The Spanish Armadas Read online

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  Contents

  Winston Graham

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fouteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bibliography

  Winston Graham

  The Spanish Armadas

  Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

  Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

  Dedication

  To Luxton Arnold

  Chapter One

  The Peaceful Invasion

  Late on Wednesday afternoon on the 18th July 1554, a Flemish squadron cruising in the English Channel off Portland Bill caught sight of a Spanish fleet moving east under full sail in a favourable breeze towards the Solent. The fleet consisted of about a hundred and thirty ships, some hundred of them substantial vessels, well equipped with bronze pieces, and carrying, aside from their crews, over eight thousand Spanish soldiers. A light rain was falling at the time, but the fleet as it approached land was in process of being dressed and beflagged; so the Flemish squadron dipped its flags in salute and fell in as escort. Near the Needles a dozen English naval sloops joined them, and by the morning of the 19th the whole armada was proceeding up the estuary of Southampton Water. It was four in the afternoon before all had dropped anchor under the eye of the castle.

  The port of Southampton was flagged too and crowded for the occasion. Hardly one of its three hundred houses was not decorated, hardly one did not shelter some members of the English court, brilliant in velvet, gold chains and medals. Every hovel swarmed with servants, every stable and byre steamed with horses; carts and baggage jammed the greasy cobbled streets. For England, the southern part of a moderate-sized island on the periphery of Europe, was waiting to welcome the greatest prince in Christendom.

  It was not difficult to pick out the Prince’s ship among the newly arrived fleet, a Biscayan of nine hundred tons, the Espiritu Santo, because of the carved and gilded decorations on forecastle and poop. As soon as she came to anchor the bulwarks of this ship had been hung with heavy scarlet cloth; silk pennons fluttered in the damp, sultry breeze, and two royal standards, each ninety feet long, of crimson damask with the Prince’s arms painted on them, hung from the mainmast and the mizzen. Three hundred sailors in crimson lined the decks.

  Soon an ornamented barge left the quayside with a party of gaudy young English noblemen who had been chosen for their looks and their distinction to welcome the Prince. Suspicious eyes from a hundred windows watched them go. Householders, lackeys, sailors, ostlers, rich merchants and fishwives, urchins and beggars, all strained anxiously – and suspiciously – from vantage points to catch a first glimpse of visiting royalty. For he was a Spaniard, his name was Philip, and he had come to marry their Queen.

  It had not been a good time, these last twenty years, for the people of England. The autumnal tyrannies of the Great King, his divorces, his quarrels with Rome, his suppression of the monasteries, his persecutions, clouded in people’s minds the popularity and goodness of his earlier years. But the decade since Henry’s death had been far worse than anything that had gone before. Ever higher prices, the infirmity of central government, the infiltration of the new rich everywhere, the enclosure of common land, the raising of rents and the turning out of long-rooted tenants, the disregard for public rights, the neglect of the fleet, and corruption and profiteering on a scale hitherto unknown even in sixteenth-century England, had led all men, or almost all men, to welcome the Queen when cold young Edward died. For years she had been neglected by her father, she had been persecuted by Anne Boleyn, she had been under constant pressure to change her religion, and she had been denied access to her mother, even when her mother lay dying; yet through it all she had retained the quiet loyalty of English people, who saw in her the only true heir and swiftly swept aside the pretensions of the Dudleys and Lady Jane Grey.

  So, although she was the first queen the English had accepted for four hundred years she had been crowned with great acclaim, and her early conduct and decrees had seemed conciliatory and clement and reasonable. She had even spared most of those who had conspired against her.

  But now, within a year – exactly within a year of Edward’s death – she was preparing to marry this foreign prince. The English have always been hypercritical and morbidly suspicious of foreign royalty who presume to marry their queens. They mistrust every gesture of friendship, analyse every public and private utterance he makes for signs of criticism or condescension, and see a plot for foreign domination under every secretary’s cloak. It was her marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet which made Matilda unacceptable in the twelfth century and finally lost her the throne. Mary’s betrothal to Prince Philip had nearly done the same for her. Wyatt’s formidable rebellion had been stopped only at the gates of London.

