Lord Howard of Effingham, the Trusted of the Queen. page 3

But the Armada had reached Calais unbroken and apparently invincible'; for the Spanish ships sat on the water like huge castles, their bulks being so planked with great beams that balls and bullets might strike and stick, but never pass through; so that the English cannon could do little damage, except only in playing on their masts and tackle - besides, their enormous height made any attempt to board them impossible.

Those English officers who thought on these things might well wonder how the Spaniards were ever to be beaten off from the Thames and London. Howard must have been consulting and wondering how the great battle was to be won. Some say that the Queen herself suggested fire-ships, others say that the device was Winter's, who had it from Gianibelli, an Italian who had practised it with great success in defending Antwerp from Parma three years before. As has been told before, six of the oldest vessels were filled with combustibles and smeared with pitch, and convoyed to the Armada at midnight.

It was a rough sea after a three days' calm, the rain fell in torrents, and the wind blew from the south-west, so that when the flaring hulks came careering with deadly detonations amongst the wooden walls of Spain, no wonder if a panic seized them, and they scurried before the wind to the mouth of the Scheldt - all but the Neapolitan galleass, the Capitana, which lost her rudder, bumped on the Calais sands and was taken. For Howard had sent his long-boat and a pinnace to seize her.

"We had a pretty skirmish for half-an-hour" - a hundred English armed with muskets and swords against seven hundred Spaniards and forty guns. "They seemed safe in their ship, while we in our open pinnaces and far under them had nothing to shroud and cover us."

The captain, Don Hugo de Moncada, smiled a sarcastic smile when asked to surrender. In a few minutes a bullet had struck him in the forehead, and he fell dead upon the deck.

On this the crew threw themselves into the sea, and the English enjoyed an hour and a half of plunder; fifty thousand ducats (£10,000) rewarded them well, but the ship was claimed by the Governor of Calais.

While the Lord Admiral stayed to watch the capture of the Capitana - not quite an admiral's duty, one would suppose - a very great fight was going on off Gravelines, where the Flemish shoals and the stormy sea together helped the English pursuers. Many great galleons were wrecked or taken, while no English ship was seriously damaged.

Lord Howard hurried up in time to see the end of the fight, and wrote, "Their force is wonderful great and strong, but we pluck their feathers by little and little." Burghley's want of resources spared the enemy a final defeat, for ammunition was exhausted, and the Spaniards limped lamely away. "Tho' our powder and shot was well near all spent," wrote Howard, "we set on a brag countenance and gave them chase."

They followed northwards up to Friday, the 2nd of August, when, being midway between the Firth of Forth and the Skager-Hak, Howard signalled to stop. For they had to refresh the ships with victuals, as well as powder and shot; so some light pinnaces only were sent to dog the Armada to the Isles of Scotland. On their way south again the English were scattered by the storm, which was driving the Spaniards on the rocks; but they assembled in Margate Road on the 9th of August.

A medal was struck to commemorate the defeat of the Armada. On it were depicted fire-ships pursuing a fleet, with the motto, "Dux femina fecit" ("The leader who did this was a woman").

We may have our doubts on this point; certainly the fire-ships did much damage, but it was the winds of heaven that finished the fight. "Afflavit Deus, et dissipantur" was more true to the facts - " God has blown on them and they are scattered," a more humble record of the victory.

The Queen was so excited by the wonderful escape from invasion that she wished to send off at once an expedition to the Azores, in order to catch the trading ships on their way back from the Indies, and so replenish the exhausted treasury.

Lord Howard consulted with Drake and Frobisher, but all held the daring scheme to be impracticable. The crews had not yet received their money due from before the Armada fight; many seamen and soldiers were in rags and half famished, in spite of all that indignant admirals had written. "Upon your letter," Howard writes to Walsingham on the 27th of August, "I presently sent for Sir Francis Drake and showed him the desire that her Majesty had for intercepting of the King's treasure from the Indies. So we considered it, and neither of us find any ships here in the fleet anyways able to go such a voyage before they have been aground, which cannot be done in any place but at Chatham, and it will be fourteen days before they can be grounded." Then with a touch of scorn for the ignorance that prompted such a desperate scheme for vessels just come from a long sea-fight, he adds, "Belike it is thought that the West Indian islands be but hereby! it is not thought how the year is spent. I thought it good, therefore, to send with all speed Sir Francis Drake, although he be not very well, to inform you rightly of all. He is a man of judgment and acquainted with it, and will tell you what must be done for such a journey."

If Sir Francis Walsingham had turned up a file of old letters, he must have found a recent letter from the Lord High Admiral, written only four days before this, in which Howard writes with reference to the Armada returning from the north to renew the fight: -

"Sir, God knowethe what we shall dow if we have no men: many of our shypse ar so wekly maned that they have not maryners to way ther ankers. Well, we must dow what we chane (can). I hope in God that he will make us stronge anufe for them, for all men are of good corage heer."

After re-reading this, Walsingham must surely have doubted his own judgment. We may notice that the spelling of those times varied with the mood of the writer, and it also gives us an insight into the manner of pronouncing words. When all men spell on the same dead level, there is nothing to be learnt from it. Drake must have spoken "a bit of his own mind" at Court, for we hear no more of any expedition to the Azores, but of an expedition under Drake to Spain. However, it was not until 1596 that the Lord Admiral again hoisted his flag; it was the year in which the British Navy lost by death three of its most eminent seamen - Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins.

