Qualla: Raid on Mount's Bay

Raid on Mount's Bay: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N p holmes, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jenkyn Keigwin died on his own doorstep. A cannonball from a Spanish galley anchored off Mousehole struck his stone house in the first hour of the raid, and when the smoke cleared his was the only building in the village still standing. Around him, on the morning of 2 August 1595, fishermen's cottages were burning along the harbour. Women and children fled inland over the cliffs toward Paul. Four galleys flying the cross of Burgundy rode at anchor in Mount's Bay, their oared decks crammed with three companies of Spanish arquebusiers under Carlos de Amésquita. For three days, the war Philip II had never finished with Elizabeth I came ashore in Cornwall.

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Image: N p holmes | CC BY-SA 3.0

Raid on Mount's Bay: A guide named Burley

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Grant, Public domain. The galleys had sailed from the Spanish base at Blavet in Brittany on 26 July, hunting for a place to bleed the English coast. After calling at Penmarch and sinking a French barque manned by an English crew, Amésquita turned north. He needed someone who knew where to land. He had...

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Image: James Grant | Public domain

Raid on Mount's Bay: Paul, Newlyn, Penzance

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Tanner, photographer, CC BY-SA 4.0. The vanguard struck inland and reached the parish of Paul, half a mile up the slope, before any defence could form. The village was defenceless. The Spanish sacked and burned it, and put the church of St Pol de Leon to the torch. Amésquita, in a letter home, called the building a...

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Image: Steve Tanner, photographer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raid on Mount's Bay: A mass on the Western Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Grant, Public domain. On the third day, before re-embarking, Amésquita did something almost theatrical. He sent Brother Domingo Martínez ashore with a field altar and celebrated a Catholic mass in the open air on the Western Hill outside the smoking ruins of Penzance, the first Latin mass on English s...

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Image: James Grant | Public domain

Raid on Mount's Bay: What the villages remembered

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Newlyn and Penzance rebuilt. Mousehole, the smallest and the first to burn, never fully recovered. For generations afterwards Cornish families on this coast carried the story without quite knowing what to do with it: a defeat with no battle, an invasion with no occupation, a war ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Raid on Mount's Bay: Flying the bay today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Grant, Public domain. From the air the geography of the raid is laid out in a single sweep. Mousehole's tight stone harbour sits at the western horn of Mount's Bay, with Newlyn and Penzance climbing the curve to the north and east, and St Michael's Mount itself a granite punctuation mark four miles ac...

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Image: James Grant | Public domain