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A FRENCH ARMADA? THE AZORES CAMPAIGNS, 1580–1583*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2012

ALAN JAMES
ALAN JAMES*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
Department of War Studies, King's College London, London WC2R 2LSalan.2.james@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

The Spanish Armada and the battle of Lepanto loom large in a remarkable period of international history shaped to a considerable extent by the deployment of sea power. Yet between 1581 and 1583, France also conducted a large-scale naval operation at great distance. A series of expeditions to the Azores reached a climax with the defeat in battle of a French fleet of sixty ships off the island of São Miguel in July 1582. Acting under the authority of Catherine de Medici and in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese throne, the commander Philippe Strozzi had not only led the most ambitious oceanic operation in French history up to that date and a bid to extend France's overseas empire but a serious challenge to Philip II's union of the Iberian crowns. Yet this was more than just a puzzling anomaly in France's foreign policy. It was also an act of royal authority and the pursuit of reputation and status by the queen mother that was entirely consistent with the domestic priorities of the crown in the context of the Wars of Religion.

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Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 1 - 20
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

In June 1582, amidst the upheaval of the French Wars of Religion, an armed fleet of up to sixty ships set sail from Belle-Isle, in Brittany, bound for the Azores, with as many as 7,000 men on board. Many of those involved in the organization of the fleet had been part of other privateering expeditions in the past and had an established, related interest further afield in Brazil. Yet this, ‘the largest French force sent overseas before the age of Louis XIV’, was exceptional.Footnote 1 It was the climax of a short series of long-range operations to the islands in the early 1580s, which were a more direct challenge to the authority and naval strength of Philip II, commanded by a relative and favourite of the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, and conducted in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese crown. Although the French challenge quickly unravelled with heavy defeat at the battle of Ponta Delgada off the island of São Miguel in July 1582, this remains an extraordinary enterprise. The question of French motivation, however, that is to say of the strategic purpose of the Azores campaigns, has not been adequately addressed.

The determination with which Philip II sought, and finally secured, the islands himself by the end of the summer of 1583 suggests that, for Spain, the stakes had been very high indeed. This had not just been a French attack on Spain's overseas empire but an intervention in a civil war, of sorts, which had started with the death of the childless Portuguese cardinal-king, Henry I, in January 1580 and in the closing stages of which the Azores came to play a key role. Very quickly, the duke of Alba led a Spanish army across the border into Portugal and marched on Lisbon. At the same time, a fleet was dispatched along the coast, and together they took the capital late in August 1580, forcing the Portuguese pretender, Don Antonio, into hiding. The Azores, however, held out against the authority of the new king, and plans were thus also laid for a force to sail out into the Atlantic to secure their obedience.Footnote 2 Subduing the islands, therefore, was the final, crucial step in the consolidation of Philip II's legal claim to the Portuguese succession.Footnote 3 Of course, the Indies convoys also habitually called in at the islands on their return from the new world, so a newly unified Iberian monarchy could not have tolerated a long-running rebellion against its authority there or a lawless, offshore haven for foreign pirates. Each year thereafter, Spain sent a larger, more powerful force until 1583 when a fleet, which included over forty armed warships and twelve galleys plus a complement of up to 16,000 men, was sent to the islands under the command of Don Alvaro de Bazan, the marquis of Santa Cruz, who finally put the matter to rest. In the aftermath of victory over the Portuguese rebels and their French allies, this veteran of the battle of Lepanto famously suggested to his king that now was the time to turn Spanish attention toward the invasion of England, a suggestion followed by the preparation of the Invincible Armada that sailed five years later.Footnote 4

The tragedy for Spain which lay around the corner is well known. Yet France, too, had just suffered a stinging defeat in an unprecedented, long-range naval operation of its own. An opportunity had passed for France to disrupt the growth of Philip II's power or to extend its own imperial influence in the Atlantic. Yet the significance of the Azores campaigns lies less in the audacity of French foreign policy ambitions, as such, than in their domestic implications. In the context of the political and confessional divisions of the civil wars, royal authority and reputation were the highest priorities for the crown. Both were at stake at the Azores, and it is only in this light that a fuller picture of French involvement can emerge.

I

The strategic and military implications of the development of Spanish sea power after the union of the crowns and the control of the Portuguese fleet that came with it has not gone unnoticed by historians. Fernando González de León has echoed a common perception by suggesting that there was a turn ‘from a Mediterranean-focused defence to an Atlantic strategy’, especially from 1580 and with the concurrent competition with Elizabethan privateers and others who encroached upon the newly expanded Spanish overseas interests.Footnote 5 From an operational point of view, John F. Guilmartin describes the climactic battle of July 1582 as the ‘first major naval engagement fought far from any continental landmass and … the last until the battle of Midway in 1942’. The final amphibious operations by Spanish forces in 1583 to take the principal island of Terceira he describes as ‘strikingly modern’.Footnote 6

Despite this interest, however, the Azores campaigns remain largely consigned to the footnotes of Spain's political and imperial history. More obscure still is the role of France, which supported Don Antonio and provided the bulk of the ships, men, and ordnance for his defence of the islands. This anonymity is partly due to the air of inevitability about the result of the main battle in most accounts to date, due to the misperception that Spain lacked any serious opposition.Footnote 7 When the ill-fated French expeditions are mentioned at all, it is usually only as confirmation of France's relative weakness as an imperial power or its lack of naval resources and organizational capacity. According to James McDermott, for example, in 1582 Spain's military ascendency faced a France that was simply ‘prostrate’ before it.Footnote 8 Yet the main reason that the Azores campaigns remain hidden from view on the historical landscape, nestled between the twin peaks of two of the most well-known naval battles of European history, is precisely this common concern with identifying in such battles elements of emerging modernity.

