Armada Real (de la Guarda de la Carrera de los Indias).
Prior to 1570 Spain had no permanent navy. That year, it formed a flotilla of 12 small galleons to escort the flota to and from the Americas. Ten larger galleons were added in the 1580s; these formed the ‘‘Castilian Squadron’’ of the Invincible Armada of 1588. To this fleet were added the great galleons of Portugal, annexed to the Spanish Empire in 1580. After the catastrophe of 1588 the fleet was rebuilt remarkably fast, and in 1591 the Armada Real resumed escort of the flota.
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‘‘Spanish Armada.’’ Dispatch of a large fleet by Philip II of Spain to escort an invasion army against England was a decision long in the making. In 1585, Pope Sixtus V called on Philip to launch a crusade in behalf of the Counter-Reformation to restore England to the Catholicism it enjoyed when Philip was wed to Mary Tudor. Philip demurred, as he was preoccupied with the Eighty Years’ War in the Netherlands and protracted conflicts with the Ottomans and Barbary corsairs. When Elizabeth I finally executed Mary Stuart in 1587, a 20-year cold war between Protestant England and Catholic Spain finally went hot. At age 53, the shrewd and cautious ‘‘Virgin Queen’’ would never have provoked so powerful an enemy as Philip if she thought peace could be preserved. But she knew the dice were down the moment Mary’s head landed in the executioner’s basket. Therefore, striking with bold preemption, she ordered Francis Drake to the Galicia coast to burn Philip’s ships and dockyards to reduce any fleet he might send against her. This was escalation, but not the first shot of the war. For decades English and Dutch pirates had raided Spanish colonies and taken Spanish prizes in the Caribbean. Elizabeth had personally financed and profited from several privateer expeditions. However, the judicial murder of a Catholic queen by a heretic strumpet tipped the balance for Philip (who neglected to recall his own plotting with Mary Stuart to assassinate Elizabeth). He dusted off invasion plans tinkered with for over a decade, took money offered by the pope, and ordered an invasion. His weak private code for the project of conquest and reconversion of the island kingdom was ‘‘Enterprise of England.’’
Methodical as always, years earlier he had commissioned a study of previous invasions and learned that since the Norman conquest of 1066 England had seen nine governments fall or be seriously weakened by invasion from the sea, seven more landings of armies in Britain, and dozens of successful large-scale coastal raids. After his usual vacillation, Philip settled on a plan of attack that involved bringing together all his ships into a grand armada. This would be sent to collect the Army of Flanders and escort it to England. An armed host of 40,000 tough tercio veterans led by Parma would then march on London, topple the harlot usurper, and restore the ‘‘one true faith’’ (in place of the other one). Knowing what was coming from well-placed spies, from 1685 Elizabeth had intrigued with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire (though to little avail), supported the Dutch rebellion to keep Philip tied down in the Netherlands, commissioned new royal warships, and embargoed all merchant vessels which might be converted into warships from leaving English ports. It was only then that she sent Drake to Spain with a squadron to destroy all shipping he found there that might be used in Philip’s invasion. On April 29, 1587, Drake entered the harbor at Cadiz and destroyed or captured 24 Spanish ships and burned the docks and warehouses. He then cruised the coastlines of Spain and Portugal, burning whole towns, taking hostages, and desecrating every Catholic church he found. The religious hatred was real and cannot be subtracted from explanation of the Armada campaign: men of the 16th century did not fight merely for economic or rational causes; they sincerely believed in religious war. Even a cut-throat like Drake wrote in his notes as he left for Cadiz that Philip was the Antichrist. Among all the major players, perhaps only Elizabeth was a mild skeptic at heart. In any case, the Cadiz raid steeled Philip’s determination to deal once and for all with England. The cost of his grandiose invasion plan was so fearsome he had to sell his wife’s jewels to finance it; his righteousness caused him to do so.
