IX. 1625. CHAP. fleets. fleets. In a few minutes casks were broached in every direction, and well-nigh the whole army was reduced to a state of raving drunkenness. Interference was useless, and the officers were well content that the enemy was ignorant of the chance offered him. Oct. 24. Disgraceful as the scene was, it had no appreciable effect upon the success or failure of the expedition. When morning dawned it was evident that the men could not be kept another day without food, even if there had been any object to be gained by remaining where they were.1 Leaving therefore a hundred poor wretches lying drunk in the ditches to be butchered by the Spaniards, Wimbledon returned to Puntal, to learn that the attack which he had ordered upon the Spanish Failure of ships had not been carried out. Their commanders had Oct. 25. Retreat to the attack upon the ships. made use of their time whilst the English were battering Puntal, and, warping their largest vessels up a narrow creek at the head of the harbour, had guarded them by sinking a merchantman at the entrance. Argall, to whom the attack had been entrusted by Denbigh, had only to report that the thing was impracticable. However great may be the risk in forming an opinion on imperfect data and with imperfect knowledge, it is diffi 1 Let Wimbledon be judged by his own Journal. "Now this disorder happening," he writes, "made us of the council of war to corsider that since the going to the bridge was no great design, but to meet with the enemy and to spoil the country, neither could we victual any men that should be left there, and that the galleys might land as many men as they would there to cut them off: and that when my Lord of Essex took Cadiz, Conyers Clifford was taxed by Sir Francis Vere . . . with mistaking the directions that were given him to go no further from the town than the throat of the land, which is not above two miles, where he might be seconded and relieved, and be ready to relieve others; but he went to the bridge, which was twelve miles off'; so in regard there was no necessity, this disorder happening and want of victuals, we resolved to turn back again, which we did." The marginal note to this is, "Why did his Lordship then go to the bridge without victuals and to lose time, having such a precedent against it?" WIMBLEDON'S RETURN. cult to resist the impression that a combined attack by sea and land would not have been made in vain, and that if Wimbledon, instead of wasting his time in pursuing a flying enemy, had contented himself with acting in conjunction with Argall, a very different result would have been obtained. But however this may have been, it was now too late to repair the fault committed. A reconnaissance of the fortifications of Cadiz convinced the English commanders that the town was as unassailable as the ships. The Plate fleet, the main object of the voyage, was now daily expected, and there was no time to linger any longer. On the 27th the men were re-embarked. The next day Puntal was abandoned, and the great armament stood out to sea as majestic and as harmless barked. as when it had arrived six days before. Oct. 27. The men re-em Oct. 28. Nov. 4. The look Plate fleet. On the 4th of November the English fleet arrived at its appointed station, stretching out far to seaward from out for the the southern coast of Portugal. Though no man on board knew it, the quest was hopeless from the beginning. The Spanish treasure ships, alarmed by rumours of war which had been wafted across the Atlantic, had this year taken a long sweep to the south. Creeping up the coast of Africa, they had sailed into Cadiz Bay two days after Wimbledon's departure.1 It may be that fortune was not wholly on the side of Spain. Judging by the exploits of the merchant captains before Puntal, it is at least possible that instead of the English fleet taking the galleons, the galleons might have taken the English fleet. At all events, if the Spaniards had trusted to flight rather than to valour, the English vessels would hardly have succeeded in overtaking them. With their bottoms foul CHAP. IX. 1625. Nov. 16. Return to England. Bad con dition of the ships and men. Buckingham's part in the matter. with weeds, and leaking at every pore from long exposure to the weather, they found it hard to keep the sea at all. It had been at first resolved to keep watch till the 20th, but on the 16th orders were given to make sail for home with all possible speed. It was indeed time. The officials who had been charged with supplying the fleet had been fraudulent or careless. Hulls and tackle were alike rotten. One ship had been sent out with a set of old sails which had done service in the fight with the Armada. The food was bad, smelling 'so as no dog in Paris Garden would eat it.'1 The cyder2 was foul and unwholesome. Disease raged among the crews, and in some