It was easier in 1940 to appreciate this point of view than it had been in, say, 1890.

To minds formed by A. T. Mahan and the theorists of empire the issue in 1588 seemed to be the command of the ocean seas and the opportunity to exploit the newly discovered routes to Asia and the Americas. To such minds it was rational and right to fight for economic interests, but absurd and rather shocking to fight about the relative validity of conflicting systems of ideas. … The men of 1588 did not think so. To them the clash of the English and Spanish fleets in the Channel was the beginning of Armageddon, of a final struggle to the death between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. … Ideological wars are revolutionary wars, easily transcending national boundaries, and always, at least in intention and in the imaginations of the men involved in them, total wars.

At one side a pair of stairs led up to it, and the fresh wood of the scaffolding had everywhere been decently covered in black velvet. On the platform in line with the stairs stood a single high-backed chair, also draped in black, and three or four feet in front of it a black cushion. Next to the cushion and rising above it something like a little low bench showed where the velvet imperfectly concealed an ordinary wooden chopping-block.

This was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. For a moment she held all their eyes, then she sank back into the darkness of her chair and turned her grave inattention to her judges. She was satisfied that her audience would look at no one else.

The black velvet gown fell below her knees revealing underbodice and petticoat of crimson silk, and she stepped forward suddenly, shockingly, in the colour of martyrdom, blood red from top to toe, against the sombre background.

Then for a moment her ladies were busy about her. The black velvet gown fell below her knees revealing underbodice and petticoat of crimson silk, and she stepped forward suddenly, shockingly, in the colour of martyrdom, blood red from top to toe, against the sombre background.

There has never been anything in history like the forty-five-year-long love affair between Elizabeth Tudor and the people of England.

It is hard, now, to say just how it began, or to analyse all the elements that went into it, but it rose in those years to a fervour the intense sincerity of which we cannot doubt, however stilted and rhetorical we may find its expression.

One desperate man, tempted by the enormous stakes, could change the history of England.

All over England that autumn the nobles and principal gentlemen of the several counties bound themselves by a solemn Bond of Association to support and save the Queen from any plots in furtherance of a pretended title to her crown, and to proceed by their own forces against all persons that shall act or counsel anything tending to the harm of Her Majesty’s person, to the utter extermination of them, their counsellors, aiders and abetters. Murder would be answered, if necessary, by murder and – their fear of civil war doubled by their fear for the life of Elizabeth – the English were determined that next time Mary should not escape.

Then came William Parry’s cold-blooded revelation that he had been promised plenary absolution from Rome for the murder of the Queen, besides substantial earthly benefits, and had come to England expressly for that purpose.

It is awkward, however, for a king to have his mother the victim of a public executioner, and not least awkward for a king of Scots whose turbulent people did not relish seeing their ancient privilege of exterminating their own kings usurped by the hereditary enemy across the border.

One may doubt that Elizabeth had quite succeeded in hiding from herself the most probable consequence of her giving Davison the signed warrant, that her surprise at the turn of events was quite unfeigned.

In the event that had overtaken her there was ample cause for tears. Better perhaps than anyone else in England Elizabeth could see how completely that falling axe at Fotheringhay had sheared through the chief link that bound England to the past.

But Elizabeth did more than merely profit by time: she baffled it; she seemed sometimes to annul it altogether. If she was always the same it was because she was always different.

Her foreign policy was to have no foreign policy not alterable by the lightest touch on the helm. Her consistency was in being always inconsistent. … Time untied so many knots, cancelled the necessity for so many desperate decisions, revealed so many unexpected shifts of pattern in a kaleidoscopic world, that the shrewdest statesmen were glad to take refuge in a wise passivity, a cautious opportunism.

Elizabeth was not the mistress but the mother of the temper we call Elizabethan, and she was as little able as most mothers to estimate her offspring. To the daring they had from her they added a determination of their own, a flaming imagination which was none of hers, and a thrust of ambition it would tax her to control.

To her cool, sceptical, disenchanted mind the enthusiasms of her own people were becoming almost as unintelligible as the dark passions of Spain. But more and more the thrust of those enthusiasms disturbed the delicate balance of forces which preserved her own freedom of action. Some lust or idealism the Golden Hind had stirred when it floated triumphantly on the Thames sent more and more of her subjects to trail pikes beside the Dutch or wake West Indian echoes with their guns.

For years Elizabeth had been the prima ballerina in a spectacle of her own designing. As long as she could call the tune she felt confident of leading the measure. … But no dance, however charged with magic, achieves more than the illusion of escaping time.

In two years the war cost her more than two hundred and fifty thousand pounds and the lives of some thousands of sturdy yeomen and gallant gentlemen, among them her favourite Philip Sidney, and all its effort barely seemed to slow the inexorable Spanish advance.

Mendoza drew confidently on the resident agents and travelling emissaries of that disciplined and devoted company whose strategic deployment stiffened the ranks of Catholicism on every battle-front from Poland to Galway. Unless contemporary observers were mistaken and circumstantial evidence misleads, Bernardino de Mendoza by 1587 had struck an alliance with the Jesuits closer than he ever told his king.

The last of the Valois looked like a man secretly at grips with death.

Crowds paraded outside the Louvre, bellowing for vengeance on the English, and King Henry felt obliged to send a message to Sir Edward Stafford, begging him for the sake of his personal safety not to leave the shelter of the embassy.