Traditionally, the battle of Lepanto (1571) and the Spanish Armada (1588) have been employed in complementary, if not entirely consistent, modernizing narratives. One had Philip II leading the triumphant rise of the Christian West against the regressive, dangerous threat of the Muslim, Ottoman tide, and the other cast him as the very embodiment of decline, swept aside by the growing power, enterprise, and imperial ambitions of Protestant, Elizabethan England. From such a perspective, at the Azores, there were no winners. France was heavily defeated, and for its part Spain soon suffered its own failure in 1588 followed by the re-establishment of an independent Portuguese crown after sixty years in 1640. As a result, there has been no equivalent narrative or historical orthodoxy.

In recent scholarship, modernity and its associated themes of overseas imperial expansion and of state-building continue to conspire to keep attention away from the Azores campaigns, which for France appear merely ill-judged and an unmitigated failure. At best, they are seen as a faltering step in the story of France overseas, in the tradition of Charles de La Roncière who long ago portrayed the Azores campaigns as a false dawn for France in the familiar, unfolding story of competitive European empires. Their failure he explained mostly as the consequence of the personal shortcomings of the military leadership. Philippe Strozzi, who was dramatically killed following his defeat in battle in July 1582, was a reckless young Italian at the French court, it is argued, and a ‘novice’ at sea who was chosen to take on one of the most successful Spanish commanders of the day simply because of his family connections.Footnote 9 Bereft of adequate leadership and even of clear strategic purpose, the effort, it would seem, was doomed from the outset.Footnote 10

In La Roncière's judgement, sealed orders which Catherine de Medici issued in 1582 for Strozzi to open at sea provide evidence that she harboured secret and ambitious imperial plans. According to these, Strozzi was first to occupy Madeira and then to secure Portuguese control of the Azores. Charles II de Cossé de Brissac, another favourite of the queen and, like Strozzi, the son of a French marshal, had been named vice-admiral for the expedition. He was to take his troops to the Cape Verde Islands. Following this, Strozzi was to go on to Brazil, should the opportunity present itself.Footnote 11 For La Roncière, the purpose of the whole operation, therefore, was to give Strozzi the vice-royalty of Brazil, in the process endowing Catherine with an overseas empire and France with a global legacy worthy of its status as a great nation.Footnote 12 Yet La Roncière's emphasis has only further obscured the campaigns to the islands themselves and the fighting there. Indeed, Frank Lestringant has recently gone further. He also claims that Strozzi's expedition in 1582 was all about the overseas imperial ambitions of the queen in South America, and he first refers to it as a design on Brazil without even mentioning Madeira, nor indeed the Azores themselves.Footnote 13

Charles-André Julien, who criticized La Roncière in 1948, did little to attract the interest of historians. Julien argued, more plausibly, that the queen mother's interests were rather closer to home and that she was simply pursuing her own dynastic rights.Footnote 14 Upon the death of King Sebastian at the famous battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578, which began the succession crisis, the queen mother announced a distant claim to the Portuguese crown herself. Not acting on behalf of her son, King Henri III, she could pursue her claim independently with an air of legality and to the profit of her younger son, the ambitious duke of Anjou, and his military efforts to secure the title of duke of Brabant offered by the Dutch Estates in September 1580. With an ambition scarcely less dramatic than that supposed by La Roncière, Julien suggested that by holding some Atlantic islands, she might have been able to secure the marriage of a Spanish princess for Anjou with some or all of the Dutch provinces as dowry.Footnote 15

II

Unfortunately, the focus on Catherine de Medici has tended to trivialize French involvement in the Azores somewhat, for neither her overseas territorial ambitions nor her personal dynastic posturing is sufficient to account for this undertaking. The steadfast silence in her surviving correspondence about overseas matters certainly suggests that her motivation for sending a force to sea in 1582 lay elsewhere.Footnote 16 Equally, however, given the weakness of her claim, it is extremely unlikely that she harboured any genuine expectation of defeating Philip II's much stronger one and of becoming queen of Portugal herself, or even of significantly altering international alignments. Indeed, although it is clear from the sheer volume of correspondence that the Azores largely preoccupied her attention in 1581 and 1582 and that she was determined to have the legality of her claim recognized and to receive from it some compensation or benefit, it does not necessarily follow that her aims were as ambitious or as clearly defined as historians have been inclined to assume. As Henri III is said to have declared to Pope Gregory XIII, ‘the least she can do to maintain her rights is to undertake some act which would serve as a legal notice against the king of Spain so that in the future he will not be able to claim that he took possession of the kingdom of Portugal easily and with no objection’.Footnote 17 Acting as an early modern monarch in her own right, putting up a defence of her claim might, therefore, have been purpose enough, reinforcing her status and reputation along with that of the Valois dynasty.