Elizabeth, too, was feeling stretched: she had one army guarding the Scottish frontier and another she could ill-afford in Flanders. Unbeknownst, her ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, was actually a spy for Philip and fed him much accurate information. Her spies were similarly well-placed— one delivered an exact copy of Philip’s plans. But the sheer disparity of forces was truly intimidating. Elizabeth knew she could not stop Parma’s veterans on land with her ill-equipped and outnumbered trained bands. She and her captains therefore decided to stop the Spanish at sea. That is why, as she laid the keels of new fighting galleons and converted armed merchants to fullfledged warships, she sent Drake to reduce the size of the coming Armada even before it assembled. Upon his return Drake told her: ‘‘I have singed the beard of the King of Spain.’’ He had done much more: Philip could stand the loss of a few ships, but neither he nor Drake yet knew that the real damage had been done when Drake’s crews burned thousands of barrels and barrel staves stacked in warehouses waiting to be filled with potable water for the Spanish fleet. These had to be replaced with fresh-cut, green staves which would slowly poison their contents and later, Spanish crews.
Philip’s plan called for a fleet of 50 royal galleons and 100 more ‘‘great ships,’’ plus 40 hulks to carry supplies. Parma’s men would cross on 200 flatbottomed barges being built in Flanders. By the spring of 1588, Philip had gathered only 13 galleons, 6 galleasses, 40 galleys, and a dozen small cargo ships. To these he added a motley crew of 70 hired or commandeered merchants, many of them rotten and slowed by cracks, bilge water, and barnacles. Worse, Spain did not have the skilled sailors to man even these ships. Men were hurriedly pressed from all over Iberia, and not just the sea towns. This produced seamen but not seamanship. When his top admiral, the Marques de Santa Cruz, died before the Armada was ready to sail Philip gave the task to Medina Sidonia on short notice. Sidonia hailed from a respected Castilian family but had no experience of either the sea or war, told Philip this, and begged to be relieved. He was denied. Sidonia arrived in Lisbon, where the Armada was assembling, to find utter chaos. Guns and powder, barrels of fresh water, casks of ship’s biscuit, had all been loaded in haste. And Philip kept some ships at the ready all winter: crews and marines had eaten the stores and many were already sick with ‘‘ship’s fever.’’ There were no reliable records as to what was stored on any given ship. Some had cannons but no shot or the wrong shot (the Spanish failure to standardize calibers would cost many lives); some had shot but no guns; other ships had guns and shot buried so deep in their holds they were effectively lost. Sidonia set about redistributing guns and stores and buying new supplies to replace those rotten or eaten: bacon, fish, hard cheese, rice, beans, vinegar, olive oil, and water by the hundredweight stored in new, green barrels. He doubled the powder order and raised the rounds of shot to 50 for each gun, for a total of 123,790 cannonballs (Sidonia and Philip kept excellent records, which have survived). Everyone in command thought that was plenty of powder and shot. In fact, the supply would prove woefully short. Smartly for a man with no sea experience, Sidonia ordered rotten timbers replaced and had ships careened, scraped, and tallowed. Still, in the nature of a convoy, the Armada would sail at the speed of its slowest ships.
As these preparations were underway Philip agreed to lend the Armada great ships from his India fleet, eight huge galleons from Portugal, which he had annexed in 1580, and more from the Caribbean. Other ships straggled in from Naples or Sicily. On May 25, 1588, Sidonia attended mass in Lisbon Cathedral. Every man on every ship was confessed and took communion; each captain read warnings of severe punishment for blasphemy and cursing; each ship was searched to ensure no women were aboard; and 180 priests boarded the fleet, to tend to its crews but more, expecting to land in England to do God’s work of reconversion of a heretic land, where they expected to be received by English Catholics as liberators. Each ship was freshly painted, though in too many the new paint merely hid rotten decks and creaky, unsound hulls. In the Cathedral the Archbishop gave Sidonia a great banner with the Arms of Spain and Christ crucified on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other. In Latin, it read: ‘‘Arise, O Lord, And Vindicate Thy Cause.’’ It was not just Philip who thought God fought on Spain’s side: most everyone in Lisbon and Madrid believed the Armada was Invincible. Later, the name ‘‘Invincible Armada’’ stuck, not as a boast but as tragic irony remembering a terrible national disaster.