It gave a shape to vague terrors and an outlet for uneasiness to blame all the evils of France on the Huguenots, and to make a desperate minority, fighting for its existence, into a menacing conspiracy about to overwhelm the kingdom. It was reassuring to the insecure to hear themselves clamouring for the blood of the heretics, as if one more act of aimless violence could cure a world whose malady was aimless violence.

But the objectives of the League, its real objectives, were clear and definite, and its techniques were appropriate. Most simply the League existed to serve the religious interests of the papacy and the ultramontane wing of the clergy against Huguenots and Gallicans alike, the dynastic interests of the Guises against the ruling Valois and the Bourbon succession, and, because Spain was the paymaster, the international interests of Spain.

Mendoza had already discounted, too, the Anglo-French alliance. The only power in France he even half-way trusted was that of the Holy League and its chieftain, the Duke of Guise. When the moment of the Enterprise came, not Henry of Valois, Mendoza hoped, but Henry of Guise would be master of France.

The hot fight at Warnsfeld which we remember for the death of Philip Sidney was remembered by soldiers in the Netherlands as a demonstration that armoured men on heavy horses charging home with lance at rest could break through, bowl over or brush aside many times their number of light horsemen and pistoleers.

But Parma, after he had tasted their quality, never underrated them. The first of their infantry to be blooded stood for the best part of two hours on the slippery mud by the Meuse at push of pike with picked Spanish veterans, and it was not the raw English levies that gave way.

The chief source of the smother of language which concealed and still conceals the character of Felice Peretti, however, was the Pope himself. Words gushed from him in a torrent, spontaneous, uncalculated, recklessly emotional, apparently utterly revealing. And yet, revealing almost nothing. Not, one guesses, usually from any intent to deceive but rather because this spate of language gave relief to all those surface impulses which his stern inner concentration prevented from finding an outlet in action. What is hard to find in his recorded words, or in the gossip about him, is any clue to the great ruler who brought peace and order to the papal states and water to Rome. To know Sixtus V one must look at what he did, not what he said.

It might not enlighten us if we did. Now, as in his lifetime, the character and policies of Sixtus V lie hidden under a foam of words. … To know Sixtus V one must look at what he did, not what he said.

Sixtus might jeer at Philip and urge him for his own sake to finish with the English, but Sixtus knew that the issue was as large as Christendom, and no Pope of the great post-Tridentine line was more single-mindedly devoted to the recovery of all the provinces lost since Luther to the faith. Sixtus might be loud in his admiration for the Queen of England, but he was eager to assist in her overthrow by whatever means might offer. Whatever Sixtus may have felt or said about the death of the Queen of Scots, only one question was really important to him. Would it spur the laggard King of Spain?

Sixtus might be loud in his admiration for the Queen of England, but he was eager to assist in her overthrow by whatever means might offer.

In 1559 non-attendance at church cost twelve pence a Sunday. By the 1580s the fine had risen to twenty pounds a month, and since only a handful of rich men could afford such a sum month after month an Act of Parliament authorized seizing the land and chattels of those behind in their payments. In all his plans for the restoration of the faith in England Allen had counted most on the Catholic landed aristocracy. But no landed class could preserve their leadership indefinitely against the grinding attrition of such fines.

In 1559 non-attendance at church cost twelve pence a Sunday. By the 1580s the fine had risen to twenty pounds a month, and since only a handful of rich men could afford such a sum month after month an Act of Parliament authorized seizing the land and chattels of those behind in their payments.

England was an open land. The harbours were many and safe. It abounded with cattle and all sorts of provisions to be had for the taking. Its cities were ungarrisoned and practically unfortified. Not one could stand a three-day siege. Its people were unaccustomed to war, no match for the Spanish veterans. But more important still, two-thirds of them were Catholics or secret sympathizers with the Catholic cause.

At the secret heart of the great building, right next to the monastery church, a meagre suite of rooms is hidden. The most important pieces are a sort of study or workroom decently lighted but somehow meanly proportioned, and off it an alcove bedroom which has a shuttered little window opening into the church near the high altar. Monastery, palace and tomb prove only so many masks concealing a retreat, a refuge, almost a hiding-place.

Monastery, palace and tomb prove only so many masks concealing a retreat, a refuge, almost a hiding-place.

And in the Enterprise there had seemed to be in victory a risk even greater than in defeat. If Mary Stuart was alive when his armies overthrew the English she would have to be Queen of England. She was a Catholic, at least. She had courted him of late and she might prove grateful. But her heart was French, and Philip had learned from his father that the gravest danger to their dynasty lay in a union of France and England. It would be a bitter irony if Spanish blood and Spanish treasure were to be spent only to make the King of France again the greatest king of Europe.

Drake’s private war with Spain, however, was not itself an inheritance, and arose from nothing so abstract as a sense of public or religious duty. It sprang, like Samson’s private war with the Philistines, from a deep personal grievance. Young Francis Drake had been in the harbour of San Juan de Ulua with John Hawkins when the armed ships of that prosperous merchant were treacherously set upon and overwhelmed by the Armada of New Spain.

What modest capital he could gather had been invested in the voyage, and all was lost.