That Catherine had been operating in the personal interests of both of her sons, however, seems clear. By maintaining her personal legal claim to the Portuguese throne, however distant, she could shield Henri III from direct responsibility for the expedition. The interests of the kingdom would not have been served by open war with Spain, and on many occasions Catherine stressed to the Spanish ambassador that she was only doing her duty as an early modern monarch to back her own legal claim with force ‘which should not seem unusual’.Footnote 18 No one, she claimed, including Philip II, should interpret that as provocation or as an illegitimate action. As far as Anjou's machinations were concerned, she disavowed them and claimed not to be able to dissuade her reckless, ambitious son.Footnote 19 She could claim this, even as she prepared an expedition which clearly played to his military plans in the Dutch provinces.

Precisely what Catherine de Medici hoped the expedition might achieve militarily is not clear. Recently, in an echo of La Roncière, Strozzi has been dismissed as a ‘disastrous’ choice for the command who ‘disobeyed orders’ by engaging the Spanish fleet at sea.Footnote 20 True, Catherine de Medici might not have specifically desired the full-scale, deep-sea naval battle that occurred, with all the risks that that entailed, if it could be avoided. It was, nevertheless, quite likely to be what she had come to expect by the early months of 1582. With news arriving of a ‘large force’ nearly ready to set sail from Spain, the queen mother wrote in March to De Brissac, who had been charged with preparing an advance force in Normandy. The increasing likelihood of clashing with the Spanish fleet meant that it would be safer and more effective, she said, for all French forces to sail together.Footnote 21 Accordingly, De Brissac was ordered to Belle-Isle in order to join with the other force, organized by Strozzi in Guyenne, which was due to embark soon from Bordeaux. There, they would meet Don Antonio and receive her handwritten orders for the expedition. For obvious reasons, its precise purpose had been deliberately kept unclear during preparations, to the point that the Huguenots feared that the force was meant to be used against them. The one certain element is that, insofar as Catherine de Medici was concerned, a challenge to Spain of some sort was to be sought as a practical statement of her legal claim. The fact that she stressed that this expedition was to be ‘no mere raid’ on Spanish interests but something of lasting effect is not evidence of a failed design on Brazil, as La Roncière assumed.Footnote 22 It is, rather, a reflection of the need to secure some bargaining power and of the seriousness with which she hoped the legal basis of her challenge would be taken.

With news of the heavy defeat and of Strozzi's death in battle in July 1582, the queen mother expressed her bitter disappointment that an army that had been raised at her request in order to pursue her just and legal rights had failed.Footnote 23 Her anger was directed at the cowardice shown by those who had accompanied Strozzi and reportedly failed to support him in battle, whilst his own bravery in defeat was celebrated with pomp in Paris.Footnote 24 Indeed, though he experienced many delays getting his fleet to sea that summer, Santa Cruz had been similarly frustrated and was forced to sail from Seville ahead of a large part of his unprepared forces which followed later. Arguably, then, Strozzi did well to arrive first at São Miguel, one of two islands loyal to Philip II, and it could be said that he showed reasonable judgement in choosing to engage an under-strength fleet head-on in open battle rather than ensconcing himself on the island.Footnote 25 Without entering into a debate about Strozzi's personal martial qualities, we can still conclude that he acted in a manner that was, no doubt, consistent with the queen's wishes. Madeira and Brazil, therefore, should not be thought of as strategic objectives. Rather, they were alternative opportunities to challenge the king of Spain or indeed, given their value, possible inducements to the commanders of, and investors in, the forces themselves.

It is very difficult to assign any single, clear objective to this operation. Indeed, recent scholarship highlights the complexity of early modern warfare, which should serve as a caution against assuming that there was always strategic coherence in this period. A recent article from a Spanish perspective, for example, explores the practical and political difficulties Spain faced raising sufficient troops for the Azores operations. The authors lay bare a system that managed to achieve a great deal but which responded in an ad hoc fashion to military circumstances and which actually lacked clear strategic direction from the crown.Footnote 26 This stands in marked contrast to the indomitable sense of royal purpose portrayed in the traditional account of the Spanish perspective by Cesáreo Fernández Duro. Similarly, though it covers an earlier, more difficult period for the French crown in the Wars of Religion, James B. Wood's work provides a similar catalogue of logistical and operational difficulties, the enormity of which challenges assumptions about the effectiveness, and even the strategic value, of the royal army in the context of ongoing confessional civil war.Footnote 27

It is tempting to conclude, as Geoffrey Parker has for Philip II's career, that Catherine de Medici's actions were sometimes poorly judged and that she undermined her own interests with unrealistic expectations. Yet this might be to exaggerate the extent to which a personal ‘grand strategy’ was possible. There is a danger, in this way, not only of overlooking the strategic implications of the complexity of warfare, but of ascribing anachronistic ambitions and of simplifying political aims in war. As the growing interest amongst historians in early modern violence suggests, different competing interests could be involved. Notably, the work of Stuart Carroll and Brian Sandberg has demonstrated that a ‘warrior nobility’ existed in France, which was frequently involved in personal violent reprisals amongst themselves, and which also played an active, and even an independent, role in warfare.Footnote 28 Certainly, any attempt to define the purpose of the Azores campaigns is complicated in this way. It would have been difficult to accommodate in one operation the political aims of the queen mother with the interests of the likes of Strozzi and his captains, not to mention Don Antonio himself, who accompanied the fleet in 1582. If we are to consider French involvement as anything more than simply a curious anomaly, we may have to reflect on more than just the intentions of the queen mother and consider a broader range of motivations and influences.

