of Parma in the Netherlands, he proposed that this force should be
transported thence to England in flat-bottomed boats, while Santa Cruz
should take with him merely enough ships to hold the Channel, and
prevent any interference by the English ships with the invasion.
Before the delayed Armada could sail Santa Cruz died; and despite his
own protestations Medina Sidonia was appointed in Santa Cruz’s place
to carry out an expedition in which he had little faith or confidence.
His total force at the outset consisted of 130 ships and 30,493 men. Of
these ships not more than sixty-two at the outside were warships, and
some of these did not carry more than half-a-dozen guns.
The main English fighting force consisted of forty-nine warships, some
of which were little inferior to the Spanish in tonnage, though all
were much smaller to the eye, as they were built with a lower freeboard
and without the vast superstructures with which the Spaniards were
encumbered. As auxiliaries, the English had a very considerable force
of small ships; also the Dutch fleet in alliance with them.
The guns of the English ships were, generally speaking, heavier,
all their gunners were well trained, and their portholes especially
designed to give a considerable arc of fire, whereas the Spanish had
very indifferent gunners and narrow portholes. The Spaniards themselves
thoroughly recognised their inferiority in the matter of gunnery,
and the specific instructions of their admiral were that he was to
negative this inferiority by engaging at close quarters, and trust to
destroying the enemy by small-arm fire from his lofty superstructures.
The small portholes of the Spanish ships, which permitted neither of
training, nor elevation, nor depression, are not altogether to be put
down to stupidity or neglect of progress, for all that they were mainly
the result of ultra-conservatism. The gun--as Professor Laughton has
made clear--was regarded in Spain as a somewhat dishonourable weapon.
Ideals of “cold steel” held the field. Portholes were kept very small,
so that enemies relying on musketry should not be able to get the
advantage that large portholes might supply. To close with the enemy
and carry by boarding was the be-all and end-all of Spanish ideas
of naval warfare. When able to employ their own tactics they were
formidable opponents, though to the English tactics merely so many
helpless haystacks.
On shore, in England, the coming of the Armada provoked a good deal of
panic; though the army which Elizabeth raised and reviewed at Tilbury
was probably got together more with a view to allaying this panic than
from any expectations that it would be actually required. The views of
the British seamen on the matter were entirely summed up in Drake’s
famous jest on Plymouth Hoe, that there was plenty of time to finish
the game of bowls and settle the Spaniards afterwards!
[Illustration: THE SPANISH ARMADA--1588.]
Yet this very confidence might have led to the undoing of the English.
The researches of Professor Laughton have made it abundantly clear that
had Medina Sidonia followed the majority opinion of a council of
war held off the Lizard, he could and would have attacked the English
fleet in Plymouth Sound with every prospect of destroying it, because
there, and there only, did opportunity offer them that prospect of a
close action upon which their sole chance of success depended. Admiral
Colomb has elaborated the point still further, with a quotation from
Monson to the effect that had the Armada had a pilot able to recognise
the Lizard, which the Spaniards mistook for Ramehead, they might have
surprised the English fleet at Plymouth. This incident covers the whole
of what Providence or luck really did for England against the Spanish.
To a certain extent a parallel of our own day exists. When
Rodjestvensky with the Baltic fleet reached Far Eastern waters, there
came a day when his cruisers discovered the entire Japanese fleet
lying in Formosan waters. The Russian admiral ignored them and went
on towards Vladivostok. The parallel ends here because the “Japanese
fleet” was merely a collection of dummies intended to mislead him.[9]
The first engagement with the Spanish Armada took place on Sunday,
June 21st. It was more in the nature of a skirmish than anything else.
The Spaniards made several vain and entirely ineffectual attempts to
close with the swifter and handier English vessels. They took care,
however, to preserve their formation, and so to that extent defeated
the English tactics, which were to destroy in detail what could not
be destroyed without heavy loss in the mass. So the Spaniards reached
Calais on the 27th with a loss of only three large ships.
They there discovered that Parma’s flat-bottomed boats were all
blockaded by the Dutch, and that any invasion of England was therefore
entirely out of the question. It must have been perfectly obvious to
the most sanguine of them by this that they could not force action with
the swifter English ships, while they could not relieve the blockaded
boats without being attacked at the outset. In a word, the Armada was
an obvious failure.
