The Infanta to be Queen of England—Approaches of the Scottish Catholic lords to Philip—Execution of Mary Stuart—Intrigues for the English succession—Drake’s expedition to Cadiz—The peace negotiations with Farnese—Preparations for the Armada—Sailing of the Armada from Lisbon—Its return to Vigo—Medina Sidonia advises its abandonment—Its strength—Engagements with the English—Panic at Calais—Final defeat—Causes of the disaster—Philip’s reception of the news.
THE principle of a direct Spanish invasion of England had now been adopted by Philip as the only means of getting rid of Elizabeth, and again uniting the country to him in a close alliance. He clearly foresaw that the absorption of Great Britain into his own dominions would be resisted to the last by France, the pope, and most of the Italian princes, as well as by Protestants everywhere, and that the opposition would be too strong for him to overcome. He therefore decided to nominate as sovereign his favourite elder daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, whose mother, it will be recollected, was a French princess, and a daughter of Catharine de Medici. He probably thought by this nomination to minimise the opposition of France, and that the pope would be conciliated.
The Scottish Catholics and Guise, however, did not relish the changed position. They were being thrust further and further into the background, and they accordingly made a determined attempt once again to place themselves in the forefront. Guise saw that the influence of the Scottish-French party in the Vatican and near Philip was powerless to overcome that of the Jesuits, Allen and the English exiles, supplemented by Philip’s own interests, and he therefore intrigued for the pressure to be brought to bear from Scotland itself upon Philip. He arranged for Huntly, Morton, and Claude Hamilton to send an emissary, Robert Bruce, under his (Guise’s) auspices to Philip, offering him, if they where supported, to restore the Catholic religion in Scotland, to compel James to become a Catholic, and to release Mary, and, above all, “to deliver into his Majesty’s hands at once, or when his Majesty thinks fit, one or two good ports in Scotland near the English border to be used against the Queen of England.” They asked for 6000 foreign troops paid for a year and 150,000 crowns to equip their own clansmen.
There had been great difference of opinion in Philip’s councils as to the advisability of invading England through Scotland or direct. It was conceded that the former would be more convenient, but that for the reasons already stated it would be unpopular with the English Catholics. But Santa Cruz and all of Philip’s most experienced advisers had continued to urge upon him the need of having some ports of refuge in the Channel or the North Sea; and the offer of the Scottish nobles seemed to provide this, as well as furnishing a diversion in the north, which would greatly harass Elizabeth. Bruce arrived in Madrid in September 1586, and met with kindly but vague encouragement from Philip, who suggested that Bruce should go to Rome and ask the pope for the money, which he knew to be impracticable. In fact, the plans of the Armada were now matured and in full preparation, and although the offer of the Scottish lords was tempting, Philip was determined that Guise should have no share in his enterprise. Farnese and Mendoza were requested to report upon the proposal, with a view of obtaining, if possible, the advantages offered by the Scots without Guise’s interference. Mendoza was strongly favourable; Farnese was cool and doubtful. He resented Philip’s half confidence in him, and perhaps also the complete ignoring of his children’s claim to the English crown, which was at least as good as Philip’s. He declined to give an opinion until he knew what were Philip’s real intentions in the invasion.
Mendoza was strongly in favour of immediately closing with the Scottish offer. He pointed out that to attack England by sea was to strike her in her strongest place, whilst a disaster to the Armada, in which all the national resources had been pledged, would bring irretrievable ruin. But Philip and Farnese were slow, and wanted all sorts of guarantees and assurances, which kept Bruce in Flanders and France for months, whilst his principals, sick of vague half-promises, lost heart, and talked of going over to the Protestant side, on a pledge that their religion should be tolerated. Then Bruce was sent back with 10,000 crowns to freight a number of small boats at Leith and send them to Dunkirk for Parma’s troops; and the 150,000 crowns demanded by the Scottish lords were promised when they rose. This was kept from Guise, but he knew all about it from his spies in Scotland, and was intensely wroth. Catharine de Medici also learnt of the matter, and thought it a good opportunity of ridding herself of Guise and checkmating Philip at the same time. She therefore offered Guise a large subsidy if he would go and help his kinsman James to the crown. He thought wiser, however, to divulge the Spanish plot to James himself. Elizabeth also informed James, so that when Bruce arrived in Scotland the artful young king was forewarned, and was only vaguely courteous in his reception of the hints that the Spaniard would help him to avenge his mother. He was indeed now surrounded by Protestant ministers, and fully understood that he had more to hope for from Elizabeth than from Philip, a view indeed which Elizabeth and her party lost no opportunity of impressing upon him.
