From the notes of Capitan Francisco de Cuellar

part 1

I guess the stories will be told many times over, I say stories because there will be many different versions from many sides and many different beliefs and wishes. I sit here to write yet another version, from mine own experience with perhaps the greatest crusade and the greatest tragedy of our time. I hope my story will be the one most people remember, but alas not to be naive usually history is remembered most by the winners....

My name is Capitan Francisco de Cuellar, and I was part of one of the greatest campaign assembled by our Spanish Empire, ! yet my role was but a mere fraction of the whole component of the endeavor. My ship was called the “San Pedro” of the Armada of the Galleons of Castile under the command of Diego Flores de Valdes.

To tell the story properly perhaps we need to go many years before the voyage of our Invincible Armada is to set sail. In fact in this mariners eyes perhaps there was another Armada that history will only hint at. The Peaceful Invasion. The first attempt to Rule the Island of England happened on 18th July in the year of our Lord 1554, when our then Prince Philip II Voyaged to England to marry Queen Mary Tudor. With a hundred and thirty vessels some hundred of them substantial, and aside from their crew eight thousand Spanish soldiers and a Spanish court of true hearted Catholics. Under a light rain the Spanish fleet met a Flemish Fleet, ! the Flemish squadron dipped it’s flags in salute and fell in as escort. By the morning of the 19th the whole armada was proceeding up the estuary of Southampton Water. It was four in the afternoon before all had dropped anchor under the eye of the castle.
Our ships entered the English port with banners and streamers of many different colors flying in the English sky, the populace was in awe at such a show of Spanish Royalty, as the trumpets blared and the drummers thundered their sound across the English shore, there were those in that land of suspicion that did not take to the idea of a foreigner being their King and a catholic one at that. But yet this did not deter the more than three hundred homes of being decorated, hardly one did not shelter some members of the English court, brilliant velvet, gold chains and medals. Every hovel swarmed with servants, every stable and byre steamed with horses; carts and baggage jammed the greasy cobbled streets. For Eng! land, the southern part of a moderate-sized island on the periphery of Europe, was waiting to welcome the greatest prince in Christendom.

It was not difficult to pick out the Prince’s ship, a Biscayan of nine hundred tons, El Espiritu Santo, because of the carved and gilded decorations on the forecastle and poop. The bulwarks of this ship had been hung with heavy scarlet cloth; silk pennons fluttered in the damp, sultry breeze, and two royal standards, each ninety feet long, of crimson damask with the Prince’s arms painted on them, hung from the mizzen. Three hundred sailors in crimson line the decks.
The watchers in the windows of all those homes were not to see their new king that afternoon. Prince Philip remained with in the confines of the Espiritu Santo and slept aboard. It was not until the morning of the 20th that he stepped on to the splendid barge awaiting him and was rowed ashore surrounded by Spanish and English noblemen! . On the barge the Earl of Arundel invested with him the garter. On shore the rain had temporarily eased so the prince could listen in comfort to the Latin speech of welcome e delivered by the enormous Sir Anthony Browne and to receive the gift of the white charger which the Queen had sent to greet him on arrival. The prince said he would rather walk to the house prepared for him, but Sir Anthony demurred and ‘took him up in his arms and put him on the saddle’. Thereupon, precede by all the English and Spanish courtiers and nobles, he passed through the curios and mistrustful and largely silent crowd to the Church of the Holy Rood to return thanks for his safe arrival.
The Prince had inherited considerable charm from his mother Isabella of Portugal, and he chose to exercise it upon the English. In the next weeks he was to need it all, not only to soften the distrust of the English but to allay the resentments of his own nobility who were to find themselves everywhere brusquely treated, and cheated and robbed at the slightest excuse. Of the eight- thousand- odd Spanish soldiers, not one was allowed to land. The fleet was sent off to Portsmouth to revictual and the troops dispatched to the Netherlands. The Spanish Guards were kept in frustrated idleness on board one of the few ships remaining in the Southampton Water, and attendance on the Prince was confined to Englishmen only. The noble Spanish watched in disgust at the - to their eyes- unrefined attempts of the English to wait upon their new master.

