Wes’s
Spanish Armada Page:History, Highlights, Myths, and Muddles
Top
10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada
The Spanish Armada encounter of 1588 was undoubtedly
an important and fascinating battle.However, even today it is frequently surrounded by common myths and
confusions that date back to Victorian Era days.The battle itself was followed by 16 years of
land and naval war between England and Spain in which the
Spanish were mostly successful and renewed their control over the high seas, a
basic fact that many texts and popular accounts often fail entirely to
mention.Spain retooled its
navy and shipped three times as much silver in the
1590s as before.The Spanish invasion
force, moreover, was never referred to (by Philip or anyone else in Spain) as
the “Invincible Armada”; medical resources on the Spanish coast were mobilized
with surprising rapidity and effectiveness to tend to sick and wounded
returning sailors in 1588, suggesting that the Spaniards very much were
prepared for the potential failure of the Spanish Armada and run-ins with rough
weather.These are just a few of the
common myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada battle; a list of the “Top
10” myths is compiled and tackled below.
(1a)
Myth: The defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588 was a decisive victory for the English that marked England’s triumph in its war with Spain.Spain never
again tried to land forces in England after that, failed in its bid to end
English buccaneering against Spanish treasure ships, and challenged England
only on land, not at sea.
(1b)
Fact:False on all counts.The Spanish Armada confrontation was not at
all decisive; it was merely an early sea battle in a long, intermittent, but
often grinding land and naval war between England and Spain that lasted from 1585
until 1604.As I’ll discuss below, Spain defeated Englandin most of theland and naval battles after the
Armada and won a favorable treaty in 1604.Spain, in fact, dispatched three more Spanish Armadas in the 1590s that were dispersed by
storms.Furthermore, in 1595, the
Spanish, in fact, did succeed in landing
troops in western England, where they attacked and burned several towns before
disembarking, as will be detailed below (myth #10a).Of all the common Spanish Armada myths, this
one—the failure to even acknowledge the most basic, incontrovertible fact of the
war that was waged between England and Spain after the Armada—has always
stricken me as the most puzzling.It’s
akin to teaching the history of the US Civil War and halting at the First
Battle of Bull Run in 1861, or discussing the Second World War and stopping at
the Fall of France in 1940, without mentioning the Battles of Midway, El Alamein, Guadalcanal, or the D-Day Normandy invasion at all!A grossly misleading, terribly incorrect
impression of the conflict is thereby imparted.The key here is to recognize that the Spanish Armada was merely one battle, an early one in a long
war; this simple fact is often unrecognized and unacknowledged,
contributing to many of the other common myths.
(2a)
Myth:The defeat of the Spanish Armada was the beginning of England’s control of the high seas.Spain never recovered from the Spanish Armada fiasco and
relinquished control of the ocean lanes to the English.England’s status as mistress of the seas would be
unchallenged for centuries as the British Empire grew
in size, and the vaunted English navy could trace its dominance of the sea
lanes to the Spanish Armada’s defeat in 1588.
(2b) Fact:One of the most common statements about the Spanish Armada, and one that
is totally false.Spain recovered quickly from the Armada debacle and
defeated England on land and at
sea in multiple military engagements in the decade following the Spanish
Armada.(In fact, an English
Armada sent in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, suffered a crushing
defeat against Spain, just as its Spanish counterpart did against England in 1588.)One
of the most important consequences of the Spanish Armada was that it altered
assumptions about naval warfare, since the English at Gravelines
had opted for smaller, rapidly reloading, more maneuverable light coastal
defensive ships in place of the heavy ocean-going galleons with single-firing
cannon (followed by seize-and-grapple tactics) used by Spain.The most eager students of the English naval
innovations and tactics were… the Spaniards.Philip’s post-Armada squadrons were much more agile and nimble than
those prior to it.The Spaniards
developed and implemented an efficient convoy system that enabled them to ship three times as much gold and silver
from the Americas after the Spanish
Armada than before it—indeed, Spain transported more precious metals in the
decade of the 1590s than in any other!England’s buccaneering sea dogs were no longer able to raid
Spanish treasure transports effectively, a fact that was underscored by the
complete failure of a privateering expedition by Sir
John Hawkins and Sir Martin Frobisher in 1589-1590
against Spanish shipping.Furthermore,
both John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake—the most famous of England’s privateering pirates—were killed in a disastrous raid
against Spanish America in 1595, a multi-pronged attack against Spanish
colonies in the Americas that was anticipated and utterly crushed by Spanish
defenses, one of the worst defeats that the English navy would ever
suffer.Spain’s post-Armada navy was
retooled and expanded, and Spain ruled the waves for most of the 1600s; in
contrast, by the last year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, England
remained relatively weak as a sea power, and its maritime strength during the
early years of the Stuart Dynasty (James I and Charles I in the early 1600s)
grew only gradually and haltingly. When Spain was finally replaced as a naval bellwether in the
late 17th century, it was the Dutch
who assumed the mantle of dominant sea power, defeating England in several Anglo-Dutch
Wars of the late 1600s.Only in the mid-1700s does England truly emerge as the naval power controlling the sea
lanes, after victories in consecutive Anglo-French wars (including the famous French and Indian War with the Treaty
of Paris in 1763, the victory that finally enabled England to dominate North America and
spread its empire on a global scale).
(3a) Myth:Spain was eclipsed as a great power following the Spanish
Armada, sinking into insolvency and rapid decline, while England became rich, prosperous, and powerful.
(3b)
Fact: Spain definitely did not slip into insignificance following
the Armada defeat.As noted above, Spain in fact defeated England on land and at sea in numerous battles of the decade
after the Spanish Armada and retained substantial influence over affairs in Europe
and the Americas well into the 1600s.Crushing debt afflicted both Spain and England as a result of their war; by the close of Elizabeth I’s reign, the English were nearly £3,000,000 in debt and
had sold offices and crown lands to avoid slipping further, and Spain’s Philip II had declared several bankruptcies in
parallel.In addition to the exorbitant
expenses in the conflict against Spain, the English were dragged into a draining, costly,
inconclusive guerrilla war against Ireland from 1594-1603 led by an Irish lord named Hugh
O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone.Late
Elizabethan England also suffered crop failures, famines, and plagues that
engendered severe poverty in much of the country.Most importantly, the continuation of the war
with Spain drained English financial resources and hindered
trade, leaving a severe financial burden for the Stuart kings of the early
1600s.This debt, in conjunction with
the Stuarts’ profligacy, would contribute to the crisis between monarch and
Parliament which caused the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, a particularly
bitter and bloody conflict that would split the nation.As for Spain, the nation was eventually
crippled in the late 1600s by internal corruption, failures in its monarchical
system— marked by feeble rulers with a propensity to play favorites and indulge
prodigally in festivities— and severe inflation caused in part by its precious
metals shipments from the New World.However,
in a military sense, the most decisive defeats it suffered were in the Battles
of Rocroi and Passaro
against the French in the 30 Years’
War (1618-1648), not the English.It was
these land defeats that most severely enfeebled Spain as a European power, enabling the French to replace Spain as Europe’s dominant nation during the reign of Louis XIV. Meanwhile, parallel Spanish defeats against the Dutch navy enabled the Netherlands to supersede Spain as Europe's major maritime power.
