For the battle was a series of personal encounters in which high officers were doing the work of private, soldiers.  Lord North, who had been lying “bed-rid” with a musket-shot in the leg, had got himself put on horseback, and with “one boot on and one boot off,” bore himself, “most lustily” through the whole affair.  “I desire that her Majesty may know;” he said, “that I live but to, serve her.  A better barony than I have could not hire the Lord North to live, on meaner terms.”  Sir William Russell laid about him with his curtel-axe to such purpose that the Spaniards pronounced him a devil and not a man.  “Wherever,” said an eye-witness, “he saw five or six of the enemy together; thither would he, and with his hard knocks soon separated their friendship.”  Lord Willoughby encountered George Crescia, general of the famed Albanian cavalry, unhorsed him at the first shock, and rolled him into the ditch.  “I yield me thy prisoner,” called out the Epirote in French, “for thou art a ‘preux chevalier;’” while Willoughby, trusting to his captive’s word, galloped onward, and with him the rest of the little troop, till they seemed swallowed up by the superior numbers of the enemy.  His horse was shot under him, his basses were torn from his legs, and he was nearly taken a prisoner, but fought his way back with incredible strength and good fortune.  Sir William Stanley’s horse had seven bullets in him, but bore his rider unhurt to the end of the battle.  Leicester declared Sir William and “old Reads” to be “worth their, weight in pearl.”

Hannibal Gonzaga, leader of the Spanish cavalry, fell mortally wounded a The Marquis del Vasto, commander of the expedition, nearly met the same fate.  An Englishman was just cleaving his head with a battle-axe, when a Spaniard transfixed the soldier with his pike.  The most obstinate struggle took place about the train of waggons.  The teamsters had fled in the beginning of the action, but the English and Spanish soldiers, struggling with the horses, and pulling them forward and backward, tried in vain to get exclusive possession of the convoy which was the cause of the action.  The carts at last forced their way slowly nearer and nearer to the town, while the combat still went on, warm as ever, between the hostile squadrons.  The action, lasted an hour and a half, and again and again the Spanish horsemen wavered and broke before the handful of English, and fell back upon their musketeers.  Sir Philip Sidney, in the last charge, rode quite through the enemy’s ranks till he came upon their entrenchments, when a musket-ball from the camp struck him upon the thigh, three inches above the knee.  Although desperately wounded in a part which should have been protected by the cuishes which he had thrown aside, he was not inclined to leave the field; but his own horse had been shot under him at the-beginning of the action, and the one upon which he was now mounted became too restive for him, thus crippled, to control.