Map: 25 May–20 June, Lisbon.
1.25 May. A council of war held off Peniche where it
is decided to undertake an expedition on land, ruling out a naval attack on
Lisbon on 26 May. Difficult disembarkation on Consolaçao beach; of the
thirty-two landing craft, fourteen went under with over eighty men drowned.
First skirmish on the beach: two hours and three charges with 250 Spanish and
150 Portuguese under Captain Alarcón and Juan González de Ateide. Death of
Captains Robert Piew and Jackson plus other men. Death of a standard-bearer and
fifteen Spaniards. 12,000 soldiers are landed.
2.27 May. Contact with the Portuguese at Peniche and
Atouguia. Preparations for the march. Attack by the cavalry of Captain Gaspar
de Alarcón: five dead plus one French prisoner who speaks Spanish: he reports
that the English Armada is bringing 20,000 men. Surrender of the fortress to
Dom António.
3.28 May. The English army reaches Lourinha, where it
has proved impossible to raise a Spanish–Portuguese army. Start of the Spanish
tactics to cut off supplies and communications. The army begins to starve.
4.28 May. Drake sets sail from Peniche to Cascais with
the whole fleet and 3,200 men. A further five hundred, left as a garrison in
Peniche, will be killed or captured.
5.28 May. Movement of Spanish troops transported in
galleys from Lisbon to São Julião and Oeiras to strengthen the naval front.
6.29 May. The English army reaches Torres Vedras.
Nobles in the area take flight. Fear in Lisbon. Locals who live outside the
walls take refuge in the city.
7.30 May. Iberian military parade in Queluz, where the
new headquarters has been set up.
8.30 May. Drake drops anchor between Cascais and São
Julião, adopting a crescent shape.
9.30–31 May. The English enter Loures. Dom António
announces that he will enter Lisbon on 1 June, the feast of Corpus Christi, but
on the night of 31 May there is a surprise Spanish attack with more than two
hundred dead.
10.1 June. The English reach Alvalade. Arms are
distributed to the Portuguese infantry.
11.2–4 June. The English army reaches Lisbon. They are
bombarded from the Saint George castle. Billeting in Lisbon. On 3 June there is
a great attack of the besieged against the English barracks.
12.5 June. Night-time withdrawal by the army to
Cascais, pursued by Spanish detachments. More than five hundred dead.
13.15 June. Arrival of the Adelantado of Castile with
fifteen galleys and six fireships.
14.19–20 June. The English Armada sails on a westerly
wind, the galleys set off in pursuit and sink or capture nine ships, a tender
and a barge. The fleet is dispersed.
As dawn broke on Wednesday, 21 June 1589, it was clear that
the English Armada was still in sight of land. While the first detachment of
the fleet continued its slow voyage northwards, Drake was to spend that day
sailing into the light onshore wind and tacking off the coast before reaching
Cascais. For its part, the damaged Gregory, which was lost out at sea,
struggled to sail northwards, while Fenner, who was even more lost and who had
to endure a storm in the night, headed off to the islands of Madeira, which
were relatively close by. These names make up for the anonymity of many other
lost ships of which we know nothing further. Meanwhile, the fifteen caravels
that had been made ready in Lisbon to come to the aid of the Azores were unable
to set sail due to the calm seas and westerly winds. While all this was
happening at sea, with the Duke of Aveiro remaining on full alert on land, the
detachment of Guzmán and Bravo reached Torres Vedras, where they learned of the
situation at Peniche from Martinho Soares.
Westerly winds continued to blow on 22 June, and nothing of
significance changed at sea, although it did at Peniche. In fact, as Guzmán and
Bravo’s detachment reached Lourinhã on their way there, they received
a report from a spy at Peniche that the enemy were trying
to embark and take the artillery from the Tower. They all set off in haste
towards Peniche, where they discovered some of the enemy already embarked on a
small ship and a barge which were already in the water (and) about 40 of them
got on board, while of those still on land they killed or captured almost 300.
Although English sources do not appear to confirm that there
were any survivors apart from Captain Barton, there must have been some, for
‘although they were making haste, before they arrived they received news of the
embarkation, and so spurring on their horses as much as they could they arrived
with some two hundred yet to board and killed them or took them prisoner’.