III

With Catherine de Medici's blessing, Don Antonio's agent, the count of Vimioso, had been in France since late in 1580 negotiating directly where he could for military support.Footnote 29 By 19 May 1581, 500 troops had arrived at Terceira which their captain, Antoine Scalin, claimed was not one day too soon. He reported that Madeira along with Santa Maria and São Miguel of the Azores had declared for Philip II simply on the back of a rumour that Don Antonio had died; the other islands were on the brink of doing the same. In response, he offered the islanders the encouraging, but optimistic, news that Strozzi was on his way with 15,000 arquebusiers.Footnote 30 He may have been influenced by a promise Anjou had earlier extracted from the Dutch Estates for twelve large ships and 1,200 men, along with 134 smaller ships and powder and cash. Nothing came of this offer, however, due apparently to the extraordinary commercial terms the Dutch demanded from the Portuguese in return.Footnote 31 Nevertheless, Catherine de Medici was very keen to supplement this initial force in order to hold the islands, and they were soon followed by four Gascon companies.Footnote 32 While Anjou, with financial support from the king, was marching toward Cambrai, the queen mother set about the organization of the principal fleet. In addition to the forces being gathered in Guyenne, another favourite of the queen, Jacques II de Goyon, comte de Matignon, recently made a marshal of France, was entrusted to oversee preparations that were taking place in Normandy, particularly at Rouen and at Le Havre.

Despite the involvement of such an influential noble, the French fleet did not materialize in 1581, and Catherine de Medici expressed her frustrations with the delays on a number of occasions in November and December.Footnote 33 All was not lost, however. The Spanish commander of an advance force of six ships had seen his landing of 350 men on Terceira defeated by the islanders in July, and he was subsequently blamed, and later briefly jailed, for failing to wait for, and to co-ordinate with, a larger force that followed later in the year and which included twelve large warships, and over 2,000 soldiers.Footnote 34 The Indies convoy successfully returned to Lisbon in 1581, though two prizes were captured and taken to France which, according to the celebrated diarist, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, whetted the appetites of those in France who were motivated to come to the islands by personal greed.Footnote 35 Still, the climax of the battle for the Azores would have to come the following year, and naval preparations continued apace both in France and in Spain.

Conflicts between the different interests involved in the operations could have a very damaging effect, as demonstrated at the islands themselves in 1582. The governor of Terceira had been suspected by some of Don Antonio's supporters of harbouring worrying sympathies for the Jesuits there. To keep him from turning the island to the cause of Philip II, as the bishop who resided at São Miguel, the other main island, had done, that year Vimioso sent a replacement. Manuel de Silva, the count of Torres Vedras, certainly appears to have had a more robust style than his predecessor, but this alienated some islanders. It also worried Charles Rouault de Landreau, the French commander commissioned by Strozzi to lead an advance party and who arrived at Terceira in May 1582 with nine ships and a complement of 800 arquebusiers and fifty cannon. Later that month Landreau attacked the main galleon that guarded Ponta Delgada, at São Miguel, which was a surprisingly hard-fought and damaging encounter that ended in failure.Footnote 36 Unbeknownst to Landreau, five Spanish ships had recently been sent to bolster the defences there. Enraged, he returned to Terceira to accuse De Silva of having played down the threat at São Miguel and of holding back three ships which he had badly needed. According to De Thou, De Silva then turned Landreau's men against him by publicly accusing him of having come to the islands only to pillage them. Landreau was eventually forced into hiding, fearing for his life.Footnote 37

Such was the political situation at the Azores when Strozzi arrived with Don Antonio. Taking his forces to Ponta Delgada on 15 July, Strozzi landed and forced the Spanish troops there back into the citadel. On 22 July, Santa Cruz arrived with a force of about thirty ships, and the French re-embarked to face him. For days, the two fleets waited for a sufficient wind and jockeyed for position until 26 July when a small number of the French ships, led by Strozzi, attacked in a general melee, focused around the two flagships. Strozzi and Vimioso, it would seem, were let down by some of the French captains who did not engage, and they were then killed. De Brissac returned to France with some ships taking news to the queen mother of the defeat and the rumour that another captain had simply retreated from the fight and sacked the island of Faial. Reportedly, up to 1,500 Frenchmen died in the main battle, though only four ships were lost.Footnote 38 The remaining Franco-Portuguese forces retreated to Terceira, whilst Santa Cruz, after granting pardons to the inhabitants, left some forces on São Miguel and joined the Indies fleet two days later as an escort, returning in triumph to Lisbon.

Just what De Brissac reported to Catherine de Medici is not known, for right up to the moment that she received formal confirmation of the awful truth of Strozzi's fate early in September her hopes had been raised by rumours of a French victory.Footnote 39 This hope was not entirely unfounded. Despite the heavy loss, it is not inconceivable that something more might have come from this expedition for the French, either on the island of São Miguel had they stayed, or even in battle at sea against Santa Cruz, which for some time was fairly close run. Though clearly disappointed, Catherine de Medici responded with renewed vigour instructing the French ambassador in Denmark to buy a fleet of twenty large, armed, and equipped warships in Denmark, Sweden, or the Hanseatic ports.Footnote 40 At the very least, with many French forces still at the islands and an enraged queen mother vowing revenge, the challenge to Spain of bringing the Azores to obedience was far from over, and another major operation would be needed in 1583.