(4a)
Myth: The British Empire—in the
sense of the long-term settlement and colonization of distant overseas
territories—was initiated following the defeat of the Spanish Armada, since
settlement was now finally opened up to the English and other northern
Europeans.
(4b)
Fact: Not by a longshot.Once again, we have to remember that the war
dragged on unsuccessfully for England after the Spanish Armada, and the country’s resources
and seafaring vessels had to be spared for the conflict against Spain.The failure
of the English
Armada in 1589, an English-led expedition to Spain and Portugal, frustrated
attempts to break Spain’s naval power, and the material, financial, and human
cost of this defeat prevented expeditions to North America—probably
contributing to the failure of the Roanoke Colony in what is now Virginia in
the United States, which had been attempted in the 1580s but from which there
were no survivors.When
the Treaty of London in 1604 officially ceased hostilities between Spain and England (the treaty having been signed by England’s King James I, who had succeeded Elizabeth in 1603), England lacked a permanent settlement in
the Americas or anywhere else.It was only
after this negotiated peace that England was finally freed to begin colonization, following on the
heels of Spain, Portugal, and France.
The Lost Colony at Roanoke
(5a)
Myth:Spain’s King Philip II craved nothing less than the
wholesale conquest of England with the Spanish Armada, and the annexation of the
island country as a colony of New
Spain.England would have been converted into a Catholic nation and,
had the Spanish Armada been successful, we’d all be speaking Spanish today.
(5b)
Fact:Philip II had relatively modest goals with
the Spanish Armada and never intended to “conquer England,” let alone convert the English populace to
Catholicism en masse or compel them to speak Spanish.As I discuss in more detail below in this
article’s main text, Philip’s center of attention was on the European Continent—in fact, his
principal enemies were the Protestant rebels from the provinces of the
Netherlands, then a part of
Spain, as well as Protestant French Huguenots and Portuguese nationalists
who opposed Philip’s annexation of Portugal in 1580.England was more peripheral to Philip’s
scheme, and his objective with the Armada was chiefly to stop England from
interfering with Philip’s central aims elsewhere—namely, to cease English
military and financial support of the Dutch insurgents (whom the Protestant
English had been assisting considerably) and to halt English buccaneer attacks
on Spanish treasure ships.Philip certainly
did seek to win tolerance for English Catholics and restore them to a more
exalted status but, as discussed in the text, conditions in England since Henry VIII’s break
with Rome had rendered it virtually impossible for Philip or
anyone else to have forced England to convert back into a Catholic country.There was no viable Catholic replacement for
the Protestant Elizabeth I since Mary Queen of Scots had been executed in
1587.Moreover, Spain’s problems in the Netherlands, the logistical issues posed by England’s location as an island nation, and the experience of
Spain’s invading armies on the Continent clearly indicate
that even an entirely successful Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 would have had
little cultural effect on England.
(6a)
Myth: In the Battle of Gravelines, the chief confrontation between the English
defensive fleet and the Spanish Armada, the English won a stunning underdog
victory, having been outnumbered and outgunned by the vastly more imposing
Spanish Armada fleet.
(6b)
Fact: The English were neither
outnumbered nor outgunned at the Battle of Gravelines,
as is so often claimed.There was a
rough parity in the sizes of the fleets; Spain had more bulky galleons, but England had more total ships in the water.
(7a)
Myth:The Battle of Gravelines
was a titanic clash on the high seas, one of the largest and most extraordinary
naval battles in history.The English
ships inflicted heavy damage on the Spanish Armada vessels while suffering
little of their own, sinking a large number of Spain’s ships and forcing the Spaniards to flee.
(7b)
Fact:The Spanish Armada battle at Gravelines
itself was definitely not a titanic naval clash, but a short, inconclusive,
rather anticlimactic encounter between two large fleets, both of which committed
major blunders and neither of which damaged each other significantly.It’s true that the Spanish Armada caused
little damage to the English ships, but then, neither did the English ships
cause much harm at all to the Spanish fleet, as discussed in the main text
below.It was an unusually ferocious
September Atlantic storm as the
Spanish vessels were rounding the tip of Ireland, that damaged and/or sank most of the Spanish Armada ships
that did not return to port, either directly or in compelling the vessels to
beach on the rocky Irish coast.Most of Spain’s casualties from the Spanish Armada invasion
resulted when sailors died of or were incapacitated from disease and exposure,
not from battle wounds.In any case,
most of the Spanish Armada ships did
manage to return to port in Spain or Portugal.Many of the
lost ships had already been in a state of disrepair, while Philip II’s crucial Atlantic class vessels—the most seaworthy in
the Spanish Armada and designed for oceanic traversal, the key to Spain’s
New World empire and the newly conquered Philippines archipelago in the
Pacific Ocean—returned to the Iberian
Peninsula largely intact.In fact,
excellent seamanship was displayed by both the English and Spanish sides in
their encounter, and it is quite remarkable that the Spaniards did not suffer
greater losses considering the unremittingly powerful storm they had
encountered.
(8a)
Myth:The Spanish Armada was dubbed “the Invincible
Armada” (La Armada Invencible) by an overconfident,
swaggering King Philip II of Spain and his advisors, having been so nicknamed
since they all assumed that the Armada was so strong that it could never be
defeated by the English.