In the meanwhile the execution of Mary Stuart had somewhat altered Philip’s position in relation to England. It became now necessary that the question of his title to the crown should be settled at once, and the pope was cautiously approached with the suggestion that he should give the investiture to the Infanta Isabel. Allen was employed to assure his Holiness of the desire of the English Catholics that she should be their sovereign, and to ply him with genealogical essays and pedigrees proving her right. Cardinal Deza too, the savage bigot who had so fiercely harried the Moriscos in Andalucia, was prompted to inflame the pope’s zeal by showing him that only under Philip’s auspices could Catholicism be firmly established in England. In the meanwhile the Scottish party, led by Chisholm, Bishop of Dunblane, with the English Pagets and others, were full of plans for converting James. One persuasive churchman after another was sent to tackle him, but the wily Stuart was not to be caught, and it came to nothing. Philip expressed and showed the deepest grief for the death of Mary Stuart, and fulfilled her dying wishes most scrupulously, at great cost to himself. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his sorrow, especially as her death added considerably to the immediate difficulties he had to overcome. Whilst the intrigues continued in Rome—on Philip’s side to obtain further aid from the pope, to secure the appointment of Allen as cardinal, and the recognition of the Infanta as Queen of England, and on the other side to secure the pontiff’s support of the Franco-Scottish plans for James Stuart’s conversion, or even an arrangement with Elizabeth—through all the year 1587 the ports and arsenals of Spain and Portugal were busy with the preparations for the great expedition. Don Antonio was in England now, clamouring for armed aid against his enemy, his every action watched by Philip’s spies; and from them news reached Spain that a considerable force was being fitted out under Drake in England in Antonio’s interests again to attack the Azores, or to plunder the treasure ships from the Indies. But suddenly the dreaded Drake with his fleet appeared off Cadiz on April 18.[2] Elizabeth had only with great unwillingness allowed him to sail for Spain, and had warned him not to do too much harm, but to watch what was being done. As usual, as soon as he was out of sight of England he took his own course, placed his vice-admiral, Borough, under arrest for reminding him not to exceed the queen’s orders, and entered Cadiz harbour, to the dismay of the Spaniards. He plundered, burned, and sunk all the ships in the port, and destroyed all the stores he could lay hands upon, and then quietly sailed out again unmolested. He did damage to the extent of a million ducats, and if he had disobeyed the queen’s orders still further, he might have stopped the Armada for good, by burning the ships in Lisbon, for we now know from Santa Cruz’s own confession that there were no men or guns on board to protect them. But he no doubt thought he had done enough, for he knew that his mistress was now engaged in peace negotiations with Farnese on account of Philip.[3] The English commissioners, the traitor Crofts, controller of the household, amongst them, after endless bickering and delay, arranged a place of meeting agreeable to both parties, and every effort to drag matters out was made by Farnese, in order to give Philip more time for preparations, whilst the English were to be lulled by false hopes of peace. How far Elizabeth herself was deceived in these negotiations is uncertain, but the commissioners, and the experienced Dr. Dale with them, were not very long before they came to the conclusion that they were insincere. The most extraordinary element in the case is that Farnese was at first ignorant of Philip’s real intention, and wrote strongly urging the king to let him make peace in earnest and abandon his plans for the invasion of England. From first to last, indeed, Farnese had no heart or belief in the enterprise. He foresaw all the difficulties which ultimately befell it and more, and, although he vehemently justified himself for his share in the catastrophe, his contemporaries were firm in the belief that he purposely failed to do his best. It is certain, from frequent complaints in his letters, that he considered himself aggrieved, and resented the cool half-confidence with which his uncle treated him. “How can I,” he says, “give sound advice or make fitting arrangements unless I am informed of the real objects in view?”
