Was war with Spain inevitable? Certainly the trickle of English volunteers and subventions to the Netherlands rebels, and Elizabeth’s connivance in attacks on Spanish shipping and colonies, meant that the risk was always there, especially as she never understood that Philip II put a somewhat different construction on her actions than the one she intended. To her they were warning shots; to him, they were the prelude to an all-out assault upon his dominions – a forgivable mistake, as this was precisely how Leicester and Walsingham preferred to see them as well. Both monarchs, however, were to some extent ‘bounced’ into war by contingent factors and forces beyond their control. Philip’s brilliant new general in the Low Countries, Alessandro Farnese (created duke of Parma in 1586), began to reassert royal authority in the Catholic-dominated provinces of the southern Netherlands from the late 1570s, heightening concern in England that Spanish forces would soon overrun the Protestant provinces in the north. Even more menacing was Philip’s conquest of Portugal in 1580 following the extinction of the Portuguese royal line. At a stroke, Spain acquired Portugal’s formidable Atlantic fleet and another global empire. A medal struck to commemorate Philip’s triumph bore the uncompromising legend non sufficit orbis: the world is not enough.
The slide towards war became virtually unstoppable in 1584. With town after town in the Netherlands falling to Farnese’s army, the assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 threw the rebels into even greater disarray. In England a majority on the privy council now backed open military intervention to help the Dutch before it was too late. In October 1584, Burghley and Walsingham drew up and disseminated a patriotic ‘Bond of Association’ by which thousands of loyal Englishmen pledged to hunt down and kill any ‘pretended successor’ – meaning Mary Queen of Scots – should Elizabeth too be assassinated. The Bond represented the first stage in raising an armed party to fight for a Protestant succession and its supporters at court. It also served as a potent reminder to the vacillating Elizabeth of the strength of Protestant public opinion.53 Similarly warlike preparations were taking place across the Channel. Having cooperated informally since the mid-1570s, Philip and the Guisards signed a military alliance late in 1584 that not only ended any prospect of Spain’s French enemies succouring the Dutch rebels but also threatened France as well as the Netherlands with Spanish domination. The Protestant nightmare of an international Catholic league for what Walsingham believed was ‘the ruyne and overthrow of the professours of the Ghospell’ had finally become a reality.54
The enterprise of England
There was no formal declaration of war between England and Spain. This would be a conflict far removed from the chivalric posturing of Henry VIII’s campaigns. Reluctantly, in August 1585, Elizabeth agreed to support the rebels with 7,500 English troops under the command of the earl of Leicester. The long-suffering Philip II had been weighing up the pros and cons of invading England since the early 1570s. Now, faced with Elizabeth’s treaty with the rebels, and raids by Drake late in 1585 on the Spanish coast and Indies, he finally made up his mind. Preparations for the Empresa de Inglaterra, ‘the enterprise of England’, went into high gear in February 1587 following the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which left her Calvinist son James VI of Scotland heir-presumptive to the English throne. Mary had dabbled in one plot too many, giving Walsingham and his agents the chance to arrange her entrapment – her written support for Elizabeth’s murder. Under intense pressure from the privy council and Parliament, and convinced that it was a case of kill or be killed, Elizabeth had signed Mary’s death warrant, and although she subsequently repudiated the regicide, she had undoubtedly wanted Mary dead. When Philip learnt of Mary’s execution he wept for the new Catholic martyr, and then issued a flood of orders to begin assembling the Armada. In the words of his secretary, it was time to put England ‘to the torch’.55
The question of who would carry that torch into England would prompt perhaps the most fateful decision of the entire Enterprise. Philip could have opted to deploy the Armada in a direct descent on England or Ireland, thereby minimising the time his fleet would be exposed to the elements and to English warships. Instead, he eventually decided on a combined operation. The Armada would sail up the Channel, anchor off Flanders, and then escort Parma’s army across to Kent. The advantage of this plan was that it would bring Europe’s finest troops to bear on England’s ramshackle and ill-prepared land defences; the disadvantage was that it was too complicated, as was only to be expected from an armchair strategist like Philip. His habitual reliance on divine intervention to plug any gaps in his preparations did little to improve the Armada’s chances of success, and nor did his choice of the duke of Medina Sidonia to command it. The duke, although a steady man, lacked the initiative or naval experience to depart significantly from his master’s inflexible instructions. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the Armada, and the good sailing conditions it enjoyed as it bore down upon England in the summer of 1588, left few in any doubt that the great moment of crisis not only in Elizabeth’s reign but also in the fortunes of the Protestant cause throughout Europe had arrived. To the English sailors who first caught sight of the Armada off the Lizard in mid-July 1588, it must have been a daunting sight: about 130 ships spread across the horizon in a crescent formation, carrying almost 19,000 troops, and mounting 138 heavy guns (that is, of 16-pounder calibre or above).
The story of Drake nonchalantly continuing his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe after receiving news of the enemy’s sighting is one of the many fictions that have grown up around the Armada like barnacles on a galleon’s hull. Another is that this was a David-and-Goliath contest that the English won against the odds. The fleet that left Plymouth on 20 July to confront the Armada was, in fact, the most powerful in the world. Commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham, it comprised some eighty ships that between them carried 251 heavy guns. Less than half of these vessels belonged to the royal navy, and the rest were provided by port towns, the London merchant companies, and privateer shipowners such as Leicester and Ralegh. The English ships were faster and handier than the floating fortresses of the Spanish, with crews better practised in standing off and outgunning opponents (although against less formidable opposition than the Armada, such tactics would normally have preceded, rather than replaced, boarding). The one glaring weakness on the English side was that Effingham’s captains had no experience of fighting in disciplined formation – in other words, as a fleet – which was the only way to attack the Armada effectively. Drake, for example, abandoned his station after the first day’s fighting to do what he knew best – seize a rich Spanish galleon – instead of leading the fleet as he had been ordered. The English made another unwelcome discovery in the heat of battle, which was that even their heaviest guns were incapable of crippling an enemy vessel unless fired at suicidally close range. As long as the Spanish maintained good order, which they did, the English ships had little chance of making their superior firepower or manoeuvrability tell. By the time the Armada dropped anchor in the Calais roads on 27 July not one Spanish ship had been severely damaged by English gunfire, much less sunk.
Calais, the scene of England’s greatest defeat in living memory, was about to witness one of its greatest victories. Medina Sidonia had done what Philip had asked of him: he had brought the Armada intact to its rendezvous point with Parma’s army. But this still left the problem of how the two forces were actually to combine. Even if Medina Sidonia had felt secure enough (with the English fleet lurking just to windward) to detach ships from the Armada to clear a way through the Dutch craft patrolling the inshore waters, Parma’s troop barges needed calm conditions to cross the Channel safely, and by late July the weather was worsening. While Medina Sidonia waited for something little short of a miracle, his ships – anchored against a lee shore – were sitting ducks. On 28 July the English launched fireships towards the Armada, and at the sight of these most feared of naval weapons many Spanish captains panicked and broke formation. At last the English were able to get in among the enemy and pound them at close quarters. Several Spanish galleons were surrounded by English ships and battered until blood ran from their gunwales. Hundreds of Spaniards were killed or wounded. And although all but half a dozen vessels survived this bombardment, the prevailing winds forced the Armada out into the North Sea and beyond all hope of a conjunction with Parma’s army.
The Armada’s long and limping journey home (round Scotland and down the west coast of Ireland), battered by autumn gales and low on food and water, took a far greater