Transcript
Knox (0:00)
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Dan Snow (1:06)
This episode of Dan Snows History is sponsored by American Historytellers. In the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women and children, risking it all to start again in in the new World. Every week on American History, Tellers host Lindsay Graham takes you through the moments that shaped America. In our latest season, we explore the untold story of the Pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving. After landing at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims forged an unlikely alliance with the Wampanoag people. They helped survive the most brutal winter they had ever known, laying the foundation for a powerful national myth. But behind that story lies another one of conflict, betrayal, and brutal violence against the very people who helped them survive. Follow American History Tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Historytellers. The Mayflower early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. It was one of those powerful fleets ever to shake out its canvas and strike out across the open ocean. Pope himself had blessed the banner that flew from the topmast of its flagship. The sails of every ship carried the vivid red cross of Crusade. They called it invincible. They called it great and most fortunate. But that was before. You're listening to Dan Snow's history at Unto taking you back to the summer of 1588. The fate of England. The fate of Europe, nay, the fate of the world, hung in the bands. Out on those gray waters of the Channel, a vast fleet of around 130 Spanish ships sailed north. A maritime crusade war. Galleons, supply vessels, troop transports, their holds crowded with 30,000 men. King Philip II of Spain, the most powerful man in the world, called it la Armada invincible. The invincible fleet. It was his instrument. Well, it was an instrument of divine justice against the heretical bastard born, regicide, usurper. Across the water, it was a tool to crush Protestant England, to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and return the island to the Catholic fold. But what did unfold was not the swift, the glorious victory that King Philip of Spain had expected. England's ships might have been smaller, but they were faster and they were more agile. They were manned by seamen who knew every inch of this English coast. They knew its idiosyncrasies, its dangers, its opportunities. They were men who knew how to fight dirty men like Drake, men like Hawkins and Frobisher. Men who'd cut their teeth on piracy and ambush. They weren't the navy of brass buttons and starched collars that lay in the future. They were the horny handed toughs who knew how to ride the flood to greatness. The Spanish were humiliated. Spoiler alert. The Armada staggered north, battered by storms. And a legend was born. The legend of a miraculous victory, of divine favor, of national destiny. God blew and they were scattered. Read the medals struck afterwards in England. Was that really true? Had God made his preferences clear? Or did good old fashioned planning, logistics, technology, leadership, investment and skill win out? In this explainer episode, we're going to find out. I'm going to take you through the story of the Spanish Armada. I'm going to explore the politics that brought these two powers to the brink of war. I'm going to hear about how the fighting at sea played out. We're going to meet the key players. Philip ii, Elizabeth I, the cautious Duke of Medina. Stoney, the man who'd never really gone to sea, who got seasick, who didn't really want to be there. We'll meet Howard and Drake. We'll also meet the sailors who faced the terror of cannon fire and the terrible gale force winds. I'm going to talk about how this failed invasion helped to forge an English identity rooted in the sea. Protestant, defiant, ready to take on the world. Enjoy. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the Shuttle has cleared the tower. It must have been an unforgettable sight. 3pm on 29 July 1588. Imagine you're a little way off Lizard Point, Cornwall, the great headland that stretches down into the Channel, the so called western approaches. And you are watching one of the greatest invasion fleets ever to be launched in the history of the world. It is a raid across the horizon. And as that fleet came into sight of land, the lead ship spilt. The wind from its sails slowed down and all the other ships followed her example. It was a tightly knit fleet. Everyone conformed to the actions of the Leader. There were 120 ships, 120 each with the red cross of religious crusade on their white weather beaten sails. Around 30,000 men on board. And this was their first sighting of the land that they had come to conquer. This was the arrival of the so called Spanish Armada. And that leading ship, around a thousand tons, a great galleon at that moment it hoisted a huge banner, a mighty banner that stretched from its top mast right down to the water. On that banner was an image of the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene kneeling before the cross. It was a banner that had been blessed by the Pope himself. This was a holy crusade. Confident in the support of God, the Pope had remitted the sins of the cruise. The Spanish Empire and its ruler, King Philip of Spain, were God's chosen instruments to deal with the wicked heretic queen of the English. But first of all, let's go back a bit and cover some of the background, some of the rivalry between England and Spain. In this period. Both those countries, England and Spain, were Atlantic powers. And the discovery by Europeans of the New World of the Americas a hundred years before the Armada sailed had ignited just the most extraordinary and gigantic competition between England and Spain. But other Atlantic powers, like France, the Netherlands and Portugal as well, it was all a race to exploit this new world and indeed the oceans and the places that lay beyond. It was a race to extract value from the Americas and beyond, to transport enslaved Africans to the New World, to bring back precious metals and commodities from the Americas, and to dominate this new Atlantic space. This competition was then given a savage ideological religious edge by the Reformation, which saw particularly the Dutch and the English embrace the other side of the schism within the Catholic Church. They adopted Protestant ideas. So now you've got bitter divisions fueled not only by cash and the desire for national prestige and power, but but also by religion. Each side thought the other was profoundly evil, devilish even. It was a toxic combination. Philip II of Spain emerges as one of the leading figures of the Catholic world, possibly the leading figure, its champion. He ruled over a massive empire. It was particularly enormous because at that point he was also ruling over Portugal as well. The Portuguese royal family had died out. It stuttered to a finish. And so Philip claimed the mantle of King of Portugal, which meant that his empire, empire was not only that of Spain, but Portugal as well. So that means he ruled over Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, much of what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, but also southern Italy, much of the east and west coasts of Africa, enclaves along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and India, Mexico well up into the modern usa, Brazil, Peru, the Caribbean islands and over into Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines. The Spanish Empire was vast and to Philip of Spain it looked like God was on his side. He had smashed the Turkish in the Mediterranean at the Battle of Lepanto. So he seemed to have halted the advance of the Ottoman Turkish into Christom for a generation. His great obsession, his great hobby other than fighting unbelievers was collecting religious relics, saintly relics. In his giant Escorial palace in Madrid he had something like seven and a half thousand relics of saints around him by the time he died. He was, let's be honest, fairly hard line when it came to religion. He said that if his son would grow up to be a heretic, that is a Protestant, he would carry the wood to burn him himself. And that religious zealotry was exacerbated by the fact that the most difficult of his subjects to control were the Protestant ones. The Netherlands was in full scale revolt against Spanish rule and many people in the Netherlands were Protestants. And Philip had sent an army there almost 20 years before the Armada set sail. That army was locked into a savage attritional war. In that low lying, boggy environment, it was very, very difficult to operate in. You needed all sorts of specialist equipment. You need boats with shallow draughts, you need a never ending supply of men. The landscape was marshy and disease ridden. It swallowed up armies. There were lots of fortresses there, lots of sieges and those mud strewn trenches ground armies into dust and that was where Philip and Elizabeth really fell out. There were lots of causes for Philip and Elizabeth becoming enemies, but their roles in the Low Countries was the main one. I'll come back to that in a second because we've also got to remember that Philip had once been Elizabeth's brother in law. He had married Mary I, the first queen regnant, I, the first queen in her own name In English history, she was known subsequently to some as Bloody Mary. She'd been the one who attempted to reintroduce Catholicism to England fairly robustly after the reign of her father, Henry VIII and her little brother, Edward vi. She did so with the support of her husband, Philip of Spain. Now, interestingly, while Philip of Spain was her consort, her husband, he'd recommended that Mary build lots of ships. He'd said, the safeguard of England is in its navy. And he'd been exactly right. But Mary had died childless, and now all those nice, powerful ships were inherited by her successor, her little sister, Elizabeth. When Mary had died in 1558, Philip had actually proposed marriage to Elizabeth. Amazingly, he hadn't let Protestantism got in the way there. But she had rejected him, which probably hadn't helped their relationship. And their relationship went further on the slide when Elizabeth allowed buccaneers, pirates, privateers, adventurers, you can call them what you like, folks, to