IV

Jan Glete has suggested that, having acted under the authority of the queen mother and not the king of France, Strozzi's expedition ‘formally was a private venture’.Footnote 41 His unceremonial death and the execution of a great many other noblemen as mere pirates at the hands of Santa Cruz demonstrates how important such distinctions could be.Footnote 42 The private interest in the operation was indeed considerable. Don Antonio had failed to get Dutch support, and Elizabeth I refused any state sanction for his plans. English support, therefore, was strictly private and limited to the seven ships that he was able to hire or purchase himself.Footnote 43 In France, on the other hand, where Vimioso had much more success, the motivating, organizing force for the expedition necessarily came from a number of different directions, from different political interests within the royal court, from himself on behalf of Don Antonio, and from within the body of privateers, seamen, and self-interested financial investors within France with whom he negotiated.Footnote 44 Thus, for historians, a simple, binary distinction between private and royal can be misleading. The king himself had formally condoned the expedition, and he even pressured Matignon to ensure its successful preparation and departure.Footnote 45 More than this, though, Henri III took a direct interest in the inevitable domestic political implications of organizing an operation on this scale.

One of the key organizational forces was the duke of Anjou, and the story of French involvement at the Azores has to be told in conjunction with his ambitions in the Dutch provinces.Footnote 46 Like many noblemen in sixteenth-century France, Anjou had maritime interests, previously organizing other overseas expeditions with Strozzi, and he negotiated directly with Vimioso. According to the Spanish ambassador who was complaining to the queen mother in 1581, Anjou also issued commissions in his own name to arrest Spanish ships and was accused of preparing a fleet in Normandy for a campaign to Brazil.Footnote 47 Strozzi, too, took a leading role. He occupied the world of financial speculators, many of whom bought and sold ships and organized overseas ventures, and he undoubtedly had a financial interest in this expedition. As an ambitious noble at court and a political creature of the queen mother, to be able to conduct a major military operation on her behalf was an extraordinary political opportunity, building on the military reputation of his family. There is, no doubt, also truth in the idea that he entertained the possibility of taking Brazil, or some other fantastically ambitious project, in the role of vice-roy. Such ambition Nicholas Le Roux has identified as a typical element of the construction of noble identity at the time.Footnote 48 Strozzi was, in effect, a self-interested agent of the queen mother, but contrary to accounts which describe him as a feckless youth, he was also a successful adventurer and naval commander who, in a typical pattern, had gained experience in command at sea on the Mediterranean, at Malta and elsewhere, early in his career.Footnote 49 Most notably, however, he helped to capture the port of Brouage for the crown in 1577.Footnote 50

Taking control of Brouage had been crucial, for it provided a base of operations in the heartland of Huguenot influence. At this time, the crown faced particular difficulties in enforcing its authority against entrenched interests in coastal areas, a problem compounded by the confessional divisions and conflicts that were endemic to France. Naval warfare in Europe in the late sixteenth century was broadly divided along confessional lines. There was Philip II and his newly expanded empire supported by the Catholic League, a powerful and militant party within France, on one hand, and the Calvinist Dutch rebels, French Huguenots, and English privateers, a loose Protestant coalition which preyed on Catholic shipping in European waters and on Iberian imperial interests overseas, on the other.Footnote 51 Thus Frenchmen could find themselves on either side of this divide. To date, the initiative had been taken by the Huguenots, who operated a virtually independent admiralty within France from their Atlantic base at La Rochelle from where they dominated maritime activity south of the Loire. They also undertook one of the first major French imperial projects, the settlement of Florida in 1562, and were involved directly or indirectly in other naval expeditions, many of them at the expense of the Portuguese empire.Footnote 52 Indeed in 1581, the Huguenots themselves attempted to take and settle Flores, the isolated, westernmost island of the Azores archipelago, hoping to take advantage of this strategic position in the mid-Atlantic to disrupt Spanish trade. Yet while some Huguenots dreamed grandly of a partnership with the French crown to displace Spanish sea power, it is clear that Catherine de Medici was not following any such lead in 1582.Footnote 53

Ten years earlier, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 had been triggered by the murder of the admiral of France, the Huguenot Gaspard de Coligny, and the consensus among historians is that the queen mother bears at least indirect responsibility. Coligny had been pushing for a more anti-Spanish foreign policy, but in the aftermath of the killings a royal fleet was gathered and used against La Rochelle and the English forces that were sent to the city's aid. More immediately, with news arriving early in 1583 that Antoine Scalin had transported some islanders from Terceira without Don Antonio's permission and that he had taken a Spanish prize to La Rochelle, Henri III wrote to the city demanding his immediate arrest. He was to be handed over to Marshal Matignon who had earlier received orders from Catherine de Medici to intercept him.Footnote 54