(8b)
Fact:This tale is repeated with bewildering
frequency—and it’s utterly, absolutely false.The Spanish Armada was never, ever referred to by King Philip or his
Spanish ministers as “the Invincible Armada” (“La Armada Invencible”);
this term was an English invention, not a Spanish one, used by English
historians who later described the battle, yet the term is frequently
attributed to the Spaniards incorrectly.In fact, the rapid mobilization of Spanish resources upon the return of
the Armada ships to harbor in Spain lucidly demonstrates that the Spaniards had been very
much prepared for the Armada’s potential failure.Populations in coastal towns were rapidly
drafted and quickly responded to aid the often injured and seasick sailors;
food supplies, hospital beds and equipment, and physicians were immediately and
efficiently mustered for the Spanish Armada’s crews, saving hundreds of
lives.
(9a)
Myth:The English suffered barely any casualties at
all in the Spanish Armada encounter, celebrating their victory with great
revelry following the departure of the Armada fleet from England’s coastal waters.
(9b)
Fact: The English themselves
suffered thousands of casualties among their sailors in the Spanish Armada
engagement due to exposure and outbreaks of infectious disease, and the
battle’s aftermath was characterized not by celebration but by finger-pointing,
infighting, and bitter protestations when many sailors were not compensated for
months.
(10a)
Myth: After the Spanish Armada’s
failure to invade England, the Spaniards were never able to successfully land
troops on English soil.This was a
continuation of England’s long and remarkable defensive tradition, in which
no hostile military force has ever succeeded in landing troops on the territory
of the English island mainland since the Norman Conquest.
(10b)
Fact: Not true!The claim that England has never suffered a hostile landing since 1066 is
repeated with extreme frequency; and it also happens to be inaccurate.That’s because in 1595, a Spanish force led
by Don Carlos de Amesquita managed to achieve just
that, even though the Spanish soldiers had not intended such a landing
initially.Amesquita’s
small force had been patrolling the waters of the English Channel when they encountered a scarcity of potable
water.Navigating the rough and fickle
winds in the Channel, Amesquita’s troops were blown
ashore near Cornwall on the western English coast.The Spaniards easily intimidated or defeated
local militia resistance and set fire to much of Penzance and surrounding localities while plundering the
hamlets for whatever victuals, nautical aids, and freshwater supplies that they
could find.Eventually the English began
to muster a professional army and summon naval forces under Sir Francis Drake
and Sir John Hawkins, but the Spanish managed to evade their adversaries when Amesquita’s force decamped and returned home to the Iberian Peninsula— after holding a traditional Catholic Mass on English
soil.
The
rest of this essay fleshes out the material summarized above with greater
detail and a more in-depth picture of the conditions surrounding the Spanish
Armada clash and its aftermath.Intended
as a companion to the English
Armada article, this piece cuts through the myths and lays out the facts of
the Spanish Armada battle, still significant in numerous respects as discussed
below, but in ways far more subtle and intricate than are generally
appreciated.
The Spanish Armada Sets Sail Into the Waters of
Historical Confusion
Chances are
you’ve been exposed to the Spanish Armada incident in your history class.The broad outlines, widely familiar, are that
Spain’s King
Philip II sent a large fleet of ships to rendezvous with professional Spanish
soldiers, led by the Duke of
Parma.The combined fleet was to
sail against Elizabethan England in 1588, with the aim of invading the island
country, yet the Spanish Armada was never able to disembark on English
soil.Encountering resistance from
English naval defense forces led by the likes of Sir Francis Drake, the Armada
beat an escape path around the northern coasts of Scotland
and Ireland,
where it encountered a ferocious Atlantic storm and suffered heavy damage and
casualties before returning to ports in the Iberian Peninsula.So far, so good.But why did King Philip dispatch the Spanish
Armada in the first place?What were his
war aims?What actually transpired
during the naval encounter between the English and Spanish fleets?Was there a raging battle, or largely a
mutual avoidance of combat?What
happened after the Armada?How did England
respond to it, and how did Spain
adjust?Most importantly, what were the
short-term and long-term effects?They’re probably not what you think, because the lore of the Spanish
Armada confrontation has attracted one inaccuracy after another over the years,
to the point that descriptions of the most basic details of the battle’s
prelude, conduct, and aftermath are regularly gotten wrong, and fundamental
aspects of the conflict—especially the bitter naval and land war waged between
England and Spain in the decade after the Spanish Armada—are omitted entirely,
to the point that many Armada accounts are downright inaccurate and misleading.
The Spanish
Armada battle is, indeed, one of the most frequently confused and thoroughly
misrepresented historical incidents one can find; numerous facets of the
battle, from the Armada’s war aims, to its naval composition, to its experiences
on the high seas, to the encounters of the Spanish ships with the English and
Dutch sailors are reported incorrectly not only on Websites but even in many
textbooks.Perhaps because it was so
closely intertwined with patriotic feelings in England (especially during the
imperial Victorian period, from which much of the contemporary Armada
historiography stems originally), the mythology of the Spanish Armada story has
often intruded on the facts, and this article is an attempt to debunk the most
egregious of these misconceptions and set the record straight.For a more detailed examination of the causes
leading up to the Spanish Armada, the state of Europe prior to its launch, and
the fascinating aftermath of the battle—which involved a war waged on multiple
continents between the naval and land forces of the Spanish and English—please
read my accompanying
essay on the Spanish Armada and a little-known, but pivotal English
counterattack against Spain and Portugal in 1589, which met with a disaster
similar to its Spanish counterpart the year before.
