How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (42 page)

Then the bloodbath began. It is not clear how many iconoclasts Alba rounded up, if any, for his wrath was directed against treason far more than heresy. He defined treason as ever having favored any degree of local sovereignty. Hence no one was safe, not even solidly Catholic nobility—a number of whom were beheaded.
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The main effect of Alba’s brutality was to drive the upper classes into opposition, including William of Orange, who went on to lead the Dutch fight for independence.

Fighting Dutchmen

The rebellious Dutch launched a fearsome opposition from the sea. The “Sea Beggars” (also known as
Gueux
) were formed in 1568 by Hendrik, Count of Brederode, and a number of Protestant nobles intent on an independent Netherlands. They were ridiculed as beggars when they had petitioned the governor-general of the Netherlands for religious toleration; when their petition was denied, they took up the name as a badge of honor. They soon assembled a fleet of very fast, small, shallow-draft fighting ships able to ply the complex waters off the Dutch and Flemish coasts, almost with impunity. Their raids caused Alba to station large garrisons at major ports, including Antwerp, where he also had built a very large fortress. But the Spanish troops, though providing some protection for dockyard areas, were useless against attacks on shipping. The Sea Beggars soon had imposed an effective blockade of Antwerp and other southern Netherlands ports. An exodus of import and export firms began.

In 1572 Alba imposed a new and onerous tax, which prompted the Sea Beggars not only to raid ports but also to take and hold them. Brill was the first, but within weeks other ports were taken. This was, of course, war. Alba proceeded via a series of sieges, taking Haarlem in 1573. Later in the year Alba was replaced by Don Luis de Requeséns, who went north with instructions from Philip II to attempt a negotiated settlement. The talks dragged on and on. Often enough the participants found a basis for agreement, but each time Philip II rejected their efforts on the grounds that there could be no toleration of Protestants.

Meanwhile, like his father before him, Philip neglected to pay his troops. In November the imperial army mutinied, and, after sacking several minor towns, a horde of troops arrived at Antwerp, at that time still a loyal outpost of the empire. What followed became known as the Spanish Fury. Thousands died, seldom without great suffering. Jervis Wegg recounted: “The Spaniards hanged men up by their legs and arms and women by their hair; they flogged people and burnt the soles of their feet to extort the hiding place of their wealth.”
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Young women were dragged screaming to the newly built fortress. No one was safe—not the poor, who often were killed because they had no money to give, and not even the clergy, who were forced (even tortured) to reveal where their valuables, including altar chalices and plates, were hidden.
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The factor of the Fugger Company, then the largest German financial firm, estimated that the Antwerp merchant community lost at least two million crowns in gold and silver coins.

Once the troops departed, Antwerp switched sides, joining the Protestant Union of Utrecht, thus becoming the major center of resistance in the southern Netherlands. Now rather than being blockaded by the Sea Beggars, Antwerp’s shipping enjoyed their protection. Still, the city’s commercial life had been severely curtailed.

In 1578 Don Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, replaced Requeséns as governor-general of the Netherlands. Parma, a distinguished general, resumed the campaign to crush the Dutch Revolt. He launched several unsuccessful attacks on Antwerp before laying siege to the city in 1584. A year later it fell, and Antwerp was back in Spanish hands to stay. But it no longer was much of a prize. Once again it was cut off from the sea by blockade. And its population was greatly reduced by the flight of Protestants, who took their commerce with them. Antwerp never recovered its financial glory.

Most of those who fled Antwerp took their capitalist enterprises north to Amsterdam. Economic historians date the boom in Amsterdam as beginning in 1585, the very year Antwerp fell to the Duke of Parma. In Amsterdam there was freedom and toleration, taxes required citizen approval, and access to the Rhine and the Meuse allowed the Dutch to dominate the rich and very active Baltic trade. Foreign merchants and traders who once clustered in Antwerp now clustered in Amsterdam—especially the English.

