The Year After the Armada

The Year After the Armada1

The Counter-Armada of 1589

On the night of Sunday, the 28th of July, 1588, the great Armada was huddled, all demoralised and perplexed, in Calais roads. Only a week before the proudest fleet that ever rode the seas laughed in derision at the puny vessels that alone stood between it and victory over the heretic Queen and her pirate countrymen, who for years had plundered and insulted with impunity the most powerful sovereign in Europe. Gilded prows and fluttering pennons, great towering hulls which seemed to defy destruction, the fervid approbation of all Latin Christendom, and the assurance of Divine protection, combined to produce in the men of the Armada absolute confidence in an easy conquest. But six days of desultory fighting in the Channel had opened their eyes to facts thitherto undreamed of. Handy ships, that could sail several points closer to the wind than their unwieldy galleons, could harass and distress them without coming to close quarters. At first they shouted that the English were afraid of them, but as the sense of their own impotence gradually grew upon them their spirits sank. Brave they were, but, said they, of what use is bravery against foes who will not fight with us hand to hand in the only way we wot of? And so from day to day, whilst they straggled up the Channel, their boasting gave place to dismay and disorganisation. They saw their ships were being sunk and disabled one after the other, whilst the English vessels were suffering little damage and had safe ports of refuge behind them. Thus at the end of the week they found themselves with a dangerous shoally coast to leeward, in an exposed roadstead surrounded by the reinforced English fleet. They were ripe for panic, for their commander was a fool and a craven in whom they had no confidence; and when the English fireships drifted down upon them with the wind, flaring in the darkness of the summer night, abject paralysing terror turned the huge fleet into a hustling mob of ships, in which the sole thought was that of flight. From that moment the Armada was beaten. The storms on the northern and Irish coasts, the cold, the rotten food and putrid water, pestilence and panic, added dramatic completeness to their discomfiture; but superior ships, commanders, and seamanship had practically defeated them when they slipped their cables and anchors and crowded through the narrow sea with the English fleet to windward and sandbanks on their lee.

But the Armada had represented the labour, the thought, and the sacrifice of years. Every nerve had been strained to render it irresistible. Spain and the Indies had been squeezed to the last doubloon, careful Sixtus V. had been cajoled into partnership in the enterprise, and the Church throughout Christendom had emptied its coffers to crush heresy for once and for ever. All along the coast of Ireland from the Giant’s Causeway to Dingle Bay the wreckage of the splendid galleons was awash, and many of the best and bravest of Spain’s hidalgos, dead and mutilated, scattered the frowning shore; or, alive, starved, naked, and plundered, were slowly done to death with every circumstance of inhumanity by the Irish kerns or their English conquerors. It could hardly be expected, therefore, that on the receipt of the dreadful news Spain should calmly resign itself to defeat. Such lessons as this are only slowly and gradually brought home to the heart of a nation; and after Mendoza’s lying stories of victory had been contradicted, and the fell truth ran through Spain as the battered, plague-stricken wrecks of what was left of the Armada crept into Santander, the first heart-cry was for vengeance and a re-vindication of the national honour.

Medina Sidonia was the scapegoat (perhaps not undeservedly, though Parma should bear his share of blame), and as he went in state and comfort through Spain to his home in the south, the very children and old women in the streets jeered and spat upon him for the chicken-hearted coward who had disgraced their country in the eyes of the world. Only the over-burdened recluse in the Escorial was patient and resigned under the blow. He had, as he thought, done his best for the cause of God; and if for some inscrutable reason all his labour, his sacrifice, and his prayers were to be in vain, he could only suffer dumbly and bend his head to the Divine decree. One after the other the provinces and municipalities came to him with offers of money to repair the disaster. In November the national Cortes secretly sent him word, “that they would vote four or five millions of gold, their sons and all they possess, so that he may chastise that woman, and wipe out the stain which this year has fallen on the Spanish nation.”2 But the Cortes and the Town Councils always tacked upon their offers two conditions, born of their knowledge that peculation and mismanagement were largely responsible for the disaster of the Armada. “First that his Majesty will act in earnest; and secondly that their own agents may have the spending of the money which they shall vote, for in this way his Majesty will not be so robbed and all affairs will go far better.”3 But the last condition was one that Philip could never brook: the secret of his failure through life was that he wished to do everybody’s work himself and he was smothered in details. Besides this there were difficulties, diplomatic and others, in the way, of which the people at large were unaware. The star of Henry of Navarre was rising, and all France was now alive to Philip’s real object in the invasion of England. Philip knew that in any repetition of the attempt he would probably not have to confront England alone. So the cries for vengeance grew fainter, and national feeling was gradually turned purposely in other directions.

But these cries had been loud enough to reach England. Exaggerated rumours of the intention to renew the Armada were industriously sent from all quarters by zealous spies and agents, and an uneasy feeling grew that perhaps, after all, England had not finished her foe; for Elizabeth’s advisers had no means of exactly gauging the depth of Philip’s purse, and they knew the papal coffers were overflowing. It is true that immediate danger was over. The hasty English levies had been sent home again, bragging of the prowess they would have shown if the hated Spaniard had dared to land, and the panic and fright had given place to perfectly natural congratulations on the special protection vouchsafed by the Almighty to the Virgin Queen and her people. The heroics were over, and England was free, for the present at all events, to don its work-a-day garb again.

But the easy victory had inflamed men’s minds. There had been very little fighting even on the fleet, and none at all on shore; and it is not pleasant to be balked of a set-to when all is ready, and to turn swords to bill-hooks without once fleshing them in an enemy’s carcase. So the idlers in England who were loath to go to work again, the turbulent youngsters who were burning for an excuse to have a go at somebody, and the lavish gentlemen who were thirsting for loot, began on their side to talk about vengeance and retaliation. It mattered little to them that for a long course of years England had been the aggressor, and that Philip had exhausted all diplomatic and conciliatory means, including even secret murder, and the subornation of treason, in England, to arrive at a peaceful modus vivendi. For thirty years he had suffered, more or less patiently, robbery, insult, and aggression in his own dominions at the hands of Elizabeth. The commerce of his country was well-nigh swept from the sea by marauders sallying from English ports or flying the English flag. His own towns, both in the Spanish colonies and in old Spain, had been sacked and burnt by English seamen without any declaration of war; and rebellion in the ancient patrimony of his house had been, and was still, kept alive by English money and English troops.

Englishmen, then as now, had the comfortable and highly commendable faculty of believing their own side always to be in the right, and they knew in this particular case that it was much more profitable to plunder than to be plundered, to attack rather than defend. Elizabeth’s caution and dread of being forced into a costly national war had over and over again caused her to discountenance this tendency on the part of some of her advisers, though she was ready enough to share the profits when her official orders were disregarded and her own responsibility evaded. Only the year before the Armada she had peremptorily ordered Drake, when he was ready to sail for Cadiz, not to imperil peace by molesting any of the territories or subjects of his Catholic Majesty. But when he came into Dartmouth, after “singeing the King of Spain’s beard,” towing behind him the great galleon San Felipe, with its 600,000 ducats in money, the Queen smiled upon him as if he had never disobeyed her. But for her positive orders of recall indeed, Drake on this very voyage would have made the Armada impossible by destroying, as he was able and ready to do, all the ships preparing for it in Lisbon harbour.

Only just before the Armada, in June, 1588, the idea of diverting and dividing Philip’s forces by attacking him in his own country, ostensibly in the interest of Dom Antonio, the Portuguese pretender, was broached by Lord Admiral Howard in a letter to Walsingham, now in the Record Office. The scheme assumed definite form soon after the flight of the Armada, when, in September, Sir John Norris presented to the Queen a complete plan for fitting out an expedition with this object by means of a joint-stock company, which might be made both patriotic and profitable at the same time. Such a proposal was one eminently likely to suit the Queen, frugal and evasive of responsibility as she was. Norris and his associates suggested that the capital of the company should be £40,000 at least, out of which the Queen was to subscribe £5,000, and to appoint a treasurer, who was to supervise the expenditure of the whole. The Queen’s contribution was only to be spent by permission of this treasurer, and if the enterprise fell through for want of subscribers she was to have her money returned to her or the munitions of war which had been purchased with it. The Queen, as was her wont, discreetly hesitated about it; and it was not until addresses had been presented from Parliament begging her to adopt some such action that she consented to take shares in the enterprise. But her treasury was well-nigh empty; and willing as she was that anything should be done to weaken her enemy, her poverty and Tudor frugality forbade her from undertaking to defray any very large portion of the cost herself. So she answered her petitioners that although she would sanction the enterprise and subscribe something to it, the main cost must be borne by others.

The story of this ill-starred expedition is usually disposed of in a few lines by English historians, although its success would have completely changed the status of England on the Continent. What is known of it hitherto is practically confined to the official documents and letters in the Record Office, which have only become accessible of late years, a few letters in the Bacon and Naunton Papers, and a curious tract printed in Hackluyt and ascribed to Captain Anthony Wingfield, minutely describing and apologising for the proceedings. The account was written in the same year, 1589, as the expedition took place; and the writer, whoever he was,4 evidently witnessed the events he relates. His description is most graphic and interesting, and presents the English view of the enterprise in its best possible light, although all his explanations and palliations cannot succeed in conjuring away the utter failure of the expedition, or the bad conduct of the men who took part in it. The English account, however, all indulgently unflattering as it is, is not the only one extant. The publication of the latest volume of the Calendar of Venetian State Papers puts us into possession of the version of the affair current in the Spanish Court and conveyed to the King from his officers in Portugal; and in addition to this I possess the transcript of an unpublished contemporary manuscript which exists in the library of Don Pascual de Gayangos at Madrid, written by a Castilian resident in Lisbon at the time of the invasion, containing a detailed diary of the event.5 This manuscript, I believe, has never yet received the attention it deserves from historians, but it is nevertheless valuable as confirming in the main the English accounts, but relating the incidents from an entirely different point of view. I have also recently discovered in the Pombalina Library in Lisbon still another contemporary manuscript diary of the English invasion, written by a Portuguese gentleman in Lisbon who was present at the scenes he describes, and whose standpoint is widely different from those of the Castilian and the Englishman.6 The Spaniard is full of scorn and contempt for the chicken-hearted Portuguese in Lisbon who, though sympathising with the native pretender, slunk into hiding at his approach; whilst the Portuguese diarist insists vehemently upon the loyalty of the Portuguese nobles to Philip, and ascribes the instability of the common people to their weakness and incredulity, to their fear of the anger of Saint Antonio if they opposed his namesake the pretender, to their desire to protect their wives and families, to any other reason but the obvious one that high and low, rich and poor, in the city were in a state of trembling panic from first to last, utterly cowed and appalled by the few Spaniards whom they hated as much as they feared.

In 1578, ten years before the Armada, the rash young King Sebastian of Portugal had disappeared for ever from the ken of men on the Moorish battlefield which had seen the opening and closing of his mad crusade. For centuries afterwards the Portuguese peasants dreamt of his triumphant return to lead to victory the hosts of Christendom. But he came not, unless indeed one of the many claimants who long afterwards assumed his name was indeed he; and in the meanwhile, when his uncle, the childless Cardinal King Henry, died, Portugal wanted a monarch.

It had a large choice of descendants of Dom Manoel, grandfather of the lost Sebastian, but the Magna Charta of the Portuguese, the laws of Lamego (apocryphal as we now believe them to have been), were then universally accepted, and strictly excluded foreigners from the throne; and all the claimants were aliens but two, the Duchess of Braganza, daughter of the elder son of Dom Manoel, and doubtless the rightful heiress; and Dom Antonio, a churchman, prior of Ocrato, the questionably legitimate offspring of Manoel’s second son.