The Spanish Armada and the Military Objectives of
Philip II
The first
and most common myth pertains to the Spanish Armada’s war objectives as
perceived by King Philip II, the vigorous, devout, and doctrinaire Catholic
Spanish ruler from the powerful Hapsburg
family.Some accounts carelessly suggest
that Philip craved nothing less than a conquest of England,
an annexation of the island country into the growing realm of New
Spain.This is reflected in
the oft-repeated throw-away comment about how “If it hadn’t been for Drake et
al. defeating the Armada in 1588, we’d all be speaking Spanish today.”This conclusion is patently ridiculous.For all the flourishes and posturing
associated with the mission, King Philip’s objectives in the “Enterprise of
England” were comparatively modest; above all, he was seeking English
noninterference in what he considered to be internal Spanish affairs, cessation
of military and financial support for the rebellious Dutch provinces (then
constituting a province of Spain) being the primary bone of contention.Philip also sought to clamp down on the
English privateers, the “sea dogs” and crafty pirates of renown, so as to
preclude their attacks on Spain’s
gold and silver treasure transports and other economic interchanges with its
colonial empire in the Caribbean and the American continental
landmass.Spain
and England had
in fact been virtually allies (against France)
prior to 1562, when the English Captain John Hawkins—with the eventual support
of Elizabeth and members of the
royal privy council—broke into the transatlantic slave
trade, then a tightly guarded Spanish-Portuguese monopoly.At the time, Spain
expected European slave traders to its vast New World Empire to pass through a
port in Spain
(typically Seville) as a way
station to the Americas.Spanish officials acted as middlemen,
skimming off a healthy cut of the profits the merchants garnered from their
trading in human cargo, a financial cornucopia which the Spaniards’ were loath
to forfeit; in their eyes, Hawkins was a smuggler.Despite initial misgivings about Hawkins’
endeavors, Queen Elizabeth and her advisory Privy Council soon gave direct
support to him, investing in his voyages, supplying ships and sailors, and
reaping a share of the profits.(Hawkins’ chief slaved trading vessel, the Jesus of Lubeck,
was a royal grant.)Hawkins’ perceived
smuggling irritated Spanish viceroyal authorities,
culminating in the San
Juan de Ulua incident in 1568, in which a small
slave-trading fleet under Drake and Hawkins was ambushed with heavy losses near
Veracruz, Mexico.It was this quarrel over slave-trading rights
and the diplomatic contretemps of San Juan de Ulua
that launched the English into privateering and
precipitated the economic competition that would impel Philip in his Armada
plans 20 years later.
The Spanish
monarch also endeavored—at the very least— to secure tolerance for English
Catholics, though a wholesale transformation of the island country from a Protestant
bastion into a Catholic nation was a nonstarter.Catholic power in England had been far too
decimated by Henry VIII and his advisors in the early 1500s to be restored even
with a dramatic success by the Spanish invasion force; monasteries had been
liquidated, priests and bishops had been executed or banished, church
properties had been seized, and the people (most crucially the aristocracy) had
been diverted from the Roman Church to the national Anglican Church instead.Pope Pius V had even
excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, imploring English Catholics to withhold
recognition of her right to rule, a de
facto recognition that England’s most prominent classes had become
Protestant.It is, furthermore, doubtful
that the Spanish king intended to supplant Queen Elizabeth I
with a Catholic English usurper, as is often supposed, in spite of Pius V’s
papal sanction.It must be recalled that
the only viable Catholic candidate to take Elizabeth’s place was Mary Queen of
Scots, but this plan suffered from the slight complication of Mary’s execution
in 1587, the year before the Spanish Armada sailed northward.Nobody else could have been installed on the
throne and been legitimately accepted by enough of England’s
population to remain in power for more than a fortnight, and Philip was no
stranger to this important difficulty.
Philip
certainly had no intention—let alone military wherewithal—to “conquer” the
English nation.The oft-repeated claim,
that the Spanish Armada threatened English sovereignty, fails to consider
contemporary events:Philip, after all,
had been entirely unsuccessful in subjugating the tiny Netherlands, in which he
had already mustered a standing army led by the brilliant and resourceful field
general Alessandro
Farnese, the Duke of Parma.The Netherlands had a historical (and,
therefore, legally recognized) place within the Hapsburg
Spanish Empire since a dynastic marriage between Maximilian I and Mary of
Burgundy in 1477, and the Spaniards maintained a long-established political and
administrative presence in the Dutch provinces.Furthermore, Philip could besiege his Dutch opponents by land routes as
well as sea channels, and he had the additional support of his Hapsburg cousins
in Central Europe.If Philip had failed to subdue the determined insurgency in the
Netherlands—where, as can be seen, he was blessed with many advantages—it was a
pipe dream to believe he could have accomplished much at all in England, a much
larger nation with no historical ties to the Spanish Empire or Hapsburg
rule, no established Spanish administrative presence, and—most importantly—no
land route.Even had Philip been
miraculously successful in the Armada’s operations against England, he still
could not have maintained a sufficiently large occupation force in such a
foreign and distant nation for long, especially with all the added logistical
headaches presented by an island country and, even more importantly, Philip’s
ongoing operations in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Portugal on the
Continent itself—which constituted Philip’s principal interest in any
case.Spanish armies successfully
stormed the capitals of numerous kingdoms in Continental Europe, Rome and Paris
among them, not to mention overran much of Germany and Central Europe, yet
these places did not suddenly revert to “speaking Spanish” or convert to
Spanish Catholicism; indeed, the temporary Spanish military success in those
locales had little if anything in the way of long-term cultural impact.Thus a “conquest” of England
by the Spanish Armada was simply out of the question, and even a Catholic
restoration or “regime change” was likely a nonstarter as well.Philip was fully aware of this, and close
analyses of Spanish strategy and objectives lucidly illustrate that the Spanish
Armada, for all its fanfare, had rather moderate goals.Hindsight has skewed our impression of events
at the time, but in Philip’s eyes England
was a sideshow; his prime objectives were on the European Continent, and above
all he simply wanted England
to stay out of the way.(As is noted in
my accompanying
essay, when England
and Spain
finally did cease hostilities with the Treaty of London in 1604, the Spanish
ironically did by-and-large achieve their objectives from the 1580s.)
Alessandro Farnese,
the Duke of Parma
Outline of the Spanish Armada Engagement, 1588
Even the
details of the Spanish Armada clash itself are often misunderstood.Many report the Armada confrontation as a
sort of David-and-Goliath showdown in which the vastly outgunned and
outnumbered English fleet miraculously managed to outwit and sink its Spanish
adversary.The English were, in fact,
neither outnumbered nor outgunned.Although the Spanish had a greater total tonnage of ships in the
water—their bulky galleons lining the horizon—the English actually had more
craft in the battle zone.They were
smaller, lighter, and more maneuverable, equipped with long-range and rapidly reloadable cannon that conferred a strategic and
technological advantage over the Spanish fleet—products of the enhancements
introduced by King Henry VIII and John Hawkins, the prescient English Treasurer
of the Navy who demonstrated remarkable skill as a sailor and administrator
alike.Moreover, although the English
fleet closed ranks to protect potential rendezvous sites on the island nation’s
coastlines, it damaged but did not actually sink many of the ships in the
Spanish attack force; only three vessels of the invading fleet were truly
disabled by the English defenses.As R.B.