Galleys were not meant to fight against sailing-ships armed with heavy batteries and had never beaten them, even by boarding, except when in overwhelming force. Galleys were too low in the water, too fragile, too vulnerable to gunfire, and carried too few guns.

Galleys were not meant to fight against sailing-ships armed with heavy batteries and had never beaten them, even by boarding, except when in overwhelming force. Galleys were too low in the water, too fragile, too vulnerable to gunfire, and carried too few guns. The Portuguese had demonstrated the combat superiority of the sailing-ship in the series of victories of their armed merchantmen over the war galleys of the Turks and Egyptians in the early decades of the century. … Though they could almost always escape from sailing-ships by dodging behind shoals, or rowing away into the eye of the wind, galleys were for fighting other galleys.

After those twelve hours none of them would ever be much afraid of shore batteries or galleys, or even fire-ships, again.

On the morning of June 13th Parma led a picked force of Spaniards floundering across, holding their weapons above their heads to keep them dry, some of them breast high in mud and water, those unlucky enough to slip plastered with slime from head to foot, the duke himself as muddy as any.

Wychegerde was quick to warn Walsingham that though fewer in numbers than had been previously reported these were first-rate fightingmen, Parma’s finest – vigilant, wary, seasoned, not to be surprised or panicked, working steadily in half-flooded trenches with the enemy on the walls looking down their throats, accepting the deadly hail of musketry with the same sullen curses they used for the grumbling of their empty bellies and the pelting rain on their backs, never missing an advantage or taking an unnecessary risk.

As the fire-ship bore down Renty ordered the sections of the bridge directly in her path to be uncoupled. They swung back, and the ship swept through and on to burn herself out harmlessly on the edge of the basin of Sluys. She had no gunpowder in her belly.

Just so, a fire-ship had drifted with the tide against such a bridge at Antwerp two years ago. Bold Spanish pikemen had leaped aboard to extinguish what seemed but a sulky fire when the whole ship blew up. Her entrails had been lined with brick and stuffed with gunpowder, stones and scrap-iron, and more men were killed and wounded in that one explosion than in many a pitched battle. No one who had seen ‘the hellburner of Antwerp’ would ever forget it.

Parma respected a valiant foe. He sought out Sir Roger Williams where he stood at the head of the remnant of his battalion, his arm in a sling and his great plume broken, praised his soldiership and offered to find a command worthy of it where he need never fight against his co-religionists or his fellow countrymen. Williams replied courteously that if he ever served any but his Queen in future, it would be in the army of that hard-pressed champion of the Protestant cause, the Huguenot hero King Henry of Navarre.

If he shunned the perils now forced upon his companions he would not only lose an army, he might lose for ever the only support he could rely on in his progress towards the crown.

Nothing in the record suggests that Henry entertained for a moment the idea of escape. Rather, he gave his captains the impression that this was just the place he would have chosen for a battle. Probably the decision was automatic; Henry knew that he owed his leadership of the Huguenot party less to his place in the succession and his somewhat ungracefully reassumed Protestantism than to his willingness to risk his life in the fore-front of every skirmish, and to bear himself in these long partisan campaigns less like a prince and a general than like an industrious captain of irregular light horse.

It cannot have been a minute later that the arquebusiers fired their volley, and the massed columns of Huguenot horse, quickening their trot, crashed into the galloping line.

The Gascons pointed out, however, that there was still a Catholic army in the south-west, about four thousand men under Matignon actually marching northward for a rendezvous with Joyeuse.

Staunch Huguenots like Maximilian de Bethune, later Duke of Sully, never really forgave Henry for letting slip so magnificent a chance. … He knew that Montaigne, though a Catholic and a loyal subject, was a moderate man, an advocate of peace and toleration.

Whether it was the hot, late summer, or the strange food, or the strong red wines, there was a steadily lengthening sick-list and since invalids left behind were likely to be knocked on the head by the justifiably irritated peasantry the long unsoldierly trains of wagons, loaded with plunder, were further burdened with men unfit to march.

Guise had circled warily around the Germans in their passage through Lorraine, slashing in to win a skirmish or two, enough to furnish prisoners and a standard for display in Paris, then dodging quickly out.

The Parisian preachers added that the King of France, who ought to be guarding his capital, was skulking somewhere behind the Loire, no doubt conniving with heretics. If it were not for the brave Duke of Guise they would all be murdered by Protestant brigands.

In vain Henry III sent the Parisians a veracious account of his conduct of the campaign in which the great foreign army had been turned back at a minimum cost in money and blood. In vain he ordered Te Deums for his triumph. The Parisians gave all the credit to the Duke of Guise.

But a victory may have other uses than military decision.

Basically the prophecy of doom depended on the numerology of the Revelation of St John, clarified (if that is the right word) by hints in Daniel xii, and reinforced by a blood-curdling passage in Isaiah. To those who had sufficiently studied the question there seemed to be no doubt that all history since the first year of Our Lord was divided into a series of cycles, complicated permutations of multiples of ten and seven, each cycle terminated by some gigantic event, and the whole series closing with awful finality in 1588.

Philip had always been a pious man, but never before had he referred grave difficulties and dangers to the will of God, as if executing that will relieved him of the need for human precautions. He had never been a ruthless egotist or shown a taste for illimitable power; he had never claimed a special destiny, only a special responsibility; but now he walked forward on the path he thought appointed for him as confidently, as unswervingly, as blindly as any saint or world-conqueror in history.

