Chapter 3 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
IN CALAIS ROADS
War was not so immediate as Gervase had supposed. Indeed, there were good reasons why neither Spain nor England should desire irrevocably to engage in it.
King Philip, however urged by the Pope to do his duty as the secular arm of the Faith and dethrone his excommunicated sister-in-law, was, after all, anything but a fool and not unreasonably self-seeking. He must therefore pause to ask himself what profit would accrue to himself from such an enterprise. God and Time and he—King Philip liked to contemplate that conjunction—made up a slow-moving trinity. It was not as if there were any prospect of making England a Spanish province like the Netherlands. The only temporal result would be to place Mary Stuart upon the English throne, and the political consequences of this would be to strengthen the French influence which Mary Stuart represented by virtue of her French alliances. The only way to avoid this and to profit Spain would be for Philip to marry Mary and share her English throne. But Philip had no wish to do anything of the kind. He may have observed that the lady's husbands were not lucky. He did not therefore see why Spanish blood and Spanish gold should be poured out for the profit of France. From the temporal point of view, the business was much more the concern of the French king than it was Philip's. There remained the spiritual point of view: the importance of restoring the unadulterated Catholic faith to England and bringing her spiritually once more under the subjection of Rome. Now this was Rome's business, and if the Pope wanted Philip to do Rome's business for him, it was fitting that the Pope should bear the expenses of the enterprise. But when Philip laid this reasonable argument before the Pope, His Holiness—the great Sixtus V—fell into such a rage that he flung his dinner plates about the room.
That was the situation in Spain through the Autumn and winter of 1586.
In England nothing could be further from the intention or wish than to declare war. Spain was, after all, the mightiest empire of the day. Her possessions were vast, her wealth fabulous, her strength colossal. The inexhaustible riches of the Indies were at her command, the finest troops in the world served under her banners. Clearly this was not an empire to be challenged. But since danger threatened from it, preparations must be made to meet that danger, if only in obedience to the old Roman maxim that who desires peace should prepare for war.
Hence those naval activities to which Gervase Crosby was summoned; the ship-building, the drilling, the storing of arms, the manufacture of gunpowder, and all the rest. The conflicting orders from Court reflected the uncertainty of the outlook. On Monday came instructions to mobilise the fleet, on Wednesday to disband it, on Saturday to mobilise it again, and so on interminably. But the adventurers, the privateers, took no heed of these ever-fluctuating orders. They went steadily ahead with their preparations. It may have been in the mind of Sir Francis that if war did not come there would still be work for his hands in plucking some more feathers from Spain's rich Indian plumage. He was, there can be no doubt of it, a pirate at heart. Let England not reproach him with it, but be thankful.
In the early part of the year, the whole aspect of the situation was changed by the execution of the. Queen of Scots. It was deemed that her removal, so long advocated by far-sighted statesmen, by putting an end to plots and intrigues which aimed at enthroning her, and the Catholic religion with her, in England, must remove the menace of a war which was to be waged for this very purpose.
The effect, however, was the exact opposite. King Philip took the view that if he were now to exert himself as the secular arm of the Church, the fruits of his endeavours would no longer fall into the lap of France. There being no longer a Queen of Scots to be placed upon the throne of England, King Philip might occupy it himself, converting England into a Spanish province so soon as he should have done his duty by executing the bull of excommunication and deposition which had been launched against his heretical sister-in-law. Now that a direct profit was perceived from the affair, the arming for a crusade against heretical pravity went forward amain; the brothers of St. Dominic were sent up and down the land to preach the sanctity of the cause; Catholic adventurers from every country flocked in to offer their swords. The hounds of God were straining at the leash. At last King Philip was to loose them at the throat of heretical England.
It occurred to Sir Francis Drake that commonsense demanded that something should be done to mar these preparations. To sit back in patience while your avowed enemy arms himself at all points to destroy you is the attitude of the insane.
So Sir Francis went off to London and the Queen. His proposals made her nervous. She was still negotiating a treaty of peace with King Philip through the Spanish ambassador. King Philip, she was assured, wanted peace, on the strong advice of the Prince of Parma, who was finding more than enough to do in the Netherlands.
"So do we want peace, Madam," the blunt Sir Francis answered. "I might do something to ensure it." She questioned him as to his intentions. He had none. He didn't know what he should do until he got there—he did not quite know where—and saw for himself what might be possible. In 'any treaty of peace she would get the best terms by showing her strength, and so removing all suspicion that she treated because of weakness.