On the night of the 28th, fire ships were sent into the Spanish fleet
by the English. This, though the damage done was small, brought the
Spanish to sea, and the next morning they were attacked off Gravelines
by the English. The battle was hardly of the nature of a fleet action,
so much as well-designed tactical operations intended to keep the enemy
on the move. It resulted in the Spaniards losing only seven ships in a
whole day’s fighting. The only really serious loss that the Spaniards
sustained was that they were driven into the North Sea, with no
prospect of returning home except by way of the North of Scotland.
Followed for awhile and harried by a portion of the English fleet,
which fell upon and destroyed stragglers, the Spaniards were driven
into what to most of them were unknown waters and uncharted seas. To
the last the retreating fleet maintained a show of order. Fifty-three
ships succeeded in returning to Spain.
[Illustration: THE END OF A “GENTLEMAN-ADVENTURER.”--THE
“REVENGE.”--CAPTURED BY SPANIARDS, 1591.]
Stripped of romance this is the real prosaic history of the defeat
of the Spanish Armada. The wonder is not that so few Spanish ships
returned, but that so many did! The loss in Spanish warships proper
appears to have been little over a dozen all told, and of these not
more than three at the outside can be attributed to “the winds.”
Havoc was undoubtedly wrought, but the “galleons” which “perished by
scores” on the Scotch and Irish coasts were mainly the auxiliaries,
transports, and small fry; the battle fleet proper kept together all
the time, and with a couple of exceptions the ships reached home
together as a fleet.[10]
At no time in the advance of the Spanish--probably at no time in the
retreat either--could the English have engaged close action with any
certainty of success. Victory was attributable solely and entirely to
the evolution of a type of ship, fast, speedy and handy, able to hit
hard, and which had been more or less specially designed with an eye to
offering a very small target to the clumsily designed Spanish style of
gun mounting.
It was “history repeating itself” in another way. As Alfred overcame
the Danes by evolving something superior to the Danish galleys; so,
in Elizabethan days, there was evolved a type of warship meet for the
occasion.
From the defeat of the Armada and onwards, English naval operations
were mainly confined to raiding expeditions against the Spanish coast,
with a view to checking the collection of any further Armadas. These
operations were chiefly carried out by the “gentlemen adventurers”; but
the real Navy itself was maintained and added to, and at the death of
Elizabeth in 1603, it consisted of forty-two ships, of which the 68-gun
_Triumph_ of 1,000 tons was the largest. This Navy was relied upon as
the premier arm in case of any serious trouble.
IV.
THE PERIOD OF THE DUTCH WARS.
With the accession of James I peace with Spain came about, but the
Dutch being ignored in the transaction, out of this there arose that
ill-feeling and rivalry which was later on to culminate in the Dutch
wars.
In James I’s reign no naval operations of great importance took place,
but considerable interest attaches to the despatch of eighteen ships
(of which six were “King’s Ships”), to Algiers in 1520. This was the
first appearance of an English squadron in the Mediterranean.
Under James I the numerical force of the Navy declined somewhat.
The art of shipbuilding, however, made considerable advance.[11] A
Shipwrights’ Company was established in 1656, and Phineas Pett, as its
first master, built and designed a 1,400 ton ship named the _Prince
Royal_. Pett introduced a variety of novelties into his designs,
and the _Prince Royal_ and her successors were esteemed superior to
anything set afloat elsewhere at the time.
Here it is desirable to turn aside for a moment in order to realise the
influences at work behind Phineas Pett. It has ever been the peculiar
fortune of the Royal Navy--and for that matter of the inchoate “Navy”
which preceded its establishment--to have had men capable of “looking
ahead” and forcing the pace in such a way that new conditions were
prepared for when they arrived.
Of such a nature, each in his own way, were King Alfred, King John,
Richard III, and Henry VII, but greater than any of these was Sir
Walter Raleigh, whose visions in the days of Elizabeth and James I ran
so clearly and so far that even now we cannot be said to have left him
behind where “principles” are concerned. Drake was the national hero of
Elizabethan days, but in utility to the future, Raleigh was a greater
than he, albeit his best service was of the “armchair” kind.