It was not the custom of Spanish noblemen to disqualify themselves for high office, especially for high military office. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the complete acquiescence with which the duke took up his post when the King again pressed it upon him represents anything except a sense of fealty to the Crown and the courage to bear any burden imposed by duty.

The Parisian Leaguers did not expect to seize power without a fight, and had anticipated that the King might have to be prodded into some rash act of violence which would incite a popular uprising. But the massed column of Swiss swinging down the Rue Saint-Honoré while evidently promising violence scarcely suggested rashness. It looked as though the King, with unexpected courage and decision, intended to forestall by a coup d’état, the coup d’état planned against him.

It was not, whatever Francis Drake sometimes darkly suspected, a matter of treachery, of a gullible sovereign and deceitful councillors. It was not even want of money, or reluctance to spend it. It was simply lack of the facilities and organization to provide very large quantities of food and drink fit to be kept for months aboard ship. The naval effort of 1588 was as unprecedented in England as it was in Spain, and the English had less experience than the Spanish in provisioning large expeditions. To keep a great fleet supplied with rations for two or three months ahead, when its crews go on eating up what you send them, requires an organization not to be improvised on the spur of the moment.

The naval effort of 1588 was as unprecedented in England as it was in Spain, and the English had less experience than the Spanish in provisioning large expeditions. To keep a great fleet supplied with rations for two or three months ahead, when its crews go on eating up what you send them, requires an organization not to be improvised on the spur of the moment.

In one thing Drake was quite wrong: Medina Sidonia had express orders not to be diverted by any English offensive, but to sail for the Channel and his rendezvous with Parma no matter what Drake did. If Drake had relied on the alarm caused by his appearance in person on the coast of Spain to keep the Spanish fleet at home he might have missed the Armada altogether. … Like Santa Cruz he was prepared to sail to meet the enemy with thirty rounds of ammunition per gun. In the actual encounter the English had spent more than that before they had done the Armada any real damage.

Like Santa Cruz he was prepared to sail to meet the enemy with thirty rounds of ammunition per gun. In the actual encounter the English had spent more than that before they had done the Armada any real damage. Off Weymouth they were able to remedy their miscalculation; if they had been off Lisbon instead they would have been in serious trouble.

Of course, it need not have happened. There is no contemporary authority for it; the earliest record is more than forty years after the event. But forty years is within the limits of fairly reliable oral transmission. It could have happened. The words are like Drake; they have his touch of swagger and his flair for the homely jest to relieve a moment of tension.

The Spaniards had achieved a kind of tactical surprise. It would be possible to say that for the moment they had the advantage of time and place which should be half the victory. They had the weather-gauge and their enemy was trapped in harbour to leeward. But it would be easy to exaggerate the completeness of the surprise.

The fourth, the Diana, which had parted earliest, stranded trying to get into Bayonne. Her crew, even her galley slaves, and her guns were saved, but the hull had to be broken up. Among the galley slaves was an imaginative Welshman, David Gwynn, whose tale of how he freed his fellow slaves on the Diana, exterminated her Spanish crew and then successively captured the other three galleys, enjoys a celebrity which no amount of refutation has much dimmed.

Weak ships, galleasses, the duke grumbled, for these rough seas. Perhaps they were. The San Lorenzo was to break her rudder again in less favourable circumstances.

In fact there is no reason to doubt that the Council of War was unanimous. The idea that Medina Sidonia could or would have tried to browbeat his experienced lieutenants into a decision they disapproved of is absurd. The custom of the Spanish service was that when a Council of War was divided, even by a single dissent, its members had to be polled, their individual opinions recorded and the whole record transmitted to the King, as was done after the council at Corunna. Medina Sidonia was a great stickler for the customs and etiquette of the service, the kind of commander William Borough would have liked to serve with; he would never have omitted so serious a formality. Nor would he have ignored the consensus of his senior officers.

That night after midnight one of the Spanish pinnaces, commanded by an English-speaking officer, came back with a Falmouth fishing-smack it had picked up and her crew of four. From them the duke learned that Howard and Drake had joined forces and been seen that afternoon, standing out to sea.

But behind them, and directly to windward, the Spanish saw the main body of the English fleet. The Spanish had lost the weather-gauge, and, since the wind for the next nine days blew mostly from the west, they were never except for brief intervals to regain it.

Expecting the English to attack, Medina Sidonia fired a signal gun and the Armada formed in battle order, each unit making or slackening sail with military precision, and changing course with due regard to its neighbours until the whole fleet presented to the English for the first time the famous crescent formation which was to puzzle and awe them all the way up the Channel. It was not, of course, a perfect crescent, but with the extended wings pointing towards the enemy, and thickened centre, it was sufficiently like one to make any experienced seaman wonder how so heterogeneous a lot of ships could achieve so smoothly and maintain so firmly so complicated a formation.

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, THE first modern naval battle in history began with gestures out of the Middle Ages, out of romances of chivalry. The Captain-General of the Ocean Sea hoisted to his maintop his sacred banner as a signal to engage, as Castilian commanders at sea had always done since first they sighted the Moorish galleys. And the Lord Admiral of England sent his personal pinnace, the Disdain, to bear his challenge to the Spanish admiral, like King Arthur sending Sir Gawaine to defy the Emperor Lucius.