cases it was hard to bring together a sufficient number of men to work the ships. One by one, all through the winter months, the shattered remains of the once powerful fleet came staggering home, to seek refuge in whatever port the winds and waves would suffer. It was certain that so portentous a failure would add heavily to the counts of the indictment which had long been gathering against Buckingham. After his defiant challenge to public opinion at Oxford, it would be in vain for him to argue before a new House of Commons that he was not answerable for Wimbledon's neglect of his opportunities at Cadiz, and still less for the accident by which the Plate fleet had escaped. Nor, after all allowances have been made for exagge ration, is it easy to deny that the popular condemnation was in the main just. The commanders of the expedition, and the officials at home by whom the preparations were made, were Buckingham's nominees, and the system of personal favouritism, the worst 1 Sir M. Geere to W. Geere, Dec. 11; S. P. Dom., xi. 49. 2 Beverage, in these letters, means cyder. It is the usual word in Devonshire now for common cyder. CAUSES OF WIMBLEDON'S FAILURE. IX. 1625. Dec. 325 canker of organisation, had never been more flourishing CHAP. than under his auspices. Nor was it only indirectly that the misfortunes of the expedition were traceable to Buckingham. If, upon his arrival at Cadiz, Wimbledon had been too much distracted by the multiplicity of objects within his reach to strike a collected blow at any one of them, so had it been with the Lord High Admiral at home. Undecided for months whether the fleet was to be the mere auxiliary of the army in the siege of Dunkirk, or whether the army was to be the mere auxiliary of a fleet whose main object was the capture of the Plate fleet, he had no room in his mind for that careful special preparation for a special object which is the main condition of success in war as in everything else. If Wimbledon's errors as a commander were thus the reflection, if not the actual result, of Buckingham's own errors, the other great cause of failure, the misconduct of the merchant captains, brings clearly before us that incapacity for recognising the real conditions of action which was the fertile source of almost all the errors alike of Buckingham and of Charles. The great Cadiz expedition of which Raleigh had been the guiding spirit, had been animated, like all other successful efforts, by the joint force of discipline and enthusiasm. A high-spirited people, stung to anger by a lifelong interference with its religion, its commerce, and its national independence, had sent forth its sons burning to requite their injuries upon the Spanish nation and the Spanish king, and ready to follow the slightest command from the tried and trusted leaders who had learned their work through a long and varied experience by sea and land. How different was everything now! It is hardly possible to doubt that the war of 1625 never was and never could have been as popular as the war of 1588 CHAP. IX. Dec. and 1597. It was a political and religious rather than a national war, awakening strong popular sympathies, 1625. indeed, so long as the home danger of a Spanish marriage lasted, but liable to be deserted by those sympathies when that danger was at an end. And if the enthusiasm were lacking, its place was certainly not supplied by discipline. The commanders were personally brave men, and most of them were skilled in some special branch of the art of war, but utterly without opportunities for acquiring the skill which would have enabled them to direct the motions of that most delicate of all instruments of warfare, a joint military and naval expedition. It was possible that after eight or ten years of war so great an effort might have been successful. It would have been next to a miracle if it had been successful in 1625. No serious investigation. The worst side of the matter was that Charles did not see in the misfortunes which had befallen him any reason for attempting to probe the causes of his failure to the bottom. Some slight investigation there was into the mistakes which had been committed in Spain. But nothing was done to trace out the root of the mischief at home. Sir James Bagg and Sir Allen Apsley, who had victualled the fleet before it sailed, were not asked to account for the state in which the provisions had been found, and they continued to enjoy Buckingham's favour as before. No officer of the dockyard was put upon his defence on account of the condition of the spars and sails. There was nothing to warrant that another fleet would not be sent forth the next spring equally unprovided and ill equipped. In the meanwhile the King and his minister had fresh objects in view, and it was always easy for them to speak of past failures as the result of accident or misfortune. |