Philip’s folly

The destruction of Spanish King Philip II’s Invincible Armada by English warships -- and the English weather -- in July and August 1588 is one of those moments in national history that has served to define the nation. The object of Philip’s Enterprise of England, as Neil Hanson says in “The Confident Hope of a Miracle,” was to land an invading army on the country’s southern coast. The Armada was intended to sail from Spain, travel up the English Channel and then rendezvous off Dunkirk with the Duke of Parma, the ablest military commander of the day. Parma then would escort a fleet of barges filled with troops from the formidable army of Flanders. Once ashore, the Spanish would have faced little serious opposition from what Hanson calls “the raggle-taggle militias and Trained Bands,” which were all Queen Elizabeth I could have put into the field.

This was the plan. Had Parma’s army landed, it would probably have been successful. Elizabeth and a substantial number of her nobles might have stood alone against Philip in 1588. But even the Protestants, Hanson claims, feared that as much as a third of England’s population would have supported the invasion. England was a recent convert to Protestantism, and Elizabeth herself was, in the eyes of many, an upstart who had had her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, executed on dubious charges of treason. Ireland remained resolutely Catholic and ready to rise against the hated English at the first sign of Spanish support. Scotland too: Although formally a Protestant state, Scotland had never fully accepted the new religion, and although allied with the French, it too might have welcomed a Catholic invasion of the south.

Of course, the army never made it across the channel. As every English student knows, Philip’s Armada was defeated by an outnumbered English fleet. How? Because, Hanson says, the English ships were smaller, faster and better armed. It was Albion’s David against the papist Goliath. Some of this is certainly true. English naval technology was slightly superior to that of the Spanish, although perhaps not quite “years in advance of their European counterparts,” as Hanson claims (he gives a riveting account of the evolution of English guns and gunnery in this period). More significantly, their gunners were able to fire more often and more accurately than the Spanish, who relied more on boarding enemy ships than shooting at them. Many of the ships of the Armada were troop transports and merchant vessels; eight were oar-propelled, fast and maneuverable in shallow waters but ill-equipped to deal with swells and storms. All were overloaded with armed men and equipment, slow and difficult to maneuver.

Most of the Spanish with any knowledge of the two nations’ forces knew that the English had a clear advantage. The more confident Spaniards, however, believed that if they did not have technology on their side, they did have God -- always a risky assumption, as Philip was not the first, nor the last, ruler to discover. As one senior officer told the pope’s special emissary before the Armada’s departure: “We are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.” “Never,” Hanson says, “can such a vast enterprise have been launched on such a flimsy basis.”

Instead of sending a miracle, God, unpredictable as always, sent a storm -- or rather a series of them. The first hit the fleet before it had even left Spain. Four days later, it was struck by another in the Bay of Biscay. Five days after that, on July 29, when the scattered ships had re-grouped and been repaired as best they could, the Armada finally entered the channel. Two days later, the battle began. It lasted on and off until Aug. 12, by which time it was clear that all hopes of the expected miracle were over. The Armada had by now missed the rendezvous with Parma and had no chance of return. Many of its ships were lost, and many others had been rendered unseaworthy by the English guns. The commander of the fleet, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, ordered his captains to take the western route home. “The Armada was so completely crippled and scattered,” he informed Philip, “that my first duty to Your Majesty seemed to save it.”

Two days later, the weather struck again. All that was left of the Armada struggled up the coast of Ireland, in monstrous seas. Many of the ships ran aground off Ireland, where peasants lay in wait for their crews, “stripping every man who swam ashore.” Only a handful of what one English observer called “the greatest navy that ever swam the sea” made it back to Spain

Hanson has written an exciting narrative that deals evenly with both sides of the story. Never before has actual battle been described in such detail and rarely with such flair. It is unclear, however, why he chose to call his book the “true history” of the Armada -- this suggests that all previous ones were false. There are new details here, new evidence certainly, but the interpretation remains unchanged. For all its careful scholarship and occasional skepticism, this is still another retelling of the national myth. *