The following extracts from Raleigh’s writings, except for geographical
and political differences, stand as true to-day as when he wrote them
about 300 years ago. The idea of a main fleet, backed up by smaller
vessels, the idea of meeting the enemy on the water and so forth, are
commonplaces now, but in Raleigh’s time they were quite otherwise. The
italicised portions in particular indicate quite clearly in Elizabethan
words the naval policy of to-day.
“Another benefit which we received by this preparation was, that
_our men were now taught suddenly to arm, every man knowing his
command, and how to be commanded_, which before they were ignorant
of; and who knows not that sudden and false alarms in any army are
sometimes necessary? To say the truth, the expedition which was
then used in drawing together so great an army by land, and rigging
so great and royal a navy to sea, in so little a space of time, was
so admirable in other countries, that they received a terror by it;
and many that came from beyond the seas said _the Queen was never
more dreaded abroad for anything she ever did_.
“Frenchmen that came aboard our ships did wonder (as at a thing
incredible) that Her Majesty had rigged, victualled, and furnished
her royal ships to sea in twelve days’ time; and Spain, as an
enemy, had reason to fear and grieve to see this sudden preparation.
“It is not the meanest mischief we shall do to the King of Spain,
if we thus war upon him, to force him to keep his shores still
armed and guarded, to the infinite vexation, charge and discontent
of his subjects; for no time or place can secure them so long as
they see or know us to be upon that coast.
“The sequel of all these actions being duly considered, we may be
confident that _whilst we busy the Spaniard at home, they dare not
think of invading England or Ireland_; for by their absence their
fleet from the Indies may be endangered[12] and in their attempts
they have as little hope of prevailing.
“Surely I hold that the _best way is to keep our enemies from
treading upon our ground: wherein, if we fail, then_ must we seek
to make him wish that he had stayed at his own home. In such
a case, if it should happen, our judgments are to weigh many
particular circumstances, that belong not to this discourse. But
making the question general, _the position, whether England,
without that it is unable to do so_: and, therefore, I think it
most dangerous to make the adventure. For the encouragements of a
first victory to an enemy, and the discouragement of being beaten
to the invaded, may draw after it a most perilous consequence.
“Great difference, I know there is, and diverse consideration to be
had, between such a country as France is, strengthened with many
fortified places, and this of ours, where our ramparts are but the
bodies of men. But I say that an army to be transported over sea,
and to be landed again in an enemy’s country, and the place left
to the choice of the invader _cannot be resisted on the coast of
England without a fleet to impeach it; no, nor on the coast of
France, or any other country, except every creek, port, or sandy
bay had a powerful army in each of them to make opposition.... For
there is no man ignorant that ships, without putting themselves out
of breath, will easily outrun the soldiers that coast them_.[13]
“Whosoever were the inventors, we find that every age hath added
somewhat to ships, and to all things else. And in mine own time the
shape of our English ships hath been greatly bettered. It is not
long since the striking of the topmast (a wonderful ease to great
ships, both at sea and in harbour) hath been devised, together
with the chain pump, which takes up twice as much water as the
ordinary did. We have lately added the Bonnet and the Drabler.
To the courses we have devised studding-sails, topgallant-masts,
spritsails, topsails. The weighing of anchors by the capstone is
also new. We have fallen into consideration of the lengths of
cable, and by it we resist the malice of the greatest winds that
can blow. Witness our small Millbroke men of Cornwall, that ride it
out at anchor half seas over between England and Ireland, all the
winter quarter. And witness the Hollanders that were wont to ride
before Dunkirk with the wind at north-west, making a lee-shoar in
all weathers. For true it is, that the length of the cable is the
life of the ship, riding at length, is not able to stretch it; and
nothing breaks that is not stretched in extremity. We carry our
ordnance better than we were wont, because our nether over-loops
are raised commonly from the water, to wit, between the lower part
of the sea.
“In King Henry VIII time, and in his presence at Portsmouth, the
Mary Rose, by a little sway of the ship in tacking about, her ports
being within sixteen inches of the water, was overset and lost.