About two hundred, therefore, remained on land, and they were killed or
captured together with others who were already on board. It is not known how
many others managed to escape, but if disease had not taken too great a toll in
the English garrison at Peniche, it could have been a sizeable number. What is
clear is that, given the great urgency to prevent the men from getting on
board, the only ones to arrive in time to prevent it were the cavalry. In any
event, the haste to embark was such that ‘a chest full of papers belonging to
Dom António was found, and amongst some important ones there was one written in
his own hand that described everything that had happened to him from the time
he had declared himself king to the day he arrived in this kingdom’. These
papers would help to thwart Dom António’s plans once and for all.
Following this bloody encounter, the Iberians reclaimed the
castle and its artillery. ‘In case any ships arrived, Pedro García’s company of
Maestre de Campo Francisco de Toledo’s regiment, remained in the castle.’ With
this new victory, ‘Don Pedro de Guzmán and Don Sancho Bravo, with their
infantry and cavalry, returned to Lisbon with about 60 prisoners.’ The failure
of the English expedition and the subsequent feeling of relief on the Iberian
side loomed larger by the day.
As he had on previous days, Drake continued to sail close to
the Portuguese coast during the morning of Friday, 23 June in order to make
progress northwards and that is how the English Armada found itself off the
coast at Peniche. He then sent in the rescue boats but, as fate would have it,
the men who had been looking for such a sign of deliverance from the
battlements of Peniche were no longer there. The ships – there were nine or ten
of them – were kept at bay from Peniche by cannon fire and they returned to the
fleet. Meanwhile, the English Armada was stretched out along the coast like the
net of a fishing trawler or the Santa Compaña that by night seizes anyone that
looks at it. Yet another merchant ship – a Hanseatic supply ship from Lübeck –
fell into their clutches that day. But the extraordinary thing was that its
captain was held on Drake’s Revenge until they reached Plymouth – perhaps
because it was a ship captured at sea and to prevent any attempt to escape.
Once he was back on the Peninsula, the captain, whose name was Juan Antonio
Bigbaque, wrote a very interesting account of what happened.
That day a north-east wind got up after all the calms and
westerlies and Drake set off for the open sea. That is when the fleet appeared
to head for the Azores; as Hume put it: ‘After sailing ostensibly for the
Azores, Drake turned back.’ But given the state of the fleet and the diverse
nature of its composition, to attempt such a voyage of conquest seemed like an
act of recklessness. Bigbaque, who witnessed the events, reported: ‘(Drake’s)
principal objective was to end up in the Cíes Islands, but because the weather
was so changeable from one day to the next, he decided to head for the island
of Madeira. He sent barges to inform all the ships of the fleet, but later when
the wind turned, he set course for Bayona and the Cíes Islands.’ With adverse
winds for the return to England, with the coast on a war footing and swarming
with galleys, with the great prize of merchant ships, and above all with the
state of the fleet worsening rapidly and making it increasingly necessary to
stop in order to recuperate, the Madeira Islands could be seen as an
appropriate place for a stopover after six perilous and pointless days at sea.
In any event, 23 June was the last day that the fleet was sighted from the
vicinity of Lisbon and Peniche.
With the English Armada out to sea, the Spanish were
suffering the same degree of uncertainty on Saturday, 24 June, as they had at
the beginning of May: not knowing where a new landing by the English might take
place. However, the situation was not the same, both on account of the drastic
reduction in the power of the English fleet and the arrival of Philip’s troops
in Portugal, including Juan del Águila’s infantry and Luis de Toledo’s cavalry.
Hence Fuentes ordered that
as an attempt could be made between the Douro and Minho
or in Galicia, it seemed advisable that the infantry and cavalry under Don Juan
del Águila and Don Luis de Toledo should be accommodated in Coimbra and the
surrounding area, for it is situated at the centre of the region and should the
need arise they can reach any part of the area.
The Count also ordered that ‘in order for the billeting to
be acceptable and convenient for the locals,’ everything should be done under
the supervision of the Count of Portoalegre, and ‘they should be given
excellent treatment there’.
On the same day, Fuentes sent two more caravels with men and
supplies to reinforce the two that were tailing the English Armada. In
addition, he began the recruitment of sailors for the new Armada that was being
prepared for the following year. For his part, Alonso de Bazán, who had been
called upon by the King for this new Armada, wrote to him on that day to say
that with the invaders now definitely gone from Lisbon, he would travel to the
Court immediately.