In the early spring of 1586 Santa Cruz had furnished a complete estimate of all that would be required for the Armada—a perfect monument of knowledge and foresight. There were to be 150 great ships, 320 smaller vessels of from 50 to 80 tons each, 40 galleys and 6 galleasses, 556 in all, besides 240 flat boats and pinnaces. There were to be 30,000 seamen and 63,890 soldiers, with 1600 horses; and the extra expenditure was calculated at 3,800,000 ducats. But to concentrate so powerful a force as this in Spain itself was too great a task for Philip’s haste, and he took the first fatal step by arranging that one-half was to be raised by Farnese in Flanders, for now Philip, like most slow men when they have once made up their minds, was in a desperate hurry. For thirty years he had driven his most faithful servants to despair by his stolid impassibility to English insult and aggression. He had seen his colonies sacked, his commerce destroyed by English privateers; he had been robbed of treasure beyond calculation, and suffered every imaginable insult from a queen whom he could have crushed a dozen times over in the earlier years of her reign. Leicester, who had fawned upon him, and had sworn eternal fealty to him, had commanded an army against him in his own territory; and the English privy councillors, who for years had battened on his bribes, had connived at the placing on the brows of a foreigner one of his own ancestral crowns. He had stood all this without revolt, in the face of his councillors, but, when at last he had lifted his ponderous “leaden foot,” he must needs do things in haste. Santa Cruz, old sailor as he was, could ill brook divided command with Parma, knowing that he must in the end take second place, and he became discontented and jealous at the alterations of his plans. He urged—as did every one else—that some safe ports of refuge must first be secured in the North Sea; but Philip was in a hurry, and trusted to happy chance. In September 1587 Santa Cruz received his instructions. He was to go direct to Margate and protect the passage of Parma’s troops across, and he was on no account to allow himself to be diverted from this course until he had joined hands with Parma. In vain the old sailor represented the danger of adopting this plan until they could be sure of harbours of refuge in case of need. The king still hoped to beguile the English with thoughts of peace, and answered with harsh hauteur Santa Cruz’s assurance that hurry meant failure. The old hero, who would have stood unmoved before an army, incontinently went home and died of a broken heart (February 1588). Philip so rarely said a hasty word, that when he did so, the effect was terrible.
The commanders and nobles on the Armada were jealous and quarrelsome, already chafing at the delay and appalling mismanagement which resulted from Philip’s insistence that all details must go through him. The only man whose rank and power would ensure respect from all of them was the most splendid noble in Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was under orders to take the Andalucian squadron from Cadiz to Lisbon; and him Philip appointed to the command. He protested plaintively, and truly, that he was entirely unfit for the task. He had no experience or knowledge of the sea, he was always sea-sick, and had no mental capacity which fitted him to a great command. Philip probably knew this as well as the duke, or even the duchess, who was very emphatic on the subject; but it suited him, he thought, to have such a man, because he would be certain to obey the king’s orders strictly, and Philip was anxious, as usual, to control the whole expedition with unerring precision from his cell in the Escorial, hundreds of miles away. When the duke arrived in Lisbon he found everything in utter confusion. Arms, ammunition, stores, and men were short. Orders given had not been fulfilled, and many weeks passed before Medina Sidonia could report that all was ready, notwithstanding the king’s urgent requests that not a day should be lost. The most trifling matters were considered and decided by the king himself in Madrid. Nothing could be done without him. The stronger sorts of wine must be mixed with a certain quantity of water; the men on the fleet must be confessed and take the communion before sailing, and must not use bad language; no private berths or bunks must be erected on the ships, and scores of similar orders were sent from Madrid solemnly signed by the king, whilst the duke was praying for men, money, and stores, and the victuallers, with the connivance of the pursers, were shipping rotten food, fraudulent both in quantity and quality. At length in April the preparations had sufficiently advanced for Philip to send his final instructions to the duke. He is reminded that he is going on a holy errand in God’s service, and divine aid may therefore be counted upon. He is to go direct to Margate and then join hands with the Duke of Parma and protect his passage across, and is not to be diverted from this even if he hears that Drake has come to Spain. If possible, he was to send to Parma the promised contingent of 6000 soldiers; and, if by any mishap he could not join hands with him, he was to capture the Isle of Wight, and then communicate with Parma, who, in union with him, would settle the next step. With this instruction a very important closed despatch was sent, to be delivered to Parma only after he had landed in England.