“We have also raised our second decks, and given more vent thereby
to our ordnance lying on our nether-loop. We have added cross
pillars[14] in our royal ships to strengthen them, which be
fastened from the keels on to the beam of the second deck to keep
them from setting or from giving way in all distresses.
“We have given longer floors to our ships than in elder times, and
better bearing under water, whereby they never fall into the sea
after the head and shake the whole body, nor sink astern, nor stoop
upon a wind, by which the breaking loose of our ordnance, or of the
not use of them, with many other discommodities are avoided.
“And, to say the truth, a miserable shame and dishonour it were for
our shipwrights if they did not exceed all others in the setting
up of our Royal ships, _the errors of other nations being far more
excusable than ours_. For the Kings of England have for many years
_being at the charge to build and furnish a navy of powerful ships
for their own defence, and for the wars only. Whereas the_ French,
the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Hollanders (till of late)
_have had no proper fleet belonging to their Princes or States._
Only the Venetians for a long time have maintained their arsenal of
gallies. And the Kings of Denmark and Sweden have had good ships
for these last fifty years.
“I say that the aforenamed Kings, especially the Spaniards and
Portugals, have ships of great bulk, but fitter for the merchant
than for the man-of-war, for burthen than for _battle_. But
as Popelimire well observeth, ‘the forces of Princes by sea
are marques de grandeur d’estate--marks of the greatness of an
estate--for _whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade;
whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of
the world, and consequently the world itself_.’
“Yet, can I not deny but that the Spaniards, being afraid of their
Indian fleets, have built some few very good ships; _but he hath no
ships in garrison_, as His Majesty hath; and to say the truth, no
sure place to keep them in, but in all invasions he is driven to
take up of all nations which come into his ports for trade....
* * * * *
“But there’s no estate grown in haste but that of the United
Provinces, and especially in their sea forces, and by a contrary
way to that of Spain and France; the latter by invasion, the former
by oppression. For I myself may remember _when one ship of Her
Majesty’s would have made forty Hollanders strike sail and come to
an anchor_. They did not then dispute de Mari Libero, but readily
acknowledged the English to be Domini Maria Britannici. That we are
less powerful than we were, I do hardly believe it; for, although
we have not at this time 135 ships belonging to the subject of
500 tons each ship, as it is said we had in the twenty-fourth
year of Queen Elizabeth; at which time also, upon a general view
and muster, there were found in England of able men fit to bear
arms, 1,172,000, yet are our merchant ships now far more warlike
and better appointed than they were, and the Navy royal double as
strong as it then was. For these were the ships of Her Majesty’s
Navy at that time:
1. The Triumph
2. The Elizabeth Jonas
3. The White Bear
4. The Philip and Mary
5. The Bonadventure
6. The Golden Lyon
7. The Victory
8. The Revenge
9. The Hope
10. The Mary Rose
11. The Dreadnought
12. The Minion
13. The Swiftsure
to which there have been added:--
14. The Antilope
15. The Foresight
16. The Swallow
17. The Handmaid
18. The Jennett
19. The Bark of Ballein
20. The Ayde
21. The Achates
22. The Falcon
23. The Tyger
24. The Bull
“We have not, therefore, less force than we had, the fashion, and
furnishing of our ships considered, for there are in England at
this time 400 sail or merchants, and fit for the wars, which the
Spaniards would call galleons; to which we may add 200 sail of
crumsters, or hoyes of Newcastle, which, each of them, will bear
six Demi-culverins and four Sakers, needing no other addition of
building than a slight spar deck fore and aft, as the seamen call
it, which is a slight deck throughout....
“I say, then, if a vanguard be ordained of those hoyes, who will
easily recover the wind of any other sort of ships, with a battle
of 400 other warlike ships, and a rear of thirty of His Majesty’s
ships to sustain, relieve, and countenance the rest (if God beat
them not) I know not what strength can be gathered in all Europe
to beat them. And if it be objected that the States can furnish a
far greater number, I answer that His Majesty’s forty ships, added
to the 600 beforenamed, are of incomparable greater force than all
that Holland and Zealand can furnish for the wars. As also, that
a greater number would breed the same confusion that was found in
Xerxes’ land army of 1,700,000 soldiers; _for there is a certain
proportion, both by sea and land, beyond which the excess brings
nothing but disorder and amazement_.”