When the Cardinal King died in 1580, Philip II., who for two years had been intriguing, suborning, and threatening the leading Portuguese to acknowledge his right to the succession, stretched out his hand to grasp the coveted crown. Of the two native claimants one, the Duchess of Braganza, was timid and unready; the other, Dom Antonio, was ambitious, bold, and eager. Around him all that was patriotic grouped itself. The poorer classes bitterly hated the foreigner, and particularly the Spaniard, whose King was really the only other serious claimant to the throne. The churchmen were devotedly attached to the ecclesiastical claimant, the nobles were Portuguese before all, and Antonio was acclaimed the national sovereign. But not for long; the terrible Alba swept down upon Lisbon, as years before he had come down upon the Netherlands, and crushed the life out of Portuguese patriotism. There was no religious question to stiffen men’s backs, and no William of Orange to command them here. The Portuguese were made of different stuff from the stubborn Dutchmen, and Alba rode roughshod over them with but little resistance. Antonio was soon a fugitive, hunted from town to town, holding out for weeks in one fortress, only to be starved into another; proclaimed a bastard and a rebel, with a great price set upon his head; and yet for eight long months he wandered amongst the mountain peasantry, as safe from betrayal as was Charles Edward amongst the Scots Highlanders. At last Antonio gave up the game and fled to France, and thence to England. He came in July, 1581, and was immediately made much of by the Queen and Leicester. In vain did Mendoza, Philip’s ambassador, demand his surrender as a rebel. The Queen said she had not quite made up her mind to help him, but she had quite decided that she would not surrender him to be killed. He was too valuable a card in her hand for her to let him go, and she made the most of him. He was treated with royal honours, and covert aid was given to him to strengthen the Azores, which were faithful to him. He had taken the precaution to bring away the crown jewels of Portugal with him, the spoils of the two Indies, but he had no money. The greedy crew that surrounded the Queen soon scented plunder, and money for warlike preparations, the purchase of ships, and the like, was speedily forthcoming on security of diamonds and pearls such as had rarely been seen in England. Elizabeth and Leicester, in presents and by a quibble, managed to grab some of the best; and most of those pledged to the London merchants ultimately fell into the Queen’s hands.7 Some were left with Walsingham for safety, but when they were demanded Walsingham alleged that he was personally responsible for some provisions Antonio had ordered, and made difficulties about giving them up. So long as the money lasted Antonio might spend it in England and leave his diamonds, but some specious excuse was always invented to prevent any openly hostile expedition to attack Philip leaving an English port under Antonio’s banner. The rascally Dr. Lopez, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn for attempting to poison the Queen, was Dom Antonio’s go-between and interpreter at Court, and he, greedy scamp as he was, made a good thing out of it until the money began to run short, when, in his usual way, he sold his knowledge to Philip, and attempted more than once to poison the unhappy Pretender. Antonio, indeed, was surrounded by spies though he knew it not,8 but he found he was being frustrated, betrayed, and defrauded in every way in England, and his precious jewels the meanwhile were slipping away. So, in dudgeon with the greedy English, he fled to France and took such of his vessels as he could gain possession of with him. Catharine de Medici, the Queen-mother, was, for form’s sake, a claimant to the Portuguese throne herself, but her shadowy claim was soon abandoned when she had an opportunity of cherishing such a thorn as Antonio promised to be in the side of her powerful late son-in-law Philip. Antonio still had jewels, and whilst they lasted he was treated with consideration and regal splendour in that gay and dissolute Court. He certainly got more return for them there than he got in England. Many were scattered in bribes amongst the easy-going ladies and painted mignons of the Court, and most of the rest went to pay for two costly naval expeditions fitted out in France in the Queen-mother’s name, to enable Antonio to hold the islands faithful to him.9 But Santa Cruz swooped down upon Terceira as Alba had pounced upon Lisbon, and the merry-making crew of revellers was soon disposed of. Then poor Antonio fell upon evil days. The emissaries of Philip, false friends of Antonio, tried time after time to put him out of the way by poison and the dagger, but he was ever on the watch; and for help and safety, still sanguine and hopeful, drifted from France to England and from England to France, the plaything in the game alternately of Elizabeth and Catharine, to be taken up or cast aside as the interests of the players dictated.

Philip’s open attempt to invade England in 1588 seemed once more to offer him a chance of success, and his hopes rose again. One gem, and one only, of all the rich store he brought from Portugal was left to him; but that was the most precious of them all, the eighth greatest diamond in the world, the chief ornament in the Russian imperial crown to-day.10 It was his last stake, and he decided to risk it on his chance. It was pledged to Monsieur de Sancy, whose name it ever afterwards bore, and with the money so raised Antonio started for England to tempt Elizabeth to link his desperate cause with her hopes of revenge upon Spain.

This was in the autumn of the Armada year, 1588, and, all unconscious of his vile treachery to him, Antonio once more evoked Lopez’s influence at Court to gain the ear of the Queen and the support of his close friend Walsingham. The venal Jew, who was for ever craving rewards and favours, persuaded the Queen, no doubt for a weighty consideration, to listen anew to the pretender’s proposals.11

The adventurer-king was confident that if he could once set foot again in his own country with an armed force the whole population would flock to his standard, and he was ready to promise anything, and everything, for the help he wanted. Already in 1582, when Catharine de Medici had aided him to fit out the fleet under Strozzi at Bordeaux which was to hold Terceira and restore Antonio to the throne, the desperate gamester had promised her the great empire of Brazil as a reward for her help; and now, if my Spanish diarist is to be believed, he offered to make himself a mere vassal of Elizabeth if he were successful.

In the Record Office there is a bond by which Antonio undertakes, in February, 1589, to reimburse to the adventurers all the cost of the enterprise and the pay of the soldiers, but the Spanish manuscript gives the substance of an agreement between Dom Antonio and the Queen which promises much more than mere repayment. The diarist I quote says:—

“The Queen, cautious and astute as she was, caught at the fine promises that Dom Antonio held out and insisted that an agreement should be entered into; which was done, in substance as set forth in the following clauses. This agreement was brought, written in the English language, by a certain Portuguese named Diego Rodriguez who came hither as treasurer to this expedition and passed over to the service of our lord the King on the eleventh of June. The clauses, translated into Castilian, say as follows:—

“First her Majesty the Queen of England undertakes to provide a fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels and twenty thousand men—15,000 soldiers and 5,000 sailors—with captains for both services, to go and restore Dom Antonio to the throne of Portugal.

“Dom Antonio undertakes that within eight days from the arrival of the said fleet in Portugal the whole country will submit to him in accordance with the letters he has received from the principal people in the said kingdom.

“Item, That on arriving in Lisbon the city will be reduced at once without any defence and all Castilians in it killed and destroyed, and, for the friendship and aid thus shown him in recovering his kingdom, he undertakes to fulfil the following things—namely:—

“First that within two months of his arrival in Lisbon he will hand to her Majesty the Queen as an aid to the costs of the fleet five millions in gold.

“Item, In testimony of the help she has given him he will pay every year to the Queen for ever three hundred thousand ducats in gold, placed and paid in London at his cost.

“Item, That the English should have full liberty to trade and travel in Portugal and the Portuguese Indies and the Portuguese equal freedom in England.

“Item, That if the Queen should not desire to fit out a fleet against the King of Spain in England she shall be at liberty to do so in Lisbon and shall be helped in all that may be necessary.

“Item, That the castles of São Gian, Torre de Belem, Capariza, Oton, São Felipe, Oporto, Coimbra and the other Portuguese fortresses shall be perpetually occupied by English soldiers paid at the cost of Dom Antonio.

“Item, That there shall be perpetual peace between her Majesty the Queen and Dom Antonio and they shall mutually help each other on all occasions without excuse of any sort.

“Item, That all the Bishoprics and Archbishoprics in Portugal shall be filled by English Catholics and the Archbishopric of Lisbon shall be at once filled by the appointment of Monsieur de la Torques (sic).

“Item, On arriving at Lisbon every infantry man shall receive twelve months pay, and three extra, as a present from Dom Antonio and they shall be allowed to sack the city for twelve days, on condition that no man of any rank shall presume to harm any Portuguese or molest the churches or houses wherein maidens are dwelling; and also that they pay in money for whatever they may need in the country. Which agreement her Majesty ordered to be duly executed under date of last day of December 1588.”12

The Spanish scribe waxes very indignant at this document, showing, as he says it does, the sagacity of the Queen and the blind infatuation of Dom Antonio, “who gives up the substance for the shadow of kingship, and is content to make the Portuguese subjects slaves so that he shall be called King.” But he is most shocked at the sacrifice to this “pestilent sect” of the two instincts clearest to the Portuguese heart, namely, devotion to their Church and their greed of gain; the first of which, he says, will be destroyed by relationship with the accursed heretics, and the second attacked by the substitution for “our lord the king who does not spend a maravedi of Portuguese money, but brings Castilian money into Portugal,” of a King who has promised to pay away more than the Portuguese can ever give him. “And besides,” he says, plaintively, “we Castilians and Portuguese are not so estranged in blood of boundaries after all, for only a line divides us, and if it be hard for the Portuguese to endure connection with their Castilian kinsmen who bring riches into the country and take nothing from it how much worse will it be to put up with a nation so greedy and insolent as the English, separated from them by land and sea, and foreign to them in customs, language, faith and laws?”

He ridicules the idea of five millions (of ducats) in gold being paid, and says he supposes that a mistake of a nought has been made, which probably was the case; but even then, he asks, where is such a sum as 500,000 ducats to come from, “let alone the 15 months’ pay”? However correct or otherwise in detail this agreement may be, it is certain that some such terms were made, and it may be safely assumed that Elizabeth, with her keen eye to the main chance, would take care to make the best bargain she could out of the sanguine eagerness of Dom Antonio, who would be ready to promise “mounts and marvels” for ready aid.13 My Portuguese diarist also ridicules the impossible terms promised by the Pretender, but adds the false finishing-touch, evidently spread by the Castilians for the purpose of arousing the indignation and resistance of the Portuguese, that the churches were to be plundered and the Portuguese inhabitants of Lisbon despoiled.

It would appear strange at first sight that Elizabeth should have made any proviso for the benefit of English Catholics whom she had sometimes treated so unmercifully, but on other occasions she had favoured the idea of English Catholic settlements being established across the seas under her sway; and the great body of Catholic sympathisers resident in England had not acted altogether unpatriotically in the hour of panic and terror on the threat of invasion. It would, therefore, not have been an impolitic move to earn their gratitude and further loyalty by opening a new field for them outside of her own country but, in a manner, under her control.

On the 23rd of February, 1589,14 the Queen issued a warrant of her instructions for the expedition, appointing Sir John Morris15 and Sir Francis Drake to the chief command thereof, and in it lays down precise rules for their guidance. She says that the objects of the expedition are two: namely, first to distress the King of Spain’s ships, and second to get possession of some of the Azores, in order to intercept treasure passing to and from the East and West Indies. Also to assist the King Dom Antonio to recover the kingdom of Portugal, “if it shall be found the public voice in the kingdom be favourable to him.”

On the same date authority was given to Norris and Drake to issue warrants to the adventurers for their shares in the enterprise; and the Queen herself undertook to repay them if the expedition were stopped at her instance. Courtiers and swashbucklers touted their hardest for subscriptions to this joint-stock warfare, and pressure was put upon country gentlemen to subscribe liberally as a proof of their patriotism—a pressure not to be disregarded in those doubtful times.16 The Queen’s subscription ultimately reached £20,000, besides seven ships of the Royal Navy. Promises of money and arms were forthcoming in abundance, and flocks of idlers, high and low, offered their valuable services. The scum of the towns, the sweepings of the jails, were pressed for the voyage, and Pricket (or Wingfield), in his apology for the expedition, lays most of the blame of failure on the kind of men they had, and complains bitterly of the justices and mayors sending them “base disordered persons sent unto us as living at home without rule.” He says many idle young men, having seen their fellows come back after a few months in the Netherlands full of their brave deeds and tales of the wars, “thought to follow so good an example and to spend like time amongst us,” and finding soldiering a harder trade than they had bargained for, were not likely to make good troops.