This despatch is of the greatest possible interest as fixing definitely what where Philip’s ultimate aims in the invasion, and the irreducible minimum with which he would have been satisfied. If Parma found that conquest was not easy, and considered it advisable to make peace, there were three points upon which he was to base his negotiations. First, that free exercise of the Catholic religion should be allowed; secondly, that the fortresses occupied by the English in the Netherlands should be restored to him; and, thirdly, that the damage done to Spain and Spanish subjects should be made good. The third condition was to be used mainly as a lever to obtain the other two; but the first condition, namely, religious toleration, was to be the main object, and with this, as a last resource, Philip would have been contented.
On April 25 the sacred standard was delivered to Medina Sidonia with great pomp in Lisbon. Rogations, prayers, fastings, and propitiatory masses were performed ceaselessly, not only on board the Armada, but all over Spain. In the most solemn manner the soldiers and sailors were inflamed with the idea that they were God’s own chosen warriors, going under His divine protection to restore the faith to millions of English people, who were yearning for their coming—to millions held in subjection by a wicked queen and a few heretics. The weather was bad—like December, said the duke,—and it was May 30 before the great fleet could be got out of the Tagus. Head winds and heavy weather kept them off the coast—some of the ships drifting as far down as Cape St. Vincent—for a fortnight. By that time the victuals on board were going bad and running short. Many had to be thrown overboard, and sickness began to prevail, mainly in consequence of overcrowding and putrid food and water. By June 14, when the duke was off Finisterre, it became evident that if the expedition was to continue, fresh provisions would have to be obtained, and despatch boats were sent to the ports begging that supplies might be sent to them. Before they could reach the fleet—June 19—a heavy gale came on, and the duke’s flagship, with forty other vessels, ran for refuge into Corunna. During the night it blew a hurricane, and the rest of the ships, scattered as they were and unable to bear up to windward, were driven far apart and in great peril. Some of them ran into various Biscay and Galician ports, others were driven as far north as the Scilly Isles and the English coast, many were badly damaged, and for days the fate of the majority of them was uncertain. The duke lost what little heart he had for the expedition, and seriously advised the king to abandon it. It had been proved now that the water was putrid and insufficient, the food rotten, except the rice, and that fraud of the most shameful description had been practised by the victuallers. The officers, said the duke, did not know their duty; the whole force was disorganised and too weak to undertake the task in hand. This was a counsel of despair, and Philip’s only answer was that not a moment was to be lost in revictualling and refitting the fleet and proceeding on the voyage. The rough old sea-dogs on the fleet—Bertondona, Recalde, and Oquendo—were scornful at the timid fine gentlemen who surrounded them and trembled at the perils of the sea. They had been breasting the gales of the North Atlantic since they were boys, and could not understand the doubts and fears which assailed the crowds of silken-clad landsmen who swarmed on board and got in the way of the sailormen. The king had appointed a council of officers to advise the duke. Don Pedro de Valdes was for sailing at once, before even waiting for the scattered ships to come in. This annoyed the duke, who was all for delay, and Don Pedro himself ascribed to this feeling his subsequent abandonment and capture by the English. The king continued to urge Medina Sidonia to activity, sometimes almost chidingly, and at last, tired of the obviously wilful delay, he gave peremptory orders that the Armada was to sail at once. The men were once