begin to gnaw away at the edges of the Spanish Empire. People like John Hawkins, who in the 1560s crossed the Atlantic with Elizabeth's backing. On one voyage, he took his young cousin, by the way, a guy called Francis Drake. They were hoping to do some trade in the Spanish Empire, which was technically closed off to foreign shipping. They took a cargo of enslaved Africans and they attempted to sell them in Mexico. But eventually a Spanish fleet found them, turned on them and crushed them in what was England's first great naval battle outside northern European waters. The young Francis Drake escaped from that humiliating defeat, but he was left with a burning hatred of Spaniards and he plotted his revenge for the rest of his life. Francis Drake didn't have to wait too long. Between 1577 and 1580, with Elizabeth as a key investor, Drake went on a circumnavigation of the world. He was the first English commander to sail around the world and led the second expedition that had ever successfully made it all the way around. It was basically part exploration and part a massive, prolonged raid on Spanish possessions. Ships were captured, towns, settlements were burned. It was just a huge propagation to Philip and it was a blow at the heart of the Spanish Empire. But curiously, it wasn't actually that that led to war between Philip and Elizabeth. That was, as I said, caused by what happened in the Netherlands in September of 1585. Elizabeth had crossed a line. She'd taken the huge step of sending troops to the continent to help the Dutch rebels fight against Spain. She did not wish to see Catholic Spain assert its control right across the Low Countries with all the implications that would have for the ports that took English trade into Europe, and indeed those ports from which an invasion fleet could be assembled to attack England. Now, don't forget Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry vii. He'd invaded England and Wales to capture the throne. The Tudors, they had a long memory. They were very nervous about someone else repeating the trick that had brought them to the throne. So for lots of reasons trade, geography, power, politics, Elizabeth was keen to keep the Protestant Dutch independent and free from Spanish imperial control. She sent 6,000 men to help them, and this was a provocation the Spanish could not ignore. Philip's initial plan had been to replace Elizabeth with her cousin Mary, Mary Queen of Scots, who was a good Catholic. But Elizabeth executed her in 1587, and that further enraged Philip and it further encouraged him to send that expedition to England. But it meant without Mary, he'd have to put himself on the throne, or possibly his daughter Isabella installed as a puppet. Either way, Philip made the decision to invade England and get rid of this heretic, treacherous queen that was causing him so many problems in Europe and around the world. A gigantic fleet was assembled from all over Philip's empire, and it was told to gather in Cadiz in southern Spain. Elizabeth decided that she would intercept this fleet. She would break up preparations for the invasion. She would strike before it had a chance to set sail. And so, in April 1587, an English fleet appeared off Cadiz. A rumor flew around town immediately that it was El Draque, that it was Drake, and they were right. Drake just sailed straight into Cadiz. He attacked the Spanish fleet at his moorings. He burnt the ships down to their water lines. He smashed up the quayside, the walls. The English had the run of the town for hours. They were able to do a huge amount of damage. He sailed off from Cadiz. He laid waste the coast. Now, this sounds unglamorous, but he was able to destroy one very important convoy. It was carrying wooden barrel staves. Now, barrels are essential for long distance transportation of food. There are no jars, there are no freezer units, refrigeration in this period. So good, tight, solid barrels are best in this period for preserving food and water for the long haul. Drake did terrible damage to Spanish ambitions by destroying a huge number of these seasoned wooden barrel staves. All in all, the whole expedition, it was a spectacular humiliation for Philip. The Venetian ambassador reported back to Venice. He said he believed the English were masters of the sea. The Pope was unimpressed. We are sorry to say it, he wrote, but we have a poor opinion of this Spanish Armada and fearsome disaster which is why the Pope was happy to bless and remit sins and say nice things. But he wasn't going to part with a penny of hard cash until the Spanish set foot on English soil. The canny operator Drake, however, was worried by what he'd seen in Spain. As he sailed back north to England, he wrote to Queen Elizabeth and said, I dare not almost write of the great forces we hear that the King of Spain hath prepare in England most strongly and most by sea. And he added a quote which I've always loved. Stop him now and stop him ever well. Drake was absolutely right about preparing by sea. Throughout British history, there's been a tension between investing in ships and investing in shore defences, like fortifications and armies. You can either fight the enemy when