The Spanish Armada

In 1588, Spain’s mighty armada sailed to invade England and change the balance of power in Europe. Dan explains why Philip II launched the Armada, details the high-stakes clash in the Channel, and outlines the decisive tactics, leadership and luck that helped the English prevail. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sir Francis Drake Explainer (Part 1) - Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/francis-drake-part-1/id1042631089?i=1000701117292 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rfyx6O0uG68OMU8nZY3Tx?si=0VCVhre5QoWckbkMJ57aUA Sir Francis Drake Explainer (Part 2) - Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/francis-drake-part-2/id1042631089?i=1000701609499 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7o0mUByT7hoB0PCqlrjgEE?si=GipNr6rxRdmmNoMxwtOugQ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:31Dan Snow?

  It was one of those powerful fleets ever to shake out its canvas and strike out across the open ocean. Pope himself had blessed the banner that flew from the topmast of its flagship. The sails of every ship carried the vivid red cross of crusade. They called it invincible. They called it great and most fortunate. But that was before.

• 2:00Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History and I'm taking you back to the summer of 1588. The fate of England, the fate of Europe, nay, the fate of the world hung in the balance. Out on those grey waters of the Channel, a vast fleet of around 130 Spanish ships sailed north. A maritime crusade, war galleons, supply vessels, troop transports, their holds crowded with 30,000 men. King Philip II of Spain, the most powerful man in the world, called it "La Armada Invencible", "The Invincible Fleet", it was his instrument, well, it was an instrument of divine justice against the heretical bastard-born regicide usurper across the water.

• 2:46Dan Snow?

  It was a tool to crush Protestant England, to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I, and return the island to the Catholic fold. But what did unfold was not the swift, the glorious victory that King Philip of Spain had expected. England's ships might have been small, but they were faster, and they were more agile. They were manned by seamen who knew every inch of this English coast. They knew its idiosyncrasies, its dangers, its opportunities. They were men who knew how to fight dirty, men like Drake, men like Hawkins and Frobisher, men who'd cut their teeth on piracy and ambush. They weren't the navy of brass buttons and starched collars that lay in the future.

• 3:32Dan Snow?

  They were the horny, handed toughs who knew how to ride the flood to greatness.

• 3:39Dan Snow?

  The Spanish were humiliated, spoiler alert. The Armada staggered north, battered by storms, and a legend was born. The legend of a miraculous victory, of divine favour, of national destiny. "God blew and they were scattered", read the medals struck afterwards in England.

• 4:04Dan Snow?

  Was that really true? Had God made his preferences clear? Or did good old fashioned planning, logistics, technology, leadership, investment and skill win out? In this explainer episode, we're going to find out. I'm going to take you through the story of the Spanish Armada. I'm going to explore the politics that brought these two powers to the brink of war. I'm going to hear about how the fighting at sea played out. We're going to meet the key players: Philip II, Elizabeth I, the cautious Duke of Medina Stoney, the man who'd never really gone to sea, who got seasick, who didn't really want to be there. And we'll meet Howard and Drake. We'll also meet the sailors who faced the terror of cannon fire and the terrible gale-force winds.

• 4:45Dan Snow?

  And we'll talk about how this failed invasion helped to forge an English identity rooted in the sea, Protestant, defiant, ready to take on the world. Enjoy.

• 5:17Dan Snow?

  It must have been an unforgettable sight. 3pm on the 29th of July 1588. Imagine you're a little way off Lizard Point, Cornwall, the great headland that stretches down into the Channel, the so-called Western Approaches. And you are watching one of the greatest invasion fleets ever to be launched in the history of the world. It is arrayed across the horizon. As that fleet came into sight of land, the lead ship spilt the wind from its sails, slowed down, and all the other ships followed her example. It was a tightly knit fleet. Everyone conformed to the actions of the leader.

• 5:56Dan Snow?

  There were 120 ships, 120, each with the Red Cross of Religious Crusade on their white, weather-beaten sails. Around 30,000 men on board, and this was their first sighting of the land that they had come to conquer. This was the arrival of the so-called Spanish Armada. And that leading ship, around 1,000 tonnes, a great galleon, at that moment it hoisted a huge banner, a mighty banner that stretched from its top mast right down to the water. And on that banner was an image of the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene kneeling before the cross.

• 6:39Dan Snow?

  It was a banner that had been blessed by the Pope himself. This was a holy crusade, confident in the support of God. The Pope had remitted the sins of the Crus. The Spanish Empire and its ruler, King Philip of Spain, were God's chosen instruments to deal with the wicked, heretic Queen of the English. But first of all, let's go back a bit and cover some of the background, some of the rivalry between England and Spain in this period. Both those countries, England and Spain, were Atlantic powers. And the discovery by Europeans of the New World, of the Americas, a hundred years before

• 7:24Dan Snow?

  the Armada sailed, had ignited just the most extraordinary and gigantic competition between England, Spain, but other Atlantic powers like France, the Netherlands, and Portugal as well. It was all a race to exploit this new world, and indeed, the oceans and the places that lay beyond. It was a race to extract value from the Americas and beyond, to transport enslaved Africans to the New World, to bring back precious metals and commodities from, from the Americas, and to dominate this new Atlantic space. This competition was then given a savage ideological, religious edge by the Reformation,

• 8:06Dan Snow?

  which saw particularly the Dutch and the English embrace the other side of the schism within the Catholic Church. They adopted Protestant ideas. So now you've got bitter divisions, fuelled not only by cash and the desire for national prestige and power, but also by religion. Each side thought the other was profoundly evil, devilish even. It was a toxic combination. Philip II of Spain emerges as one of the leading figures of the Catholic world, possibly the leading figure, it's champion. He ruled over a massive empire. It was particularly enormous because at that point, he was also ruling over Portugal as well.

• 8:48Dan Snow?

  The Portuguese royal family had died out, it stuttered to a finish. And so Philip claimed the mantle of King of Portugal, which meant that his empire was not only that of Spain, but Portugal as well. So that means he ruled over Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, much of what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, but also southern Italy, much of the east and west coasts of Africa, enclaves along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and India, Mexico, well up into the modern USA, Brazil, Peru, the Caribbean Islands, and over into Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines. The Spanish Empire was vast. And to Philip of Spain, it looked like God was on his side.

• 9:31Dan Snow?

  He had smashed the Turkish in the Mediterranean at the Battle of La Panto, so he seemed to have halted the advance of the Ottoman Turkish into Christendom for a generation. His great obsession, his great hobby, other than fighting unbelievers, was collecting religious relics, saintly relics, in his giant Escorial Palace in Madrid. He had something like seven and a half thousand relics of saints around him by the time he died. He was, let's be honest, fairly hardline when it came to religion. He said that if his son would grow up to be a heretic, i.e. a Protestant, he would carry the wood to burn him himself. And that religious zealotry was exacerbated by the fact that the most difficult of his subjects to control were the Protestant ones.

• 10:16Dan Snow?

  The Netherlands was in full-scale revolt against Spanish rule, and many people in the Netherlands were Protestants. And Philip had sent an army there almost 20 years before, the Armada set sail. That army was locked into a savage, attritional war in that low-lying, boggy environment. It was very, very difficult to operate in. You needed all sorts of specialist equipment, you needed boats with shallow drafts, you needed a never-ending supply of men. The landscape was marshy and disease-ridden. It swallowed up armies. There were lots of fortresses there, lots of sieges, and those mud-strewn trenches ground armies into dust.