The misfortunes of the enterprise began before it was fairly launched. As may be supposed, promises of support, given under such circumstances as those which I have described, were hardly likely to be strictly kept, and the performance in this case fell far short. Pricket (or Wingfield) bemoans this as follows: “For hath not the want of 8 out of the 12 pieces of Artillerie which was promised unto the adventure lost her Majestie the possession of the Groyne and many other places as hereafter shall appeare whose defensible rampiers were greater than our batterie (such as it was) could force and therefore were lost unattempted. It was also resolved to send 600 English horse out of the Low Countries whereof we had not one, notwithstanding the great charge expended in their transportation hither.... Did wee not want seaven of the thirteene old Companies we should have had from thence? foure of the ten Dutch Companies and sixe of their men-of-warre for the sea from the Hollanders? which I may justly say we wanted in that we might have had so many good souldiers, so many good shippes, and so many able bodies more than we had.

“Did there not, upon the first thinking of the journey, divers gallant courtiers put in their names for adventurers to the summe of £10,000, who seeing it went not forward in good earnest, advised themselves better and laid the want of so much money on the journey?”

But the expedition was got together somehow. Men were cajoled into the belief that they were going on a great plundering excursion, and would soon return home again loaded, as Wingfield says, with “Portogues” and “Milrayes” which should make them independent for life. There were no surgeons, no carriages for the hurt and sick, and from the first the discipline was of the loosest. Provisions were said to be shipped for two months, but in some of the ships the men declared they were starved from the first day.

Even amongst contemporaries much difference of statement exists as to the number of ships and men that composed the expedition, although this difference is partly accounted for by a fact which will presently be mentioned, and which has hitherto escaped notice. We should probably not be far out when we put the number of soldiers who left Plymouth at about 16,000 and the sailors at 2,500.17 Of the men-at-arms all but the three or four thousand old soldiers, mostly from the Netherland wars, were idle vagabonds whose first idea was loot and whose last was fighting. In addition to these there were 1,200 gentlemen or more, the flotsam and jetsam of the Court, younger sons of slender fortunes, and gallants whose hearts were aflame to do good service to their country. Seven18 of the bravest of the Queen’s ships, of three hundred tons burden each, twenty other armed ships, and a large number of transports and galleys of light draft, would have completed the fleet, but sixty German smacks and sloops, which had been wintering in Holland on their way to Spain, were pressed into the service and added to the number, which finally reached nearly two hundred sail. The 1st of February was the date originally fixed for starting, but when that date arrived nothing was ready but the army of idlers, who wanted feeding, so that when the fleet could have sailed it was found that most of the stores had been consumed, and in some ships not a week’s provision remained. Money ran short, and Drake and Norris wrote, day after day, during all the month of March and first two weeks in April, heartrending letters to the Council and to Walsingham. The provisions were run out, they said; the enterprise must fall through if help be not sent at once. They point out the dishonour and disgrace of such a lame ending, and again and again beg for more provisions.

The innkeepers and victuallers of Canterbury, Southampton, Winchester, Plymouth, and elsewhere wrote dunning letters to the Queen for money due for stores supplied. The Dutch shipmasters commanding the flyboat transports contributed by the States formally protested and refused to put to sea with such insufficient provender as they had; and, just as it looked as if the expedition would break down for good, there came providentially into the harbour a Flemish ship with a cargo of dried herrings, another with five hundred pipes of wine, and above all a sloop loaded with barley. These provisions were promptly transferred to the fleet to the dismay of the masters, who protested for many a day afterwards, fruitlessly, against the confiscation of their cargoes. The expedition was declared ready for sea, but then came tales of contrary winds that kept them in and out of harbour for several days more; and one day, whilst they were thus detained, the Queen’s kinsman, Knollys, comes post haste from London. Had anybody seen or heard anything of the young Earl of Essex, the Queen’s last new pet? Curiously enough nobody had, although only the day before a party of young gallants had dashed into Plymouth from London all dusty and travel-stained, and had been received with open arms by the courtiers and officers on the fleet. Hot-blooded Essex, with all the thoughtlessness of his twenty-two years, tired of sickly dallying with an old lady and of squabbling with Raleigh, tired of his debts, his duns and duties as prime favourite, had made up his mind to see some fun, and had fled against the Queen’s orders. No one had seen him of course, but the Swiftsure, with Sir Roger Williams, the general second in command of the army, mysteriously left the harbour as soon as Knollys had told his tale. But a few hours later the Earl of Huntingdon came with warrants of arrest and all manner of peremptory papers, and Drake saw the matter was serious. Boats were sent scouring after the Swiftsure, but could get no news of the missing earl. The other ships stayed in Plymouth ten days longer for a fair wind, but the Swiftsure came back no more until the expedition was at an end. Drake and Norris wrote nearly every day until they sailed disclaiming any knowledge of Essex or his intention to join the force, and expressing their deep sorrow; but the Queen did not believe them, and from that time had nothing but hard words and sour looks for an adventure that had robbed her of her favourite. At length, on the 13th of April 1589, (O.S.), the expedition finally left Plymouth, but even then it was only a feint in order that the men might be kept together and not stray on shore and get out of hand. “The crosse windes held us two daies after our going out, the Generalls being wearie thrust to sea in the same wisely chosing rather to attend a change out there than to lose it when it came by having their men on shoare.”

Knocking about in the Channel in bad weather was, however, not to the taste of some of the ruffians who thought they were bound over summer seas to a paradise of plunder; and three thousand men in twenty-five ships, probably most of them owned by the recalcitrant Dutchmen, deserted and were heard of no more—at least so far as the expedition was concerned. This desertion to some extent explains the divergence between the accounts given of the numbers of the expedition.

The rest of the fleet on the third day caught a fair wind and stretched across the Bay of Biscay in fine spring weather. They were four days before their eyes were gladdened by the sight of Cape Finisterra, but in the week they had been at sea their provisions were running out. Murmurs at the short commons were heard on all the ships, and it was seen that the only way to keep the scratch crews from open mutiny was to give them a chance of plunder.

So, instead of obeying the Queen’s strict injunctions—for Drake was a far better hand at commanding than obeying—and landing poor Dom Antonio on the country he assured them was yearning for him, they bore down upon Corunna, on the north-west coast of Spain. For months before this, as the difficulties attending the fitting out of a new Armada became more evident, terror-stricken rumours had pervaded Spain that the dreaded Drake, who had now become a sort of supernatural bogey to the Spanish people, was about to descend upon this or the other place on the coast and wreak a terrible vengeance for the Armada. Early in January even false news came to Madrid that an English fleet had appeared outside Santander, and at the end of the month the Venetian ambassador in Madrid writes to his Doge that news had just arrived from Lisbon that forty sail of English ships were out, divided into squadrons of eight or ten ships each, and were doing much damage. It was feared, he said, that they would all unite under Drake and make an attempt first upon Portugal and then will go to the Azores, and finally to the Indies. The fitting out in Spain of fifty ships to protect the seas was hurried on; but, says the Venetian, “it is thought that two months must elapse before they can be ready, and then one does not see what they can do against such light ships as the enemy’s.”

Philip was dangerously ill and sick at heart. Fear reigned supreme in his councils—fear that Drake the terrible would ravage the coasts whilst Henry of Navarre crossed the Pyrenees. The Portuguese nobles were known to be disaffected, and a rising in favour of Dom Antonio was feared. Philip, with the energy of despair, did what he could, ill as he was, immersed in mountains of papers dealing with trivial detail. But he could do little. The Portuguese nobles who were at all doubtful were ordered to come to Madrid, the Spanish grandees were enjoined to raise and arm their followers and hold themselves in readiness to march either towards the Pyrenees or to Lisbon. Then rumours came that the Moorish King of Fez was to act in concert with the English, and seize the Spanish possessions on the African coast opposite Gibraltar.

It will thus be seen in the distracted condition of affairs that Spain was practically defenceless against a sudden descent on the coast, but most defenceless of all at the extremely remote north-west corner of Spain, where Drake decided to land. The fear was mostly for Portugal, where, we are told, “the population is so impatient of the present rule that neither the severity of penalties, garrisons of soldiers, nor the ability of governors have succeeded in quieting the contumacious spirits. This causes a dread lest Drake who is acquainted with those waters may furnish pretexts for fresh risings and they (the Spaniards) wish to be ready to crush them.”19 The troops they raised, says the Venetian ambassador, were inferior in quality of horses and men: raw levies pressed unwillingly into the service, whilst Portugal was in violent and open commotion awaiting the arrival of Drake the deliverer.

But whilst all panic-stricken regards were directed upon Portugal, Drake and his joint-stock Armada suddenly appeared where they were least expected, before Corunna, and cast anchor; and the men, nothing loath, were put on shore in a little bay within a mile of the town. There was no one to stay their landing, and they had come nearly to the gates before a hasty muster of townsfolk met them. These, all unprepared and surprised as they were, soon retreated when they saw the force that was coming against them, and shut themselves up behind the gates and walls of the town. The place was weak and ill-garrisoned, commanded by the Marquis de Cerralba, and could not hope to hold out against a regular siege, but there were three galleons loaded with arms in the harbour, which the new commander-in-chief in Madrid, Alba’s son Fernando, said would be a much greater loss than the town itself. The English slept the first night in the cottages and mills belonging to a hamlet on the bank of one of the small streams discharging into the bay, and out of gunshot of the walls. They were, however, quite unmolested by the terrified townsfolk, although the galleon San Juan and her consorts in the harbour kept up a fire upon them as they passed to and fro.

The place indeed was utterly taken by surprise. The Cortes of Galicia were in session at the time, the people peacefully pursuing their ordinary avocations; the soldiers of the garrison were nearly all on furlough, scattered over the province; “and, in short, every one was so far from expecting an attack that they had no time to turn the useless out of the town nor put their dearest possessions in safety.” The wife and daughter, indeed, of the Governor Cerralba at the first alarm fled in their terror two leagues on foot, through the night, to a place of safety, but after that none dared to move. The lower part of the town fronting the harbour was protected on the land side only by weak walls, and was unfit for protracted defence. The townspeople therefore agreed that if the place were attacked on the water side it would be untenable, and arranged that as soon as those in the higher town on the hill should espy the English boats approaching they were to signal the low town by a fire, so that the people below might make their escape to the better defensible upper portion of the town. Some artillery was landed by the English to stop the fire of the Spanish ships, and on the morning of the second day the town was attacked simultaneously by 1,200 men in long boats and pinnaces under Captain Fenner and Colonel Huntly; and by Colonels Brett and Umpton on one side, and Captains Richard Wingfield and Sampson on the other by escalade. The people in the upper town, either from panic or oversight, neglected to give the signal, and those below, thinking they had only to deal with an escalade on their walls by Captain Wingfield, fought desperately until they found two other forces had entered at other points, and then panic seized them, and, as Pricket (or Wingfield) describes it, “The towne was entered in three severall places; with an huge crie, the inhabitants betooke them to the high towne which they might with less perrill doo for that ours being strangers knew not the way to cut them off. The rest that were not put to the sword in furie fled to the rockes in the iland and hid themselves in chambers and sellers which were everie day found out in great numbers.” A perfect saturnalia seems to have been thereupon indulged in by the English troops. Here was the fruition of all their golden dreams—a flying, panic-stricken foe, ample provisions to loot and to waste, and, above all, wine without limit. “Some others (i.e., Spaniards) also found favour to bee taken prisoners but the rest falling into the hands of the common soldiers had their throates cut to the number of 500.... Everie seller was found full of wine whereupon our men by inordinate drinking both grewe senseless of the danger of the shot of the towne which hurt many of them, being druncke, and took the first ground of their sickness, for of such was our first and chiefest mortalitie.”

