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Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?
From 1066 to 1918, our obsession with battles, elections and even voyages of discovery risks distorting a true understanding of the past
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.” Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1066-and-all-that-later-edition-CMYKWeb-Ready-dfb5326.jpg" width="2295" height="1530" alt="The cover of a book, with the title 1066 And All That across the top, and two men standing side by side in green and pink clothing" title="The 1930 book 1066 and All That wittily parodied the conventional approach to teaching history in schools at that time (Image by Amazon)" /> But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time. Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history? The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology. Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history. Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-815264642cmykWeb-Ready-2ce7a55.jpg" width="3569" height="2379" alt="A 2017 re-enactment of the 1410 battle of Grunwald. Poles and Lithuanians see this victory over the German Teutonic Order as a turning point in their national stories (Image by Getty Images)" title="A 2017 re-enactment of the 1410 battle of Grunwald. Poles and Lithuanians see this victory over the German Teutonic Order as a turning point in their national stories (Image by Getty Images)" /> Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410. But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes. Read more | Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past. Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic. Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-599969077cmykWeb-Ready-7d51147.jpg" width="4272" height="2848" alt="A painting of a man dressed in a white shirt with a brown cloak, and a dark hat" title="This 1519 portrait reputedly depicts Christopher Columbus. Did his first transatlantic voyage in 1492 really have such world-changing consequences? (Image by Getty Images)" /> The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures. Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events. Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them. Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant. To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-128261385cmykWeb-Ready-6731e0e.jpg" width="3941" height="2628" alt="A photograph of a courtyard under tall, intricate archways with several columns throughout" title="The Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, Granada. That city’s fall in January 1492 arguably led to the European colonisation of the Americas. But it’s an episode that can be framed in different ways, argues Robert Blackmore (Image by Getty Images)" /> As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories. In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself. Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.” So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-122317088cmykWeb-Ready-15b2d1a.jpg" width="3708" height="2472" alt="An image showing four people dressed in wool skins and carrying spears, walking across a large" title="An illustration depicts Asian hunters migrating across the Bering Strait Land Bridge. The strait becoming impassable some 15,000 years ago was a vital juncture in global history (Image by Getty Images)" /> Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools. Read more | Do you know all the major periods in British history? To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose. History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it? Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”. This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Tudor traders: keep calm and ignore the Armada
Robert Blackmore reveals how English merchants and mariners responded to the Spanish Armada
What did English merchants and mariners do when a Spanish invasion fleet menaced the South Coast in 1588? Well, as today’s long read written by Robert Blackmore reveals, they simply boarded their ships and carried on trading. HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the September 2023 issue (you can read it here) and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.
Keep calm and carry on trading: how English merchants reacted to the Spanish Armada
When King Phillip II's invasion fleet menaced the south coast of England in 1588, what did the merchants and mariners who depended on the Narrow Seas to the continent do? As Robert Blackmore reveals, they filled the holds of their ships and kept on making their voyages anyway
On 21 July 1588, the English navy first engaged the Spanish Armada in battle off Devon. The very next day, as the Armada sailed east along the channel to rendezvous with the army of the Duke of Parma in the Spanish Netherlands and invade England, a tiny ship named the Wren left its home port of Sandwich, in Kent, carrying cloth bound for French Calais. On 23 July, the two fleets clashed again off Portland Bill in Dorset. The day after that, another small vessel, the Penny Pot, carried beer to Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Queen Elizabeth I’s England is often presented as isolated from Europe by the Reformation and war. The story goes that the Tudor kingdom ‘went global’, projecting new maritime military and commercial power far beyond its shores and setting the stage for the British empire. Yet this simple formula ignores the lived experience of coastal communities where the so-called ‘Narrow Seas’, which divided Britain from Europe, drew narrowest. The shipmaster of the Wren, Anthony Hickson, may have lacked the swagger of the queen’s ‘sea dogs’, like John Hawkins, Francis Drake or Walter Ralegh. But he, and many others, showed startling resilience in maintaining strong ties with the continent, even while under threat from the Spanish ‘Grande y Felicísima Armada’ (‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’). Shipping in late Tudor times I have been working on a project investigating Kent’s maritime links with its European neighbours from the mid-15th to the mid-17th centuries. Our new research uses Kent’s surviving port books, the records of shipping and cargoes that passed through its harbours. These reveal, in detail, the realities of life for late Tudor and early Stuart mariners and merchants where multiple key land and sea routes converged. England’s capital, London, was close by, growing rapidly thanks to the county’s sizable surplus cereal production. The adjacent Strait of Dover connected the North Sea and the Baltic with the North Atlantic and ultimately, the Mediterranean. But despite being the great ‘Age of Discovery’, fewer galleons arrived direct from distant lands ‒ stuffed with spices, silks, jewels and precious metals ‒ than we imagine. Here, most business remained with France and the Low Countries, as it had for centuries. After all, the nearest foreign markets lay just 21 miles across the channel. A vast array of trade goods passed back and forth via this route. Some exotic commodities like indigo, pepper or tobacco were bought from middlemen, while increasingly elaborate lightweight textiles and manufactured goods were also exchanged. However, most products traded in bulk were humble: grain regularly moved in all directions; imports often included onions and cheese alongside barrels of wine, as well as fish and the salt needed to preserve them. Imported hops were used to make the Kentish beer which would then be exported back. Timber, pitch and tar were likewise brought in, even bricks; and holds full of locally produced lime would leave. Little ships in the Narrow Seas Such supply chains often relied on remarkably small ships. Their tonnage, once based on the capacity to carry wine barrels from Gascony, indicates that while the largest vessels of the age might top 1,000 tons, most operating across the Narrow Seas were less than 20. Many were minuscule. The Wren of Sandwich, for instance, was just 5 tons. There was even a 3-ton vessel called the Baker’s Basket of Faversham which imported wine from Calais. Ambitions were customarily limited and enterprises modest. They were nonetheless integral to a web of highly lucrative commercial interests. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, himself noted that one small craft “will bring as much in one year as 10 merchant ships are wont to bring from other places in two years”. This intricate trade system was also highly adaptable, as was revealed after the Dutch revolted against their Spanish Habsburg overlords in the 1560s. The resultant Eighty Years’ War created the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, a new Protestant power and – for England – a particularly close trading partner. This also became a military alliance once Elizabeth unleashed privateers to seize the riches of the Spanish empire and provoked war with Philip II of Spain in 1585. That year, while negotiating the Treaty of Nonsuch, the Dutch demanded English commerce with Spanish territories be restricted but ceded Elizabeth control over three ‘Cautionary Towns’ in the Netherlands: Brielle, Fort Rammekens and Vlissingen. These ports offered easy access into European markets. They also added to growing socio-economic links between the continent and south-eastern England which had developed as Flemish and Dutch Protestants fled persecution over the previous generation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/08/AKG941129-07463bb.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Two dutch merchants sell their wares on the street. The man is holding up a chicken. The womans holds a cheese and a basket of eggs" title="A 1569 painting of a market scene in the Netherlands. Tudor England would soon enjoy strong mercantile ties with a fellow Protestant power (Photo by AKG)" /> By 1604, William Browne, the lieutenant-governor of Vlissingen, reported to the Privy Council how the city’s inhabitants’ “chief wealth depends on trade through our narrow seas to our havens and port towns, and most especially on their fishing on our coasts”. Examples of this abound in our sources. Jacob Skellworth, for example, master of the 6-ton Pelican of Vlissingen, sailed back and forth between there and Faversham for some three decades, primarily exchanging fish, salt, Dutch cheese and hops, for Kent’s beer. But we shouldn’t underestimate the autonomy of contemporary mariners and merchants, who would often sail contrary to the political wind. Neither the treaty nor conflict halted mercantile contact with the enemy entirely. For instance, barrels of Spanish sack, notoriously Falstaff’s favourite wine in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (c1597), were frequently imported via neutral countries. Smuggling was likewise rife. Invasion looms, business as usual This takes us to July 1588 once more. For, even as the threat of a Spanish invasion grew, two Dover merchants reported to Francis Walsingham, the queen’s principal secretary and spymaster, that many “ill-disposed persons” continued to export grain to their adversaries. That November, after the emergency had passed, the government even alleged that some English merchants had supplied the Armada itself. Being official records, Kent’s port books largely exclude such illicit trade, but they do suggest that local mariners and merchants were remarkably untroubled by the events of that year. Little changed with domestic coastal trade. During July and August 1588, there were 74 voyages into or out of the harbours of Sandwich and Faversham, travelling to or from other English ports. This was four more than the previous year. The impact on overseas trade was similarly light. On 3 July the departure of the “Worst-Kept Secret in Europe”, as one modern historian characterised the Spanish invasion, was imminent, but the Diamond of Rye left Faversham regardless, bound for La Rochelle in western France. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/08/BAL3610851-c8132ed.