• 10:58Dan Snow?

  And that was where Philip and Elizabeth really fell out. There were lots of causes for Philip and Elizabeth becoming enemies, but their roles in the Low Countries was the main one. I'll come back to that in a second because we've also got to remember that Philip had once been Elizabeth's brother-in-law. He had married Mary the First, the first queen regnant, i.e. the first queen in her own name in English history. She was known subsequently to some as Bloody Mary. She'd been the one who attempted to reintroduce Catholicism to England fairly robustly after the reign of her father, Henry VIII, and her little brother, Edward VI. She did so with the support of her husband, Philip of Spain. Now, interestingly, while Philip of Spain was her consort, her husband,

• 11:42Dan Snow?

  he'd recommended that Mary build lots of ships. He'd said, "The safeguard of England is in its navy", and he'd been exactly right. But Mary had died childless, and now all those nice, powerful ships were inherited by her successor, her little sister, Elizabeth. When Mary had died in 1558, Philip had actually proposed marriage to Elizabeth, amazingly. He hadn't let Protestantism go on the way there, but she had rejected him, which probably hadn't helped their relationship. And their relationship went further on the slide when Elizabeth allowed buccaneers, pirates, privateers, adventurers, you can call them what you like, folks, to begin to gnaw away at the edges of the Spanish Empire.

• 12:24Dan Snow?

  People like John Hawkins, who in the 1560s crossed the Atlantic with Elizabeth backing. On one voyage, he took his young cousin, by the way, a guy called Francis Drake. They were hoping to do some trade in the Spanish Empire, which was technically closed off to foreign shipping. They took a cargo of enslaved Africans and they attempted to sell them in Mexico. But eventually, a Spanish fleet found them, turned on them and crushed them in what was England's first great naval battle outside Northern European waters.

• 12:55Dan Snow?

  The young Francis Drake escaped from that humiliating defeat, but he was left with a burning hatred of Spaniards and he plotted his revenge for the rest of his life. Francis Drake didn't have to wait too long. Between 1577 and 1580, with Elizabeth as a key investor, Drake went on a circumnavigation of the world. He was the first English commander to sail around the world and led the second expedition that had ever successfully made it all the way around. It was basically part exploration and part a massive prolonged raid on Spanish possessions. Ships were captured, towns, settlements were burned. It was just a huge provocation to Philip and it was a blow at the heart of the Spanish Empire.

• 13:38Dan Snow?

  But curiously, it wasn't actually that that led to war between Philip and Elizabeth. That was, as I said, caused by what happened in the Netherlands. In September of 1585, Elizabeth had crossed a line. She'd taken the huge step of sending troops to the continent to help the Dutch rebels fight against Spain. She did not wish to see Catholic Spain assert its control right across the Low Countries, with all the implications that would have for the ports that took English trade into Europe, and indeed those ports from which an invasion fleet could be assembled to attack England. Now, don't forget, Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII, he'd invaded England and Wales to capture the throne. The Tudors, they had a long memory.

• 14:23Dan Snow?

  They were very nervous about someone else repeating the trick that had brought them to the throne. So for lots of reasons, trade, geography, power politics, Elizabeth was keen to keep the Protestant Dutch independent and free from Spanish imperial control. She sent 6,000 men to help them, and this was a provocation the Spanish could not ignore. Philip's initial plan had been to replace Elizabeth with her cousin Mary, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a good Catholic. But Elizabeth executed her in 1587, and that further enraged Philip, and it further encouraged him to send that expedition to England. But it meant, without Mary, he'd have to put himself on the throne,

• 15:05Dan Snow?

  or possibly his daughter Isabella, installed as a puppet. Either way, Philip made the decision to invade England and get rid of this heretic, treacherous queen that was causing him so many problems in Europe and around the world. A gigantic fleet was assembled from all over Philip's empire, and it was told to gather in Cadiz in southern Spain. Elizabeth decided that she would intersect this fleet, she would break up preparations for the invasion. She would strike before it had a chance to set sail. And so in April 1587, an English fleet appeared off Cadiz. A rumour flew around town immediately that it was El Drake, that it was Drake, and they were right.

• 15:48Dan Snow?

  Drake just sailed straight into Cadiz. He attacked the Spanish fleet at its moorings. He burnt the ships down to their water lines. He smashed up the quayside, the walls. The English had the run of the town for hours. They were able to do a huge amount of damage. He sailed off from Cadiz, he laid waste to the coast. Now, this sounds unglamorous, but he was able to destroy one very important convoy that was carrying wooden barrel staves. Now, barrels are essential for long-distance transportation of food. There are no jars, there are no freezing units, refrigeration in this period. So, good, tight, solid barrels are best in this period for preserving food and water for the long haul. Drake did terrible damage to Spanish ambitions

• 16:32Dan Snow?

  by destroying a huge number of these seasoned wooden barrel staves. All in all, the whole expedition, it was a spectacular humiliation for Philip. The Venetian ambassador reported back to Venice. He said he believed that the English were masters of the sea. The Pope was unimpressed. "We are sorry to say it," he wrote, "but we have a poor opinion of this Spanish armada, and fear some disaster." Which is why the Pope was happy to bless and remit sins and say nice things, but he wasn't going to part with a penny of hard cash until the Spanish set foot on English soil. The Canio operator. Drake, however, was worried by what he'd seen in Spain.

• 17:16Dan Snow?

  As he sailed back north to England, he wrote to Queen Elizabeth and said, "I dare not almost write of the great forces we hear that the King of Spain hath. Prepare in England most strongly, and most by sea." And he added a quote which I've always loved, "Stop him now, and stop him ever." Well, Drake was absolutely right about preparing by sea. Throughout British history, there's been a tension between investing in ships and investing in shore defences like fortifications and armies. You can either fight the enemy when they're at sea, or you can try and stop them when they land. Drake knew that ships are a much better bet. You can wait for someone to arrive and land before you try and fight them, but that's a pretty inefficient way of stopping an invasion.

• 17:59Dan Snow?

  Sending your ships out to sea to intercept an invading fleet, when all the enemy troops are vomiting into the scuppers, teeth falling out from scurvy, knackered after weeks at sea, before they've had the chance to get onto land, well, that's much better. Sink just one troop transport ship and, well, it's a much more efficient way of killing men than when they're all scuttling about on land. Drake's advice was good. Prepare most strongly by sea. And within the context of the Tudor state, they did exactly that. I've been to National Archives here in London, and I've looked at documents to show how the Tudor state, Elizabeth's government, was trying to take a rigorous, very modern approach to mobilisation.

• 18:43Dan Snow?

  For example, there's one document I've seen where every sailor who lives by the Thames, their name is listed, their home address, their skill set, whether they're ferryman or fisherman, et cetera. So the idea is you could mobilise those people when the time came. You didn't just have to recruit them and then pay for them to sit around in case the invasion arrived. In the event of that invasion, you just knock on their door and say, "Mate, you're up. Bring your stuff. We're going to sea." And so the Tudor state was responding to that invasion threat. And you get the germ of a modern navy. And that's a force that would grow into one of the most dominant military forces in history. This is the beginning of a centuries long story of British naval excellence.

