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The drift into war

Philip II was born six years before Elizabeth I in 1527 and died five years before her in 1598. Between them 'el rey prudente' (the prudent king) and the virgin queen dominated the second half of the sixteenth century. Quite unusually for reigning monarchs of that period, they actually met. This occurred in May 1555 while Philip was king consort of England and when Elizabeth was brought to Hampton Court after her imprisonment at Woodstock. Neither has left any personal recollections of the meeting, but from the wariness with which they treated each other thereafter no great rapport seems to have been established.

But Philip did harbour a grievance. He claimed the credit for bringing Elizabeth back to court and arranging a reconciliation with her half-sister (according to one account he observed the meeting between them from hiding). It was at this point that his doubts about Mary's ability to conceive were confirmed by her hysterical pregnancy, and in the absence of an heir of their bodies he gave his support to Elizabeth's ultimately uncontested accession in 1558. This assistance she refused to acknowledge. Backing Elizabeth was not a comfortable decision, for he harboured few illusions about her religious allegiances and he appreciated that he was probably abandoning English Catholics to their fate. A sense of responsibility inspired his offer of marriage to her in 1559 - a gesture strongly opposed in Spain - and lasted for the rest of his life.

The steady decline in relations between England and Spain after 1558 makes it tempting to see a certain inevitability in the hostilities that broke out in 1585 and dominated the last years of Philip's and Elizabeth's lives. Yet it was not a conflict that either of them sought and war was never formally declared. The drift into war meant that a number of fluctuating issues and pressures became involved and assigning precise causes is not easy. But, if there is one, it is undoubtedly what became known in the Catholic world as the Empresa de Inglaterra (the Enterprise of England), the overthrow of the new Protestant regime.

Early plans for invasion

The earliest scheme for an invasion of England dates from the summer of 1559, a proposal to Philip that his voyage down the Channel to return to Spain provided an excellent opportunity to make an armed landing. This he rejected as too rash, a caution he maintained for over two decades. He was faced then and throughout his reign with the range of demands that his widespread domains presented. If his sense of moral obligation to protect English Catholicism was very real, this had to be balanced against what were considered greater priorities. Moreover, given that Elizabeth's treatment of English Catholics during the first decade of her reign was in fact quite moderate, there was every reason not to provoke her into harsher methods. Stability in north-western Europe was Philip's immediate aim, and to that end he also urged the Papacy to avoid doing anything rash.

This assessment changed when full-scale revolt broke out in the Netherlands at the end of the 1560s, but the revolt also created an almost insoluble dilemma. The clear priority was bringing the rebellion to an end, but many of Philip's councillors claimed it was instigated from London and argued that the Empresa de Inglaterra was the necessary first step to success over the rebels. On the other hand, without a firm base in the Netherlands, an invasion of England would have to come from Spain and that would mean an enormous maritime expedition. How difficult that would be was demonstrated by Philip's attempt to send a fleet up the Channel in 1574, an operation that never got off the ground. Philip had no illusions about the strength of English naval power. The use of the English fleet was one of the few clear advantages he had seen in his marriage to Mary and he had played a direct role in initiating a major naval rebuilding programme in 1557-8.

Continuing hostility

Portrait of Elizabeth I  © The English perception of the situation was almost a mirror image of the Spanish. Philip's underlying hostility to Elizabeth's government was accepted as given. One of the strongest arguments in favour of assistance to the Dutch was that an independent or friendly Netherlands would effectively prevent a Spanish invasion. On the other hand, there was a counter argument that weighed heavily with Elizabeth: aid to the Dutch rebels would be an act of provocation that would justify Philip aiding English Catholics or Irish rebels. What appears to have changed her mind was Philip's appointment of his half-brother Don Juan of Austria, an eager supporter of the Empresa, as governor-general in the Netherlands in 1576. Although Don Juan died in 1578, his appointment was read in England as evidence that Philip was now committed to the enterprise and it was assumed thereafter that an invasion would follow a Spanish victory in the Netherlands.

This was a misreading of the situation in Spain. At the very point when the Anglo-Netherlands connection appeared to be the central concern of Philip's foreign policy, his attention was diverted by the Portuguese succession, and the dynastic union with Portugal absorbed most of his energies between 1580 and 1583. The union was followed in 1584 by the danger that the Protestant Henry of Navarre would inherit the French throne, which in some respects became the major issue of the rest of Philip's life. Yet if these concerns appeared to lessen his interest in England, the struggle for Portugal was accompanied by an increase in English piracy in his American empire, most dramatically illustrated by Francis Drake's Circumnavigation Voyage of 1577-80. Imperial defence now became a priority.