As for the English, it was on the Saturday that Robert
Devereux, Earl of Essex, more or less unwittingly rendered one last service to
the expedition by providing Cerralbo with the same major headaches as he had
suffered in May and in the process making the Vigo estuary more vulnerable. In
fact, the first sighting of the first squadron of the English Armada occurred
on that day in the Rías Altas, off the Costa de la Muerte. It included the
favourite Devereux with many other nobles, a good number of English ships
carrying the sick and the discharged Dutch vessels. This sighting created a
counterproductive movement of Galician troops, for when Cerralbo thought that
the English Armada was going to attack Corunna again, he ordered the three
companies that were stationed in Pontevedra as reinforcements for Vigo and the
Rías Bajas to return at once to Corunna. It would have been far better in this
game of cat and mouse for these veteran soldiers to have remained in
Pontevedra, for this would have spared them gruelling and futile marches across
the Galician countryside that took them away from the place where the final
attack by the English Armada would be unleashed shortly afterwards.
On Sunday, 25 June, the northerly winds and rough weather
intensified. As night fell, Drake, who had sailed out to sea on 23 June, was
sighted off Oporto. These facts suggest that Drake took advantage of the
north-easterly wind on 23 June, sailed west-northwest at the start of what was
to be a long tacking movement (that led some to think that he was heading for
the Azores). At some point on 24 June, now at some distance from the coast and
with the wind from the north, the tacking took them several miles out to sea.
Following the change in direction and sailing into the wind as much as possible
in order to get as far north as he could, he started a new tack, this time back
towards the Portuguese coast. Finally, on 25 June, with the ships leaning hard
to starboard, he completed the tack which took him to within five miles of
Oporto. As far as the first squadron of the English Armada was concerned, it
tacked using the northerly wind to reach Finisterre, while trying not to lose
too much of the northern advance already made.
The northerly wind was still blowing on Monday, 26 June, and
Drake was tacking gently off the north coast of Portugal between Vila do Conde
and Esposende under the watchful eye of Pedro Bermúdez, commander of the
military garrison in that sector. The first squadron of the fleet was doing the
same off the Galician coast and was seen again that day from Finisterre. On the
Spanish side, that was the day that the fifteen caravels at last set sail to
reinforce the Azores. Meanwhile, the Gregory from London which, as mentioned
earlier, had been hit by the guns from the galleys days before, ‘was not
sailing as well as the rest’ and had got detached from the fleet, managed to
join up with them again. According to Evesham’s account that was also the night
when, in addition to the gradual dispersal of individual ships, the second
squadron of the English Armada was in turn split in two. Evesham described how
during the night Drake lit a beacon on the Revenge, which by daybreak had
disappeared along with sixty ships.
On Tuesday, 27 June, the wind continued to blow, resulting
in the virtual standstill of the English ships, which were becoming more and
more spread out as they tried to sail into the wind off the Portuguese and
Galician coasts. Tragically, they were being held back, with the vessels
beginning to look more like mortuaries owing to the relentless increase in
hunger, thirst, sickness and death.
By 28 June, most of the second squadron of the English
Armada was close to the Portuguese–Galician border between Viana and Caminha.
In fact, a number of ships showed signs of attempting to land on Ancora beach
next to the river. But the same day the wind veered to the south, and so they
were able to sail towards the estuaries which offered unparalleled respite for
any ship exhausted from being at sea. However, they did not all anchor in Vigo
as a number of them headed straight off to England. One of these was the
Gregory, which headed north after abandoning a lost supply ship that it had
come across and which decided to stay. Shortly afterwards, the Gregory came
across another ship on its own, the Bark Bonner from Plymouth, and they decided
to keep each other company on the tough voyage that awaited them on their
homeward journey.
But on 29 June Drake finally managed to drop anchor off Vigo
and, throughout that day, a large number of ships came to join him there. In
conclusion, Drake had the wind in his favour to head for the Azores and against
him to return to England. But what he wanted was to go home and, from setting
sail from Cascais on 18 June until a southerly wind got up on 28 June, he had
tacked against the wind in order to make some headway north. And during that
time, disease and hunger began to seriously ravage the fleet.
