If the Armada Had Landed: A Reappraisal of
England’s Defences in 1588
NEIL
Original
IF
THE
YOUNGER
Articles
ARMADA
HAD
LANDED
Blackwell
Oxford,
©
1468-229X
0018-2648
History
HIST
XXX
2008
The
UK
Publishing
HistoricalLtd
Association
and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
NEIL YOUNGER
University of Birmingham
Abstract
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 stands as one of the greatest triumphs of
Elizabeth I’s reign, but, the success of the navy notwithstanding, received wisdom
presents the land defences as woefully inadequate. This article shows that the existing
picture of the English preparations is flawed in several ways and that they were better
organized, more efficient and more willing than has been recognized. The privy council
was called upon to deploy limited forces to defend a long coastline against an unpredictable attacker, and the evidence shows that they contrived to maximize the effectiveness
of the available resources whilst balancing the calls of military practicality, financial
necessity and political constraints. An assessment is also made of the response from
the counties, using the mobilization as a test case of the structures put in place by the
Elizabethan regime to deal with such an emergency.
I
n an article of 1976, Geoffrey Parker offered a bleak assessment of
England’s preparedness to face a Spanish invasion in 1588. In the
face of the finest army in Europe, Elizabeth I’s preparations were
hopelessly inadequate. Preparations were ‘desperately behind-hand all
over’. The strategy was poor, the command structure weak, the English
officers divided amongst themselves on the strategy to be pursued.
‘The troops at Dover (most of them raw recruits) began to desert in
considerable numbers when the Armada came in sight off Calais. In any
case, there were only 4,000 men in all, a ludicrously inadequate force.’
The Duke of Parma’s invading army would have been facing ‘untrained
troops without clear orders, backed up by only a handful of inadequately
fortified towns’. On top of all this, the defensive forces were concentrated
in Essex, and not the real intended target, Kent. Parker’s account, developed
over several works, has perhaps been the most influential treatment of
I would like to record my gratitude to Richard Cust, Simon Adams and this journal’s anonymous
reader for their comments on this article. I must also acknowledge the support I have received from
the AHRC, formerly the AHRB.
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
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the subject, leaving the enduring impression that English forces were ‘in
the wrong place’.1
More recent studies have certainly been more favourable to the English
preparations, but there is still no entirely satisfactory account of the
mobilization. Existing historiography on the land forces in 1588 contains
a number of significant errors and misapprehensions with regard both to
the overall picture of the privy council’s planning against invasion and to
the events themselves.2 This article aims to provide a new overview of the
defence, and to assess it in the context of Elizabethan military policy.
In the light of recent developments in the historiography of the English
state, it also provides a test case of issues around the power of the central
state, its organizational and strategic capabilities, and the response of
the counties.3 These were in large part efficient, capable and willing, and
overall, the English preparations were more impressive than is often
thought. Whether they would have been sufficient to repel the Spanish
remains, however, a moot point.
Before looking at the events of July and August 1588 in detail, some
background must be given on the development of the English militia
system in the preceding years, since this sets the parameters within which
the council operated during the crisis. As far as land defences go, the
central issue is that of what troops would be available to defend against
an invasion. The Elizabethan state possessed no standing army, aside
from those troops on active service in the Netherlands or in permanent
garrisons in Ireland and Berwick. These were not only few in number,
but also difficult to extract from their duties for home defence. In practice,
the government had to depend largely on the county militias. It was
recognized from early in the reign that the existing militia, as codified
by the Marian militia acts of 1558, was unequal to the demands of postmilitary revolution warfare. Soldiers needed to be equipped with more
modern armour and weaponry, particularly the pike and the caliver or
musket, and they needed to be trained to use these weapons effectively.
Thus, from the early 1570s onwards, the government had been attempting
to implement a nationwide scheme of ‘trained bands’, whereby each
county would establish units of specially selected men, organize them
1
Geoffrey Parker, ‘If the Armada had Landed’, History, lxi (1976), 358–68 [hereafter Parker,
‘If the Armada had Landed’]. It should be acknowledged that this article addresses only those
parts of Parker’s article which concern English preparations, and seeks neither to challenge Parker’s
expertise on the Spanish forces, nor to speculate on the possible outcome of an invasion. See also
Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (1988) [hereafter Martin and Parker,
The Spanish Armada], pp. 265 –77; Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998; pbk edn. 2000)
[hereafter Parker, Grand Strategy], pp. 226 –7.
2 The privy council was the monarch’s principal executive body, with members including all of
the leading political figures of the day, notably William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Robert Dudley, earl
of Leicester, and Sir Francis Walsingham. It took overall responsibility for defence planning and
co-ordination.
3 These issues have been explored with regard to the north in Michael J. Braddick, ‘ “Uppon this
instant extraordinarie occasion”. Military Mobilization in Yorkshire before and after the Armada’,
Huntington Library Quarterly, lxi (1998), 429–55.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
under captains and other officers, provide them with modern weapons
and equipment, and periodically train them, in the hope that they might
be of some use in the event of an invasion. Since the trained bands policy
was not only expensive and troublesome, but also unsanctioned by any
statute, it had been broadly resisted in the country, largely with the kind
of quiet inactivity at which the English gentry excelled. Thus, although
the council made major pushes to have the policy implemented in 1573
and again in 1577, it met with very limited success. The council took up
the policy again at the start of 1584, with considerably more energy and
persistence, and pursued it right through to 1588 and beyond. This time,
the response was more impressive: each county at least accepted the
principle of the plan, and made some effort to implement it. Most counties
also used the remainder of the weaponry available to set up bands of
armed (‘furnished’) but untrained men; a second standard, as it were.
A number of factors may be adduced to explain this greater level of
co-operation. Certainly the council’s supervision was closer and more
persistent from 1584, but the danger against which the trained bands
would be defending – a Spanish invasion – was more obviously threatening.4
Another important factor was the reintroduction of the office of lord
lieutenant across the country between 1585 and 1587, which provided a
much more coherent and effective structure for communicating and
enforcing council orders than had the commissioners of musters which
they superseded.
By 1588, the privy council was able to plan its defence against the
expected invasion attempt in the knowledge that it could call upon reasonably well-established companies of men in every county, numbering
from over 7,000 armed men in Kent to just 300 in Flintshire. The limitations of these troops were clear. Only a proportion of them (somewhere
between one-half and two-thirds) were even nominally trained, and it is
certain that the quality of their training would have varied widely, so
they were clearly no match, man-for-man, for the Spanish tercios. Nevertheless, the trained bands were a major improvement on what had gone
before, in that they were at least suitably armed, and placed within a
coherent command structure provided by the lieutenancy and their
captains, mainly local gentry. It should be emphasized that the trained
bands were central to the government’s plans for defence. Although the
nobility and the clergy were called upon to provide troops for defence,
the trained bands far outnumbered these and were in effect the beginning
and end of the available forces. The council’s planning, therefore, largely
revolved around distributing these relatively scarce resources along a
long and vulnerable coast.
4
For an outline of the trained bands programme up to 1588, see Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (1967) [hereafter Boynton, Elizabethan Militia], ch. 4, esp. pp. 91–5;
Neil Younger, ‘War and the Counties: The Elizabethan Lord Lieutenancy, 1585–1603’ (PhD thesis,
University of Birmingham, 2007), pp. 54 –91.
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In addition to the military shortcomings of the militia, there were
other important constraints on the council’s planning. The trained bands
were not units of a national militia, but county militias, which traditionally had no obligation to serve outside their own counties. In a moment
of crisis, they might well be more concerned with defending their own
homes than uniting to face the enemy. This was particularly the case in
the maritime counties, whose role had traditionally been to defend their
own coasts against invasion. Another key consideration in planning the
defensive strategy was financial: the Elizabethan government was not in
a position to be able to keep troops waiting for long periods in case of an
invasion, because they had to be paid, and the money was not available.
In the overall defensive strategy, by far the most important element was
the navy, which had to prevent any landing. No risks could be taken with
its funding, and so any land mobilization had to be kept as brief and
cheap as possible.
The English defence planning against the expected attack was a mixture
of obvious imperatives and frightening uncertainties. The basic plan for
defence against invasion had remained essentially the same throughout
Elizabeth’s reign, traceable as far back as 1559. The county militias in
the coastal counties would respond to an initial amphibious attack,
supporting each other as necessary, whilst the inland counties’ forces
would form a separate army either as a reserve or to defend the queen
and capital.5 The scenario in 1588 was more complex, as the council was
aware that they faced two separate enemy forces, the Armada itself, and
the army of Flanders, able to attack together or, potentially, independently. The council of war held on 27 November 1587 considered it likely
that the Armada would want to seize a major port on the south coast, in
order to regroup and possibly send for aid; Plymouth was thought
most likely, Portland and a number of other ports a possibility. 6 Thus, a
landing attempt might fall on any one of a significant number of places
on the south coast, or even in Wales. Secondly, the main attack from
Flanders had to be considered, and here the case was simpler: Parma’s
army had to take a short route across the Channel, so Kent or Essex was
almost certain to be a target.
This much was straightforward. By mid-July 1588, however, as Simon
Adams has recently identified, the council had become convinced that
the main attack would be made directly on London or the Thames estuary
itself. It is not clear what intelligence lay behind this conclusion, but it is
5 Roger Vella Bonavita, ‘The English Militia, 1558–1580: A Study in the Relations between the
Crown and the Commissioners of Musters’ (MA thesis, University of Manchester, 1972), pp. 11–12;
Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, p. 140; National Archives [hereafter NA] State Papers [hereafter SP]
12/206/2.