• 19:27Dan Snow?

  Meanwhile, back in Spain, there was a huge argument. The fleets were being reassembled, ships were being built, men were being found. But there was debates about how exactly to deal with Elizabeth. Should they take enough troops with them just to invade England, land in Devon or Cornwall or Hampshire, march to London, get rid of Elizabeth? Or should they take advantage of an existing army, the one that was in the Low Countries, fighting those Dutch rebels? It was led by the Duke of Palmer, Philip's brilliant nephew. That was an army of veterans. They were trying to crush that rebellion. Should the Spanish Armadas sail up the Channel, pick that army up, whizz across the straits of Dover and land in Kent?

• 20:12Dan Snow?

  Broadly speaking, they opted for the second of those two plans. They sent a well-equipped fleet with some reinforcements and lots of cannon, lots of artillery and supplies. But basically, the plan was to go and pick up the Duke of Palmer's army in the Low Countries and bring him across to England. Now, there was a fundamental problem with that plan. And those of you who have anything to do with boats might recognise it immediately. It is a lot easier to say, oh, I'll meet you around here and I'll just hop on that boat than it is to actually do it in practice. This plan demanded a massive amount of logistical organisation.

• 20:54Dan Snow?

  You have got to transport an army from its basis in what is now Belgium. To the coast, onto ships waiting out at sea. And for that, you need a port. And if you don't have a port, you need a very, very safe anchorage. And you'll need lots of flat-bottomed boats, they're called. So boats that can get into the shore, beetling in and out, transferring troops and artillery from the shore to the much bigger ships with their deeper keels out at sea. By the way, enough of those boats were not available. And to make matters even worse, there was no viable port. France was technically neutral. You couldn't just march in and grab Calais and use it as an embarkation port.

• 21:39Dan Snow?

  And the Dutch and Belgian ports that were in Spanish hands were blockaded by Dutch rebels. You have a swarm of smaller, brilliantly constructed craft that knew those shoal-strewn waters of the Rhine estuary like no one else. So the Spanish force on land had no way of getting on the Armada, when and if the Armada arrived. Experienced veterans knew that. One senior officer in the Spanish fleet told a papal envoy, "We sail in confident hope of a miracle." Because they knew that logistics weren't in place to move Palmer's army onto the Spanish

• 22:24Dan Snow?

  Armada when it got near. This was a very, very complicated amphibious operation. And it was not helped by the fact that the commander of the Armada, the Duke of Medina, Sedonia, did not know what he was doing. He might have been the richest, most powerful feudal lord in Spain. He was a good, maybe even a brilliant administrator, but he'd never really been to sea before. In fact, he wrote to King Philip, and he said he didn't want to serve. He wrote to the king and said, "I'm seasick and always catch a cold. I have no experience of the sea or of war. I feel I should give but a bad account of myself, commanding thus blindly and being

• 23:06Dan Snow?

  obliged to rely on the advice of others, without knowing good from bad." Even his mother didn't think he was up to the job. But Philip the Second ignored the pleas of the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, and he was appointed to command the Armada. It was a position that had been left vacant because in February of 1588, Spain's legendary premier admiral, Santa Cruz, the great seafarer, he died. Now Medina-Sedonia was a poor choice as a successor, but not immediately so, because actually he was a very able administrator and he managed to get this fleet together. He managed to stockpile the food and deal with jealous subordinates and assemble a vast number of ships. So that bit he pulled off.

• 23:50Dan Snow?

  The next bit, though, would be a different story. In May 1588, the Duke of Medina-Sedonia and the senior officers of the fleet went to the cathedral in Lisbon and took the expedition's sacred banner, blessed by the Pope, from the altar. Every man made a confession. The ships were checked for women that might have been hidden aboard. The brothel ship that usually accompanied expeditions like this was left behind, just not suitable, not appropriate for a crusade. There was to be no blasphemy, no gambling, no feuding, no swearing aboard. I do wonder how carefully that was observed by men clinging to the rigging, trying to

• 24:34Dan Snow?

  reef sails in thirty knots of breeze in the teeth of a biscay storm. At daybreak every day, the ship's boys were to sing the Ave Maria. On the 28th of May, what the Spanish call the Holy Enterprise glided out of Lisbon. And I think the Duke of Medina-Sedonia could have taken some solace that first night in the Atlantic. Presumably he was lying, prostrate in his bunk from seasickness, but he had managed to get the Armada to sea. Well done him. But deep down, he knew that was the easy bit. The fact that the rest of the mission would require a miracle to succeed must have been a bit daunting. Waiting in England was the English Navy.

• 25:16Dan Snow?

  It wasn't the Royal Navy, as we understand it today, that would take shape in subsequent centuries. It was a fleet assembled for the short term by the monarch of England, Elizabeth I. Some were her ships that she'd paid for, but most were armed merchant ships which she had rented, they effectively contracted for the duration of the campaign. In command was not Sir Francis Drake, but Charles Howard, Baron Effingham. He was fifty-two years old, he was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, and much like Medina Stoney, he'd been appointed really for his royal and aristocratic connections. However, unlike Medina Stoney, he was really enthusiastic about it, he really took to it. He made it his business to inspect every ship in his fleet. He said he was more comfortable sleeping aboard than he was in his own bed at home.

• 26:01Dan Snow?

  He turned himself into a passable naval commander, and he was blessed with his subordinates, a generation of buccaneering adventurers who knew their business. We've got Sir Francis Drake, who agreed to accept the role of second in command, probably for the only time in his entire career. There were also men like John Hawkins, whose ship designs had revolutionised fighting at sea. There was Martin Frobisher, he was a pirate, he was a slave trader, who would command the Triumph, a thousand-ton ship, the largest in the English fleet. Howard and Drake moved the majority of their ships to Plymouth to wait for the armada. There was another squadron of the navy under Lord Henry Seymour in the Narrows around Dover to protect against a sudden dash across the channel by Spain's army in the Low Countries,

• 26:46Dan Snow?

  the one commanded by the Duke of Palmer. On came the Spanish, or rather, they didn't come. Inevitably, when a large fleet of wooden ships puts out to the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, there's going to be complications. And there was a great storm just after they left Biscay, and the ships were scattered, they were damaged, and they had to put back into harbour in northern Spain to replenish and reorganise. And they didn't leave again until the 21st of July. So it wasn't until a week after that, after a journey across the Bay of Biscay, that they sighted southern England, that they sighted the Lizard. The phony war had come to an end. The world's greatest superpower had arrived off England's coast.

• 27:29Dan Snow?

  Now, many people will have heard the famous story of Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Ho. Wonderfully, they still play bowls up there today, which is a bit of a gift for documentary makers like me, because you can go and film them actually playing bowls in exactly the same place that Drake was playing 500 years before. The apocryphal story is that Drake was playing bowls when news arrived that the Spanish Armada had been sighted. It was off the lizard. There's no way of getting sailing ships out of Plymouth Harbour if the wind and tide are against you. So he just said, "Well, we have time to finish the game and beat the Spanish too." This story could be true, we don't know. It was and not reported for some time afterwards. But it does disguise the fact that actually the English are in real trouble here.