Great stores of provisions were found in the lower town, and many were also captured as they were brought in by Spanish ships. These provisions were alleged by the English to have been collected for the purpose of a new attack on England, and it is quite probable that such was the case, although the evidence on the point is insufficient. At all events, the destruction of these stores is the only act which in any sense justified the expedition sent out by the adventurers.20

The next few days were spent by the invaders in desultory attacks on the upper town, burning a monastery and scouring the country round by Colonel Huntly, who “brought home verie great store of cowes and sheep to our great reliefe.” A great crowd of country people, two thousand strong, came down with a run one day, armed with rough weapons, to see what manner of men were these who raided their cattle and burned their poor huts, but a discharge of musketry killed eighteen of them and sent the rest scampering away.21 On “our side” we hear of an improvised gabion battery being shaken down by the first fire, and Master Spenser, the lieutenant of the ordnance, and many others killed by the enemy’s guns as they stood all exposed. But brave Sir Edward Norris held his ground manfully until his orders came to cease firing and retire. Captain Goodwin makes a mistake of a signal and prematurely attacks the upper town, getting shot through the mouth as a reward, and the “common sort” drop off by drink, pestilence, and bullet plentifully enough, but unrecorded. Norris and Drake sent home by Knollys flaming accounts of their success, and still asked for more provisions from England and more money; but Queen Bess was in a towering rage, and was not to be appeased. She could not forget or forgive the loss of her favourite. Raleigh and Blount were very well in their way, but she wanted Essex, and suspected Drake and Norris of being parties to his escape. On the 4th of May (O.S.) she wrote to them a remarkable letter, showing that she had tidings of Essex’s being on board the Swiftsure, and demanding dire vengeance on Sir Roger Williams, who helped to hide him.22

After four days of fruitless pottering the troops were presumably sober enough to attempt an attack upon the upper town, and the guns being pointed against it, the general sent a drummer to summon it to surrender before he opened fire. The summons was answered by a musket-shot that laid the poor drummer low, but immediately afterwards a pole was projected over the town wall, and from it there dangled a man hanged by the neck. This was the man who had fired the dastard shot. And then the Spaniards called a parley, and begged that the war might be fair on both sides, as it certainly should be on theirs. Considering that five hundred of their brethren had their throats cut ruthlessly, after they had submitted, this was magnanimous at least; “but as for surrendering the towne, they listened not greatly thereunto.”

So Norris banged away with his cannon for three days to make a breach in the wall of the high town, and at the same time set men to work to bore a mine in the rock beneath the gate, and at the end of the time, all being in readiness, and his men, under the gallant brothers Wingfield, with Philpot, Sampson, and York, waiting to storm the two breaches, the mine turned out a dismal failure, and nothing was done. The next day they tried again, and this time with such success that one half of the gate tower was blown up, and the other half left tottering. On rushed the assailants. Some few got into the town, but as the officers and their immediate followers set foot on the breach and waved their men onward, down came the other half of the tower upon them, and crushed them beneath the ruins. Two standards were lost, but captured again, and scores of men were killed. In the dust and terror the unpractised soldiery thought they were the victims of some stratagem of the enemy and fled, leaving the officers and gentlemen volunteers to extricate themselves as best they could. Poor Captain Sydenham “was pitifully lost, who having three or foure great stones on his lower parts was held so fast, as neither himself could stirre, nor anie reasonable companie recover him. Notwithstanding the next day being found to be alive there was 10 or 12 lost in attempting to relieve him.”

On the other side of the town the breach made in the walls by the culverins was too small, and when brave Yorke had led his men to push of pike with those who stood in the breach, the slope of rubbish on which they mounted suddenly slipped down, and left them six feet below the opening, and so they had to retreat too, through a narrow lane exposed to the full fire of the enemy, and thus the attack failed at both points.

In the meanwhile all Galicia was arming, and a prisoner brought in by the cattle raiders gave news that the Count de Andrada, with 8,000 men, was at Puente de Burgos, six miles off, which was said to be only the beginning of a great army being got together by the Count de Altamira. On the next day, May 6th, it was determined to attack them, and nine regiments of English marched out to the fray. The vanguard, under Sir Edward Norris, was divided into three bodies under Captains Middleton, Antony Wingfield, and Ethrington, respectively, and attacked the enemy in the centre and both flanks simultaneously, routing them at the first charge. They only stopped running when they came to a fortified bridge over a creek of the sea, on the other side of which was their entrenched camp. Sir Edward Norris, with Colonel Sidney, and Captains Fulford, Hinder and others, always in front, fought hand to hand over the bridge and into the trenches, under “an incredible volie of shot for that the shot of their armie flanked upon both sides of the bridge.” But the earthworks were soon abandoned, and Sir Edward Norris, in his very eagerness to be first, tumbled over his pike and hurt his head grievously. The officers of the vanguard were nearly all more or less hurt, but when the enemy had fled the usual amusement of the “common sort” commenced. All round for miles the country was burnt and spoiled, and the flying countrymen were slaughtered without mercy or quarter. “So many as 2,000 men might kill in pursuit, so many fell before us that day”; and after that was over and the men were returning, hundreds of cowering peasants were found hidden in hedges and vineyards, and their “throates” were cut. Two hundred poor creatures took refuge in a “cloyster,” which was burned and the men put to the sword as they tried to escape. “You might have scene the countrie more than three miles of compasse on fyre,” says the English eye-witness, and he grows quite hysterical in his laudation of the English valour; but the Spanish accounts tell how the Netherlands wars, and the fears for Portugal and the French frontier, had denuded all north-western Spain of soldiers, Count de Andrada’s force only being a hasty levy of undrilled and practically unarmed countrymen, who were easily routed.

The next day the English began to ship their artillery and baggage and made ready to depart, after again unsuccessfully trying to fire the upper town. They managed indeed to burn down every house in the lower town, and they set sail on May 9 (O.S.), 1589.

In the meanwhile utter dismay reigned at Madrid. What was left of the fleet was acknowledged to be powerless for defence, and none knew for certain where the blow was to fall. The accounts from Corunna were intercepted by the Government, and were surmised to be worse than they really were; but still the general opinion was not far out in supposing that Drake could not do much permanent harm on the open places on the coast, but would eventually attack either Lisbon or Cadiz. Fernando de Toledo was appointed commander-in-chief, but soldiers could not be got together.23 Pietro de Medici was hastily ordered to raise 6,000 mercenaries in Italy; and Contarini writes from Madrid to the Doge: “It is true that for want of soldiers they have adopted a plan which may prove more hurtful than helpful; they have enrolled Portuguese, and so have armed the very people whom they have cause to fear, but perhaps they think that as they have destroyed the leaders they have made themselves safe.”

Norris was almost as much dreaded as Drake himself, and his skill and daring suggested to the terrified Court that he might intend to cut through the neck of land upon which Corunna stands, and entirely isolate the town, which he might then make into a great depot for an English fleet. Philip, we are told, was in great anxiety, “not so much on account of the loss he suffers as for the insult which he feels that he has received in the fact that a woman, mistress of only half an island, with the help of a corsair and a common soldier, should have ventured on so arduous an enterprise, and dared to molest so powerful a sovereign.”

The bitterest blow of all to Philip was the knowledge that Spain’s impotence was now patent to the world, and that the mere presence of Drake was sufficient to paralyse all resistance. When the English force re-embarked at Corunna, says Contarini, they were not even molested, so glad were the besieged to be rid of him at any cost. “Whilst Drake was at Corunna he was so strongly entrenched that he suffered no loss at all. If he had remained a few days longer the place would have fallen for the reliefs were not as ready as was rumoured. Drake occupied the place called the fishmarket. He knocked down houses, seized cattle, killed soldiers, released officers on ransom, and by pillage of the suburbs and the burning of monasteries seemed to care more for plunder than for glory.”24 As we have seen, in fact, Drake’s sole reason for going to Corunna at all against his mistress’ orders was to satisfy with loot the mutinous rabble on board his ships, but of this the Spaniards were naturally ignorant.

The fleet sailed out of Corunna on the 9th of May, leaving smoking ruins behind them for many miles around; but contrary winds drove the ships back again and again. At last, on the 13th of May, the truant Swiftsure hove in sight, “to the great delight of us all,” bringing the Earl of Essex, Sir Roger Williams, Master Walter Devereux (“the Earl’s brother, a gentleman of wonderful great hope”), Sir Philip Butler (“who hath always been most inward with him”), and Sir Edward Wingfield.

However glad the men of lower rank may have been to see the dashing young nobleman, Drake and Norris can hardly have been overjoyed. They knew by this time that Elizabeth was in earnest about it, and that the purse-strings would be drawn tighter, and the censure be stricter, whilst her errant favourite was with the expedition; and some inkling of this even reached the writer of the English account of the expedition. “The Earle,” he says, “having put himself into the journey against the opinion of the world, and as it seemed, to the hazard of his great fortune, though to the great advancement of his reputation (for as the honourable carriage of himself towards all men doth make him highlie esteemed at home, so did his exceeding forwardness in all services make him to be wondered at amongst us) who I say put off... because he would avoide the importunity of messengers that were daily sent for his return and some other causes more secret to himself.”

The earl’s first request was that he should always be allowed to lead the vanguard of the army; “which was easilie granted unto him, being so desirous to satisfie him in all things”: and thenceforward to the end of the expedition he marched at the head with Major-General Sir Roger Williams, who seemed, by the way, “not one penny the worse” for her Majesty’s anathemas.

Early in the afternoon of May 16th (O.S.) the fleet cautiously approached the town of Peniche, in Portugal. Drake had learnt on his way that a great galleon from the Indies with a million crowns in gold had taken refuge under the guns of the fortress, and doubtless hoped to net so big a prize. But the Archduke Albert in Lisbon was also looking anxiously for the gold, and sent his galleys, under Bazan, to bring the galleon into the Tagus just before the arrival of the English at Peniche. The town of Peniche was held by Gonsalves de Ateide with a body of Portuguese who could not be trusted, and some Castilian reinforcements sent to him under Pedro de Guzman; but the fortress was commanded by a Captain Araujo, who was known to be secretly in favour of Dom Antonio. Here it was determined to land the force, and Ateide drew up his men at the landing-place before the fortress and opened fire upon the ships as they entered the bay. On the other side of the harbour, half a league off, the surf was running high, and a landing there was looked upon as impracticable, so that the shore was left undefended. Suddenly, when least expected by the Spaniards, Norris began to land his men on this side. Hot-headed Essex would not even wait for his boat to reach land, but jumped into the beating surf breast high with Sir Roger Williams and a band of gentlemen, and so struggled ashore to protect the landing of the rest. By the time Ateide and his 350 Castilians had reached the spot 2,000 English had landed on the beach of Consolation as it was called. Some slight show of resistance was made, and fifteen Spaniards fell at the push of the English pike; but the Castilians were out-numbered and nearly surrounded, and were forced to retire precipitately inland to a neighbouring hamlet to await reinforcements from Torres Vedras. When Norris had landed 12,000 or 13,000 men, with the loss of several boatloads in the surf, but without further molestation from the Spaniards, he summoned the Portuguese commandant of the fortress to surrender. He replied that he refused to surrender to the English, but would willingly do so to his lawful king, Dom Antonio. So the poor pretender, “bigger of spirit than of body,” landed with his son Manoel, and his faithful bodyguard of a hundred Portuguese, to be received once more on his own land as a sovereign. He found all things ready for him: his canopy of state erected, plate for his table set out, and kneeling subjects seeking for his smiles. He spoke smoothly and fairly, we are told, to the country people, taking nothing from them, but giving, or at least promising, much, and assuring them all of his protection.