they're at sea or you can try and stop them when they land. Drake knew that ships are a much better bet. You can wait for someone to arrive and land before you try and fight them. But that's a pretty inefficient way of stopping invasion. Sending your ships out to sea to intercept an invading fleet when all the enemy troops are vomiting into the scuppers, teeth falling out from scurvy, knackered after weeks at sea before they've had the chance to get onto land, well, that's much better. Sink just one troop transport ship and, well, it's a much more efficient way of killing men than when they're all scuttling about on land. Drake's advice was good. Prepare most strongly by sea. And within the context of the Tudor state, they did exactly that. I've been to the National Archives here in London and I've looked at documents to show how the Tudor state, Elizabeth's government, was trying to take a rigorous, very modern approach to mobilization. For example, there's one document I've seen where every sailor who lives by the Thames, their name is listed, their home address, their skill set, whether they're ferryman or fisherman, et cetera. So the idea is you could mobilise those people when the time came. You didn't just have to recruit them and then pay for them to sit around in case the invasion arrived. In the event of that invasion, you just knock on their door and say, mate, you're up. Bring your stuff, we're going to sea. And so the Tudor state was responding to that invasion threat and you get the germ of a modern navy and that's a force that would grow into one of the most dominant military forces in history. This is the beginning of a centuries long story of British naval excellence. Meanwhile, back in Spain, there was a huge argument. The fleets were being reassembled, ships were being built, men were being found. But there was debate about how exactly to deal with Elizabeth. Should they take enough troops with them just to invade England, land in Devon or Cornwall or Hampshire, march London, get rid of Elizabeth, or should they take advantage of an existing army, the one that was in the Low Countries fighting those Dutch rebels? It was led by the Duke of Parma, Philip's brilliant nephew. That was an army of veterans. They were trying to crush that rebellion. Should the Spanish Armada sail up the Channel, pick that army up, whiz across the Straits of Dover and land in Kent, broadly speaking, they opted for the second of those two plans. They sent a well equipped fleet with some reinforcements and lots of cannon, lots of artillery and supplies. But basically the plan was to go and pick up the Duke of Parma's army in the Low Countries and bring him across to England. Now, there was a fundamental problem with that plan, and those of you who have anything to do with boats might recognize it immediately. It is a lot easier to say, oh, I'll meet you around here and I'll just hop on that boat, than it is to actually do it in practice. This plan demanded a massive amount of logistical organization. You have got to transport an army from its bases in what is now Belgium to the coast onto ships waiting out at sea. And for that you need a port. And if you don't have a port, you need a very, very safe anchorage. And you'll need lots of flat bottom boats, they're called, so boats that can get into the shore, beetling in and out, transferring troops and artillery from the shore to the much bigger ships with their deeper keels out at sea. By the way, enough of those boats were not available. And to make matters even worse, there was no viable port. France was technically neutral. You couldn't just march in and grab Calais and use it as an embarkation port. And the Dutch and Belgian ports that were in Spanish hands were blockaded by Dutch rebels. You have a swarm of smaller, brilliantly constructed craft that knew those shoal strewn waters of the Rhine estuary like no one else. So the Spanish force on land had no way of getting on the Armada when and if the Armada arrived. Experienced veterans knew that. One senior officer in the Spanish fleet told a papal envoy, we sail in confident hope of a miracle, because they knew that logistics weren't in place to move Parma's army onto the Spanish Armada when it got near. This was a very, very complicated amphibious operation and it was not Helped by the fact that the Commander of the Armada, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, did not know what he was doing. He might have been the richest, most powerful feudal lord in Spain. He was a good, maybe even a brilliant administrator. But he'd never really been to sea before. In fact, he wrote to King Philip and he said he didn't want to serve. He wrote to the King and said, I'm seasick and always catch a cold. I have no experience of the sea or of war. I feel I should give but a bad account of myself, commanding thus blindly and being obliged to rely on the advice of others without knowing good from bad. Even his mother didn't think he was up to the job. But Philip II ignored the pleas of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and he was appointed to command the Armada. It was a position that had been left vacant because In February of 1588, Spain's