THOROUGHLY alarmed at the prospect of being burned where they lay, the Spaniards cut their cables and made sail for the north.* They were hotly pursued by the English, who, having lost but a single vessel in the fight, might have cut them to pieces, had not the queen’s suicidal economy stinted them both in powder and provisions.*
Meanwhile the Spanish forces kept on. The wind increased to a gale, the gale to a furious storm. As in such weather the Armada could not turn back, the commander attempted to go around Scotland and return home that way; but ship after ship was driven ashore and wrecked on the wild and rocky coast. On one strand, less than five miles long, over a thousand corpses were counted. Those who escaped the waves met death by the hands of the inhabitants. Eventually, only about a third of the fleet, half manned by crews stricken by pestilence and death, succeeded in reaching Spain. Thus ended Philip’s boasted attack on England.*
abridged
* On July 29th, the morning after the fireships broke in, the chief battle of the campaign took place at Gravelines off the French coast. The Spanish commanders fled northeast, into the North Sea and away towards Scotland. On August 9th-10th, Elizabeth inspected the troops and gave a rousing victory speech at Tilbury docks, and on August 21st the Duke of Parma acknowledged defeat by ordering his Flanders fleet to stand down, as the proposed rendezvous with the Spanish was now out of the question.
* “The English crews” added Montgomery severely in a footnote, having already drawn attention to these insufficiencies in the English fleet’s artillery, “suffered so much for want of food through Elizabeth’s parsimony, that thousands of them came home from the great victory only to die.” A side-effect was that John White, who had come back to gather provisions for the struggling New World colony at Roanoke Island, was unable to set out again until 1590, a maddening delay of three years. That proved to be a humanitarian tragedy, and for White also a very personal one. See The Lost Colony of Roanoke.
* This was not the last such Armada sent against Elizabeth by Spain. Another in 1596 was frustrated by storms, and a third in 1597 suffered the same fate. There was yet another attempted invasion in 1719, when Philip V of Spain tried a fourth time and was once more check-mated by the weather. See The Battle of Glen Shiel. Montgomery himself wondered at the ways that wind and wave have conspired to keep the diverse peoples of the British Isles free. See Fairest Isle.