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Woodcut of English merchants buying wine in Bordeaux" title="English merchants buy wine in Bordeaux, in a woodcut from 1580. Few Kentish merchant ships were diverted to the navy to fight the Spanish Armada and, for most, disruption was limited to just a matter of days (Photo by BAL)" /> With the enemy closing in, many vessels, like the Wren of Sandwich, continued about their business. This was possible because, while militias were mustered, only a handful of Kent’s merchant ships were actually requisitioned for the English navy. In most places any hiatus in shipping abroad was only a few days at most. The inconsequential Armada One outlier was Dover. After a local ship called the Greyhound departed on 18 July no vessel is recorded to have left for the continent for a month. Calais was their main destination, and so the Spanish were often directly in their path. Giraud de Mauleon, the French governor there, was also on friendly terms with the Spanish, so this was best avoided. Yet, some persisted even while the Armada was actually in the Strait of Dover. On 30 July, the Pelican arrived at Faversham with another Dutch ship, the Lion of Veere. Only the day before, the English and Spanish fleets had clashed at the battle of Gravelines and were, by then, around 25 miles north east of Calais, very near the sea route across from Zeeland. But why was the Spanish Armada so apparently inconsequential? Well for one, Spanish tactics demanded they keep their ships in a tight defensive disposition, so there was little advantage to be had in breaking formation simply to seize a cargo of cheese. However, such an explanation may undervalue the agency of the mariners and merchants themselves. Subject to the vagaries of wind and tide, while always under threat from storms or pirates, their livelihoods depended on well-integrated information networks. As such, they perhaps knew that the Armada’s campaign was poorly conceived and ill-prepared, then made an informed bet that it was at best a momentary challenge, with little chance of long-term success. And they were proven correct. Harried by the English fleet and tormented by fireships, the Spanish were forced by poor weather to abandon the invasion then circumnavigate Britain and Ireland to return home. The trade across the ‘Narrow Seas’ in numbers 4,000 The number of tonnes of quicklime (calcium oxide) and slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) dispatched each year from Dover to the Netherlands in the mid-1590s. Made by heating limestone – like chalk, without oxygen – this was used in mortar and cement as well as to deacidify soil. 288 Tonnes of cast-iron cannons called demi-culverins, sakers, minions and falcons were shipped from Rochester harbour in just 12 months from September 1598. Most were taken by the Dutch to Amsterdam for the war effort against the Spanish. 1,595,000 Pints of beer shipped in 1605 to Europe from Kent alone – mostly through the port of Sandwich. Some ships specialising in this trade had appropriate names, like the Drunkard of Dieppe. 18,370,000 That same year, enough wheat to bake around 18,370,000 modern loaves of bread was exported from Kent. Most was bound for destinations in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Some even reached Larache and Agadir in Morocco and Zakynthos in Greece. The importance of the Narrow Seas The war with Spain dragged on for a further 16 years until King James VI & I negotiated the 1604 Treaty of London, having united the thrones of Scotland and England in a personal union the previous year. Throughout, commercial connections across the Narrow Seas continued largely uninterrupted. As in 1588, only when conflict came too close for comfort was there a brief pause or diversion, such as when the Spanish occupied Calais from 1596–98. The treaty was not welcomed everywhere. Its terms required England cease support for the Dutch, who remained at war. William Browne wrote from Vlissingen that this bred “grudgings” there, such that English ships were seized and their crews drowned. Violence quickly spread to Kent. He reported that a captain from Vlissingen was murdered in Sandwich, while two crewmen on a Dutch vessel were killed in Dover. Yet, despite these flashpoints, Dutch ships had already become indispensable to English trade. Indeed, they handled much of the overseas commerce of the kingdom’s ports, even after the Cautionary Towns were sold back in 1616. This provoked a commercial rivalry that would, decades later, initiate the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54). Even before the Treaty of London had been signed, most people had already moved on. By 1605, when a Catholic conspiracy formed to take over the English state – the ‘gunpowder plot’ – direct legal trade with the Spanish empire had dramatically expanded. Our records show that Kent itself redirected its large grain surplus abroad, much of it to Catholic southern Europe. The county’s own larger ships were joined by those from London and the east coast of England, as well as Scotland, which converged on its ports to be loaded with wheat. Thence they sailed to regions of Portugal, Spain and Italy that had suffered persistent shortages of food and periodic famines for a number of years. With peace then, England – now fast becoming Britain – indeed ‘went global’ to some degree. The East India Company was founded in c1600. In 1607, a small fort was built in the Americas that would become Jamestown, Virginia. It was the first successful English settlement in the New World. Yet these were small beginnings. Relationships across the Narrow Seas remained crucial: whether via treaties with European powers or the resolute actions of maritime communities and their small ships. Dr Robert Blackmore is a research fellow at the University of Southampton, currently working on the Janus Foundation-funded project: Kent’s Maritime Communities and their European Neighbours, c1450-c1650, together with Canterbury Christ Church University This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part 12 in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1550–1599. Pauline Croft says the decisive defeat of Spain's invasion force helped reconcile England and Scotland – and had great significance for western Europe too
You may think it hardly original to choose the defeat of the Spanish Armada as the key event of 1550–99. However, its significance is often misunderstood. It was not merely an English or even British drama, but a contest when much of the fate of western Europe hung in the balance. After the accession of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, friction between England and Catholic Spain became endemic. In 1580, the English sea captain Sir Francis Drake returned from his successful circumnavigation of the globe, including sailing up the Pacific coastline of south America and ransacking Spanish settlements. At the same time, Philip II of Spain’s forces invaded Portugal, where the royal line had died out, leaving Philip as the nearest heir. The conquest of Portugal brought huge extra colonial territories to the Spanish crown: it also brought the deep-water Atlantic port of Lisbon, a great naval asset. The successful takeover of the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Terceira in 1582/3 confirmed Spain’s new status as an oceanic power. Meanwhile France was devastated by divisions between the Huguenot (Protestant) party and the extreme Catholic League. The death in 1584 of the Duke of Anjou, next in line to his childless brother Henri III, indicated that the throne would go to their distant cousin, the Huguenot Henri of Navarre. That was intolerable not only to the Catholic League but also to Philip II. They secretly concluded an agreement that Spain would support the League when civil war inevitably resumed. In the Netherlands, a dominion inherited by Philip from his father, a long standing rebellion appeared to be waning. Philip’s nephew, the Prince of Parma, was proving an effective general and in July 1584, the rebels’ charismatic leader, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was assassinated. England now faced the possibility that Spain might soon control the entire coastline of western Europe, from the western Mediterranean around France to the borders of north Holland. In August 1585, convinced she had no other option, Elizabeth concluded the treaty of Nonsuch, sending aid to the Dutch. To Philip, that made England a hostile power, and in October he began to think seriously of an invasion. By spring 1587, preparations were proceeding rapidly in Cadiz, the Basque ports and Lisbon. Then in April, with no warning, Sir Francis Drake descended on Cadiz and destroyed 24 ships, together with considerable stores of food and munitions. From then on, Spain was committed to the Enterprise of England. 1588 in context Elizabeth I managed religious divisions and kept Spain at bay. England’s earlier prosperity declined but relations with Scotland improved England was overshadowed by France and Spain, but since the latter were usually at odds with each other, it could pursue its own interests safe from attack. Until 1550, England and Scotland were often at war, and for a while the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the son of Henry II threatened England with a Franco-Scottish “pincer movement” on the Borders and in the Channel. However after mid-century, France fell victim to a series of civil wars, largely the consequences of the Reformation. Spain was hardly touched by the Reformation and grew wealthy on profits from its New World territories. Elizabeth and her council had to ensure religious divisions did not destabilise the country, and that Spain, the super-power, was kept at arm’s length. The first aim was achieved, and English intervention in Scotland in 1560 ensured the success of the Scottish Reformation. Thereafter the victorious Protestant faction in Scottish politics cultivated an increasing amity with Elizabeth. The Scottish Reformation alarmed the French crown, and led English statesmen like the staunchly Protestant Sir William Cecil to foster the “British dimension” in their policies. All this alienated Scotland from its traditional ally, France, and strengthened good relations with England. But Spain’s Philip II became increasingly hostile to Elizabeth, whom he saw as a troublemaker, on the high seas and in the Netherlands. Elizabethan England prospered, with good harvests for over 30 years and an increase in overseas trade. London boomed and English merchants reached out to Muscovy, the Levant, and in 1600, the East Indies. Stability was broken only by the rising in the North, (1569–70) which was harshly repressed, and the disturbance in the capital led by the earl of Essex in 1601. The queen put great effort into public appearances, particularly in the 1570s, going on progress throughout the country. After 1588, the second part of her reign was darker, with England involved in continental wars and faced after 1594 with a gathering revolt in Ireland. The majority of the population were still Gaelic in language and culture, and remained Catholic. Led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, they seized the chance of throwing off the English yoke, and hoped for Spanish aid. In England, a rising population put pressure on limited resources. Military costs led to heavy taxation, and inflation, harvest failures and poor trade due to wartime disruption made life more difficult for most, and desperate for the poor. As the queen aged, there was concern over the succession. After the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, her son James VI of Scotland was the most likely heir. Elizabeth never confirmed him as successor, but after 1586 she paid him a pension. On her death in March 1603, the new King James I was peacefully proclaimed by her privy council. Standing between England and conquest There are four main points about the events of 1588. First, despite Drake’s raid, the scale of the Spanish action was enormous, and twin-pronged. The