August 8, 1588—At the Battle of Gravelines, two great naval forces, each led by an
inexperienced commander and swearing allegiance to an absolute monarch, clashed
off the coast of England. When it was over, the English fleet watched as the Spanish Armada, under the direction of the
Duke of Medina Sidonia, limped off, a
threat postponed but not ended, from a diminished but still dangerous force.
Only a few minutes into this latest post of mine and
you’re already reading two things that might not meet your expectations! First,
there’s that line, “absolute monarch.” Sure, historians have applied it without
thinking twice to King Philip II of Spain, but the idea of affixing the label to Queen Elizabeth I of England still makes some shudder. Not Good
Queen Bess! Not a ruler bound, as all English monarchs have ostensibly been
since 1215, by the Magna Carta. But she gets off easily by virtue of having a
father (Henry VIII) for a psychopath. She was every bit as intent on having her
way as the male Tudors—and, in fact, the Stuarts, down to unlucky, foolhardy
James II—were. Former favorites could tell you that. So could Roman Catholics
and Puritans, neither of whom were allowed to worship as they wished.
Second, there’s that phrase about a “diminished but
still dangerous force.” What? Didn’t British seamanship and know-how kill the
threat from Spain decisively?
To be sure, the English naval force frustrated the
Spanish fleet. But in the nine-day campaign that began in Calais in late July
and ended at Gravelines, the English succeeded in sinking only six ships. Allow
me to place that number in better context: six
ships out of nearly 130.
Even after the disaster that met the fleet after Gravelines (more on that shortly), Philip was still able to launch two more attempts to take England in the remaining 10 years of his reign. But those, too, failed.
“It was bad luck, bad tactics and bad weather that
defeated the Spanish Armada - not the derring-do displayed on the high seas by
Elizabeth's intrepid sea dogs,” wrote Robert Hutchinson, author of a new
history of the encounter between the two navies, on “England’s Lucky Escape” in
the April 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine. “But it was a
near-run thing.”
Let’s start with that “bad weather” part, because
it’s by far the easiest to understand. Somewhere between 50 and 64—i.e., nearly
half—of the Spanish fleet foundered either on the way to England or as it
rounded Scotland on the way home. After his two encounters with the English ships, Medina Sidonia set sail for the Atlantic, but was blown by
treacherous winds into a force he greatly feared: the stormy shores of
Ireland’s west coast. A hurricane, no less, scattered some two dozen ships as
far north as Donegal and as south as Kerry. Approximately 5,000 men drowned or, if
captured, were executed when caught onshore.King Philip's two attempts over the next several years to take Spain likewise failed because of bad weather.
“Bad tactics?” Yes. How else can you describe a
situation in which the Armada managed to surprise the English in Plymouth Harbor—despite
invasion warnings received almost daily by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis
Walsingham—and still lost the
battle?
The Armada’s crescent-shape formation and the unwieldy
size of their ships would have made it possible to come alongside the British
vessels, grapple and board them, then sweep across the English coast like a
scythe, but it never got that far. The English used their galleons to fire on
the Spanish from long range, picking them apart bit by bit—and then sending
nighttime fireships their way, spreading terror.
“Bad luck”? Yes, that played a part, too. Had the Armada been able to land troops on British soil, they would have found a nation ripe for the taking: one with terrible coastal defenses, virtually no local militia, a population still deeply divided over Elizabeth's move toward Protestantism, and an unbelievable willingness to rely on bow and error rather than gunpowder. One of the
Spanish vessels that blew up early in the fighting, taking down all 200 on
board, caught fire because of the carelessness of one of its own sailors, it
was discovered later. Worse than that, had the Spanish known that the English
were all out of ammunition at the end of the encounter at Gravelines, they
could have still borne down on the galleons and won the day.
Winners write history, and it was no different in
this case. Accounts of the battle years later were written by the English.
Particularly in the cases of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward S. Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, both
writing as Britain herself became an imperial power, the tone is both
triumphalist and anachronistic, reading history backward from a later event—i.e.,
Spain’s decline in the 17th century.
Still, it’s hard to argue with Macaulay’s
description of the advantages enjoyed by King Philip as the two navies prepared
for their epic clash:
“In America, his dominions extended on each side of
the equator into the temperate zone. There is reason to believe that his annual
revenue amounted, in the in the season of his greatest power, to four millions
sterling,— a sum eight times as large as that which England yielded to
Elizabeth. He had a standing army of fifty thousand excellent troops, at a time
when England had not a single battalion in constant pay. His ordinary naval
force consisted of a hundred and forty galleys. He held, what no other prince
in modern times has held, the dominion both of the land and of the sea. During
the greater part of his reign he was supreme on both elements.”
Well, there is
one thing on which nearly all historians can agree: Elizabeth had all kinds
of reasons to dread the wrath of Philip and his “invincible Armada”:
·
*Her refusal to acknowledge her debt of
gratitude to Philip when he persuaded her sister (and his wife), Queen Mary, to
reconcile with Elizabeth—an act that paved her way to the throne upon Mary’s
death in 1558;
·
*Her steering of England away from
Catholicism and toward Protestantism;
·
*Her aid to Dutch Protestants who, for
the past two decades, had been in full revolt against Philip;
·
*Her decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots,
a Catholic co-religionist of Philip’s;
·
*Her official sanctioning of privateering
by Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, who burned and looted Spanish
towns and brought the booty home for the Crown.
Back to my opening paragraph, and
especially the part about each navy being led by an “inexperienced commander.” I’ve
already alluded to Medina-Sidonia, but his English counterpart needs to be
accounted for.
That would be Lord Howard of
Effingham. He had nowhere near the amount of sea experience as the second in
command of the English navy, Francis Drake, but his innate caution meant that
his chief early decision—staying beyond the reach of Spanish guns—meant that
the enormous advantage enjoyed by Spain (an army on board its vessels) would be
effectively neutralized. He listened carefully to his council of war. Thus, he
decided to send fireships at night against the Spanish at Calais when told that
an attack would be better early rather than later, since his navy would have
lost strength. (Both sides were losing a fifth of their forces due to sickness
up to that point.)
(The image accompanying this post is of the
oil-on-canvas painting Defeat of the
Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588 (1796), by Philip James de Loutherbourg, in
the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital Collection)
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