The further we get from this event the more detailed and dramatic does its story become. … In the diary or smooth log of his voyage sent to Philip on August 21st, Medina Sidonia says simply that aboard the San Salvador some barrels of gunpowder blew up. … Everyone anywhere in the vicinity of the explosion seems to have been killed. Naturally, various conjectures were soon bruited in the fleet.

The duke had been on deck all day and had eaten nothing since breakfast. He did not go below now. He had a boy bring him a crust and some cheese to the poop-deck, and stood a long time, leaning on the taffrail watching the wake and the blackness beyond. Abandoning the Rosario was his first real failure, and he knew that whoever advised it and however wise had been the advice his would be the blame. Perhaps it was only then he remembered that Diego Flores de Valdés and Pedro de Valdés were not only cousins but inveterate and implacable enemies.

Abandoning the Rosario was his first real failure, and he knew that whoever advised it and however wise had been the advice his would be the blame. Perhaps it was only then he remembered that Diego Flores de Valdés and Pedro de Valdés were not only cousins but inveterate and implacable enemies.

Conduct which in any modern regular navy would have resulted in court martial and disgrace just brought Sir Francis added fame and a tidy packet of prize money. His contemporaries never blamed him; why should we?

The bitter lesson for the Spanish was that even when they had the weather-gauge they could not grapple and board the English ships, which were fast enough and weatherly enough to keep whatever distance they chose. The Spanish all thought that the enemy seemed to be right, too, in trusting to their guns, for the English had more big guns and of longer range, and better gunners who could fire much faster. Everyone in both fleets said three times as fast, though it must have been hard to keep count.

The bitter lesson for the English was that, in the face of Spanish discipline, their chosen tactics were not working. They had not expected to sink many of the Spanish fleet at the first encounter, or the second, but they had expected to cripple the galleons one by one so that they would have to drop out of formation and be overwhelmed. So far they had taken only two Spanish ships, the Rosario and the sinking hulk of the San Salvador, and, although the English may have thought their gunfire a contributory cause, both of these had been crippled by accidents.

After Tuesday morning’s fight off Portland Bill there were recurrent periods of dead calm, some light variable airs, and the rest of the time a very gentle breeze breathing from some quarter of the west. The Spanish could scarcely have asked for better weather. It enabled them to keep their close formation with a minimum of risk and trouble, it deprived the English of part of the advantage of their superior agility

Armies and navies have often remodelled their tactics or their organization in imitation of some admired antagonist, but not often in the face of the enemy and within sight of the crisis of a decisive campaign. The new organization does seem to have worked better than the old one. Its adoption was a credit to the intelligence of the English Council of War, and a tribute to the efficiency of their adversaries.

But from the poop-deck of his flagship the pilot who stood beside him could see something that would, the look and colour of very shoal water too close under his lee, stretching north-eastward as far as the eye could see, with here and there the black tooth of a rock showing. Francis Drake and John Hawkins would have known all about the Owers, and if they could have held the Spaniards’ interest and kept nudging them northward they would have had the whole Armada on the rocks in another twenty minutes.

The English believed, and so did the Spanish, that a fleet with a marked advantage in long-range weapons, culverins and demi culverins, could lie off at extreme range or nearly, and knock the enemy fleet to pieces without danger to itself. It turned out not to be so. At ranges of three to seven hundred yards a sixteenth-century culverin or demi-culverin might fail altogether to pierce the thick hull of a galleon or stout greatship

The English believed, and so did the Spanish, that a fleet with a marked advantage in long-range weapons, culverins and demi culverins, could lie off at extreme range or nearly, and knock the enemy fleet to pieces without danger to itself. It turned out not to be so. At ranges of three to seven hundred yards a sixteenth-century culverin or demi-culverin might fail altogether to pierce the thick hull of a galleon or stout greatship, and when it did would only make a small hole quickly caulked by an alert crew.

Sixteenth-century ships’ guns were hard to aim and uncertain to fire and, of course, errors that would have made no difference at fifty yards meant a complete miss at five hundred, but with decent training the gun-crews on both sides should have been able to do a great deal better. Most of the trained gunners in the Armada had never fired a gun from a ship’s deck

There was only one way to do it: fire-ships.

There is something unreal about the whole scene that stormy Tuesday evening at Dunkirk; one flyboat with no guns and its mast unstepped, another with no running rigging, another waterlogged and on its beam ends in the mud of the canal; some barges left uncaulked and already beginning to leak; others whose seams started the minute they were loaded; and the soldiers being tumbled into the sound barges like sacks of wheat, laughing incredulously when they saw the bare coffin-shaped boxes in which they were expected to put to sea.

If Parma was able to face the failure of the Enterprise with stony calm it may have been because he had foreseen long ago that it was doomed to failure.

It concerned the inventor of the hellburners of Antwerp, the most terrible weapons ever used by men in war, fire-ships which were actually enormous bombs capable of killing more men in one blast than might fall in a great battle, and of strewing a circle more than a mile across with a litter of flaming wreckage. The designer of these infernal machines, the Italian engineer Giambelli, was said to be now in England, working for Queen Elizabeth. And so he was indeed. At the moment he was harmlessly occupied with a somewhat impractical boom, meant to close the Thames at Gravesend. The only effective weapon he lent the English for the Armada campaign was the terror of his name. It was enough.