Armada intended to link up with Parma’s Army of Flanders, which would punch home the invasion. On the vessels were 19,000 troops, almost all Spanish veterans. A further 27,000 were being readied by Parma for bringing across the Channel, in requisitioned vessels and barges. The admiral, Medina Sidonia, commanded around 130 ships with the combined firepower of 360 guns. The campaign cost 45,000 ducats a day and tied down the whole military and naval resources of the Iberian peninsula, gravely affecting the defence of other parts of the Spanish monarchy. All that stood between England and conquest was the navy. Secondly, despite the sheer size of the Armada, the contest was not completely unequal. Largely constructed in the 1570s, the English navy’s “race-built” vessels were fast, heavily armed and weatherly. They proved far more manoeuvrable than anything in the Spanish fleet, which never managed to implement its plan of grappling and boarding them. The English on board, unlike the Spanish, were all skilled seamen and even the aristocrats in command, men like Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham and Lord Henry Seymour, all had some sailing experience and joined in the crew’s labours. The royal navy consisted of 36 fighting ships with six smaller pinnaces, essentially message ships. They were backed up by 143 merchant vessels, some of them heavily gunned for privateering – preying on the enemy’s shipping to make money out of captures. The best of the fleet, especially the ten biggest race-built vessels, was superb, but it was a small force to hold off the massive, crescent-shaped formation coming up the Channel. Thirdly, the situation was rendered even more dangerous since the English privy council misread Spanish intentions and ordered troops to gather at Tilbury in Essex. Medina Sidonia intended to land his formidable forces in Kent. He would establish a base for Parma’s men, then as soon as they were streaming across the Channel, the veterans carried on the Armada would storm to London. However, English strategy was superior to Philip’s over-ambitious plan of linking up Medina Sidonia’s fleet with Parma’s army. English land forces were in the wrong place, but the navy was not, for Drake had correctly divined Spanish intentions. The English ships initially tried to engage the Armada in Atlantic waters, but failed and returned to Plymouth. There, on 30 July 1588, over a hundred ships assembled in Plymouth Sound. Under cover of darkness, they skilfully tacked across the face of the oncoming Armada and round its southern tip. Advantageously placed upwind of their opponents, English vessels continually harassed the Spanish formation as it sailed eastwards. Parma could not move his men safely across the Channel until the Armada had cleared it of English warships. He also faced a threat from rebel Dutch vessels trying to blockade him in, ready to fire on his unarmed barges if they put to sea. Provided the English navy remained capable of fighting, Parma’s forces were unlikely to embark. Competently, Medina Sidonia brought most of his great fleet relatively unscathed into Calais roads on 6 August, but the English still controlled the Channel. Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded? Fourthly, the English won the key battle. On the night of 7 August, eight fire ships bore down on the Spanish galleons clustered off Calais. Faced suddenly with the burning vessels, most Spanish captains cut their anchors and fled. The Armada was transformed from a cohesive and still formidable fighting force to a scattering of panic-stricken vessels. Remarkably, they managed to regroup, but the following day, off Gravelines, the English came within artillery range and the battle raged for nine hours. Morale on the Armada was broken and Medina Sidonia hanged a captain who disobeyed his orders to continue fighting. Twenty officers were arrested: a recent discovery in the Spanish archives has shown that even surrender was briefly considered. Although the Armada sustained great damage, so far only six major galleons had been lost. Worse was to come on the way back; more than 30 ships, weakened by English guns, sank in severe storms off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. But as the experienced admiral of the Biscayan squadron observed in his journal, the whole venture was lost when the English retained command of the Channel, preventing them from linking up with Parma. The ships went down as they were fleeing for home, long after their enterprise had ended in defeat. There have been attempts, at the time and more recently, to argue that the outcome was just due to luck, or weather, or more in the nature of a draw, since Spain rebuilt a substantial navy in the early 1590s. Those arguments are unconvincing. The campaign of summer 1588 was an outstanding English victory. It was hard fought, and by the end, the English were almost out of ammunition. However, Drake’s fireships were a brilliant tactical device and Gravelines must count as one of the greatest English naval actions. It is clear from the profusion of pamphlets across Europe that everyone accepted Spain had been resoundingly defeated. Philip II never again considered an invasion of England by combined sea and land forces: the best his rebuilt navy could do was to raid Cornwall. The outcome of 1588 was a European turning point. England’s successful resistance showed that Spain was not invincible, encouraging Protestants in the Netherlands and France to continue their struggle. The Dutch threw off Spanish rule and Henri of Navarre became king of France, bringing religious peace and economic recovery. The young James VI of Scotland, bound to England by the treaty of Berwick in 1586 but alienated by the execution of his mother Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, shrewdly seized the Armada moment to emphasise his claim as Elizabeth’s heir. He wrote at the height of the crisis in summer 1588, assuring her of his support “as your natural son and compatriot of your country”. In 1589 James also composed a “Meditatioun” on the unity of “the Ile of Britain”, jointly protected by “our virtewe” and God’s “michtie wind”. Scotland’s king presented the events of 1588 as a victory for “Britain” and for himself as the future first king of “the Ile”. James had done little to help, but he recognised that the defeat of the Spanish Armada was already becoming a defining moment in the development of a national identity that would be both British and Protestant. History facts: 1550–1559 Population peaked in mid-century for England and Wales at about 3.4 million, but by 1561 had shrunk by around a quarter of a million. This was due to poor harvests and epidemic diseases. Thereafter a steady rise took the population to c4.2 million for England and Wales by 1603. Key years: Other important events in the second half of the 16th century 1558 – The accession of Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been a persecutor, burning over 300 people at the stake for their beliefs. Her successor, her half-sister Elizabeth, was a moderate Protestant who hoped to avoid religious division by constructing a national church acceptable to everybody. The Church of England never became completely comprehensive, but Elizabeth’s mostly benign rule brought peace and security to England. 1560 – The Scottish Reformation. The absence of the half-French Mary Queen of Scots (who as fiancée of the heir to the French throne was at the French court) allowed a Protestant group to seize control. In 1560 they dominated the Scottish Parliament, abolishing the power of the papacy and the Mass. In England Sir William Cecil persuaded Elizabeth to use English troops to evict the French, who were forced to withdraw. The Protestants, initially a minority, steadily transformed Scotland into a Presbyterian country. This was crucial in developing Anglo-Scottish Protestant solidarity, allowing a sense of “Britishness” slowly to emerge on both sides of the Border. 1561 – Recoinage completed. From 1544, coinage had been steadily debased for profit by successive monarchs until it looked untrustworthy. Plans for a full recoinage were drawn up in 1556, under Mary, but nothing was done until 1560 when the base coin was “cried down” by proclamation. The minting of good quality new coins was completed in 1561. It caused inconvenience, even hardship, but was essential for economic expansion and overseas trade. 1570 – Rebellion and excommunication. Northern England remained conservative in religion and its leading nobles, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, joined a conspiracy in 1569: the Duke of Norfolk would marry Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic and Elizabeth’s nearest heir, while the North would rise in rebellion. Just as it collapsed, the Pope xcommunicated Elizabeth, releasing her Catholic subjects from loyalty to her. This major tactical miscalculation made the plight of English Catholics more difficult. 1580 – Drake returns to England. Drake left Plymouth in November 1577. Three years later, he returned, becoming only the second captain, and the first English one, to complete the circumnavigation of the globe. He brought with him booty from Spanish ships and settlements, so when the Queen knighted Drake at Deptford on the deck of his weatherbeaten flagship Golden Hind she was condoning attacks on Philip II’s subjects. 1588 – The Welsh Bible. Publication of the first Welsh-language Bible. The Welsh New Testament appeared in 1567, but translating the rest of the Bible took 21 more years. The privy council ordered that by Christmas, every Welsh parish should acquire a copy. The Welsh Bible helped make Wales into a genuinely Protestant country. 1589 – The Portugal expedition. The defeat of the Armada led to over-optimistic English plans to complete the humiliation of Spain by destroying those ships that had returned to harbours on the Iberian north coast, and assisting Portugal to throw off its Spanish conquerors. The expedition had muddled aims, conflicts arose among the commanders, and little was achieved. 1596 – The Oxfordshire rising. In November 1596, a few men gathered in western Oxfordshire to complain about recent enclosures. They plotted to throw down the fences enclosing new fields, to seize weapons from the houses of the gentry, perhaps even to murder some landowners. Two were executed, but the following year the privy council also rebuked the local gentry for their enclosures. The real problem was the disastrous series of four harvest failures from autumn 1594 to autumn 1597, which sent food prices soaring and hit the poor hardest. 1599 – The Globe theatre. William Shakespeare was already established as a playwright, but in 1599 he and his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, moved into the Globe. They became the capital’s leading company, performing among other great plays The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. Between 1570 and 1630, England produced a profusion of talent that has hardly ever been matched, with the Globe dominating the London scene. More turning points in British history Read next: The Scottish Revolution Go back: Henry VIII declares his empire <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2007/04/TP-Images-with-overlay13-4244e02.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part thirteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part thirteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. (Image by Getty Images)" /> This article was first published in the March 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Spanish Armada: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Robert Hutchinson answers your questions on England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
Why did the Spanish Armada set sail? What ships were used by the fleets? And did Queen Elizabeth I really give a famous speech at Tilbury? In our latest ‘Everything you wanted to know’ episode, Robert Hutchinson answers your questions on the Tudor era’s most famous maritime face-off.