"We'll put on a brag, your grace," the sailor laughed.
He was a difficult man to resist when his long, steady grey eyes were upon you. A sturdy fellow of middle height, now in his fortieth year, too powerfully built for grace, but of an engaging countenance with his crisp brown hair and the pointed beard which dissembled the inflexibility of his mouth. The Queen yielded, if reluctantly.
Because he perceived the reluctance, he lost no time in fitting out, and he was away in the Buonaventura with a fleet of thirty sail at his heels on a fine April morning, not more than a few hours before the arrival of a courier to detain him. Perhaps he had word that these countermandings were on the way.
Six days later he was in Cadiz Roads discovering for himself what there was to be done, and seeing it clearly there before him in the shipping that crowded the harbour. Here lay the elements of that great expedition against England: the transports, the provision vessels, even some of the mighty ships of war that were now fitting.
What was to be done was as clear to him as how to do it. He went in on a flood tide. He took them unawares. Such an act as this was the last audacity Spain could have expected even from one so audacious and endemonized as El Draque. They ran the gauntlet of the hail of shot from the Spanish batteries, sank the guardship with a broadside, scattered a fleet of galleys that ventured momentarily to oppose them, and swooped down upon their prey.
Twelve days they stayed in Cadiz harbour, during which at his leisure Drake stripped the ships of all that could be useful to him, then set them on fire and so destroyed a million ducats' worth of shipping. When he sailed out again, having in his own words thus singed the beard of the King of Spain, he did so in the assurance that the Armada would not sail that year. Not that year would the troops of the Prince of Parma be landed on English soil.
He was correct enough in his estimate, for it was not until May of the year following that the Invincible Armada of a hundred and thirty vessels sailed out of the Tagus in the wake of the San Martin, the stately flagship of the Admiral, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. The fleet sailed in a state of grace. Every man of the thirty-thousand distributed through the ships had confessed himself, received absolution of his sins, and had communicated. Every ship had been especially blessed by the Primate of Spain; every mainmast-head carried a crucifix; on the great banner flown by the Admiral, the red and gold standard of Spain, the figures of the Virgin and her Son had been embroidered and the motto "Exsurge Deus et vindica causam tuam"; there was great provision for the care of the souls of those crusaders—greater than the provision for the care of their bodies; for whilst the ships carried two hundred priests they carried fewer than a hundred surgeons. Majestically this mighty fleet, as formidable in spiritual as in temporal armament, advanced on the blue water.
There were delays and difficulties; enough of them to have suggested that the Deity was none so eager to vindicate His cause at the bidding of Spain or through the arm of Spain.
But at last, at the end of July, the invincible fleet was in the Channel and the season of English waiting was at an end. It had not been wasted so far as Drake and the privateers were concerned. Most of them had been at their stations ever since the return from Cadiz, and they had found abundant work for their hands.
They slipped out of Plymouth without any kind of ostentation, and some fifty of them, low-hulled ships, gave the towering Spaniards an exhibition of close-hauled sailing which made them rub their eyes. Reaching easily to windward, their low hulls offering comparatively little target, they crossed the Spanish rear, and whilst themselves out of range of the Spanish cannon, they poured from their own more powerful guns broadside after broadside with deadly effect into those great floating castles. The Spanish ships suffered the greater mortality from being overcrowded; this because they counted upon time-honoured boarding tactics. But the English, outsailing them, and refusing to grapple or be grappled, showed them a new and disconcerting method of sea-fighting. In vain the Spaniards cursed them for cowardly dogs who would not come to hand-grips. The English answered them with broadsides and slipped away through the water to go about and empty into them the guns on the other quarter.
To Medina-Sidonia this was all very exasperating in its difference from all that he had expected. The good Duke was not a sailor, nor indeed a fighting man of any kind. He had pleaded his incompetence when the King had placed this responsibility upon his shoulders. He had been abominably sea-sick when first they put to sea, and now he and the mightiest fleet the waters of the world had ever seen were being chased up the Channel like a herd of bullocks before a pack of wolves. The Andalusian flagship, with her commander Don Pedro Valdez, the ablest, as he was the most gallant admiral in that fleet, had come to grief and had been constrained to surrender; other vessels had suffered dreadfully from the damnable tactics of these endemonized heretics before the close of the first day of action, which was Sunday.