6 There are a number of copies of the council of war’s report, which differ somewhat. NA SP
12/209/49, 50. The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson in Six Books, II, ed. M. Oppenheim (Navy
Record Society, xxiii, 1902) [hereafter Monson Tracts], pp. 267–9. Historical Manuscripts Commission
[hereafter HMC] The Manuscripts of the Right Honourable F. J. Savile Foljambe, of Osberton, Notts
[hereafter Foljambe], p. 32. British Library [hereafter BL] Harleian MS 168, fos. 110r–114r.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
crucial in understanding the whole mobilization.7 It required a substantial
rethinking of the plan: on 17 July 1588, members of the privy council
including Lord Hunsdon, Sir Thomas Heneage and Sir John Wolley met
with Sir John Norreys and Sir Thomas Leighton to discuss how to
respond, and the following day, Norreys was sent to view the Thames
and consider its defence.8 With London assumed to be the primary target,
the key point of weakness was evidently the north bank of the Thames.
An enemy force landing in Kent would take some time to reach London:
it would face resistance not only from the Kent militia and whatever
other forces could be gathered, not to mention the fortifications that
existed there, old-fashioned though they were, but crucially from the
barrier of the Thames. This was not the case for Essex: a landing on the
flat north bank of the Thames would allow an extremely rapid attack on
London, raising the spectre of swift and decisive defeat.9 In addition to
the defence of the south coast and an army to defend the queen, therefore,
the defence of Essex became a much higher priority, and by 19 July it
had been decided to place 5,000 foot and 1,000 horse there, as and when
a landing threatened.10 Thus, historical accounts which have seen the
forces in Essex as a late addition to the strategy are clearly accurate, but
it was of central importance, not peripheral, as, for example, John Nolan
has suggested.11
This was, however, only seen as the most likely of several possible
scenarios. It remained unsafe to neglect other possible invasion spots
along the south and east coasts. In order to be able to respond to any or
7 The belief that the attack would be made directly on London itself is revealed in Sir Francis
Walsingham’s letter to the earl of Sussex, governor of Portsmouth, of 24 July 1588, in which he
dismisses the likelihood of an attack on the south coast, writing that ‘any time [sic] these twelve
days [we] have very certainly discovered that their whole plot and design is against the City of London
and [that] they will bend their whole forces that way.’ The letter is printed in ‘The Armada Correspondence in Cotton MSS Otho E VII and E IX’, ed. Simon Adams, in The Naval Miscellany, vi,
ed. M. Duffy (Navy Record Society, 146, 2003) [hereafter ‘Armada Correspondence’], pp. 80 –2;
see also p. 81, n. 2. This scepticism as regards an attack on the south coast and belief that the
attack would be directed on London is evident in other letters: Acts of the Privy Council [hereafter
APC], xvi. 176, 206.
8 T. Wright, Queen Elizabeth and Her Times (2 vols., 1838) [hereafter Wright, Queen Elizabeth],
ii. 378 (Heneage to Leicester, 17 July 1588); BL Harleian MS 6994, fo. 128r. (Walsingham to Burghley,
18 July 1588). The new intelligence appears to have kept Burghley awake on the night of 15–16
July: NA SP 12/212/52 (Burghley to Walsingham, 16 July 1588).
9 Monson wrote: ‘if an enemy land on Essex side, he may march directly to London without let,
impeachment, or other impediment, but by the encounter of an army’, whereas ‘if an enemy land
in Kent he is kept by the river of Thames from coming to London’ ( Monson Tracts, pp. 282–3).
See also Burghley’s words, in his propaganda piece, The Copy of a Letter, the army was ‘betwixt the
Sea and the City’ (Copy of a Letter (1588), p. 21).
10 NA SP 12/212/66 (Burghley to Walsingham, 19 July 1588), printed in facsimile in N. A. M. Rodger,
The Armada in the Public Records (1988), pp. 48–50.
11 Nolan argues that Tilbury was ‘primarily intended as a reserve depot’, which ‘may have been
created to provide Leicester with a suitable command’ (John S. Nolan, ‘The Muster of 1588’,
Albion, xxiii (1991) [hereafter Nolan, ‘Muster of 1588’], 387– 407, at pp. 399– 400). McDermott also
refers to Tilbury as being ‘almost certainly intended as a subsidiary element of England’s defences’
(James McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel (2005) [hereafter
McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada], p. 240).
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NEIL YOUNGER
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even to all of these threats, the English forces had to be highly flexible.
Consequently, the council settled on a plan with three main elements:
troops from the maritime counties would remain in their counties to
counter any landing by the fleet; a larger force would be gathered in
Essex, where the main joint attack was thought most likely to come; and
a reserve army would be formed at London to defend the queen and
capital. Each element was essential to the overall strategy for turning
back a Spanish invasion.
The first of these elements, described by the council as forces to
‘impeach the landing . . . of th’enemy upon his first descent’, is by far the
least understood.12 The trained bands in coastal counties, particularly
along the south coast, were expected to offer initial resistance to any
attempted landing, buying time for reinforcements to be assembled. As
Sir Thomas Scott wrote to Lord Burghley, even if his east Kent troops
could not repel a Spanish landing, they would at least delay it, ‘wherby
the inland partes of this Countie and other Counties adjoyning may be
in the more forwardnes to staye the enemy from speedy passage to
London, or the harte of the realme’.13 Once the location of an attack was
known, reinforcements would be brought in from neighbouring counties.
Thus, if there were to be a landing at Plymouth, the trained bands not
only of Cornwall and Devon but also of Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset,
17,000 in all, would have congregated to defend or counterattack. Should
an attempt be made on Portsmouth, the Wiltshire troops would head
there instead, along with troops from Hampshire, Berkshire, Sussex and
Surrey. Under this plan, 11,000–20,000 men would be available to defend
any point between Falmouth and the Wash.14 This was a long-established
plan, and in the months preceding the crisis, local officials along the
south coast had made arrangements with their colleagues in neighbouring counties for putting it into practice: the marquess of Winchester, for
example, lord lieutenant of Hampshire and Dorset, arranged a meeting
with the deputy lieutenants in Berkshire to do so.15
The details of the plan are clear, therefore; the key issue arises from
what actually happened in the crisis. Almost all recent scholarship has
argued that the south coast counties’ trained bands coalesced together
and marched along the coast, shadowing the Armada in case of a landing. As the most recent detailed account, that of James McDermott, has
12 HMC Foljambe, p. 45 (the council to lord lieutenants, 27 June 1588). A number of works on the
Armada fail altogether to mention the forces on the south coast: Garrett Mattingley, The Defeat of
the Spanish Armada, (1959); Martin and Parker, The Spanish Armada.
13 NA SP 12/212/40 (13 July 1588).
14 There are many copies of this plan, for example, NA SP 12/213/84. This plan has sometimes
been misinterpreted to mean that the numbers of men shown all existed separately, rather than simply
representing the planned response to different contingencies, thus dramatically overestimating the
number of troops available: J. N. McGurk, ‘Armada Preparations in Kent and Arrangements made
after the Defeat (1587–1589)’, Archæologia Cantiana, lxxxv (1970) [hereafter McGurk, ‘Armada
Preparations’], 86; Calendar of State Papers Domestic [hereafter CSPD] 1581– 90, p. 519.
15 NA SP 12/213/29; HMC Fifteenth report, appendix, part VII: The Manuscripts of the Duke of
Somerset etc., pp. 4–5. APC, xv. 269.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
it, ‘as the composite host shadowed [sic] the armada passed eastward
along the English coast, “old” formations – those that had come furthest
from the west – dropped out and returned home as the bands of the
counties into which they advanced joined it’.16 This argument seems to
have originated in Lindsay Boynton’s The Elizabethan Militia (it does
not occur in earlier accounts, such as that of Conyers Read 17). Boynton
writes that
there were mobile forces, of indeterminate number, which remained in the
maritime counties to shadow the Armada . . . They never, in fact, formed
an army, so that their paper strength of 27,000 foot and 2,500 horse cannot be checked. Instead, as the Armada made its way up the Channel,
they moved with it to cover as far as possible the landing-places along the
coast. Very little is recorded of their itinerary.18
Boynton’s comments were, in the absence of detailed evidence, perhaps
intentionally tentative. Nevertheless, the notion of a ‘shadowing army’
has become firmly established, and is repeated, mutatis mutandis, in all
the major subsequent accounts of the mobilization, in a process of
Chinese whispers. This literature is very vague, however, sources are not
clearly stated, and it is nowhere clarified where this movement is supposed to have begun or ended.19
In fact, aside from the intrinsic improbability, in the context of Elizabethan military capability, of a massed force moving along the south
coast with no overall commander or staff, there is no solid evidence that
such a movement took place, or even that it was planned in any detail.
Only one document in the state papers deals with this ‘army’: a list of
June 1588 of ‘Numbers of Men appointed to be drawn together to make
an Army to encounter th’enemy’.20 This must be a discarded plan. There
is no reference in the state papers or elsewhere to a legal or administrative
structure for this army, such as a commander, a royal commission, orders,
instructions, or means of paying the troops, such as are found abundantly
for the Essex and London armies. Nor is evidence for such a force to
be found elsewhere, in the state papers or the council’s correspondence
16
McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada, p. 371 n. 54. See also p. 238.
Conyers Read writes: ‘it seems likely that . . . large forces were stationed in the maritime counties
along the channel. One list puts the figure at 21,272 fighting men.’ See Read, Lord Burghley and
Queen Elizabeth (1960), p. 417 and nn. 37–9.
18 Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, p. 160.
19 McGurk, ‘Armada Preparations’, 71; Ian Friel, ‘The Defence of England in 1588’, in Armada
1588–1988, ed. M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado (1988) [hereafter Friel, ‘Defence of England’], p. 125 and
figure, p. 124; Nolan, ‘Muster of 1588’, 402–3; Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Basingstoke,
2003) [hereafter Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars], p. 146; Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare, 1511–1642
(2001) [hereafter Fissel, English Warfare], p. 57; McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada ,
p. 371, n. 54. Two works take a more doubtful approach: Joyce Youings noted that ‘a certain mystery,
however, surrounds the mobile units which were supposed to be ready to cross county boundaries
to relieve hard-pressed neighbours . . . whether they did so is not revealed by the records.’ See Joyce
Youings, ‘State of Emergency’, in Royal Armada – 400 years (1988), p. 203; Bertrand T. Whitehead,
Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada (Stroud, 1994), pp. 95– 6.