It concerned the inventor of the hellburners of Antwerp, the most terrible weapons ever used by men in war, fire-ships which were actually enormous bombs capable of killing more men in one blast than might fall in a great battle, and of strewing a circle more than a mile across with a litter of flaming wreckage. … The only effective weapon he lent the English for the Armada campaign was the terror of his name. It was enough.

Then lights appeared at the edge of the English fleet. Not lights, fires; two, six, eight of them moving forward rapidly and growing in brilliance until the watchers at the Spanish anchorage could see plainly eight tall ships with all sails set and lines of fire beginning to run up their rigging, driving straight towards them with wind and tide. The fire-ships seemed to maintain a perfect line, and to keep so close together that two pikemen on adjacent ships, if men could have lived on those blazing decks, could have leaned out and clashed their pike-heads above the intervening water.

These flaming monsters were no mere fishing-smacks, stuffed with brush and straw, to be fended off with oars. Getting a grapnel to hold on them, swinging them around and towing them on to the beach would be a feat of seamanship requiring nerve and brawn and split-second timing, for the line was driving along so fast, pushed by a strong wind, a spring tide and the set of the Channel current all working together, that it would cover its whole course in a few minutes. Apparently the first pair of pinnaces executed their manœuvre smartly enough, for the next morning the charred ribs of two fire-ships lay smouldering well short of the Spanish anchorage; but, a few seconds later, just as the next pair of pinnaces came into position and when, one must assume, the men standing in their bows were ready to throw their grapnels, the double-shotted guns heated now almost white-hot began to go off, spraying their shot at random over the water and by the force of their recoil sending up a fountain of sparks to be blown down among the boats. Startled, the pinnaces sheered off, there was a moment of tangled confusion; and in that moment the six remaining ships swept past and bore down on the anchored fleet, the sound of their exploding guns heard above the roar of the flames and the fountains of sparks shooting skyward. There could be no doubt. Here, once more, were the deadly hellburners of Antwerp.

That crippled monster, seeing the English line bearing down, scrambled desperately towards the shelter of Calais Harbour. A fast-ebbing tide, a heavy surf, no rudder and no knowledge of the contour of the beach, made escape unlikely, and at the last moment the straining exertions of the galley slaves tugging at the great sweeps only drove the galleass that much more firmly aground. There she lay, quickly heeling over more and more towards her beam ends as the water ebbed from beneath her, her deck canting inshore and her port batteries pointing foolishly skyward, stuck fast under the walls of Calais Castle.

The recovery of that formidable but tricky order in the first blustery hours of Monday morning was one of the more remarkable feats of Spanish discipline and seamanship. It was made possible, of course, by the leadership of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the stubborn courage of his rearguard action.

No more than Howard did Drake foresee that they would not fight with this Armada again.

Her Majesty was on her way to inspect her army at Tilbury.

But it was hard for Elizabeth to believe in religion as an overmastering motive, except for a few crack-brained fanatics who might be annoying, but not dangerous.

Elizabeth was easy to upset but hard to frighten. She might chop and change and draw back a dozen times before an unwelcome step. She might ignore an ugly fact until she drove her ministers nearly mad. But the pressure of real danger braced her.

From Plymouth to the Isle of Wight the Spaniards had been in sight of the English coast, following the usual track of east-bound ships. Thousands of eyes had been on them, and throngs had crowded the headlands and downs to watch the four great naval battles which punctuated their progress.

From a distance and through dense clouds of smoke the Newfound-landers may have thought they saw something like the Rouen account. Mendoza must have had confidence in the judgment of his Rouen agent, for this time he transmitted the news without the customary cautions and with expressions of rejoicing.

But the most definite news came from England. Twenty-five ships, all that were left of the English fleet, had taken refuge in the mouth of the Thames. On August 13th there had been a battle off Scotland. Drake had attempted to board the San Martín and been captured. At least fifteen English galleons had been sunk and others taken, while many of the rest had been so damaged that it was likely that they had gone down in the ensuing storm. The storm had prevented the pursuit and destruction of the surviving remnant, and the duke had put into a Scottish haven to refit and take on water and stores while he waited for a fair wind to take him back to the straits. Meanwhile the English were stricken with panic. It was forbidden to write or say anything about the fate of the fleet. There was widespread fear of an uprising by the English Catholics, and the Queen had betaken herself for safety to the army.

Drake is captured! The news winged its way from Cologne to Mainz and so to Munich, Linz and Vienna. Drake is captured! Paris told Lyons and Lyons told Turin and Turin told all Italy, though Venice had already had the same story, among others, in its own diplomatic pouches.

The Armada ran before a south-west wind. The time for turning back towards the Channel had passed, and however much the duke might have preferred going down with his flagship to going home in defeat he had made up his mind that the only way he could still serve his master was to bring as many ships as possible home.

The duke did what he could about that. He held a summary court-martial aboard the San Martín and, on evidence that his order had been received and deliberately disobeyed, sentenced twenty delinquent captains to be hanged. One of the culprits, a gentleman and a neighbour of his at San Lucar, he did have hanged at the yard-arm of a pinnace which paraded through the fleet with its grisly burden. The remaining nineteen were removed from their commands and committed to the custody of the Judge Advocate General, Martin de Aranda.