But if their new sovereign was chary of oppressing them, no such scruples afflicted their Castilian masters. My Portuguese diarist says that the Spaniards retaliated for Araujo’s treachery in surrendering Peniche by stealing everything belonging to the Portuguese they could lay their hands upon, and he cites one case in which they took the large sum of two thousand crowns from one of the most influential friends of the Spanish cause. “But,” he says, apologetically, “in confused times such as these soldiers will act so.”

Dom Antonio’s bodyguard was armed with muskets and pikes from the castle, and here the poor King kept his rough-and-ready Court for two days. He was tenacious of his regal dignity, and had many a little wrangle with the English about the scant ceremony with which they treated him. But greater disappointments were yet in store for him. The friars and peasants flocked in to salute their native king, but, alas, Antonio hoped and looked in vain for the coming of the lords and gentry from whom he expected so much. Wily Philip had been once more too cunning for his enemy. At the first whisper of the expedition he had banished to distant places in his own dominions every Portuguese noble—seventy of them in all—who was not pledged hard and fast to the Castilian cause. One of Antonio’s false friends, too, had escaped at Corunna, and had gone straight to Philip and divulged all the pretender’s plans and the names of his supporters still in Portugal who were to help him into Lisbon. Their shrift, as may be supposed, was a short one, and when Antonio came to his kingdom he found none but monks and clowns to greet him. Such of the gentry as he approached were usually too panic-stricken to side with him, seeing the fate of others of their class, and my Portuguese scoffs at the insolence of the idea that Antonio and the English could hold Lisbon, even if they won it against all the might of Spain, or of the common Portuguese rising without the “fidalgos,” and courting the ruin that would befall them if the “heretics” got the upper hand without the fidalgos to restrain them.

But Antonio put a brave face on matters, and was all eagerness to push on to his faithful capital of Lisbon, which he was confident awaited him with open arms. His confidence to a certain extent seems to have been shared by Norris, and here the second great mistake of the expedition was made. The first vital error was the fruitless waste of time at Corunna; the second was the resolution now arrived at by Norris, entirely against Drake’s judgment, to march from Peniche overland forty-two miles to Lisbon. Drake, true to the sea and to the tactics by which he had so often beaten the Spaniards, was in favour of pushing on to Lisbon by sea, letting three or four fireships drift about the castle of São Gian, which commanded the entrance to the harbour, so that the smoke should spoil the aim of the guns, and then make a dash for the city—and doubtless, thought Drake, for the galleon, with its million gold crowns, lying in front of the India house. Dom Antonio, whose one idea was to keep foot on the land where he was king, sided with Norris. In vain Drake pointed out that they had no baggage train or proper provisions for a march through an enemy’s country; that they had only one weak squadron of cavalry, of which the cattle was out of condition; that they had no fitting field artillery; and that once inland they would lose the support and protection of the fleet.

It was all of no avail; Dom Antonio and Norris had their way, and a single company was left to garrison Peniche,25 supported by six ships, whilst the whole of the land forces were to march to Lisbon, and Drake undertook to bring the rest of the fleet to Cascaes, at the mouth of the river, when the weather would allow him to do so.

During the night after the landing, some cavalry under Captain Alarcon had joined the Spaniards, and a force of Portuguese militia had also been sent in by Don Luis Alencastro, but they soon deserted their colours and left their officers to shift for themselves. The next morning at four o’clock Captain Alarcon and a few of the Spanish cavalry reconnoitred the position at Peniche, but found the enemy too many for them, and could only scour back as hard as they could ride to Luis Alencastro, the Grand-Commander of the Order of Christ, who was endeavouring to reorganise a body of Portuguese a few miles off, on the road to Lisbon. But terrible tales of the strength of the English had already spread; and when Alarcon and Guzman reached the Grand-Commander they found his hasty levies in a panic at the story that Drake had brought with him nine hundred great Irish dogs as fierce as lions, and “capable of eating up a world of folks.” So they flatly refused to stir; and the Grand-Commander could do no more than hasten back to Lisbon to inform the Cardinal-Archduke Albert of the state of affairs, whilst Guzman, with the troops, fell back upon Torres-Vedras, to hold if possible the road to Lisbon.

In the meanwhile the capital was in a state of intense excitement. The native inhabitants, with a lively recollection of the sacking of the city by Alba, flocked to the other side of the Tagus, notwithstanding the strict orders of the Cardinal-Archduke to the contrary. Provisions and munitions of war were hastily sent from Spain, and the Prior Fernando de Toledo was already on the move, slowly bringing such troops as he could muster for the relief of Lisbon, whilst the castles and walls of the city were put into a state of defence. The Castilians, few in number and intensely hated by the townsfolk, knew that in a fight the brunt would fall upon them, and that the Portuguese, even though they might not help the enemy, and this was by no means certain, would not raise a finger to support the dominion of Philip. The priests went from house to house, strong adherents of Dom Antonio almost to a man, whispering that the English were not, after all, such bad people; that there were many Catholics amongst them who were better Christians than the Castilians themselves, and, as the Spanish diarist says, other things of the sort which will not bear repeating. To the well-to-do they said that as soon as a native king was on the throne their wealth would enormously increase, whilst the poor were told that “fishing in troubled waters was profitable to the fisherman.”

On the other hand, the Archduke, knowing the people with whom he had to deal, established a veritable reign of terror, and sacrificed without mercy—often without evidence—any person who was even suspected of open sympathy with the invaders, although it was well known in Madrid that the populace of Lisbon had tacitly agreed to open the gates to Dom Antonio and to massacre the Spaniards on his approach. Some Portuguese nobles had left the Archduke on the first landing of Dom Antonio, but, finding that most of their order had been terrorised into quiescence, returned to Lisbon and tendered their submission. They were at once beheaded or imprisoned, and the rest became more slavish than ever in their professions of attachment to the Archduke. Terrible stories were spread at the same time of the “impious abominations” of the English heretics, and the dreadful fate that awaited all Catholics if the invader succeeded, until, as my Portuguese diarist says, “there was not even a loafer on the quay who did not know that he would be cast out or ruined if the English came.” But it was all insufficient to make them willing to fight. The exodus still continued, and under cover of night the people stole across the river by thousands, and a boat whose usual freight was two ducats could not now be hired under fifty, whilst a bullock-cart and bullocks which could be bought right out in normal times for fifty ducats now charged sixty for a single journey to Aldea Gallega, on the other side of the Tagus. The people of the provinces, says my Portuguese diarist, oppressed the flying citizens more than the English, until the scandal became so great that the Archduke had to interfere and check their rapacity. Under some excuse or another every Portuguese was anxious to get away and leave the fighting to be done by some one else. The Portuguese diarist stoutly denies that his countrymen were cowards or traitors, but always explains that the common people could not have risen without the lead of the native nobles; and we have seen the methods by which they were terrorised and made powerless. The Spaniard, on the other hand, makes no secret of his contempt for the white-livered Lisbonenses, and uses much strong language about them. My Portuguese diarist greatly resents this feeling, and gives a little personal experience of his own to show how harsh were the words used by the Castilians towards the craven citizens. “On the morning,” he says, “that the enemy fled I went up to the castle to get some things of mine out of my boxes which I had left there in the rooms of one of the officers, where I had determined to await my fate if things came to the worst. As I was on my way down to the palace again the rumour spread that the enemy was retreating, whereupon some soldiers ascended the watch tower to enjoy the sight. I asked them when they returned if the good news were true that the enemy was really flying, and one of them answered me roughly that they who were flying were not the enemy but those who still stay in Lisbon. To which I answered him not a word but God be with ye.”

But by terrorism, energy, and promptness the Archduke at length got the city into a state for defence both against the enemy from without and the probable enemy within. The city water-tanks were locked and the supply brought from outside, so as to save the precious liquid for the coming siege. The resident Spaniards formed themselves into a bodyguard of 150 men, “very smart and well armed,” and, as in duty bound, the Germans and Flemings offered two hundred harquebussiers in good order, whilst many Portuguese “fidalgos” slept in the corridors of the palace to protect the Archduke in the hour of need. Four colonels were appointed to organise bands of the inhabitants for the defence of the city, and Matias de Alburquerque, a famous sea-captain, took charge of the twelve war galleys in the Tagus and armed thirty merchant ships which were lying in the harbour. The defensive works round the city were divided into sections and apportioned to the command of officers of tried fidelity, whose names need not be recorded here, the river front being mainly entrusted to Portuguese, who evidently considered theirs the post of danger, as they had not the walls to protect them along the quay side. The Castilians, however, made no secret of the fact that they were placed there as no attack was expected from the river. The parts most strongly guarded, almost entirely by Spaniards, were the quarters of St. Catalina, San Antonio, and San Roque, facing the north and west, from which quarters the English were expected to approach.

The English army, by all accounts twelve thousand strong, marched out of Peniche on the 17th of May, with the Earl of Essex and Sir Roger Williams leading; and Drake, accompanying them to the top of a hill at some distance off, greeted each regiment as it passed him with kindly words, and hopes of success, which he could hardly have anticipated.

Soon the English soldiery began to show their true metal. Strict orders had been given that the property and persons of Dom Antonio’s faithful subjects were to be respected; but as soon as they got clear of Peniche housebreaking and pillage became rife, and Norris had to order his provost-marshal, Crisp, to hang a few of the malefactors before he could obtain obedience.

The Archduke had sent three squadrons of Spanish horsemen to reinforce Pedro de Guzman at Torres Vedras, block the road to Lisbon, and harass the English. They went out to reconnoitre the enemy at various points after he left Peniche, but they did not like the look of him, and fell back again to Torres Vedras, whilst messengers were hourly sent to the Archduke begging for more men, whom he could not send. At first it was rumoured amongst the English that a stand would be made at a village near Peniche, but when they arrived there the last Spanish horsemen were just scampering out of it. The next day it was said that certainly a great stand would be made at Torres Vedras, and this undoubtedly was the Archduke’s intention; but even the almost impregnable Torres Vedras was untenable with a few hundred horse and a body of militia, who, if they fought at all, would fight on the other side; and the Spanish forces, for fear of being cut off from their base, hastily evacuated Torres Vedras and fell back gradually, harassing the flanks of the enemy as much as they could and cutting off stragglers.

And so the main body of Morris’ force, with the Earl of Essex and Sir Roger Williams always leading, moved rapidly and peacefully towards Lisbon, whilst the panic in the capital grew greater as the English came nearer. Peaceably—but hungry—for the land was bare, and the English, we are told, “found our food dry and tasteless and hankered after their own fat meats and birds, comparing our barrenness with the abundance of their own land.” There was little or no money in the host, and nothing was to be taken from the Portuguese without payment. There was in any case very little to take, for most of the people along the road had fled or had been stripped clean by the Castilian soldiers who had gone before. Drake’s predictions of trouble in moving an army without a baggage train began to come true, and at last starvation was breeding open mutiny in the English host. Norris was then obliged to tell Antonio that unless food were forthcoming more plentifully the soldiers must be allowed to shift for themselves. The poor pretender could only beseech his controller, Campello, to scour the country far and wide for delicacies for the English, “who are naturally dainty and exquisite in their food”; but he could only pay in promises, and the land was bare, so the invaders still marched a hungry host towards the larders of Lisbon.