Wernham noted [p. 3], the English sailors and
soldiers “all were a little dispirited, and more than a little surprised, at
their failure to destroy the Armada in battle.”
The outline
of the Spanish Armada’s invasion plan was as follows:The approximately 130 Armada ships under the
command of Medina Sidonia, disembarking from the port
of Lisbon in May of 1588, were fundamentally intended as an escort to England for the professional,
experienced land army of the Duke of Parma, which had proved its mettle in the
wars on the Continent (though it had, of course, failed to suppress the Dutch
Revolt entirely).The Spanish Armada was
delayed for two months by scattering gales on its northward journey, but in
early summer of 1588 it approached the Flemish coast where it would presumably
provide the essential escort for Parma’s army—though the Armada would be
compelled to remain offshore, since Philip lacked a deep-water port capable of
harboring his hulking vessels on the strategic coasts of the Dutch Provinces or
in France.This was in part due to
rivalries with other continental powers, but even more because the Armada’s
size and composition would have made harboring in any single port extremely
difficult; Philip had allies in Catholic coastal regions of northwest Europe,
but the architects and builders of European defensive and mercantile ports
generally did not construct them the possibility of a 130-ship, galleon-laden
escort in mind.Here alone, one can see
another reason why a successful invasion of the British Isles was questionable
even under the most optimal circumstances of weather and propitious sailing
conditions:Philip dispatched his fleet
with instructions for a difficult rendezvous with Parma’s troops in the Low
Countries for which optimal timing was of the essence, yet the Spanish king
lacked a reliable port, and he was demanding impeccable coordination over three
centuries before the invention of radio.Once Medina Sidonia had anchored his vessels
in the vicinity of Parma’s troops,
he would then be compelled to simply wait as Parma
replied and mustered his own forces from their scattered positions throughout
the Dutch canal system.A difficult feat
no matter how auspicious the conditions, and in any case Medina Sidonia’s prolonged standby status in the Channel would
provide a relatively easy target for English attack—which is precisely what
occurred.The famous English nighttime
“dispatch of the fireships”—in which Drake, as it is
often reported (though Lord Howard of Effingham was more directly responsible),
set fire to several old hulks laden with pitch and gunpowder, and sent them in
the direction of the Armada then moored off Calais in France—convinced Medina Sidonia to cut anchor and return to Spain by way of the
Irish coast.There was undoubtedly an
initial sense of panic among the Spanish sailors at the sight of the smoking
hulks at night, accelerated by the landward current toward the galleons then
arrayed in tight formation.The
precipitate decision by Medina Sidonia to cut anchor
was also tactically important since, no matter what the outcome of a subsequent
confrontation, it would now be even more difficult to reorganize the provide
the promised escort for Parma’s troops.Nevertheless, the Spanish were easily able to escape the English firing
line and move themselves out of effective range, then regroup for battle
formation against their English adversaries.
In the
ensuing Battle of Gravelines, the only genuine
confrontation between the English and Spanish navies in the waters around
England, Hawkins’ improvements enabled the English to rapidly unload much of
their ordnance, damaging the Spanish galleons’ hulls and masts enough that
Medina Sidonia decided to delay a move to commence
the traditional grapple-and-board tactics used by Spanish naval forces against
their opponents, as they had effectively done against the Turks in the
Mediterranean Battle of Lepanto in 1571.The English were able to position and fire their cannon with greater
frequency and from a greater range than the Spanish.It was a remarkable technological and
tactical advance in naval warfare and a testament to the foresight of Henry
VIII and Hawkins, the chief architects of the rapid-fire long-range gun
strategy (a lesson that the Spanish would learn well, since they would soon
adopt similar techniques).Nevertheless,
there was not much tangibly accomplished by the English fleet at Gravelines against the Spanish Armada in terms of damage,
sinking, or incapacitation of Medina Sidonia’s
force—which was still very much intact and a genuine menace after the Gravelines encounter.The Spanish fleet proceeded in orderly formation out of the battle zone,
and it was hardly in a state of panic as it regrouped.Thus Gravelines was
ultimately inconclusive, and this was largely due to the scarcity of ammunition
on the English side, a chronic problem that plagued the English and engendered
widespread consternation.Wernham [p. 3] quotes an English master-gunner, William
Thomas:“So much powder and shot spent,
and so long time in fight, and in comparison thereof
so little harm.”Thus in terms of the
naval confrontations themselves—Gravelines and its
associated skirmishes— the Armada battle was essentially a rather anticlimactic
stalemate; neither fleet inflicted severe damage on the other.It is often remarked with astonishment that
the English did not lose a single ship in the Armada engagement, yet as we can
see, the Spaniards suffered relatively light losses themselves—3 ships that
were already of questionable seaworthiness to begin with.Both fleets made surprising blunders and
failed to take advantage of opportunities, while both also demonstrated courage
and quick thinking in the face of challenges.Both, in the aftermath of the conflict itself, were fully capable of
reengaging each other.In any case,
Medina Sidonia by this point had come to realize the
impracticality of an escort for Parma in the midst of the still-hostile waters
of the English Channel, and so he issued orders for the Spanish Armada—still
largely intact and capable of seaborne combat—to round the tip of Scotland and
Ireland en route back to Spain and Portugal.It was a series of September storms
in the North Sea and the Northern Atlantic
especially, not English gunnery, that actually sank
most of the Spanish vessels or forced them onto the rocky coasts of Ireland.Over half of the sailors in the Armada force
died or did not return to Spain in fighting form, many perishing from combat or
disease or shipwreck, some disappearing into the Irish population where many of
the ships struck land (hence the oft-repeated legend of the “Black Irish”),
others reaching port but so wounded, ill, or seasick that they could not set
sail again to wage battle for Philip’s navies.Nevertheless, most of the commanders returned home and in any case, more
than half of the Spanish sailing fleet did manage to return successfully to
port in the Iberian
Peninsula.
