The Confident Hope of a Miracle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  PART I - The Enterprise of England

  CHAPTER ONE - God’s Obvious Design

  CHAPTER TWO - In the Cause of God

  CHAPTER THREE - The Master of the Sea

  CHAPTER FOUR - Smoking the Wasps fro Their Nests

  CHAPTER FIVE - The Floating Forest

  CHAPTER SIX - So Violent a Sea and Wind

  CHAPTER SEVEN - The Sea Beggars

  PART II - The Wall of England

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Like Bears Tied to Stakes

  CHAPTER NINE - The Advantage of Time and Place

  CHAPTER TEN - A Bad Place to Rest In

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Greatest Navy that Ever Swam upon the Sea

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Heavens Thundered

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - A Terrible Value of Great Shot

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Resolved There to Live and Die

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Hell-burners

  PART III - Aftermath

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - A Wonderful Fear

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The Rags Which Yet Remain

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Disease Uncured

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Vanished into Smoke

  CHAPTER TWENTY - God Will Tire of Working Miracles

  Bibliography

  Glossary

  Notes

  About the Author

  ALSO BY NEIL HANSON

  Copyright Page

  For Lynn, Jack and Drew

  ACCLAIM FOR NEIL HANSON’S

  The Confident Hope of a Miracle

  “Hanson’s narrative is brilliant—melding deep research and page-turning writing. When he deals with the disaster of the Armada’s homeward passage, battling monstrous seas and shipwrecks he reaches dramatic heights that make him the equal of Parkman or Prescott.” —The Sunday Express (London)

  “Hanson writes with sweep, confidence and great verve. He re-creates the feel and sounds of sixteenth-century battle [and] is especially vivid when describing the appalling squalor of shipboard life. The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a driving narrative, filled with keen observation and the occasional debunking.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “An exceptionally vivid account. . . . Hanson is essentially a narrative historian with all the talents required of that genre: a gimlet eye for interesting detail, an ability to convey atmosphere and a storyteller’s instinct for pace. He has written a marvelous book.”—The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “An extraordinarily detailed and . . . magnificently researched account. . . . Hanson’s text remains intelligent, persuasive and well-structured throughout, a triumph of diligent research that will undoubtedly be of immense appeal.” — San Francisco Chronicle

  “Superb. . . . Not only does the author convincingly nail Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake as egregious villains but he does so in glowing historical prose.” —“Best Reads of the Year,” The Independent on Sunday (London)

  “In 1959, Garrett Mattingly, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a landmark account of the Spanish Armada of 1588. No one, until now, has supplanted it. . . . A brilliant summary of the endgame, as vivid and passionate as everything that has gone before.” —The Economist

  “Hanson tells the story well, and with a good eye for the telling quotation. . . . It is with the ships, the commanders and the common fighting men at sea—Spanish and English—that he comes into his own. Here is where the book carves out its special place.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Hanson’s own contribution is to have researched, more thoroughly than any historian before, the fate of the common sailors and soldiers on both sides of the epic sea battle. That story, which fills the final chapters of his book, is among history’s saddest and most forlorn. . . . Clear, insightful, and very gripping.” —St. Petersburg Times

  “Portrays in vivid, almost cinematic detail how the highest and the lowest lived their daily lives during those turbulent months when the destiny of all Europe was in question. This is a book that truly brings the past to life with compelling prose and a carefully researched foundation. An outstanding read, and a ‘must-have’ for every history library.” —History Book Club

  “Brilliant in conception and exquisite in execution, The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a definitive account.” —The Charleston Post and Courier

  “Entertaining and exhaustive.” —The Spectator (London)

  “This year’s greatest triumph of sheer driving narrative and a master-piece of popular history. There are passages that can stand comparison with the finest historical prose but what is just as attractive is Hanson’s originality. At the hands of Hanson’s impeccable scholarship, the myth of ‘Gloriana’ takes even more of a battering than the storm-tossed Spanish galleons.” —“Books of the Year,” The Glasgow Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)

  “Hanson tells the story of the famous victory and its political, economic and social ramifications with formidably detailed scholarship and narrative flair. . . . An enlightening work of historical investigation.” — The Irish Times (Dublin)

  “A splendid narrative interspersed with irreverent, but convincing, character sketches. . . . Escapism of a very high historical and literary order. We should be the poorer without this privileged glimpse into another world.” —History Today (London)

  Acknowledgements

  Among the tens of thousands of documents on the Armada held primarily, but not exclusively, in archives in England, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands, I have concentrated much of my original researches on the fate of the survivors of the fleets after they came ashore. Like countless other writers and historians, I have also consulted the Calendars and printed versions of contemporary documents, offering silent prayers for the dedication of those, usually Victorian, scholars who performed the difficult task of transcribing the often tattered and near-illegible originals for the benefit of writers and researchers as yet unborn, and I am also indebted to the painstaking research work in the Spanish archives undertaken by historians from Duro and Laughton in the nineteenth century to Geoffrey Parker towards the end of the twentieth.