On Monday both fleets were becalmed, and the Spaniards licked their wounds. On Tuesday the wind had veered and the Spaniards had the weather gauge. Now was their chance to sail the English down and grapple them. At last, in the wind He sent them from the East, God lent a hand to the vindication of His cause. But the devil, it became clear to them, fought on the side of the English. Sunday's history was repeated, in spite of the wind from the east. English broadsides continued to crash through Spanish, bulwarks from ships that were either out of range or else so low in the hull that they offered no target at all, and by vespers the noble San Martin was leaking like a sieve through her fractured timbers, six-feet of solid oak though they were.
On Wednesday there was another pause. On Thursday a further hammering, and on Friday, at last, the Duke saw nothing for it but to endeavour to establish communications with the Prince of Parma, from whom he would require supplies and what other assistance the Prince could bring him. With this intent he brought his battered fleet to anchor on Saturday in Calais Roads, neutral waters into which the English would not dare to follow him.
But that the English did not mean to lose sight of him he understood when he perceived them at anchor a couple of miles astern.
The Spaniards were licking their wounds again; cleaning up the ships, effecting repairs where possible, t ending the wounded, putting the dead overboard.
The English, half a league away, were considering the position. In the main cabin of the Ark Royal, the flagship of the Lord Admiral, Howard of Effingham, his lordship sat in council with the principal officers of the fleet. They were under no delusion as to the Spaniard's reason for anchoring in Calais Roads, or the danger to themselves and to England in allowing him to remain there. The Armada after all was not yet sensibly impaired. She had lost but three ships, and could easily spare them. What she could spare less easily was the confidence which had been shaken by those first knocks exchanged, or indeed the lives that had been lost; but men could be replaced by Parma; courage and confidence could be restored by rest; damages could be repaired; the ships could be revictualled, and Parma could renew also their ammunition, which must be running low. Here was one set of reasons why the Duke of Medina-Sidonia could not be left in peace where he now lay. Another was in the fact that the English supplies were becoming exhausted, and they could not wait here indefinitely for the Spaniards to come out of neutral waters. Something must be done.
Drake was for burning them out. A strong flood tide was due that night setting towards the Spanish anchorage. This could be used to float a fleet of fire-ships down upon them. Seymour, Sir John Hawkins, Frobisher and the Lord Admiral himself were heartily in accord. But it would be blindfolded work unless first by daylight they took some more accurate observation of the Spanish position than was possible at their present distance. Therein lay the difficulty. Hawkins offered a suggestion. The Lord Admiral weighed it, and slowly shook his head.
"Too desperate a chance," said he. "The odds are a hundred to one, a thousand to one against his return."
"It depends upon whom you send," said Drake. "Odds of that kind are to be reduced by skill and courage."
But Howard would not yet hear of it. They discussed other means, and dismissed them one by one, returning at last to that first suggestion.
"I think it's that or nothing," Hawkins submitted. "Either that or we go to work blindfolded."
"We may have to go to work blindfolded after that," Lord Howard reminded him, "and we shall have sacrificed some gallant lives."
But Drake had an answer to this. "Every man of us makes a gamble of his life. We should not be here else, or being here we should never engage in action. I am of Sir John's opinion."
Lord Howard's fine eyes considered him. "Do you know of a man for such an enterprise?"
"I have him under my hand here. He came aboard with me, and is waiting now on deck. A strong lad of his hands, with brains to act quickly in an emergency. He hasn't yet learnt to be afraid of anything, and he can handle a boat with any man. I first proved his mettle at San Domingo. He's been with me ever since."
"Almost too good a man to lose in this affair," Lord Howard deprecated.
"Nay. He's the sort of man that won't be lost. I'll send for him if your lordship says so, and we'll put the matter to him."
And that is how Mr. Crosby comes into this famous council of war and, as it were, into history. His youth, his inches and his gallant bearing when he presented himself won him the sympathy of those hard-bitten seamen. His seemed too fair a life to offer up on the ruthless altar of Bellona. But when Drake had expounded to him the task ahead, the laugh with which he took it for a jest, an escapade, won him the love of every man present, and most of all of Drake because the lad so nobly justified his captain's boast of him. Aglow with eagerness, young Crosby listened to a recapitulation of what was required and how he was to obtain it. Himself he suggested that as the afternoon was waning, no time should be lost. He had best start at once.
Lord Howard shook him by the hand at parting. The Admiral's lips smiled, but his eyes were wistful as they surveyed this smiling audacious lad whom he might never see again. He strove for a moment to say something.