The Armada
defeat was not even nearly as clear-cut a victory for the English as is
frequently assumed; the English lost thousands of soldiers and sailors
themselves in the battle, mostly to disease and exposure as the strains of
chronically maintaining a vigilant coastal defense took their toll.Felipe Fernandez-Armesto,
in his splendid and thorough book on the battle, notes that the personal
suffering and bitter vituperation following the Spanish Armada clash were oddly
similar on both the Spanish and the English sides:“this sort of personal suffering [exhaustion
and disease from the battle] embraced the English forces with almost equal
ferocity [p. 220],” “it remains a curious fact that that disillusionment,
recrimination, and mutual reproach were almost as rife on the English side… as
on the Spanish side [p. 220],” “the English fleet and, to a lesser extent, the
army, were suffering from much the same combination of adversities as faced the
Armada [p. 224].”Moreover, many of the
courageous and long-suffering English sailors were not even paid for their
valiant defense of the homeland, a fact that was understandable considering the
financial straits for England at the time but which inspired no small measure
of disgruntlement on the part of the English crews who thought they deserved
better.Conversely, the Spanish sailors
and commanders, in spite of the Armada’s failure in its invasion attempt, had
shown remarkable and surprising fortitude in the face of adversity,
particularly when confronted with some of the worst Atlantic storms recorded by
mariners of the 16th century.As Fernandez-Armesto has noted, the resolve of
the sailors and the preparations and responsiveness of the receiving ports in Spain
substantially mitigated the disaster and saved thousands of lives.Extraordinary feats of poor-weather sailing
and surprising durability enabled the vast majority of the Spanish “great
ships” to return to port in Spain or Portugal, particularly those—as Fernandez-Armesto cogently mentions— of the battle-hardy Atlantic
class, which fared remarkably well.(The
especial hardiness of the Atlantic class figured prominently in the English
Armada battle of 1589, as I discuss in my companion
essay; the maintenance and protection of these ships was key to Spain’s
Empire in the Americas,
and thus these were the main targets of the English invasion of Spain
and Portugal in
1589.)In some respects, the Spanish
Armada had been extremely fortunate to have survived its travails as well as it
did.The entire fleet was nearly beached
off the coast of Flanders by untoward winds early in the
invasion attempt, before a lucky shift averted a catastrophe.And such a remarkable number of ships and
sailors, bruised and battered as they were, found their way home that, as
suggested by Fernandez-Armesto, the Armada’s losses
“seem surprisingly modest overall.”* The fleet would remain intact enough, in
fact, that Philip would launch several more Armadas against the English over
the next decade.
Sir Francis Drake
Significance of the Spanish Armada Confrontation
With all
these caveats borne in mind, I should make it clear that the Spanish Armada’s
failure was definitely not unimportant,
and there were several key consequences (themselves often unmentioned) that merit
recognition.They are more subtle and
complicated than those normally (and falsely) assumed about the Armada’s
aftermath, since they bear principally on the wars throughout the European
Continent which constituted Philip’s chief focus of action.A successful Armada landing, even given the
probable repulse of Spanish invading forces on the ground, would likely have
compelled the English to withdraw all their troops from the Continent, leaving
Philip open to wage an unrelenting war of attrition to devour his Dutch and
French Protestant Huguenot opponents who were being supported by English
expeditionary forces.With the Armada’s
decampment for Spain
after Gravelines, the English were able to continue
their interventions in the Netherlands
and France, helping
to avert the collapse of the Dutch Revolt and further their support of the
Huguenots and anti-Spanish forces in France.While many English confrontations against the
fortified garrisons and professional troops of Spain
were unsuccessful, there were some notable accomplishments—such as the
amphibious landing and relief of the Siege of Brest in 1594—which were of
enormous help to Philip’s opponents on the Continent.France’s would-be successor to King Henri
III—assassinated in 1589— was the initially Protestant Henri of Navarre (known
as Henri IV or Henry IV upon his coronation), an ally of the English who was
opposed by the French Catholic League (also referred to as the “Holy League”)
and by Philip’s allied armies, led by the always-formidable Duke of Parma.
After
surviving four years of grueling warfare against Philip and his
comrades-in-arms, Henri converted, perhaps somewhat opportunistically, to
Catholicism in 1593 (uttering the oft-cited quote, “Paris is well worth a
mass,” perhaps indicating a nod to expediency so as to secure his position as
French king).This was a bittersweet
development for the English, but it also assured that Philip would be unable to
anoint his daughter— the Infanta Isabella Clara
Eugenia—as the “rightful” French ruler, as the Spanish king had planned since
1589.Though the war in France
ground on for several more years, Henri reinforced his position and hold on the
crown against insurgents from the Catholic League.He was a bold and decisive military leader, and Henri’s defeats of League and Spanish forces at Burgundy
and Amiens in 1595 and 1597,
respectively, led to the Peace of Vervins in 1598,
which ended hostilities between France
and Spain.(Henri would become one of France’s
most effective rulers, and his Edict of Nantes in 1598, which forbade
persecution of French Protestants, would prove to be a politically shrewd and
historically precedent-setting example of religious toleration.)Although Henri IV’s successes ensued chiefly
from his own political acumen and military leadership, English aid of his cause
was especially valuable as the new king struggled to establish his legitimacy
and position.The continuing English
assistance to the Netherlands and France thus provided a partial victory;
Philip was not able to place his offspring on the French throne and did not
fully subdue the northern Dutch provinces, though France did remain under a
Catholic ruler and the more southerly Dutch and Flemish provinces were
maintained within the Catholic fold by Parma’s military mastery and Spain’s
sustained administrative presence.
English,
French, and Dutch privateering would have likely
ceased in the event of an Armada landing, depriving these North
Atlantic states of what had become a valuable, if rather unreliable,
income stream.Perhaps most importantly,
the morale boost of the Armada’s defeat cannot be discounted.People of the time anxiously sought signals
of the divine favor conferred upon or withheld held from their causes in the
results on the ground.In a war so
thoroughly suffused by religious overtones, it was a welcome relief to
Protestants that God at least did not frown upon their beliefs so much that He
would allow the hated Popist forces to set foot on
the land of a Protestant stronghold. The
Armada’s defeat undoubtedly inspired Protestants in this religious war to keep
waging what was, in their eyes, a good fight against the unreformed Roman
Church and its Spanish agents.Furthermore, as noted above, the Armada battle revolutionized naval
warfare by altering assumptions about battle formations, use of ammunition, and
the types of ships to be employed in combat—a lesson that the Spaniards,
ironically, were able to apply to great effect themselves after 1588.Moreover, although the persistent war with
Spain frustrated English efforts to initiate colonization in the Americas,
English sailors nonetheless gained valuable experience on the high seas out of
the sheer necessity of maintaining constant operations against Spain, and a
generation of English mariners in the 1600s was thus able to cut its teeth on
the waves and learn the always-challenging technical nuances of ocean currents,
fickle winds, compass-assisted navigation, and victualling
that are essential for oceanic voyages.(It should be noted, however, that Hawkins’s focus on light,
maneuverable ships—useful in the defense against the Armada—may have also
impaired English attempts at transatlantic exploration and settlement, since
such vessels were generally not as reliable as the larger Spanish transports in
ocean seafaring.)