  Eugene L. Rasor’s bibliography of the Armada sources and literature is the starting point for any researcher, and of the innumerable previous accounts of the Armada, I would single out four. Garrett Mattingly’s, written as long ago as 1959, remains the definitive account of the diplomatic background to the launching of the Armada, though he perhaps made less of the Spanish attempts to create a second front in Scotland and Ireland than their importance merited. Geoffrey Parker and Colin Martin combined their respective expert knowledge of Spanish archives and marine archaeology and Armada wrecks to correct many prior misapprehensions, Alexander McKee constructed a vivid account from primary sources, and David Howarth wrote one of the more elegant and intelligent analyses of the campaign. Other significant sources include Boteler’s Dialogues, written within thirty years of the Armada and invaluable on the day-to-day running of ships of the era and their conduct in battle, Peter Kemp’s excellent exploration of life on the lower deck, The British Sailor, Kenneth R. Andrews’s absorbing study of Elizabethan privateering, Leon van der Essen’s massive biography of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, and Peter Pierson’s definitive biography of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. The many other writers upon whose work I have drawn are listed in the bibliography. Direct quotations have been converted into modern English—“doth” and “hath” have been replaced by “does” and “has,” for example, but no other changes have been made to the contemporary texts.

  All dates in this book use the Gregorian cal
endar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and still in use today. Because of its “papist” origins, England refused to adopt the system and stubbornly adhered to the old Julian calendar for over a century after it had disappeared from the rest of Europe. As a result, all events mentioned in contemporary English documents on the Armada appear to have occurred ten days earlier than in Spanish ones. To avoid confusion, they have been rendered into the equivalent “New Style” date. The first sighting of the Armada off the Lizard therefore occurred on 30 July 1588, not 20 July.

  As always, my thanks go to the knowledgeable and helpful staff at the London Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library in London and its outstation at Wetherby, the Public Record Office, the Historic Manuscripts Commission, the National Maritime Museum, and all the many regional libraries, museums, archives, record offices and historical societies who responded so positively to my requests for help and information. I’m grateful also to the fishermen, yachtsmen, coastguards, naval officers and many other people with expertise in a variety of fields whom I encountered during my researches, and who, without exception, gave freely of their time in answering my queries.

  My thanks also to my New York agent Kim Witherspoon and David Forrer; to Mark Lucas and his assistant Alice Saunders in London; and to the magnificent team at Knopf Publishing including, among many others, Ashbel Green, Sonny Mehta, Andrew Miller, Luba Ostashevsky, Gabriele Wilson, Maria Massey, Lydia Buechler, Katherine Hourigan, Eric Bliss, Soonyoung Kwon, and Tracy Cabanis; to the proofreader, Kate Norris; and to Christine Casaccio, the publicist for this book, and to all the people in sales and marketing who promoted this book.

  My personal thanks also go to Peter Metcalf for his help with the research from regional sources, to Didy Metcalf, who drew my attention to some interesting documents in Ireland and Yorkshire, and most of all to Lynn, Jack and Drew, whose love and support over the last three years have sustained me through the mammoth task of researching and writing this book. Lastly, I’m grateful to Chris Harper, who pointed me in the direction of this incredible story, so familiar to us all in half-remembered myth and legend, and yet so utterly unfamiliar in its true details.

  Neil Hanson

  JUNE 2004

  Illustrations

  Title page: Ventorum Ludibrium, 1588. Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

  The images opening the chapters show playing cards printed towards the end of the seventeenth century depicting events leading up to, during and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. They demonstrate the strong anti-Catholic sentiments that still persisted. Chapters 2, 3 and 7: © The Bridgeman Art Library; remaining chapters: © National Maritime Museum.

  FIRST PICTURE SECTION

  Anonymous portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1585–90. © The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library; insert: Queen Elizabeth I by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, 1595: Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire. © The Bridgeman Art Library; The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Netherlandish School, c. 1613. Scottish National Portrait Gallery. © The Bridgeman Art Library.

  The Prince of Orange Milking the Cow of the Netherlands, c. 1583–84, English School. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Philip II of Spain by Sofonisba Anguisciola, c. 1580. Museo del Prado, Madrid. © The Bridgeman Art Library; Don Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, after 1610. Collection of the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Photo Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic-Arxiu Mas, Barcelona; background: sixteenth-century ceramic mural from the palace of the Marquis of Santa Cruz. Photo Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic-Arxiu Mas, Barcelona; Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, by Otto van Veen, c. 1585–90. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Photo Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic-Arxiu Mas, Barcelona; Pope Sixtus V, c. 1588–90, Venetian School. The Vatican Museums; Justin of Nassau, studio of Jan Anthonisz. van Ravesteyn. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Henri III, French School, sixteenth century. Musée de Tessé, Le Mans. © The Bridgeman Art Library; Henri IV, French School, sixteenth century. Château de Versailles. © The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Map of the south-west coast, 1539. By permission of the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Cotton Augustus li. 38–39; anonymous portrait of Charles Howard, Lord Effingham and Earl of Nottingham, 1602. © The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library; anonymous portrait of Sir Francis Drake, c. 1580. © The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library; Sir John Hawkins, English School, sixteenth century. © National Maritime Museum; Sir Martin Frobisher by Cornelius Ketel, 1577. The Curators of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Three pages from “Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry” by Matthew Baker, c. 1586. Pepysian Library MS 2820. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge; mariner’s astrolabe, 1588. © National Maritime Museum; frontispiece by Theodor de Bry to The Mariner’s Mirror, Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, 1588. © National Maritime Museum.

  Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, English School, sixteenth century. The Collection at Parham Park, West Sussex. © Mark Fiennes; Sir Francis Walsingham by John de Critz the Elder. © The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library; William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, English School, 1586. The Collection at Parham Park, West Sussex. © The Bridgeman Art Library; title page of the pamphlet “A Pack of Spanish Lies . . . ,” 1588.

  SECOND PICTURE SECTION

  Sixteenth-century map of Portland Bill and Weymouth Bay. By permission of the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Cotton Augustus li. 31 and 33; beacon hut, Higher Manhay, Cornwall. Author’s photo.

  Details of the Armada charts from Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera description Anno Do: MDLXXXVIII, 1590, by Augustin Ryther after Robert Adams: 30–31 July (top left); 31 July–1 August (bottom left); 2–3 August (top right); 8 August (bottom right). © National Maritime Museum.

  Detail of The Launch of the English Fireships against the Armada, 7 August 1588, Netherlandish School, sixteenth century. © National Maritime Museum.

  A shipwreck, sixteenth-century manuscript illumination. Glasgow University Library. © The Bridgeman Art Library; anonymous portrait of Sir Richard Bingham, 1564. © The National Portrait Gallery Picture Library; resolution to pursue the Armada. By permission of the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MSS. 33740 f. 5; map showing the route of the Armada fleet from Expeditionis Hispanorum . . . as above. © National Maritime Museum; salamander pendant from the Girona, sixteenth century, gold with rubies. Photograph © Ulster Museum, Belfast. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the National Museums & Galleries of Northern Ireland; Lacada Point, Northern Ireland. Bates Littlehales © National Geographic Society.

  Elizabeth I, the Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower, c. 1588. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. © The Bridgeman Art Library; a rich man spurns a beggar, from A Christall Glass of Christian Reformation by Stephen Bateman, 1569. Private collection. © The Bridgeman Art Library; list of executed Armada survivors, December 1588. The National Archives (SP63/139).

  Endpapers (hardcover edition): The English and Spanish Fleets off Berry Head . . . : one of the series of engravings by John Pine after the House of Lords Armada tapestries, 1739. © The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.

  Was he the only one to weep?

  BERTOLT BRECHT,

  Questions from a Worker Who Reads

  PART I

  The Enterprise of England

  CHAPTER ONE

  God’s Obvious Design

  A little after ten o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 18 February 1587, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, entered the great hall of Fotheringay, preceded by the Sheriff, bearing the white wand of his office, and escorted by the Earls of Kent and Shrewsbury. Her retinue of six followed behind. She had already kept her audience waiting for three hours as she made her prayers, read her will aloud to her servants, gave them final instructions, and finished last letters to be smuggled with her “principal notes and papers” to her cousin the Duc
de Guise and to Henri of France. “I must die like a criminal at seven in the morning,” she wrote, but even on the day of her execution none had dared to hurry the preparations of a queen, until at last soldiers were ordered to break down the door to her quarters if she delayed any longer. Over two hundred knights and gentlemen were present, hastily summoned to witness her end. Some had ridden all night; their boots were mud-splashed and the smell of damp wool from their rain-soaked cloaks hung in the air, for the logs blazing in the great stone hearth did little to lessen the chill of a bitter winter’s day. A much larger crowd had gathered outside the castle, some holding placards depicting Mary as a mermaid—the symbol of a prostitute. They were watched over by a troop of cavalry, and musicians assembled in the courtyard played a dirge, “an air commonly played at the execution of witches.”1

  The crowd stirred, men jostling and craning their necks to see the most notorious woman in Europe, tall, beautiful and sexually voracious, but also a constant treacherous conspirator against their own queen and, if rumour were true, a murderess twice over. Many must have been disappointed; there was no hint of such scandals in the modest demeanour of the woman in front of them that cold morning. Mary’s gait was slow and measured, and her eyes downcast “like a devout woman going to her prayers.” A chain of scented beads with a golden cross hung around her neck, she had a rosary at her waist, and she carried an ivory crucifix in her hand. Age had dimmed her beauty but her eyes, in a face almost as pale as the white lace at her throat, remained clear and keen. The auburn hair showing beneath her kerchief was the only flash of colour in the room. She was clad from head to foot in black velvet, echoing the drapes on the dais in front of her. Hurriedly constructed after the arrival of the death warrant signed by Queen Elizabeth on Sunday evening, the platform was twenty feet by twelve and little more than three feet high, topped by a rail like a picket fence, low enough to allow the spectators an uninterrupted view. It was a modest stage for the last act of a drama that had been played out for almost thirty years.