• 28:13Dan Snow?

  If the Spanish had sailed directly for Plymouth, they could have bottled up the English fleet. They could have landed before the English fleet got to sea. They could perhaps have stormed Plymouth, it would have been a very, very different outcome. Instead, the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, remember, this is a man who has never done this before. He had no confidence in his own decision-making. He decided to stick with the letter of his orders from King Philip, his sovereign. He was not meant to attempt an invasion himself. He was meant to go to the Low Countries to collect the army of the Duke of Palmer. Now Medina-Sedonia's most experienced subordinates, Juan Martinez de Recalde and Don Alonso de Leiva,

• 28:53Dan Snow?

  they urged the admiral to sail instantly into Plymouth to try and cut the head off the viper, to smoke them out. But Medina-Sedonia refused. He said, "No, we're going to go on a far more stately procession up the Channel." A huge opportunity had been missed. And sometimes it seems like you're too busy waiting for a miracle to notice the one that presents itself. As soon as the tide did turn, the English ships desperately put to sea, whether or not Francis Drake had finished his game of bowls or not. Warps were cast off, jibs and stasiels set, crews hurled out of taverns to take their place at the capstans. Shouts, insults, horns, drums, the English clawed their way out of Plymouth,

• 29:36Dan Snow?

  rowing boats pulling the great ships out into the sound. Sails were set as soon as they could, tacking to get out of sea. Leeches of sails shivering, bow waves kicked up as the ships caught the wind. There was a scramble to secure the so-called windward gage, to be upwind of the enemy fleet, which is the key to the thing to do when you're fighting in a sailing fleet battle. By the morning of the 30th of July, the day after the armada had been spotted, fifty-five English ships were at sea, heavily outnumbered, about two to one. But Drake and Howard didn't seem worried about that. They made the interesting decision to get to windward of the Spanish fleet.

• 30:19Dan Snow?

  If you're upwind of the enemy, you control the tempo and the position, the timing of any battle, because you can swoop down with the wind behind you, discharge your cannons and then engage the enemy fleet and then break off whenever you want. It's much harder if you're downwind, because you've got to tack, you've got to do these zigzags towards the enemy. So the English spent all day on the 30th, trying to get upwind of the Spanish fleet, trying to get behind them, if you like. This is a bit of a gamble, it means placing the Spanish fleet between them and the English coast, which is at first sight slightly alarming. But Drake and Howard knew what they were doing. They led their squadrons around behind the armada, so that the morning of the 31st of July dawned,

• 31:02Dan Snow?

  and the Spanish caught sight, for the first time really, of the English fleet. To their astonishment, it was not in front of them, between them and the coast, defending the coast of England, it was behind them, it was out to sea, it was upwind of them. It was the first indication that the English fleet was being led by men who knew what they were doing. And they were sailing in ships, not all the ships, but lots of them, which had been built to the latest design. Ships which were going to fight in quite a different way. Ships which were not designed to fight an enemy as they had done, for example, that battle I mentioned, the battle of La Panto, which is ships that all they did was crash into an enemy and then fight it out with cold steel, hand to hand on the quarterdeck.

• 31:44Dan Snow?

  No, these English ships had been designed with cannon in mind. They'd been designed to act as floating gun platforms, to stay further away from the enemy and batter them into submission. There's something you can go and see, if you go to the Mary Rose Museum down in Portsmouth. The Mary Rose began its life as a towering warship, and that was designed to go alongside an enemy ship, and archers, and men operating primitive gunpowder weapons would then shoot at each other out on the decks, and then fight it out to try and capture that ship. But as Mary Rose goes through its life, you see it going through various upgrades and refits. You see them harnessing the technology of cannons. It's fitted with bigger and bigger guns, which means there need to be openings in

• 32:29Dan Snow?

  the sides, these swinging gun ports. Now, those would ultimately prove to be the doom of the Mary Rose, because when the gun ports were left open, there was a freak gust of wind, it caused the ship to capsize, and water came through those gun ports, and it sank very quickly. But you can see how Mary Rose changes as naval technology is changing rapidly through the 16th century. By and large, the Spanish Armada was made up of ships that sort of expected to fight in that old fashioned way, to literally get to grips with the enemy, to throw grappling across, pull them close, and then just fight it out on the decks. But many of the English ships were of a new, sleek design.

• 33:10Dan Snow?

  They were interceptors, they were warships armed with cannon. They were designed for coastal defence, to whip out at speed, blast the enemy, and then dip back into port to resupply. So there were two very different concepts at work here. It was a turning point in military history, and the Spanish were about to discover that their giant fleet, composed of these towering galleons, were no match tactically for the smaller, speedier English ships that packed a much bigger punch.

• 33:45Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Head. Thank you very much, Drisia. There's more coming.

• 33:55Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 34:37Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalised, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves.

• 35:20Dan Snow?

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• 35:49Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 36:32Speaker 01

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• 36:39Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:18Dan Snow?

  On that morning, the 31st of July, those English ships were about to go into action against the Spanish. Nothing like this had ever happened in the world before. Two fleets, armed with cannon, they're about to fight a multi-day battle on the high seas. They would not pull into shore every night and then come out the next day like the battles in China or the Mediterranean, and been fought stretching back into ancient history. No, no, no. This was expeditionary fleet warfare in the gunpowder age. The English had never done anything like it before. The Spanish, neither. Everyone, I think, sensed that history was being made. One English witness was astonished by the size of the armada.

• 38:02Dan Snow?

  He said, "Beneath the weight of it, the seas seemed to groan." In terms of its tonnage, it was probably the largest fleet to ever sail in European waters. But remember, many of those ships were supply ships, they weren't actually designed for fighting. They were transports, they were just carrying extra soldiers and ammunition, and they were ready-made defensive barricades, anything they would need for the invasion of England. These transport ships were protected in the centre of a great mass of ships. It looked like a huge crescent moon. You've got the slower-moving transport ships in the middle, and then you've got the escorts, the warships, on either side. These escort ships, they had towering stern castles and forecastles, brimming with soldiers,

• 38:46Dan Snow?

  with their muskets, their ammunition, their swords sharpened, they were ready to go, they were confident, they were ready to take on the enemy in their little ships if they dared to come too close and tried to clamber aboard. But remember, that was not the English plan. Howard and Drake and the others were not going to fight in that traditional manner. They were planning on using cannon, heavy guns, to subdue the Spanish. Howard sent a little eighty-ton bark, a small ship called Distain, to perform an act of etiquette, a bit incongruous at this point of the battle. Distain sailed within shouting distance to the Spanish ships and fired one cannonball straight into their midst. England was now at war with Spain. Hostilities could commence.

• 39:30Dan Snow?

  Howard was on board the ship Ark Royal, and he led his squadron straight at the southern end of this Spanish crescent. Drake on board his ship Revenge headed for the north. Now, this is open for debate and discussion, but this is pretty much the first example of this tactic that we see being used in war at sea. A fleet following in line astern, one after the other. They head towards the enemy fleet, then they can fire their broadside cannon one after the other. That's all the cannon mounted along the sides of the ships, they fire it ninety degrees to the way the ship is moving. And once they've fired, those ships can turn away and reload before going in for another go. Now, that was a kind of warfare that begins here, and it would be refined, it would be

• 40:15Dan Snow?

  perfected all the way up through the next centuries, till the Battle of Trafalgar in eighteen oh five, and really all the way up to the Battle of Jutland in the First World War in nineteen sixteen, where these big-gun battleships would fire in lines, one behind the other. This was pretty much the first incarnation of this tactic.

