What happened to the Spanish Armada?
England won. In 1588 Philip II of Spain sent about 130 ships to clear the Channel for an invasion army from Flanders. English ships harried the fleet up the Channel, fireships broke its anchorage off Calais, and on 8 August it was battered off Gravelines. Driven north, it lost many ships to storms off Scotland and Ireland.1
In the summer of 1588 a huge Spanish fleet sailed from Lisbon to change the religion and the ruler of England. Philip II of Spain called the enterprise the Jornada de Inglaterra, the expedition to England. The English remember it as the Spanish Armada. A week of running fights in the Channel, a night attack with fireships off Calais and one hard day of gunfire off the Flemish port of Gravelines decided that it would never land its army. The weather and the coasts of Scotland and Ireland then turned a failed invasion into a catastrophe.2
This is the story of the campaign from both decks: Philip's plan and the reluctant Spanish admiral who had to carry it out, the English commanders and their guns, the battle of Gravelines on 8 August 1588, the long voyage home and the myths that grew afterwards. It sits beside our guides to the military history of Britain and of Spain, the life of Francis Drake and our ranking of the greatest naval battles in history.
Why did Philip II send the Spanish Armada?
Philip had long wanted to bring England back to the Roman Catholic Church, and English attacks on Spanish trade and colonies gave him further reason. Two events in 1585 decided him: by the Treaty of Nonsuch Elizabeth I promised troops and money to the Dutch rebels fighting Spanish rule, and Drake sailed for the Caribbean, where he sacked Santo Domingo and Cartagena in 1586.3
Seen from Madrid, the war had two aims at once. A study of the expedition by the Spanish historian Rafael Lazcano describes it as meant both to defend Spain's political and economic interests in Europe and to protect the Catholic faith, and he quotes Medina Sidonia's general order to the fleet, which named the service of God and the return of souls to the Church as the King's first motive. Elizabeth's chief minister, Lord Burghley, read the threat the same way: in a council paper endorsed 25 February 1587 in the English reckoning of the time, early March 1588 in ours, he described a King of Spain urged on by the Pope and fighting "principally" over religion.4
The calendar of Philip's own letters shows a dynastic aim as well. In February 1587, before news of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, had reached him, the King asked his ambassador in Rome to obtain from the Pope a secret brief recognizing him as heir to the English crown, which he promised to settle on his daughter, the Infanta Isabel. That spring Drake raided Cádiz, destroying shipping and stores gathered for the invasion and delaying the enterprise.5
What was the Spanish plan?
Spain's best admiral, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, wanted one great fleet from Lisbon to carry the whole invasion. Philip chose a different combination. Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma and governor of the Spanish Netherlands, would cross from Flanders with the veteran Army of Flanders, about 30,000 men, in barges, and the fleet from Spain would defeat or hold off the English navy and clear the Strait of Dover for the crossing.6
The plan had a flaw that Parma saw from the start. His barges could not fight their way out, because Dutch warships under Justin of Nassau blockaded the shallow Flemish ports and he had no warships of his own to drive them off, while the Armada's big ships could not come close inshore to protect him. Parma asked for 6,000 Spanish veterans from the fleet and for an escort across the Channel. Philip seemed to agree, but his instructions to Medina Sidonia made the 6,000 men conditional on the fleet not having had to fight on the way.7
Santa Cruz died in February 1588, and Philip gave the command to Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Duke of Medina Sidonia, the greatest noble of Andalusia, an able organizer with little experience of the sea. The Duke tried to refuse. "I know nothing about it," he wrote, in the words of the English calendar of his letter, "I have no health for the sea." Philip insisted.8
How big were the fleets?
