Spanish Armada

The Spanish Armada was the great fleet that Philip II of Spain sent against England in 1588. It was meant to escort a Spanish army from the Netherlands across the Channel to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I. The English fleet harried it up the Channel, broke its formation with fireships off Calais and fought it at Gravelines, and storms wrecked many of its ships on the long voyage home around Scotland and Ireland. Its failure became a founding story of English national identity.

Spain under Philip II was the leading power in Europe and the champion of the Catholic cause, while Protestant England had become a rival. English privateers such as Francis Drake raided Spanish ships and colonies in the Americas, and from 1585 Elizabeth openly supported the Dutch rebels fighting Spanish rule in the Low Countries. The execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 removed a Catholic heir to the English throne. Philip, backed by the pope, prepared what was called the Enterprise of England. A raid by Drake on Cádiz in 1587 destroyed many ships and stores and delayed it by a year.

The plan was for the fleet to sail up the Channel and join the Duke of Parma, commander of the Spanish army in Flanders, whose troops would cross to England in barges under its protection. The experienced admiral Santa Cruz died early in 1588 and was replaced by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, a nobleman with little experience at sea. The Armada left Lisbon in late May 1588 with about 130 to 140 ships, many of them armed merchantmen and supply vessels, carrying some 30,000 sailors and soldiers. Storms forced it to stop at Corunna for repairs, and it entered the Channel only at the end of July.

Dates here follow the Gregorian calendar used in Spain; England still used the older Julian calendar, ten days behind. The Armada was sighted off Cornwall on 29 July, and the English fleet under Lord Howard of Effingham, with Drake as his deputy, came out of Plymouth. The English ships were generally faster and handier and tried to fight at a distance with their guns, while the Spanish wanted to close and board. Engagements off Plymouth, Portland and the Isle of Wight cost each side little, but the Armada, keeping a tight defensive crescent, was steadily pushed east without finding a safe anchorage.

On 7 August the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais. Parma's army was not ready, and Dutch ships controlled the shallow coastal waters it needed to cross. During the night the English sent eight fireships drifting into the anchored fleet. The Spanish cut their cables and scattered. On 8 August, at the Battle of Gravelines, the English attacked the disorganised fleet at close range, sinking or wrecking a handful of ships and badly damaging others. A shift in the wind saved the Armada from running aground on the Flemish sandbanks but drove it into the North Sea.

With the invasion impossible, Medina Sidonia led the fleet north around Scotland and down the west of Ireland. Storms in September wrecked more than twenty ships on the Scottish and Irish coasts, where thousands drowned, starved or were killed after coming ashore. Perhaps a third of the ships and a much larger share of the men never returned to Spain, though exact figures are uncertain.

England was saved from invasion, and the victory strengthened Elizabeth's Protestant regime and its reputation abroad. But the war went on until 1604. An English counter-attack in 1589 failed, and Spain sent further armadas in the 1590s and 1601, all frustrated by weather or defeat. Spain rebuilt its navy and remained the leading European power for decades, while the Dutch revolt continued with English help.

Our 1600 map shows the Kingdom of England, the Spanish Empire and the Dutch Republic as they stood in the years after the campaign.