• 40:34Dan Snow?

  The English couldn't risk getting too close to the Spanish ships because remember, those Spanish ships are bristling with those soldiers who who want to overwhelm any English ships they can grapple. So led by Drake and Howard, the English squadrons use their superior sailing skills to sail up, fire their cannon, and whiz round to reload and plan another pass. So the Spanish are very discomforted to find themselves under almost constant bombardment. And interestingly, one of Spain's more experienced commanders, Ricardo, who I mentioned before, he tried to initiate the kind of close quarters fight that him and his Spanish compatriots wanted. He offered his ship as bait. He let his ship

• 41:17Dan Snow?

  fall behind slightly, offering himself as a tempting prize to the English. But infuriatingly to this old Spanish veteran, people like Drake and Frobisher didn't take the bait. They kept sailing their ships two or 300 metres away, smashing his ship with a broadside, and they did enormous damage. But they never got close enough for him to grapple them. So he's got 600 troops aboard his ship just watching helplessly as their vessel is being battered to pieces. It's a classic example of that old military problem. The enemy are absolutely refusing to fight in the way that you'd hoped and expected they would, very ungentlemanly. Medina Sonia was eventually forced to bring a squadron of battleships

• 42:02Dan Snow?

  to tack back and go and rescue Ricardo and bring him back into that protective crescent. The official Spanish log of that day states that the Duke collected the fleet but found he could do nothing more for the English still kept the weather gauge and their ships are so fast and nimble, they can do anything they like with them. It's a clash of two different doctrines. But there was also a problem for the English. They could damage the Spanish fleet, but they couldn't destroy it. They couldn't break it up. They couldn't sink significant numbers of those ships. They couldn't capture them by long range artillery fire alone. The English ships didn't carry the weight of cannon that, for example, HMS Victory would have 300 years later.

• 42:47Dan Snow?

  Or the weight of cannon that allowed the British ships, the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 759, to just smash their French opponents so that they could sink French ships with a broadside or two. This is the early days of fighting with cannon. They were employing long-range fire. And so these jabs coming from the English were frustrating, but they didn't yet represent an existential threat to the Spanish fleet. And so the Spanish sailed onwards, a little bit bruised, but making their way up the English coast towards their rendezvous in the Low Countries. The Spanish did lose some ships. One called the Rosario was damaged in a collision with another Spanish ship in the confusion of battle. And ships

• 43:29Dan Snow?

  tried to take it on the tow, but it didn't work out and was forced to fend for itself. Another Spanish ship just blew up. We don't really know why. The story goes that one gunnery officer was so furious that someone else had nicked his girlfriend that he blew the whole ship up by plunging a lighted taper into a barrel of gunpowder. We don't know if that's true. So two Spanish ships had been knocked out. There was an interesting story about the Rosario that Drake's enemies used to discredit him. That night, so the night after the first battle, he was meant to be leading the English ship. He had a lantern in his top moustache that he could follow him. But he came across the Rosario, which had been abandoned by the rest of the Spanish. And it's said that he then put out, extinguished the lantern, and he headed off for a little privateering, a little piracy

• 44:11Dan Snow?

  action for himself. He went alongside the Rosario. It was the dead of night, and he shouted that he was Drake, and Rosario immediately surrendered. Now, there's a great line that I once read, that he sailed up the Rosario and just shouted, "I am Drake, and my matches are lit." And the ship surrendered immediately. Now, unfortunately, you can't take my word for that, because I haven't been able to find that line, and I can't tell if it's true. However, whatever was said, they did immediately surrender. It was a little bit embarrassing how fast they surrendered to Drake as he came up alongside. And on board that ship was fifty-five thousand golden ducats, around one-third

• 44:52Dan Snow?

  of the treasure that the Armada carried with it to pay the men and pay for supplies and everything it might need to spend money on. Mysteriously, not all of that treasure seems to end up in Queen Elizabeth's coffers. Some of it strangely went missing along the way. So it was a good night for Sir Francis Drake, but it wasn't a great night for the English fleet because without Francis Drake guiding them, as the sun came up in the morning, they were a little bit more scattered than they would have liked. And that's why they spent the first of August frantically regrouping as the Spanish fleet moved sedately but steadily across Lyme Bay. On the second of August, there was a bit of a shift in the wind, which gave the Spanish an advantage. And there was a fierce battle of Portland Bill, which is a notoriously difficult place to sail at the best of times.

• 45:36Dan Snow?

  It has one of the most remarkable tidal races in the world. It just rips around the bottom of Portland Bill. I've been there in fairly calm conditions, and the waves there can be two, three metres high, and that's before you factor in any wind. And on this occasion, back in fifteen eighty-eight, it seemed that local knowledge was really an advantage to the English fleet. There was a fierce exchange of fire, and described by some historians actually as the fiercest naval gun battles to have occurred to that point in history, but still no knockout blows by either side. By the evening of that day, the San Martin, Medina Stonia's flagship, had been hit by five hundred cannonballs. The Spanish were learning a bitter lesson, that the English were naval gunnery experts,

• 46:17Dan Snow?

  and the Spanish simply had no mechanism to fire back at anything like the English rate of fire. It is estimated that for every three shots the English fired, only one Spanish shot was fired. Their crews just weren't trained for that kind of war. There was no doctrine of rapid broadside firing in the Spanish fleet. And they hadn't arranged their ships to allow all of their broadsides to engage with the English. It just wasn't how they were intending to fight. But still, at the end of that day, the Spanish Armada was intact and continuing onwards. By the third of August, the Spanish Armada reached the Isle of Wight. Now, there is a mystery here. It's one of the great questions about the Armada.

• 46:59Dan Snow?

  The Duke of Medina Stonia seemed to be sufficiently concerned by his experiences over the last few days, that maybe he would listen to advice and he would grab a base and have a regroup, have a rethink, because he had this fundamental problem. He hadn't heard anything from the Duke of Palmer. There had been no successful communication between him and this army that he's due to go and pick up. And he knows there are no big natural harbors really between the end of the Isle of Wight and the Straits of Dover. And it seems like, although it's a little bit unclear, that Medina Stonia did think, like the French had tried to do in the 1540s actually, to seize the Isle of Wight and

• 47:40Dan Snow?

  use it as a base of operations, until they'd heard something from their army in the Low Countries. Howard was very aware of this possibility. He organised the English fleet and told them to pursue a very simple aim, which was keep the Spanish out of the Solent, keep the Spanish out of the protected water north of the Isle of Wight. And the obvious men to do this were put in charge of four squadrons: Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Howard himself. These four squadrons would act independently, but they would keep this simple strategic goal in mind, to just keep the Spanish armada out of the Solent. Early that morning, Drake almost captured another ship, the Gran Grifon, I mean, please excuse my Spanish pronunciation there. The Gran Grifon was lagging, it was behind the Spanish fleet, and Drake sailed up.

• 48:25Dan Snow?

