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.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 22