Years of preparation

If Philip had relegated the Empresa to the future in the early 1580s, the vacuum was filled by the Papacy and English Catholic exiles, who now saw the enterprise as the means of freeing the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1583-4 Elizabeth's government discovered a considerable amount of fragmentary evidence about their plans. These discoveries, together with a major crisis in the Dutch Revolt in the winter of 1584-5, finally pushed Elizabeth into open military intervention in the Netherlands in 1585, an intervention accompanied by a naval expedition under Drake to the West Indies. Philip spent the whole of 1585 in Aragon, where he married his daughter to the duke of Savoy, saw his son recognised as heir to the throne, and then fell seriously ill. It was during his recovery in the autumn of 1585 that he finally took the decision to mount the Empresa. His reasoning appears to have been that Elizabeth's actions had created a virtual state of war with England and that it was better to seek a quick and decisive victory than risk a long drawn out maritime conflict in the empire.

The preparation of the Armada, which began more or less from scratch early in 1586, took over two years. Credit for the delay has been given to Drake's Raid on Cadiz in April 1587 and the subsequent pursuit of his fleet, but even without this diversion it is doubtful whether the Armada would have been ready to sail by the summer of 1587. The old strategic dilemmas had not been resolved. The duke of Parma, Philip's governor in the Netherlands, was unhappy about mounting an attack on England before he had regained a large enough port on the Dutch coast. Philip over-ruled his doubts by deciding that a fleet from Spain would secure a landing area on the Kentish coast and then ferry Parma's army across. So worried was Philip that the English might successfully divert the fleet that he refused to permit a stage by stage advance up the Channel and made no preparations for a battle if the English fleet should be encountered en route.

Launch of the Armada

The Armada was further delayed in 1588 and its 122 ships did not arrive off Land's End until late July. Parma, the latest Spanish research has revealed, had given up hope of its arrival and had sent the crews of his own ships to work on canals inland. The English had made two attempts to intercept the Armada in Iberian waters in June and July, only to be blown back by storms. Now somewhat sceptical themselves, their fleet of sixty-six ships was caught by surprise re-supplying in Plymouth when the Armada appeared. Although they were able to escape from Plymouth successfully, they were faced with a stern chase up the Channel. Much ammunition was expended, but the Spanish formation held together well, and only two ships were lost, both by accidents. The Spanish admiral, the duke of Medina Sidonia, then took the unexpected decision to anchor off Calais on 6 August. This enabled the English to disperse his fleet by a fireship attack and strong winds blew it into the North Sea. Four Spanish ships were lost at this point, but the great majority escaped northwards. However, there was now no alternative to the risky voyage home round Scotland and Ireland. In the course of this a further thirty-four or five ships -mostly weaker-built transports - foundered or ran aground.

The ultimate responsibility for launching the Armada and devising its strategy was Philip's. The widespread appreciation that he had disregarded professional advice did great damage to his reputation within Spain and, although most of the fleet returned safely, the failure of the Armada also shattered the image of the invincibility of Spanish arms. There was considerable disappointment in England that so few Spanish ships were sunk or captured, but the relative efficiency of the English government in the crisis and the queen's public appearance among her troops did much to boost Elizabeth's prestige.

A further fifteen years of hostilities lay ahead, but the Anglo-Spanish maritime war now became only a part of a much wider conflict in which the struggle for France was the vital theatre. The English made two major landings on the Iberian coast (at Lisbon in 1589 and Cadiz in 1596), and the Spaniards a raid on Cornwall in 1595 and a landing in Ireland in 1601, but none of these had any decisive effect. The Anglo-Spanish war was to all intents a stalemate, for neither side was able to attack the other effectively, but even this result showed that there were limits to Spanish power. On a one to one basis England was clearly much weaker than Spain, but Elizabeth had demonstrated successfully that of all Philip's contemporaries in Europe she was the most dangerous enemy.

Find out more

Books

The Spanish Armada by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker (London 1998, 2nd edition Manchester 1999)

Armada 1588-1988 by M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado et al., (London, 1998)

England, Spain and the Gran Armada 1585-1604 by M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado and Simon Adams (eds.) (Edinburgh, 1991)

The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume I 660-1649 by N.A.M. Rodger (London, 1997)

Philip of Spain by Henry Kamen (New Haven and London 1997)

The Grand Strategy of Philip II by Geoffrey Parker (New Haven and London 1998)

The Spanish Armada of 1588: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography by Eugene L. Rasor, Westport, Conn. (London, 1993)

About the author

Simon Adams is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde. The first volume of his collected essays, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester University Press), will appear in the spring of 2001. He is presently writing Elizabeth I for the Yale English Monarchs Series.