  We hear that its decks were rammed with soldiers, they wanted to get to grips with Drake, but Drake stood off, fired a broadside at close range down the length of the ship, it's called raking the ship, from one end to the other, just broadside after broadside. The Spanish suffered a couple of hundred casualties in the space of a few moments, but other Spanish ships managed to take it in tow and it was brought back into the heart of the Spanish fleet. Frobisher meanwhile, was trying to get his ships in on the landward side of the Isle of Wight, trying to block off the entrance to the Solent, protect the Isle of Wight, because it looked like a squadron of Spanish ships trying to get into that calm water of the Solent. But Medina Stonia was distracted, because on his southern flank was a powerful attack being made by Drake. Drake was probing them.

• 49:08Dan Snow?

  Attacking them, he's hoping he could push them past the point at which they were able to enter the Solent. Drake hurled himself at the southern flank of the Spanish. Medina Sidonia was forced to rip his gaze away from the northward, maybe trying to get his fleet into the Solent, and go and counter-attack Drake in the south. One Spanish officer wrote, "We who were there were cornered. So if the Duke had not come about with his flagship, we should have come out vanquished that day." The trouble is, as the Duke is rescuing that portion of his fleet, they're on a kind of moving sidewalk, if you like. The wind is just pushing them all very slowly, all the time, slowly to the east. They're passing the Isle of Wight. They're going to be unable

• 49:50Dan Snow?

  to get into the entrance of the Solent. So every minute that Drake can keep the fleet's attention out to sea, stop them from turning into the Solent, is an opportunity missed by the Spanish to sail in there and find a safe anchorage. And Drake's plan, Howard's plan, it was a success. As the Spanish drifted ever further east, they came across a giant sandbank, it's known as the Hours, it's still there today, obviously. A sharp-eyed Spanish lookout saw this patch of shallow water, a sandbank that stretches way out to sea, and the Spanish were forced to alter course to the southeast to avoid hitting the shallows. But that means they had no realistic chance of getting back into the Solent. So now, with the wind at their stern, they've got nowhere to stop between them and the Low Countries.

• 50:34Dan Snow?

  The die was cast. Medina Sidonia had saved his fleet from English attacks, saved his fleet from the shallows, but he was now heading towards the Low Countries with absolutely no idea whether the army would be waiting for him and whether they'd be ready for him at all. The English regarded this battle as a big success. Again, tantalisingly, we just don't know enough about the Spanish plans for that day, but the English behaved as if they were pretty happy. Howard knighted Frobisher and Hawkins on the spot.

• 51:05Dan Snow?

  Both fleets were now being driven on a gentle breeze towards Dover. Howard needed to conserve his shots, his cannibals, his gunpowder. And as for the Spanish, they used the fairly benign weather to patch up their ships, to replace rigging and stitch patches over the holes in their sails. The Armada had been bruised, but not destroyed. The threat of invasion was still very real. And it was even more real on the 6th of August, when the Spanish Armada dropped anchor in the wide bay, really the stretch of coast off the French port of Calais. First thing Medina Señora did was dispatch a messenger to find that Spanish army and make contact with the Duke of Palma.

• 51:44Dan Snow?

  When that messenger arrived at the Duke's headquarters, just a few miles away in Dunkirk, the Duke was pretty surprised. The last message he'd received from the Spanish Armada was one sent when they were in Coruna in North Spain, weeks before, saying that they were about to set sail. Now, here they were, they'd arrived, off the coast of Northern France, very near his army. On paper, the fleet and the army were close to joining up. But this was not a paper exercise. It was a much more complicated one. It was a scenario of canals and bad roads and piles of supplies on wharves and units of men spread across miles of territory. Palma's army was spread out, as armies were in those days.

• 52:29Dan Snow?

  You had to take the men to the food, you couldn't bring food to the men. So armies would spread out across the landscape, the region, for billeting and other logistical reasons. It would take days to gather or concentrate all of his men together in the port of Dunkirk and get them aboard invasion barges. And even then, he still had that problem that I talked about before, the problem that the Armada was supposed to solve. He had no way of getting his troops out to the Spanish ships. Philip of Spain had airily said, "They will meet you in the channel." But Palma was blockaded in Dunkirk. He didn't have the necessary specialist warships to fight his way out of Dunkirk

• 53:11Dan Snow?

  through the swarm of Dutch blockade vessels. Now, this was tantalizing for the Spanish, because they had managed to get this giant fleet to within a few miles of this very impressive veteran army. But the devil's in the detail, folks, there is no way for them actually to join up. The anchorage off Calais is not very well protected. In fact, it's not protected at all. It's very, very vulnerable to the strong southwesterly gales that you get in the Channel. So Medina Sidonia could not keep the Armada anchored there for more than a few, well, days at most. Even though he didn't know the sea that well, he didn't know that. And he'd written to Palmer a few days before, saying, unless we can find a harbour, we

• 53:54Dan Snow?

  will perish without doubt. Now, those of you who live in distant lands may think, hey, come on, this is August. It's the height of the summer. They can just anchor off the coast there. The sun will flash off the little wavelets and they can build the odd sandcastle, wait for Palmer to get that army assembled. Well, no, because summer in the English Channel is a highly relative concept. There are some nice days occasionally. And then there are lots of days when the wind howls from the southwest and the green brown waves crash on foam strewn beaches where the high tide line is marked with the detritus of shattered ships. It's really not an ideal place to hang about. However, the English were concerned.

• 54:38Dan Snow?

  The Spanish Armada and the Duke of Palmer's army were too close for comfort. And that's why they decided to act straight away, to take action that night. They did not want to take the risk that the Duke of Palmer would somehow manage to embark his troops and meet up with the Armada. Even if it did take a week or two, they wanted to act now to break the Armada, to sever the link between the land and the sea forces.

• 55:03Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. The best is yet to come. Stick with us.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed His wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:43Dan Snow?

  At midnight that night, at the very end of the 6th of August, Spanish sailors noticed eight lights blazing in the English fleet. The lights drew closer and closer, drifting towards them. The Spanish realized with horror that the English had deployed fire ships. They'd taken eight older ships, armed merchantmen with no great value. They'd stacked them high with spare supplies, old sails, rope covered in tar and pitch, a bit of gunpowder, and they'd turned them into floating bombs. Then they sailed them in on the breeze and the tide towards Calais, towards the Spanish fleet. Now sailors in wooden ships are terrified of fire for a simple reason. Every single thing on those ships, everything, is very, very flammable.

• 57:29Dan Snow?

  Fires destroyed ships more certainly than a storm, more certainly than cannonballs, more certainly than an enemy boarding party. Fire was devastating. Few soldiers or sailors could swim. When the ship caught on fire, it was a death sentence. You had to choose with just seconds to spare between death by icy water or at the hands of terrible flames. Now Medina Sodonia had anticipated that the English would try and use fireships. He'd organised a small flotilla of Spanish open boats, rowing boats really, which would head out and grapple fireships as they arrived. And they did manage to grapple two of the ships. They toed them out of the way where they burned down harmlessly in the shallows. But the rest of those fireships, they kept coming on.

• 58:13Dan Snow?