more confessed and absolved, and finally on July 22 (N.S.), 1588, the great fleet left Corunna harbour, not without grave misgivings of the timid duke, which were openly scoffed at by the sailors. The whole fleet consisted of 131 sail, with 7050 sailors, 17,000 soldiers, and 1300 officers, gentlemen-adventurers, priests, and servants. The four galleys soon found themselves unable to live through the Biscay seas and abandoned the Armada, taking refuge in various French and Spanish ports. The rest of the fleet first sighted the Lizard at four o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, July 30 (N.S.). The moment land was discovered the blessed flag with the crucifix, the Virgin, and the Magdalen was hoisted, and signals fired that every man on board the fleet should join in prayer. Then a council was called, and for the first time the admirals were informed of the king’s orders. They were dismayed to find that they were to sail up the Channel to the Straits of Dover, leaving Plymouth, and perhaps the English fleet, behind them untouched. Recalde warned the duke against ruining the king’s cause by a too slavish obedience to his orders, and almost violently urged him to attack and take Plymouth before going further. The duke replied that “the king had ordered him strictly to join hands with Parma before anything else, and he had no discretion in the matter; nor was he so vain as to suppose that the king would allow him to violate his commands on this, his first expedition.” The commanders, however, sufficiently worked on the duke’s fears to prevail upon him to write to the king that night, saying that as he had not received any reply from Parma to all his despatches, he purposed to remain off the Isle of Wight until he heard whether the Flemish forces were quite ready, because, as they had no ports of refuge in the Channel, he could not wait for Parma off the shoally Flemish coast.
The first panic in England had been succeeded by feverish activity; all that could inflame patriotic zeal was done. The Spaniards, it was said, were bringing cargoes of scourges and instruments of torture, all adults were to be put to death, and 7000 wet-nurses were coming in the Armada to suckle the orphan infants. Such nonsense as this was firmly believed, and the echoes of it have not even yet entirely died out. Corporations and individuals vied with each other in providing means for defence; but withal the land forces, assembled in two corps d’armÉe, one on each side of the Thames, were but hasty levies, half drilled and armed, and commanded by the incompetent Leicester. The queen was personally popular, but if Parma had landed and she had fallen, it is probable that there would have been no great resistance on the part of the people at large to the adoption of the Catholic religion. They had changed too often to care very much about it, if they were allowed to go about their business without molestation and had a firm, peaceful government. Parma had from the first insisted that his force was purely for land warfare, and his boats were merely flat-bottom barges for the transport of his men. He had been kept terribly short of money, and had borrowed the last ducat he could get at most usurious interest. His army, moreover, was small for the work it had to do, and he continued to insist that he must have the 6000 Spanish soldiers from the Armada which had been promised him. The English fleets consisted of 197 sail in all, with, at most, 18,000 men on board. Most of these ships—as also was the case with the Spaniards—were small cargo boats, lightly armed, and quite unfit for severe fighting. The largest Spanish ship, the Regazona, was 1249 tons burden, and the largest English ship, the Triumph, 1100 tons, but, generally speaking, the Spanish fighting ships were much larger, as they certainly were of much higher build than the English, the tactics of the latter always being to fire low into the hulls of their opponents and avoid grappling and boarding, which they could do, as their lines were finer and the vessels much more handy.