Equally unwelcome to the crown as Huguenot maritime activity, however, was the rising political and military influence of the duke of Guise, who led the nascent Catholic League in France. Guise aspired to the admiralty of France, which, from 1578 to 1582, had been held by his brother (and future League leader), the duke of Mayenne. This would have strengthened his hold in the French admiralty's principal legal jurisdiction of Normandy, where he already acted as a rival naval patron to the queen, reportedly even outfitting ships there for an expedition to Scotland.Footnote 55 The nomination of Strozzi to the command in 1581, therefore, had been no mere personal whim of the queen mother but a careful attempt to maintain independence and control and to navigate these difficult political waters. Other plausible candidates were considered to be too closely linked to the League or simply too politically unreliable. Guy de Lanssac, vice-admiral of Guyenne until 1579, for example, was one of many who eventually came under League influence. He enthusiastically encouraged the queen mother to support Don Antonio and requested a leading role in the project. A former partner of Strozzi in privateering ventures, he had also served with him in battle at sea, once notably at the capture of Brouage under Mayenne's command for which he received the governorship.

In 1582, Lanssac raised two companies at Brouage to accompany Strozzi, but just weeks before embarkation he suddenly withdrew. According to La Roncière, this was due to a personal dispute with Strozzi over the command. While it is true that he felt betrayed by the man ‘he felt was his friend and whom he had served and loved as such for over eighteen years’, there was clearly more than a clash of personalities at work.Footnote 56 Lanssac was specifically upset about having to sail under Strozzi's authority and not being able to secure a commission directly from the king, something he said that Strozzi, despite all of his assurances to the contrary, knew he would never be able to secure. No mere fit of pique, then, as Lanssac put it, he felt frozen out ‘from all sides’, and indeed by 1582, his political stock had collapsed.Footnote 57

According to Nicolas Le Roux's account of his fall from grace, Lanssac was initially too closely tied to the queen mother for the king's liking. More than that, he had begun to use his naval power in the area too independently. By the time Henri III started to isolate him and pressure mounted on him to give up the governorship of Brouage late in 1578, Lanssac was even suspected of open co-operation with Philip II.Footnote 58 Early in 1582, Catherine de Medici had impressed upon Matignon her priority for unity in command, even if it meant sending a slightly smaller force and, after the fact, she claimed that a decision to remove Lanssac had been taken on these very grounds. Yet it is still extraordinary that a favourite of hers was removed just weeks before embarkation. This undercut the numerical strength of the French force even as reports were being received of a much bigger fleet preparing to sail from Spain. This, it would seem, had been neither a personal clash nor a minor administrative matter but a more serious national concern.Footnote 59

V

Henri III's interest in the Azores expeditions is consistent with his improving reputation amongst historians and his ambition for the general reform of the realm with which he has been credited.Footnote 60 He had only reluctantly lent notional support to Anjou's ambitions in the Dutch provinces, yet his influence on the Azores expeditions can be clearly felt as he tried to guarantee that their organization did not upset the repose of his kingdom.Footnote 61 He was most obviously concerned with the many delays and specifically of reports of unruly veteran Piedmontese soldiers hired for the campaign disrupting communities around Brouage and Bordeaux as they waited to embark in the summer of 1582.Footnote 62 As the Huguenots looked on with increasing concern, Henri III claimed that his anxiety over the delays setting sail ‘had as much to do with the fears of which his reformed subjects complained daily and the crushing of his people’ as with the outcome of the mission itself.Footnote 63 He ordered Matignon, as a matter of priority, to ensure that Lanssac's troops which had been left behind were not kept together on any pretext whatsoever but immediately and forcibly disbanded ‘and even if necessary [allowed] to be chased by the crowd’ for the general relief of his people.Footnote 64 This emphasis reflects the predominant concern by the monarchy at the time for establishing a lasting, legal peace between the faiths, a key theme in recent scholarship on the French Wars of Religion.Footnote 65

The Azores campaigns also coincided with a larger reorganization of maritime government. By naming one of his favourites, Anne de Joyeuse, as admiral of France in June 1582, Henri III frustrated the ambitions of the duke of Guise. In August, he also issued an edict defining the authority and the various rights and fees to which Joyeuse was entitled. This was an interim measure, presaging the larger edict of 1584, which was a wide-ranging reform of maritime justice and government.Footnote 66 Whereas once this might have been interpreted by historians as evidence of an indulgent and reckless generosity to a personal favourite, it is clear that awarding admiralty rights and encouraging them to be enforced and collected by a trusted political servant was not just financial generosity but one way of enforcing royal authority in French ports with potential political and military effect in the immediate and longer term.Footnote 67

Vimioso, who also died in battle in 1582, was replaced as Don Antonio's principal agent by De Silva who canvassed far and wide for help for the coming year. Elizabeth I again declined to offer formal support, though she gave him permission to purchase artillery and munitions. Within France, he found much more willingness to help and, with the support of the queen mother, Joyeuse nominated Aymar de Chattes to command another French force.Footnote 68 De Chattes embarked from Le Havre on 11 June 1583 with a dozen ships gathered in Normandy and up to 1,200 men, but he was disappointed with the state of the island's fortifications when he arrived at Terceira. The Franco-Portuguese forces then watched with concern as Santa Cruz arrived at São Miguel on 17 July 1583 with what we might today call overwhelming force, that is to say with over 12,000 men and a fleet of about a hundred vessels of various sizes.Footnote 69 On 26 July, the Spanish landed at Terceira easily overcoming the defenders they encountered, and for three days they fought the Portuguese and French soldiers and forced many of them into the mountains. At Angra, the main port on the south side of the island, the Spanish galleys attacked the Franco-Portuguese fleet in harbour, while some others were sent to the island of Faial to fight the French contingent there, easily bringing the islands of São Jorge and Pico to obedience along the way.Footnote 70