And it Rained: how it rained! The weather was always truly on the English side. For all the three days that the Prince stayed in the Southampton it rained so hard that the Prince had to borrow a cape and hat to cross the street each day from his lodging to the church.
On Monday he finally arrived in Winchester at the great Cathedral. At the doors he was welcomed by a sonority of mitred bishops, a procession to the high alter, sung Mass, and all the ceremonial by which God’s anointed was greeted in a foreign but friendly land. The wedding was not until Wednesday, but in the evening Queen Mary, unable to restrain her natural curiosity, sent secretly from the bishop’s palace, saying she wish to meet him informally at ten of the clock that night.
Prince Philip accepted the invitation. The Queen wore a high-cut black velvet gown, a petticoat of frosted silver, a black velvet gold trimmed wimple covering the head and sides of the face, and some of the finest diamonds at throat and waist that the English crowned possessed. The Queen at thirty eight was a slim, rather small woman whose fair hair had become mousy in color and she seldom wore it about her face. Her eyes were grey and unwavering under sandy lashes and scarcely existing eyebrows. Her complexion, though naturally pale, was good and still youthful. She ha! d a strong rather deep voice and a warmth and sincerity of manner that was not leavened by self-criticism or a sense of humor.
The Prince at once bowed and went towards her, first accepting her hand and then kissing her full on the lips in what he said was ‘ the English manner’. It was a greeting that the Queen clearly did not find distasteful. And the prince did the same to the Queens ladies in waiting many whom were young and pretty girls. Again the prince claimed it was the English custom and no one denied him.
The Prince and Queen chatted further for half an hour in a private room. She was clearly captivated. It was now well after midnight before Philip rose to go.
The wedding took place on the Wednesday, still in the pouring rain. Not for nothing the cathedral had been dedicated to St. Swithin. But in it’s five hundred years of history there could not have been a more brilliant scene than this. Philip wore a white satin su! it and a mantle of cloth of gold embroidered in jewels. The Queen again wore black velvet, but was so ablaze with precious stones that she seemed on fire. Her fifty ladies, according to the Spanish, ‘look more like celestial angels than mortal creatures’. The long ritual completed and the Mass done, the King of the Heralds, preceded by the blast of the silver trumpets, proclaimed the titles of their majesties: ‘Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Hapsburg, Flanders and Tyrol.’ It was a formidable list.
When the Wedding was at last over, the king and Queen walked side by side to the palace through the crowd, which behaved with notable restraint. At the palace was a banquet for one hundred and fifty-eight, with four services of ! meat and fish, each service comprising of thirty dishes, and endless toasts and more ceremonial, swords of state and ritual staffs and loving cups. The Spaniards noted that Mary was served on gold plate, Philip on silver; she, too, had the higher chair, was given precedence in everything. The English were leaving us in no doubt as to how they saw the future.
The meal lasted lasted until six, then dancing until nine. Here there was difficulty, as the Spanish gentlemen and the English ladies did not know the same steps. Philip and Mary solved the problem by dancing in the German style. As night fell the candles and torches lit the brilliant scene, but soon the King and Queen retired, not surprisingly after the fatigues and tension of the arduous day. Mary’s mother Catherine of Aragon, so steadfast in her loyalty to the country of her birth and the faith of her ancestors, would have been happy to have seen that night. It l! ooked as if friendship with Spain was restored and recemented and a permanent return to the Old Faith guaranteed.

Where did it all go wrong then? Clearly the Queens inability to produce a child. Had a son been born it seems almost certain that the English, however much they hated the union which produced him, would have accepted him as their King.
Writing home to Spain a month after the wedding, one of the kings stewards, Don Pedro Enriquez, a nephew of the duke of Alva, says:
Their majesties are the happiest couple in the world, and more in love with each other than I can say here. he never leaves her, and on the road is always by her side, lifting her into the saddle and helping her dismount. he dines with her publicly sometimes, and they go to mass together on feast days.