Elizabeth I: a guide to her life and rule, plus 7 facts you might not know
The daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was England’s ‘Gloriana’ – a virgin queen who saw herself as wedded to her country and who brought almost half a century of stability after the turmoil of her siblings’ short reigns. Here, historian Tracy Borman reveals seven surprising facts about her life
Flame-haired, white-faced and always lavishly dressed, Elizabeth possessed the natural charisma of her father, Henry VIII, and was the darling of her people. Her finest hour came in 1588 when she defeated the Spanish Armada, catapulting her to legendary status. Leading Tudor historian Tracy Borman reveals some surprising facts about the famous Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I... Elizabeth was never meant to be queen Although Elizabeth is now hailed as one of our greatest monarchs, she should never have got anywhere near the throne. She was not only a girl at a time when the laws of succession favoured boys, but she had an elder sister, Mary. Elizabeth was also removed from the line of succession altogether when her parents’ marriage was declared invalid prior to Anne Boleyn’s execution, and was only reinstated thanks to the kindly intervention of her last stepmother, Katherine Parr. By the time of Henry VIII’s death, therefore, Elizabeth was third in line to the throne behind her younger brother Edward and elder sister Mary. It is one of the greatest ironies of history that Henry VIII had been so obsessed with having a son, yet his cherished boy only reigned for six years, dying of tuberculosis at the age of just 15. The second in line, Mary, did not fare much better. Her brief, catastrophic reign ended after just five years. It was up to Elizabeth to show them how it ought to be done. Read more | Alternate history: what if Henry VIII’s first son had lived? Elizabeth I: a biography Born: 7 September 1533 Died: 24 March 1603 Reigned: queen of England and Ireland for 44 years, from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. She was the last monarch of the Tudor period Coronation: 15 January 1559, Westminster Abbey Parents: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn Spouse: None Children: None Siblings: Mary I (half-sister); Edward VI (half-brother) Religion: Protestant Cause of death: Hotly debated – possible causes include blood poisoning; pneumonia; streptococcus (infected tonsils); or cancer Succeeded by: King James VI and I Elizabeth was a mummy’s girl There is a common misconception that Elizabeth thought little of her ill-fated mother, Anne Boleyn. The fact that she hardly spoke of her and saved all of her praise for her adored father, Henry VIII, has often led to the conclusion that Elizabeth was ashamed of Anne. On the contrary: all this proved was what a great pragmatist Elizabeth was. She had no wish to alienate swathes of her subjects by openly voicing her love for the woman who was still reviled as the ‘Great Whore’. Instead, Elizabeth chose more subtle ways to demonstrate her affection. For example, when posing for a portrait during her teenage years, she wore her mother’s famous ‘A’ pendant around her neck – an audacious stunt that would have landed her in hot water if her father had spotted it. As queen, Elizabeth made sure that all of her late mother’s relatives were promoted to the best positions at court, and she also wore a pendant necklace that contained a miniature portrait of her mother opposite one of herself. View oEmbed on the source website Elizabeth liked to give nicknames to her courtiers Elizabeth was as famous a flirt as her mother. She loved to surround herself with the most handsome men at court, and also entertained various foreign princes all hoping for her hand in marriage. Elizabeth used her femininity to bring a male-dominated court to its knees, and gave playful nicknames to her favourites. Her chief minister, William Cecil Lord Burghley, was called her ‘spirit’, and her alleged lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was her ‘eyes’. Rather more cheekily, she called François, Duke of Anjou, her ‘frog’. Was Elizabeth I really a Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I was England’s ‘Gloriana’ – a virgin queen who saw herself as wedded to her country. Or was she? Both at home and abroad, rumours about Elizabeth’s love life – real or imagined – circulated throughout her reign. Over the years, countless books, novels, plays and films have depicted Elizabeth I’s relationships with figures such as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the Duke of Anjou. In the absence of conclusive proof one way or another, the question ‘did they or didn’t they?’ will always linger. Far from being the Virgin Queen, for some hostile observers Elizabeth was the ‘whore’ of Europe, says Dr Anna Whitelock. Read more about Elizabeth I’s love life Elizabeth used dirty tactics to outshine her rivals Elizabeth exalted in being the queen bee at court. But although for the early part of her reign she was the most desirable bride in Europe, as her physical charms began to fade she employed dirty tactics to make sure that she kept all of the male attention to herself. Thus, while Elizabeth appeared at court bedecked in lavish gowns of rich materials and vivid colours, her ladies were obliged to wear only black or white. No matter how attractive they might be in their own right, the plain uniformity of their dress would draw all eyes to the star of the show. To test the effect that this created, the queen once asked a visiting French nobleman what he thought of her ladies. He immediately protested that he was unable to ‘judge stars in the presence of the sun’. This was exactly the response Elizabeth required. Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics “England's Elizabethan Catholics were public enemy number one,” says Jessie Childs. “Their Masses were banned and their priests were executed”. Around 200 Catholics were executed, effectively for their beliefs, during Elizabeth’s reign. Catholics in Elizabeth’s Protestant England couldn’t hold public office, they couldn’t take up arms for the monarch, and they were fined if they refused to attend Anglican services. They were also banned from observing Mass. Read more about Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics Elizabeth I took longer to get ready than any other monarch Elizabeth was always fastidious about her appearance, but the ritual of dressing the queen became increasingly elaborate as age began to overtake her: it took her ladies a staggering four hours a day to complete the ceremony of dressing and undressing the queen. Elizabeth had originally worn wigs that matched her own colouring, but as she grew older these were used to conceal her greying hair. At the same time, ever more layers of makeup were applied to complete the so-called ‘mask of youth’. Her face, neck and hands were painted with ceruse (a mixture of white lead and vinegar); her lips were coloured with a red paste made from beeswax and plant dye, and her eyes were lined with kohl. Read more | What did Elizabeth I really look like at 60? Why did Elizabeth I wear white make-up? “Elizabeth I, the all-glorious queen of magnificence and spectacular display, was celebrated for her ageless glamour, her white flawless skin and sumptuous clothing,” says Dr Anna Whitelock. Yet over the 40-plus years of her rule, the young and pretty Elizabeth aged into a balding, frail woman with black, rotten and foul-smelling teeth; scarred by pox, crippled by headaches and plagued by bouts of depression. “Elizabeth’s contemporaries believed that beauty amplified female power, and so they regarded the queen’s splendour as confirmation of her claim to the throne,” Whitelock explains. “An elderly, unmarried queen with no heir raised fears. Over the course of her reign the physical reality of Elizabeth’s weak, female and ageing ‘natural body’ had to be reconciled with the unerring and immortal ‘body politic’.” Read more about Elizabeth I’s make-up regime Ironically, most of these cosmetics did more damage to the skin than ageing ever could. Ceruse was particularly corrosive, and one contemporary observed with some distaste: “Those women who use it about their faces, do quickly become withered and grey headed, because this doth so mightily drie up the naturall moisture of their flesh.” But Elizabeth insisted that she continue to be adorned with this and other dangerous cosmetics, and only ever let her closest ladies see what lay beneath. When the impetuous Earl of Essex famously burst into her chamber before Elizabeth was dressed or made up, he was so shocked by her haggard appearance that he secretly joked about her “crooked carcass” to his friends. Elizabeth found out and it was said that she cut off his head in revenge – although his rebellion against her [in February 1601] probably had something to do with it. View Riddle on the source website There was a theory that Elizabeth might have been a man (!) Although she has gone down in history as the Virgin Queen, upon her accession it was widely expected that Elizabeth would marry. But as she continued to resist pressure from her councillors to take a husband, rumours began to circulate that there was some secret reason why she was so determined not to marry. One of the most popular was that Elizabeth had some ‘womanish infirmity’ that prevented her from conceiving. This gained such currency that a foreign ambassador bribed the queen’s laundresses to report on the state of her sheets so that they might discover whether her menstrual cycle was normal. Read more | Did Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots really meet? At the opposite end of the scale, there was a theory that the real reason Elizabeth would not marry was because she was really a man. According to the ‘Bisley Boy’ story, the real Elizabeth had died as a young girl and been replaced by the only redheaded child that could be found. The fact that he was a boy was inconvenient, but he spent the rest of his life dressing as a woman to continue the pretence. The Bisley Boy theory has proved a curiously enduring one, despite the lack of any reliable evidence. Deadly rivals: Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots Elizabeth I's relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots (her first cousin once removed) dominated English and Scottish politics for 20 years. In November 1558 Elizabeth I acceded to the throne of England having been acknowledged as Henry VIII’s heir in her father’s will and testament. Yet for many Catholics in England and abroad, Elizabeth was illegitimate. They saw Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland and legitimate granddaughter of Henry’s sister Margaret Tudor, as the rightful queen of England. Elizabeth eventually authorised the execution of Mary in February 1587. Read more about the rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots Elizabeth is a screen star Elizabeth has been portrayed more often in film and on television than any other British monarch. First was Sarah Bernhardt in Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth (1912), then Bette Davis played her twice – first in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and again in The Virgin Queen (1955). Read more | 11 historically inaccurate films you need to watch Many more actresses followed, including the iconic portrayal by Glenda Jackson in the BBC television series Elizabeth R (1971). Perhaps inspired by the Bisley Boy legend, a man was cast to play her in 1992’s Orlando, when Quentin Crisp took on the role. More recently, Cate Blanchett gave us a distinctly un-virginal Elizabeth in the films of 1998 and 2007, while Judi Dench won an Oscar for her brief but brilliant portrayal in Shakespeare in Love (1998). Helen Mirren took on the role with typical aplomb in the TV mini-series Elizabeth I in 2005. Time-travelling time lord, Doctor Who, has also bumped in Queen Elizabeth I in episodes from 1965 and 2007. Think you know Elizabeth I? Test your knowledge with our Elizabeth I quiz View oEmbed on the source website This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2015
The Spanish Armada: one of history’s biggest fibs?
From Elizabeth I’s rousing speech at Tilbury to that famous game of bowls, much of what we think we know about the events of 1588 is the product of four centuries of spin, argues Lucy Worsley...