Catherine de Medici had initially ordered De Brissac to lead the return to the islands in 1583 to take revenge for Strozzi's defeat. Yet Henri III intervened by insisting that the choice of command must belong to Joyeuse.Footnote 71 Whatever else might be achieved militarily, Joyeuse gave De Chattes the important task of reinvigorating the military effectiveness of the office of admiral of France by exercising unambiguously royal authority at sea and by defending the queen mother's rights with appropriate dignity and honour. Facing his formidable enemy, De Chatte initially aimed only to hold out on the island to the end of the campaigning season and thus to take the struggle into the next year. Very quickly, however, he turned his efforts to negotiating the surrender of the French forces and their safe passage home, brandishing patents from the queen mother and from the king himself.Footnote 72 They left on four Basque barques on a long, dreadful journey of fifty days to Andaye, in northern Spain, whence on to St Jean-de-Luz. Many of the French soldiers who had been taken prior to the formal capitulation were hanged or put to row in the galleys.

De Chattes's reputation and that of the French army, however, was still carefully protected. In his own account, he presented the French as more determined to fight and to defend themselves within the island's fortifications and less ready to surrender or to resort to what were said to be inappropriate tricks as suggested by the Portuguese, such as releasing herds of cattle to disrupt the Spanish forces (as they had successfully done in 1581). De Silva was singled out as a coward and was said to have sneaked off and escaped the fighting on a boat.Footnote 73 That their relative bravery was an important area of contention is suggested by a similar attack on De Chattes's own reputation in an unsigned, unfinished account which stopped with a description of him also fleeing the island at night on a fishing vessel after, it was said, no quarter had been offered by Santa Cruz. The author did not have the opportunity to correct this detail nor indeed to finish the account.Footnote 74 Along with a number of key figures, De Silva was soon found and publicly executed. Santa Cruz ordered the restoration of the Jesuit church that had been pillaged, established a new governor, and left 2,000 soldiers in support before leaving, victorious, for Spain on 29 August 1583.Footnote 75

VI

Conflicts at sea are often assessed by historians in the context of the presumed strategic connection between sea power and empire or, more recently, as part of an interest in institutional history and state-building.Footnote 76 Both perspectives, of course, are appropriate for Santa Cruz's victory, even though it was not the key to Spain's long-term imperial interests and the union with Portugal was not a success.Footnote 77 Yet there is a danger that such an approach might obscure the contemporary significance of the victory. For Spain, this was clearly not a minor, peripheral campaign.Footnote 78 Since 1585, representations of the Spanish triumph at the Azores have partly dominated the walls of the sala de batalla at the Escorial, the physical monument to the imperial power of both Spain and of Philip II and to the spiritual values upon which they were based. Much of the motivation for the Azores campaigns for France, which to some extent defy conventional understanding of national self-interest, is also rooted in the martial values of early modern monarchy.Footnote 79

To modern observers, Catherine de Medici's claim to the Portuguese succession might seem faintly ridiculous or merely a cynical cover for some extraordinary, though more familiar, ambitions. Yet whilst the legal claim itself might have been weak, it was still an effective focus for the range of other individual interests and motivations which coalesced and drove this extraordinary enterprise. It was also central to the enhancement of Catherine de Medici's reputation as an early modern monarch, pursuing her rights by feats of arms. This appears to have been well understood by Strozzi, whose ‘archaic principles of war’ led him to pursue military glory for himself and for his political master when more cautious military options were open, according to one of his contemporary critics.Footnote 80 Even after Spain's comprehensive victory, the queen did not abandon her legal claim to the Portuguese throne which she still plausibly announced to have pursued for the good of all Christendom.Footnote 81

With its campaigns to the Azores, the French crown flirted with the tantalizing prospect of disrupting the union of the Iberian crowns and of vastly extending French imperial interests overseas. Yet just as Philip II and the duke of Medina Sidonia would be forced to do five years later, Catherine de Medici and others involved could only reflect on the capriciousness of fate and the sometimes unfathomable will of God. To be sure, the organization of the 1582 expedition had been beset with difficulties. Problems with provisioning had caused serious delays which led to disease and misery amongst the French forces before they even arrived at the islands, and immediately following the defeat French naval power fell into precipitous decline. However, this was not the result of defeat in battle to the marquis of Santa Cruz, nor of any possible institutional or systemic failings, but simply of the wider political crisis that was engulfing the country.

In 1584, the duke of Anjou died, dramatically changing the political landscape. With the Huguenot admiral of Guyenne, Henri of Navarre, now the heir presumptive to the French throne, confessional allegiances polarized. The rise of the power of the Catholic League reignited the civil wars, and the maritime periphery of the realm threatened to slip entirely beyond the independent influence of the crown. It is in the context of these tensions that the significance of the Azores should be considered. By building her own reputation Catherine de Medici was also defending that of the Valois dynasty, and protecting royal authority was, of course, the greatest challenge facing the monarchy. Thus the campaigns had been neither anachronistic nor frivolous, and indeed by having a reliable servant in the person of De Chatte and a secure port at Dieppe where he was governor, the crown could still outfit a small fleet, which was later used to try to re-take Brouage from League influence. This was a legacy of those dynamic years that saw France make its audacious attempt to take the Azores and a practical expression of royal authority, through the office of the admiral of France, which would contribute to the survival of royal authority in the turbulent years of civil war that lay ahead.