If the Netherlands had once been reclaimed from the Atlantic, now the ocean rescued the Dutch by providing superb defensive water barriers. Fighting at home and for their homes, using arms of their own manufacture, funded by a booming commercial economy, having unimpeded access to the sea and a stalwart English ally, the Dutch could afford to fight on and on and then some more. To oppose them, the Spanish Empire depended on expensive mercenary troops, using arms of foreign manufacture, mainly supplied from abroad. Lacking control of the sea, the Spanish had to bring everything overland, following the Spanish Road just as had Alba’s battalions. The costs of all this were staggering.

The Queen and Her Pirates Prevail

As the 1580s began, things were not going well for Philip II. The Dutch had not been dislodged despite repeated onslaughts. Then, in 1585,
Queen Elizabeth sent her small but effective army, made up of 6,350 infantry and 1,000 cavalry commanded by the Earl of Leicester, to the Netherlands in support of the Dutch cause. (She had long permitted the Sea Beggars to use English ports.)
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Elizabeth also bought shares in stock companies organized to finance raids on Spanish shipping—especially on the treasure ships from the Orient and the Americas. To make things worse, the French continued to connive against Spain, always ready to attack from the rear.

Something had to be done. Putting first things first, Philip II and his advisers decided to remove England from the equation. They would transport their invincible battalions from the Netherlands across the English Channel, overrun the irregular forces Elizabeth could muster against them, replace her with a Catholic monarch, and that would be that.

It was a wonderful design. It might well have succeeded had England also been ruled by a despot—but the plan was doomed against a free nation “of shopkeepers,” where technology blossomed, enterprise was cultivated, and the queen was a devoted capitalist and pirate.

In 1587 the Spanish began to assemble the great fleet needed for the invasion of England. The plan was to sail north into the English Channel and inflict such damage to the English ships that the Armada could then protect a vast flotilla of barges and small ships conveying the Duke of Parma’s veterans from the Netherlands to the English coast. Special arrangements were well in hand for barges capable of carrying cavalry units with their horses, ready to ride through the surf and attack all comers. The main assembly ports for the Armada were to be Cádiz (just west of the Strait of Gibraltar) and Lisbon.

Drake’s Raid

Fully aware of Spanish intentions, the English decided to make a disruptive raid, a plan that bore “all the signs of Elizabeth’s personal intervention,” observed Garrett Mattingly in his history of the Armada.
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The English force was commanded by Sir Francis Drake, who had been knighted by Elizabeth in 1581. Although he was one of Elizabeth’s favorites, Drake was not an officer in the Royal Navy. In keeping with the English affinity for free enterprise, private citizens could command the queen’s ships, and English battle fleets often were a mixture of both royal and privately owned ships.

Drake planned to strike against both Cádiz and Lisbon, hoping to
find their harbors jammed with ships not yet ready to fight. The makeup of his fleet reveals much about a truly “capitalist” approach to warfare and about the unique nature of the English merchant fleet. Drake began with four powerful ships of his own. Then Elizabeth put four of her best royal galleons under Drake’s command and authorized him to complete his fleet by recruiting as many merchant ships as London merchants would agree to furnish.

Of what use could merchant ships be to a battle fleet? None, if they were the wide, deep, lightly gunned, cumbersome ships that continental merchants used. But English merchants built fighting ships and overcame the commercial deficiencies of these vessels by scorning bulky cargoes in favor of light, valuable goods. Built to take their place in the line of battle, these ships had narrow bottoms for speed, and their hulls spread to their greatest width above the water in order to provide for gun decks. As the historian Violet Barbour pointed out, the way to distinguish a royal man-of-war from a large English merchant ship was not on the basis of shape, number of gun ports, or rigging but only “by the decoration lavished upon her,” for the queen’s ships had a great deal of scrollwork and carving and impressive figureheads.
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Recognizing the military value of merchant ships, Drake convinced the Levant Company to provide him with nine, plus a number of frigates and pinnaces for scouting, communication, and inshore service. The merchants’ motives were not purely patriotic. Drake’s fleet was in fact commissioned as a stock company, and participants (including the queen) were to receive shares in all prizes and loot the expedition acquired. As Mattingly noted, the voyage had “some of the aspects of a private commercial venture.”
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Upon arriving at Cádiz on April 29, 1587, Drake saw everything go as he had hoped. The harbor was crowded. The Spanish ships were mostly without crews, and many lacked guns and sails. Drake sailed in, sank some thirty ships, and sailed out again with a large number of prize vessels, which he dispatched for England. Drake then sailed for Portugal’s Cape Saint Vincent, where he positioned his fleet to harass the coastal trade and intercept squadrons trying to reach Lisbon (which he had judged as too strong to attack once surprise was lost). Again he wreaked havoc on the Spanish, taking many prizes and supplies.
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These blows were sufficient to cause the Spanish to postpone the sailing date for their immense Armada until the next year. Drake kept it all in perspective,
writing to Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, “Prepare in England strongly and most by sea!”
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The Armada Sinks

