenly burst into flame and made for the Spanish
anchorage. There were no boats ready to grapple the fire-ships and tow
them clear. There was no time to weigh; for every vessel had two
anchors down. Sidonia, enraged that the boats were not out on patrol,
gave the order for the whole fleet to cut their cables and make off for
their lives. As the great lumbering hulls, which had of course been
riding head to wind, swung round in the dark and confusion, several
crashing collisions occurred. Next morning the Armada was strung along
the Flemish coast in disorderly flight. Seeing the impossibility of
bringing the leewardly vessels back against the wind in time to form
up, Sidonia ran down with the windward ones and formed farther off.
Howard then led in pursuit. But seeing the _capitana_ of the renowned
Italian galleasses in distress near Calais, he became a medieval knight
again, left his fleet, and took the galleasse. For the moment that one
feather in his cap seemed better worth having than a general victory.
Drake forged ahead and led the pursuit in turn. The Spaniards fought
with desperate courage, still suffering ghastly losses. But, do what
they could to bear up against the English and the wind, they were
forced to leeward of Dunkirk, and so out of touch with Parma. This was
the result of the Battle of Gravelines, fought on Monday the 29th of
July, 1588, just ten days after Captain Fleming had rushed on to the
bowling green of Plymouth Hoe where Drake and Howard, their shore work
done, were playing a game before embarking. In those ten days the
gallant Armada had lost all chance of winning the overlordship of the
sea and shaking the sea-dog grip off both Americas. A rising gale now
forced it to choose between getting pounded to death on the shoals of
Dunkirk or running north, through that North Sea in which the British
Grand Fleet of the twentieth century fought against the fourth attempt
in modern times to win a world-dominion.
North, and still north, round by the surf-lashed Orkneys, then down the
wild west coasts of the Hebrides and Ireland, went the forlorn Armada,
losing ships and men at every stage, until at last the remnant
straggled into Spanish ports like the mere wreckage of a storm.