The Armada sailed up Channel in a curved line seven miles in extent, with a light west wind, and at dawn on Sunday the English fleet was sighted off Plymouth to the number of about fifty sail. The latter soon gained the wind, and began firing into the Spanish rear-squadron. Then began the memorable series of skirmishes which decided the fate of Europe for all time to come. The Spanish ships were out-manoeuvred from the first. They found that the English vessels could sail round them easily, their superior speed and sailing qualities enabling them to harass their enemies without coming to close quarters. It was purely artillery fighting, and in this the English were immensely superior. The Spaniards shouted defiance and taunts that the English were afraid of them and dared not approach. Drake and Howard knew where their strength lay; kept the wind and followed the Armada, always harassing the rear and flanks. Recalde’s flagship of the rear-squadron was for a time exposed to the united fire of seven English galleons and became almost a wreck. This first fight on Sunday demoralised the Spaniards. They felt they were fighting a defensive battle and were running away from the enemy. The contempt for their commander, and the knowledge of their helplessness, crept over them like a paralysis. When late in the afternoon the duke gave orders for the squadrons to be re-formed and proceed on their way, Recalde’s damaged ship was found to be unable to keep up with them. Don Pedro de Valdes went to her assistance, and in doing so fouled one of his own ships, breaking his bowsprit and foremast. His ship too became unmanageable. She had 500 men on board and a large amount of treasure. An attempt was made to take her in tow, but unsuccessfully. Night was coming on, and the duke himself wanted to get away from the English, who hung upon his rear only a couple of miles away. He would fight no more that night if he could help it, and he abandoned two of the finest ships of his fleet without striking a blow. Then Oquendo’s great ship, Our Lady of the Rose, was accidentally blown up, and soon became a blazing wreck. The duke ordered the men and treasure to be taken out of her and the ship sunk. But the heart of the crews had gone, and such was the panic, that the unwounded survivors scrambled out of the ship as best they might, leaving the vessel and their scorched and wounded comrades to their fate. And so from day to day the spirits of the men fell as they realised their powerlessness, and the Armada crept up the Channel with the English fleet always hanging on their rear and to windward of them. Every day the duke sent beseeching letters to Parma to come out and help him. Parma was indignant. Help him! How could he help him with flat-bottom barges that would not stand a freshet, much less a gale? Besides, said he, the arrangement was that you were to help me, not I help you. Justin of Nassau, with the Dutch fleet, moreover, was watching as a cat watches a mouse, and Parma could not stir. The officers sent by the duke declared that Parma was not ready to come out, even if the Armada had fulfilled its task. He gave them the lie, and with one of them nearly came to blows. What if he had no water, or guns, or food on his boats? They were only barges to carry men across, and were not meant either for fighting or for a voyage of more than a few hours. Besides, how could he come out with the wind dead in his teeth and Nassau and Seymour watching him? And so on Sunday, August 7 (N.S.), just one week after the Lizard was sighted, the great Spanish fleet was huddled, all demoralised and confused, in Calais roads, at anchor, whilst the duke in vain sent hourly petitions to Parma to come out and reinforce him. The crews were ripe for panic now, and when at midnight eight fireships came flaring down upon them with the wind from the English fleet, the duke seems to have lost his head. He did not tow the fireships out of reach, in accordance with his own previous instructions, but gave orders for his cables to be cut. All the great ships had two anchors each out, and these were left at the bottom of the sea, whilst the invincible Armada crowded and hurtled away. The duke’s intention had been to come back in the morning, pick up his anchors, and resume his position until Parma could come out. But if Parma was shut up before, when only Lord Henry Seymour and Justin of Nassau were watching him, much less could he stir now that the lord admiral and Drake had joined Seymour.
The duke brought up in a dangerous position near Gravelines, and when the morning of Monday dawned he found his fleet scattered and demoralised, with a stiff west wind blowing and most of his ships drifted far to leeward. He had only forty ships with him now—one of his great galleasses, the San Lorenzo, had been wrecked at the mouth of Calais harbour in the confusion of the night—to fight the united English fleets. The engagement was terrible, lasting from nine o’clock in the morning till six o’clock at night, the English tactics continuing to be the same, keeping up a tremendous artillery fire on particular ships until they were utterly crippled. The Spaniards fought desperately, but they could rarely come to close quarters, and their gunnery was greatly inferior to the English. The result, consequently, was never in doubt. The duke’s ship was in the hottest of the fight, and her decks were like shambles, for she had been hit by 107 shot. At the end of the dreadful day she and her consorts were utterly beaten and riddled; two of the finest galleons, completely unseaworthy, drifted on to the Flemish coast and were captured, and at dawn on Tuesday what was left of the Armada was dragging heavily in a strong westerly gale, with sandbanks on the lee. All spirit and discipline were lost now. The one idea was to get away from these “devilish people,” who would only fight with big guns and would not come to close quarters. The duke himself was for surrender, but Oquendo swore he would throw overboard the first man who attempted such a thing. He brought his ship alongside the duke’s and yelled sailor curses upon the landlubber that wanted to run away. “Go back to your tunny ponds, you chicken-hearted craven,” he cried again and again; and so the poor duke, in complete collapse, shut himself in his cabin and was seen no more till he arrived in Spain. At noon a providential—the Spaniards called it miraculous—wind came from the south-west, and they were able to weather the dreaded shoals. Oquendo and the old sailors were now for turning about and fighting again. But the duke had had enough fighting for the rest of his life, and would have no more. Besides, there was no ammunition on most of the ships. So the fatal order was given to run up the North Sea with the wind to the north of the Orkneys, make a long leg to the west, far out into the Atlantic, and thence set a course for home. Off the Scottish border the English fleet left them to their fate. Assailed by tempests almost unexampled, rotting with pestilence, the water quite putrid now and the food worse, they struggled to the north and west. Many fell off to leeward and were seen no more; many sank riddled like sieves in the wild Atlantic gales; seventeen could not beat far enough to the west and were dashed to pieces on the frowning coasts of Ulster and Connaught, where the men who escaped drowning were slaughtered—several thousands of them—by the English garrisons and the wild Irish kerns. Only sixty-five ships ever got back to Spain, and of the 24,000 men who sailed, full of hope that they were going on a sacred crusade to certain victory, only 10,000 poor, starved, stricken creatures crept back to Santander.
A wail of grief went up through Spain. The little-hearted duke abandoned his ships and men as soon as he sighted Spanish land, and went to his home in the south in shameful, selfish luxury, with the curses and insults of a whole populace ringing in his ears. Some said it was Parma’s jealousy that caused the disaster, others that it was the duke’s cowardice. Be it as it may, the old sailors, Oquendo and Recalde, who had borne themselves like the heroes that they were, died of grief and shame as soon as they brought their battered hulls to port.
It is difficult to apportion the blame, but one thing is certain, that the germ of the disaster lay in Philip’s rigid, blighting system, by which everything, great and small, had to be worked by one weary, overburdened man from a cell in the Escorial. Spain might curse and clamour for vengeance, but Philip said not a word. He saw the efforts and hopes of years scattered like scudding clouds. He saw his impotence made patent to a scoffing world. He saw his enemies exulting in his downfall, and his rebel Netherlanders at last free from his grasp. He saw his treasury empty and his credit ruined, for the pope himself mocked him, and refused to pay the subsidy he had promised, because the conditions had not been fulfilled. He saw himself an old and ailing man, with only a dull child to succeed him; and yet in the face of all this his marble equanimity never left him. He had, he said, only striven to do God’s work, and if God in His inscrutable wisdom had ordained that he should fail, he could only humbly bow his head to the divine decree and bless Him for all things.
There was no defeat for such a man as this; and he could afford to be generous and magnanimous, as he was, to the men whose shortcomings were the immediate cause of the great catastrophe which ruined the power of a nation, but could not break the faith or spirit of a man who regarded himself as the fly-wheel of the machine by which the Almighty worked the earth.
