History of the British Army (Vol.1&2). J. W. Fortescue
at some distance from the town, he sent forward a convoy of supplies towards it, protected by an escort of three thousand men under the command of the Marquis of Pescayra.[127] The convoy was to start at midnight, and it was reckoned that it would be within a mile and a half of Zutphen by daybreak. Pescayra was then to halt at an appointed place, send a messenger into the town and concert arrangements with the Governor for a sortie to facilitate the entrance of the convoy.
Sept. 22
Oct. 2.
Intelligence of Parma's design was duly brought to Leicester, who, calling John Norris, ordered him to take two hundred horse and three hundred foot and lie with them in ambuscade by the road by which the convoy was expected to arrive. Norris readily picked out two hundred horse, ordered Sir William Stanley to follow them with three hundred pikemen, and before dawn of the 22nd had successfully taken up the position assigned to him. No force appears to have been detailed by Leicester to support the ambushed party, and no scouts to have been sent forward by Norris to give warning of the enemy's approach. The morning broke with dense impenetrable fog, amid which the English could hear a distant sound of rumbling waggons and tramping men. Presently Norris was joined by all the adventurous gentlemen—Lord Essex, Lord Audley, Lord North, and many others—who were to be found in Leicester's camp: they had not been able to resist the temptation of an action, and came galloping up with their retinue at their heels to see the sport. The sounds of the approaching convoy became more distinct, but nothing could be seen till the fog suddenly rolled away and revealed straight before them the three thousand Spaniards, horse and foot, marching by their waggons in beautiful order.
The English gentlemen threw all discipline to the winds at the sight: they never dreamed of anything but a direct attack, and one and all went at once, each in his own way, to work. Young Lord Essex called on his squadron of troopers to follow him, and couching his lance flew straight upon the enemy's cavalry, overthrew the foremost man and horse, flung away his broken lance for his curtel-axe, and with his handful of men hard after him burst into a heavy Spanish column and shivered it to pieces. The routed Spaniards fled in disorder to the shelter of their musketeers, with Essex still spurring at their heels; and then Spanish discipline told. The musketeers fired a volley which brought down many of the English horses and compelled the rest to wheel about. Then the action became simply a series of furious personal combats. Sir Philip Sidney's horse was killed under him at the first charge, but he mounted another and plunged into the hottest of the fight. Lord North, unable owing to a recent wound to draw on more than one boot, dashed in half-booted as he was and fought as busily as any. Sir William Russell swung his curtel-axe so murderously that the Spaniards vowed he was a devil and no man. Lord Willoughby was so beset with enemies that only great good fortune and immense personal strength served to pluck him out. Sir William Stanley's horse was struck by seven bullets but found strength to carry him safe out of action. And meanwhile the drivers of the waggons had fled, and English and Spanish soldiers were tugging the heads of the teams this way and that with oaths and yells and curses; but still Spanish discipline told, and still the convoy moved slowly forward. Again and again the Spanish horsemen shrank before the English cavaliers, but the firm ranks of the musketeers always gave them shelter, and, charge as the English might, the waggons crept on and on till they fairly entered the town. Nothing was gained by the action. The attack, if supported, might have been fatal to Pescayra, but no support could be looked for from Leicester, and there was so little intelligence in the onslaught that no one seems to have attempted even to hamstring the waggon-horses. Zutphen therefore remains no more than one of the maddest of the many mad exploits performed by English officers of cavalry, and is remembered chiefly through the death of one of the noblest of them. Before the action, Philip Sidney had given the thigh-pieces of his armour to the Lord Marshal, Sir William Pelham; at its close he was seen riding painfully back, with the unprotected thigh shattered by a musket bullet. He lingered in agony for some days and then died. His body was brought back to England to be followed to St. Paul's Churchyard by the London train-bands and laid to rest, as befitted a good and gallant soldier, under the smoke of their volleys.[128]
Yet another scene of desperate valour was witnessed at Zutphen before the campaign came to an end. One principal protection of the town was an external sconce,[129] which on a former occasion had resisted the troops of the States for a whole year, and was now carried by the English by assault. The breach was barely practicable, the footing on the treacherous sandy soil being so uncertain that the storming party could hardly mount it. Their leader, Edward Stanley, however, was not to be turned back. Dashing alone into the breach he caught the head of a Spanish soldier's pike that was thrust out against him and tried to wrench the weapon from his grasp. Both men struggled hard for a time, while a dozen pikes were broken against Stanley's cuirass and a score of bullets whistled about his ears. At last Stanley, without quitting his hold, allowed the Spaniard to raise the pike, used the purchase so gained to help him up the wall, scrambled over the parapet and leaped down alone into the press of the enemy with his sword. His men, redoubling their efforts, hoisted each other up the breach after him and the sconce was won. Stanley, marvellous to say, escaped unhurt, and received not only warm commendation in Leicester's despatches, but a pension for life from Leicester's own pocket, for the most daring act that is recorded of the whole of that long war.
1587.
1588.
The plot of the Spanish Armada now began to thicken, and the scene must be shifted for a moment to England. In the Low Countries Parma was looking about for a port of embarkation from which to ship his men across the North Sea. He fixed upon Sluys, and in spite of a desperate resistance from a handful of gallant Englishmen, led by Roger Williams, he succeeded in capturing it after a siege of three months. At the end of 1587 Leicester resigned his command and returned to England; and in the following year all the best officers, and many of the English companies, were gathered together in the camp at Tilbury. Leicester was in chief command, with John Norris for his second, and Roger Williams among others for assistant, but these officers were not on very friendly terms with each other; and, indeed, the less said of Tilbury Camp as a whole the better. Contemporary writers indeed aver that it was a pleasant sight to see the soldiers march in from the various shires, "with cheerful countenances, courageous words and gestures, leaping and dancing";[130] but such a display was a better indication of loyalty than of discipline, and sadly different from the pace, full of gravity and state, which had been enjoined by the best authorities. There was, moreover, great disorder and deformity of apparel; most of the men wore their armour very uncomely, and the whole army refused point-blank to use the headpieces issued from the Tower. Ammunition again was short, provisions were scanty, organisation was extremely defective, and the general confusion incredible. Four thousand men who had marched, pursuant to orders, twenty miles into Tilbury, found that they must go that distance from the camp again before they could find a loaf of bread or a barrel of beer. A thousand Londoners who were likewise in the march were ordered to halt unless they could bring their own provisions with them. Leicester might safely remark that "great dilatory wants are found upon all sudden hurly-burlies,"[131] but there was no excuse for such chaos after the incessant warnings of the past thirty years. Elizabeth must bear the chief share of the blame. The woman who in her imbecile parsimony starved the fleet that went forth to fight the Armada could not be expected to show better feeling towards the army. It was no thanks to the Queen that the Spanish invasion was repelled.
1589.
1590.
I shall not follow the veterans John Norris and Lord Willoughby on their expeditions to Corunna and Brittany in the following year. Far more important to us is the rise of a great leader, and the opening of a new era in the war of the Low Countries. On Leicester's resignation of the chief command, there was appointed to succeed him a man whose name must ever be venerated in the British Army, Prince Maurice of Nassau,[132] second son of William the Silent. Though but twenty years of age when selected as Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the United Provinces, he had already made up his mind that if the War of Independence were to end in victory it must be fought not, as heretofore, with a mob of irregular levies, but with a trained, disciplined, and organised army. His own natural bent lay chiefly towards mathematics, which he cultivated as a means to the mastery of military engineering, and eventually reduced to practice by so sedulous a use of the spade in all military