From day to day they were told that the Spaniards would certainly stand and fight to-morrow, but they were continually disappointed, as indeed was the stout-hearted Archduke in his palace, who received with dismay the constant news that his forces were falling further and further back towards the capital without fighting.

Whatever country people had remained on the road welcomed the invaders with cries of “Viva el Rei Dom Antonio!” but the poor King still looked in vain for the promised gentlemen. His desire to please his rustic adherents was almost pathetic. He condescended, we are told, to caress and embrace the “commonest little people”; and in order to make as brave a show as possible before the English, picked out any countryman who was decently fair-spoken to be paraded before them as some grand gentleman in disguise. But however hopeful he might show himself, he could not conceal the fact that not a dozen men-at-arms had joined him, and his only chance now was that Lisbon itself should declare in his favour. But the native citizens were distracted and divided. The judges and magistrates had abandoned their posts, the shopkeepers had deserted their stores, incendiary fires and pillage were of hourly occurrence, and the Archduke alone kept his head. Even he was not free from danger of attack, for more than one attempt was made to assassinate some of his chief officers.

On one occasion a large number of men were caught deserting their posts and escaping in a boat to the other side of the Tagus. When they were brought to the Archduke for punishment he said if they were too cowardly to fight in defence of their God and their fatherland they were useless to him and could go. This he knew, that even the Castilian women would mount the walls and fight with stones, if need be, in such a cause. Albert required all his firmness and nerve, for one sign of weakness from him and his handful of Spaniards, would have given heart to the craven Portuguese within and without the walls, who were thirsting for their blood.

Three-quarters of the Portuguese in Lisbon had fled or were in hiding, and the rest were in Spanish pay or watched day and night by jealous eyes. But watched as they were, and few in numbers, their hopes were still high, and amongst themselves their speech grew bolder. They got news daily from English prisoners and others of the approach of their king, and plotted together how they would serve the hated Castilians when the English deliverers came.

The rumour ran that the city would be surrendered to the invader on Corpus Christi day, and not a Spaniard was to be left alive, and much more to the same effect. But, alas! on one occasion when a few English prisoners were being brought in a panic-cry arose that the invaders had entered the city, and then each man fled to hiding to save his own skin rather than to his post, and the few Spanish guards that remained had to drag them out of cellars and lofts by main force, kicking and cuffing them for a set of cowards for not helping the defenders. The Count de Fuentes, once on a false alarm, was sent out of the city with every man who could be spared to Orlas, three leagues off on the road to Cascaes, where it was expected the enemy would pass; but the English went by Torres Vedras, and Fuentes had to hurry back into Lisbon again the same day, to avoid being cut off and the gates being shut against him.

On the 19th of May Norris and his troops marched into Torres Vedras, where Dom Antonio was received with regal honours, and the oath of allegiance taken to him. He was desirous of making a detour to Santarem, through, as he said, a rich country favourable to him, but Norris knew the danger of delay, and insisted upon pushing forward to Lisbon.

Guzman and his Spanish horsemen had fallen back during the previous night to Jara, nearer Lisbon, but he had left Captain Alarcon, with two companies of horse, to hang on the skirts of the enemy. The next day Captain Yorke, who commanded Norris’ cavalry, determined to try their metal, and sent a corporal with eight men who rode through forty of the enemy, whilst Yorke himself, with forty English horse, put to precipitous flight Alarcon’s two hundred. On the following day, May 21st, the English, disappointed again of a fight, were lodged in the village of Louvres, not far from Lisbon, which Guzman had hurriedly evacuated after being very nearly surprised by Norris. The village was small and the accommodation poor, so Drake’s regiment, thinking to better their quarters, went to sleep at a little hamlet a mile off. In the early dawn a cry was raised of “Viva el Rei Dom Antonio!” which was the usual friendly salutation of the country folk. The young English sentries fraternised with those who approached, and admitted them into the sleeping-camp. It was an ambuscade, and many of the English were slain, but the enemy was finally driven off by two companies of Englishmen who were lodged near. The next day, at a village near Lisbon, a large number were treacherously poisoned by the bad water from a well, or, as some said, by the honey which they found in the houses. This was three miles from Lisbon, at a place called Alvelade, and at eleven o’clock at night Essex left the camp with Sir Roger Williams and 1,000 men to lie in ambuscade near the town. When they had approached almost to the walls a few of them began banging at the gates and otherwise trying to alarm those within and provoke a sally. But the device was too transparent, and a few men shot and a sleepless night were the only result. When the English had arrived at Alvelade, Count de Fuentes, with the main body of Spaniards, was at Alcantara, a mile or so nearer Lisbon. Thither Albert hastily summoned a council of war, and urged his officers at last to make a stand at once before the English could co-operate with their friends within the walls of Lisbon. Fuentes and the other Spanish commanders were of the same opinion, but the Portuguese Colonel, Fernando de Castro, made a speech pointing out that the English were short of stores, cut off from their base, and weakened by sickness and short commons. “Let us,” he said, “fall back into the city and conquer them by hunger and delay. Behind our walls they will be powerless to injure us, whilst we can draw abundant supplies from across the river, and they cannot blockade us even by land with less than 40,000 men.” This exactly suited the other Portuguese, who were never comfortable unless they had a good thick wall between themselves and their enemies. The opinion of the Spaniards was overborne, and the defending force entered the gates of Lisbon on Corpus Christi day, midst the ringing of bells and the more or less sincere rejoicing of the populace. Lisbon feasted and welcomed its defenders, whilst poor Dom Antonio, we are told, at Alvelade just outside, had not a fowl or even a loaf of rye bread to eat. “You may guess how he is hated by the Portuguese,” says my Portuguese diarist, “that he being so near his native Lisbon not even a costermonger or a down dared to send him a meal, whilst we in the city had plenty.”

Most of the houses adjoining the walls had been blown up, but the monastery of the Trinidade, down the hill towards the river, still remained. The prior was understood to be in favour of Dom Antonio, as were nearly all churchmen, and Ruy Diaz de Lobo, one of the few nobles with Dom Antonio, undertook to negotiate with him to admit the English to the city through the monastery garden. By the aid of two sympathetic monks he obtained access to the prior. But the latter had been gained over by the Spaniards, and a few hours afterwards the pale heads of Ruy Diaz de Lobo and the two monks were grinning with half-closed, lustreless eyes from the top of three poles on the great quay, whilst Sir Roger Williams and his men, when they approached the monastery in expectation of a friendly reception, were received with a shower of harquebuss balls, and fell back. The rest of the day, now that the main body of English had come up, was spent in quartering the men in the suburbs of the city, entrenched camps being formed, protected by breastworks of wine-pipes filled with earth. Tired with their six days’ march and their labour in the trenches, Norris’ little army were glad to pass their first night before Lisbon in such peace as the besieged would allow them.

If the enterprise was ever to succeed this was the moment. The English were more numerous as regards men bearing arms, but they had come upon their wild-goose chase against a fortified city without any battering artillery or proper appliances for a siege, whilst the Spaniards were behind strong walls, with unlimited sources of supply from the river front across the Tagus. Norris, on the other hand, was short of supplies, with fifteen miles of defensible country between him and Cascaes, the point where the fleet was to await him. The advantage, therefore, was clearly on the side of the besieged, but for the one element of the disaffection of Lisbon itself from within, and in this lay Dom Antonio’s last chance. A letter written by Don Francisco Odonte, adjutant-general in Lisbon, on the day following the arrival of the English forces before the walls, gives a vivid description of the state of affairs there at the time.26

“Dom Antonio,” he says, “spent the night in the house of the Duke d’Aveiro, and then early in the morning completed the investment of the city and continued his search for some secret gate by which he might enter. But the garrison harassed him as much as they could. Don Sancho Bravo and Captain Alarcon have been skirmishing all day outside the city, and have sent in 25 or 30 English prisoners who have been consigned to the galleys; and if they could only do the same by all those who are really fighting us, whilst feigning to be our friends, they might man more galleys than are to be found in all Christendom this day, for those who have shown their colours during the last three days, and that without a blush, are simply infinite, nor is there any wonder that Dom Antonio has attempted this enterprise, owing to the promises held out to him; for from the moment he disembarked, he has been supplied with abundance of provisions,27 whilst not a man has offered us his services. All the aldermen of the city are against us but two, the rest are all in hiding, and some even have supplied Dom Antonio’s troops, with as little shamefacedness as if they had come from England with him. In this quarter of the city there is not a man left. Some have fled across the river, some are hidden, some have joined Dom Antonio. The troops under the four colonels publicly declare they will not fight. Dom Antonio was certain the moment he appeared the city would rise, and on this account we are in great alarm and have passed a very bad night. God help us!”

But the English did not sleep tranquilly either. In the first hours of the morning of the 25th of May Don Garcia Bravo, with 500 Spanish troops from Oporto, arrived in Lisbon. They were hungry, ragged, and weary, but they were eager to meet the foe, and barely gave themselves time to snatch a hurried meal before sallying from the gate of San Anton and up the hill to the quarters of Colonel Brett in the farm of Andres Soares. Another force at the same time came from the gate of Santa Catalina and forced Brett’s trenches from that side. The long rows of windows of the monastery of San Roque on the hill were lined by Spanish musketeers, who kept up a deadly fire on the English, whilst two of the great guns of the castle were brought to bear upon one exposed side of the invaders’ camp. The attack was made before dawn, and Brett had hardly time to muster his men in the darkness and confusion, when a cannon-shot from the walls laid him low. Captain Carsey and Captain Carr were mortally wounded, and 200 other officers and men slain. The rest of the English forces were aroused, and came to the rescue under Colonel Lane and Colonel Medkirk, and “put them to a sodain fowle retreate, insomuch as the Earle of Essex had the chase of them even to the gates of the High towne, wherein they left behind them many of their best commanders.” A body of Spanish horse, sallying from the gates of San Anton to support their comrades, met the latter in full retreat in a narrow lane, and unwillingly trampled them down; thus adding to the confusion, which was completed by a flank charge upon the struggling mass by Yorke’s cavalry. The English chronicler claims that the Spanish loss tripled ours, but my diarists say that they had only twenty-five killed and forty wounded, and the Portuguese tries to account for the heavy loss of wounded by accusing the English of using poisoned bullets. The next day the English tried to get in through the monastery, but they found the city forewarned and on the alert, although the monks had done their best for them. The day after they bribed a Portuguese captain in charge of the wall at the nearest point to the river to let them pass round at low tide, but the spies told the Archduke, and the English found their ally replaced by a Spaniard with a strong force, who sent them flying back again. And so three days passed in constant skirmishes, whilst Norris was chafing and helpless without. The fatal mistake he had made in leaving the fleet was now apparent. The time, too, they had lost at Corunna was irreparable. Fernando de Toledo was approaching with relief, and the first dismay in Spain had now given way to desperate energy. The loss of men in the English camp from sickness and wounds was terrible, supplies and munitions were desperately short, there was no medical aid or transport for the sick and disabled, whilst the Portuguese in Lisbon, from whom everything had been hoped, still made no sign.

Dom Antonio still put a brave face on the matter, but his heart was sinking. For the first two days he had lodged in the rear of the English camp, outside Santa Catalina, but on the third, says my Portuguese diarist, he began to fear for his safety, and, wearied of low fare and the sound of musketry, sought refuge in the house of a Portuguese gentleman on the road to Cascaes. But he was repulsed and barely escaped capture, and thereafter could but cling desperately to the English force. In vain he looked now for the general rising in his favour, for the promised nobles who never came, and hour by hour the prospect darkened. The Earl of Essex, young, inexperienced, hot-headed, was for assaulting all sorts of impossible places with pike and musket, but Norris knew better, and sadly acknowledged to himself that the expedition had failed.