After three months of preparation in Lisbon the Armada sailed on 30 May 1588 (20 May in the English Old Style calendar, which ran ten days behind the Gregorian one already used in Spain). The relations printed at the time gave it 130 ships of 57,868 tons, 2,431 guns and 30,656 men. Storms drove the fleet into A Coruña to refit, and it sailed again on 22 July, with 127 ships not counting caravels in the reckoning of the Spanish naval historian Antonio Gómez Beltrán. By the time it reached England, Corbett calculated, sickness and desertion had cut its soldiers from 19,000 to 17,000 and its sailors from 8,000 to 7,000.9
The English navy was commanded by Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral, with Drake as his vice admiral. Its muster lists name 197 ships with 15,925 men, but the editor of the English state papers, John Knox Laughton, showed that many were small craft or absent, and that perhaps 8,000 to 9,000 men took any real part in the fighting. The best English ships were fast and heavily gunned, built to stand off and fight with artillery rather than board.10
What happened in the Channel fights?
The Armada was sighted off the Lizard in Cornwall on 29 July (19 July Old Style), and beacons carried the news along the coast. The English fleet at Plymouth was caught downwind of the enemy, but by a skillful maneuver came round to windward, to the west of the Spaniards, which gave it the choice of when and where to attack. The famous story that Drake insisted on finishing his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe first was traced by the naval historian Julian Corbett to a pamphlet of 1624. The remark itself appears only in an eighteenth-century biography.11
The Armada sailed up the Channel in a tight defensive formation, and three fights followed: off Plymouth on 31 July, off Portland Bill on 2 August and off the Isle of Wight on 4 August. Each time the pattern was the same. The Spaniards tried to bring the English within grappling distance and board, and the faster English ships kept out of reach and fired from a distance. The English harried the Armada and did some damage, but could not break its formation or stop it.12
The Spaniards still lost two great ships. On 31 July the San Salvador, vice flagship of Oquendo's Guipúzcoan squadron, was crippled by an explosion that blew out her stern, and Pedro de Valdés's flagship, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, lost her foremast after colliding with other ships. Medina Sidonia pushed on and left her behind, and the next morning Drake took her surrender. Both ships ended up in English hands. Valdés later told the King he had been deserted on purpose.13
How did the fireships break the Armada at Calais?
On 6 August the Armada anchored in the open roads off Calais, still short of Dunkirk and with no news from Parma. It was a dangerous berth, as the governor of Calais himself warned. The English anchored to windward and were joined by Lord Henry Seymour's squadron from the narrow seas, and Medina Sidonia's messengers came back with bad news: Parma was at Bruges, nothing had been embarked, and, as Fernández Duro records, the Duke's secretary Arceo judged that a fortnight would not be enough to embark it.14
Around midnight on 7 to 8 August the English sent eight ships, filled with combustibles and set alight, down on the wind and tide. None of the Spanish ships caught fire, but the attack caused panic. The Spaniards cut or slipped their anchor cables and scattered out to sea, and in the dark and the strong current most could not get back. The formation that had held all the way up the Channel was gone.15
What happened at the Battle of Gravelines?
At dawn on 8 August (29 July Old Style) Medina Sidonia found only a handful of ships around his flagship, the San Martín, and the rest were scattered toward Dunkirk. Rather than run after them, he turned to face the English with the few galleons he had while pinnaces told the others to regroup. The flagship galleass San Lorenzo, her rudder broken in a collision during the night, ran aground under the walls of Calais. English boats attacked her, her commander Hugo de Moncada was shot dead, and Howard reported that he had "taken the chief galleass this day before Calais". In the same letter to Walsingham he wrote of the Armada: "Their force is wonderful great and strong," and in the next breath, "and yet we pluck their feathers by little and little."16
The battle that followed lasted from about eight in the morning until mid afternoon, off the coast between Calais and Gravelines. For the first time the English came in close, sometimes within musket range, and fired into the hulls. Fernández Duro wrote that only eleven Spanish ships bore the fire of more than a hundred English ones for long periods, and he counted 107 hits on the San Martín. In the New Catholic Encyclopedia's account the Spaniards had exhausted their large shot and the English were running out of cannonballs by the end of the day. Colin Martin, as the next paragraph shows, doubts the first half of that.17
Three Spanish ships were lost on the day or the night after. The galleons San Felipe and San Mateo, crippled after fighting alone against much of the English fleet, drifted toward the coast of Zeeland, where Dutch ships took them, and the Biscayan María Juan sank. Many other ships were holed below the waterline, damage that would decide their fate on the voyage home. The English broke off in the afternoon, short of ammunition, with little damage to their own ships. Antonio Gómez Beltrán, writing for the Spanish Navy's Institute of Naval History and Culture, counts only about sixteen Spanish ships in the line that took the first English onslaught and some forty by the end of the day, against 136 to 150 English ships. For him, losing three ships, four with the galleass, after such a day was a poor return for the English.18
Why did the Spanish guns achieve so little? The archaeologist Colin Martin, who excavated three Armada wrecks, argues that Spanish gun carriages and drills were made for a single broadside before boarding, not for reloading again and again in a close gunnery duel. The ships' own records support him: the 22-gun Levanter Trinidad de Escala fired 38 shots on 8 August, 1.7 rounds per gun, and many wrecks still held plenty of heavy shot. Britannica's account agrees that the Spanish heavy guns were not mounted or manned for reloading in action. In Martin's verdict the low English casualties show how ineffective the Spanish fire was. Gómez Beltrán rejects this reading: in his view Spanish gunners fired sparingly by doctrine, seeking certain hits at close range rather than volume of fire.19
Why did the Armada sail around Scotland?
