🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of The Spanish Armada

History · Early modern

The Spanish Armada

1588

Philip II's attempt to invade Elizabethan England by sea

In 1588 Philip II of Spain sent a great fleet up the Channel to escort the Duke of Parma's army across from Flanders and overthrow the Protestant Elizabeth I. Harried by English gunfire, broken up by fireships off Calais and mauled at Gravelines, it was driven north around Scotland and Ireland, where storms wrecked much of what was left. The invasion never landed.

How to spot them

  • ▸1588: a Catholic king sends 130 ships to escort an invasion army from Flanders to England
  • ▸Beacons along the south coast; Elizabeth I riding out in armour to address troops at Tilbury
  • ▸Quiz clue: 'Medina Sidonia', 'fireships at Calais', 'Gravelines', 'the Protestant wind'
  • ▸The crescent formation, and a long running fight up the Channel rather than a single battle

What happened

A game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe, said to have been finished before the fleet would sail (1588)

First recorded decades later; almost certainly legend, though the tide did keep the English in harbour

Philip II's plan to ferry the Duke of Parma's veterans across from Flanders

The fatal flaw: there was no deep-water port where the fleet and the army could meet

Eight blazing hulks cut loose into the anchorage off Calais at midnight (7–8 August 1588)

Feared to be 'hellburners' packed with powder; cables were cut and the crescent formation broke

The running fight off Gravelines that finally broke the crescent (8 August 1588)

The fiercest day of the campaign; the wind then drove the fleet into the North Sea

'I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman' — a speech to troops on the Thames (1588)

Elizabeth I at Tilbury, continuing '…but I have the heart and stomach of a king'

A commemorative medal struck with the motto 'He blew, and they were scattered'

Flavit et dissipati sunt — crediting the storms, and God, rather than English gunnery

Wrecks strewn along the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland on the long way home

Only about half the ships that set out ever got back to Spain

Quick-fire facts

  • •Philip II's first commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, died before sailing; the reluctant Duke of Medina Sidonia, a soldier with no naval experience, replaced him
  • •The English were led by Lord Howard of Effingham as Lord Admiral, with Francis Drake as his vice-admiral
  • •The fleet numbered about 130 ships when it left Lisbon in May 1588
  • •Drake's raid on Cadiz in 1587, which delayed the sailing by a year, is remembered as 'singeing the King of Spain's beard'
  • •English ships were lower, faster and better gunned; Spanish tactics assumed boarding, English tactics did not
  • •No English ship was sunk in the fighting, though disease killed thousands of English sailors afterwards
  • •The Anglo-Spanish War it belonged to dragged on until the Treaty of London in 1604, under James I
  • •An English counter-attack, the Drake–Norris expedition or 'English Armada' of 1589, failed just as badly

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources