BOOKS

Infirm of purpose

John Bayley

ARMADA by Duff Hart-Davis

Bantam Press, £16.95, pp. 224

ARMADA by Peter Padfield

Gollancz, f14.95, pp. 208

THE SPANISH ARMADA by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker

Hamish Hamilton, f15, pp. 304

THE ILLUSTRATED ARMADA HANDBOOK by David A. Thomas

Harrap, £9.95, pp. 224

THE CAMPAIGN OF THE SPANISH ARMADA by Peter Kemp

Phaidon, £17.95, pp. 176

FROM MERCILESS INVADERS . . . THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA by Alexander Mackee

Souvenir Press, £14.95, pp. 288

THE ENTERPRISE OF ENGLAND, THE SPANISH ARMADA by Roger Whiting

Alan Sutton, £12.95, pp. 224

THE SPANISH ARMADA: THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR IN 1588 by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

OUP, f15, pp. 280

In Captain Margaret, one of John Mase- field's now forgotten but still highly read- able romances, the hero reflects as he sails his galleon home from an unsuccessful expedition, that 'failure is spiritual suc- cess'. As he peered by night from his study window into the cavernous depths of St Laurence's church in the Escorial, would Philip II have agreed? Perhaps, but more likely he would not have recognised that his enterprise had failed. A small setback, sent by God to try us, before the accolade of ultimate victory.

Oddly enough the English were not cock-a-hoop either. Fear of Spain was as great as ever after the Armada, and justifiably so. By land the veteran force of German and Walloon soldiers — only 18 per cent Spanish — were as invincible as the Germans in 1940, and the English leaders knew it: there were no post- Dunkirk illusions about fighting on the beaches. An experienced veteran, Sir Ro- ger Williams, said the Duke of Parma's Flanders Army was 'the finest ever I saw'; and the Earl of Leicester, presiding in his scratch Officers' Mess at Tilbury, had gloomily observed that the Spaniards had 'the best soldiers at this day in Christen- dom'. Only seamen like Drake and Fro- bisher were full of fire and confidence, which events were in some ways to prove misplaced.

In general, then, an atmosphere of uncertainty, not to say ambiguity. One Spanish captain at Coruna had remarked that they were setting out 'in confident expectation of a miracle'. Was he being humorous, or merely pious? Feet were being dragged at Flanders HQ; specialists in amphibious warfare are seldom sanguine about their chances, and Parma's staff would have appreciated the rhyme that went about more than two centuries later, when the British Navy was preparing to invade Flushing during the Napoleonic wars.

Great Chatham with his sword drawn Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan. Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.

But back at the Escorial Philip himself was determined to go ahead, disregarding advice once given by his father, the Emper- or Charles V, that 'fleets are as uncertain as the waves that bear them'.

What exactly did he hope to achieve? Not the occupation of England, which previous experience with his wife Mary Tudor had showed him would not be a practical or sensible scheme. To impress foreign bankers? Like most great monarchs he was in a permanent state of insolvency. To impress the rest of Europe and frighten the English queen into adopt- ing a moderately pro-Catholic policy? He was perfectly well aware of the tricky nature of combined operations, and of the unlikelihood of Parma and Medina Sidonia pulling one off, with the English fleet in the channel, and the light craft of the Dutch 'Sea Beggars' threatening their doorstep. In one of the best of these all highly competent and beautifully illustrated accounts of the business Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker suggest that the whole thing was an elaborate Renaissance exer- cise in public relations. There is something in that.

A campaign of opportunity, without a set and definite strategic goal, is a danger- ous tactic for a great power, as Napoleon and Hitler found when they invaded Rus- sia. Yet the best Spanish leaders, like Parma himself and the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who was originally appointed to lead the Armada and who died before it was ready, had a very sound idea of what might be done towards isolating England and finally imposing Spanish hegemony on the continent. If Philip's subsidy of the Duke of Guise and the Catholic League had resulted in the availability to the Armada of the French channel ports the results might have been very different. At least Philip's great fleet might have hung around as a long-term threat, paralysing England's trade and depleting her naval resources, while intimidating as a 'fleet in being' the crowned heads of Europe and Scotland, who were maintaining a wait-and-see poli- cy. The Queen's supplies were strictly limited, and in a long campaign the Span- ish would have realised how little was available against them. As things were the English ships ran out of ammunition while the Armada was still off the North Fore- land, and pursued them up into the North Sea with empty guns.

Against a still resolute enemy such bluff could not have worked long. But in spite of Parma's crushing victories in Holland the actual fiasco was plain to see; the grand exercise in public relations had failed. In France Guise was murdered and Henry of Navarre won a Protestant victory in the south-west. All the wealth of America was not going to help the Spanish Empire against the slow tide of French ascendancy, for it was they and the Dutch, rather than the English, who were most to profit from the eclipse of Spain. The international chess board in the Armada time was graphically set out 20 years ago by Garrett Mattingly, the American historian, whose admirable narration of the stirring events of 1588 is the ancestor of most of these accounts that have been timed for the anniversary. It would be unfair to say they depend as much on splendidly coloured pictures, charts, and portraits as on text (superb photographs in Martin and Parker of the Girona's salvaged hoard of gold and silver coins, and a blue and white Ming bowl from the wreck of the Trinidad Valencera, are particularly noteworthy) but Mattingly did his business without such aids, and none of the present historians depart very far from his conclusions. In his own class for serious scholarship is

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, who also exhaustively explores the Spanish side of things, giving the story from 'over the hill', or what the poet Robert Graves called 'the Persian version'.