"When you return," he said, and keen ears might have noted that he stressed the "when" as men do when a word is changed between thought and utterance—"When you return, sir, I shall be glad if you will seek me."
Gervase bowed to the company, flashed them a smile, and was gone, the sturdy Sir Francis labouring after him up the companion-ladder. They went back to Drake's ship the Revenge. The boatswain piped all hands on deck. Sir Francis told them what was needed; a dozen volunteers to go with Mr. Crosby and ascertain the exact position of the Spanish ships. There was not a man would have refused to follow Gervase, for many of them had followed him before and knew him for a leader who never flinched.
That afternoon the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, moodily pacing the poop of the San Martin with a group of officers, beheld to his amazement a sailing pinnace detach herself from the English lines to bear down upon the Spanish anchorage. He and those with him stood at gaze. So did others on the Spanish ships, in the utter inactivity of men who can but observe the unfolding of a marvel they do not understand. Straight towards them came the little craft, rippling through the light waves, straight for the Spanish flagship.
It must be, opined the Duke, that she bore him a message from the English. Perhaps his guns had mauled them more than he suspected. Perhaps the loss of life had been such that they would be willing to make terms. Fatuous imaginings possible only to a landlubber. Politely his mistake was pointed out to him, also that this pinnace bore no flag of truce, as she must have done if she sought a parley. Whilst they were still conjecturing, she was under their counter.
Gervase Crosby stood in the stern-sheets, himself handling the tiller. With him sat a youth with a writing-tablet and a pen. In the bows a gun had been mounted and a gunner stood with lighted match beside it. The little craft sped on, circled the San Martin completely, and as she circled fired a shot at her. Drake would have described this as putting on a brag. The object of that piece of swagger was to deceive the Spaniards as to the real purpose of the visit. Meanwhile Gervase's eyes were measuring the distance from the shore, and taking in the position of the other ships relatively to the flagship, and his details were rapidly being written down by the improvised secretary.
It was done, and he was already leaving the Spaniards astern before one of their officers recovered from his surprise at this impudence to ask himself if something else did not lie behind it. Whether impudence or not—something was due here. He commanded it, and a gun executed the command. But, trained too hastily, its shot, which could easily have sunk the frail boat, tore harmlessly through her mainsail. Other ships roused themselves, and there was a cannonade. But it was loosed too late by at least five minutes. The pinnace was already beyond the short range of the Spanish guns.
Drake was in the waist of the Revenge awaiting him when Gervase climbed aboard.
"I ask myself," said Sir Francis, "what particular kind of luck protects you. By all the laws of war and of chance and of common sense you should have been sunk before ever you got within a cable's length of them. What's this?"
Gervase had proffered the sheet of notes which he had dictated.
"Lord!" he said. "You bring the methods of the counting-house with you. Come away to the Admiral."
That night eight vessels thickly coated with pitch drifted down in the dark upon the tide, controlled by long sweeps, in the wake of their leader, which was steered by Gervase Crosby. This, a trivial task from the point of view of danger, compared with his earlier one, he had almost insisted upon undertaking as being the logical corollary to his inspection of the positions. At comparatively close quarters, slow matches were lighted aboard each vessel. The crews slipped silently overboard to the waiting pinnace, and the ships were left to drift down the short remainder of the way upon the Spaniards.
When as they got amongst them they suddenly broke into flame one after the other, they scattered panic through the invincible fleet. These English it seemed had every resource and artifice of hell at their command. It was conceived, reasonably enough, that the fire-ships were full of gunpowder—as indeed they would have been if the English had possessed powder to spare—and knowing the fearful havoc they would work upon exploding, the Spaniards, without waiting to weigh anchor, cut their cables and stood out to sea.
At dawn, Medina-Sidonia found the English bearing resolutely down upon him, and on that day was fought the most terrific action that the seas had ever known. When evening fell the power of the Armada was definitely broken. Thereafter, in the days that followed, it but remained to drive into the high latitude of the North Sea where they could do no harm, the seventy surviving ships of the hundred and thirty that had sailed so proudly from the Tagus as the instrument by which God should vindicate His cause.
Medina-Sidonia asked nothing better than to be allowed to go. He had endured all the sea-fighting to which his stomach was equal, and was glad enough to drive before the wind away from any further risk of action. Like sheep-dogs herding a flock, the English ships hung on their heels until they were past the Forth; then left them to the winds and the God in whose name they had sailed forth on their crusade.