The Spanish Armada was a great fleet of armed ships. Everyone thought that the Spanish Armada could not be defeated. The Armada was made of 130 ships. People of Spain often called it the “Invincible Armada,” but in 1588 the armada was defeated by England. The Armada was assembled in 1586 as a part of the attempt by Philip II to invade England. Philip II sent his armada to attack England in August in 1588. The Spanish had more ships, but the English knew the seas better. The English ships were better able to be moved than the heavy Spanish galleons. There had been bad feeling between Spain and England. They had been there for a while, like since the 1560’s.
The
Spanish Armada
fleet was assembled and dispatched by King Philip II of Spain in an unsuccessful
attempt to invade England in 1588. The defeat of the armada was one of the great achievements
of Queen Elizabeth I of England and helped bring about the subsequent decline of the Spanish
Empire. The mission of the armada combined political and religious aims. King Philip, leader of Roman
Catholic Spain, could not suppress a revolt of his Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. This
revolt, which began in 1566, was aided by Protestant England. By 1586 Philip had decided that he
would be unable to defeat the Dutch without first mastering England. At the same time, he hoped
to resolve the long-standing religious rivalry between England and Spain by dethroning Elizabeth
and reconverting England to Catholicism. He therefore evolved a plan to conquer the English.
The scheme called for coordinating a fleet sailing from Spain with an army from the Netherlands for
a simultaneous invasion of England. Philip appointed Alonso Pérez de Guzmán,
Duke of Medina-Sidonia, to lead the force of 130 ships, which transported nearly 30,000 men. The English,
aware of the plan, tried to prevent the armada from sailing by attacking it at Cádiz, Spain, in
1587. They succeeded in delaying it for nearly a year.
By July 1588, however, the armada had sailed. It was first sighted off the English coast on July 29,
and a larger English fleet, commanded by Lord Charles Howard (later 1st earl of Nottingham),
intercepted it near Plymouth. For the next week, Howard, with his faster and
smaller ships, attacked the Spanish in battles off Plymouth, Portland Bill, and the Isle of
Wight. Unable to break the armada's formation, however, the English waited for a chance to strike
a decisive blow.
The opportunity came when the armada anchored near Calais,
France. Howard hoped to join the troops scheduled to sail from the Netherlands. Howard ordered ships set on fire to be sent against the
armada, producing panic that broke the Spanish formation. In the ensuing Battle of Gravelines on
August 8, the English defeated the armada. Unable to sail home through the English Channel
because of heavy winds, the badly damaged remaining ships were forced to sail north around
Scotland and Ireland to return home. Only 67 of the original 130 ships reached Spain, and most of
these ships were in poor condition.
The failure of the armada did not end the war between England and Spain, which lasted until 1604.
It did, however, stimulate English nationalism, secure Protestantism as England's state religion, and
create the trust in the English navy that for centuries was the first line of the nation's defense.
For Spain, in contrast, it was a demoralizing defeat that nearly bankrupted the
treasury.
In summary, the
reason being that Spain was taking gold and silver from the lands it had claimed
in the Americas, and England wanted some of this wealth.
Queen Elizabeth I encouraged
Frances Drake and other English seamen to raid Spanish ships and towns, even
though the countries were officially at peace.
Religion was a problem, too. They fought from Lisbon, Spain, to the
Drkney Islands of Scotland. The English finally defeated the Spanish Armada.
They defeated them in 1588. Even though the Armada had a lot more ships,
the English still won the battle .The English won the battle in the English
Channel located between England and France.
During the nine-day battle, the smaller, easier to move English ships
meet the Armada and inflected terrible losses. The Spanish ships that got away
from the English ran into bad weather. Very few ships made it back to Spain.
Some ships were lost through battle damage, bad weather, storage of food and
water, and directional error. Some
ships were just lost in the open sea; others were driven into the coast of
Ireland and wrecked. Only sixty ships were known to make it back to Spain. Many
of the ships were too badly damaged to be fixed, and maybe
as many as 15,000 men died. The English lost several hundred, maybe even
thousands of men, but most of them died of disease rather than battle injuries.
With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England became the dominant world
power and remained so for centuries. However, it is interesting that the armada
action was the first major naval gun battle under sail, and started a period of
two and a half centuries during which gun armed sailing warships dominated the
seas. It is hard for me to believe, with our modern day naval technology, what
it must have been like back in those times. The Spanish Armada eventually led to
and opened the way to our modern naval technology.