Footnotes

*

All translations are the author's own except where indicated otherwise.

References

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11 Lettres, viii, p. 28, and note. The main orders, written in the queen's hand, refer directly to Madeira and the Azores, with Brazil as an additional aim for which separate orders would be received from the king. In the note, appended on behalf of the king by the secrétaire d'état, Villeroy, Strozzi was ordered to follow the orders as laid out ‘according to his judgment and in accordance with the intentions of the queen’.

12 According to d'Aubigné, Don Antonio promised Catherine de Medici ‘une partie de ses seigneuries esloignées pour ses prétensions’, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Histoire universelle, ed. André Thierry (repr., 10 vols., Geneva, 1981–99), vi, p. 270.

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21 Referring to ‘la grand force que le roy d'Espaigne a mis ensemble et qui sont prestes ausi tost que nous à partir’, to De Brissac, 20 Mar. 1582, Lettres, viii, p. 16.

22 ‘Cet que entreprenés n'est pas pour fayre une raflade: c'èt pour vous en rendre le metre et le conserver à jamès’; the specific object, however, is not mentioned in this letter, Lettres, x, p. 21.

23 To de Ferrier, 22 Sept. 1582, Lettres, viii, p. 61.

24 To Matignon, 19 Jan. 1583, Lettres, viii, p. 79. ‘Desfaite du seigneur Stroszi sur mer, par les Hespagnols’, in Pierre de L'Estoile, Registre-Journal du règne de Henri III, ed. Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenk (repr., 6 vols., Geneva, 1996–2006), iv, pp. 30–4.

25 Santa Cruz initially arrived with twenty-eight large ships and a number of smaller vessels (to be followed later by nineteen further ships, two galleons, and twelve galleys). Opinion was divided about the wisdom of taking on Santa Cruz at sea. ‘Relation contemporaine de l'expédition naval des Açores et de la défaite de Strozzi’, Lettres, viii, pp. 389–96; and see the very critical assessment in ‘Relation du voyage et de la défaite de Monsieur de Strossi, en 1582’, ibid., pp. 397–405. According to one account, it was Don Antonio himself, and not Strozzi, who insisted on sailing directly to São Miguel. This is suggested in ‘Relation du voyage et de la défaicte de monsieur de Strossi’, Lettres, viii, p. 397. La Roncière says that De Brissac refused to go to Madeira because he did not want to sack an island he was promised as vice-roy, La Roncière, Marine française, p. 179.

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58 Le Roux, ‘Imaginations’, pp. 537, 540, 543–4.

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71 Henri III to Villeroy, Oct. 1582, Lettres, viii, p. 407; and Aug. 1583, ibid., viii, p. 121, note.

72 ‘Instruction donnee au commandr de Chattes’, 6 May 1583, BN Fr. 16121, fos. 456–8.

73 De Chatte, ‘Voyage de la Tercere’, pp. 7–9, in Thevenot, ed., Relations de divers voyages.

74 ‘Discours de la prinse de la Tercière’, BN Fr. 16121, fo. 460.

75 Among the executed was Manuel Serradas who commanded the Portuguese ships and who led an attack on Madeira the previous year. And see Cueto, who argues that Philip II feared the Jesuits and their influence. Cueto, Ronald, ‘1580 and all that … : Philip II and the politics of the Portuguese succession’, Portuguese Studies, 8 (1992), pp. 150–69Google Scholar.

76 On the organization of violence at sea, see the works of Jan Glete including, most recently, ‘Warfare, entrepreneurship and the fiscal-military state’, in Tallett, Frank and Trim, D. J. B., eds., European warfare, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on the assumption that the strategic purpose of sea power was always imperial expansion, see N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Sea-power and empire, 1688–1793’, in Wm Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford history of the British Empire (5 vols., Oxford, 1998–99), ii, pp. 169–83, and elsewhere. He says this was an anachronism even as late as the eighteenth century.

77 J. H. Elliott, ‘The Spanish monarchy and the kingdom of Portugal, 1580–1640’, in Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe (London, 1991), pp. 48–67.

78 Parker, , Grand strategy, pp. 102, 167Google Scholar.

79 As described, for the seventeenth century, by Cornette, Joël, Le roi de guerre: essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du grand siècle (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.

80 He used ‘viels mots de philosophe au temps de résolution’, according to the author of the ‘Relation du voyage et de la défaicte …’, Lettres, viii, p. 403; Roncière, La, Marine française, p. 182Google Scholar.

81 Waiting for news to arrive, she hoped to hear that De Chatte had held Terceira ‘car si nous avons ce bon heur de la garder, j'espère que ce nous sera plus de moyen de parvenir au bien de la paiz pour toute la chrestienté’, to Longlée, 6 Sept. 1583, Lettres, viii, p. 141. As late as 1585, she maintained her pretension and wished to receive something in a settlement with Spain, ibid., p. 233.