20 NA SP 12/211/74; HMC Foljambe, p. 45. These are in effect copies of the same document.
17
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NEIL YOUNGER
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with the various lord lieutenants on the south coast – the earl of Sussex
in Portsmouth, the marquess of Winchester in Hampshire and Lord
Buckhurst in Sussex, for example. Winchester’s letters to the council of
25 and 26 July contain no mention of troops from Devon and Somerset
marching through his counties of Dorset and Hampshire: they are
instead shrill pleas that they should be reinforced – requests that the
council refused, pointing out that reinforcements were clearly not needed
there.21
Nor has evidence been found in local primary sources for such a
movement. Neither A. L. Rowse nor Wallace MacCaffrey mentions it,
and J. C. de V. Roberts does not provide evidence for his case that ‘it
seems probable that these men [the Devon trained bands] moved along
inland more or less in step with the Armada’s progress up the Channel.’ 22
No reference to thousands of passing soldiers has been found in the
records of towns such as Southampton or Plymouth.23 Nor are they
mentioned in contemporary accounts of the campaign, such as those of
Camden and Stow, both of whom had access to state papers – in fact,
Camden notes that ‘twenty thousand Souldiers [were] dispersed upon the
South shores.’24
What then did the south coast counties’ militia bands do? The council’s
mobilization orders of 23 July directed that county forces should
assemble at a single predetermined point. However, as earlier orders of
27 June had made clear, they were only to move to the coast ‘as occasion
may serve, to impeach the landing or [for the?] withstanding of th’enemy
upon his first descent’.25 Short of an invasion attempt, they had no orders
to move, and such evidence as survives suggests that this instruction was
adhered to. When the Armada’s presence off the south coast became
known, alerts were sounded by the firing of beacons and by messenger,
and plans for the trained bands to assemble at certain places were carried
21
NA SP 12/213/29, 12/213/36; APC, xvi, p. 192.
A. L. Rowse, Sir Richard Grenville of the ‘Revenge’ (1937) [hereafter Rowse, Grenville], pp. 262–4;
idem, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (1941), pp. 396–8; Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Exeter,
1540–1640: The Growth of an English County Town (2nd edn., 1975), p. 239; J. C. de V. Roberts,
Devon and the Armada (East Wittering, West Sussex, 1988), p. 257.
23 The Third Book of Remembrance of Southampton 1514–1602, iii: 1573–1589, ed. A. L. Merson
(Southampton, 1965), contains no mention of soldiers, only a reference to the dispatch of powder
and shot to the fleet (at pp. 54 –5). M. Brayshay, ‘Plymouth’s Coastal Defences in the Year of the
Spanish Armada’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of
Science, cxix (1987), 169–96; at 174. Brayshay points out that ‘it seems safe to assume that no such
massive garrison of militia was ever assembled in the town. Had it come, soldiers would have
outnumbered townspeople by three or four to one, and there is virtually no evidence in the
Borough records to indicate that Plymouth was called upon to cope with an influx of county soldiers
on such an impossibly large scale.’
24 W. Camden, Annales (1625), bk. III, p. 257 (my italics). Stow mentions only Leicester’s and
Hunsdon’s armies. See J. Stow, Annals (1592), p. 1264.
25 APC, xvi, p. 169; HMC Foljambe, p. 45; the interpolation by the original editor. The council
register contains only a précis of the letter, from which it is not clear that these orders are contingent on
further orders which would follow as and when necessary. APC, xvi. 137– 8.
22
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
out.26 In Hampshire, the beacons were fired, and around 2,500 troops
from the county mustered at Portsmouth.27 In Sussex, Lord Buckhurst
‘assembled the forces of the cownty’, and the council suggested that they
be ‘disposed in apt and convenyant places’, even though ‘their Lordships
do not thincke that the Spanish Navy will or dare attempt to land on
that cost, beinge followed by the Lord Admyrall, nevertheless they think
it meet his Lordship should not dismisse his forces untyll he heare
further from them [the council]’.28 On the Isle of Wight, the governor,
George Carey, assembled his troops into a camp; on 25 July, he informed
the earl of Sussex at Portsmouth that the two fleets had disappeared
from sight by three that afternoon, ‘whereupon we have dissolved o[u]r
campe wherein we have continued since Monday [22 July]’. 29 Accounts
from two Cornish parishes suggest similar plans. From St Columb
Major, near Newquay, the parish soldiers were provided with victual and
marched to Bodmin (about 10 miles) and then on to Liskeard (a further
10 miles); similarly, armour was carried from Stratton, near Bude, to
Launceston.30 This would be consistent with forces assembling so as to
be in a position to defend Plymouth, without marching right into the
town, which, since the English fleet sailed out of Plymouth to engage the
Armada as soon as it was sighted, hardly seemed to be in immediate
danger. All the evidence points to assemblies within counties, not as a
massed army to march eastwards. Once the Armada was safely clear of
their coasts, the troops were stood down, either on local initiative (as in
the case of the Isle of Wight) or on the council’s orders (in the cases of
Hampshire and Sussex, on 26 and 27 July respectively).31
Late in the afternoon of Saturday 27 July, the Armada anchored at
Calais. An attack on the south coast, prior to the rendezvous of Medina
Sidonia and Parma, was now unlikely, so the council could focus its
attention on the expected assault on London. The chronological interval
between the potential invasion attempts is important: whilst an attack
26 Although there is little evidence, beacons do appear to have been fired: Viscount Montague
refers to the firing of that at Ports Down, in Hampshire: NA SP 12/213/11. The Duke of Medina
Sidonia also wrote that ‘on the 30th [July, n.s.], at dawn, the Armada was very near the shore. We
were seen by the people on land, who made signal fires’ (Calendar of State Papers Spanish 1587–
1603 [hereafter CSP Spanish], p. 395). Messengers, however, were a much more practical form of
communication.
27 A muster roll was taken at Portsmouth on 29 July (NA SP 12/213/60). This document has been
misinterpreted as showing that troops from Dorset reinforced Portsmouth, but all of the captains
named can readily be identified as Hampshire men. The Preparations in Somerset against the Spanish
Armada A.D. 1558–1588, ed. E. Green (1888), pp. 117–18; CSPD 1581–90, pp. 395, 438–9, 443 – 4.
28 APC, xvi. 176.
29 NA SP 12/213/40 I (Carey’s report from the Isle of Wight, 25 July 1588, 8pm). According to
orders laid down jointly by Sir John Norreys and the local authorities on 7 May 1588, the Dorset
militia were also to assemble at primary rendezvous points and then march together to Weymouth:
NA SP 12/210/8.
30 ‘The St. Columb Green Book’, ed. T. Peter, supplement to the Journal of the Royal Institute of
Cornwall, xix (1912), 37–8; accounts of Blanchminster’s charity in Stratton, quoted in Rowse, Grenville,
p. 263.
31 NA SP 12/213/40; APC, xvi (1588), pp. 184 –5, 194.
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from the Armada itself could have been made at any point once it was
off the English coast, it would take some time for the rendezvous
between Medina Sidonia and Parma to be effected, and for the attack to
be made on (as they thought) the Thames estuary. J. L. Motley, followed
by Parker and Nolan, suggested that Parma might land as early as
28 July, but this is hardly credible unless Parma had been ready to leave
Dunkirk at the very moment Medina Sidonia arrived; as Parma always
argued, this was quite impossible: he thought he needed six days, so a
landing on 2 or 3 August was his estimate.32
How accurately the English could estimate the likely date of attack is
unclear, but they must surely have been expecting a few days of grace at
least. The council certainly took advantage of it when preparing the
defence of London. On 23 July, when the council first became aware of
the Armada’s arrival off the south-west coast, it ordered lord lieutenants
in the south-east, the home counties and East Anglia to bring their militia to full mobilization: the trained footmen were to assemble in one
place in every county and measures to be taken for internal security. The
council also explained in this letter that an army was to be set up in
Essex under the earl of Leicester’s command, and ordered specified
numbers of cavalry to report to his command at Brentwood by 27 July
(a few were directed to the court, then at Richmond).33 Certain counties
were also to send contingents of foot either to ‘Stratford of the Bow nere
London’ or to London itself. Those to be at Stratford by 29 July were
500 each from Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and 1,000 each from
Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Surrey: that is, troops from
inland counties with no responsibility for coastal defence. One thousand
foot from London, plus the Kent horse, were ordered to Gravesend,
opposite Tilbury on the Kent side of the Thames.34 Although they are
not listed in the council’s records, the 4,000-strong Essex trained bands
were also called up, apparently by Leicester as lord lieutenant of Essex,
to a rendezvous at Chelmsford.35
32
J. L. Motley, History of the United Netherlands (4 vols., 1860 –7), ii. 488. Motley uses new style:
7 August. Parker, ‘If the Armada had Landed’, p. 358. Nolan, ‘Muster of 1588’, 404. Six days:
Martin and Parker, The Spanish Armada, p. 185.
33 The Brentwood cavalry came from Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent,
Middlesex, Suffolk, and Surrey; those for the court from Gloucestershire, Somerset and Sussex.
APC, xvi. 169. The full text of the letter (which is summarized in the APC), which specifies that the
cavalry were to form part of an army under Leicester’s command, can be found in HMC Foljambe,
p. 48. On the 25 July, further horse from Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Somerset,
Suffolk and Sussex were ordered up to London: APC, xvi. 181. The council received its first news
of the Armada around midnight on 22/23 July, by the hands of William Stallenge, who rode bringing
letters from the Mayor of Plymouth: see ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 79 and nn. 2–3 and the
record of the reimbursement of Stallenge’s costs for three horsemen: NA E 351/242, rot. 9 d. He
was still at Plymouth at 8 a.m. on Sunday 21 July, and evidently covered the distance to Richmond
(around 220 miles) in around 40 hours.
