Few episodes in English History are as myth laden as the story of the Armada. The Elizabethan propaganda machine swung smartly into gear and successfully ensured 1588’s fake news stuck. It had Sir Francis Drake standing defiantly against Spain, a heroic symbol of England’s swashbuckling confidence toward the world. And Queen Elizabeth making inspirational heroic speeches to the army about to fight an invasion. Unfortunately many people still believe this spin.
Philip's aim
So where to start demythologising? Philip II of Imperial Habsburg Spain had married Mary, Elizabeth’s half-sister, over 30 years before. He had tried to rein in some of her excesses, but as a highly devout Catholic he was still keen to turn Protestant Elizabethan England back to the true faith. English privateers were attacking Spanish ships, too, with Drake’s provocative 1587 raid on Cadiz seen as the last straw. But Mary Queen of Scots’ execution that year was also key, as there was no longer a risk that England would fall under the control of the Habsburg empire's main rival, France.
Philip finally acted, building up a large fleet. Its
purpose was not basically to invade, but to create a bridgehead and provide support
for the Duke of Parma’s battle hardened army of 30,000 to cross from the
Spanish Netherlands. Backed, Philip thought, by large numbers of English
Catholics rising in sympathy, they would move on London to remove Queen
Elizabeth and her government.
The Duke of Medina Sidonia, an aristocratic court
favourite, was appointed to lead this ‘enterprise’. He had no experience of
naval command and didn’t want the job - he wasn't sure he was up to it. He wrote to Philip asking that a man with
more relevant qualifications take responsibility. He also said he believed the
plan would fail, though this advice was kept from Philip. Farnese, the Duke of
Parma, also thought it would fail. An attempt was made to cobble something
together, and Spain ended up with a plan nobody much wanted. Philip said God
would guide them.
130 ships left in late May from Lisbon, then after
storms struck, started again from Corunna. Medina Sidonia was even less confident now and
wrote to Philip that his force was weak, and ‘we should seek honourable terms
with the enemy’. Meanwhile Parma warned Philip that the flat river barges to
carry his troops across the channel could not meet the Armada at sea. “If we
come across any armed English or Dutch rebel ships they could destroy us with
the greatest ease”.
Engaging the Spanish fleet
Yet the Armada set sail and was sighted off the Lizard
on 19th July. It moved in a crescent formation up the channel. Lord
Howard, the English commander, had 200 ships in total, though only 34 were naval
warships, and much of the fleet was at first trapped in Plymouth by the tide.
Drake was Vice Admiral, having contributed 12 privateer vessels. When two of
the Armada ships, San Salvador and Nuestra Señora de Rosario, collided, and were abandoned, Drake turned his ship back
to loot them. This was characteristic of him, of course, and it angered
colleagues. The result was to cost the English fleet a whole day to re-group
and catch up. They were chasing the Armada up the channel. But they were
wasting ammunition, with their guns mainly out of range and having little
effect. Spanish vessels sunk? Zero.
The Armada waited at anchor at Gravelines, near
Dunkirk, the nearest point of the Spanish Netherlands to England. But Parma had
not yet arrived. Worse, Dunkirk was blockaded by 30 Dutch rebel vessels (called
flyboats) under Admiral Justinus of Nassau. These effectively barred the way
for Parma’s barges in the shallow waters. So it was impossible to make the
rendezvous. In any case Parma’s force had been decimated by illness and he had
only 16,000 troops available.
On 28 July eight English ships were loaded with pitch
and explosives, set alight, and sent into the Armada off Gravelines. Some of
the Spanish vessels slipped their anchors. These fireships were not as
effective as the ‘Antwerp hellburners’ used by the Dutch against Spain a few
years earlier. A few Spanish ships ran aground on the shoals of that coast. But
still no vessels had been sunk.
Then the wind changed direction and pushed the Armada
largely intact into the North Sea. Despite the myth of it being scattered, it
was in reasonable order at this stage. The English ships, being low on ammunition,
followed at a respectful distance. Drake actually raided one or two easy
transports, not armed warships, for prizes. Typical behaviour similar to the
earlier - but much more costly - Rosario
affair, when Drake, ordered to shadow the Armada, had turned off his light and
left his station. Howard buried his doubts, reluctant to court martial
a naval hero during a national crisis.
Tilbury speech
On 8th August Elizabeth addressed some of
the 4000 troops Lord Dudley had gathered at Tilbury. This speech “I may have
the body of a weak and feeble woman…” has gone down in history as a defiant
national call to arms. But it was a full 10 days after the Gravelines clash. The
Armada was by then way up in the North Sea in Scottish waters. Easier to sound tough
once the enemy has withdrawn. And in one of her many mean spirited acts, the
queen ordered immediate demobilisation of the army to save less than £800 a day.
The Armada later ran into severe storms across the
north of Scotland and on the Irish Atlantic coast, where many of the ships were
wrecked. Despite this, most of the fleet returned home to Spain. The ships
themselves were understandably in a poor state, and many of the sailors sick
and hungry. Yet the English sailors were starving too. Illness also caused them
to die by the thousand. Scandalously they also went unpaid. Some English commanders
used their own funds to try and alleviate suffering.
Legacy
England decided to offer a return fixture next year.
150 ships and 23,000 men were sent under Drake to attack Spain. 40 of his vessels were captured or sunk, and many thousands of men were killed or died of disease. The chance
to strike a decisive blow against a weakened Spanish navy was lost. This
catastrophic failure almost emptied the English treasury. Another
disaster that for some reason many of us didn’t learn anything about in school.
Historian Robert Hutchinson points out that some smaller Spanish efforts in 1596 and 1597 were also stymied by storms. Token landings in Cornwall and Kinsale, to assist Irish rebels, all failed. Finally in 1604 the new king James I ended an expensive, near 20 year, period of hostilities. England stopped supporting the Dutch rebellion in the Netherlands, and agreed to end privateer attacks on Spanish shipping, as Philip had wanted in 1588. Spain accepted that official hopes of restoring Catholicism to England were over. This ended a period when a leading power refused to accept the legitimacy of the English state, a recurring problem in Europe and beyond up to the present.
This was the legacy of the episode. So was the Armada beaten by a brave queen and her swashbuckling sailors fighting against superior forces? No. It was defeated by an incoherent strategy, bad planning, the help of Dutch allies - and of course, appalling weather. And the conflict lasted a further 16 years. This is far from the narrative of Elizabeth’s spinners, the myth that lots of us learned as children, and many still believe today.
Indeed it’s a dangerous picture to paint. By ignoring inconvenient facts, it sets us on a collision course with reality. It exaggerates what Britain did, and can do, as a small nation, taking an imagined glorious national past of buccaneering derring-do as a model for the present and future. Fit only for fantasists it's false equivalence writ large. Historian Robert Saunders perceptively writes, ‘History is the mask worn by ideology when it wants to be mistaken for experience.’ He is absolutely right.
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