On the morning of the ninth more than half the fleet had ignored the signal to lie to and await the enemy. The duke did what he could about that. He held a summary court-martial aboard the San Martín and, on evidence that his order had been received and deliberately disobeyed, sentenced twenty delinquent captains to be hanged. One of the culprits, a gentleman and a neighbour of his at San Lucar, he did have hanged at the yard-arm of a pinnace which paraded through the fleet with its grisly burden. The remaining nineteen were removed from their commands and committed to the custody of the Judge Advocate General, Martin de Aranda.

It was now seen how deadly was the blow that Drake had struck at Cape St Vincent. With a long hard voyage ahead squadron after squadron reported only enough water to last, with the severest rationing, for a month or less.

Every available cask and butt had been filled at Corunna; there should have been enough for three months. But again casks leaked, and some when opened held no more than a few inches of green slime. It was now seen how deadly was the blow that Drake had struck at Cape St Vincent. With a long hard voyage ahead squadron after squadron reported only enough water to last, with the severest rationing, for a month or less.

His simple policy was to kill them all as soon as they could be found. In the main, that was done.

Two myths should, perhaps, be dealt with here: the story, spread by the English almost from the Armada year, that the Spaniards who came ashore were spontaneously murdered by the Irish for their clothes and arms and jewellery; and the legend, persistent in the west, that black eyes and hair, aquiline profiles and swarthy cheeks show the blood of the Spaniards who came ashore from the Armada ships and stayed. Not infrequently the wild Irish did relieve their unbidden guests of their valuables. Perhaps, now and then, a throat was cut. But there is only one recorded instance of the killing of Spanish castaways by Irish not directly in English pay, and it aroused general reprobation. Usually the Irish sheltered the Spaniards, supplied their necessities, and, whenever they could, helped them out of the realm. Several hundred Spaniards did so escape, mostly to Scotland. They thought they had left few if any of their countrymen behind. Perhaps here and there some castaway found a roof and a wife in a friendly village, but not enough, surely, to have any effect on the look of the people as a whole. If one sees, time and again, the same physical types in Connaught and in Galicia, it must be for some other reason.

But there is only one recorded instance of the killing of Spanish castaways by Irish not directly in English pay, and it aroused general reprobation. Usually the Irish sheltered the Spaniards, supplied their necessities, and, whenever they could, helped them out of the realm. Several hundred Spaniards did so escape, mostly to Scotland. … If one sees, time and again, the same physical types in Connaught and in Galicia, it must be for some other reason.

But when his contemporaries laid its failure to the incompetence of its commander, and said that if only Santa Cruz or Recalde or Oquendo or that odd hero, Pedro de Valdés, had been in command everything would have turned out differently, Medina Sidonia agreed with them. Perhaps that is why the judgment has so seldom been questioned since.

Who actually led the broken fleet on the last leg of its voyage, we shall never know. Captain Marolín de Juan should have done so, but that veteran seaman and skilled navigator had been unintentionally left behind at Dunkirk. There were four pilots aboard the San Martín, one of them an Englishman. Three died at sea. It must have been the fourth who brought the flagship staggering past Corunna before a westerly gale, and conned her to her landfall off Santander. We do not know his name.

In one note to Idiáquez he wandered from the subject to protest that the King had been wrong ever to place him in command of the Armada. He knew nothing, he said, echoing his first response to the appointment and forgetting the grim lesson of the summer past, of the sea or of war. He had warned the King that he would be ill-served by a general who had no judgment of his own in these affairs, and did not even know whom to trust. And now see how things had turned out! He would never command at sea again – no, not if his head should pay for it!

It is at least arguable, however, that no one could. Unless he could have cut off the Ark Royal and her two companions that Monday morning off Tor Bay it is hard to point out a mistake he made which affected the outcome of the campaign. It can be argued that all his other decisions, including the decision to anchor at Calais and the choice of the route home, were as sound as his personal conduct was courageous.

Before four days had passed, he had. There was one time when the royal apartments were not exposed to unannounced intrusions of Guisards. The Royal Council met in the ante-chamber which opened directly from the great circular staircase giving access to the royal suite. During its meetings all unauthorized persons were excluded; councillors were expected to enter unattended; the ushers of the Council kept the doors. And there was one body of men whose loyalty the King could count on absolutely – the Forty-five. Epernon had recruited them four years ago. They were all noblemen, but petit-noblesse of Gascony, whose whole wealth each was a horse, a sword, a ragged cloak and a few rocky acres to starve on. They had no friends or connections at Court, and no one to rely on except the King.

Guise was too greedy and too careless of details to leave anyone with the impression that he served either the Church or Spain for any but his own ends. Spain probably regretted him more than Rome, but mercenaries are always expendable. He had been employed for a diversion on one flank of a vast operation, and when the main attack had failed he had been left for the moment exposed and without adequate support. In a way he was as much a casualty of the Armada as Hugo de Moncada or Alonso de Leiva; but whereas those captains had died in the performance of their duty Guise, so Mendoza implied, had chiefly his own rashness to thank.