  The crews of the Spanish Armada, which had been anchored in a tight defensive huddle, they acted in panic. They cut their anchor cables, they just hacked their anchor cables through, they jettisoned their anchors, and they did what they could to escape the oncoming fireships. The wind was blowing from the southwest, and it blew many of them beyond Calais. It blew them up towards the port of Graveline, which is today on the border between France and Belgium. The Armada was now spread out, ships in ones and twos, little clusters of ships anchored desperately right the way along what is now the French and Belgian coast. And at dawn, as the sun came up, the English saw their enemies.

• 58:56Dan Snow?

  They saw their opportunity and gleefully attacked. With trumpets blaring, the English fleet, the Royal Galleons, other heavily armed merchant ships, private men of war, they closed with the Spanish ships. The Spanish desperately fired signal cannons trying to get their fleet to reassemble, but it was just too spread out, it was to no avail. The tight Spanish formation was broken, their ships were unprotected, their ships were vulnerable, and the English sprang among them like predators. The battle that followed... Was the Battle of Graveline. And it was a bit of a free for all. Howard, the commander, unforgivably seems to have seen dollar signs.

• 59:37Dan Snow?

  He saw a massive Spanish galleys, which is a sort of half sailing ship, but also half oar powered galley slaves at the oars. It got damaged at the outbreak of the battle and it tried to slink into Calais, hoping the neutral French would give it safe haven. Howard spotted this going on. It was a juicy prize and rather than aiming for Medina Sodonia's flagship or rather than attacking the main body of the Armada, he just headed for that galleys. He wanted to capture it. He wanted to get the wealth that was on board. And many of Howard's squadron followed. So you end up with a situation where a huge number of English ships attacking this one wounded Spanish galleys. They drove it ashore.

• 1:00:20Dan Snow?

  They looted the wreck before the neutral French upset this was going on in their waters, opened fire and drove them back to their ships. So one of the Armada's greatest ships had been destroyed. Yes, brilliant, but it was at the cost of a huge amount of time and attention from some of the best English ships in their fleet. Meanwhile, by contrast, Drake had taken his responsibilities seriously. He had led his other ships straight at the Spanish fleet. His ship Revenge passed by the Duke of Medina Sodonia's San Martin at very short range. So close that if they wanted to, the two men could have shouted at each other. The Revenge's stern cabin was shot through with some of the Spanish ship's cannonballs. Drake then performed his now trademark tactic of firing one broadside into the Spanish ship,

• 1:01:03Dan Snow?

  then the other, damaging Medina Sodonia's flagship terribly. And critically, the ship that followed Drake into action did the same thing. There was a near constant battering of some of Spain's finest vessels. Onboard that Spanish flagship, it was a scene of hell. Rigging crashing down, they were hauled by the waterline. She was hit something like 200 times. It was said that her decks were awash with blood. The Spanish soldiers at their action stations, remember they're waiting to grapple. They're waiting to do as they'd been trained to do, expecting to board enemy ships, but they're unable to. Bring those weapons to bear, they're not able to have any impact on the outcome of this naval battle. It must have been incredibly frustrating. We hear about the Spanish roaring at the English,

• 1:01:46Dan Snow?

  calling them Luther and hens, challenging them to come and fight like men with cold steel rather than standing off and battering them in this rather unsporting fashion. But the English ships were able to come closer and deliver killer blows. Isolated Spanish ships were picked off and surrounded by a swarm of English ships. The San Mateo and the San Felipe both suffered badly. The San Felipe had holes torn in its hull, her rudder was smashed, her foremast was knocked over, two hundred men killed on her decks. The San Mateo was said to be so riddled with shot that she was said to be like a sieve. Sailors on board got a taste of this new era of war at sea. Cannonballs smashing through hulls, sending shards of razor sharp wood cartwheeling through the air,

• 1:02:29Dan Snow?

  splintering and scything into men, causing terrible, terrible injuries and death. Beneath the decks, carpenters smashed bungs into jagged hulls, torn by English cannonballs. Frightened, exhausted men worked the ship's pumps, trying to stem the rising waterline in the bilges. Their crewmates' missing limbs, their soft bellies torn by jagged splinters. Men screaming, dragged below to nonexistent or primitive medical attention. Corpses just hurled overboard by the living. The Spanish gunnery, by contrast, ineffective. As I say, they haven't trained for this way of fighting. There were some rare successes, one Spanish cannonball managed to smash into the Earl of Northumberland ship,

• 1:03:10Dan Snow?

  grazing his feet and knocking down two men, but in general, the Spanish were unable to inflict heavy damage on the English ships. Many of the cannon, for example, didn't have the specialist maritime gun carriages that we associate day with naval guns. You think about the guns on HMS Victory, for example. Four little wheels on them, you can maneuver them in confined spaces. The Spanish were using the cannon you'd expect to use on land with the two enormous wheels. They were far more unwieldy, they were difficult to maneuver and handle in the confines of the lower decks of a ship. By the afternoon of that day, many Spanish ships were in terrible condition. The San Felipe, the San Mateo that I mentioned were floating wrecks. Their commanders were helpless. They beached themselves.

• 1:03:51Dan Snow?

  They'd just hit the sandbanks on the Dutch coast and they were set upon by jubilant Dutch rebels. Another ship, the Maria Juan, sank outright. And I think this battle disproved the traditional telling of the Armada story, which is that it was the weather, not the English ships, that defeated the Spanish Armada. This was, in fact, a comprehensive defeat that the Spanish had suffered at sea. Their central strategic plan, the operational plan, had been completely destroyed. Their ships were damaged terribly. Some were captured or sunk or grounded. And in fact, this is the naughty bit, folks. The weather actually saved the Spanish Armada at this point. At four o'clock in the afternoon, as many Spanish ships were drifting hopelessly,

• 1:04:33Dan Snow?

  helpless, unable to steer, their crews battered, command and control broken down, a squall blocked from the northwest, from offshore, pushing the Spanish onto one of the most treacherous stretches of coastline in the entire world. The shallows off the Dutch coast. There are rocks and sandbars, tidal, it's brutal. It's an impossible place to sail even today. And those Flemish sandbanks came ever closer. The colour of the water changed. The depth sounding showed eight fathoms, seven fathoms. The biggest ships needed five fathoms of water beneath them to sail. It seemed as if real complete disaster. The wreckage of an entire fleet was only minutes away. The English were to seaward. The Dutch rebels in their light shallow craft were inland.

• 1:05:17Dan Snow?

  The Spanish looked like they were about to suffer a catastrophe. Various officers came up to the Duke of Medina-Sedonia and asked him to take the papal banner, jump into a small fast boat and try and make for a a safe haven with Spanish forces in Flanders. He refused. He wanted to die like a Christian soldier. He shouted to one of his squadron commanders who passed close by, "We are lost. What should we do?" And the commander shouted back, "As for me, I'm going to die like a man. Send me a supply of shot." Then, quite suddenly, well, perhaps that's the miracle we were all waiting for. The wind backed to the southwest. It gave the Spanish ships an opportunity to claw away from the shallows and make their way north into the North Sea.

• 1:06:02Dan Snow?