I have quoted from Raleigh at considerable length--a length which may
seem to some out of all proportion to the general historical scheme of
this work. But of the three possible “founders of the British Navy,”
King Alfred by legend, King Henry VII by force of circumstances, and
Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, by his realisation of certain eternal
verities of naval warfare, the palm goes best to Raleigh, to whose
precepts it was mainly due that England did not succumb to Holland in
the days of the Dutch wars. Compared to the struggle with the Dutch,
neither the Spanish wars, which preceded them, nor the great French
wars which followed, were of any like importance as regarded the
relative risks and dangers. And the interest is the greater in that
where the United Provinces were, about and just after Raleigh’s time,
Germany stands towards the British Navy to-day.
In 1618 the Duke of Buckingham was appointed Lord High Admiral and
continued in that position after the accession of Charles I. Of the
incapacity of the Duke much has been written, but whatever may be said
in connection with various unsuccessful oversea enterprises, for which
he was officially responsible, naval shipbuilding under his régime made
very considerable progress.
Things were quite otherwise, however, with the _personnel_. Abuses of
every sort and kind crept in unchecked, and the men were the first to
feel the pinch. The unscrupulous contractor appeared, and with him the
era of offal foods and all kinds of similar abuses, of which many have
lasted well into our own time, and some exist still. The money allotted
for the men of the fleet became the prey of every human vulture, the
officers, as a rule, being privy thereunto. Besides food, clothing also
fell into the hands of contractors who supplied shoddy at ridiculously
high prices, with the commission to officers stopped out of the men’s
pay.
Pay, nominally, rose a good deal, and in 1653 reached twenty-four
shillings a month for the seaman, but the figures (approximately equal
in purchasing value to the pay of to-day) convey nothing. The men were
half-starved, or worse, on uneatable food, and their clothing was such
that they went about in rags and died like rats in their misery.
The first naval event in Charles I’s reign is mainly of interest
because of the peculiar personal circumstances that attended it. One
King’s ship and six hired ships were despatched, nominally to assist
the French against the Genoese. On arriving at Dieppe, however, the
English officers and men discovered that they were really to be used
against the revolted French Protestants of La Rochelle. This being
against their taste, they returned to the Downs and reported themselves
to the King. They were ordered to sail again for La Rochelle. One
captain, however, point blank refused to do so. The other ships went,
but the officers and men, with a single exception, having handed their
ships over to the French, returned to England.
Little or nothing seems to have been done in the way of punishment to
the mutineers (possibly on account of public opinion). But the incident
sheds an interesting sidelight on the state of the Navy at the time. It
is hardly to be conceived that the Army at the same period could have
acted in similar fashion with equal impunity.
[Illustration: PHINEAS PETT, 1570–1647.
From the contemporary portrait by William Dobson in the National
Portrait Gallery.]
The history of the British Navy of this period is the history of a
navy lacking in discipline, and its officers divided against each
other. Such expeditions as were undertaken against France and Spain
signally failed. It is usual to attribute these failures to the
mal-administration of the Duke of Buckingham, an unpopular figure.
But whether this is just or not is another matter. The entire Navy
was rotten to the core in its _personnel_. But Buckingham’s share in
it would seem to have been inability to understand rather than direct
carelessness.
Under the Duke’s régime the building of efficient warships continued
to progress. The “ship money,” which was to cause so much trouble
inland later, is outside the scope of this work, save in so far
as its direct naval aspect is concerned. This, of course, was the
principle that inland places benefited from sea defence quite as much
as seaside districts. A great deal of the money was undoubtedly spent
on shipbuilding; indeed, some of the trouble lay over alleged (and
seemingly obvious) excessive expenditure on the “Dreadnought” of the
period, Phineas Pett’s _Royal Sovereign_, a ship altogether superior
to anything before built in England, and the first three-decker ever
constructed in this country. She was laid down in 1635 and launched in
1657. An immense amount of gilding and carving about her irritated the
economically minded, but it is questionable whether the objections were
well informed.