legendary premier, Admiral Santa Cruz, the Great Seafarer, he died. Now, Medina Estonia was a poor choice as a successor, but not immediately so, because actually he was a very able administrator and he managed to get this fleet together. He managed to stockpile the food and deal with jealous subordinates and assemble a vast number of ships. So that bit he pulled off. The next bit, though, would be a different story. In May 1588, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the senior officers of the fleet went to the cathedral in Lisbon and took the expedition's sacred banner, blessed by the Pope, from the altar. Every man made a confession. The ships were checked for women that might have been hidden aboard. The brothel ship that usually accompanied expeditions like this was left behind, just not suitable, not appropriate for a crusade. There was to be no blasphemy, no gambling, no feuding, no swearing aboard. I do wonder how carefully that was observed by men clinging to the rigging, trying to reef sails in 30 knots of breeze in the teeth of a Biscay storm. At daybreak every day, the ship's boys were to sing the ave Maria. On 28 May, what the Spanish call the Holy Enterprise glided out of Lisbon. And I think the Duke of Medina Estonia could have taken some solace that first night in the Atlantic. He presumably was lying prostrate in his bunk from seasickness. But he had managed to get the Armada to sea. Well done him. But deep down, he knew that was the easy bit. The fact that the rest of the mission would require a miracle to succeed must have been a bit daunting. Waiting in England was the English Navy. It wasn't the Royal Navy, as we understand it today, that would take shape in subsequent centuries. It was a fleet assembled for the short term by the monarch of England, Elizabeth I. Some were her ships that she'd paid for, but most were armed merchant ships which she had rented. They effectively contracted for the duration of the campaign. Incommoud was not Sir Francis Drake, but Charles Howard, Baron effingham. He was 52 years old. He was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth and much like Medina Sidonia, he'd been appointed really for his royal and aristocratic connections. However, unlike Medina Sidonia, he was really enthusiastic about it. He really took to it. He made it his business to inspect every ship in his fleet. He said he was more comfortable sleeping aboard than he was in his own bed at home. He turned himself into a passable naval commander and he was blessed with his subordinates, a generation of buccaneering adventurers who knew their business. We've got Sir Francis Drake, who agreed to accept the role of second in command, probably for the only time in his entire career. There were also men like John Hawkins, whose ship designs had revolutionised fighting at sea. There was Martin Frobisher, who was a pirate, he was a slave trader, who would command the Triumph, a thousand ton ship, the largest in the English fleet. Howard and Drake moved the majority of their ships to Plymouth to wait for the Armada. There was another squadron of the Navy under Lord Henry Seymour in the Narrows around Dover to protect against a sudden dash across the Channel by Spain's army in the Low Countries, the one commanded by the Duke of Parma. On came the Spanish, or rather they didn't come. Inevitably, when a large fleet of wooden ships puts out to the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, there's going to be complications. And there was a great storm just after they left Biscay, and the ships were scattered, they were damaged and they had to put back into harbour in northern Spain to replenish and reorganise. And they didn't leave again until the 21st of July. So it wasn't until a week after that, after a journey across the Bay of Biscay, that they sighted southern England, that they sighted the Lizard. The phoney war had come to an end. The world's greatest superpower had arrived off England's coast. Now many people will have heard the famous story of Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe wonderfully. They still play bowls up there today, which is a bit of a gift for documentary makers like me, because you can go and film them actually playing bowls in exactly the same place that Drake was playing 500 years before. The apocryphal story is that Drake was playing bowls when news arrived that the Spanish Armada had been sighted. It was off the Lizard. There's no way of getting sailing ships out of Plymouth harbour if the wind and tide are against you. So he just said, well, we have time to finish the game and beat the Spanish too. This story could be true, we don't know it was and not reported for some time afterwards. But it does disguise the fact that actually the English are in real trouble here. If the Spanish had sailed directly for Plymouth, they could have bottled up the English fleet, they could have landed before the English fleet got to sea. They could perhaps have stormed Plymouth. It would have been a very, very different outcome. Instead, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, remember this is a man who has never done this before. He had no confidence in