The 1589 English Armada and the Continuing
Anglo-Spanish War
Nevertheless, from a strategic perspective, the Spanish Armada’s defeat alone accomplished little for the
English or their Protestant Continental allies in their concerted efforts to
repulse Philip’s armies and defeat his still-imposing navy, and it was
definitely not the decisive blow that it has often been mistakenly
portrayed.As discussed in the main
article on my Website (“The Defeat of the English Armada”), the state of
affairs in the immediate aftermath of the Armada’s straggling return to Spain
indeed presented an enticing opportunity to the English.They duly attempted to follow up the Spanish
Armada repulse with an expedition
to Spain and Portugal in 1589, an invasion by the English (led by Sir
Francis Drake and John Norris) of Spanish and Portuguese soil designed,
chiefly, to destroy Spain’s
Atlantic navy.Had this been successful, the entire course of world history may well
have been dramatically changed, since Spain
would have been deprived of the naval forces it needed to sustain its fledgling
New Worldempire, and its
treasure fleet from the West Indies and Spanish
Main would have fallen into the hands of its enemies.This is the principal reason that the Spanish
Armada battle, as it is so often taught, is so woefully inaccurate in its
rendition; it is impossible to understand the Spanish Armada without a thorough
comprehension of its military and strategic context and its quite fascinating
aftermath in particular.Francis Drake,
Robert Dudley, Francis Walsingham, Lord Howard of Effingham,
Queen Elizabeth I, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, King
Philip II, the Duke of Parma, and the other major participants in the
Anglo-Spanish war all grasped this well.They knew that the Spanish Armada had failed but returned to Spain
intact enough for Philip to achieve his war aims later, and all recognized
that—ultimately—the struggle for power in the Western Hemisphere would depend
on whether the English could inflict a crushing blow at an opportune moment on
Philip’s Atlantic-class squadrons, the cream of Spain’s seafaring crop and the
nucleus of its power in the Americas, which had escaped the Armada
confrontation largely unscathed.Only
then would the Atlantic sea lanes finally open to enable the English to
initiate their long-frustrated aims of New World
colonization and empire, for which the Spanish and Portuguese had enjoyed such
a dominant headstart after Columbus’s
voyage in 1492.
This is why
the English saw such a tantalizing opportunity in 1589.With the Spanish fleet moored in a few ports
off northern Spain for refitting—predominantly in the cities of Santander and San Sebastian, fronting the Bay of Biscay
between Spain and France—and relatively unprepared to defend the peninsular
coastal waters, Spain’s Atlantic class-ships would be uniquely vulnerable to
English surprise attack.It is for this
reason that the English Armada of 1589, as one might term the Drake and
Norris-led English invasion force against Spain
and Portugal in
that year, would wage such a historically significant battle, and why so many
“what-ifs” accompany a slight change in the fortunes of Drake and Norris in
their expedition.For reasons discussed
in the companion
essay, Drake and his navy never set foot in Santander
or San Sebastian, a crucial error that robbed the English invasion force of an
easy opportunity; instead, his troops attempted unsuccessfully to seize and
sack the Spanish city of Coruña to the south, then
failed in an attack on the Portuguese capital of Lisbon as well as in an
attempted capture of the Spanish treasure fleet, suffering heavy casualties in
the process and returning back to England defeated and demoralized.Had Drake only sailed to those cities as
originally planned, rather than dallying in Coruña
and (later) encountering failure in Portugal,
the English would have found an undefended and dangerously vulnerable Spanish
Atlantic fleet all but begging to be put to the torch.Had this occurred, the Spanish would have
lost the keystone of their Atlantic power and the military underpinning of
their American empire, and not only the Spanish treasure fleets but the vast
span of the Americas—both the territories tenuously claimed by Spain and those
still unexplored—would have been opened to predation and colonization by the
English, French, Dutch, and other comers from Western Europeans coastal
nations.What we now take for granted as
the vast landmass and cultural sphere of “Latin America”—Panama,
Puerto Rico, Hispaniola,
Argentina, Venezuela,
and many other territories on the American continent or the Caribbean—
could easily have fallen under the control of the North Atlantic
countries if only Drake and Norris had more successfully carried out their
mission.
In any case,
the fascinating and crucially important aftermath of the Spanish Armada
confrontation—which was merely one battle in a long, grinding naval war between
England and Spain—is often neglected, one of many egregious errors in the
common portrayal of Anglo-Spanish relations during the late 16th
century.While there were some successes
for the English in the post-Armada period—the capture of the Madre de Dios
in 1592, the relief of Brest in 1594, the sack of Cadiz in 1596 (though the
English were thwarted in their attempt to capture the treasure fleet, their
principal objective)—overall the English foundered in their attempts to break
Spain’s power.Privateering
expeditions by Hawkins and Frobisher in 1590 and 1591
were unsuccessful, and English corsairs in general were so often thwarted in
their aims that the costs of their forays greatly outweighed any remunerative
benefit.The AzoresIslands off the Portuguese coast in
particular drew English attention because of their strategic location relative
to the Spanish naval ports of disembarkation and the treasure fleet, yet
English attempts to challenge Spain
in the vicinity of the Azores met with little
success.A squadron under Lord Howard of
Effingham in 1591 was surprised and scattered by a Spanish convoy passing near
the coveted islands, and The Revenge,
despite a brave last stand, surrendered and was captured by Spanish
forces.The “Islands Voyage” expedition
to the Azores in 1597, under Robert Devereux, the Earl
of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh began with similar hopes and encountered
similar frustrations, collapsing amid Spanish defenses and bickering among the
English commanders.
