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.
Invasions are not always turned back by the heavier fleet. Sometimes they are turned by a single decision made in the dark, by a commander who understands that an anchored enemy is only an enemy at rest, and that fire travels faster than discipline.
THE ADMIRAL AND HIS QUEEN
Charles Howard, second Baron Howard of Effingham, is fifty-two in the summer of 1588. His father served four Tudors as Lord Admiral before him; his mother was a Boleyn; the queen who has given him the command of her fleet is his first cousin once removed. He is a Catholic by family, married to a Catholic wife, and he holds the staff of Lord High Admiral over a Protestant navy in the year when Philip II of Spain has sent the greatest fleet ever assembled north to depose her. The country has not faced an invasion of this weight since 1066. There are one hundred and ninety-seven English sail under his flag, and one hundred and thirty Spanish sail under Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, working their way up the Channel toward a rendezvous with the Duke of Parma's thirty thousand veterans waiting in barges at Dunkirk.
THE RUNNING FIGHT UP THE CHANNEL
From the twenty-first of July the English have harried the Spanish formation as it advanced east, never closing to the boarding range at which the Spanish soldiery would tell, holding the weather gauge and the long gun. The Spanish ships are higher, heavier, fuller of pikemen. The English are lower, faster, longer in the reach of their pieces. On the third of August the Spanish stand off the Isle of Wight, and Howard will not be drawn inshore to anchor across them; he keeps the sea, and the Spanish, with no deepwater harbour in southern England open to them, are pushed on past the Solent toward Calais. On the afternoon of the sixth Medina Sidonia drops anchor in the Calais Roads to wait for Parma to bring his army down from Flanders. Parma's barges are not loaded. Parma's barges may not be loaded for three days. The English fleet lies a half mile to seaward, upwind, with a south-westerly under it and the tide starting to run east.
A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY
On the quarterdeck of the Ark Royal at the close of the seventh of August, the lights of the Spanish anchorage burn in a long row in the bay astern, and the Lord Admiral walks his deck. To anchor across Parma's line of sortie is to lose the wind and to be engaged from windward by a Spanish fleet that wants nothing more than to close and board. To let Parma cross is to lose the country. There is a third course. Eight old Channel hulks lie with the fleet, already bought out of the Queen's purse, lightly built, fit for nothing now but burning. Pitch in their holds, faggots of dry brush in their waists, guns left aboard and double-shotted so that when the fire reaches them they will speak for themselves and the Spanish gun-crews will believe English ships are firing into the anchorage. Tar on the timbers. Rudders ready to be lashed. The wind sets fair into the bay. The tide will carry what the wind does not. He has, in the formal record of the day, written to Walsingham only that we mean so to course the enemy as that they shall have no leisure to land; the rest is between him, the Council of War aboard, and the dark. A weaker man at this hinge does what his orders cover and waits for the morning. The orders cover waiting. The orders do not cover sending fire into a sleeping enemy at midnight. He gives the order.
THE FIRESHIPS GO IN
At midnight the eight ships are brought up under low sail, set alight from forward, their rudders lashed, the small boats astern cast off and the men in them pulling back for the English line. At a quarter past twelve, with the row of Spanish lanterns clear across the water, eight separate fires bloom in the dark and close upon the anchorage in line abreast. On the San Martín, Medina Sidonia has the bell rung. The order is given to cut cables and run before the wind. One hundred and twenty-eight ships of the line slip their anchors along the whole length of the Spanish formation and stand out of the bay under hasty sail, with no order among them and an easterly tide under their keels. Two hundred Spanish anchors lie that night on the bottom off Calais.
GRAVELINES
Howard chases up the Channel into the North Sea through the morning of the eighth. The action off Gravelines that afternoon is the only sustained close-range gunnery of the campaign. The English get into musket and cannon shot at last and stay there; the Spanish, scattered and unable to reform, never get into the boarding range they need. Four Spanish ships are forced ashore on the Flemish banks. At six in the evening, with both fleets shooting away the last of their powder, the wind veers northerly. Medina Sidonia takes the only course it leaves open to him. North, around the top of Scotland, around the Hebrides, down the long Atlantic past the west coast of Ireland, to come home to Spain by the long way.
THE WESTERN SHORES
On a strand in County Sligo called Streedagh, in the late September of that year, three great ships break in a single afternoon. The men who reach the beach are stripped on the sand. The Spanish soldier most often named in the parish memory of the western coast that autumn is the one who came ashore at Streedagh and was killed by a tenant of Sir Brian O'Rourke for the gold buttons sewn into his cloak. Other ships break on the cliffs of County Mayo, on the Blasket Sound, on the Donegal coast. Medina Sidonia comes into the Bay of Biscay six weeks after Gravelines with perhaps sixty sail of the hundred and thirty he had set out with. The Armada has lost about a third of its men and half its ships, and almost all of it after the Lord Admiral broke the line off Calais and pushed it into a sea where the wind would do the rest.
THE RETURN
He was made Earl of Nottingham five years later. The cousin who had given him the command kept the country he had defended, and kept it for fifteen years more. He ordered fireships used again, by the same method, against the Spanish at Cadiz in 1596, and the trick by then had a name in English naval thinking, the weapon of Calais. He died in 1624 at Haling House in Surrey, eighty-eight years old, the last man living who had commanded a fleet for Elizabeth. He is buried at Reigate, and the Howard line he carried forward kept its Catholic kinship and its admiral's staff in the same hand, which was, in the England of his queen, a quieter feat than any fireship.
Invasions are not always turned back by the heavier fleet. The Calais Roads anchorage is, on a calm day, still reckoned a hazard for ships that drag, because the bottom is rocky with the iron of two hundred Spanish anchors a Lord Admiral four hundred years ago saw cut in the dark.
Explore With Your Ancestors · The Legend
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