Howard · 1588
Effingham and the Armada
On the evening of the seventh of August 1588, while the Spanish Armada under Medina Sidonia lay at anchor off Calais waiting for the Duke of Parma's army to come down from Flanders, the English fleet of Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, sent eight fireships into the anchored line at midnight. The Spanish cut their cables and ran north before a south-westerly. The English fleet under Howard, with Drake on the *Revenge*, Hawkins on the *Victory*, Frobisher on the *Triumph*, gave chase up the Channel through the morning of the eighth. At the action off Gravelines that day they broke the Spanish line, drove four ships ashore on the Flemish coast, and pushed the rest into a North Sea where the wind would carry them around the top of Scotland and break a third of them on the Irish coast. Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham, was fifty-two years old, a Catholic in religion in a Protestant fleet, the cousin of the queen, and the man whose decision not to anchor inshore at the Isle of Wight on the third of August had kept the Spanish from a deepwater harbour in southern England.
It is half past eleven on the night of the seventh of August 1588, on the quarterdeck of the Ark Royal, half a mile off Calais Roads, with a breeze off the south-west and the lights of the Spanish fleet at anchor in the bay astern. He is fifty-two years old. He is Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral of England, cousin to Queen Elizabeth, son of a Catholic father, husband of a Catholic wife, in command of a Protestant fleet of one hundred and ninety-seven sail at the moment of greatest danger to the country since 1066.
The Spanish fleet of one hundred and thirty sail, under Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, has been at anchor off Calais since the late afternoon of the sixth, waiting for the Duke of Parma to bring his thirty thousand veterans of the Army of Flanders down from Dunkirk in barges. Parma's barges are not ready. Parma's barges may not be ready for three days. The English fleet is upwind. The English fleet has not, in the running fight up the Channel, been able to do material damage to the Spanish formation. The Spanish ships are heavier and better-manned at close quarters; the English are faster and have more long guns. So far the English have shot away the rigging of the San Salvador and the Rosario and have boarded neither.
He thinks: if Parma comes down, this country is lost.
He thinks: if I anchor in front of him to stop him crossing, I lose the wind, and the Spanish will engage me from windward.
He thinks: I have eight old hulks I have already paid for. I can run them at the Spanish in the dark.
He thinks: if I send fireships in tonight Medina Sidonia will cut his cables, lose his anchorage, and run before the wind north out of the bay. He will leave Parma stuck at Dunkirk. The army that does not cross from Dunkirk does not invade England.
He has, on the Bear under Sir Henry Palmer, been preparing the fireships since the morning. Eight Channel hulks, lightly built, packed with pitch, gunpowder, faggots of dry brush, the guns left aboard and double-shotted so that, when the fires reach them, they go off and the Spanish gun-crews believe English ships are firing into them. The fireships have been tarred. The wind is south-west to the Spanish anchorage. The tide is starting to run east.
He gives the order at midnight. The eight fireships are brought up under low sail, set alight, the rudders lashed, the men in the small boats astern released to come back to the line. The eight ships go in down the wind and the tide together, and at twelve fifteen, with the line of the Spanish anchorage clearly seen, eight separate fires bloom in the dark in a row, half a mile out and closing.
On the San Martín, Medina Sidonia gives the order to cut cables and run before the wind. He has expected this. He has the bell rung for it. The Spanish anchor cables are cut along the entire line. One hundred and twenty-eight ships of the line, every one of them under hasty sail, leave the Calais Roads in the next half hour with no formation and an easterly tide under them. Two hundred Spanish anchors lie on the bottom of the Channel off Calais; some of them are still there.
Howard chases up the Channel into the North Sea through the morning of the eighth. The action off Gravelines on the afternoon of the eighth is the only sustained close-range gunnery exchange of the campaign; the English get into long-range musket and cannon shot, the Spanish do not get into the boarding range they need, four Spanish ships are forced ashore on the Flemish banks, and at six in the evening, with both fleets running short of powder, the wind shifts northerly and Medina Sidonia takes the only course open to him, north, around the top of Scotland, around the Hebrides, and down the Atlantic past the west coast of Ireland to make for Spain by the long way.
He had a fleet at Gravelines of about one hundred and ten sail still under command. He had at the Bay of Biscay six weeks later about sixty. The lost ships had broken in storms in the Hebrides, on the cliffs of County Mayo, on the Donegal strand at Streedagh, on the Blasket sound. The single Spanish soldier most often quoted in Irish parish memory of the autumn of 1588 is the man who came ashore at Streedagh and was killed by a tenant of Sir Brian O'Rourke for the gold buttons on his cloak. The Armada lost about a third of its men and a half of its ships, all of it after Howard had broken the line off Calais and pushed it into the North Sea. He was made Earl of Nottingham five years later. The cousin who had given him the command kept the country he had defended. The fireships of Calais became, in English naval thinking, the first deliberate use of the weapon as a battle-deciding tool. They were used again, by Howard's own order, against the Spanish at Cadiz in 1596. The Calais Roads anchorage is, on a calm day, still a notable hazard for ships that drag, because the bottom is rocky and an English commander four hundred years ago saw to it that the Spanish anchors would still be there.