Not that it could be in essentials so very different. The Spaniards blamed their lead- ers, particularly the Duke of Medina Sido- nia, whom Mattingly was inclined to think had done a reasonable job in fairly im- possible circumstances. He kept the fleet together and brought most of it home; he excelled as an organiser and his instruc- tions were usually sensible. But he and his Flag Captain, Diego Flores de Valdes, were not popular, and they had no success at keeping up morale. De Recalde or the redoubtable Santa Cruz might well have done better, always assuming Philip had allowed them a proper tactical freedom. It was the insistence on joining Parma, in the trickiest of all coastal waters, which ruined the chances in '88 of the greatest and most hopeful of the many armadas. Had the goal been to occupy Falmouth, to windward of the English fleets, or to bottle them up in Plymouth, it would have been much more dangerous. But when this was tried in '97 the season was too late, and the gales dispersed an armada already depressed by the original failure, and by the English success at Cadiz the previous year.

But the English commanders, who sig- nally failed to stop the progress of the Armada up channel in '88, were well aware of the dangers of such a landing. A landing almost anywhere in southern England by such a huge force would have confirmed Philip's credit in the eyes of Europe and been a serious embarrassment to Eli- zabeth, very much worse than in 1542, when the French had occupied the Isle of Wight and her father from Southsea Castle had watched the sinking of the Mary Rose. Once they realised they could not stop the Spanish, Howard and his officers saw they must at all costs hurry them on — 'we mean to course the enemy so that they shall have no leisure to land'. All the books give excellent detailed descriptions of the running fight: Kemp and Whiting are knowledgeable on details; Padfield ques- tions the received opinion that the Spanish nearly came to grief on Walcheren shoals before tacking, still in good order, out into the North Sea. A leader like Santa Cruz might still have attempted at that point to get up the Thames or Medway, particularly if he had suspected the English shortage of powder and shot. But, as Duff Hart-Davis observes in the most exciting of the accounts, Medina Sidonia had now lost his nerve, though he never lost his steadfast courage, and even resorted to hanging an incredulous and perfectly loyal captain (also a country neighbour of his) at the yardarm. That did not improve fighting morale, which till then had been so high, even at the worst moments off Gravelines. Another captain to be sentenced and then

reprieved, Francisco de Cuellar, had astounding adventures later, including shipwreck in Ireland, escape to Scotland, and a final return through Europe after surviving pirates and further shipwreck.

Ireland would have been a far better bet in the first place, but there was no prop- aganda value in occupying Ireland, although the Armada force might have done it easily, and Elizabeth's army have been seriously weakened trying to effect its recapture. Did Philip intuit the psycholo- gical bogs involved, the perverseness of his best Catholic allies? Certainly the English had no doubt of the threat, and carefully massacred the Armada survivors, as had been done previously under Grey and Raleigh with the prisoners of a small expeditionary force at Smerwick. Crisis produced routine cruelty; the Spaniards did the same in the New World and elsewhere; and when Drake in dubious circumstances took the Rosario off Torbay, the first Armada victim, the commanders in Plymouth expressed regrets that her 500 or so crew had not been 'made water- spaniels'.

The Rosario was unlucky, and she was one of the few. Gunfire at long and even medium range caused surprisingly little damage or casualties, though one suspects it must have severely shaken the over- crowded crews, for it was new: seamen weren't used to it. Much more important than their vaunted long culverin were the low-built English ships, larger than most of their opponents, and also wonderfully handy. Frobisher's big Triumph was an older type, but even so had no trouble escaping off a leeshore from a whole Spanish squadron with the weather gauge. Not until Nelson was it grasped that sea bombardment required the shortest possi- ble range — 'half pistol shot'. The Victory at Trafalgar should have been raked and riddled before she got near the French, but she was not; and when she broke the line she destroyed the rival flagship Bucentaure with a single treble-shotted broadside, much of it from short carronades. Nothing like that happened to Sidonia's San Martin. Padfield points out that although there were experts and theoretical treatises it was not grasped, then or later, that to make a smooth bore gun long beyond a certain point actually weakens the impact of its shot and shortens its effective range. We got it all wrong, as so often with military hardware, but fortunately it didn't matter.

The Spanish hope was to board, and had they been able to do so they would have carried every Queen's ship in the channel, as Vera Cruz had done earlier with the Portuguese pretender's fleet at the Azores. To us it happened only once, again at the Azores in 1591, when Sir Richard Gren- ville, from whom Drake had bought Buck- land Abbey, lost his friend's great ship Revenge 'by unadvised negligence and wilful obstinacy'. That was the verdict of Sir William Monson, one of the Cadiz heroes; he and Sir John Burrough were far more competent than the unbalanced Grenville, who fortunately held no impor- tant command in Armada year. Philip learned more, than Elizabeth, and soon began to lay down' `racebuile ships on the English pattern and arm them heavily. This explains the English failure to score any decisive victory later in the war.

In the light summer airs of the channel it must all have gone with dream-like slow- ness, the English ghosting about their clumsier opponents, and the wind still further laid by the incessant gunfire. A beautiful and extraordinary spectacle, which we cannot help seeing today as a film or pageant; those involved must have been in a fever of unromantic doubts, fears, excitement. Yet visual beauty was a part of their daily style, as was the poetry of ship names — Golden Lion, White Bear, Rain- bow, Vanguard, Rata Encoronada . . . Captain Margaret's ship The Broken Heart, had her emblem carved and coloured on yards and taffrail. The ragged cross, red on blue, and Philip's arms in red and gold floated over the Spanish crescent; the topsides of the English warships were chequered geometrically green and white; and, but for the union with Scotland 15 years later, the English flag might still be recognised in the pennants and swallow- tails that floated over the ships in elegant

lines of Tudor green and white with a red St George in the canton. In effect not unlike the stars and stripes; and perhaps for this anniversary that too has some significance.