In a world where thousands of opinions are competing for our attention, we like to think of history books speaking with one clear voice to tell us the definitive truth about the past. But it’s not like that at all. One of the stopping-off points in the usual story of England’s journey towards becoming a global superpower with a world-class navy is the so-called defeat of the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada in 1588. The quotation marks are used advisedly, for all is not as it seems. The schoolgirl version of the story is that Philip II of Spain, deadly foe of Elizabeth I of England, sent his huge Armada of ships to invade England and return it to the Catholic faith, only to be defeated by the plucky little English navy, whose courageous captains included Sir Francis Drake. Drake’s celebrated against-the-odds victory is often depicted as the moment that England took on Europe and won. For example, here’s Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain: “We must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls...” Was Sir Francis Drake really playing bowls when the Armada approached? Yet that game of bowls is problematic. You probably have the idea that it was while Drake was enjoying a game on the greens of Plymouth Hoe that the Spanish Armada was first sighted on the horizon. The usual story has Sir Francis turning to Lord Effingham, commander of the English fleet, and saying that there was no need to hurry, there would be plenty of time to finish the game, and to thrash the Spaniards too. It’s deep in our national psyche as a moment of coolness in the face of fire; of the stiff upper lip. Disappointingly, though, none of the early accounts of the Armada mention anyone playing bowls at all. It was a number of years after the event that one account finally describes sailors in Plymouth in July 1588 “dancing, bowling and making merry” on the shore as the Armada appeared. But it was an irresistibly juicy detail. In the 1730s, a biography of Sir Walter Ralegh tells us that Drake was determined to finish his game – and from then on it became ‘history’. Another strand of the traditional story of the Armada concentrates on the psychodrama between two bitter and personal enemies: Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I, locked in an existential struggle between their differing religious beliefs. In 1588, Philip was 61, a devout Catholic and king of the biggest empire in the world, reaching from South America to the Philippines. Elizabeth I was in her 50s, still unmarried, still childless, and ruling over a Protestant England in which Catholic plots were a constant threat. Was Elizabeth I really a ‘Virgin Queen’? But in 1554, some 34 years earlier, Philip had set sail from the northern Spanish port of Corunna in order to become part of the Tudor royal family. We often forget that before he was king of Spain, Philip II – the great villain in the Armada story – spent four years as king of England, due to his marriage to Mary, Elizabeth’s older half-sister. Mary was desperate to secure England’s future as a Catholic country, and dreaded the thought that she might die childless and leave the Protestant Elizabeth to take the throne. But Philip felt differently. The alternative to Elizabeth, in the event of his and Mary’s marriage producing no children, was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Catholic, which was a plus, but – due to her ancestry and powerful ties to the French court – she would have taken England firmly into the orbit of Philip’s French enemies, which was intolerable. Listen | Following calls for statues of Drake to be removed for his role in the slave trade, Claire Jowitt explores a dark chapter in Tudor history So Philip rooted for his sister-in-law, persuading Mary to release Elizabeth from the house arrest under which she had been placed. When Mary lay dying, Philip realised that the only way he could persuade Elizabeth to support Catholics was to marry her, and get her to convert. And so he proposed. Elizabeth, as ever, refused to commit herself. A few months later, hearing that Philip had started new negotiations with a French princess, she said (and this is classic Elizabeth I) that he couldn’t have loved her all that much if he couldn’t wait a month or two for an answer. Although the proposed match failed to materialise, Elizabeth and Philip remained friends. But over the next decade, as Elizabeth and her nation became decidedly Protestant, there were rumblings from Rome. In the late 1560s, Catholics in the north of England attempted an unsuccessful rebellion. To encourage them, in 1570 the pope excommunicated their queen. Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics Philip was now under pressure from Rome to topple Elizabeth. But with his vast empire to run, he had plenty of other priorities. Although films – notably Elizabeth: The Golden Age, directed by Shekhar Kapur – often show Philip as some sort of God-crazed psychopath, religion alone wasn’t a strong enough reason for Philip to invade England. Two other factors tipped his hand: firstly, Drake’s raids on Spanish ships, which Philip saw as piracy. Then there was Elizabeth’s support of Philip’s rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. This finally goaded Philip into planning his Armada. Listen | Jessie Childs tells the story of Tudor gentleman Thomas Tresham whose faith set him at odds with the Virgin Queen Invincibility myth The Spanish fleet that Philip assembled is usually depicted as an ‘invincible’ Goliath to England’s little David of a navy. In reality, it was anything but. It wasn’t even the biggest fleet ever to have attacked England: the Norman invasion fleet of 1066, and the French force that crossed the Channel in 1545 and sank the Mary Rose, both boasted more vessels. The Spanish had around 130 ships – from war galleons to messenger vessels and provision boats. Although the English navy was smaller, a host of merchant and private boats were commandeered to create a force equal to that of the Spanish. And, anyway, the invasion fleet had sailed into trouble long before it had an opportunity to engage its English foes. Soon after departing from Lisbon, they faced disease, rotting provisions and bad weather. They had to stop at Corunna for repairs. From there, the commander of the fleet wrote to Philip, confessing that he could see “hardly any of those on the Armada with any knowledge or ability to perform the duties entrusted to them... we are very weak”. Was the Spanish campaign doomed to fail from the start? But Philip said the attack was to go ahead anyway. So off the Armada went, planning to sail up the English Channel towards its narrowest point. There it was to meet with an army of soldiers from the Netherlands led by the Duke of Parma, who were to be ferried across on barges to invade Kent. First, though, the Spanish had to make it up the Channel, and here they began to experience more problems. The first major casualties they experienced were self-inflicted: a crash and explosion lost them two ships. Dramatic effect Once the Spanish were sailing up the Channel, the next narrative beat in most popular retellings of the story is Elizabeth I’s rousing speech to her men at Tilbury on the northern bank of the Thames. That famous piece of oratory – in which the queen tells the assembled troops that she may “have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – has been dramatised in countless films. Elizabeth is often depicted riding a horse, dressed in white velvet, or even in armour. “I myself will be your general,” she tells her men. But this involves a tweaking to the timing of events for dramatic effect. Elizabeth had come up with the plan to address the troops while the Spanish were still in the Channel. Yet by the time she did so, the Armada were already staring defeat in the face. Eleven days earlier, English fireships had attacked the Spanish fleet while it was waiting off France for its rendezvous with Parma’s army. These burning vessels caused the Spanish to panic, with further crashes and losses. So when Elizabeth uttered her famous words at Tilbury, what was left of the Armada was on its way home, running up around Scotland and Ireland to get back to Spain. And there, in the north, the death knell was dealt to Spanish plans: not by Drake, Elizabeth I or brave English sailors – but by bad weather. Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded? Interestingly, the content as well as the timing of Elizabeth’s speech has also ‘evolved’ over time. The sources don’t mention the famous “heart and stomach of a king” line until more than three decades after the event. It was first introduced by a Protestant chaplain who had been at Tilbury – and it sounds like just the sort of thing Elizabeth would have said. But historians cannot be sure that she really used those very words. Does that matter? Tilbury has become a touchstone of history, not because of the facts, but because of the emotion it inspires. Shortly before the Second World War, when the actor Flora Robson, playing Elizabeth I, delivered the speech in the 1937 film Fire Over England, she was really talking about the feared Nazi invasion. Eight decades later, Elizabeth’s words were employed again – this time to sell feminism, football and beer as part of a Budweiser advertising campaign throwing its support behind the England Lionesses in the 2019 Women’s World Cup. As these examples prove, the idea that Elizabeth, Drake and underdog pluck defeated a practically invincible Armada is now firmly established at the heart of England’s conception of itself. The Victorians found this idea particularly appealing. They were especially drawn to a story about a nation with a brilliant navy – something that’s reflected in the fact that the Armada formed part of Prince Albert’s planned decorative scheme for the House of Lords. But, for all the veneration of Drake and co, there was no straight line from 1588 to Britain’s imperial greatness in the 18th and 19th centuries. For one thing, the defeat of the Armada didn’t bring victory in the war with Spain; in fact, that conflict dragged on into the 17th century. For another, the Spanish themselves never really saw the Armada as a significant setback. And that’s because, in 1589, the English suffered an embarrassing naval disaster of their own. That year, Drake led a so-called ‘Counter Armada’, with the aim of destroying the remainder of Philip’s fleet while it was under repair in Santander. It was a fiasco, in which 15,000 Englishmen died, and many of the 86 ships were lost. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Spanish Armada Drake and his fleet were forced – just like Philip II’s own fleet a year earlier – to stop at Corunna for lack of provisions. And here, a local woman, Maria Pita, led fierce resistance against the English navy. Still celebrated as a heroine in Corunna, Pita is said to have killed an English soldier herself, thereby inspiring the town to victory. In another football connection, she has become a symbol of the local women’s team. Someone should have told Margaret Thatcher about the ‘Counter Armada’. When Spain tried, unsuccessfully, to extradite the Chilean dictator General Pinochet from Britain for human rights abuses, the British prime minister sprang to the defence of the man who’d supported her during the Falklands War. She sent him a silver plate commemorating the English victory over the Spanish Armada, with a note decrying Spanish colonialism. Thatcher herself had often been photographed among her troops during the Falklands conflict, yet always appeared hyper-feminine in her personal style. She had learned a way of being a female war leader from Elizabeth I – to be womanly, yet to deny that gender mattered. Listen | Historian and author Dominic Sandbrook explores the pivotal early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in Britain: 1979-1982 The legend of the Spanish Armada created by the Elizabethans and retold by generations after them has a powerful legacy. In times of crisis – from the Second World War to the Falklands – it’s been used to convince us that this small island can take on superpowers; that we come from a long line of cool-headed and inspirational leaders; that, small as we are, we can still play a mighty role on the world stage. The popular version of the story of the Armada – true or not – gives us confidence to believe in that fantasy. Who knows where this impressive mingling of facts, fantasy and fibs might take us next? Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. The Spanish Armada was one of the topics she covered in her three-part series History’s Biggest Fibs on BBC Four in February 2020. This article was first published in the February 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded?
Victory over the Spanish Armada is remembered as one of England’s greatest military triumphs and a key moment in the nation’s naval supremacy. What if the Spanish had broken through and landed in England? Jonny Wilkes talks to historian Robert Hutchinson about how things could have gone differently...
Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes asks Robert Hutchinson what if… the Spanish Armada had landed in England? King Philip II of Spain ordered his ‘invincible’ fleet to sail up the English Channel and rendezvous with a 30,000-strong Spanish army waiting at Calais, before turning towards the coast of Kent. Once on English soil, the invasion force – under the command of the Duke of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands – headed straight for London, took Queen Elizabeth I and her ministers hostage, and called for Catholics to rise up in rebellion. England was Catholic once more... At least, that was what the Spanish hoped would happen. Instead, the events of 1588 are remembered for England’s historic victory over the Spanish Armada. A lot went wrong for the Spanish: delays to preparations, a destructive raid on their port of Cadiz, a disrupted voyage, inexperienced leadership, poor strategy, a faster English fleet, and – as if a sign of divine intervention – the weather. Yet had it gone differently and the landing been a success, says author and historian Robert Hutchinson, “we might be speaking Spanish today”. More alternate history What if... Boudica had defeated the Romans? What if... Alexander the Great had lived longer? How could the Spanish Armada have won? What if the Armada had been ready to sail earlier than 28 May 1588? The Spanish would likely have found the English less prepared, having not set up the beacon warning system on the coasts or built up their own fleet at Plymouth. Perhaps more importantly, the Armada would still be under the command of Spain’s greatest admiral, the Marquess de Santa Cruz, who allegedly never lost in battle. His death in February 1588 forced the selection of a new commander: the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an able administrator, but no seaman. As Hutchinson claims: “The more experienced Santa Cruz might have been more aggressive during the running fight up the Channel.” 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Spanish Armada The Spanish Armada: England’s lucky escape If Medina Sidonia had not stuck so rigidly to Philip’s orders not to attack first unless absolutely necessary – a “fatal flaw in Spanish strategy” according to Hutchinson – he could have caught the English fleet when anchored and vulnerable. Such a strike could have neutralised the naval commander, Lord High Admiral Charles Howard, as well as his second in command – Spanish enemy number one, Francis Drake. “Bottling up the English ships at Plymouth would have provided a clear run for the Spanish and demoralised the English,” says Hutchinson. That would have meant that English ships could not have taken the crucial position west of the Armada, from which they bombarded the enemy all the way to Calais. This in turn would have meant no fireship attack to break up the Armada’s crescent formation and less chance of heavy winds forcing the Spanish into retreat north. If Medina Sidonia took advantage, a landing of Parma’s army could have been possible. “Faced with invasion”, says Hutchinson,“the future of Elizabeth I and her Protestant England would have looked very black indeed.” The Spanish Armada: All at sea Life of the Week: Sir Francis Drake “If Parma’s battle-hardened troops successfully landed near Margate on the Kent coast, it is likely they would have been in the poorly defended streets of London within a week,” he adds. Parma would have been in a position to force concessions from Elizabeth I concerning Catholic worship in England and the surrender of English influence in the Spanish Netherlands. Meanwhile, Philip’s war chest would grow bigger from collecting payments that had been promised by Pope Sixtus V in the event of a successful landing. What would have happened to Elizabeth I? The Pope’s support for Philip’s ‘Enterprise of England’ depended on the restoration of Catholicism. “The Spanish boasted that Elizabeth would be paraded in a cage in the streets of Rome,” says Hutchinson. Whether she was captured quickly during the siege of London or later after making a last stand at a stronghold like Windsor Castle, England would certainly have lost its Protestant regime. This would have an instant effect on European politics as Protestant rebels in the Spanish Netherlands would stop receiving English support and so likely face defeat, all but ending hope for Dutch independence. The Spanish believed Catholics around England would rise up in support of the invasion, heartened by reports from their spies of friendly populations in counties like Lancashire, Westmorland, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Hampshire; they even brought gifts of jewel-encrusted swords for Catholic nobles. Some English Catholics would conceivably support the Spanish and there would be little chance of loyal Protestants holding out. “English land forces were dangerously short of personal weapons, armour and artillery and would have proved a poor match against the Spanish invaders,” says Hutchinson. Elizabeth I: the great unifier Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics Total conquest of England was by no means assured. The Spanish were on foreign soil and facing at least a guerrilla campaign from Protestant forces, which could have spilled over into civil war. That would come, moreover, after the problematic task of getting Parma’s army over the Channel in the first place, says Hutchinson. “The invasion forces, with horses and artillery, would have been towed in flat-bottomed barges in a protected ‘corridor’ to safeguard them from attack. The sea would have to have been exceptionally calm, the weather kind and the tides benevolent.” If all had gone right for the Spanish, though, then it may not have been only England and Spain to have had a severely altered history. England, no longer a Protestant nation and bearing the humiliation of invasion, could have become part of the Spanish Empire. Colonisation of the New World would have looked very different with Spain as the dominant power and England not featuring at all. Hutchinson goes so far as to say: “If England had been defeated by the Armada, its naval prowess would have been erased from history. There may not have been a British Empire.” What really happened The Spanish Armada, a fleet of around 150 ships carrying nearly 30,000 men, had been built for one purpose: the invasion of England. Philip II of Spain had a mission to overthrow the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholicism to the country. A further strategic gain from this ‘Enterprise of England’ would be to end English support for Protestant Dutch rebels in the Spanish Netherlands. His ‘Great and Most Fortunate Navy’ set sail in May 1588, but encountered a maelstrom of misfortune and setbacks. Once at Plymouth, the Armada was outmanoeuvred by quicker English ships and chased to Calais, where the promised Spanish army for the invasion failed to appear. The Armada was then broken up by an English fireship attack, then horrendous weather, forcing a retreat to Spain via the north of Scotland. The defeat of the Spanish Armada was hailed as a supreme victory for Elizabeth and the Protestant cause. Dr Robert Hutchinson is a Tudor historian and archaeologist, whose critically-acclaimed books include The Spanish Armada (W&N, 2013). He was speaking to freelance writer Jonny Wilkes This content first appeared in the March 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed Like this? Read more alternate history here
9 of the most overrated battles in history (and one underrated one)
From Bosworth and Bannockburn to the Battle of Britain, historian Sean Lang examines nine British battles accorded a decisive importance that, he argues, does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny…
To be overrated, a battle must be famous and have been generally regarded as decisive or of great historical significance. Of course, some battles, like those of the Crimean War, never had much reputation to start with; others, such as El Alamein, are genuinely debatable: a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, it helped turn the tide in the Second World War’s north African campaign and was of genuine value in stiffening British morale. Judging a battle to be overrated does not mean it was insignificant; still less does it deny the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought in it. It simply means that it has been accorded a decisive importance that does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. For reasons of space, I have restricted this exploration to battles from British history; other peoples can doubtless compile similar lists of their own. Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain, 55 and 54 BC The cheeky satirical volume 1066 and All That gave 55 BC as one of the two memorable dates in English history (the other, of course, being 1066), but a memorable date does not prove a battle’s significance. What was Julius Caesar actually doing in Britain? What was his landing supposed to achieve? Caesar himself says it was to punish the Britons for the aid they sent the Gallic tribes during his conquest of Gaul in 58–50 BC, which would make it a sort of punitive expedition, like the ones the British would later launch in their own empire. Either way, it cannot be called a conquest, or even, properly speaking, an invasion. One of the problems with Caesar’s raid, as with so much ancient history, is that we are so heavily dependent on tainted written sources – in this case Caesar’s own written account. Corroborative archaeological evidence for the scale of Caesar’s expedition is relatively sparse. We do know that Caesar’s account was a propaganda exercise to promote his own bid for power, and that it would have suited his purposes to ‘big up’ what was either a large raid or an embarrassingly aborted invasion. Either way, its significance seems to have been overblown. Read more about Caesar's British gamble Bannockburn, 1314 Robert the Bruce’s victory over King Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn was unquestionably important, but it wasn’t as decisive as many like to claim. For one thing, Edward II was one of the most incompetent men ever to occupy the English throne; it is hard to imagine his father, Edward I, the fearsome ‘Hammer of the Scots’, walking so blithely into Robert the Bruce’s trap. In the short term, the English were so completely defeated that Bannockburn really did seem to have established Scottish independence. But not for long. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history The English kings’ claim to overlordship of Scotland remained in force, so in 1320 Bruce had the Declaration of Arbroath drawn up, addressed to the Pope and asserting Scotland’s right to be a free kingdom. It was needed, because although Bruce got the English to accept Scottish independence in 1328, just over a year later he was dead, leaving his five-year-old son, David II, on the throne. The English promptly invaded, forced the king into exile, put Edward Balliol on the throne and annexed the southern part of the kingdom. It was the end of the reign of the House of Bruce. Later Scottish nationalism was to accord Bannockburn a decisive significance that would not have been so obvious to people in Scotland at the time. Bosworth, 1485 It is still popularly believed that the battle of Bosworth, the battle in which Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took the throne from the Yorkist King Richard III, marked the end of the Wars of the Roses and therefore of the English Middle Ages. It did nothing of the sort. Militarily, the battle hung on the decision of Lord Stanley as to which side to support; he chose Henry Tudor, which sealed the contest, though the real significance of the day lay in the fact that Richard III himself was killed. It gave Henry just enough of an opening to try to make his rule permanent, but by no means did it indicate that his position was secure. Treachery at Bosworth: what really brought down Richard III There were plenty of people with a stronger claim to the throne than Henry Tudor, and he knew it. The Yorkists were a genuine threat, especially as they had good contacts abroad, in France, Burgundy, Ireland and Scotland. It’s too easy for us nowadays to underestimate the importance of the Yorkist pretenders to Henry’s throne: the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, in which Henry VII faced the Irish-backed Yorkists under the pretender Lambert Simnel, required him to mount a robust defence and has a better claim to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Even after Henry’s victory, the Yorkists were able to maintain their military and diplomatic pressure through a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck. Bosworth’s importance in the popular imagination comes from the significance given to it by Henry’s skilful use of propaganda, rather than from events on the battlefield. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-638913846-1-153b046.jpg" width="6557" height="6717" alt="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The Armada, 1588 The defeat of the Spanish Armada was for so long such an iconic moment in English history that it might seem perverse to include it here. Certainly, English naval gunnery was superior, both in technology and in its execution, and as an English propaganda coup, the Armada campaign was a masterpiece: the narrative of the little English ships nipping in and out between the ungainly Spanish galleons, of Drake’s fireship attack at Calais, and above all of Queen Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury, has stirred patriotic hearts for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-463909425-0345deb.jpg" width="3699" height="2827" alt="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The reality was very different. The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation, and it was acknowledged even at the time that what really destroyed the Armada was the stormy weather that drove it northwards to be wrecked on the rocky Scottish and Irish coasts. More importantly, the battle did not establish immediate English naval supremacy, as so many have assumed: the English fleet dispersed shortly afterwards and many of the sailors were soon destitute. In 1596–97 the Spanish sent two further invasion armadas, which were again defeated more by the storms in the Channel than by the English fleet. The defeat of the Armada was a major blow to Spanish prestige, but the English had no call to be complacent. Was the Spanish campaign doomed to fail from the start? Plassey, 1757 For many years, Plassey was up there with Blenheim and Waterloo as a triumph of British arms – a “miracle”, as one historian once called it. This was the battle at which Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) defeated the treacherous nawab (ruler) of Bengal, avenged the atrocity of the Black Hole of Calcutta and established British rule over India. The trouble is, almost none of that version of events is accurate. The nawab had driven the British from Calcutta and, in an event still hotly disputed, some of the prisoners he took died in the airless room in which they were confined – the famous ‘Black Hole’. He also flirted with the idea of a French alliance, so Clive was sent to retake Calcutta and deal with the French. He did both of these, and that should have been the end of the campaign – only Clive sensed an opportunity to stage a palace coup and replace the nawab with one of his subordinates, Mir Jafar. The result was a strange non-battle: although his forces heavily outnumbered Clive’s, the nawab didn’t know which of his own men he could trust, while Clive, for the same reason, didn’t want to press home an attack in case he was killing the wrong men. What fighting there was began on the initiative of a British officer who disobeyed Clive’s orders and launched an attack. Politically, Plassey was of the first importance, but as a military exercise it has been heavily overrated. The chaotic conquest of India New Orleans, 1815 New Orleans is a battle more overrated in the United States than in Britain, where few people have ever heard of it. It was the climax of the curious Anglo-American War of 1812–14, a sideshow to the main military event of the time, the war against Napoleon. It must rank as one of the most needless conflicts in history: American merchants were caught between the wartime blockades that Britain and France imposed on each other, and opinion was divided in the United States over whether to fight France or Britain. In the end, British impressment of US sailors tipped the balance in favour of war with Britain, but the war began badly for the Americans: their invasion of Canada was defeated and the British were able to outmanoeuvre them and take Washington DC itself, burning the presidential mansion down as they did so. Trafalgar, a futile victory? Why Nelson's triumph didn't turn the tide on Napoleon American history myths: 7 things people get wrong A war over wartime trade restrictions becomes pointless when that war ends, so when the European war ended in 1814, there was nothing left for Britain and the US to fight about. A number of Wellington’s Peninsular War veterans were shipped over to the States, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, a competent rather than a gifted commander. The British attack on New Orleans, where the American commander was Andrew Jackson, was not well planned, and Pakenham was himself killed in the fighting. It was certainly an American victory; however, since peace between the two countries had already been signed (the news had not yet crossed the Atlantic), the battle cannot be said to have decided the war one way or the other. It was undoubtedly a source of patriotic pride to the Americans, but of much less significance to the British. Rorke’s Drift, 1879 The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was as blatant an example of aggressive war as one can find: Britain had no particular quarrel with the Zulu people before invading their land. Moreover, the British commander, Lord Chelmsford, was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Zulus and committed the elementary blunder of dividing his force when he could not be certain where his enemy was. That enemy turned out to be attacking Chelmsford’s base camp at Isandlwana, where the British force holding it was wiped out. To the Victorian public, Isandlwana was a defeat of unimaginable proportions. All the more reason, therefore, to make the most of the more successful engagement that followed, at Rorke’s Drift. The attack on the tiny mission station at Rorke’s drift was led by Zulu commander Prince Dabulamanzi, in defiance of strict orders not to attack fortified positions, especially along the frontier with British territory, as Rorke’s Drift was. He and his men had played no part at Isandlwana and they were keen to ‘wash their spears’ in British blood. The defence was led by two junior officers, Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, who displayed an almost impressive lack of military imagination, missed the chance to evacuate and just sat there, waiting for the Zulus to attack. In the event, even rudimentary fortifications of mealie bags and biscuit boxes proved enough protection to break the Zulu attack, which was called off before British reinforcements could arrive. No fewer than 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, and the 1964 film Zulu helped to embed the battle in national consciousness; in reality it was an unnecessary battle, badly planned on both sides, and given a huge importance it never really deserved. 9 medieval battles more significant than Agincourt The Siege of Mafeking, 1899–1900 When the Boer republics launched pre-emptive strikes into British territory at the start of the Anglo-Boer War towards the end of 1899, they managed to catch the British on the hop and besiege them in a series of townships, including Kimberley, Ladysmith and the railway junction at Mafeking. The British commander at Mafeking, Robert Baden-Powell, having got himself unnecessarily trapped there, went on to make the most of it by a brilliant news management campaign, presenting himself as the plucky lad at the wicket, gallantly blocking some fiendish Boer bowling. When Mafeking was finally relieved by troops under Field Marshal Roberts in May 1900, the British public went wild with joy and relief. The importance of the siege of Mafeking was always heavily overstated: it gave the Boers some initial propaganda leverage, but in military terms it tied too many troops down and left them unprepared to face the main British attack when it came. The British presented the siege as a sort of test of manly character, though it was of limited importance to the outcome of the war. It also gave them a sense of moral superiority, which was soon undermined by the revelations about the appalling conditions in the concentration camps in which the British held the local Boer population. The Battle of Britain, 1940 You might think you need your eyes tested, or me my brain examined, to see the Battle of Britain in this list. The crucial role of the RAF in denying the Germans control of the air in 1940 and therefore persuading Adolf Hitler to abandon his invasion plans is so well known that it might seem almost sacrilegious to question it. There is, indeed, no cause to question the importance of the battle, but was it solely responsible for saving Britain from invasion? Not quite. For a ruthless dictator, Hitler was surprisingly sensitive about heavy losses in battle and his navy had taken a pounding in 1940 during the invasion of Norway. The difficulties of launching an amphibious invasion across the Channel were hardly a secret, and he knew the appalling damage that even a relatively small squadron of British ships could inflict on an exposed German fleet of invasion barges if it caught them mid-Channel. The loss of life would be devastating, and so would the blow to German prestige. Had the Germans been able to get hold of the French fleet the odds might have been evened, but Churchill’s ruthless decision to sink it at Mers-el-Kébir denied Hitler that possibility. German control of the air would certainly take a heavy toll on the Royal Navy, but it only needed a few British planes disputing the skies with the Luftwaffe to allow the Navy to destroy the German army in the West. It was probably never worth the risk and Hitler almost certainly knew it. The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few And one underrated battle: Jutland, 1916 The battle of Jutland was probably the single most important British victory of the First World War, yet not only is it often underrated, some books even suggest it was a British defeat. It was nothing of the sort. When Winston Churchill called Admiral Jellicoe, in charge of the British Grand Fleet, the one man who could lose the war in an afternoon, he was speaking the truth. If Britain lost control of the sea, the Allies would lose the war. If the Germans controlled the Channel, they could cut British military aid to France, land troops on the undefended French coast and launch a devastating attack in the Allied rear. Submarines could certainly take their toll on Allied shipping, but the Germans’ key to landing a decisive blow lay with the battleships of their High Seas Fleet. All they had to do was command the sea. And that is why Jutland was so important. Jutland was certainly not decisive in the way Nelson’s battles were: the British actually lost more ships than the Germans, in many cases through poor ship design, and the Germans escaped to fight another day. Except, they didn’t fight another day. As an American journalist put it, the German fleet had assaulted its jailer and was back in jail. Where it stayed until the end of the war – thanks to Jutland. Sean Lang is a senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in the history of the British empire. He is also a professional playwright and a regular broadcaster on radio and television. You can follow him on Twitter @sf_lang
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Spanish Armada
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – a fleet of Spanish ships led by Spanish commander Medina Sidonia with the purpose of overthrowing Queen Elizabeth I – is considered one of England's greatest military achievements, and one that served to boost the monarch's popularity. Here, Robert Hutchinson, the author of The Spanish Armada, shares 10 lesser-known facts…
The Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 changed the course of European history. If Medina Sidonia, the Spanish commander, had managed to escort Philip II’s 26,000-strong invasion army from Flanders, the future of Elizabeth I and her Protestant England would have looked very black indeed. After landing near Margate in Kent, it is probable the battle-hardened Spanish troops would have been in the streets of London within a week. England would have reverted to the Catholic faith, and there may not have been a British empire to come. We might still be speaking Spanish today. But Medina Sidonia suffered one of the most signal catastrophes in naval history. Myth, driven by Elizabethan propaganda, has shaped our view of that dramatic running fight up the English Channel. The Spanish were not defeated by the queen’s plucky sea dogs fighting against overwhelming odds: it was destroyed by appalling weather, poor planning and flawed strategy and tactics. Here are some surprising facts about the campaign… Both Elizabeth’s ministers and King Philip of Spain expected that the 50 per cent of England’s population that remained Catholic would rise in support of the Spanish invaders after any landing Jewel-hilted swords, intended as Philip’s gifts for English Catholic nobles, were found in a box on board the fatally damaged Nuestra Señora del Rosario after the English vice-admiral Sir Francis Drake boarded the ship. The Spanish king’s spies had reported beforehand that the “greater part of Lancashire is Catholic… and the town of Liverpool”, and the counties of Westmorland and Northumberland remained “really faithful to your majesty”. In addition, another Spanish assessment in August 1586 estimated that 2,000 men could be recruited in Lincolnshire “which was well effected to the Catholic religion”, plus 3,000 more in Norfolk, while Hampshire was “full of Catholics”. The Spanish Armada: England's lucky escape This last report may have contained some truth. In early June 1586, Henry Radcliffe, 4th Earl of Sussex, suppressed what he described as an intended rebellion “in the country near Portsmouth” and arrested some of its leaders: Elizabeth’s government took stern measures to contain the threat posed from what they saw as potential fifth columnists. Recusants – those who refused to attend Anglican services because they were Catholic – were