Spanish Armada
Popular history decrees that the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was a ‘David versus Goliath’ victory forged entirely by outnumbered English ships and plucky English sailors. The reality is very different.
The running fight up the English Channel left the Armada almost intact and still fully capable of transporting the Duke of Parma’s army from Flanders to the coast of Kent, just across the Dover straits. But communication break-downs meant the troops had not embarked in their invasion barges by the time the Armada had fought its way up the south coast of England.
The English fleet failed to land a killer blow, despite being commanded by such daredevils as Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins. Even their fireships carried no explosives because of a perilous shortage of gunpowder. Moreover, due to Elizabeth’s parsimony, her ships had no munitions left when the Armada finally retreated and her sailors were unpaid and dying from disease.
In truth, it was climate change and pure bad luck that destroyed the Spanish Armada (ironically in Spanish, Grande y Felicí³©ma Armada, the ‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’). The weather cycle in 1588 was almost the worst since the late Roman period with an unsettled summer and a tempestuous autumn. ‘The breath of God’ (or the ‘Protestant wind’) was the decisive factor in most engagements.
Storms later destroyed Spanish ships on Ireland’s west coast as they struggled home. Evidence recovered from the wrecks indicated that the Spanish barely fired their guns. Afterwards Philip II of Spain complained: ‘I sent my fleet against men, not against the wind and waves’.
This book gives a dramatic hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow account of the Spanish Armada’s attempt to destroy Elizabeth’s England and reveals that if Parma’s 23,000 battle-hardened veterans had landed in Kent, they could have been in London in just a week.
Some may have welcomed them with open arms. Elizabeth was beset by home-grown conspiracies to assassinate her. Would her subjects – many still Catholic – have defended an aging queen with no obvious successor? Some rejoiced ‘when any report [was made] of the [Spaniards’] success and sorrowed for the contrary’ while others declared that ‘the Spanish… were better than the people of this island’.
In the Tower of London, the imprisoned Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, prayed for the Armada’s success as it battled up the Channel, carrying English Catholics among its crews. In Flanders, Cardinal William Allen impatiently awaited news of Elizabeth’s downfall; he had been appointed by Pope Sixtus V to oversee the administration of an England returned to the Catholic fold.
The queen had gambled everything on her naval forces protecting her realm. The campaign had cost at least 400,000 but she still did not have the troops or the fortifications to defeat the Spanish on English soil. Her 20,000-strong army, made up of poorly-armed, untrained militia, was concentrated in Essex, as her generals believed, wrongly, that the invasion would strike in the Thames Estuary.
Of the 130 Spanish ships that sailed against England, only 60 limped home – the rest had been sunk or wrecked. Just 34 major fighting ships survived, many no longer seaworthy. The flagship had three huge hawsers wrapped around her hull to prevent the seams from springing open.
Shipwreck (and the slaughter of the survivors in Ireland), starvation, disease and the cold North Atlantic weather had taken a terrible toll on the Armada: only half its sailors returned to Spain and only 9,500 of its 19,000 soldiers. In January 1589, relatives were still trudging forlornly from port to port for news of their lost loved ones.
Philip II read with horror reports of his Armada’s demise: ‘I have read it all although I would rather not have done so because it hurts so much’, he confided. The king told his chaplain: ‘God does not return to fight for His cause’ [This] would not have been permitted except to punish us for our sins’.
Elizabeth thirsted for revenge and still fretted about the threat of the surviving Spanish ships. Her perennially bare Treasury forced her into approving a venture capital expedition under Sir Francis Drake to destroy what remained of the Armada before snatching plunder from the treasure ships and landing a force under Sir John Norris to attack Lisbon. At the last moment, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, fled the court to join the expedition - even though the queen had forbidden her favourite from going.
England’s own Armada departed Plymouth on 8 May 1589 with 180 ships and 19,000 soldiers. Spies had reported the survivors of the Spanish fleet in Santander harbour but unaccountably, Drake sailed to Corunna and spent two weeks sacking the town, living up to his reputation of fighting for his God, his queen and his own plunder.
The English force sailed down the Iberian coast and landed Norris and his troops 80 km north of Lisbon. The English attempted only a limp-wristed assault on Lisbon’s fortifications before retreating to their ships. The earl of Essex’s sole contribution was hurling his spear at the city’s walls.
Drake missed the treasure ships and beset by foul weather, reached Plymouth, empty-handed both of plunder or glory at the end of June. Elizabeth’s buccaneer had failed and he had lost 11,000 men. He did not sail in the queen’s service again until 1595.
- This tautly-written narrative of derring-do and disaster on the high seas will be drawn from contemporary eye witness accounts and letters contained in the state papers of England and Spain.
- It will be the first comprehensive history of the Spanish Armada, revealing the secret intelligence war, the naval tactics and weaponry, the mistakes made and the bad luck suffered by both sides in this epic story that changed the political face of Europe.
This is a dramatic sequel to the critically-acclaimed and successful Elizabeth’s Spymaster (now in its ninth PB reprint) and also to House of Treason
Book Author
Robert Hutchinson, author and broadcaster started his working life as a reporter on regional newspapers before joining The Press Association, (the news agency for UK and Irish media) as a night sub-editor. He returned to reporting, later becoming Defence Correspondent. In late 1983 he joined Jane’s Publishing Company as one of the team that successfully launched Jane’s Defence Weekly and became Publishing Director of Jane’s Information Group in 1987, responsible for its magazines, newsletters, books and digital products.
Leaving a decade later, he compiled and edited two ...
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