  So Lady Jane Grey had finally gone to the block, but Mary had been unshaken in her resolve to pursue her marriage plans. Half Spanish herself, she saw nothing but good in a union with the future king of Spain. Spain and England had a long tradition of friendship. Henry’s divorce of Catherine and England’s subsequent apostasy had put some strain on that friendship, but now that England was returning to Catholicism such a union could only help to repair what had been damaged. It was true that Mary was now a virgin of thirty-eight and her husband a young widower of twenty-seven; it was true that they had never met or even corresponded, that
all the courtship had been done on behalf of his son by Charles, Philip’s father; it was true that Spain was at war with France and that an Anglo-Spanish marriage might drag England into the same war; but the advantages to Mary seemed far to outweigh all these objections.

  Indeed, she might have argued – the later example of her half-sister not being available to her – what was a queen to do? Whomsoever she married she would offend someone. And it was essential for the continuance of the Tudor dynasty and the preservation of the Catholic faith that there should be an heir. Who more suitable to father one than a man who was heir to the Holy Roman Empire and who furthermore was a direct descendant of Edward III of England?

  The watchers in the windows of all the little houses were not to see their new king that afternoon. Philip remained closely within the confines of his staterooms aboard the Espiritu Santo and slept aboard. It was not until the morning of the 20th that he stepped on to the splendid barge awaiting him and was rowed ashore surrounded by English and Spanish noblemen. On the barge the Earl of Arundel invested him with the Garter, and was in return presented with the wand of Chamberlain. The rain had temporarily eased when Prince Philip stepped ashore; so he was able to listen in more comfort to the Latin speech of welcome delivered by the enormous Sir Anthony Browne and to receive the gift of the white charger which the Queen had sent to him to greet him on arrival. The Prince said he would walk to the house prepared for him, but at this Sir Anthony demurred and ‘took him up in his arms and put him on the saddle’. Thereupon, preceded by all the English and Spanish courtiers and nobles, he passed through the curious and mistrustful and largely silent crowd to the Church of the Holy Rood to return thanks for his safe arrival.

  What sort of man did the English see? Clearly an impressive figure, despite his medium height and slight build, for he was in black and silver, hung with gold chains and glittering with jewels on coat and bonnet and breast. A quiet dignified young man – looking younger than his years – with a gracious manner and a charming, diffident smile. Titian’s portrait of him painted about this time and now in the museum in Naples shows him to have a high forehead, strong up-growing rather short-cropped blond hair, firm winged eyebrows over heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, and a trace of a moustache and blond beard partly hiding the Hapsburg jaw. Not a young man, one would think, to whom women would be indifferent. Mary, when she met him, was not indifferent.

  He had inherited considerable charm from his mother Isabella of Portugal, and he chose to exercise it upon the English. In the next weeks he was to need it all, not only to soften the distrust of the English but to allay the resentments of his own nobility who were to find themselves everywhere brusquely treated, and cheated and robbed at the slightest excuse. Of all the eight-thousand-odd Spanish soldiers, not one was allowed to land. The fleet was sent off to Portsmouth to revictual and the troops dispatched to the Netherlands. The Spanish guard were kept in frustrated idleness on board one of the few ships remaining in Southampton Water, and attendance on the Prince was confined to Englishmen only. The noble Spanish watched in disgust at the – to their eyes – unrefined attempts of the English to wait upon their new master.

  And it rained: how it rained! The weather in that century was nearly always on the side of the English, and now it weighed in with a commentary to suit the mood of the most convinced Lutheran. For all of the three days that Prince Philip remained in Southampton it rained so hard that the Spanish prince had to borrow a cape and hat to cross the street each day from his lodging to the church. When he eventually rode to Winchester for the wedding with an escort of three thousand nobles and retainers, halberdiers, archers and light horse, the weather was so bad that he was compelled to stop a mile from the city in the shelter of a recently dispossessed monastery to change his finery before entering the city.

  Thereafter followed his welcome at the doors of the great cathedral by a sonority of mitred bishops, a procession to the high altar, sung Mass, and all the ceremonial by which God’s annointed was greeted in a foreign but friendly land. This was Monday, and the wedding was not until Wednesday, but in the evening of Monday Queen Mary, unable longer to restrain her natural curiosity, sent secretly from the bishop’s palace, saying she wished to meet him informally at ten o’clock that night and to bring only a select few of his retinue.

  The events of their first meeting, as described by the Spaniards who accompanied the Prince, are in strange contrast with the reputation that Philip has been given by English, French and American historians of later centuries. It is hard to reconcile his behaviour with the picture of the monster many of them draw: the persecutor of the Netherlands, the bigot, the fanatic, the cold-blooded despot. Yet perhaps it is all – or nearly all – true. Perhaps age and authority changes men. Who, seeing Mary’s father as the golden-haired boy coming to his throne and winning the hearts of his people at eighteen, could have foreseen the dangerous and unpredictable tyrant of his last years?