disarmed and those regarded as most dangerous were imprisoned without trial in a number of fortresses, such as Wisbech Castle in Cambridgeshire. These were the world’s first internment camps. In Bedfordshire, Henry Grey, 6th Earl of Kent, inquired how he was to deal with female recusants who were “married to husbands that are conformable in religion”. Godfrey Foljambe arrested his own grandmother and “now have her in custody”. There were some among Elizabeth I’s faithful subjects who placed profit ahead of patriotism Sometime in 1587, Elizabeth I's ministers learnt that 12 English merchants – some based in Bristol – had been selling supplies and equipment to the Armada “to the hurt of her majesty and undoing of the realm, if not redressed”. Their nine sizeable cargoes of contraband, valued at between £300 and £2,000 each, contained not merely provisions, but also quantities of ammunition, gunpowder and ordnance. The fate of these reckless traders (perhaps they were Catholic sympathisers?) remains unknown but, in those edgy times, it’s unlikely they’d have enjoyed the queen’s mercy, which at best was rather limited. Sir John Gilbert [who organised Devon's defence against the Spanish Armada] also refused permission for his ships to join Drake’s western squadron and allowed them to sail on their planned trading voyage to South America in March 1588 in defiance of naval orders. English Catholics sailed on board the Armada At least four of its “gentlemen adventurers” were English, and there were 18 among the salaried officers. Inevitably, some paid the heavy price of disloyalty to the crown: five Catholics slipped away by boat from the stricken Rosario before Drake’s arrival, but two Englishmen were captured on board and taken to the Tower of London as “rebels and traitors to their country”. One, identified as the Cornishman Tristram Winslade, was handed to officers employed by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, who were ordered to interrogate him “using torture… at their pleasure”. (Miraculously, Winslade survived the rack and Elizabeth’s justice, and died in the Catholic seminary at Douai in France in November 1605). On board the battle-damaged San Mateo, beached between Ostend and Sluis after the battle of Gravelines, two Englishmen were killed by Dutch sailors – one named as William Browne, a brother of Viscount Montague. The local commissioner for the Protestant States of Zeeland reported that the second man killed was “very rich, who left William as his heir”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-556910813-067cf02.jpg" width="2878" height="3060" alt="Portrait of Sir Francis Drake. Drake was more interested in booty than fighting when meeting the Spanish Armada, says Robert Hutchinson. (Picture by De Agostini / C. Bevilacqua / Getty Images)" title="Portrait of Sir Francis Drake. Drake was more interested in booty than fighting when meeting the Spanish Armada, says Robert Hutchinson. (Picture by De Agostini / C. Bevilacqua / Getty Images)" /> Other Englishmen were reported to having been aboard this ship, eating with her captain, Don Diego Pimentel. “One was called Robert, another Raphael, once servant to the… mayor of London. We do not know their surnames.” They may have been among those forcibly drowned or hanged by the Dutch who were rebelling against Spanish rule. Before the campaign began there were reports of disaffection below decks in Elizabeth’s warships. After a scare on board Lord Edmund Sheffield’s Bear, the “barber and three of four others took the oath [of allegiance to the crown] and renounced the pope’s authority”. Pope Sixtus V, who supported the Armada, was infatuated with Elizabeth, telling an astonished Venetian ambassador: “Were she a Catholic, she would be our most beloved, for she is of great worth” Philip was forced to ask the pope for a loan to help meet the rocketing costs of preparing the Armada. However, this pope was notorious for his miserliness – the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican complained: “When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood.” Sixtus meanwhile had a pet project to buy the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks and rebuild it in Rome – or recover it by force of arms. He was piqued that, although the Spanish army “would be sufficient for this purpose”, it was fighting England, instead of achieving his ambitions in the Holy Land. In the end Sixtus promised to pay 1m gold ducats (£662m in 2015 spending power), but cannily stipulated that half would be paid only after Spanish forces set foot in England. The remainder would be in equal instalments every two months thereafter. Philip could bestow the English crown on whomever he wished, providing that the realm was immediately returned to the Catholic faith. Sixtus also demanded that the church’s property and rights, alienated since the time of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, should now be restored. Not one penny was ever paid out. After the Armada’s defeat, Sixtus told one of his cardinals to write to Philip to console him and to encourage him to launch a new expedition against England. He refrained from writing himself, as he feared the king “might make it a pretext for asking him for money”. Medina Sidonia did not want to command the Armada He was an administrator, and had never been to sea. He told the Spanish king: “I know by the small experience I have had afloat that I soon become sea-sick.” He had been the first to reinforce Cadiz during Drake’s raid on that city in 1587, and had been appointed captain-general of Andalusia as “conspicuous proof of the king’s favour”. After considering his appointment for two days, Medina Sidonia made clear his absolute conviction that the Armada expedition was a grave mistake and had little chance of success. Only a miracle, he added in a frank and outspoken letter, could save it. Philip’s counsellors, horror-struck at its electrifying contents, dared not show it to the king. “Do not depress us with fears for the fate of the Armada because in such a cause, God will make sure it succeeds” they begged the new admiral. As for his suitability for command, “nobody knows more about naval affairs than you”. Then their tone became menacing: “Remember that the reputation and esteem you currently enjoy for courage and wisdom would entirely be forfeited if what you wrote to us became generally known (although we shall keep it secret).” Deadly Rivals: Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots Love and marriage in Tudor England When storms scattered and damaged the Armada after it left Lisbon, Medina Sidonia’s grave doubts about his mission returned He wrote to Philip: “I am bound to confess that I see very few, or hardly any of those in the Armada with any knowledge or ability to perform the duties entrusted to them. “Your majesty may believe me when I assure you that we are very weak. Do not be deceived by anyone who may wish to persuade you otherwise.” The admiral added: “Well, sire, how do you think we can attack so great a country as England with such a force as ours is now.” Better, he advised, to agree “some honourable terms with the enemy” while the Armada was being repaired in Corunna. Not surprisingly, this gloomy letter alarmed and depressed Philip, who spent all “day and night in prayer, although suffering from the gout in his hand”. His mood was not improved by a letter from Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, commander of his land forces in the Spanish Netherlands and the general in charge of the invasion army. Parma warned Philip that the flat river barges that would carry his troops across to England could not meet the Armada at sea: “If we came across any armed English or [Dutch] rebel ships they could destroy us with the greatest ease.” Philip noted in the margin alongside this passage: “God grant that no embarrassment may come from this.” But he could not accept any more arguments from his naval commander. He wrote to Medina Sidonia: “I have dedicated this enterprise to God. Pull yourself together then and do your part!” Sir Francis Drake was more interested in booty than fighting After the first fight south of Cornwall, Drake was ordered to shadow the Spanish fleet with a light burning at his stern as a guide to the following English fleet. But sometime that night, the light disappeared. Drake had left his station to loot the stricken Rosario. At dawn, the English admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, in Ark Royal, and two other English ships found themselves hard up against the Armada’s rearguard. They hastily retreated. Drake claimed afterwards that he had sighted strange sails to starboard at midnight and, believing them to be Spanish, doused his lantern and set off in hot pursuit. They turned out to be innocent German merchant ships. Doubtless Howard deemed it impolitic to court-martial one of England’s naval heroes at a time of national emergency – even though through his actions, the English fleet had lost both time and distance in chasing the Spaniards. Martin Frobisher, commanding Triumph, seethed: “Drake’s light we looked for but there was no light to be seen… Like a coward he kept by her [the Rosario] all night because he would have the spoil… We will have our shares or I will make him spend the best blood in his belly.” Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury – “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman” – which pledged that “shortly we shall have a famous victory over the enemies of my God and of my kingdom”, was made after the Armada had entered Scottish waters on its way home That same morning, Howard had arrived with his ships and starving crews at Harwich in Essex. In the evening, while Elizabeth was still at the English army camp at Tilbury, there were rumours that Parma and his invasion force had embarked and “would be here with as much speed as possibly he could”. The queen refused to return, for her own safety, to London, declaring that she “would not think of deserting her army at a time of danger”. The next day her troops kept a public fast for victory. The rumours about Parma were just Elizabethan propaganda. With the cost of her forces in the likely invasion areas of Kent and Essex amounting to £783 14s 8d per day, the queen ordered an immediate demobilisation of the army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/04/dreamstime_xl_19443314_0-ae2cfc9-60fc308.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Elizabeth I on an engraving from the 1800s, engraved by W Holl and published in London by Charles Knight, Ludgate East. (© Georgios | Dreamstime.com)" title="Elizabeth I on an engraving from the 1800s, engraved by W Holl and published in London by Charles Knight, Ludgate East. (© Georgios | Dreamstime.com)" /> A long propaganda tract written at the behest of Elizabeth’s secretary of state Lord Burghley was allegedly found “in the chamber of one Richard Leigh, a seminary priest who was lately executed for high treason”. In fact, it was a forgery; Leigh’s identity had been conveniently stolen The tract claimed that the truths of English naval supremacy or the power of the Protestant God were undeniable: “The Spaniards did never take or sink any English ship or boat or break any mast or took any one prisoner.” This amazed the Spanish prisoners in London who exclaimed that “in all these fights, Christ showed himself a Lutheran”. Medina Sidonia attracted special vilification. He had spent much of his time during the Armada campaign “lodged in the bottom of his ship for safety”. The tract concluded with this scornful and contemptuous phrase: “So ends this account of the misfortunes of the Spanish Armada which they used to call INVINCIBLE.” The propaganda onslaught did not end there. A 10-page doggerel verse promised English readers that it was safe to eat fish, even though they had fed on corpses of Spanish sailors, infected with venereal diseases. Was this the first government health warning? The Spanish Armada was not the last Armada sent against England Two more were despatched in 1596 and 1597, but these fleets were also dispersed by storms. On 23 July 1595, four Spanish galleys sailed on a reconnaissance mission from southern Brittany and landed at Mousehole in Cornwall. The fishing village was burned and three men killed. A small force of Cornish militia fled in blind panic at their first sight of the Spanish troops and Penzance was then bombarded, destroying houses and sinking three ships in its harbour. Newlyn was also burned. Fear of the imminent arrival of an English fleet forced the Spaniards to depart on 4 August – but not before a Catholic Mass was celebrated openly on English soil. A larger force of 3,000 Spanish troops landed in Kinsale in south-west Ireland in 1601 to assist Irish rebels but were forced to surrender. The 19-year Anglo-Spanish war ended in 1604 as Elizabeth’s successor, James VI and I, wanted to end the cripplingly expensive hostilities. The Treaty of London granted much of what Philip II demanded if England had been forced to sue for peace in 1588. England ended its support of the Dutch rebellion in the Spanish Netherlands and renounced her privateers’ attacks on Spanish shipping. On Spain’s part, the treaty acknowledged that official hopes of restoring Catholicism to England were over for ever. Robert Hutchinson is the author of The Spanish Armada (W&N, 2013). This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2015.