By this date most of the English had disperse to their estates. The Spanish were in less happy case. The Admiral of Spain was on his way! back with part of his fleet to Caruña; the rest had convoyed the troops to Flanders. There still remained some hundred noblemen with their servants, who had accompanied the Prince and who now in desultory fashion followed him to London.
Among them discontent at their early treatment had been succeeded by profound disillusion. The English were crude and ungentlemanly. And very unfriendly. There was no attempt on their part to hide their feelings. It was a barbaric country, full of heretics and renegades. The Spaniards found themselves jeered at in the streets, overcharged wherever they went, and actually attacked by vagabonds if they strayed far afield. Don Juan de Pacheco was robbed of a large sum of money and all his jewelry. The monks had to keep out of sight for fear of being set upon. Even such grandees as the duke of Alva. were given inferior lodgings on the way. When they reached London it was little better. There were constant quarreling, and one week three Englishmen and one Spaniard were hanged for brawling. Two of the most distinguished of Philips knights of Santiago were set on in the streets by a raucous crowd who had taken offense at their clothes and tried to strip it off their backs.
Soon the Spanish noblemen were craving their Prince’s leave to go, and by late September all had slipped away except for Alva and four others and their personal servants. Thankfully the dukes and marquises, the counts and the knights took ship for home, bearing with them a memory of a land of uncivil and unpolished barbarians. But also a land of richness and plenty, the halls of the nobles doubly resplendent with the loot of the despoiled monasteries; a land of beautiful open harbors, of green fields and abundant flowers, of great flocks of sheep, of splendid palaces and churches and populous and prosperous villages and towns. They had come to conquer in friendship. The first Spanish invasion of England was nearly! over.

Philip stayed a little over a year. During that time Mary fell completely in love with him, and she adored him for the rest of her short life.
In November Cardinal Pole returned from Rome to be made archbishop of Canterbury. On the 30th Pole solemnly absolved the Lords of Commons and the whole country from their apostasy and accepted England back into the roman Catholic Church. At the end of the year the old heresy laws were revived, and the first Protestant was burned at the stake on the 4th February 1555.
Of course some of the Protestants who burned did make things difficult for themselves. What could one do, for instance, with a preacher who on New Years Eve 1555 offered up prayers from his pulpit for the Queen’s death?
In November 1554 Mary announced she was with child by May of 1555 it became clear she was mistaken. In August of that year Philip received word of his father’s decision King Charles the V of Spain to abdicate in his favor, and on the 3rd of September he left Dover to cross Calais and ride to Brussels, where in the Hall of the Golden Fleece he formally accepted the sovereignty of the Netherlands. Early in the following year he became King of Spain.
Affairs of the state which were all-demanding, kept him away from England and his wife for eighteen months. When he returned in March of 1557 and was reunited with Mary, it was urged that England should honor her alliance with Spain and declare war on France. On the 7th of June England entered into a war for which she was completely unprepared, and soon after Philip announced his departure. On the 3rd of July he and his Queen set out for Dover, spending a night at Sittingbourne. Mary was weak and ailing, and grieved at the thought of another separation. When he left her on the 5th of July neither of them was to know that i! t was their last meeting. In sixteen months she was dead. Philip was never to visit England again.

One other event of great consequence occurred during Philip’s visits to England. He met the tall, pale, slim, auburn-haired girl of twenty-one who was to succeed Mary and was to be his adversary all his life.
The Prince and Elizabeth got on rather well, talking for many length of time from everything worldly. The Prince then thirty-eight had an eye for everything pretty, and Elizabeth, if not exactly pretty, had grace and vitality and charm and the ineffable glamour of youth- a very different person from the intent, plain, spinster-like, delicate woman who was his wife. Mary took to jealousy, the King fought in the young princess favor ensuring no foul came to Elizabeth. As for Elizabeth she desperately needed an ally in her position as a royal political -prisoner to her sisters reign. A venetian Ambassador Giovanni Michieli, reported to Venice ‘ At the time of the Queen’s pregnancy Lady Elizabeth contrived so to ingratiate herself with all the Spaniards and especially the King, that ever since no one has favored her more than he does’, and that ‘the King had some particular design towards her.’

After Mary’s death Elizabeth became the newly crowned royal of England, the King dispatched his ambassodore Count de Feria to represent his proposal to marriage. Philip forbade his ambassador to remind Elizabeth of any favor that she might owe him. It appears, however, that de Feria disobeyed his royal master, for Elizabeth's reply is documented in a manuscript still lying in the Spanish archives in Samancas. ‘It is the people who have placed me in the position I present hold as the declared successor to the crown.’

end of part 1