On the morning of 9 August a northwest wind pushed the battered fleet toward the sandbanks of Zeeland, and Medina Sidonia's pilots told him that not a ship could be saved. Then the wind backed to the southwest and the Armada stood out into the North Sea. A council of war that afternoon agreed to return to the Channel if the wind allowed, and otherwise to sail home around Scotland. The wind and the English fleet, still to the south, decided it.20
The English followed until the Armada passed the Firth of Forth, then turned back for supplies. Medina Sidonia now issued sailing orders for the voyage home: north to 61½ degrees, well clear of Scotland, then far out into the Atlantic, taking "great heed lest you fall upon the Island of Ireland". Most of the ships that kept to this course, including the flagship, reached Spain. Medina Sidonia sighted the Spanish coast on 21 September and was put ashore at Santander, ill with fever. Two days later he wrote to the King that he had come back "almost at my last gasp".21
What happened to the Armada in Ireland?
Ships slowed by damage, short of water or poor at sailing to windward were driven onto the coasts of Scotland and Ireland by the autumn gales. The hulk El Gran Grifón was wrecked on Fair Isle, and the Levanter La Trinidad Valencera sank in Kinnagoe Bay in Donegal. Counts differ: the surveyor William Spotswood Green, who charted the west coast of Ireland, found about 24 or 25 ships wrecked there and the National Monuments Service of Ireland gives 26, while Colin Martin puts the losses off Scotland and Ireland at thirty or more, and the Oxford Companion to British History at upwards of 30 in the Hebrides and western Ireland.22
Three ships of the Levant squadron, La Lavia, La Juliana and the Santa María de Visón, were driven onto Streedagh strand in Sligo, and the National Monuments Service of Ireland dates the wreck to 21 September 1588. Captain Francisco de Cuéllar, who survived, wrote that within an hour all three ships were broken to pieces, that fewer than 300 men escaped and more than a thousand drowned. The English official Geoffrey Fenton counted 1,100 bodies on that one strand in the letter Allingham quotes, and the National Monuments Service gives the loss as over 1,100 lives, while Green, citing Fenton, gives 1,200.23
Many who reached the shore were killed. In Clare the sheriff Boetius MacClancy executed men washed ashore, and in Mayo survivors handed over to George Bingham, brother of the Governor of Connacht, were put to death. An English report from Connacht estimated that six or seven thousand men had been cast away on that province's coast and that some 1,000 who escaped to land were "put to the sword". Cuéllar, helped by Sir James MacDonnell of Dunluce, crossed to Scotland and reached Flanders, where he wrote his narrative at Antwerp in October 1589.24
How many ships and men did Spain lose?