34 APC, xvi. 171–2; The Twysden Lieutenancy Papers 1583–1668, ed. G. Scott Thomson (Kent
Archæological Society, Kent Records, x, 1926) [hereafter Twysden Lieutenancy Papers], pp. 70 –1
(Lambeth Palace Library [hereafter LPL] MS 1392, fo. 37r.).
35 NA SP 12/213/21.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
Thus, although the intelligence of mid-July 1588 certainly convinced
the council that further troops were needed to defend the Thames
estuary, the initial disposition of forces does not accord with the received
picture of a grand assembly of troops at Tilbury. The 5,000 trained
infantry called up from the home counties were to assemble not at
Tilbury but at Stratford, which is much closer to London (about 3 miles)
than to Tilbury (about 18 miles). It is not clear why this was; it may simply
have been to allow greater practical or tactical flexibility: for example,
Stratford was a more convenient point if it was thought that the troops
might be needed on either side of the Thames. However, the relationship
of these forces to Leicester and his forces at Chelmsford and Brentwood
is unclear, as a note of the council’s discussions of the previous day suggests that Leicester was due to command only his own 4,000 Essex
trained bands, 1,000 foot from London, and the county contingents of
horse summoned to Brentwood.36 In addition, in the mobilization orders
of 23 July, the council specified that the cavalry at Brentwood would be
under Leicester’s command, but they did not do so for the infantry. 37
Therefore, it is not clear exactly what had been decided with regard to
these troops.
Nevertheless, on 23 July, the same day as these orders were issued,
Leicester was confirmed as commander in chief by a royal commission. 38
This did not, as is sometimes stated, appoint him lieutenant general of
all England, or even of the south parts: he was made ‘lieutenant and
captain general’ of ‘our Army that shall be provided to withstand all
manner of invasion of our realm by sea’. This commission – which was
largely unprecedented and never tested – left some doubt as to the precise
extent of Leicester’s power: it empowered Leicester to summon and
dispose troops from the counties, but in fact it was the council which
had been and continued to manage this. In practice, Leicester simply
commanded such troops as were assigned to him by the council’s
36
NA SP 12/213/4.
HMC Foljambe, p. 48. Adams has written (‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 80 n. 1) that ‘there
appears to have been a decision taken earlier in July that in the event of a landing in Essex, Leicester
as Lord Lieutenant would command any troops assembled there’, but this is based on a misdated
letter: a council letter dated to 8 July in Twysden Lieutenancy Papers, pp. 70 –1. The original (in fact
a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth century copy), in the Twysden muster book (LPL MS 1392,
fo. 37r.), is dated 23 July, though, curiously, the date is written ‘2iij’; the ‘2’ has been misread as a
‘v’. It can also be compared with the précis in APC, xvi. 169, and with the full text in HMC
Foljambe, p. 48. The same mistake is made in McGurk, ‘Armada Preparations’, 82–3 and n. 63,
and Parker, Grand Strategy, p. 227. Interestingly, in its letter of 27 June, ordering lord lieutenants
to be ready to respond to an attack, the council refers only to ‘such a person of quality as shall be
notified to you to be appointed by her Majesty to be the General of the Army’ (HMC Foljambe,
p. 45).
38 This had been planned in advance: see ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 80. It was delivered to
Leicester by Sir John Norreys, who arrived at 3 a.m. the following morning: NA SP 12/213/21.
See the text of the commission: HMC Foljambe, pp. 49–51.
37
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NEIL YOUNGER
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orders.39 In the event of an invasion this may well have changed, but the
tone of his letters in the few days before and after the discovery of the
Armada off Cornwall do not smack of the commander-in-chief.
Although his responsibilities in Essex were important – the supervision
of the construction of the boom across the Thames, for example – he was
very much dependent on the council for troops and supplies, requesting
Walsingham on 25 July to ‘be not forgetfull to resolve what shalbe done
here [in Essex] & to lett me knowe yt as sone as may be’.40
Nor, up to 24 July, is there any reference to a camp at Tilbury. On 22
July, when Leicester was arranging for powder to be dispatched to him,
he asked that it be sent not to Tilbury, but to Brentwood. 41 Only on 24
July is Tilbury mentioned as a gathering point for defence forces (rather
than as a fort), when Leicester told the council that he had decided upon
‘a most apt place to begynn o[u]r camp in not farr from the fort at a
place called west Tylbury’.42 It is also interesting to observe that Leicester
talks here not of ‘establishing’ or ‘settling’ the camp there, but ‘beginning’
it; in sixteenth-century terminology, the word ‘camp’ referred not to an
entrenched position, but to a field army, and it may be that Leicester
intended Tilbury to be only a rendezvous point, a base for later mobile
operations against the Spanish invasion force, rather than some kind of
fortified camp.43 Given that any campaign on the flat north bank of the
Thames would likely be highly mobile in any case, this seems very plausible.
Since the invasion never came, Leicester had no cause to reconsider his
location and Tilbury continued to be the centre of operations.
To summarize, the council did not initially intend all of these troops
to form a camp in Tilbury; they may not have intended them all to be
under Leicester’s command; and they had not decided what to do about
an army to defend the queen’s person. The overall pattern is of the council
gathering troops between London and the Essex coast but undecided
about precisely what to do with them.
There is very little evidence showing what happened to the county levies
when they arrived at Stratford. Leicester certainly proceeded with his camp
at Tilbury: on 25 July, he escorted most of the Essex foot from their
39
Leicester clearly understood that his commission was limited to ‘all forcs & Armyes ye North &
Wales excepted’ (NA SP 12/213/55). This ran alongside Hunsdon’s commission (issued a few days
later), covering ‘our Army . . . for the defence and surety of our own Royal person’. Neither commission
was entered onto the patent roll (which was not unusual for commissions of lieutenancy or temporary commissions), but both originals survive: Longleat House, Dudley Papers Box III, art. 62 and
Berkeley Castle, Select Charters, art. 796. I am very grateful to Simon Adams for providing me
with these references. The text of Hunsdon’s commission is given in HMC Foljambe, pp. 53–5.
40 NA SP 12/213/27. This underlines Adams’s emphasis on the close co-operation between senior
ministers during the crisis: ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 43.
41 NA SP 12/213/10.
42 NA SP 12/213/21. References to Tilbury are often confusing, since they can refer either to the
fort or to the camp, quite separate establishments some miles apart. This appears, however, to be the
first clear reference to the camp.
43 OED: see Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
1558–1561, 1584–1586, ed. S. Adams (Camden Society, 5th ser., vi, Cambridge, 1995), p. 348.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
rendezvous at Chelmsford to this camp, and the 1,000 militia from London
probably arrived the following day.44 It is very unclear, however, if and
when other troops joined the camp; the principal documentary source
for the Essex forces, Leicester’s letters, do not mention the arrival of
troops from other counties.45 Leicester did write on 28 July that he would
be able to dispose his troops more flexibly ‘now I shall have this new
suply of vM [5,000] men’, which must surely refer to the 5,000 troops
from the home counties, ordered up by the council on 23 July, but it is
not clear whether he means that they were arriving at Tilbury or that
they had been placed under his command; the phrasing would seem to
suggest the latter.46 Indeed, 28 July is the earliest date on which the council
register makes clear that these home counties foot were assigned to his
command, and several later references make clear that Leicester was in
command of other forces: the ‘armyes and companyes’ (in the plural)
referred to on 30 July, for example.47 But they do not refer to an army at
Tilbury; in his letter of 27 July inviting the queen to visit the camp,
Leicester mentions ‘your army being about London (at Stratford, Eastham,
Hackney, and the vyllages thereabout)’; these may have been the county
forces which had been summoned to Stratford and were to be under his
own command. He goes on to say that they would be ‘a reddy supply to
these countreys, Essex and Kent, yf nede be’, suggesting that it had not
by then been determined that they would be stationed at Tilbury. 48 There
seems no reason to assume that they were all at Tilbury: they may have
been, initially at least, dispersed, with foot at Tilbury and Stratford (or
elsewhere) and horse at Brentwood. Having troops dispersed rather than
concentrated had obvious advantages in terms of supply of food and
water, hygiene, maintaining order, and so on. A letter of Leicester’s even
suggests that he had no notion that all of his troops should be assembled
for Elizabeth’s visit to Tilbury: he told the queen that her presence would
‘make gladd many thowsandes both here & not farr of’.49
By 1 August, however, Leicester may have assembled further troops at
Tilbury: the council directed the Norfolk levies originally intended for
44
NA SP 12/213/27, 12/213/38, both printed in State Papers relating to the Defeat of the Spanish
Armada, anno 1588, ed. J. K. Laughton (Navy Record Society, vols. i–ii, 1894) [hereafter Laughton,
State Papers], i. 305, 318. See Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M. M. Knappen (Chicago, 1933),
p. 79. The Essex militia seem to have come in a great hurry, without having time to go home and
prepare victuals.
45 McDermott thinks other troops assembled in the five days after 25 July, and Christy writes that
‘no doubt the arrival of the Essex men was followed quickly by the advent of other troops’, but
neither provides evidence. See McDermott, England and the Spanish Armada, p. 241; Miller Christy,
‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit to Tilbury in 1588’, English Historical Review, xxxiv (1919), 43 – 61 [hereafter
Christy, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit’], at 46. The lack of evidence of further troops arriving at Tilbury
is also noted in Susan Frye, ‘The Myth of Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury’, Sixteenth Century Journal,
xxiii (1992), 95–114, at 97, n. 5, though she errs in taking the 4,000 mentioned in NA SP 12/213/27
to be different from the 4,000 mentioned in NA SP 12/213/38; they are both Leicester’s Essex militia.