Drake, with the fleet, had in the meanwhile reached Cascaes with everything he could lay hands on in the form of prizes. He had cast anchor on the very day twelvemonth that the great Armada had first sailed out of Lisbon, and the townspeople of the capital were full of portents which they saw in this coincidence. Every one in Lisbon by this time feared that he would sail up the river and enter the harbour; and such was the dread of his name that if he had done so he might have turned the tide of victory. But his advice had been rejected, and he would not venture under the guns of the forts with an under-manned fleet and no soldiers. So he remained at Cascaes and left Norris to get out of the hobble as best he could. When he arrived he found the town almost abandoned, for the citizens had fled in terror at his very name. My Portuguese says that Cardenas, the commander of the fortress, “a great gentleman,” was deceived by a monk (or, as he says, the devil in disguise of one) into the belief that Lisbon had fallen, and he accordingly gave up the fortress, and himself took to flight. The Castilian and the Englishman tell the story somewhat differently, and say that Cardenas was an adherent of Dom Antonio, and stipulated that a show of compulsion should be used before he surrendered the fortress. The result in any case was the same to him, for the “great gentleman’s” head soon afterwards adorned one of the Archduke’s poles on the quay at Lisbon.

Drake had therefore established himself without difficulty at Cascaes, and patiently awaited the result of the land attack on Lisbon.

If the English outside the walls of the capital were in a bad way, the small force of steadfast Spaniards inside were not much better. They knew that the Portuguese citizens around them were hourly watching for an opportunity to cut their throats and let in the native pretender. Panics of treason and treachery were of hourly occurrence, and on several occasions only the coolness of the Cardinal-Archduke averted disaster. Every day men of the best blood of Portugal, often taken from the immediate surrounding of the Archduke, were seized for assumed treason, the policy being to deprive the disaffected populace of native leaders. To further terrorise the citizens, and prevent them from plucking up heart to open the gates, a great review of all the Spanish troops was held in an open space where the enemy could see as well as the wavering townfolk. My Spanish diarist says, “With the sun flashing on shining morions and the brave show of arms and men all were convinced, friends and enemies alike that the success of our cause was certain.”

Boldness and firmness won the day. The next morning Norris called his colonels together to seek their advice and consult with Dom Antonio. He said that as the besieged stood firm and the populace made no move, the English force must have artillery and munitions if they were to succeed, and asked their opinion as to whether he should wait for Dom Antonio’s forces, which came not, and meanwhile send a detachment to Cascaes for munitions, or raise the siege altogether. Many were for sending 3,000 men to Cascaes at once. They had given the enemy a good drubbing, they said, and they would sally no more; but Norris had lost hope in Portuguese promises, and was not quite so contemptuous of the enemy as some of them, and he decided that he would wait only one day more for Dom Antonio’s levies. If 3,000 came in that night he would send a like number of English to Cascaes for the munitions, otherwise he would raise the siege and leave before daybreak. In vain Antonio prayed for a few days’ longer grace. In nine days all Portugal would acclaim him. Lisbon was wavering already, and would turn the scale. But all his prayers were in vain; and before dawn the English army was mustered and ready for the march. Essex was disgusted at the turn things had taken, and went up to the principal gate (he and Williams being the last men to leave) and broke his lance against it, crying out that if there was any within who would come out and have a bout with him in honour of his mistress let him come, and he gave them all the lie to their teeth. And then he turned away and followed the army, no doubt much relieved in his mind.

During the day that Norris was awaiting the arrival of Dom Antonio’s troops the English had not left their trenches, and the defenders feared that some deep design lay behind this. Were they mining, or was Drake sending up some heavy guns? they thought. So when the dawn of the 27th of May showed that the main body of the English was already on its way to Cascaes, Count de Fuentes still doubted whether it was not all a feint to draw him out from the shelter of his walls, and peremptorily refused permission to Count Villa Dorta to follow them up and engage them. The way of the retreating force lay along the shore, but to avoid the fire of the galleys which followed their movements they chose the rough by-paths where possible. And so, all undisciplined, sick, and starving, they wandered and struggled on as best they could, four hundred at least of stragglers and sick being killed or captured by Villa Dorta, who hung upon the rear, notwithstanding his chief’s prohibition. Later in the day Fuentes so far conquered his suspicion as to lead his army out to Viera, half-way to Cascaes, but he had barely sighted the enemy than some rumour or suspicion reached him of an intended rising in Lisbon during his absence, and he hurried back again to the city. My Portuguese diarist ridicules the suggestion of such a danger as unworthy of any sensible man; but the utter futility of the English and Portuguese proceedings from the first was such as well might excuse Fuentes for thinking that some deeper design must surely lay behind. The suspicion of the Portuguese on the part of the Spaniards at this time is illustrated by an anecdote given by the Portuguese diarist. Alvaro Souza, the captain of Philip’s Portuguese guard, with five companions, accompanied Sancho Bravo, who took out a force to harry the English on their way to Cascaes. Souza straggled and was captured by Spanish soldiers, who did not know him. They were near the castle of São Gian at the mouth of Lisbon harbour and knowing that Pero Venegas, the commandant, was a friend of his father, Souza sent a messenger to him begging him to answer for his loyalty. Venegas declined to reply, and Souza was lead off under arrest. On the way he met the famous Alvaro de Bazan going to his galleys. He was a friend, and Souza appealed to him to stand by him and his companions, “but he answered coldly that he knew him not, nor was this a time to recognise any one.” He had, he said, recently answered for some Portuguese fidalgos in the palace, and a few hours afterwards they were arrested for treason.

Fifteen weary miles over rough ground, and with Villa Dorta’s troops harassing their flank and rear, the English managed to cover during the day, and at last, late in the evening, they marched into Cascaes.28 We may well imagine that the meeting between Drake and Norris was not very cordial. The officers threw the whole blame for failure upon Drake for not coming up the river to support them before Lisbon; the sailors, on the other hand, saying that the march overland was against Drake’s advice, and that his ships, without men-at-arms to defend them and work the guns, would have been at the mercy of the enemy. At all events, it was clear they had failed in two of the objects of the voyage—namely, to burn the King of Spain’s ships and restore Dom Antonio; and one other only remained to be attempted, which was to take the Azores.

I have already said that the raising of the siege of Lisbon took the defenders by surprise. They fully believed it to be an attempt to draw the Spanish troops out of the town in order that the citizens might rise and massacre the few Spaniards left. So certain were they of this that an unfortunate Portuguese noble—Count Redondo—who arrived that day and went to pay his respects to the Archduke, was immediately seized and beheaded pour encourager les autres. As soon as they saw the English had really gone, Count de Fuentes with his six or seven thousand men again made a reconnaissance almost to the English position at Cascaes, and finding the invaders well entrenched, with the fleet behind them, decided that it would be too risky to attack them, and hastened back again to Lisbon. News of the nearness of the Spaniards was brought in by some friars, of whom great numbers hung about Dom Antonio’s quarters, and Norris and Essex each promised the messengers a hundred crowns if they found the enemy in the place reported, as they were spoiling for a fight in the open before embarking. But Fuentes had gone to Lisbon, and the friars lost their reward. Norris, however, still eager, sent a page who spoke French, and a trumpeter, post-haste to Lisbon, with a challenge to Fuentes and his army to come into the open and fight. The opportunity was too good for Essex to miss, so he too sent a cartel by the page on his own account, giving every one the lie in a general way and offering to fight anybody in single combat. The messenger came back again without an answer, only that the Spaniards had threatened to hang him for bringing such vapouring insolence to them; but the Spaniard tells the story in another way, less honourably for himself. He says, whilst the messengers were being entertained “as if they were great gentlemen” at breakfast by some of the captains who spoke French, the letters (which they had said could only be opened by the Archduke’s permission) were surreptitiously steamed, read, and re-sealed, and handed back again as if unopened, with the reply that his Highness would not allow them to be opened. So Norris and Essex had their bravado for nothing, and went without their fight.

In Lisbon the common people were as disturbed as ever, doubtless feeling that their chance of freedom was slipping away from them, and alarms were constantly raised that the English were returning. But Spanish reinforcements were arriving now. The Duke of Braganza, head of the Portuguese nobility, arrived in royal state with a great body of retainers to help the Archduke, and all hope for Dom Antonio gradually ebbed away.

The English commanders in Cascaes began now to think it high time to put themselves right with the angry Queen, who continued to send furious messages about their disobedience and about Essex and Sir Roger Williams. On the 2nd of June they wrote from Cascaes a full account of all that had happened in the best light they could devise, and saying they knew not what to do unless supplies came at once from England. Everybody was terribly seasick, they said, and well-nigh starving. Seeing that no more provisions could be expected, they wrote, on the 5th of June, that they had decided to go to St. Michaels; and then, for the first time, they confessed that Essex was with them. They had met him, they said, to their great surprise, off Cape Finisterra, but could not send him home before, as they could not spare the Swiftsure; but still no word about Sir Roger Williams.29

If Drake could not or would not burn the Spanish fleet on this occasion, he was always a splendid hand at plundering merchantmen, and during the six days that his fleet lay before Cascaes he scoured the sea for miles round in search of prizes, taking as many as forty German hulks loaded with Spanish merchandise. Into these prizes the men from the Dutch flyboats were transhipped, and the Dutch captains sent off without being paid their freights, glad, no doubt, to get away from such company on any terms.

In the meanwhile Lisbon was gradually settling down. People who had been hiding in churches and cellars for the last ten days crept out, nearly all under the impression that the Spaniards had all been murdered, and that King Antonio had come to his own again. Dire was their disappointment when they found that they were not the only people who had skulked in hiding, and that none of all the city had dared to strike the blow that would have made Portugal free again. So they patiently bent their neck to the yoke and cheered his Highness the Archduke at the top of their voices as he went in state to the cathedral to hear a solemn Te Deum of victory.

The Spaniards did their best to follow up the enemy. The ships in the Tagus were fitted out to watch Cascaes and follow the English fleet, doing all the damage they could, and Don Pedro de Guzman was sent to cut off the English garrison left at Peniche. They urged the horses, says the Spanish diarist, until they were ready to drop, but arrived too late to stop the embarkation, except of about 200 men, who were put to death.

On the 8th of June the English fleet set sail, pursued and harassed by the galleys from Lisbon in nearly a dead calm. Three of our ships were taken or sunk and one burned, by her captain, Minshaw, after a desperate resistance. A wind sprang up, however, and the Spanish galleys were left behind; but soon the fleet got scattered, the men died, and were thrown overboard by the hundred from scurvy, starvation, and wounds; but, notwithstanding all, after sailing ostensibly for the Azores, Drake turned back again and, picking up twenty-five of his ships which had been separated from him, sailed up the bay and attacked Vigo. He had only 2,000 men fit to fight: sickness and privation had thinned them down to that, but with those few men, finding Vigo deserted, the English burnt and wasted the town and all the villages around. “A verie pleasant rich valley but wee burnt it all, houses and corne, so as the countrey was spoyled seven or eight miles in length.” Then they decided to drop down to the isle of Bayona, and there put the pick of the men and stores on twenty of the best ships for Drake to take to the Azores, whilst the rest returned to England. But for some reason Drake broke the agreement and passed Bayona without even calling, and the thirty ships that were awaiting him there were left to their fate. Beset with tempest and pestilence, without a commander, it was decided by those on board to make the best of their way to England, in terrible distress as they were for provisions and water. After ten days’ voyage they arrived at Plymouth on the 2nd of July, and found that Drake had already arrived there with the Queen’s ships, having abandoned his voyage to the Azores. Most of the remaining ships had sought other ports in preference, in order to sell their prizes without having to share the proceeds with others.

