Free The Spanish Armada by Robert Hutchinson Page B

rather than from the agonising gout that frequently afflicted him.
    Parma, in his twenty-eight-page plan delivered that June, envisaged a thirty-thousand-strong force plus five hundred cavalry transported in flat-bottomed barges launching a surprise attack on
the Kent coast between Dover and Margate, before assaulting London, 67 miles (107 km) inland. The crossing, the general declared confidently, would probably take around ten or twelve hours –
or less, with a following wind. Naval protection was only necessary if Elizabeth’s government had learned of the invasion plans beforehand, but either way, Spanish ships could lure the
English fleet away from the Straits of Dover. Sceptical that surprise could be achieved, Philip scrawled ‘Hardly possible!’ alongside this requirement in Parma’s plan.
    Other strategies were submitted to the Escorial Palace. Bernardino de Escalante, who was a member of the entourage accompanying Philip to England for his marriage to Mary I in 1554, had fought
as a soldier in the Netherlands in 1555–8 before becoming a priest two decades later. In June 1586, he drew up a campaign map, urging a diversionary attack on Waterford in southern Ireland by
thirty-two thousand men to decoy Elizabeth’s fleet from the English Channel, so allowing a landing in Kent by Spanish troops from Flanders. The invaders could then mount a swift and decisive
seizure of London, which was only defended by the ‘
E Greet Tuura
’, the great Tower of London. 11 The ill-trained English
militias would in any case melt away before the onslaught of Parma’s battle-hardened veterans.
    One of Philip’s advisers, Don Juan de Zúñiga, charged with coordinating the now weighty range of invasion plans, was impressed by the priest’s strategy, appending only
the sensible requirement for reinforcements and supplies to be delivered as soon as the queen’s navy had been neutralised. This ‘Enterprise of England’, he suggested, should be
launched in August or September 1587.
    However, some disquieting uncertainties remained about the consequences of a successful landing. Once London had been captured,Zúñiga urged that Parma should
set up an interim government, pending the coronation of a new Catholic monarch – why not Mary Queen of Scots? – who should then marry a reliable and steadfast Catholic prince, perhaps
even Parma himself. If stout English resistance prevented the subjugation of the entire nation, important concessions could be wrung from the rump Tudor state: freedom of worship for English
Catholics; the surrender of English garrisons in the Low Countries (plus repatriation of English forces), and Spanish troops to continue to occupy the conquered regions until payment of hefty war
reparations to Madrid. 12
    While the precise strategy was being worked out, early military preparations were put in hand.
    Intelligence reaching Walsingham in London had dried up following Philip’s seizure of English and Dutch ships in Spanish ports in retaliation for Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch
rebels. The earliest intimation of the Armada threat came via a north German ship that docked in Plymouth from Lisbon in the first week of January 1585. Her master suggested that ‘the King of
Spain had taken up all the masts for shipping, both great and small, so there is likely [to be] war[s]’. 13 A message to the Privy Council from
the English merchant William Melsam on 4 February 1586 reported gossip that ‘immense quantities of grain, wine and military stores’ were being collected by Philip, who was also
increasing the size of his fleet and mobilising ‘land forces from various parts’. Melsam added:
    They [are] saying . . . that the Pope does send fifty-thousand men out of his diocese which shall come with twelve galleasses and other shipping.
    More, the King of Spain prepares [an]other fifty-thousand men [for] which he has taken up many soldiers in the country, as the poor people say . . .
    They