46 NA SP 12/213/55 (Leicester to Walsingham, 28 July 1588).
47 APC, xvi. 195, 203, 222.
48 NA SP 12/213/46, quoted in Christy, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit’, 46 –7.
49 NA SP 12/214/34 (Leicester to Elizabeth, 5 Aug. 1588).
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London to go to Tilbury ‘where the Lord Stewarrd laye ready in campe
to receave them’; on the other hand, on 4 August they told the Suffolk
troops to continue forward to Stratford.50 The English troops sent for
from the Netherlands were also transported from Flushing ‘hether to the
Campe to Tylbery’ (though they landed at Margate). 51 Nevertheless,
as late as 10 August, the day after the queen’s visit to Tilbury, Edward
Radcliffe, who was in command of a troop of horse, signed a letter from
Brentwood, suggesting that the horse were still camped there. 52
Leicester also had overall charge of the army in Kent, by virtue of his
commission of 23 July. A camp was erected at Northbourne, near Deal;
it, too, is ill-documented, but it apparently consisted of 5,000 men at its
peak, probably shortly after the alarm was raised, plus 1,500 on the Isle
of Sheppey and 1,200 at Lydd, near Dungeness. These seem to have been
reduced in stages: on 5 August, the council thought that 5,000 Kent
troops were in pay, but by 13 August, they had been reduced to about
3,300. At any rate, the payroll lists only 3,513 foot, all from east Kent,
and 336 horse, who were paid from about 29 July to 19 August under the
command of Sir Thomas Scott and Sir James Hales as colonels of the
foot and horse, respectively. The west Kent militia were not listed on
the payroll: they were presumably called up on the initial alarm, and sent
home when no immediate threat of invasion loomed (it may be that they
were held in reserve in west Kent so that they would be in a position to
counter an invasion attempt either in Kent or in Essex). They also provided
pioneers for the works at Gravesend.53 On 16 August, Leicester called up
1,000 from the west to replace the east Kent troops, but this must have
been abandoned when the camp dispersed a few days later. 54 Contrary to
J. N. McGurk’s assumption, there is no evidence that any Kent troops
were called up to London.55
At the same time as Leicester was pulling together an army in Essex,
the council was working to assemble the third element of its strategy,
which, according to the plan as it developed, was to form the largest
single body of troops: that assigned to defend the queen, court and
50
APC, xvi. 209, 217. One wonders whether this latter was an error on the part of the council.
APC, xvi. 230. Margate: NA SP 12/214/52, 214/61. Note that the index of the APC twice mistakes
references to Hunsdon’s army for references to ‘The camp at Tilbury’: APC, xvi. 196, 197. Likewise,
it indexes an order to deliver ordnance ‘to the Lord Steward to Tilberye’ as a reference to ‘the camp’
(ibid., p. 208).
52 ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 87. For Radcliffe’s command of the horse, see NA E 351/242,
rot. 3r.
53 NA SP 12/215/7, 12/213/45, 12/214/52; APC, xvi. 222. It can be established that these were all
east Kent troops by the names of the captains listed in the payroll: NA E 351/242, rots. 5d.–7r; the
Kent section is in print: ‘Pay-list of the Kentish forces raised to resist the Spanish Armada’, ed.
James R. Scott, Archaeologia Cantiana, xi (1877), 388–91. This account of the Kent troops differs
markedly from McGurk’s version in ‘Armada Preparations’; I have preferred retrospective sources
to the various plans used by McGurk, in particular NA SP 12/215/7, the report of Scott and Hales
to the lord lieutenant, Lord Cobham, who had been at the peace conference at Bourbourg and
arrived back in England on 7 August.
54 Staffordshire Record Office, D593/S/4/12/16, D 593/S/4/12/14.
55 McGurk, ‘Armada Preparations’, 88.
51
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
government. This army, too, was to be composed mostly of county
levies, which were ordered in two separate batches. On 23 July, infantry
were summoned from Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwickshire and Wiltshire, 16,700 in all. On 28 July, further troops were summoned
from several of these counties, and in addition troops from Berkshire,
Devon, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey and Worcestershire,
bringing the total to 27,150.56 These were to arrive at London only from
6 August.
The force was to be commanded by Lord Hunsdon, although, again,
it is far from clear that this was envisaged far ahead; there is no definite
reference to his selection until 28 July, in a letter of Leicester’s. It was
only at this point that the assembly of this army began in earnest: a commission was issued to Hunsdon and officers assigned and summoned. 57
However, the decision to delay the rendezvous for several days meant
that this army – or its militia element at least – never really came into
being. Most of the county levies, which had been ordered to arrive at
London only from 6 August, were ordered to turn back before they
reached the camp and entered into the queen’s pay (for the example of
the Gloucester troops, see below). The only troops to enter pay were 600
foot from Northamptonshire, from 2 August, and 600 from Warwickshire, from 8 August, all of whom were dismissed on 14 August. 58 As the
example of the Kent troops shows, however, the payroll is not a perfect
record of what actually took place, so it is probable that other contingents were in fact ready: the Surrey troops, for example, seem to have
assembled at Croydon, where it was envisaged that the Sussex contingent
would join them.59 Presumably, Hunsdon’s forces were intended to
assemble around (rather than actually in) London, forming a united
army only when necessary. As with other aspects of the mobilization, the
council’s approach was to have troops ready in position, but retain flexibility by leaving final arrangements to the last possible moment.
In addition to the county contingents, Hunsdon was assigned the
forces provided by the nobility, privy councillors and the clergy, which
were expected to come to around 5,300 foot and 2,150 horse. 60 It is not
known how many of these arrived at London; as they were not paid by
the crown, they do not appear on the payroll. It may probably be
56
APC, xvi. 171, 186, 195–6. For some reason, the Huntingdonshire troops were summoned
separately, on 26 July; this may have been an afterthought. They were turned back on 3 August
(ibid., pp. 215–16).
57 NA SP 12/213/55. Note Leicester’s reference to ‘some special nobleman’ to command the Queen’s
army on 26 July: NA SP 12/213/38, printed in Laughton, State Papers, i. 320; APC, xvi. 196, 197.
58 NA E 351/242, rot 8r.
59 The churchwardens’ accounts of Lambeth record 14d ‘to two men for goinge to Croyden to
fetche ye Churche Armor after the breakinge uppe of ye Campe’, but it is not clear which camp
this was, and whether it was the camp itself, or simply the demobilization, which was at Croydon;
Lambeth Churchwardens’ Accounts 1504 –1645 and Vestry Book 1610, pt. II, ed. C. Drew (Surrey Record
Society, xliii, 1941), p. 173. On Sussex: BL Harleian MS 703, fos. 53v.–54r.
60 Figures derived from HMC Foljambe, p. 57 and NA SP 12/213/84, which differ slightly.
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doubted whether many clergy forces came into the camp: although some
of the certificates submitted by bishops are impressive (the 165 foot and
35 horse certified by the archbishop of Canterbury, for example), others
were much less assiduous – Wolton of Exeter sent in his certificate only
on 18 August and Piers of Salisbury on 19 August, by which time the
crisis was decidedly past.61
The forces of the nobility are a different matter: noblemen who had
pledged to provide men would wish to be seen to do so.62 These troops
were raised through the clients and associates of noblemen, in the same
way as Leicester had raised his cavalry for his 1585 campaign in the
Netherlands.63 Evidence survives of a number of examples of individual
gentlemen offering their service to greater men. Burghley received an
offer of ‘xx or xxx furnished men, at my own proper charge’ from one
W. Wright of Hampshire, and Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth, Cheshire,
offered him 200 foot armed with ‘bowes, jackes and bylles’, on the occasion of ‘the styrre and the newes about the southe partes’. Sir Francis
Walsingham apparently raised 50 lances, 10 petronels and 200 foot from
associates such as William Darrell, a Wiltshire gentleman, to whom he
promised not only his own favour but access to and thanks from the
queen.64 This caused a problem in that many of the men called up by
noblemen were trained bandsmen (a fact which casts interesting light on
the social composition of the trained bands). Lord Chandos, lieutenant
of Gloucestershire, complained that many of his men, ‘and those verie
sufficient and able’, had been ‘sent to from their L[ord]s & m[aste]rs to
prepare them selves with horse and furniture to attend them’, with the
culprits including the earls of Worcester and Pembroke and some privy
councillors, thus seriously reducing the number of cavalry he could
provide.65 There is evidence of similar problems in Essex and Dorset. 66
Nevertheless, these may well have been valuable troops: the cavalry
raised by the nobility and gentry had proved to be of relatively impressive
61 J. J. N. McGurk, ‘The Clergy and the Militia 1580 –1610’, History, lx (1975), 198–210, at 200 –3;
CSPD 1581–90, p. 533.
62 Sir Henry Cromwell, for example, brought ‘ten lances, ten light horse and ten carbines to serve
her Majesty all of his own’, leaving Huntingdonshire on 2 August and apparently (though the
language is ambiguous) reaching London. BL Additional [hereafter Add.] MS 34394, fo. 36v.
For further examples of nobles and gentry requesting permission to report for duty in London,
see APC, xvi. 191, 205– 6.
63 Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court (Manchester, 2002), chs. 9, 12 and 16.
64 BL Lansdowne MS 58, fo. 76r.; BL Harleian MS 6994, fo. 134r. (printed in Wright, Queen Elizabeth,
ii. 386). On Darrell: NA SP 46/44, fos. 106 –11; the relevant letters are printed in C. E. Long, ‘Wild
Darell of Littlecote (No. 2)’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vi (1860),
201–14, at pp. 206–9. No money appears to have changed hands. Conyers Read, Mr Secretary
Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (3 vols., Oxford, 1925), iii. 316. See also Robert
Eyton’s offer to serve the Earl of Shrewsbury in the same way: LPL MS 3204, fo. 155r.