his own decision making. He decided to stick with the letter of his orders from King Philip, his sovereign. He was not meant to attempt an invasion himself. He was meant to go to the Low Countries to collect the army of the Duke of Parma. Now, Medina Estonia's most experienced subordinates, Juan Martinez de Recalde and Don Alonso de Leva, they urged the AR admiral to sail instantly into Plymouth to try and cut the head off the Viper to smoke them out. But Medina's Donia refused. He said, no, we're going to go on a far more stately procession up the Channel. A huge opportunity had been missed. And sometimes it seems like you're too busy waiting for a miracle to notice the one that presents itself. As soon as the tide did turn, the English ships desperately put to sea, whether or not Francis Drake had finished his game of bowls or not. Warps were cast off, jibs and staysails set, crews herded out of taverns to take their place at the capstan's. Shouts, insults, horns, drums. The English clawed their way out of Plymouth, rowing boats pulling the great ships out into the sound. Sails were set as soon as they could, tacking to get out of sea. Leeches of sails, shivering bow waves kicked up as the ships caught the wind. There was a scramble to secure the so called windward gauge to be upwind of the enemy fleet, which is the key to the thing to do when you're fighting in a sailing fleet battle. By the morning of 30 July, the day after the Armada had been spotted, 55 English ships were at sea, heavily outnumbered, about two to one. But Drake and Howard didn't seem worried about that. They made the interesting decision to get to windward of the Spanish fleet. If you're upwind of the enemy, you control the tempo and the position, the timing of any battle, because you can swoop down with the wind behind you, discharge your cannons and then engage the enemy fleet and then break off whenever you want. It's much harder if you're downwind because you've got to tack, you've got to do these zigzags towards the enemy. So the English spent all day on the 30th trying to get upwind of the Spanish fleet, trying to get behind them, if you like. This is a bit of a gamble. It means placing the Spanish fleet between them and the English coast, which is, at first sight, slightly alarming. But Drake and Howard knew what they were doing. They led their squadrons around behind the Armada so that the morning of 31st July dawned and the Spanish caught sight of, for the first time, really, of the English fleet. To their astonishment, it was not in front of them, between them and the coast, defending the coast of England. It was behind them, it was out to sea, it was upwind of them. It was the first indication that the English fleet was being led by men who knew what they were doing. And they were sailing in ships, not all the ships, but lots of them, which had been built to the latest design. Ships which were going to fight in quite a different way. Ships which were not designed to fight an enemy, as they had done, for example, at that battle I mentioned, the Battle of Lepanto, which is ships that all they did was crash into an enemy and fight it out with cold steel, hand to hand, on the quarter deck. No, these English ships had been designed with cannon in mind. They'd been designed to act as floating gun platforms to stay further away from the enemy and batter them into submission. This is something you can go and see if you go to the Mary Rose Museum down in Portsmouth. The Mary Rose began its life as a towering warship, and that was designed to go alongside an enemy ship. And archers and men operating primitive gunpowder weapons would then shoot at each other on the decks and then fight it out to try and capture that ship. But as Mary Rose goes through its life, you see it going through various upgrades and refits. You see them harnessing the technology of cannons. It's fitted with bigger and bigger guns, which means there need to be openings in the sides, these swinging gun ports. Now, those would ultimately prove to be the doom of the Mary Rose, because when the gun ports were left open, there was a freak gust of wind. It caused the ship to capsize and water came through those gun ports and it sank very quickly. But you can see how Mary Rose changes as naval technology is changing rapidly through the 16th century. By and large, Spanish Armada was made up of ships that sort of expected to fight in that old fashioned way, to literally get to grips with the enemy, to throw a grappling hook across, pull them close and then just fight it out on the decks. But many of the English ships are of a new sleek design. They were interceptors, they were warships armed with cannon. They were designed for coastal defence, to whip out at speed, blast the enemy, and then dip back into port to resupply. So there were two very different concepts at work here. It was a turning point in military history. And the Spanish were about to discover that their giant fleet, composed of these towering galleons, were no match tactically for the smaller, speedier English ships. That packed a much bigger punch. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Thank you. Vost here. There's more coming.