  Medina Sedonia wrote, and you can tell this to someone next time they talk about the weather in the Spanish Armada. Medina Sedonia wrote, "We were saved by God's mercy." That night, councils of war were held in both fleets. In the English fleet, they celebrated a success, but perhaps a muted success. The Spanish Armada was still at sea. The English had managed to separate it from the Duke of Palma's army. When they'd been in Calais, they're only twenty or so miles apart. Now the Spanish Armada was drifting off into the North Sea. The ships were badly damaged. There seemed little chance that they'd be able to turn around and fight their way back to the Low Countries. But it was still in existence. It was therefore still a threat.

• 1:06:44Dan Snow?

  And to make matters worse, the English had used up nearly all their cannonballs and gunpowder in the Battle of Graveline. So the English were celebrating, but their mood would have been far more buoyant if they could have eavesdropped on the Spanish councils of war that night. They faced a dire situation. There was no hope of sailing back into the Narrows to meet up with their army. Their ships were trashed, their crews were weak and disheartened. It was clear to everyone aboard the Spanish Armada that the plan that was never going to work had now categorically failed. It was over. The English, with their new ships, their guns and their methods, were blocking their way home.

• 1:07:25Dan Snow?

  The only realistic way back now was up through the North Sea, around the top of Scotland Island, back out into the Bay of Biscay and down to Spain. It was a brutal journey at the best of times. But with crews decimated by battle, ships that had been badly damaged, it was a journey that many of those ships would be unable to make. However, it was the only decision open to the Spanish. And they set off on a long, terrible journey. The English shadowed them as far as the Scottish border, at which point they turned around and headed back to southern England. It's worth noting at this point, by the way, the timing of Queen Elizabeth's direct, personal, charismatic intervention.

• 1:08:07Dan Snow?

  Famously, one of the great famous stories of English history, she had joined the ragtag amateur army that had been hastily assembled east of London at Tilbury. They were ready to confront a Spanish invasion. And she then delivered a barnstormer of a speech to the men who believed that they might be facing that invasion within days. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, that I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general," all that good stuff. Well, Elizabeth uttered those words long after she knew the Spanish armada had been blown up into the North Sea. It was 10 days after the Battle of Gravelynn when she made that speech.

• 1:08:48Dan Snow?

  So, like all the best politicians and generals, she never let the facts get in the way of a ostentatious show of leadership. As she swore to fight like a king, the Spanish were heading into hell. Well, Scotland and Ireland, to be more precise. Ship after ship was smashed on the exposed beaches of Scotland, then on the north coast of Ireland, Donegal and Antrim. They ran low on water, they had irreparable damage, they stopped to take on survivors of other ships, so their ships were overcrowded. I've dived on the wreck of one great galleys, the Girona. It's very near the Giant's Causeway on the Antrim coast, and several ship companies backstage had been amalgamated.

• 1:09:32Dan Snow?

  They'd picked up so many survivors that there was just a great confused mass of men on that ship. And that poor ship and its company struck on the coast in a gale. There were very, very few survivors. Those who did make it to shore were hunted down by the English authorities in Ireland and killed. De Laver, one of the better sailors on board, and one of King Philip's favourites, the aristocratic admiral I mentioned before, he was one of the many killed on that coast. The stories of that journey home are almost too awful to comprehend. Medina Sidonia, remarkably, he made it back with a group of ships. He arrived in Santander in northern Spain on the 21st of September, 44 days after the defeat at Gravelynn.

• 1:10:18Dan Snow?

  Over the next few weeks, other ships struggled in, the crews hobbled, enfeebled by scurvy, influenza, typhus, malnutrition. Medina Sidhoni himself nearly died of dysentery. Ricardo, his second in command, died just days after arriving back in Spain. People said at the time he died of shame. He was just too broken to face his family and friends. Of the 120 or so ships that set sail, at least 45, and perhaps 10, 11,000 men were lost. Even Philip's unquestioning faith was apparently shaken as the extent of the disaster became known. It was a great victory for Elizabeth, a great victory for Tudor England. It's a victory that has been seen as the birth of a period of English naval greatness.

• 1:11:03Dan Snow?

  But there would be considerable ups and downs after the Armada. Anyone who knows the history of the rest of the 16th century, let alone the 17th, will know that Britannia did not in fact rule the waves and probably wouldn't do so for at least another 150 years. Even King Philip would send later armadas. And when England tried to switch to the offensive, there were some terrible and costly failures. Success would be a generational project. I think rightly it's seen as a starting point. Every movement needs its stories, its mythological beginnings. And the story of the rise to maritime greatness of the English and then the British Navy, I think it begins that summer of 1588. And certainly many of the strengths that Drake and Howard and Hawkins were able to draw upon and hone

• 1:11:49Dan Snow?

  were strengths that successive generations of British sailors would build upon, enlarge and embed in a culture of excellence. Admirals like Blake in the 17th century, the great commanders of the 18th century, they were able to seek inspiration, to learn the lessons, to draw on that success against the Spanish Armada. It was also a great moment of national triumph, salvation from the world's great superpower, that indefinable thing, national confidence. It received a boost, it mattered. England's sailors and shipwrights and investors and politicians, they looked with growing confidence on the world beyond the oceans. They became hungry for fame and wealth and power and success. The immediate aftermath of the Armada, though, was less poetic.

• 1:12:34Dan Snow?

  Elizabeth let her victorious sailors rot at their moorings. They were left to die as the country celebrated its victory. Typhus tore through the fleet, which is what happens when large fleets, large crews of men, get together with inadequate sanitation and hygiene and poor food and water, no knowledge of disease and microbes. Thousands died. Food and fresh water were just not delivered to the ships in harbour. England had exerted itself to the limit to find the resources to deal with the Spanish Armada. It did not find the resources to feed and look after its victorious sailors. Men were demobilised, they were given no food, no money.

• 1:13:17Dan Snow?

  The streets of Dover and Rochester were lined with emaciated sailors too weak to go home. Howard, to his great credit, was devastated by this. He pawned his own family's silver, he attempted to provide food and shelter for the men who'd fought under him. It's thought, stunningly, that the English lost only around a hundred men fighting the Armada, but it lost something like eight thousand men, or fifty per cent of their strength, in the weeks and months that followed. It was a shameful end to a story of English victory. Unsurprisingly, though, all that was forgotten as myths were made, portraits painted, narratives crafted, and for centuries, the defeat of the Spanish Armada became the great founding

• 1:14:02Dan Snow?

  myth of Britain's navy and its empire. Well, in the end, the invincible Armada, the ships never dropped anchor in English ports. The troops never invaded English soil. Instead, thousands of Spanish sailors and men were lost to storms and shipwrecks, their bodies washed up on the shores of Ireland and Scotland in particular. England, meanwhile, celebrated a victory that marked its beginnings, perhaps, beginnings as a great naval power. The Spanish Empire would go on, it would remain powerful and vast, but its aura of invincibility at sea was gone. And as for England, well, this was something new.

• 1:14:46Dan Snow?

  There was now a story of divine deliverance, of survival against impossible odds. This was a story to inspire the generations. Over the centuries, the Armada became more than a failed invasion. It became a founding myth, a story that shapes how the English saw themselves and their place in the world. A small island nation holding their own against the world's most powerful.

• 1:15:12Dan Snow?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, I did a two-part explainer on Sir Francis Drake earlier this year. You can find links to those in the show notes. Please make sure to check those out. Thanks for listening, folks. Until next time.

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• 1:16:44Dan Snow?

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