Most
notably, the English would suffer two particularly damaging setbacks in
1595.Drake and Hawkins would lead a
substantial expedition to the Spanish Main in that
year.Although it was conceived as a
raiding party to seize precious Spanish galleons, the expedition was planned in
an effort to attack and overtake Spanish positions perceived as vulnerable,
attempting to establish a foothold in and divest Spanish control over forts in
Puerto Rico, Panama, and other strongholds in the West Indies and Central
America.This 1595 expedition is rife
with “what-ifs” since, had it been successful, the English may have seized and
annexed numerous Spanish territories which are today taken for granted as
Hispanic lands.(Indeed, the English did
precisely that to Jamaica,
which was originally a Spanish sugarcane colony but fell into English hands
under Oliver Cromwell in the mid-1600s.)However, remarkably precise Spanish intelligence enabled a smothering
defensive perimeter to be established on land and at sea in the targeted
regions, routing the English forces who would suffer an unusually severe naval
defeat.The expedition’s leaders fell
into corrosive infighting as their objectives went unrealized and their ships
became deprived of supplies and victuals; Hawkins died of disease in Puerto
Rico in 1595, while Drake would contract a fatal dysentery on an island off
Panama, where he died and was buried at sea (near Porto Bello)
in January of 1596.The Spanish both
feared and respected Drake and Hawkins, and now their two most formidable
opponents—the most visible symbols of English buccaneering and naval
derring-do—had been killed in the same expedition.During the same year, western England
suffered the shock of a successful raid by a Spanish commander, Don Carlos de Amesquita, who exploited favorable winds to alight in Cornwall
and torch Penzance and several
other villages within the fishing region before holding Mass and disembarking
again.Besides the continuing setbacks
against Spain,
the English would also be sucked into a painful and costly guerrilla war
against Hugh O’Neill, Red Hugh O’Donnell, and other rebellious Irish lords in
1594, their efforts funded and supported by the Spanish Crown.
To be sure,
the continuing war against England
was also quite expensive for Spain,
and English piracy, despite its diminishing returns after 1589, was still
enough of a menace that it ate into the Spanish Crown’s much-needed
revenues.However, Spain
managed to ship three times as much precious metal in the 1590s than it did in
the previous decade, and its effective control of the sea lanes both helped to
guarantee its control over the American colonies as well as to thwart English
attempts to initiate their own colonization for the war’s duration.Spain’s
fiscal troubles continued apace and were undoubtedly exacerbated by the
buccaneers’ harassing attacks and the grueling campaigns on the Continent.Nevertheless, Spain’s
financial morass was chiefly of its own making.Philip had, after all, declared two bankruptcies well before England
and Spain
initiated mutual hostilities in 1585, and Philip’s successors—woefully lacking
in his domestic thrift and self-discipline—squandered enormous sums in fiscal
mismanagement and court corruption in the 1600s.If anything, Spain’s dependence on the silver
shipments from the New World would probably prove to be the chief factor in its
undoing as a great power in the late 17th century; the precious
metals gave rise to a ruinous inflation that inexorably burdened Spain’s
economy and ruined many in its merchant class.Nevertheless, these factors were chiefly internal, and as can be seen, the
Spanish Armada defeat ultimately had little effect on Spain’s naval and
political supremacy, or the country’s vise grip on the Western Hemisphere,
during the 1590s.The Anglo-Spanish war
of the late 1500s—in which Spain, not England, would emerge strengthened on the
high seas—had pivotal consequences for the course of world history which
reverberate powerfully today, not least in the extraordinarily large and
vibrant cultural sphere of Latin
America.
For more information about the little-known but
extraordinarily significant invasion of Spain
and Portugal by
Francis Drake and John Norris against Spain
in 1589, please read my main article,
*The Armada setback was hardly the only defeat encountered
by the Spanish military in its numerous operations of the 16th and
early 17th centuries, and in their historical annals, the Spaniards
do not seem to have been particularly perturbed by the 1588 Armada’s defeat in
any case.To the extent that the Spanish
ruefully reflected upon battles lost and wars misbegotten, it was their fierce
17th-century clashes with the French—and their decisive defeats at Passaro and Rocroi in
particular—that broke their power and enabled France to rise in their place as
Europe’s “Great Power.”
For further reading:
Cheyney, Edward P.A history of England from the defeat of the Armada to the death of Elizabeth, with an account of English institutions during the
later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.P. Smith, New York, 1926.
deCordóba,
Luis Cabrera.Historia de Felipe II, Rey de España.Junta de Castilla y León, Valladolid, 1998.
Fernandez-Armesto,
Felipe.The Spanish Armada:The
Experience of War in 1588.OxfordUniversity
Press, 1988.
González-ArnaoConde-Luque, Mariano.Derrota y muerte
de Sir Francis Drake, a Coruña 1589-Portobelo 1596.Xunta de Galicia, Servicio Central de Publicacións, Coruña, Spain, 1995.
Lynch, John.Spain, 1516-1598 : from
nation state to world empire.Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992.
Terrero, José.Historia de España.R. Sopena, Barcelona, Spain,
1988.
Wernham, RB.After
the Armada:Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588-1595.Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1984.
Wernham, RB, ed.The Expedition of Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake to Spain and Portugal, 1589.Navy Records Society, Brookfield, Vt., 1988.
Whiting, Roger.The Enterprise of England:The
Spanish Armada.Alan
Sutton Publishing, Gloucester, UK 1988.
The Spanish Armada 1588 site by Invicta Media—concise, easily readable, and
information-rich summary of the Armada plans and point-by-point description,
with nice, easily visualizable technical
descriptions.
Spanish Armada article at Wikipedia—the
free online encyclopedia is a collaborative effort of many hands
worldwide.I’m one of the contributors
to the Spanish Armada article, but there were many before me, and this resource
is so accurate and useful in general that it deserves mention here.
The Defeat of the Spanish
Armada pages on the HistoryBuff site, Rick
Brown’s outstanding resource for those seeking primary documents and old
newspapers—an excellent aid for professional historians and history buffs
alike.I wrote this series of pages on
the Spanish Armada in an “encyclopedia style” to provide a ready and useful
reference for students and teachers seeking information on the battle.The pages are split into articles covering
the factors leading to the Armada, the confrontation itself, and its aftermath,
as well as summary and conclusion sections for rapid consultation.
The UK History
Learning Site Spanish Armada page—without doubt one of the best I’ve seen
on the Armada encounter, detailed yet easy to follow.A particularly interesting aspect of this
site is its demonstration that the always unpredictable weather factor wasn’t
as unfavorable to the Spaniards as is often assumed.There were sudden shifts in winds that
enabled Medina Sidonia’s fleet to escape a
catastrophic beaching on the Dutch and French shorelines, as well as to regroup
and assume its tight defensive formation.