65 NA SP 12/212/74 (Chandos to Walsingham, 21 July 1588). For examples of the council instructing lord lieutenants to release noblemen’s retainers from the trained bands, see APC, xvi. 127, 144,
157, 174–5, 176–7, 179, 192, 207.
66 NA SP 12/213/22, 12/214/31.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
quality in the Netherlands.67 Little is known about where they camped or
lodged or how many there were. It may well be that these troops were the
reason that London was, in the council’s words of 4 August, ‘greatly
embarrassed with troops, sent to it from divers parts of the country, for
whom no fit entertainment in lodging and food can be made’. 68
In all, Hunsdon’s establishment – foot, horse and officers – cost only
£739 8s 5d, out of the £26,000 assigned to the treasurer-at-war, Sir Thomas
Heneage, to cover the costs of the land campaign. This not only indicates
how small was its role in the overall mobilization (as it turned out), it
also explains its neglect in the historiography. Ultimately, however,
this was a success for the government’s careful and flexible planning.
Certainly there was a strong element of brinkmanship in the operation,
but efficient management of available resources is a crucial element of
military strategy, and, with the Essex–Kent army estimated to cost £783
14s 8d per day, this was a sensible policy.69
As mentioned earlier, a substantial chronological interval between
the point at which an attack would be made on the south coast and the
point at which the joint Spanish attack could be launched was inevitable,
and the council was able to use this to its advantage, in effect recycling
many of the troops which would have been used to defend against an
attack on the south coast. Many of the troops intended to form part of
Hunsdon’s army were from counties with responsibility for defending the
south coast: Dorset (1,000 troops), Somerset (4,000), Hampshire (2,000),
Sussex (2,500), Wiltshire (2,300). When the council called up these troops,
on 23 July, it was aware that such an attack still remained possible.
A strategy of withdrawing troops from the defence there would thus
seem absurd, even assuming the county authorities would execute it. The
council’s stipulation, however, was for these troops to arrive in London
only from 6 August, fourteen days later, so they would not need to leave
their counties for several days at least. If the Armada did attack the
south coast, plans would obviously change, and the long established
mutual-aid plan would come into operation; these orders were, inevitably,
only the council’s first response, only based on the most likely scenario,
and always subject to change. Assuming, as the council did, that there
would be no attack on the south coast, the counties would be well aware
of this by the time they had to leave for London, and so would have no
qualms about leaving their homes undefended.
This double use of the troops is illustrated by the example of Sussex.
When the first alarm came, Lord Buckhurst, the lord lieutenant, formed
his troops up into a camp, in case of an attack on the coast which never
came. In the meantime, on 23 July, the council ordered 2,000 troops sent
67 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, pp. 125 –9, esp. p. 129. It is worth noting, however, that the council
had to make provision for armour to be sold to some of them. See APC, xvi. 220; NA SP 12/215/71.
68 HMC Seventh Report, MSS of W. More-Molyneux esq., p. 645. This letter is not in the council
register.
69 This estimate for the 17,000 foot, 1,200 horse, 500 pioneers and their officers from NA SP 12/213/90.
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from Sussex to London, to arrive on 6 August. Since this journey did not
take two weeks, it was clearly not intended that they should leave at once.
Buckhurst issued final orders for the mobilization only on 31 July, when
he would have had his orders for almost a week. The council had by then
increased its demand on Sussex to 2,500, but they were all clearly still in
Sussex – there is no sign whatsoever that 2,000 troops had already left,
and 500 additional troops followed them separately. Buckhurst intended
to arrange victuals at Reigate on 8 August and Croydon the day after, so
they would perhaps have expected to leave on 6 August (the deadline had
since been postponed from 6 August to 9 August).70 Thus, the Sussex
troops were available to defend the coast against any attack by the
Armada itself on, say, Portsmouth or Kent, but once this danger was
passed, they had sufficient time to march to London and join Hunsdon’s
army.
The fact that the council was planning from the beginning to make
use of these troops twice has not been evident to historians, possibly
because the full text of the council’s instructions (which may have
clarified the point) is not readily available, and only a précis was entered
into the register.71 However, a letter of 27 July to the Dorset deputy
lieutenants notes that ‘forasmuch . . . that the said Fleet was past that
coast, they should not faiell to put in readiness with all speed and send
up to Stratford in the Bow the thowsand footmen . . . appointed by their
Lordships’ letters’.72 It can also be seen that this arrangement not only
satisfied the natural desire of the south coast counties to defend their
own homes, but also delayed the mobilization as long as possible, thus
minimizing trouble and expense.73
Hunsdon’s army, then, was only intended to come into being after a
landing had been made. This was certainly not the most desirable solution, and was dictated mainly by financial and political considerations,
but it was an effective way of making the best use of the available
resources, and it also allowed a degree of tactical flexibility. 74 The council
relied on the forces on the spot wherever the Spanish landed (this, it
expected, would be in Essex) to delay the enemy sufficiently to allow the
70
BL Harleian MS 703, ff. 53v.–54r. (Buckhurst to the JPs and militia captains of the rape of
Lewes, 31 July 1588).
71 As far as I am aware, no copy of the 23 July orders as sent to the relevant counties (Dorset,
Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Sussex) survives.
72 APC, xvi. 192–3.
73 See the council’s responses to the concerns of Norfolk about leaving their county undefended:
APC, xvi. 206, 209.
74 The council register appears to be defective here: it records that the letters summoning the troops
required them to report to London by 6 August; however, the letter addressed to Northamptonshire
required them to be there by 29 July. It is not clear why this was, and whether Northamptonshire
was unique in this respect. It would seem to make sense for counties with no coast to defend to get
their troops to London as soon as possible, as in this case, but on the other hand, the council may
have wished to save money by assembling troops as late as possible. Northamptonshire Lieutenancy
Papers and Other Documents 1580 –1614, ed. J. Goring and J. Wake (Northamptonshire Record
Society, xxvii, 1975) [hereafter Northants Lieutenancy Papers], pp. 60 –1.
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
principal army, Hunsdon’s, to assemble. Flexibility was, indeed, the key
to the entire mobilization. The council had no qualms about changing its
orders to the county militia, or even stating straightforwardly that it had
not quite decided what to do with them. The lord mayor of London, for
example, was told that the horse raised in the City were to be used either
to guard the queen’s person or ‘to joyne with [the] Army which the Erle
of Leycester, Lord Lieutenant, shall have char[ge] of for the defence of
the Cytye’.75 On 1 August, when the council received news that the
Armada had been sighted off the Norfolk coast, the troops from Norfolk
and Suffolk were told to halt in their advance towards London or Essex
‘untyll it may appere what course the said Fleete will take’; they were
subsequently diverted from London to Stratford or Tilbury. 76 It also
seems likely that, had they ever been called into battle, the relationship
between Leicester’s and Hunsdon’s armies would have been reasonably
fluid. Had Leicester’s troops performed well, no doubt more troops
would have been sent forward into Essex. Had Parma advanced towards
London, Leicester would perhaps have fallen back towards the city and
merged with Hunsdon’s army. Military planning is inevitably subject to
change in response to events. The decisive factor was not only the council’s
planning, but also the capability of the structures it had put in place to
cope with rapidly changing orders.
A clearer picture of the relationship between Hunsdon’s army and the
forces in the counties also allows a better estimate to be made of the size
of the defence forces available. Existing estimates have been subject to a
variety of problems. It is not always recognized that the 27,000 troops
along the south coast were not all discrete from the 27,150 ordered to
form Hunsdon’s army: these men have often been counted in both
places, thus overestimating the total number of troops available. 77 The
Sussex troops, for example, are accounted for both as part of the 4,000
Sussex troops on the south coast and as 2,500 troops of Hunsdon’s army,
which they cannot have been, since Sussex only had 4,000 armed men in
total.78 On the other hand, 9,000 of the 10,000 London militia bands and
1,000 from Middlesex are often left out of calculations, because orders
were never given for their mobilization.79
At the height of the alarm, the council had ordered the mobilization
of 38,150 men, with plans to set up armies of 11,000 in Essex, and 27,150
at London; 6,000 further troops (at the council’s estimate) were ready in
Kent. To these can be added 10,000 further militia from London and
Middlesex, which could have been called up very quickly if necessary,
and the forces of the nobility and clergy (nominally 5,331 foot and 2,169
75
76
77
78
79
APC, xvi. 180.
APC, xvi. 209, 210, 217. ‘Armada Correspondence’, pp. 83 – 4.
Fissel, English Warfare, p. 57. Nolan, ‘Muster of 1588’, 406 –7.
NA SP 12/213/37; APC, xvi. 195.
APC, xvi. 202.
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NEIL YOUNGER
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horse), giving a total of 59,481 foot and 5,130 horse which were or could
quickly be called up.80
This figure is somewhat lower than some estimates (for example, the
76,000 quoted by Ian Friel81), and clearly does not represent the total
number of troops available to defend against invasion. Most obviously,
not all of the troops from the south coast militias were called up. Nor
were any troops ever called up from Wales, the Marches, or the North
and adjacent counties (Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire,
Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire), which were in readiness to respond
to Spanish (or Scottish) attack there. More problematically, attempts to
give definitive figures for the total defence forces founder on the vagaries
of sixteenth-century administration: county muster certificates are almost
invariably unreliable, incomplete or inconsistent in their terminology.