But Strada was, after all, Roman born and bred, and Spanish eloquence at its best is less ornate and has a deeper more iron-throated clang. Perhaps that is why, from the later seventeenth century on, Spanish historians preferred a variant version. The build-up, the frightened Secretaries, the serenely toiling King, the courier’s grim news, all these are the same, but before he takes up his pen again the King says only: ‘I sent my ships to fight against men, and not against the winds and waves of God.’

That Philip faced the bad news, as it came in, with dignity and constancy one can well believe, though there are limits to the constancy that can be expected of any human frame. He was seriously ill that autumn – an illness in the opinion of the diplomatic corps brought on, or at least aggravated, by anxiety and disappointment.

Almost as soon as he learned the extent of his losses he was assuring ambassadors that he would build another fleet stronger than the last, if he had to melt down every piece of plate on his table and every silver candlestick in the Escurial. It did not quite come to that, but American bullion had to be supplemented by scraping the cupboards of Castile and striking new bargains with Genoese bankers.

After talking to some of his captains Philip saw more clearly that it was not just a question of hiring ships. He would have to build his own if he wanted sound ones. And he would have to expand Spanish production of cannon.

But if Philip felt the blow of Fate, and showed that he felt it, he was not crushed by it. Almost as soon as he learned the extent of his losses he was assuring ambassadors that he would build another fleet stronger than the last, if he had to melt down every piece of plate on his table and every silver candlestick in the Escurial.

‘We are bound to give praise to God for all things which He is pleased to do. Now I give thanks to Him for the mercy He has shown. In the storms through which the Armada sailed, it might have suffered a worse fate, and that its ill-fortune was no greater must be credited to the prayers for its good success, so devoutly and continuously offered.’ And he tells the bishops gently that the prayers may be discontinued. No more ships were likely to come home. As early as this, then, the defeat of the Armada began to be ascribed in Spain to the winds of God.

At first thought, the hardest to understand is why the Spanish should have adopted the myth about the storm. Naturally the English welcomed a material proof that God was with them, but why should the Spanish accept the view that God was against them, that their fleet had contended in vain not against men but against the winds and waves of God? It is only at first thought that it is hard to understand. It is always easier to accept defeat at the hands of God than at the hands of men, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition is rich in resources for explaining apparently irrational behaviour on the part of the Deity.

Philip reached no brilliant solutions, but at least he faced the problem and began to see how much there was still to be done. The shock of defeat had awakened him from the somnambulistic trance into which he had been plunged after the death of Mary Stuart. For the rest of his reign he was again the Prudent King, cautious even to the point of what looked like timidity, hesitant, watchful, given to second thoughts, providing against every possible contingency as far as he could before leaving anything to Providence.

All that winter Philip’s pen probed at the mistakes he had allowed himself to make: the heterogeneous fleet – next time the ships must be better, and up to some uniform standard; the lack of long-range guns – more culverins and demi-culverins, next time; the divided command, the bad co-ordination, the lack of a deep-water port, even the question of how to dominate Dutch coastal waters, the crucial question which somehow Parma had neglected and allowed everyone else to neglect.

The shock of defeat had awakened him from the somnambulistic trance into which he had been plunged after the death of Mary Stuart. For the rest of his reign he was again the Prudent King, cautious even to the point of what looked like timidity, hesitant, watchful, given to second thoughts, providing against every possible contingency as far as he could before leaving anything to Providence.

Philip was walking in the inner garden of San Lorenzo when he heard the gardener declaring that after so much work done to train the pear trees on the south wall, God simply could not allow the promised fruit to be blighted. Philip called to him in a sterner tone than he commonly used among his monks. ‘Brother Nicholas! Brother Nicholas, mind what you say! It is impiety, and almost blasphemy, to presume to know the will of God. It comes from the sin of pride. Even kings, brother Nicholas,’ he went on more gently, ‘must submit to being used by God’s will without knowing what it is. They must never seek to use it.’

There is no link in England between the Armada campaign and any literary work as clear as one we can find in Spain. According to the accepted story a maimed veteran of Lepanto, a minor poet, in the confusing weeks before the Armada sailed from Lisbon, got his accounts of collections he was making for the fleet so embroiled that nobody could tell whether he was trying to cheat the Crown or not, and in due time he was sent to prison until somebody could straighten out his books. In his enforced leisure he found time to begin to write Don Quixote.

It seems more likely, however, that even had the Spaniards snatched a victory at sea the final picture of Europe, when peace came, would not have been much different. … By its very nature the war between Spain and England was likely to be indecisive, and men being what they are even its object lesson proved to be in vain. Most of Europe had to fight another war, thirty years long, before deciding that crusades were a poor way of settling differences of opinion, and that two or more systems of ideas could live side by side without mortal danger to either.

When the Spanish Armada challenged the ancient lords of the English Channel on their own grounds the impending conflict took on the aspect of a judicial duel in which, as was expected in such duels, God would defend the right. … So, when the two fleets approached their appointed battleground, all Europe watched.

It decided that religious unity was not to be reimposed by force on the heirs of medieval Christendom, and if in doing so it only validated what was already by far the most probable outcome – why, perhaps that is all that any of the battles we call decisive have ever done.

The galleass was an attempt to combine the speed of the galley with the fire power and sea-keeping qualities of the galleon. The attempt was not altogether successful, but they were formidable ships. The galleasses of Naples with the Armada mounted fifty guns apiece, some quite large, and were manned by three hundred soldiers and sailors and another three hundred rowers.