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The Spanish Armada Lands in Scotland—or does it? (1588)
DOCUMENT CITATION: TRANSLATION:
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: In fact, it was the Spanish Armada that suffered grievously at the hands of the English in August of 1588—not the other way around. However, avviso-writers in Antwerp, the chief port of the Spanish Netherlands, must have enjoyed sharing such unwontedly optimistic tidings with the Medici court, which was resolutely Catholic and pro-Spanish. Spanish troops never landed in Scotland nor were they aided by the Orkney Islanders--least of all those of the island of "Hylandia", which does not appear on any known map, past or present. There is indeed an Orkney island called "Hoy" and better known islands elsewhere called "Ireland" and "Iceland". Perhaps this overly enthusiastic avviso-writer scrambled his Scottish geography and moved the mountainous region of "The Highlands" offshore? By September of 1588, when this avviso was circulating, bad weather and three battles with the English navy under the command of Admiral Howard and Vice-admiral Drake had already reduced the Invincible Armada to a straggling caravan of doom. Most of the surviving ships were limping homeward around the coast of Scotland, passing the Shetland islands on the seaward side, then down the West coast of Ireland, toward Santander on the Basque coast of Northern Spain. How could the avviso-writer have gotten it so wrong? Though these hand-written newsletters were an expensive and generally elite source of information, distributed to rich and powerful subscribers (including princes, government officials, businessmen and ecclesiastical dignitaries), they were the product of a peculiar journalistic underground. Avviso-writers, working independently or in organized "avviso shops", were a motley assortment of penniless scholars, aspiring letterati, moonlighting diplomats and marginal eavesdroppers. (See "Nice Place When They Finish It", February 2001 Document Highlights and "Whores, Heretics, Ecclesiastics and Jews", April 2001.) Like present-day journalists, avviso-writers worked against deadlines, struggling to get out a story under the pressure of time. (Most avvisi were distributed weekly though there were sometimes "special editions" when warranted.) More often than not, avviso-writers were in competition to scoop each other with the late-breaking news and insider revelations for which their subscribers were paying. There were established networks of correspondents or "intelligencers" around Europe and the Mediterranean ("This evening there were letters from London...") and information to be gleaned from people with privileged access to correspondence in embassies and government offices. In a seafaring city like Antwerp, there were also merchants and sailors freshly arrived from other ports, as well as private travelers of every description. Though information could make the rounds with surprising speed, it was often difficult to verify sources or check facts—especially for an avviso-writer laboring under a weekly deadline. And if one’s competitors were not lingering to check their facts, there was precious little incentive to do so.
In the avvisi, the more-or-less true story usually emerged sooner or later, after successive rounds of assertion, denial and revision--like papers today. And again, like their present-day counterparts, sixteenth-century avviso-writers were ready and willing to say almost anything that had short-term news appeal, while throwing the weight of responsibility onto unnamed "authoritative sources." The Medici Granducal Archive contains one of the world’s richest collections of avvisi. These allow us to track the developing "Armada Story", as it shocked, frightened, encouraged and bewildered people of all religious and political persuasions across Europe. As we see, information alternated with misinformation, disinformation and sheer fabrication. The fact remains, however, that whatever people believed at a particular moment in the past stands as an essential historical truth in its own right. Here are a few highlights: March 19, 1588: 100 Spaniards allegedly land in England and seize a port called "Baldras" near the Scottish border. This incursion is doubly problematic. There is no known town of Baldras in that part of the world (perhaps Berwick-upon-Tweed was intended?) And the invincible Armada was still massing in Lisbon harbor, not to sail for another two months. [Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 3085, c. 621; entry 11123 in the "Documentary Sources" database.] March 26, 1588: According to this avviso writer, the Spaniards are circulating counterintelligence that the Armada intends to fight the Turks, not the English, in retaliation for pirate attacks on Spanish shipping. Its true target is thus Algeria, not the British Isles. [ASF MdP 3085, c.588; entry 11099] May 28, 1588: Francis Drake "il Drago" is already lying in wait for the Armada off "Plaume" Harbor ("Plaume", pronounced as "plow-may" by the Italians, is evidently a quaint designation for Plymouth.) [ASF MdP 3085, c.645; entry 11139] June 11, 1588: According to an avviso from Rome, the Spanish are aiding the Catholic faction in the French religious wars; their intention is to distract Protestant partisans who might harass the Armada when it sails along the French coast. In fact, the Spanish had legitimate cause for concern since the strategic port of La Rochelle was the chief Huguenot stronghold. [ASF MdP 3085, c.649; entry 11138] June 18, 1588: The Armada is known to have left Lisbon harbor and is navigating the Portuguese coast. [ASF MdP 3085, c.650; entry 11141] August 13, 1588: The Armada reached England, where it resisted a heavy attack by Francis Drake; bad weather then forced it back toward the Dutch coast. [ASF MdP 3085, c.665; entry 11148] October 29, 1588: Genoese merchants at Dunkirk claim that the Invincible Armada has been broken up and dispersed. Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Duke of Medina Sidonia and Admiral of the Armada, arrived at the port of Santander in Vizcaya with just 25 ships. A further 12 ships, in very bad shape, reached La Coruña in Galicia; along the way they had encountered 10 other equally damaged vessels. "They are unaware of where the rest of the Armada has disappeared, in which many thousands of soldiers had embarked." Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and General of the Spanish forces in the Netherlands, was suffering from "extreme melancholy" due to his inability to reach the Armada with crucial reinforcements. [ASF MdP 3085, c.675; entry 11152] BIBLIOGRAPHY
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The
names of people and places (as we saw in the Hylandia/Hoy/ Highlands/Ireland/Iceland
conflation) were often the chief victims of error, in an age when there
were few detailed maps and atlases (especially of the Hyperborean wilds),
not to mention "Who’s Who?", telephone directories and current
C.V.s on personal home-pages. In regard to place names, there was seldom
a single regularized form but rather a proliferation of variants in
Latin and the local languages, not to mention the language of the writer.
(In 1588, as documented by the correspondence in the Medici Granducal
Archive, letterwriters could opt for Firenze, Fiorenza, Florentia, Florencia,
Florence, Florenz, etc., and still count on getting their letters delivered.)
In regard to transpositions of names, one of the more dramatic creations
of contemporary journalism was the expression "Il Drago" ("the Dragon"
in Italian), a headline-grabbing apellative for Sir Francis Drake. Though
"Drago" is quite a reasonable Italianization of "Drake", it conveys
a mythic fierceness not evident in the English original (where the word
"drake" of course means "male duck.")