  Prince Philip accepted the invitation of his future wife, but the ‘select few’ of his entourage amounted to more than twenty noblemen. On this point he was taking no risks. The whole party entered the bishop’s palace by way of a back door and mounted a spiral stone staircase to the room where the Queen was waiting, attended only by Gardiner – the all-powerful Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Winchester, who had spent five years in the Tower for his religious principles – and by some dozen elderly noblemen and noblewomen. All women of her own age or younger Mary had excluded.

  Tonight she was wearing a high-cut black velvet gown, a petticoat of frosted silver, a black velvet gold-trimmed wimple covering the head and sides of the face, and some of the finest diamonds at throat and waist that the English crown possessed. Mary at thirty-eight was a slim, rather small woman whose fair hair had become mousy in colour, and she seldom wore it about her face. Her eyes were grey and unwavering under sandy lashes and scarcely existent eyebrows. Her complexion, though naturally pale, was good and still youthful. She had a strong rather deep voice and a warmth and sincerity of manner that was not leavened by self-criticism or a sense of humour.

  Philip at once bowed and went towards her, first accepting her hand and then kissing her full on the lips in what he said was ‘the English manner’. It was a greeting that she clearly did not find distasteful; and she led him by the hand to two chairs placed under a brocade canopy where they sat talking in private for a long time. Presently the Prince asked if he might meet the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and reluctantly she took him into the next room where they were all assembled, many of these being young and pretty girls. Philip kissed the lot. Again he claimed it was the English custom and no one denied him.

  Afterwards Mary led him back into her private room and they chatted together for a further half hour. She was clearly captivated. It was now well after midnight and Philip rose to go, but said that he must first return to the ante-chamber to wish the ladies-in-waiting good night. How did one say this in English? The Queen taught him, and he started for the door, only to return laughing to say that he had forgotten already. Playfully she coached him again, and, repeating ‘God ni hit’ half under his breath, he returned to the ladies to salute them once more.

  ‘Fickle Philip’ he was sometimes called by his friends. It all seems a long way from ‘ the Spider of the Escorial’.

  The wedding took place on the Wednesday, still in the pouring rain. Not for nothing had the cathedral been dedicated to St Swithin. But in its five hundred years of history there could never have been a more brilliant scene than this. Philip wore a white satin suit and a mantle of cloth of gold embroidered with jewels. The Queen again wore black velvet, but was so ablaze with precious stones that she seemed on fire. Her fifty ladies, according to the Spanish, ‘looked more like celestial angels than mortal creatures’. The long ritual completed and the Mass done, the King of the Heralds, preceded by a blast of silver trumpets, proclaimed the titles of their majesties: ‘Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, Fr
ance, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Hapsburg, Flanders and Tyrol.’ It was a formidable list.

  When the wedding was at last over, the King and Queen walked side by side to the palace through the crowd, which behaved with notable restraint. At the palace was a banquet for one hundred and fifty-eight, with four services of meat and fish, each service comprising thirty dishes, and endless toasts and more ceremonial, swords of state and ritual staffs and loving cups. The Spaniards noted that Mary was served on gold plate, Philip on silver; she, too, had the higher chair, was given precedence in everything. The English were leaving them in no doubt as to how they saw the future. Only one Spaniard was allowed to serve the King at table, elsewhere ever since he landed his attendants had been English, the Spanish pushed out.

  The meal lasted until six, then dancing until nine. Here there was difficulty, as the Spanish gentlemen and the English ladies did not know the same steps. Philip and Mary solved the problem by dancing in the German style. As night fell candles and torches lit the brilliant scene, but soon the King and Queen retired, not surprisingly after the fatigues and tensions of the arduous day. Mary’s mother, so steadfast in her loyalty to the country of her birth and the faith of her ancestors, would have been happy to have seen that night. It looked as if friendship with Spain was restored and re-cemented and a permanent return to the Old Faith guaranteed.

  What went wrong? Clearly Mary’s inability to produce a child. Had a son been born it seems almost certain that the English, however much they hated the union which produced him, would have accepted him as their king. He would have been a male Tudor in direct descent from the two Henrys who had founded the line. The only other possible claimants were women.