The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden

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      From the Boazio map of Falmouth.

      In order to illustrate the danger, Killigrew cited a recent incident. A Spanish force had landed at Arwenack at midnight, and laid barrels of gunpowder around the house. Only one charge went off and the raiding party fled, taking a fisherman and a local boy with them back to Spain. The intention, said Killigrew, had been to kidnap his own wife and children. When they reached King Philip the Spanish detail tried to cover their failure by dressing the boy up in fine clothes and telling the King that they ‘burnt Mr Kyllegrews house to the grounde being the finest house of one of the finest cavaliers in all the weste partes’. Pointing to the boy, they told Philip that he was a younger son of Killigrew. King Philip made him the page of his own younger son, and rewarded the captain with a gold chain of 200 ducats and an annual pension. The fisherman returned, reporting the intention of more raids.

      But there was a much easier way for the Spanish to secure Pendennis Castle. It was common knowledge in coastal ports, ‘table talk’. A Spanish prisoner, captured at Calais, confessed that he had been ‘feasted, entertained and lodged’ at Arwenack. He was then secretly sent to Spain with an offer from the Englishman Killigrew: when he saw the approach of Spanish ships, he would hand the castle to them without a fight.

      On 8 October 1597 another Spanish Armada left La Coruña for Falmouth. There was, this time, no fleet to stop them. The English fighting ships, under Essex, were far to the south, in the Azores. One hundred and thirty Spanish vessels pushed north across the Bay of Biscay. On board were crammed 10,000 troops, along with chests of booty to establish themselves in Falmouth and the West Country. On the great St Bartholomew alone were 100,000 ducats and sheaves of printed posters proclaiming in English: Peace and immunity for all who turn Catholic! Devastation to apostates! The country lay like a ripe fruit before them. But twenty leagues short of the Isles of Scilly, the winds veered and strengthened, coming out of the worst and also the rarest direction, east-north-east. The fleet was scattered and the St Bartholomew lost with all its treasure.

      Once it became known that the Adelantado’s plan was to capture Pendennis and the Fal, Killigrew’s pleas were answered. A high-ranking delegation was sent to Pendennis to survey its defences. It included Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Ferdinando Gorges. They were horrified by what they found. ‘It is now,’ spluttered Raleigh as he inspected the headland, ‘the most dangerous place that I ever saw and the worst provided for.’ Only a few months separated the realm from disaster – with better weather in the coming spring, the Spanish would try again. Hundreds were drafted to dig earthworks and erect around the headland a series of 200 wooden perches. As the men trenched the slopes of Pendennis Point, and the order went through to the foundries for more guns, so in Castile, Philip II lay dying. Thoughts of invading England receded. As for John Killigrew, he was summoned to London when the true state of Pendennis was revealed. He was thrown into a cell in the Gatehouse at Westminster.

      For England, the Elizabethan era had been shaped by the sea, with its bounty, its threats and its natural cordon. It had also shaped the fortunes of the Killigrews. Just over fifty years earlier, they had been minor gentry, living in a modest house in a far-off province. Within decades, they had land and money, command of a castle, family members in Parliament and among the Queen’s ministers, and the highest offices locally. Now there was nothing to show for it. The line between villainy and heroism in Elizabethan England was always a fine one. Perhaps it was their own fault that the Killigrews found themselves on the wrong side of it, unable to resist the temptations that the sea offered them. Or maybe it was just bad luck.

      CHAPTER 7

      The uncanny failure of the Spanish to land their forces, repeated again and again, stamped itself on English identity for centuries to come. The weather had played its part in 1588 and had helped turn back two subsequent Armadas. What it took away from the English in terms of naval might, it gave back to them in mystique. But to speak of luck is to fail to understand the divine hand half hidden in the breeze and in the mysterious folds of the sea. A.L. Rowse was echoing a widely held belief when he wrote of the ‘anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish winds of the Channel’.

      The moment in 1591 when Sir Richard Grenville died off the Azores, with his crippled Revenge surrounded by enemy ships, the winds freshened to a gale. Soon fish were being hurled against the Spanish topsides. Grenville, muttered the watching Spanish (according to the Dutch traveller and historian Van Linschoten), ‘was raising all the Devils of Hell from the bottom of the sea’. Van Linschoten also reported that, after all these years of war between Elizabeth I and Philip II, the Spanish believed that ‘fortune or rather God was wholly against them’ while the English, ‘seeing all their enterprises do take so good effect, that thereby they are become lords and masters of the sea’.

      The same spirit fills the second volume of Richard Hakluyt’s anthology. Amidst the epic tales of sea fights, the taking of Spanish prizes and the firing of their carracks, is a strange presumption of eventual triumph. ‘It is evident in all the writings of that period,’ wrote the literary historian Anne Treneer, ‘that English sailors relied consciously or unconsciously on a force external to themselves, which made them invincible.’

      That English seafaring emerged so suddenly and so effectively contributed to the sense of destiny. From the high ground of the 1890s the jingoistic historian James Froude pointed to the early Elizabethan years: ‘the bark of the English water-dogs had scarcely been heard beyond their own fishing-grounds, and the largest merchant vessel sailing from the port of London was scarce bigger than a modern coasting collier’. But within a couple of decades, ‘these insignificant islanders had struck the sceptre from the Spaniards’ grasp and placed the ocean crown on the brow of their own sovereign’. For puff-chested British imperialists, the improbability of Elizabethan sea victories helped explain СКАЧАТЬ