Such of the soldiers as came to Plymouth were sent grumbling home with five shillings each for their wages and the arms they bore. The English chronicler thinks that this was “verie good pay, considering they were victualled all the time.” Such, however, was not the opinion of the unfortunate men themselves, who had not been allowed to loot as much as they thought fit in Portugal. They said that if they had been permitted to march as through an enemy’s country, they would have come back the richest army that ever returned to England. Not more than 5,000 of them ever came home; but their story was so dismal a one that all England rang with reprobation of the bad management and parsimony that had brought the expedition to so inglorious a conclusion.

The first and third objects of the expedition—namely, the burning of the Spanish fleet and the capture of St. Michaels—were never even attempted, but the second object was very nearly being attained, and the restoration of Dom Antonio, practically as a vassal of England, might have been effected a dozen times over if the Portuguese in Lisbon had not been an utterly terrified set of poltroons. On various occasions, when Count de Fuentes and his troops were outside, a few dozen daring men might have seized the gates and have turned the tide in Antonio’s favour. It was not to be, however, and the poor King wandered a poverty-stricken fugitive yet for a few years before he died, but his desperate struggle for sovereignty ended with the ignominious failure of the English attempt to avenge a great national injury by a joint-stock enterprise.

This diamond is probably identical with the celebrated stone given by Charles I. when Prince of Wales to the Count-Duke of Olivares, favourite of Philip IV., when Charles and Buckingham went on their foolish visit to Madrid. A contemporary account (Soto’s MS. in the Academy of History, Madrid) describes the diamond as being of the purest water, weighing eight carats and called “the Portuguese,” from its having been one of the crown jewels of Portugal. It had a great pearl pendent from it.

“1. To attempt to burn ye shippes in Lysbon and Civill.”
“2. To tak Lysbon.”
“3. To tak the Hands.”

Camden, the historian, speaks of 12,500 soldiers, and Speed, following Pricket’s tract, puts the number of landsmen at 11,000 and mariners at 2,500. There is a letter in the British Museum from one of the Portuguese nobles (Count de Portalegre) to Philip II., in which the army before Lisbon is spoken of as 12,000 men; and the Spanish diarist whose MS. I have mentioned says 16,000 men-at-arms left England and very few sailors. The terrible mortality from sickness, &c., and the comparatively small number that came back made English writers of the time anxious to minimise the disaster by underrating the numbers of the expedition.

The draft of this letter, deeply scored by the Queen’s own hand, was submitted to Walsingham by Windebanke, the Secretary of the Signet, and the minister said that although the letter was as mild as could be expected “under the circumstances,” he much feared that any proceedings against one so beloved as Sir Roger Williams would breed mutiny. And so apparently thought the generals, for they took no notice of the Queen’s commands.

The Queen wrote another outspoken letter to the generals on the 20th of May, in which she says they were perverting the object of their expedition; which was to burn the King of Spain’s navy and restore Dom Antonio, and then proceed to the Azores. Corunna, she says, is of little importance and the risk great, and she commands them to fulfil her orders at once. Do not, she says, suffer yourselves to be transported with an haviour of vainglory which will obfuscate the eyes of your judgment.

Secretary Windebanke, writing to Heneage at the same time, says the Queen is strangely set against the expedition, and is intensely incensed at the fruitless attack on Corunna. “She thinks they went to places for their own profit rather than for her service.”—State Papers (Domestic).

Notes

1 For the sake of uniformity, throughout this narrative the dates are given in the “old style,” then used in England, ten days earlier than the dates cited by the Spanish and Portuguese authorities.

2 Venetian Calendar of State Papers.

3 Ibid.

4 In a subscription reprint of sixty copies of this tract published in 1881 under the editorship of the Rev. Alexander Grosart, the authorship appears to be ascribed, I know not on what grounds, to a certain Robert Pricket who served probably as a gentleman volunteer and follower of the Earl of Essex. He had seen previous service in the Netherlands, and was the author of several poetical works, one being a panegyric on the Earl of Essex. The tract is entitled “A True Coppie of a Discourse, written by a gentleman employed in the late voiage of Spaine and Portingale. Sent to his particular friend and by him published for the better satisfaction of all such as having been seduced by particular report have entered into conceipts tending to the discredit of the enterprise and Actors of the same. At London. Printed for Thomas Woodcock, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the sign of the blacke Beare 1589.”

5 It is called “Relacion de lo subcedido del armada enemiga del reyno de Inglaterra a este de Portugal con la retirada a su tierra, este año de 1589.” MS. Gayangos Library. Transcript in possession of the author.

6 “Memoria do successo da vinda dos Ingreses ao reino de Portugal.” Biblioteca National, Lisbon. Pombalina, 196, fol. 271. Transcribed by the author.

7 Mendoza, writing to Philip from London, August 8, 1582, gives one instance of this amongst several. He says: “The Queen lent Dom Antonio £3,000 when he was here, and I understand she peremptorily demands payment of the sum, taking possession of the diamond which was pledged here for a sum of £5,000 lent by merchants, who offer to relinquish their claim to the Queen, if she will lend them £30,000 free of interest for six years out of the bars brought by Drake, which they will repay in five yearly instalments of £6,000 each. So far as I can learn, this talk of the loan is a mere fiction and a cloak under which the Queen may keep the diamond for the £8,000 on the ground that the merchants advanced the £5,000 by her express order, without which they would not have done so. This plan was invented by Cecil in order to prevent Dom Antonio from getting his diamond back again.”

8 See Calendar of Spanish State Papers of Elizabeth, vol. 3, for particulars of them.

9 The first of these, in 1582, commanded by Strozzi, consisted of 55 ships and 5,000 men. Terceira, which was held for Dom Antonio, welcomed it at once, and in the midst of the rejoicings to celebrate the event the Spanish fleet under Santa Cruz appeared and scattered the French like chaff, Strozzi being killed, Antonio barely escaping, and the fleet almost entirely destroyed. The second expedition in the following year under Aymar de Chastes with 6,000 men was, curiously enough, beaten by Santa Cruz in the same place and under exactly similar circumstances (“Un pretendant portugais du xvi. siècle”).

10 It is a curious co-incidence that this gem was long afterwards carried away from England by another fugitive King, James II., who sold it, as Antonio had done, to provide for his needs. It had formerly belonged to Charles the Bold of Burgundy, the great-grandfather of Philip II.

11 After the return of the expedition Lopez writes (July 12, 1589) to Walsingham, deeply regretting that the Queen had been induced by his advice to spend so much money to no purpose, and hinting that he had intimated to Dom Antonio that he and his Portuguese were not wanted in England. On the same day he himself craves for help in his need and again asks for a thirty years’ monopoly of the import of aniseed and sumach into England. He was executed in 1592, and was in high favour almost up to the day of his arrest. In the Mendoza Papers in the National Archives in Paris, to which I have had access, are documents proving that he made a regular trade of poisoning—or attempting to poison, as he does not seem to have been very successful in the cases recorded.

12 It is certain from letters of Dom Antonio’s friends in London, now in the Archives Nationales (K 1567), that it was not until the end of December that Antonio was confident that the fleet was really intended to aid him.

13 There is a rough memorandum in Burleigh’s writing, September 20, 1588, in the Record Office, setting down the details of the proposed expedition, in which he mentions that four thousand men are to be sent for from Holland, as well as two thousand horsemen volunteers. At the foot of the memorandum Burleigh sets down the “Articles of offers from King Antonio.

14 Calendar of State Papers (Domestic). Record Office.

15 Norris had greatly distinguished himself in Ireland and the Netherlands, notwithstanding Leicester’s persistent attempts to ruin him; and, from his conduct there and during this expedition, he would appear to have been brave, but turbulent and of doubtful discretion.

16 Philip was informed late in December by his spies in England that Drake was to contribute 12,000 crowns, the Earl of Essex 10,000, Norris 8,000, and London Merchants 24,000, and that the Queen had advanced £20,000.

17 On the eve of departure Norris and Drake officially told the Council that the total number of all sorts was 23,375. Captain Fenner, Drake’s vice-admiral, gives the number as 21,000 (Bacon Papers). Captain Baillie, of the Mary German, in a letter to Lord Shrewsbury says the landsmen alone were 20,000; whilst Drake himself, in one of his many letters begging for supplies, says, “20,000 men cannot be kept for a trifle.”

18 English accounts usually say six, but I am inclined to believe the Spanish account is correct, as Drake writes to the Council (Record Office, Domestic Calendar), after the six ships had been appointed, asking for a larger vessel, the Victory, “in respect of the King Dom Antonio.”

19 Venetian Calendar.

20 The Venetian ambassador at Madrid, in his account to the Doge of the events at Corunna, says that Drake’s booty from that place consisted of “6,000 salted oxen, fifteen thousand jars of biscuit, 6,000 barrels of powder and 3,000 hogsheads of wine; all of it provision for the Armada which went so unsuccessfully last year, or else to furnish a new Armada according to the design which they entertain. This plunder will prove of the greatest service to the English... and here the news has caused much chagrin; and it is hidden or minimised as much as possible.”

21 It was said in Madrid that these two thousand peasants had only six muskets amongst them.—Venetian Calendar of State Papers.

22 “She dowteth not but they have thoroughly weighed the heinousness of the offence lately committed by Sir Roger Williams in forsaking the army with one of her principal ships. If they have not already inflicted punishment of death upon him he is to be deprived of all command and kept in safe custody at their perils. If the Earl of Essex has joined the fleet they are to send him home instantly. If they do not they shall truly answer for the same at their smart, for as we have authority to rule so we look to be obeyed and these be no childish actions.”—State Papers (Domestic), May 4, 1589.

23 The bitter jest in Madrid at the time was that, whereas with the Armada the year before there went an army with no commander, there was now a commander with no army.

24 Contarini to the Doge. Venetian Calendar of State Papers.

25 A letter in the collection of the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield curiously illustrates the not altogether happy relations that existed between the English invaders and the pretender’s friends. The letter is dated the 27th of May, and is from General Norris to Captain George (Burton?), whom he had left in charge at Peniche, complaining that “the King is aggrieved that you do take upon you to give the word since he hath appointed a Governor. And in truth it is not reason but the Governor should have the pre-eminence and therefore henceforward fail not to let him have that honour.” This is a sample of the frequent complaints that the English did not treat Antonio quite as a king expected to be treated in his own realm. The fact was that Antonio had been too long a suppliant and a fugitive dependent largely upon Elizabeth’s caprices for the English to regard him otherwise than as a tool for their own ends.

26 Venetian Calendar of State Papers.

27 This is more likely to be true than the assertion of my Portuguese that Antonio could get nothing to eat. The great body of the people were unquestionably in his favour, but had no leaders and would not fight.

28 If the Earl of Essex was rash and headstrong, he was also chivalrous. Pricket (or Wingfield) says: “Hee for money hired men to carrie sick and hurt upon pikes (for want of waggons) and hee (whose true virtue and nobilitie, as it dooth in all other his actions appear so did it very much in this) threw his owne stuffe, I mean apparell and necessaries from his owne carriages, and let them be left by the way, to put hurt and sick men upon them in this march.”

29 Essex started for England on the 16th of June, two days after his brother, on receipt of letters direct from the Queen, brought by a ship with stores from England. Williams was very desirous of accompanying him, but the generals refused to let him go, as they doubtless wished him to have the benefit of the favourite’s mollifying influence with the Queen for some weeks before he arrived in England.