Philip had been steadily gaining ground in Brittany and began to think of another attempt at invasion. In February 1594 he wrote to his Viceroy in the Netherlands, instructing him to destroy Elizabeth's shipping at home. "Two or three thousand soldiers might be landed at Rochester, who might burn or sink all the unarmed vessels they could find there, and then sail off again before the people of the country could collect in sufficient numbers to do them any damage." Later in the year 1594 a raid of Spaniards from Brittany upon Penzance burnt and plundered that town; in 1596 a second raid was made upon the same district. On the 10th of April Spain seized Calais, and stirred the brave Virgin Queen to wrath.

By the 3rd of June a fleet of nearly one hundred and fifty vessels was ready to sail from Plymouth, of which seventeen were Queen's ships and eighteen Netherlanders.

Lord Admiral Howard had the chief command at sea; the young Earl of Essex was given the command of the land forces. Lord Thomas Howard, a cousin of Lord Charles, and Sir Walter Raleigh had each a squadron. The entire force was 17,000 strong, the largest force sent from England since the days of the Crusades. As military rank in those days was settled according to rank in the peerage and not by standing in the army or navy, this young Earl had precedence in the commission, because the Lord Admiral was only a baron. On the 18th of June they learnt from an Irish vessel, that had just left Cadiz, that the port was full of men-of-war and galleons richly laden.

On the 20th they anchored quietly in the harbour to the amazement of all, and now the Earl of Essex set up a claim to the honour of leading in. But Lord Howard of Effingham stoutly resisted it, for he knew what a rash and impetuous firebrand the Earl was. " No, my lord, it belongs to me as a seaman to arrange all this; besides, I must acquaint you privately that I have been strictly charged by her Majesty to prevent you from exposing yourself to unnecessary danger."

The whole council backed up the Lord High Admiral, and the Earl sulked in a boyish manner: he was to be taken care of like a child!

On the 21st of June they fought from 5 a.m. until 1 p.m.; several vessels were taken and spoiled. The San Felipe, the glory of Spain for her size, was blown up to save her from falling into English hands. But the gunpowder exploded before her soldiers and sailors had had time to leave.

Raleigh wrote an account of it: "Tumbling into the sea came heaps of soldiers, as thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack - some drowned, some sticking in the mud... many, half-burnt, leaped into the water; others hung by ropes' ends to the ship's side, under water even to the lips... and withal so huge a fire and such tearing of the ordnance in the great Felipe, as, if any man had a desire to see hell itself, it was there most vividly figured."

The Earl of Essex with a body of 800 men landed about a league from Cadiz, and he and Lord Howard met in the market-place.

The city had surrendered, and promised 600,000 ducats as ransom for the inhabitants. Lord Howard wrote with pride to the Queen's Council: "No aged or cold blood touched, no woman defiled; but all the ladies, nuns, and children, with great care embarked and sent to St. Mary's Port with all their apparel and rich things about them."

Even Philip II. was forced to admit that the world had never seen more chivalrous humanity among victors, and Queen Elizabeth in her letter of thanks to Howard and Essex, wrote: "You have made me famous, dreadful, and renowned; not more for your victory than for your courage; nor more for either than for such plentiful liquor of mercy, which may well match the better of the two."

On the 23rd of October in the following year, 1597, the Lord High Admiral was created Earl of Nottingham for saving his country twice from invasion.

In 1599 he was made Lieutenant-General of all England; in 1601 he was instrumental in crushing the insurrection of Essex. He attended the death-bed of his Queen, being the first cousin of Queen Anne Boleyn; Howard had also married a Carey, the grand-daughter of the Queen's aunt, Mary Boleyn, sister of Queen Anne. He was at this time in great affliction for the death of this lady, and had retired from the Court to grieve in solitude; for the Queen, like her father, hated the sight of mourning. But now she had sent for her faithful Lord Admiral, and he came and knelt by her cushions and fed her with broth with a spoon, and begged her to go to bed, yet she still refused. At last she bade all go away but Howard; then in piteous accents she murmured, "My lord, I am tied by a chain of iron about my neck;" but he knew not if she spoke this in frenzy. We will end this account of the Lord High Admiral by a gayer scene.

It was the year 1603; James I. and Queen Anne of Denmark were spending November at Winchester Palace. They played games from twilight till supper-time; they danced, and the Queen noticed that the old admiral, now over sixty-seven, seemed mighty fond of Lady Margaret Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Murray, a blooming girl of nineteen. Anne told the King, and his Majesty at once made himself very busy in merrily promoting the marriage of the old veteran with his pretty cousin. They were soon married, and, before he died, the Earl of Nottingham had the pleasure of seeing two more children, one of whom succeeded his half-brother in the earldom. His remaining years were spent at Haling House in Surrey, in honourable ease and retirement; he died in his eighty-eighth year, loved and respected by all who knew him. "He was a nobleman," says Camden, "whose courage no danger could daunt, whose fidelity no temptation could corrupt."