It is, therefore, impossible to give a definitive figure for the total number
of available troops. Virtually all of the troops came from the militia, and
since every able-bodied man between the ages of 16 and 60 was liable to
militia service, the number of potential troops was in theory close to
inexhaustible. In reality, the effective size of the militia was limited by the
availability of weaponry, and the organization of the men into companies. It seems likely that, in the event of a prolonged campaign following
an invasion, existing militia units would have been augmented by whatever other troops and equipment were available across the country or
even from the Netherlands or Ireland. The total number of armed militia
men, trained and untrained, in the country must have come to something
in the region of 100,000 men, with a majority of these being (nominally
at least) trained.82 These would have been of widely varying quality, with
the best likely to have been those from the south, the home counties and
East Anglia, which were called up first; one would expect that the counties would have sent their best men first. Any reinforcements called up
later would have been either poorer quality troops from this same area,
or those from more remote areas which were in general poorer anyway.
Thus, reinforcements would have been of progressively diminishing quality.
A picture of the national disposition of forces can be summarized as
follows. The trained bands in the coastal counties, from Cornwall to
Norfolk, were ready to be the first line of resistance against any Spanish
landing in their localities; after any threat on their coast had passed, they
either disbanded or were called up elsewhere. Leicester’s army in Essex
performed essentially the same function, but since the council believed
that the attack was most likely to come here, the Essex forces were augmented with trained bands from other counties, were kept on for a much
longer period, and were, unlike the forces assembled in other coastal
80
This figure essentially agrees with that quoted in HMC Foljambe, pp. 57–8, although I add 1,000
Middlesex militia and 400 from Huntingdonshire (for which, see above, n. 56).
Friel, ‘Defence of England’, p. 126.
82 Compiled from NA SP 12/210/42, a digest of the county muster certificates of April 1588, with
missing figures from NA SP 12/213/37.
81
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
counties, paid by the queen. The same applies to the forces under Leicester’s command in Kent. Finally, Hunsdon’s army would have defended
the queen, capital and government from swift capture by the Spanish;
this force was projected to be larger than Leicester’s on the first (23 July)
mobilization, and even more so after the orders of 28 July, and was
clearly to be the main force in the event of a successful landing. The
‘Tilbury’ army has always received the most attention, as early as the
histories of Camden and Stow, leading to an almost universal misdirection of attention thither, but it can be seen that this is the result of essentially ephemeral factors. Most importantly, this army, unlike Hunsdon’s,
actually came into being and was kept in existence long after other forces
had been disbanded, for strategically dubious reasons. It could thus be
visited quite easily from London, most notably of course by the queen
on 8 –9 August, but also by other ministers and leading figures. This
being so, it is not surprising that the picture presented by the queen’s visit
stuck in the memory of all who witnessed it.
Once it became evident that neither the Essex nor the London forces
were to be required to fight, the government carefully exploited them for
public relations purposes. The queen’s visit to Tilbury was an extremely
effective symbol of resistance to Spain, quickly becoming part of the
mythology of 1588. If it was indeed the case, as has been suggested
above, that the troops reviewed at that gathering had not all been camping
at Tilbury, this only underlines the extent to which the review was a
highly self-conscious propaganda performance. The troops supplied by
the nobility were adapted in a similar way: later in August, several noblemen
and councillors put on reviews of their contingents before the queen and
the public – first Hatton, on 19 August, then Burghley, Leicester and
others, and lastly Essex on 26 August, whose review was followed by
jousting. Although not nearly as well remembered as the Tilbury review,
observers in London found them highly impressive.83
It remains to discuss the counties’ responses to the council’s mobilization orders, which is best characterized as mixed. There were many
reports of great enthusiasm: in Dorset, the gentry voluntarily upgraded
their light horse to lances; Bedfordshire sent fifty more footmen than
were required for Leicester’s army; Leicester reported a great deal of willingness in his Essex troops.84 On the other hand, there were various
reports of meanness and evasion: refusals to contribute in Sussex, reluctance in Middlesex; Hertfordshire gentry were accused of sending horses
inferior to those they had showed at musters. 85 Indeed, the response
was equally varied within counties: in Huntingdonshire, for example. 86
This was the inevitable corollary of an amateur military force. Typically,
83
CSP Spanish 1587–1603, pp. 418–19. See also Burghley, Copy of a Letter (1588), pp. 25 – 6.
NA SP 12/214/31; APC, xvi. 200. NA SP 12/213/38, quoted in Christy, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit’,
45.
85 APC, xvi. 218, 219, 216; NA SP 12/214/69 & I.
86 NA SP 12/214/14.
84
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some of the most critical reports concerned the dishonesty of captains. 87
However, on the surviving evidence, the overall response can at least be
said to have been orderly and well organized.
Contrary to some accounts, the arrival of the council’s mobilization
orders did not necessarily require frantic urgency in the counties. For a
start, the counties had had extensive advance warning of the crisis they
were facing. The council’s focus on preparation of the trained bands had
been unprecedentedly consistent since the beginning of 1584, with a regular stream of orders building upon one another, along with demands
for muster certificates and incentives such as the visit of centrally appointed
muster-masters. From mid-June 1588, the country had been effectively
on amber alert: the council informed lord lieutenants on 15 June that the
Armada was at sea and required troops to be in readiness, captains to be
present, beacons to be readied, and so forth. On 18 June, the queen wrote
to lord lieutenants, asking them to encourage the gentry to increase their
contributions towards the defence, and on 27 June, the council ordered
lord lieutenants to have their troops in readiness.88 Therefore the mobilization orders of 23 July and afterwards will have come as no surprise to
the responsible officials. Indeed, many lieutenants had probably been
warning their deputies about what was soon to be expected of them on
their own initiative. Sir Christopher Hatton, for example, had written
four letters in mid-July to his deputies in Northamptonshire, urging them
to have all things in readiness.89
The one part of the mobilization which was likely to have been very
hurried was the assembly of troops in the south coast counties in case of
a landing by the Armada. In the south and south-west, the news of the
fleet’s sighting on 19 July evidently reached many people before the
council’s orders did. George Carey established his camp on the Isle of
Wight on 22 July, before the council had received news of the Armada’s
arrival.90 In the case of Wiltshire, the council dispatched Sir Henry Knyvet, a leading county gentleman and deputy lieutenant, from court to
take command of the 2,000 troops to be sent up from the county. He sent
orders ahead of him for the troops to rendezvous at Marlborough on 28
July. However, the other deputy lieutenant, Sir John Danvers, had heard
‘credible advertisement of the Spanish Fleet being nere unto our coast’
and acted on his own initiative, ordering mobilization of the county
forces. The county JPs met on 27 July to work out the details of the
mobilization, by which time the council’s orders of 23 July would have
arrived.91
87
HMC Foljambe, pp. 61–2.
APC, xvi. 137–8; the full text in HMC Foljambe, pp. 42–5.
89 Northants Lieutenancy Papers, pp. 56 – 60.
90 NA SP 12/213/40 I.
91 Danvers’s letter must date from about 22 July. Long, ‘Wild Darell of Littlecote’, pp. 208 –9.
‘Longleat Papers, A. D. 1553 –1588, VIII – Wiltshire Preparations against the Spanish Armada,
A. D. 1588’, ed. J. E. Jackson, Wiltshire Archaeology and Natural History Magazine, xiv (1874),
243–53, at 248–9.
88
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
Therefore in most cases, receipt of the mobilization orders would have
been followed by several days of final preparations, and details of finance
and arrangements were probably finalized only during this period. In
Gloucestershire, as in Wiltshire, there was a meeting of the county JPs,
who agreed to raise a tax of £854 to cover the costs of the 1,500 men
ordered on 23 July; this was extended once the council’s orders of 28
July, demanding a further 1,000 men, were received. On 30 July, the
authorities in the city of Gloucester (it is their book of musters which
records these details) held a muster to select 300 men as their contribution to the contingent; their armour was selected and packed into carts
for the journey the following day. The men reported to the county
rendezvous at Cirencester on 2 August, marched the following day to
Fairford, then on 4 August to Dorchester (east of Abingdon), where they
were reviewed by their lord lieutenant’s mother, ‘the old Lady Chandos’,
at Ewelme. However, ‘before ix of the clock on that munday [5 August]
tidinges came from Sir Henry Poole lyenge at Henly that he had receaved
speciall l[ett]res from the Pryvie Counsaile that all the captaines with
their bands should returne back into their cuntries and discharge their
souldiers.’92 Thus, although the Gloucester city band’s Armada campaign never got further than Oxfordshire, the response from the local
authorities seems impressive: the soldiers were selected from the band
which had been trained several times earlier in 1588, their armour had
been chosen and packed up for safe transport, they had been provided
with coats and wages, and they seem to have been on schedule to arrive
at London by the appointed day. It is true that some bandsmen bribed
their way out of the trained band, which hardly reflects well on the captains, but the lord lieutenant, Lord Chandos, responded promptly by
sending other men to make up the numbers.93
The Northamptonshire deputy lieutenants, normally some of the worst
foot-draggers in the country, also responded reasonably well. Although
the deputies had been hoping to get away with supplying only 400 soldiers,
the council called up all 600 trained bandsmen on 23 July. Over the next
few days there was a good deal of last-minute preparation. Although
little armour or weaponry was purchased, some was ‘trimmed’, or repaired,
and coats were bought for each man, at 15s each, a relatively generous
allowance. The four bands of 150 men each received four or five days
training, at Wellingborough, Oundle, Towcester and Daventry, costing
the county £200, plus ‘80 pounds of gunpowder for to practice by the
way, as they marched towards London’.94 The men left Northampton on
31 July, and arrived at Islington, where they entered the queen’s pay, on
2 August.95
92 Gloucestershire Archives, GBR H 2/1, fos. 18r.–33r. That same day, 5 August, William Heydon,
at Newmarket with his band of Norfolk trained bandsmen, en route for Tilbury, received orders to
turn back (BL Add. MS 48591, fo. 44v.).