When the Armada did sail the following year, several extreme flaws in the Spanish plan were revealed. The English fleet could not in fact be defeated because it refused to fight in the traditional manner. Rather than closing for deck-to-deck infantry battles, the nimble English vessels stood off and relied on powerful broadsides from cannons, which outranged the Spanish guns. The Spanish ships were stuffed with troops eager to put the English sailors to the sword, but their cannons lacked range, weight, and number and also began to run short of powder and shot. Fighting so close to home that crowds on the shore could see some of the battle, the English were constantly resupplied with powder and shot carried out on lighters.

Even so, the Armada did well enough as it battled its way up the English Channel that it remained mostly intact and was still a potent naval force as it passed the coast of Flanders, where the Duke of Parma awaited. Now a second major tactical flaw was revealed. The Armada was capable of sheltering the barge flotilla, and indeed, bringing the flotilla out from shore might have forced the English to close in for deck-to-deck fighting. So why didn’t Parma’s veterans come out? Because the Dutch Sea Beggars were blockading Flanders, and their ships could sail in the shallow coastal waters, out of reach of the Armada. Had the barges pushed out, then, the sea soon would have been full of drowning Spanish soldiers and riderless cavalry horses.

So the Spanish troops sat on the beach and the Armada continued north, pounded all the way by the longer-range English guns. Eventually, having passed to the north of Scotland, the Armada decided to swing west to circle around Ireland and hence back to Lisbon. Now came terrible storms, and dozens of Spanish ships were wrecked along the Irish coast; for many weeks bodies kept washing up on Irish beaches.

That it was storms that had done the worst damage to the Armada revealed much about the two navies. English naval construction was so superb and their seamen so adept that, as the historian G. J. Marcus pointed out, during Elizabeth’s entire forty-five-year reign “not a single English warship was lost through shipwreck; while over the same term of years, entire squadrons of Spaniards were overwhelmed by the sea.”
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Spanish Realities

When Philip II died in 1598 it was already obvious that the Spanish Empire was in decline. It would be another century before the empire no longer played a significant role in European affairs, but Spain’s neighbors were already exploiting its fading power. The British and the Dutch ruled the seas and were not only colonizing North America (as were the French) but also intruding into Spanish’s colonies in the Caribbean. The English even welcomed and taxed pirates (real ones) in their new Caribbean ports. Worse yet, attacks on Spanish treasure ships continued, with English battle fleets now involved. Thus, in 1592, a six-ship English squadron, lying in wait just off the Azores, intercepted the enormous carrack
Madre de Deus
(Mother of God) and seized the largest treasure ever. She was the biggest ship the English had ever seen: as Harvard scholar David S. Landes recorded, the
Madre de Deus
was “165 feet long, 47 feet of beam, 1,600 tons, three times the size of the biggest ship in England; seven decks, thirty-two guns plus other arms.”
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As for treasure, “chests bulging with jewels and pearls, gold and silver coins … 425 tons of pepper, 45 tons of cloves, 35 tons of cinnamon,” and much else. The total value was estimated at £500,000, and “a large share of this catch was owed to the queen.”
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The loss of this treasure was a terrible blow to the Spanish economy.