No exact count exists. Two Spanish lists drawn up in October 1588, of ships returned and ships missing, disagree with each other. Colin Martin's estimate is about 44 ships of all kinds, roughly a third of the fleet, and he judges that of some 30,000 men who sailed barely one in three was alive the following spring. Britannica gives about 60 ships known to have reached Spain, many beyond repair, and perhaps 15,000 dead. The Oxford Companion to British History suggests some 11,000 Spanish dead, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia counts 64 ships reaching northern Spain at the end of September with 9,000 sick and dying men.25
The English suffered negligible damage and few casualties in action. Corbett notes that by the time the fleets reached Calais not a single English ship had been lost. Disease killed far more. On 10 August (Old Style) Howard wrote from Margate that sickness was growing "wonderfully" and that men who had served valiantly were dying in the streets. On the Elizabeth Jonas alone more than 200 of 500 men had died. Laughton identified the epidemic as typhus, worst in ships commanded by Howard's less experienced kinsmen.26
Who won, and why did the Armada fail?
England won: the invasion never landed, and the Dutch revolt survived. Britannica judges that the defeat saved England from invasion and the Dutch Republic from extinction and struck a heavy blow at the prestige of the greatest power of the age, and it calls the campaign the first major gun battle under sail. The Oxford Companion to British History is more measured: England gained great international prestige, Spain showed it could send a huge fleet into northern waters, and neither state radically changed its policies.27
Historians from both countries put the root cause in the plan rather than the sea fight. Colin Martin concludes that a self-contained task force from Lisbon, as Santa Cruz proposed, would probably have succeeded, but that Philip's insistence on making Parma's army the main force raised problems that could not be solved: "as an armed convoy the Armada might indeed have proved invincible, but as a battle-fleet it was almost inevitably bound to fail." The Spanish naval historian Cesáreo Fernández Duro, writing in 1884, was harsher on the commander: on the morning of Gravelines, he wrote, fate seemed to counsel Medina Sidonia "the worst in every case", and he quoted a contemporary critic who held that the Duke erred greatly in anchoring at Calais without being sure that Parma could join him. He also noted that Philip had always doubted Parma's cooperation.28
Spain was far from finished, and neither was the war. In 1589 Drake and Sir John Norris led an English expedition against Lisbon, and Spain kept sending help to England's enemies: in September 1601 a fleet sailed from Lisbon to support the rising in Ireland. Hume's calendar of the Spanish papers gives it 33 ships and 4,500 soldiers. A storm split the fleet at sea. The Irish Catholic historian Philip O'Sullivan Beare, writing in Spain two decades later, records that seven ships under Pedro de Zubiaur were driven into Corunna, while the larger part reached Kinsale under Juan del Águila in September 1601 and landed 2,500 foot.29
Was the Armada really "invincible", and did God's wind sink it?
The name "Invincible Armada" was never the fleet's official title. Spanish papers speak of the Jornada de Inglaterra and the Armada, and Lazcano notes that "Invincible" began as a sarcastic phrase of English merchants, later picked up by the Italian writer Filippo Pigafetta. The name stuck in Spain too: Fernández Duro titled his documentary history of 1884 La Armada Invencible.30
Another myth made the Lord Admiral a Catholic who led his co-religionists to defend the realm. Writing in the American Historical Review in 1917, Armand Gerson showed that every contemporary record contradicts it: Howard sat on commissions to arrest recusants, and the government, fearing disloyalty, kept Catholic recusants out of the forces altogether. Burghley's council paper of early 1588 had assumed that "all the papists" able to harm the Queen would side with Philip.31
The most lasting myth is that a storm alone saved England. Laughton wrote in 1894 that the phrase Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt, "God blew and they were scattered", had long been accepted as a true and pious explanation of the whole campaign, and a flattering one, when in fact the English fleet had already beaten the Armada. Not every historian agrees: the Oxford Companion to British History still holds that the elements principally saved England.32
Where was the Battle of Gravelines fought?
The battle was fought in the southern North Sea just beyond the Strait of Dover, off the French and Flemish coast between Calais and Gravelines, a small port on the way from Calais to Dunkirk. The wrecks of the voyage home lie from Fair Isle to the west coast of Ireland. For another age of sea fighting see our account of Trafalgar, and for the galley war Spain had just won in the Mediterranean, Lepanto.33