93 Gloucestershire Archives, GBR H 2/1, fo. 24v.
94 The Northamptonshire accounts are NA SP 12/214/32 –3.
95 They remained there in pay until 14 August. NA E 351/242, rot. 8r.
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As mentioned earlier, these were an exception in arriving at their
destination, since the council was able to begin the demobilization before
many troops reached London. Most of the troops for Hunsdon’s army,
21,150 in all, were ordered to halt their advance on 3 August.96 Leicester’s
forces proved more difficult to dispense with. On 5 August, since there
was ‘no apparaunt danger from th’enemie’, the council ordered Leicester
to reduce his army to 6,000, sending home troops from nearby counties
which could quickly be recalled if necessary.97 Evidently he simply disobeyed, perhaps on account of the queen’s decision to visit the camp.
Leicester knew of her decision to come by the morning of 5 August, and
it took place on 8 and 9 August, during which there was a brief panic
that Parma might after all invade independently.98 On 14 August, Leicester was again told that the 16,500 men he still had in the field should be
reduced to 6,000, from the more remote counties, keeping the horse on
as well.99 Leicester remained reluctant; as late as 16 August, he was
giving orders to the deputy lieutenants of Kent to mobilize 1,000 soldiers
to replace others being sent home to the harvest.100 On 17 August, however,
the council gave order that the camp be dissolved altogether, and this
time Leicester complied.101 It is not at all clear what the troops still in
camp had been doing all this time.
Thus ended the English militia’s Armada campaign. In the light of
this article’s reassessment of the events of the crisis, Parker’s critique
of the English preparations appears overstated. The concentration of
defence forces in Essex rather than Kent was not a matter of ignorance
but a considered response to new intelligence which minimized the risk
of a surprise attack. The disagreement between Sir Thomas Scott and
Sir John Norreys over the disposition of forces in Kent is not sufficient
evidence that there was serious confusion over strategy amongst the
English commanders: Scott was not a professional soldier, and he owed
his command more to his local influence in east Kent than his merits as
a commander.102 Nor can it be accepted that there was confusion in the
council’s orders; the specific example cited is based on a misread source.103
The overall organization and management of the queen and council were
much more impressive than has been argued. The council sat every day
96
APC, xvi. 215–16; ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 86.
APC, xvi. 221–2.
98 NA SP 12/214/34, printed in Christy, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Visit’, 47; BL Harleian MS 6994,
fo. 142r; ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 87.
99 APC, xvi. 234.
100 Staffordshire Record Office, D593/S/4/12/14.
101 APC, xvi. 239. Bodleian Library, Oxford, St Amand MS 8, fo. 65r. (Leicester to Sir John
Norreys, marshal of the camp, to dissolve the army, 18 July 1588). Wright, Queen Elizabeth,
ii. 391–2 (Leicester to Burghley, 18 Aug. 1588).
102 Parker, ‘If the Armada had Landed’, 364 –5.
103 Ibid. 365. Parker writes that the council ‘ordered all forces in Kent to move to the sea-shore to
prevent a landing’, whereas this letter in fact ordered ‘the levies in Kent to be ready to move to any
part of the coast in order to prevent such a landing’ (Parker, ‘If the Armada had Landed’, 365 and
n. 23, quoting Twysden Lieutenancy Papers, pp. 70–1, which is in any case misdated: see above, n. 37).
97
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IF THE ARMADA HAD LANDED
from 22 July to 5 August, coordinating virtually everything. The response
to the movement of the Armada, with men called up from the south-west
and south coast once the danger had passed, was successful. It is true
that much of the detail seems to have been decided very late; the
approach seems to have been to get as many troops as possible to
London and then work out exactly what to do with them. This certainly
allowed greater flexibility in disposing the troops, and whilst there was
potential for confusion, the relatively small numbers of men involved
made this less of a risk. Furthermore, Parma’s operations would have
been very much on the hoof too.
On a broader level, the crisis allows an assessment of the overall success
of Elizabethan military policy in preparing the country to repel an
invasion. First of all, the fact that the trained bands existed at all can be
regarded as a success; certainly Walsingham and Burghley were extremely
proud that they had caused so many men to be ‘reduced into bands and
trained . . . under captains and ensigns . . . a thing never put in execution
in any of her Majesty’s predecessors’ times’.104 The command structures
set up by the council in the years prior to the Armada – the lieutenancies
in each county and the militia structures under their aegis – worked well
in the crisis. Even the slackest lieutenancy machineries, such as Northamptonshire’s, met the council’s demands. In many ways, the achievement of the trained bands campaign was not military but organizational.
Leaving aside for the moment their military prowess, the scheme ensured
that there was a clear chain of command to relay the council’s orders
to the county trained bands’ captains and men. When called upon, the
troops would (and did) turn out with their weapons, under designated
leaders whom they knew, and assemble at the rendezvous points in a
reasonably orderly fashion. As Paul Hammer emphasizes, it was the
government’s confidence in ‘how efficiently the trained bands could
respond’ which allowed them to take the risk of partial mobilization. 105
This was indeed a success for the council’s efforts to create a network of
command based on the lieutenancies. It has also been noted that the
counties were well able to act on their own initiative, implementing the
plans laid down in conjunction with military experts. Furthermore, it is
significant that there appears to have been no protest around the issue
of the militias leaving their own counties, even though the militias from,
for example, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire marching to join the army to
defend the queen’s person must have been aware that they were leaving
their homes undefended against any Spanish landing in the south-west.
Certainly, then, the trained bands had their drawbacks, but they were,
in Adams’s words ‘however flawed, . . . a precocious experiment in the
creation of a national system quite unparalleled on the Continent’. 106
104
NA SP 12/206/2.
Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, p. 147.
106 S. Adams, ‘England and the World under the Tudors, 1485 –1603’, in The Oxford Illustrated
History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. J. Morrill (Oxford, 1996, pbk edn., 2000), pp. 397–415, at p. 415.
105
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NEIL YOUNGER
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To some extent, this answers Parker’s point about the lateness of many
of the preparations, since, placing considerable confidence in the flexibility
and reliability of the lieutenancies, the council was able to organize the
defence mobilization in the very last-minute way demanded by the national
finances. The mobilization had to be tailored to the available resources,
and it was: to have repelled an invasion at the cost of bankruptcy would
have been a pyrrhic victory, if the country was thereby unable to maintain
the navy against future attacks.
Perhaps the most vexed point concerns the effectiveness and morale
of the defenders. Clearly, an assessment of the trained bands’ military
capability is difficult because they were never tested in battle, and
sixteenth-century history offers few examples of citizen militias confronting trained soldiers from which might be extrapolated the outcome of an
English resistance to invasion. Despite elements of success in the trained
bands’ programmes, the council was never able to force the county
authorities to implement sustained military training programmes effectively over a period of years. Although they would have had some
rudiments of military discipline, it is doubtful whether many of the
troops were outstandingly well armed or trained; at the very least, the
quality varied enormously. Perhaps crucially, few had experience of facing an enemy. On the other hand, there must have been an admixture of
veterans of various wars, and there was a sizeable pool of officers with
military experience available to be used.107 As Parker rightly argues, however, a crucial factor, should a successful landing have been made, would
have been the level of determination in the defence shown by ordinary
Englishmen. Anecdotal evidence supports Parker’s own case that there
was a good degree of popular anti-Spanish sentiment at many levels of
society. Many of the nobility and gentry expressed great willingness to
contribute their services.108 Parker’s speculation over whether the English
defenders of English towns would be likely to betray them to the Spanish
– in the same way as the Catholic Sir William Stanley betrayed the
Dutch Protestant town of Deventer – is hardly a direct comparison. 109
One problem which may have become very serious in any prolonged
campaign was the shortage of weapons, particularly of more modern
types. Throughout the period, the supply of weaponry appears to have
been the principal limiting factor in the size of county trained bands: the
counties invariably certified far fewer sets of equipment than men to bear
them. In July 1588, the council had to dispatch 2,000 pikes and 2,000
burgonets to the Essex trained bands, which would still not be enough,
107
On Leicester’s pool of captains ‘to attende the Armye for ymploymente if nede shall require’,
see NA E 351/242, rot. 7d. Leicester also made efforts to replace the local gentry with experienced
captains as commanders of the county militias under his command: see NA SP 12/214/1.
108 For example, CSPD 1581–90, pp. 516, 527.
109 Parker, ‘If the Armada had Landed’, 362– 4. There were of course Catholics in English towns as
well, although some care was taken, particularly in the south-east, to exclude them from the militia,
for example by administering the oath of supremacy to trained bandsmen: Boynton, Elizabethan
Militia, p. 111.
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apparently.110 At the height of the crisis, on 28 July, Hatton told Sir
Richard Knightley, one of his deputy lieutenants in Northamptonshire,
that the council was contemplating forming auxiliary units of archers. 111
There was also a widespread chronic shortage of powder.112 In this
respect it is difficult to disagree that England was underprepared in ways
which could have been remedied very easily.
It is impossible to be sure what would have happened had a successful
landing been made. In this context it is well worth remembering that the
land forces were very much the poor relation of England’s defences: it
was the well-supplied, increasingly professionalized fleet which was England’s first line of defence. Not only had it provided England’s advance
strategy, as in the case of Drake’s 1587 voyage to Cadiz, which successfully prevented the Armada sailing that year, but its strategy of hustling
the Armada down the Channel was a great success: in Howard’s words,
they ‘course[d] the enemy as that they shall have no leisure to land’. 113 As
Leicester asked, at the very height of the crisis, ‘If [the queen’s] navy had
not been strong and abroad, as it is . . . what case had herself and her
whole realm been in by this time?’114
110
APC, xvi. 198.
Northants Lieutenancy Papers, p. 61.
112 ‘Armada Correspondence’, pp. 81–2.
113 ‘Armada Correspondence’, p. 78 (Howard to Sussex, 22 July 1588). See also p. 81, where Walsingham
refers to ‘the Lord Admiral being so strong at the seas upon their back, [that] they will never offer
to land’ on the south coast.
114 NA SP 12/213/38.
111
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.